K-Driven: 1,000,000 Meters of K-Driving
If you’ve been reading recent articles lately, you may have noticed a theme. I’ve been on a Warframe achievement binge. A while back, I realized that 100% achievement completion was in range for me. Both in Warframe and in my Steam achievements. In the past however, I’ve only ever managed to 100% one other game. And that game was the original version of Skyrim, which is no longer even really on Steam.
Unfortunately, there is a massive roadblock to getting 100% achievements: the humble K-Drive.
Specifically, the K-Driven achievement.
The K-Driven achievement is hell. You need to right 1,000,000 meters on your K-Drive. Thankfully, the achievement isn’t so bad that you have to do that in one go. But holy fuck that is a long way. To put it into context, the Orb Vallis is about 3,000m2, meaning that if you drove around in a big circle around its outer edge, you’d be at it for ages. In fact, K-Drives aren’t even particularly fast. They all have the same base stats and a speed of “18.00”, which could mean anything.
Either way, 1,000,000 meters is about 1,000 kilometers. Which is a pretty long way and is approximately 621 miles. According to Wikipedia, that’s more than the distance from Washington, D.C. to Chicago, Illinois as the crow flies. And you have to do this on a skateboard in a fictional game.
To my credit, I managed 450,000m before I decided that I was fucking done with doing this normally. The distance I traveled is about equal to the length of the Pyrenees, the mountain range between Spain and France. There HAD to be a way to do this more quickly.
Luckily, there’s a workaround.
And the workaround was actually quite simple. It involved throwing yourself out of bounds and basically falling infinitely. The problem was that you had to find the perfect spot, otherwise you’d respawn somewhere, with no distance gained. Funnily enough though, I’d actually stumbled across the workaround by accident. For a while, I had been riding around the very edges of the Orb Vallis. But at one point, I’d fallen off my K-Drive and out past the massive ice clouds. And somehow, I fell so far that I fell past where the ground still had collisions, down into nothingness.
To make this workaround actually work, I’d have to mount my K-Drive and drive straight into the edge of the Orb Vallis. This would dismount me, throw me out of bounds and cause me to fall. At a certain point though, when everything stops being black and turns into skybox textures, I can then launch myself into Archwing, fly upwards for a long time, then immediately switch to my K-Drive. If I got this right, I’d fall a huge distance, and it would count to the achievement.
There are downsides to this.
Namely, I can’t just do this, then AFK. After a while, you hit some kind of invisible floor at the bottom of the map. Normally, this would just respawn you at Fortuna’s lift. Or it might just kill you. On a K-Drive, you just float there. But after a seemingly random amount of time, not only do you stop accumulating combo points, but you stop accumulating distance too. When this happens, you need to reset. And resetting often means either returning to Fortuna by the Esc. menu, or falling and dying in an infinite void. While you’d think you could Archwing back to reality, the ice winds that are supposed to stop you from escaping in the first place also stop you from getting back in.
This workaround is also kinda easy to do wrong. If you do mess it up, as mentioned before, you can just respawn or end up dead, and neither count towards the achievement. You really need to launch yourself quite far into the void. At least it’s easy to tell when you’ve done it wrong: if you can’t use Archwing, you haven’t fallen enough. You can also use Space Kid to test this – if you switch to your Operator and appear 1. at the border of the map and 2. moving really slowly, then you need to try again.
The biggest downside though is that this still takes bloody ages. To get the 550,000m I needed, it took me a good 3-4 hours. But that’s far, far better than actually riding a K-Drive for 3 hours.
Ironically though, I still have one achievement left.
The Race Ace achievement requires you to do all 22 K-Drive races on the Orb Vallis. Seems simple enough, right? Well, not really. You see, there are only 5 K-Drive races available every day. And they are randomly chosen. I’ve not had much luck finding the 3 last races I need.
But I’m patient. Those races will come eventually. And after that, I’ll have 100% completed a second game. At least, according to Steam.