Wake Up, Guardians
When it comes to Destiny‘s vast collection of fancy space guns, exotic weapons are the fanciest of them all. Every exotic weapon has unique qualities and is usually designed to bend or break a rule that governs one of the game’s mechanics. One of the most elusive exotics in The Taken King so far has been Sleeper Simulant, a spiffy-looking Fusion Rifle that, unlike its brethren, actually goes into the Heavy Weapon slot instead of the usual special slot.
Though the weapon featured in marketing materials leading up to The Taken King‘s release, particularly as an example of how Bungie planned to make earning Exotics a more involved and interesting process, there were few clues as to how to get it, leading to extensive data-mining and speculation by players, including a dedicated subreddit. Now it looks like the doors are opening on the path to get it. Players can now access a mission called “The First Firewall” on Earth, where they’ll fight a collection of Hive and Taken Knights in the bunker of Rasputin, the AI Warmind.
Finishing the mission awards a special item that requires the entry of four codes (the sequence of which is based on certain elements in the mission), which then unlocks another mission that rewards an item that itself needs to be repaired by completing five tasks. The tasks range from rerunning a specific story mission to participating in a certain type of public event. Repairing the item appears to be the last step available so far, but it’s certainly the most involved item-related quest line in the game so far, as the preliminary steps involved a series of random items dropped in the Cosmodrome and lots of flavor text about the character Banshee-44 and his missing memories.
At the moment though, there seems to be a lot of salt being thrown around in various comment threads and forum posts on the topic, accusing Bungie of hiding the weapon (or its quest) behind a simple time-lock rather than an actual mystery to be solved. Some of the folks who spent quite a bit of time scouring the maps for clues and forming elaborate theories as to how to get at “The Sleeper” are particularly miffed, claiming the company deliberately deceived fans by implying it was all a matter of solving the puzzle, rather than waiting for someone to toggle a script on a server. Whatever the case, the doors seem to be open now, and Guardians interested in scoring one of The Taken King‘s most coveted exotics can take the first steps.
Sleeper Simulant Quest Megathread [reddit]
