If you’ve logged into Destiny 2 since the latest Season of Dawn update, you may have noticed mysterious obelisks on The Tangled Shore and Mars. These new additions to the game look a bit like planetary vendors at first glance, but they serve several purposes, which can make them confusing to interact with at first.
Here’s everything you need to know about obelisks, including how to unlock them.
Activating the Obelisks
Obelisks currently appear on The Tangled Shore, Mars, Nessus, and the EDZ, but they all must be activated as part of separate quest lines.
When you first log in, pick up the A Matter of Time quest from Ikora Rey. As part of this, you’ll be sent to the Tangled Shore, where the game will walk you through two simple steps to activating the first obelisk. To see the exact steps involved, check out our A Matter of Time guide.
To activate the rest of the obelisks, you’ll need to completely finish the A Matter of Time quest. Once you complete the quest and receive your seasonal artifact, return to Osiris on Mercury and speak with him. He’ll have new quests for you to pick up, including the Obelisk Link quests. Note that when you pick up one of Osiris’ quests, he will no longer show the rest. If this happens, just exit the conversation and talk to him again to respawn his available quests.
To complete the Mars Link, you’ll need to defeat Hive on Mars. This is easily accomplished by heading to either of Mars’ landing points and activating Escalation Protocol, which will cause several Hive to spawn. Once you’ve done that, head to the obelisk at Braytech Futurescape and deposit your materials.
For step two, simply kill enemies with a super or collect orbs to fill up a progress bar. This can also be accomplished rather quickly if you equip a super like Stormcaller which can wipe out tons of enemies at once. Again, head back to the obelisk once you complete this and interact with it to activate it.
For Nessus, you’re going to have to kill Vex on Nessus and collect 50 Undamaged Vex Parts. The trick here is you won’t get parts if you kill the Vex with abilities or weapons that cause disintegration, like Fusion Rifles. Most weapon types are fine, just make sure you’re not punching or throwing grenades at enemies here. Head to the Obelisk, which is right next to the Exodus Black landing zone, and deposit the materials. Then, you’ll have to repeat step two from the Mars link here, killing enemies with your super or collecting orbs to complete a progress bar. Once that’s done, head to the obelisk and you’ll activate it.
Finally, to unlock the EDZ link, you’ll need to defeat Cabal on the EDZ to obtain 50 pieces of Armor Plating. If you defeat a Cabal with a finisher, you’ll get more pieces, so make sure to use weapons like auto rifles or SMGs which can be used to whittle enemy health down and set them up for a finisher. It’s rinse and repeat from there; follow the same steps as the other obelisks and you’ll be able to activate the one on the EDZ.
Some players have reported a bug that prevents them from activating the EDZ obelisk after depositing the necessary materials into it. If this happens to you, leave the area, return, and interact with it again.
What do Obelisks do?
Obelisks are a bit like planetary vendors, in that they have their own bounties and weapons which can be obtained from them. To use obelisks, you’ll need to get familiar with the new Fractaline currency. Fractalines are used to upgrade an obelisk’s resonance rank, which levels each one up and unlocks more options.
Fractalines come in bundles of varying sizes and can be obtained in several ways. You’ll get bundles for reaching certain ranks on your season pass, giving you guaranteed drops.
However, the most consistent source of fractalines will come from bounties. Each obelisk carries two weekly bounties, which will reward Major Fractalines Harvests. You’ll want to make sure you’re completing these often, as upgrading the obelisk will net more perks.
In addition to traditional bounties, you’ll see weapon bounties within each obelisk, which cost both glimmer and fractalines. These will give you a random objective in order to obtain the weapon listed. One weapon bounty will become available at resonance rank one, another at rank three, and a third at rank five.
These bounties can be repeated, which means that you can easily use them to farm for perfect rolls on popular weapons like Bygones. The only catch is you’re limited in the number of weapon bounties you can carry at once, denoted by your Timelost number above the row.
You’ll also see a row of enhancements. These are persistent perks that you can unlock in exchange for glimmer. These range from giving you a chance at planetary materials for killing enemies to raising your Timelost limit. The more you rank up, the more perks will become available to you at each obelisk. This row also contains special mods which can be purchased with Mod Components.
Customizing Sundial rewards with Obelisks
Season of Dawn brings the all-new Sundial activity to Destiny 2, and obelisks can be used to customize the rewards you get for completing it. Each obelisk adds two unique weapons to the activity’s loot pool.
As soon as you activate an obelisk via a Sundial link, you’ll be able to obtain those weapons at the end of a Sundial run. Hover over the first box in the Sundial Link box and you can see what weapons that obelisk adds. You’ll be able to obtain the following weapons.
Tangled Short Obelisk Link
- Breachlight (Sidearm)
- Steelfeather Repeater (Auto Rifle)
Mars Obelisk Link
- Martyr’s Retribution (Grenade Launcher)
- Line in the Sand (Linear Fusion Rifle)
EDZ Obelisk Link
- Gallant Charge (Fusion Rifle)
- Infinite Paths 8 (Pulse Rifle)
Nessus Obelisk Link
- Patron of Lost Causes (Scout Rifle)
- Traveler’s Judgement 5 (Sidearm)
The catch is there’s a limit to how many obelisks can be activated at once. Currently, you can have two active. The season pass will let you link a third eventually, and there will be five obelisks in the game total.
At the moment, it appears that you won’t be able to have every obelisk active at once. Fortunately, the second box in the Sundial Link row will allow you to reset all of your sundial links for 10,000 glimmer, allowing you to activate the ones you want.
Obelisks are the key to getting new rewards in Season of Dawn, so take the time to activate and upgrade these whenever you get a bundle of fractalines.
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