More On K-Drives

It’s been a while since Fortuna released and while I may be max rank with Solaris United and would be max rank with Vox Solaris if I actually remembered to go and rank up with them, I am still only on the second level with the Vent Kids. Because frankly, I don’t have much reason to use my K-Drive.

The reason is pretty simple. No matter what I do, it’s easier and quicker just to use my Archwing. Right now I’m rocking Itzal, teleporting across the Orb Vallis like a demented Loki/Nova crossbreed with wings, but even Elytron, the slowest Archwing by far, is faster. Mostly because you can fly in a straight line while you have to K-Drive over the many, many mountains of the Orb Vallis.

Sure, you can ride along the roads, grinding on the many rails as you do so, but the roads are cut into the mountains and are very windy as a result. Going to a Corpus base is no big deal on a road but many caves and animal tracking start points are on mountains, so you have to wriggle and jump a bit to access them. When it comes to caves though, neither Archwing or K-Drive are very good. Better to use your feet.

But my biggest problem with K-Drive is that you can’t just level it up naturally. I found, even grinding and tricking my way between objectives, it’s just not very effective. If you want to earn K-Drive standing, you need to specifically do so. And the best way to do that is to find an easily chainable set of rails to grind on. The most popular place to do this is at the Pearl, a massive floating gold orb that has a circular rail you can grind on, jumping and doing tricks between each barrier that blocks parts of the rail. Other areas include the massive pipes behind the entrance to Fortuna and various sets of railings out in the wild.

That’s just if you want to do things efficiently. Driving around normally won’t get you any standing at all.

But even if you do find a good spot to grind and grind, you can’t do it indefinitely, because there’s a maximum of 3000 points per trick. Something that makes me, as a former Tony Hawk’s Proskater 1-4 and T.H.U.G player, very sad. I mean, come on, doing massive tricks is the whole fucking point of K-Drive, right?

At least the standard K-Drive you get is at least somewhat serviceable. You can’t customize it at all though. You want a custom board, you have to buy a K-Drive from the Vent Kids. Which costs either Platinum if you buy the random daily offer or… About 15-20k standing for the lowest level board. Not including the 5k standing needed to get to the second rank in the first place. You also need a Vehicle slot to put your board in, aka an Archwing slot, since K-Drives and Archwings were basically shoved in together.

You can level up and mod your K-Drive just like you can with Archwing, using mods only available via the Vent Kids. That also cost standing. Be careful though, because driving speed and boost speed are two separate things and there are separate mods for both.

The costs all build up very quickly as well. Vent Kid items and standing scale up the same way all other Syndicates do, but there are no other ways aside from tricks and the odd race for you to earn standing.

Frankly, it’s all a bit of a pain in the ass. Especially if you are trying to level up other syndicates as well. K-Drives are more meant the bored veteran than the dazed newbie.