Turns out people didn’t have to solve some giant riddle to find Destiny’s most mysterious gun. Turns out they just had to... wait.
As of this morning, the quest for Destiny’s enigmatic Sleeper Simulant has officially begun, kicking off with a story mission called The First Firewall that you’ll find on Earth’s map if you’ve brought enough legendary fusion rifle relics to the Gunsmith. (Big hat tip to the r/DestinyTheGame community for finding all this.)
Nobody’s found a way to get the actual weapon just yet—it seems like we’ll have to wait a bit longer—but at least now we know where to start. For weeks now, people have come up with all sorts of theories about triggering the quest for what could be Destiny’s one of most powerful new guns, but all of the leads went nowhere... until this morning, when The First Firewall popped up:
It’s not clear why this happened today. Maybe Bungie always just knew they’d launch this mission on October 7. Or maybe—and this is my personal theory—it was triggered by the entire Destiny community turning in a combined total of X hundred thousand relics.
Either way, you can start the quest now, and it’s awesome. If you don’t see The First Firewall on your map, you probably need to turn in more DVALIN relics—you know, those purple fusion rifles you can find out in the wild and give to the gunsmith for reputation gains? There’s no way to check how many you’ve turned in, but they’re pretty common drops from enemies, so if you don’t have The First Firewall active, just go out and kill things on any planet until you get some relics. There are four total, so that’s likely the number you have to hit.
The First Firewall is pretty simple—you go into Rasputin’s bunker and fight off a bunch of Taken and Hive knights who pop up in a strange pattern:
Once you beat four waves of knights and then a big Taken boss, you’ll get a new object called the Curious Transceiver:
Here’s where we get into puzzle territory, and I strongly recommend that if you want to do this quest yourself, you try to figure this one out on your own. Otherwise, read on.
The transceiver will ask you to input a series of four passcodes that look like this:
As it turns out, we saw patterns like that just before getting the transceiver—those waves of Hive and Taken knights. Going from left to right, you have to hit the top box for each Hive knight and the bottom box for each Taken knight. There are four waves of enemies, and four passwords to enter.
So let’s say the top is “0” and the bottom is “1.” Here are the four codes:
0 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1
0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0
0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0
0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0
Once you’ve done this, you’ll activate the transceiver, and it’ll tell you to go track down a new relic on Earth. This will open up a temporary mission called Shadow Call:
This one’s a little tricky. You may remember the Devil’s Spire from the original Taken King quest—you know, the place where Cayde had you do a whole bunch of platforming as you jumped your way up to the stash where he hid that stealth drive? Now you’ll have to do the same thing... with a timer.
Here’s video I shot this morning while going through the mission:
Beat Shadow Call and you’ll get your hands on an exotic item called the Ikelos Fusion Core. Examine the core and you’ll find even more riddles:
You can activate all five of these nodes by fulfilling certain requirements. Hovering the cursor over each one will give you clues like “GA=ISHTAR.ARCHIVES,” so again I’d recommend trying to figure this part out on your own, but if you want a full walkthrough:
Ionized Shell Harmonics - Beat the Archives mission on Venus
Heavy Power Coupling - Dismantle a legendary/exotic heavy weapon
Plasma Confinement Control Module 1 - Do the Warsat public event on Earth
Plasma Confinement Control Module 2 - Do the Warsat public event on the Moon
Plasma Confinement Control Module 3 - Do the Warsat public event on Mars
To keep track of exactly when the Warsat events spawn, you can use the fanmade public event tracker.
Once you’ve completed all this, you’re just about done. For now. Give the completed Ikelos Fusion Core to the Gunsmith and he’ll say he needs more time to check it out, which means we’ll likely have to wait another week or two before he gives us access to the next part of what has become Destiny’s most exciting hunt.
I sure hope the Sleeper Simulant is worth all this.
UPDATE: Turns out this will be a temporary thing, so try to get it done today:
UPDATE 2 (10/8): The quest is over. The gun has been found. For details on the second chunk of the Sleeper Simulant quest, check out this post.
You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.