The Helminth Illness
There’s a new Warframe in town, the annoyingly hard to get Nidus. He comes with a half good, half awful quest to get his blueprint and can only be obtained via the C rotation of rewards on a pain in the ass mission. Nidus’s update, the Glast Gambit (weird title, right?) came with a lot of ups and downs. The ups mostly being a new sparring weapon after the first two were released three years ago and the impressively good abilities Nidus has, the downs mostly being the second half of the Glast Gambit quest and the research costs of the Hema, a new weapon that uses health as ammo. I can’t really talk about most of this right now because I’ve only just got the parts for the Hiruda, the new melee – the rest of it is still locked off from me.
The biggest thing though is the reveal of what’s behind that damn infested door. Every ship has an infested door in it, and I’ve spoken of it before. In fact, I mentioned it way back in one of my original articles. Turns out, there’s a fish in there, a fish called Helminth, who only likes Nidus. And a chair. And of course there is infested stuff everywhere. I haven’t been in myself, because the only way in is to have Nidus. You just need to equip him and walk into the door, and it opens up for you.
But there’s something else going on.
Turns out, sitting in that chair does something to your Nidus. It infects him with something. There’s rumours of this infection doing something to your ‘morality meter’ (something added in to the later parts of the War Within), but no one’s sure yet, and most people seem to thing it doesn’t affect your morality. Some have noticed changes in their morality meter but since there was a glitch with several choices in the Glast Gambit, it’s possible people’s morality changes stem from there.
Either way, this infection can spread. It can spread to other players and their Warframes via contact. You can tell if someone is infected by the fact they have a purple cyst on their neck. But that is assuming they’ve had the illness for more than a day. Before then, the infection is completely invisible. Over the next seven days, it grows into an ugly tentacle thing sticking out of of your poor Warframe’s neck. Or even your operator’s neck if you’ve completed the War Within and are that way inclined.
What the illness does, no one knows. No one knows how to cure it or anything. Well, apart from potentially making it into pets.
Of course, I wasn’t sure at first. The second I heard about it and could get in-game, I set my matchmaking to Solo, so I would only be able to play on my own. But eventually I lamented, and decided to infect some of my Warframes. I took Trinity Prime, Ember Prime and Titania out on missions. Apparently there is supposed to be a particle effect on infection, but I never saw it. Even after running through three relays and ten public missions with Niduses everywhere.
Not thinking my frames were infected, I leveled up Trinity and Ember Prime, then went off to farm for Loki, using Valkyr. Then after 16 attempts at getting Loki’s systems, I used Volt Prime.
Big mistake. I didn’t know about the fact that there are no visible symptoms on the first day, and it turns out the random person I had played with to get Loki was infected. And of course, I didn’t find out until the day after, when the purple pimple of doom appeared on Volt Prime’s neck.
Of course, seeing my beloved Volt Prime being infected, I quickly locked him in quarantine along with Trinity, Ember and Valkyr, who were all also infected and re-set my status back to Solo. I threw Titania in there as well just in case.
Not that there actually IS a quarantine section on my ship. I just sealed them off inside my arsenal, refusing to use any of them in case I infect other people.
On the plus side, Oberon, Frost, Frost Prime and normal Volt are all safe and clean. As long as Volt is good, I’m good.
In the mean time, all we can do is wait. And read this Reddit post which describes the damn infection with more detail. Here’s hoping this won’t be another Corrupted Blood incident…
Future edit: The cyst can now be cured by entering the infested room and sitting in the infested chair, using an infested frame with a fully grown infested cyst. The cyst will be popped and your frame won’t be able to get infected or enter the room again.