Scan it, read it, record it, and share it live with your corp.
A Nexum wormhole guide
A wormhole "chain" is the tree of systems you can reach from your home through wormholes - your statics, the wandering holes into them, and the k-space exits at the far ends. Because those holes shift and die constantly, the chain is never the same twice, so wormhole corps keep a live map of it. This guide walks through building one from scratch and keeping it current.
Open the probe scanner and resolve every cosmic signature in your system to 100%. Filter for the wormhole signatures - those are your ways out (and other people's ways in). Data/relic/gas sites matter for ISK, but for mapping it is the wormholes you care about.
Warp to a wormhole and look at it. If it shows a named type (like "N062" or "C247"), that side tells you the destination class, total mass and lifetime. If it shows a K162, it is the exit side of a hole someone opened from elsewhere - jump through and read the named signature on the far side to learn what it really is. Note the mass stage ("not significantly disrupted", "reduced", "on the verge of collapse") and the lifetime ("not yet begun to decay" vs "reaching the end of its natural lifetime").
In game you can copy your whole probe-scanner signature list. A good mapper lets you paste it straight in, matches it against what is already on the map, and auto-tags wormholes - so you are not hand-typing six-character sig IDs under time pressure.
As you identify each hole, add the system and the connection to your map. A dedicated wormhole mapper beats in-game bookmarks because it shows the whole tree at a glance, remembers wormhole types and mass, ages holes automatically as they decay, and does not clutter your bookmark folder. Mark your home, tag connections (frigate hole, EOL, critical mass), and note anything you found - occupied POCOs, a tower, recent kills.
Jump into each connected system and repeat: scan, identify, record. Keep going until you have mapped out to the k-space exits (highsec/lowsec/nullsec) and any dead-end holes. The result is a full picture of everywhere you can go and everywhere something can come from - which is the difference between roaming safely and warping blind.
The single biggest upgrade to wormhole life is a real-time collaborative map. Instead of one person scanning and everyone else asking "what's the chain?", every pilot sees the same map update instantly as it is scanned. Threats, mass status, and who is where are visible to the whole fleet at once. That is what turns mapping from a chore into a shared situational picture.
Holes decay and collapse whether or not anyone updates the map. A good mapper ages wormholes toward end-of-life on its own, flags stale connections, and (with opt-in tracking) even follows your pilots as they jump - so the chain reflects reality without constant babysitting.
Map your chain in real time - free. Nexum syncs every edit live to everyone viewing the map.
Open Nexum