Unlocking the Forge and its capabilities, though, requires a lot of work — and the process to get guns from the Lighthouse isn’t exactly quick, either. Nobody’s quite sure yet what the Forge will eventually unlock, but so far, we know about four guns you can nab if you’re willing to put in the effort.
Here’s how to get your forge weapons, and the best places to hunt for the materials required to create them.
Unlock the Lost Prophecies
Before you can unlock the Cult of Osiris‘ Forge and the Prophecy Tablets that go with them, you need to complete most of the missions in Curse of Osiris. You need to work your way through the campaign, plus the three “adventure” sidequests that pop up on Mercury once you’re done. After you’ve cleared all of those missions, head to Brother Vance in the Lighthouse on Mercury for a new addition to your slate of activities.
When you talk to Vance, he offers you “heroic” versions of the Mercury adventures you just finished. Like the difficult, timed Nightfall Strikes, which rotates every week in Destiny 2, these are tougher takes on the missions with a variety of modifiers that ratchet up the difficulty, and force you to change your tactics.
To find the Forge, pick and complete any one of the heroic adventures. Note that they’re recommended for Power level 300 or above, which should give you an indication of how tough they are. You will have an easier time if you can band together with friends to finish them. You get some solid rewards and finish a Milestone for completing the heroic adventure. You can earn reputation tokens from heroic adventures once per day, and it’s worth it to do so if you want to get more of the new gear.
When you complete your heroic adventure, return to Brother Vance.
Get your Prophecy Tablet
When you talk to Brother Vance after completing your first heroic adventure, he has an item you can take from his menu for free: A “Prophecy Tablet.” The tablets, which unlock weapons, become available in batches. The first group has four tablets, each of which requires you to gather a certain set of items in order to activate it.
The first item you need is “Concentrated Radiolarian Culture.” Once you have the Prophecy Tablet, these items will start to drop for you around the world of Destiny 2. “Concentrated” items are harder to find than the average pickup — they are the uncommon version, which has a blue background. It won’t show up nearly as often as the common, “green” version, which is simply called “Radiolarian Culture.”
Where to find Radiolarian Culture
To get hold of Radiolarian Cultures, you need to know where to look. And to get the uncommon blue variety, you have to gather up several of the common green kind.
Radiolarian Culture generally drops during public events and related endeavors around the solar system, not just on Mercury. Radiolarian Culture drops most often during Public Events, and the chances of some dropping seem higher after triggering the heroic version of an event. You can also find Radiolarian Culture when you defeat high-value targets wandering around any of the planets, and hidden in treasure chests. That includes the gold Regional Chests you can find in every level, as well as the caches that are scattered around each area randomly. The good news is, you can get them anywhere, not just Mercury, and the drop rates don’t seem to be much different from place to place.
The trouble with gathering Radiolarian Culture is that the drop rate isn’t great (and the drop rate for Concentrated Radiolarian Culture is terrible). You won’t get some from every Public Event, High-Value Target or chest, so you may find yourself playing event after event trying to get what you need. To make it slightly easier, Brother Vance will convert a batch of 10 green Cultures into one blue Culture for you, but he charges you 15 legendary shards for the privilege.
The best approach to minimize fatigue is to roll your material hunting into other activities, like clearing the weekly Flashpoint. You also want to equip a Ghost shell that will show you where chests are, or buy Cayde-6’s consumable Scouting Reports to highlight chests as you wander each zone.
Activating a Prophecy Tablet
Once you have a blue Concentrated Radiolarian Culture in your inventory, you can “use” it in order to activate your Prophecy Tablet. Once you’ve done so, go back to Brother Vance in the Lighthouse. He will give you a new item that you can take to the Forge, to his left. Fire it up to get your gun.
It’s worth noting here that you can mess this up. You can “Use” any material you have, even if your Tablet doesn’t call for it — and if you use the wrong material, nothing will happen to your Tablet, but the material will still be used up. So be careful not to accidentally highlight the green version of Radiolarian Culture, or even worse, a material you need to activate a different tablet. You also want to double-check that you’re applying the correct material to your tablet, just to be safe.
The first Prophecy Tablet will net you a scout rifle called “Garden Progeny 1.”
Where to find Paradox Amplifiers
Once you turn in your first Prophecy Tablet and forge your first gun, Brother Vance will offer you one of three other tablets. Pick any one, since you can come back for the others after you have finished. Two of the tablets require a new material in addition to Radiolarian Culture, called a Paradox Amplifier. That said, here’s a list of what they get you:
Verse 3: Jack Queen King 3 (Energy hand cannon)
Verse 4: Machina Dei 4 (Kinetic pulse rifle)
Verse 6: Sol Pariah 6 (Energy submachine gun)
The good news is that Paradox Amplifiers drop regularly. The bad news is that they’re limited to just three types of events: Strike missions, the Crucible, and Heroic Adventures on Mercury.
