Back from Vegas, back at home, and back to work by Wednesday, I was also able to get back to working on the current No Man’s Sky expedition.

In looking down what I had left to do, there was a task about claiming a multi-tool from a Harmonic Camp.

The reclaimed weapon task

Dissonant worlds are not that hard to find.  Most of the systems that Hello Games picked for this merry chase seem to have at least one.  I just needed to land on one and use an Echo Locator to find a Harmonic Camp.  How hard could it be?

So I rifled through my inventory and things I could build and came up with exactly zero Echo Locators.  Hrmm…

Then I went back through the past tasks, because Hello Games is pretty good about giving you things in one task that you will need for a later task.  And, sure enough,

Wild Things… complete

The thing is, I had done that task… probably on the first night when Potshot and I set off.  See, I had already been on a dissonant planet.  So where was my Echo Locator?  I guess I had sold it or run out of inventory space or something, because I sure didn’t have one now.

Fine, I just needed to get another one.  I went to the wiki which said:

Echo Locators are obtained via destroying a Dissonance Resonator, as alternative loot to the common Inverted Mirror required to unlock crashed Sentinel Interceptors. Echo Locators can also be found as a random drop from Corrupted Sentinel Quadrupeds.

There are many words there that mean things, but I am not sure I could put them all together… mostly because I was still new to dissonant worlds.  But mostly, sentinels make me tired.  I wouldn’t mind having to kill a few, but once you kill one you either have to run and hide or go through the whole escalation process.  It sometimes feels like having to run an event just to pick up the paper from the driveway in the morning… he said using what is probably a pretty outdated metaphor.  I already complained about print media last month.

I started out on a dissonant planet killing corrupted sentinels, because there was a task to do that as well, even riding an escalation through quite a few quadrupeds, but no luck.

I gave up for a bit, refueled my hyper-drive, and went off to the next destination system for the next phase.  Then I sat down to think this through.  I did have a Sentinel Boundary Map in my inventory, a drop from one of the sentinel events.  That marks the Sentinel Pillar on a planet, a location from which you can turn off all the sentinels, which is one of my favorite things to do.

So my plan was to go to a dissonant planet, use the map, turn off the sentinels, then go looking for Dissonance Resonators, blowing those up until I got my Echo Locator.  I just wanted to make sure I had a long stretch of time because I had no idea how long that might take and I didn’t want to waste the map. (Also, turning off the sentinels would complete another task, which is probably how I ended up with the map.)

The next night my wife was off with some friends so I was on my own for dinner and the evening.  Plenty of time to commit to this venture.  I picked the local dissonant planet and headed down.

In hindsight, I might have been better served going back to one of the last couple such planets, as the one I chose was overheated… which is fine, I can deal with that… and subject to frequent bouts of lava shooting all over you out of the ground.  That sent me scurrying back to my ship to wait out a surge multiple times.  Still, I persisted.

Having done the Sentinel Pillar thing before, I used the map, went to the spot, and shut them all down.  Then I looted the place for good measure.

Also, I completed that task

Then came the uncertain “this might take some time” part of the venture, which was finding and destroying Dissonance Resonators.  The didn’t show up on my visor and scanning didn’t bring any up, so I resorted to just flying low and slow over the landscape, looking… for something.  I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for.  But I figured they would be purple, because all the corrupted sentinels were that color.

As it turned out, on this particular planetary landscape, they were not too hard to spot.  I saw what looks like a purple water tower, headed over to it, then beamed down from the corvette and blew it up.

That got me an inverted mirror.  Not what I wanted, but at least I knew what I was looking for.  And, in flying around I found the next few pretty quickly, getting an Echo Locator on my third try.

The piece I was looking for

Now I was on track.  I engaged the Echo Locator, which turns out to be a one use item, and it lit up the Harmonic Camp, my destination.

It is that away!

Back up into the ship and off I went, landing just outside the camp.  I ran over to the terminal, passing the multi-tool, locked up in its display case.  I launched the terminal between bouts of gushing lava… seriously, worst planet ever to walk around on… and got to the memory register bit.

So what am I supposed to do with this?

That triggers a vague memory of hitting this before… like maybe I used the original Echo Locator, got to this, didn’t have time, so left it, not knowing it was my one shot with that Echo Locator.

Anyway, the spoiler here is that you get the answers to these simple equations (15, 5, and 10) and then go to the screen where you enter glyphs and enter the glyph with the corresponding number down the screen in order.  I was initially confused because the UI only shows the first 8 glyphs, and isn’t always great at indicating that there is more to see, the inactive arrow being a light shade of gray not that far from the active arrow, so I wasn’t sure how to indicate “15,” but then I did scroll down and there is a glyph for every number you need.

So I did that, unlocked the access, left the terminal to go check the multi-tool… only to find it was steal sealed in its container.

Back to the terminal to find a new option to unseal the multi-tool, which I did and, hey presto, the multi-tool was mine.

Gimme gimme gimme

Of course, like every multi-tool you get, it was full of broken upgrades you need to fix, so I immediately swapped to the one I had been using and upgrading all expedition and was good to go.

That got me the task completion and wrapped up all but one of the sentinel based tasks, leaving me with just a couple more things to do in order to finish the expedition.