What you need to know
- Update: Helldivers have successfully liberated Estanu in well under 24 hours, and as a result, Fori Prime is now available to play on and liberate. This quick victory gives me hope that the community will be able to pull off this Major Order, though freeing it, Hellmire, Nivel 43, and Zagon Prime in two days will still be extremely difficult to accomplish.
- Helldivers 2's latest Major Order is directing players to free the planets Zagon Prime and Fori Prime from bug infestation by Friday morning, and will reward the community 35 Warbond Medals if it's accomplished.
- The catch, though, is that both worlds are currently located behind enemy lines, which makes fighting on them impossible currently. This is Helldivers 2's "Supply Lines" mechanic at work.
- To open fronts on Zagon and Fori Prime, we'll have to first free worlds like Hellmire and Estanu. Luckily, about 120,000 Helldivers are already fighting on Estanu now, with more joining the ongoing battle as I write this.
- Comically, the reason why Super Earth wants control of these two planets is because it's "culling the Terminid population and harvesting the E-710 they provide." Element 710 is all-but-confirmed to be oil by the game's lore, so basically, we're farming the bugs for fossil fuel.
Update 3/19/2024 at 10:45 p.m. PT / 3/20/2024 at 1:45 a.m. ET: Estanu, the frigid world blocking off access to Fori Prime, has been successfully liberated by the Helldivers 2 community in well under 24 hours. As a result, Fori Prime — an arid planet with the Tremors effect that can stun both players and enemies with earthquakes — is now available to deploy on. As I write this update minutes after its front opened up, thousands are already dropping into its rocky battlefields.
The quick victory gives me hope that fans will actually be able to pull this Major Order off, though doing so will still be incredibly difficult thanks to the time limit. On top of liberating Fori Prime, the community also has to take Hellmire and Nivel 43 just to get to Zagon Prime, which itself then has to be freed in order for the campaign to be won. Essentially, players now have just over two days to win four planets, which may simply not be enough time.
In any event, we'll see how things go, and I'll keep this article updated with the latest news from the front. Now, stop reading this and get to Fori Prime, soldier. That's an order!
The next Helldivers 2 Major Order is here, and when I first looked it over, it didn't seem too tough. We have to liberate two planets — Zagon Prime and Fori Prime — from Terminid bug infestation in about three days. Not bad, right? Players freed an entire sector in just a few days last week, after all, so two worlds shouldn't pose much of a challenge...
...or so I thought. Then I went and actually looked at the galaxy map, and realized what the catch is: neither of these planets are actually available to fight on right now, as both of them are located behind bug-controlled worlds like Hellmire, Estanu, and Crimsica. To even open up fronts on Zagon and Fori Prime, we'll need to liberate some of these planets first — and now, I'm starting to feel the squeeze of that three-day time limit.
What's at work here is Helldivers 2's "Supply Lines" mechanic, which hasn't come into play for Major Order objectives until now. This detailed write-up goes over the system in detail, but the TL;DR is that liberation campaigns can't begin on a given planet unless there's a supply line connecting them to a world that's currently under Super Earth control. In this instance, we'll need to take Hellmire and then Nivel 43 before we can invade Zagon Prime, and Estanu or Crimsica have to be taken before we can deploy on Fori Prime. Note that you can view the supply line network yourself with this nifty Helldivers 2 Galactic War live map (toggle "supply lines" in the map's top-right corner).
Given that the community has less than three days to accomplish all of this, this might end up being the hardest Major Order yet — though it's also possible that each individual planet will be easier to take than worlds usually are to compensate for the tight time limit. Or maybe Joel the Game Master saw all that trash talk on Reddit and decided to put us in our place. Either way, Liberty needs all of her finest space marines for the war effort right now.
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If the Helldivers manage to pull this off, we'll get 35 Warbond Medals, which is quite a nice reward for a Major Order that only lasts until Friday (especially since the Cutting Edge Warbond just came out). What happens if we fail isn't clear, though I'm sure the consequences won't be anything good. Maybe there'll be a game-wide debuff for a few days, similar to the temporary bonus stratagems we often get for liberating worlds successfully.
If you're curious, the narrative context for the Major Order is pretty chuckle-worthy; the reason we're on Zagon and Fori Prime is because we're "culling the Terminid population and harvesting the E-710 they provide" to safeguard the "economic future" of Super Earth's citizens. Illegal Propaganda Tower side objectives on bug planets outright claim that "Element 710" is oil, and well, I don't need to tell you what "710" looks like when you flip it upside-down and mirror it horizontally.
The good news is that players are already battling on the frontlines en masse, and it looks like it's focusing on Estanu first. As I write this, about 120,000 Helldivers are fighting on the frosty planet, which notably has the Extreme Cold modifier that reduces rate of fire and heat buildup in energy weapons active (30,000 are also on Crimsica, but you should move to Estanu if you're one of them; splitting up our forces will likely lead to defeat).
Overall, I'm happy to see the supply lines mechanic finally have an impact on the structure of a Major Order, as I think it adds an interesting layer of depth to Helldivers 2's Galactic War metagame. Whether the player base can rise to the challenge or not remains to be seen, but after how swiftly fans blitzed through the last few orders, I'd bet my Super Credits that it'll come through.
Helldivers 2 is available now for $39.99 on both PS5 and PC, and so far, it's one of the best PC games of the year. Notably, the game also supports cross-platform play between PS5 and PC.