If you’re going for efficiency and you’re alone, the best approach is to hunker down in the Crucible. Like Cultures, you need 10 green Amplifiers to create a blue one. But as far as we can tell, every match will drop at least one green Paradox Amplifier, and sometimes two. That means 10 matches, max, will get you enough for one blue Advanced Paradox Amplifier. You shouldn’t need more than two for any given Prophecy Tablet.
Where to find Hermaion Blossoms
Once you’ve run through the first batch of four Prophecy Tablets, Brother Vance will make a few more available, usually one at a time, allowing you to choose from a batch of three. He’ll also eventually sling the “Signal Light” mission your way, which starts you on the “Legends Lost” quest. That’ll happen before you’ve completed all your Forge weapons.
According to a handy list on the Destiny subreddit, these are the rest of the weapons you can earn:
- Verse 2: The Conqueror 2 (Kinetic submachine gun)
- Verse 5: Traveler’s Judgment 5 (Energy sidearm)
- Verse 7: West of Sunfall 7 (Kinetic hand cannon)
- Verse 8: Infinite Paths 8 (Energy pulse rifle)
- Verse 9: Null Calamity 9 (Energy auto rifle)
- Verse 10: Future Safe 10 (Sword)
Some of these will require an additional material for you to grind out from around the world, called “Hermaion Blossoms.” Like the other materials, you need the uncommon, or blue, version of the materials, known as “Fossilized Hermaion Blossoms.” These are the toughest materials to come by. You can find them in three specific activities: Nightfall Strikes, Heroic Strikes, and Trials of the Nine matches. To unlock all the Prophecies, you need seven Fossilized Blossoms in total.
Again, there is no way to avoid the grind, so your best bet here is to concentrate on the content you like best or whatever can match your current Milestones. Heroic Strikes are definitely the easiest of the activities to complete, but Trials of the Nine matches go faster if you can find a good team. Your best bet for drops is likely the Prestige version of the Nightfall, but like all these drops, none of them are easy to track.
‘Legends Lost’ Quest
About midway through your quest to unlock all the tablets, you’ll receive a new quest from Brother Vance called “Signal Light.” It takes you back into the Infinite Forest in search of a long-lost guardian known as Saint-14, one of the original Vanguard leaders.
You won’t find Saint-14 on your trip into the Infinite Forest, though, so you’ll need to come back out and keep working on tablets. Complete another one and another mission will open up that sends you, again, into the Infinite Forest. When you finish it, you’ll have a completed Prophecy Tablet that you can return to Brother Vance. Use it at the Forge to receive Perfect Paradox, Saint-14’s high-power, full-auto shotgun.
Finishing the prophecies
There are 11 total prophecy weapons to complete, 10 of which are tablets. It’ll take a while to knock them all out, especially for the ones that require a lot of Radiolarian Cultures or Paradox Amplifiers. Earning all of them brings you a handful of powerful weapons, though, and there’s a little extra surprise when you finish all of them.
Completing all the prophecies automatically earns you an Exotic Ghost shell: Sagira’s shell, the spiffy pointy one from the Curse of Osiris story campaign.
Sagira’s shell is extremely useful. First off, it produces telemetry for all three elemental weapon types, which you can use to increase your rank with the Gunsmith. It also gives you some serious bonuses on Mercury — you’ll earn more glimmer and have the chance to get extra tokens from chests and completing events. Sagira’s shell can also detect caches and resources on Mercury from a huge distance: 75 meters. That’s more than double the usual 30 meters, which means you’ll spot stuff much more easily when you’re working on Mercury.
You also get a cool, unique character emblem to go with your name that indicates you completed all the prophecies, and which tracks the number of kills you racked up with all your prophecy weapons.
Is the seal complete?
There’s one more interesting element about the Prophecy tablets. Beside the Forge is a seal on the wall of the Lighthouse that includes 12 symbols. As you unlock the prophecies, the symbols light up — but even when you’ve finished all the tablets, there will still be one symbol that’s not lit up.
It looks like a blank place where a last symbol might light up, which could mean there’s one last part of the Lost Prophecy storyline for players to do that hasn’t unlocked yet. But as is clear in the image above, that last space is where the cord from the Forge plugs into the wall, so that space might be deliberately left empty. We’ll have to wait to see if something in Destiny 2 unlocks the last space some time in the future.
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