Fortuna Bounties and Ignoring the Orb Vallis

In order to level up with Fortuna, you need to do a lot of bounties. Just like Cetus, Fortuna’s boss Eudico directs us through various stages of a bounty, either sabotaging the Corpus or saving their own. It’s all very standard stuff, and the missions themselves are pretty easy. If anything, the hardest tasks are the assassination ones simply due to a lack of enemies. However, there’s another big problem with Fortuna bounties.

Only the centre of the Orb Vallis exists apparently.

If you grab a bounty from Eudico, all of the tasks will be in the same 2-3 areas. It’s very rare that a bounty will take you anywhere too far away from the centre of the Orb Vallis. In fact, most tasks have you flip-flopping between the same two locations. Occasionally, you’ll get either an empty space for excavators, or a small Corpus hut with some prisoners inside.

Either way, by doing bounties from Eudico only, you’re missing out on the rest of the Orb Vallis.

Doing a long, boring defense mission so you can do more bounties

There is a way to access bounties outside of Fortuna. In the various larger Corpus stations, there’s often a small terminal. If you kill enough people there, one of them will drop a data mass. Stick the data mass in your nearby small terminal, and you can access new bounties from there… Except, well, you have to defend the area at first. And the Corpus really don’t like it when we mess with their terminals. They will definitely bring on the big guns, the Hyenas and Raptors in a bid to stop you.

Defeat the Corpus though and this base now belongs to you. In this one specific session. If you leave the Orb Vallis, the place you took over is instantly invaded by Corpus again, as if nothing happened. Heck, you can’t even hack more than one base! If you decide to go and defend another terminal somewhere else, the one you are leaving will promptly return to the Corpus as well.

What are we missing out on?

There is actually quite a lot of cool, interesting stuff in the Orb Vallis. A massive statue is being built by Nef Anyo; there is a relic the size of a house, spinning around on its own; we have a large space port that has pretty much nothing space-like gonig on, and there is plenty to see in between. And what about the third orb? Does anyone else even know about the third orb? It’s been sitting in a pond for the last three years, bubbling and doing nothing.

On top of that though, there are plenty of buildings and areas that can EASILY be used by bounties. For example, located at the north east corner of the Vallis, there’s a place called Reflector Control. Venus doesn’t have a moon or proper day and night or proper seasons, so taking over Reflector Control could do all sorts of things. But no, we never go there.

At the end of the day, the Orb Vallis has a LOT going on. But we don’t really explore much of it as a team. The rest of the Orb Vallis, far beyond Fortuna and Solaris United’s small area, is left almost untouched, most of the time. A shame, really.