Rebuilding a Relay for the Steel Meridian
There’s an event going on in Warframe right now. An event in which we rebuild a relay, one of the relays that was destroyed in another event three years ago. Dubbed the Pyrus Project, this is a community effort to revive what should have been rebuilt a long time ago. Helping us in this effort are the Steel Meridian, the ragtag force of defected Grineer that just want to help others… as long as they’re not the Perrin Sequence.
Except I kinda did the whole event solo. In fact, it wasn’t really “community-y” at all. Aside from sitting in the finished relay chatting with people and chatting with a couple of clan mates, I didn’t communicate with ANYONE during the event.
What did players have to do for this event? Not much. Two new resources were added for the event: Tremebra Essence and Pyrus Essence, and both are needed to complete the four goals every player needs to help build the new relay.
Firstly we need to kick the shit out of the Gustragg Three, three times. Luckily the chances of them appearing have been buffed dramatically for the event, but the bastards don’t actually drop their normal loot. You also don’t need to piss off the Grineer to get them to spawn, they have a chance to appear on Earth, Mercury, Ceres and Saturn no matter what. This part took me the second longest to do.
Secondly, we need to collect Pyrus Essence. This comes from a specific enemy that Cressa Tal, the leader of the Steel Meridian, will inform you of and mark on your map. You have to kill these enemies and capture them, just like normal Capture targets. You need 30 Pyrus Essence, which is about 10 missions on Ceres or 30 on Earth, as the amounts scale with planet difficulty.
Thirdly, we need to, uh, complete a daily Synthesis task for Simaris. Because… uh… I don’t know. We just do. But that’s piss easy, as long as you have planets unlocked. I did this in 3 missions.
Fourthly, we actually need to build Relay Struts. Five of them. They cost 5000 salvage, 2 Morphics and 15 Trembera Essence. They take 3 hours each to build and are the only real time gate on this whole event.
Once you’ve done all that, you go back to Cressa outside the under-construction Strata Relay, give her the stuff, then leave. Literally the instant you get back to your ship, Cressa sends you an urgent email screaming that Sargus Ruk and a bunch of Grineer have attacked and Cressa needs you to come back and fight.
It’s literally just killing some Grineer, then killing Sargus Ruk when he spawns.
And that’s it. You’re returned to your ship again and you’re free to go to the new Strata Relay whenever you want.
It’s a really easy and actually pretty boring event. The only difficult part was fighting level 50 Gustragg Three enemies, but that was only hard because I also completed this mission with my MR3 Phovos the Excalibur. Okay, I had to get a taxi to do the Synthesis target (because the two available when I checked only spawned in the higher levels of the Void, requiring me to get all the way to Neptune to access) but apart from that, it was all doable with a badly modded Excalibur and his Vectis sniper rifle.
Just took longer as Phovos since Mars is the only unlocked planet I have that has Salvage, and of course Phovos doesn’t have nearly as many resources in general compared to Retvik. On the plus side though, I got from early Mars to Ceres pretty damn quickly.
The rewards were pretty alright though. A pistol riven is always nice to have, as is a new noggle of Ember. The Zylok, a new pistol that is a mini version of the Sybaris, looks lovely but is a slow-firing Status weapon, meaning it has little space to make a niche for itself and isn’t particularly useful. Fending off Sargus Ruk also gets you a really nice Liset skin, but it’s not nice enough for me to change my current Prisma Liset skin.
As for the new relay itself… I don’t get it. It’s Ember themed. Everything is red and on fire. In fact, Strata relay looks more like a RED VEIL relay than either a Tenno relay or a Steel Meridian one! And it has a massive flaming statue of Ember and a Heat Sword in it. The layout is different, yes, there are Fortuna and Cetus people wandering around which is nice, but it’s not a Steel Meridian relay. In fact, all the Syndicate rooms are the same, and the Conclave/Simaris/Darvo Deal rooms are all the same, just located downstairs rather than upstairs.
And why is Sargus Ruk involved at all and not Vay Hek? Why is it always the same three Grineer anyway, Hek, Ruk and occasionally Mister Tubemen? Why is THIS relay the Ember relay, and not the relay on Saturn where Ember is located? Who knows.
At least the relay looks nice and has some nice NPCs, I guess.
All in all, the event was boring. It was obviously a stopover for bigger things to come, but it wasn’t even that much of a resource sink. I know they’re working hard on other, bigger updates, but a little more care could have gone into this update.