As soon as the update hit, I knew exactly what would happen. People coming out in droves screaming that this “Kuva in the Kuva Fortress” mission doesn’t give enough Kuva and that it’s not very good and that DE should be ashamed of themselves. That was exactly what happened. That and a few bugs – Kuva not being saved to your inventory at the end of the mission and being unable to farm more Kuva, but I think they’ve been ironed out already.

The mission is simple. On Taveuni, the Survival mission on the Kuva Fortress, enemies can now drop weird red versions of the power cores you see in Excavation missions. You pick one of these up, stick it in a Life Support Capsule and defend it from enemies who are pissed off at you. When it’s done, you lose the ability to use that capsule for life support, but you get 200 Kuva. You can do this for as long as you want, assuming you don’t run out of life support. A new capsule drops every 90 seconds, and all capsules (assuming they don’t bug out) can be turned into Kuva excavators.

By this logic, you can get 600 Kuva, the equivalent of one Kuva Siphon mission, every four and a half minutes. Let’s round it up to five minutes, because you’ve got to include loading in and moving around and things like that.

The current argument is that Kuva Floods and Kuva Siphons are always better than Kuva Survival, so Kuva Survival is useless. But I don’t think that’s really true.

You see, you get 1200 (approximately!) Kuva from a Kuva Flood, but you have to fight level 80-100 enemies to do so. After you’ve done a Kuva Flood once or twice, the mission disappears and you have to wait for another one. The idea here is that you get a big chunk of Kuva faster, but you have to work harder for it.

The same sort of applies to Kuva Siphon missions, but this is more based on mission type. A half-decent player like me can do a Kuva Siphon set on a Capture mission in under five minutes somewhat easily. But Kuva Siphons on Capture missions aren’t always available. Worse, Kuva Siphon/Flood missions in general can sometimes take longer than five minutes, depending on the mission type – a non-Kuva Fortress Survival mission is guaranteed to take over five minutes, and Mobile Defense requires a guaranteed four and a half minutes to hack all three terminals. Spies can also become longer and more tedious due to enemies spawning in too. You’re then left with Exterminate, Sabotage and Capture, and the former is often made longer because Kuva Grineer don’t count towards your total kill counts. There are also tile sets that players will often avoid, most notably the horrible cramped corridors of Eris, and the fact that Ceres Kuva missions seem to spawn the siphons in really weird places.

On top of that, Kuva missions rotate throughout the day. You might find that you’ve done all the Kuva Siphon and Flood missions available to you. I’ve actually done this quite a lot whenever I go farming, and I have to wait five minutes for new missions to appear.

The whole point of Kuva Survival was NEVER to replace normal forms of Kuva. It provides a different way to earn Kuva in a similar way, without having to mess around looking for missions, and having to pick and choose. Yes, it’s not an interesting way to farm Kuva, but neither are doing Siphons and Floods – it’s the same every single time, but with the added bonus of being far more consistent.

At the end of the day, you’re trading speed for consistency. Yes, 200 Kuva per 90 seconds doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s 200 Kuva that’s always there for you to earn, no matter what time it is and no matter where the Kuva Fortress is located. At the same time, if you want a chunk of Kuva right now, you can do some Kuva Siphons or Floods and THEN do Kuva Survival.

There’s nothing stopping you from doing both. The issue isn’t so much that one is better than the other, the problem is that Kuva in general is required in far too large an amount compared to how hard it is to earn. Really, Kuva amounts should be upped across the board, for both Kuva Siphons/Floods AND Kuva Survival.

But there’s one more, far more important thing about Kuva Survival…

YOU DON’T NEED TO USE OPERATOR MODE!

It’s just a cross between Survival and Excavation, nothing special. You don’t need to constantly jump to and from space kid mode, aside from killing a handful of Kuva Guardians or activating your Operator Mode passives.

For that alone, I think Kuva Survival is worth it.