Mass Effect: Andromeda guide: Hunting the Archon walkthrough

The end of Mass Effect: Andromeda’s “A Trail of Hope” mission tells you about the angaran traitor Vehn Terev who is currently on Kadara Port. You’ll pick up the “Hunting the Archon” mission automatically, so all you have to do is go to Kadara Port in the Govorkam (#gesundheit) system.

Kadara Port

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1. Kadara is an exile haven, and is currently being fought over by two factions of Initiative exiles and the kett. And, unless you want to spend the next 10 hours sorting out all of those narrative threads, your job is to ignore it all. You can come back and spend as long as you want fixing all the problems and attending to the steady stream of side missions thrown at you from the moment you arrive. We’re only going to focus on the priority op here.
2. Speak to the Resistance contact at Kralla’s Song. On your way, you’ll pass by three merchants — armor, weapons and mods — that you can hit to buy anything new you want. When you’re done, just follow your HUD marker to the bar and talk to the contact, Reyes Vidal.
3. Meet Sloane Kelly in the Outcast HQ on Kadara Port. Once again, just follow your HUD and work your walk through the dialogue (which has a real The 100 vibe, if you ask us #clexa).
4. Interrogate Vehn Terev. Follow your HUD to Terev and interrogate him by, you know, just straight up asking him what you want to know.
5. Retrieve the kett transponder from the badlands. The next part takes you out of the city into the Badlands. As soon as you leave the gate, you’ll call down a forward station and your Nomad.

What follows is really straightforward — drive the the location marked on your map — but we’re going to break it out for a minute. Your drive to the camp where the transponder is buried will take you across a good-sized chunk of Kadara, and you’re going to bump into constant fights between the Outcasts and the Collective that you can join.

Join the fights if you want to (XP is XP), but also know that you can just keep driving right past them. These fights are part of the various side missions and distractions all over Kadara. And they’ll still be fighting when you come back.

Tafeno

Before you even get to talk to Gil, the team meeting on the Tempest is going to introduce you to two new priority ops missions. They’re obviously more important than side missions, but they’re still distractions. And, despite how everyone makes it sound, you don’t have to do them first.

The only question here is whether or not you’re a high enough level to take on a big, drawn-out kett fight. We took on this mission at level 25, and that was right in our preferred sweet spot — challenging, but we were still comfortable (read: comfortably overpowered). Level 25 is probably higher than necessary for this mission (we’ve done a lot of side missions), but we do have to stress that this is a very long, very tough fight against a lot of bad guys.

Grid View

1. Speak to Gil in Tempest engineering.
2. Locate the kett flagship in the Tafeno system. Things get immediately complicated — the Archon has captured the salarian ark (Hey! You found the salarian ark!). This changes your plan a bit.
3. Patch SAM into the ark’s systems. The terminal is right in front of you when you walk in.
4. Locate the salarian Pathfinder, Zevin Raeka. Follow your HUD to Medical Bay A13. Your goal is the dead body about halfway down on the lefthand side. After you scan the body, your HUD frustratingly doesn’t update or help you find the terminal. It’s on the left side of the bed against the wall.
5. Identify the dead salarian. Follow your HUD to the other side of the room to find the sequencer.
6. Locate the dead salarian’s stasis pod. You’ll have to scan a few pods before you find the right one.
7. Revive the salarian Pathfinder.

The Archon’s flagship

The list below is both simpler and more complex than it seems at first glance. All of the steps boil down to “follow your HUD marker” over and over again, which sounds simple. But every “follow your HUD marker” is immediately followed by “and fight your way through a horde of angry kett,” which is less simple. This is the start of the big, drawn-out fight we warned you about earlier. Keep following your HUD and keep shooting the bad guys. You can do this.

The Archon is going to keep blocking you at every turn, but your HUD will keep updating. Instead of repeating ourselves at each step, here’s our basic advice:

• Try to stick to the wings. Stay out of the middle of rooms as much as possible — there’s usually ammo crates on the sides, and you’re less likely to get surrounded.
• Don’t ignore the chosen. The bigger baddies are more tempting targets, but those chosen can still ruin your day.
• Let them come to you. Don’t go charging in because you’ll just get yourself killed. Find some reliable cover near an ammo crate and wait them out.
• Fight the Ascendant like you fought the Cardinal before. We wrote about it here. tl;dr: shoot the orb, shoot the guy, keep your distance, watch out for his attacks.

Grid View

1. Infiltrate the kett ship.
2. Patch SAM into the kett ship’s systems.
3. Send the salarian Pathfinder team on their way.
4. Make your way to the Archon’s private chamber.
5. Survive the ambush.
6. Bypass kett security.
7. Make your way to the Archon’s private chamber.

The Archon’s Chamber

Grid View

1. Escape the trap. There’s only one way to escape the trap, and it’s not fun. Once that unpleasantness is out of the way, you’ve got to figure out how to proceed. You HUD is surprisingly unhelpful here. Feel free to pick up and/or scan everything you can as you look for your escape route. Face the big green specimen tank and turn left. You’ll see a window with a room behind it — that’s the room where the console you need is. Find a door, get into the room and activate the console. Then return to the main room to pick up your HUD marker again. When you finally exit the maintenance tunnel, you’ll be right outside the Archon’s chamber.
2. Make your way to the Archon’s private chamber.
3. Find the relic. Hint: It’s the one all the way in the back with the giant glowing symbol on it.
4. Kill the exalted krogan and the kett. (Well, you had to see this coming.) The exalted krogan is another bullet reef, and he’s angry to boot. Your primary tactic here is going to be to shoot him. A lot. And then keep shooting him with everything you have. Beyond that, try to stay away from him. His ranged weapon is easily-avoidable, but he’ll try to close the distance and punch you in the face — and that part sucks. When you get him down past half health, a bunch of kett will flood into the room. Get to one of the sides — it does you no good to have an angry mutant krogan in front of you and a horde of kett behind. There are elevated platforms with ammo crates on the sides that will let you catch your breath, restock and clear out the kett. Keep moving to avoid the krogan while you kill the kett, then turn your attention back to him. Just keep shooting.

Escape the kett ship. Your escape doesn’t go quite as planned and you’re left with a decision to make. We can’t make this one for you, Pathfinder — it’s on you.

Either choice you make will lead to another long, brutal fight. This time, though, remember that you’re trying to escape — if you start to get overwhelmed, don’t worry about killing every single kett you see, disengage and sprint toward your HUD marker. This won’t get you out of every fight, but it will save you a few bullets.

Here’s a spoiler/hint to help you decide: saving the krogans will lead to them showing up to help you later, but Pathfinder Raeka will die (to be replaced by another salarian).