Truth Sought and Found

There's a dynamic encounter on Hoth called "Trial By Fire", which I ranked among my top ten favourite encounters on that planet. As mentioned in that post, the encounter has you testing an experimental heat resistance suit inside one of the small lava fissures in the area, which requires you to press some buttons both to stay alive and to gather data.

Back in January I wrote: "I also feel like there's definitely more to how the suit works that we just haven't quite figured out yet, which intrigues me." At the time, I even spent some time trying to do more research on that myself, which included recording myself doing the encounter and noting down the sequence of available ability buttons in a spreadsheet. Unfortunately it quickly became clear that there wasn't a straightforward solution or "correct" button-pressing order. I was intrigued that on one of my attempts my charge button changed to "hyper-charge" but at the time, I couldn't figure out what that meant.

In the end I got bored of the whole thing again pretty quickly. In March however, the devs added new achievements to the dynamic encounters on Hoth with patch 7.6.1, and the real depth of Trial By Fire was revealed, including several new achievements and other rewards, which of course got the real super-sleuths on the case pretty quickly. That hyper-charge I had previously achieved by accident turned out to be only one of those achievements.

Going somewhat counter to what you'd expect considering my initial interest, I didn't immediately jump on working on all the new achievements myself. The main reason for this was that when I initially read about them, it sounded like you'd need a second person to help unlock most of them. You see, they required you to stay in the lava fissure for longer and focus on the data-gathering abilities at the expense of the self-preservation abilities, so initially the advice given was to bring another person to heal you through the damage (your own companion gets dismissed whenever you don the lava suit).

However, as new information was uncovered and the guides were updated, I learned that it was possible to survive by yourself, by falling back on tried and tested methods used for other purposes: buying a health regenerating meal on the fleet (yes, this is a thing) and getting the "refreshed" buff from the moisture vaporators on Tatooine, the same buff that's required to hatch an Orobird pet out of its egg (and serves to protect you from extreme heat in that context as well). It just really tickled me that they'd actually re-used an old mechanic like that in a way that made sense and I wanted to see for myself how it worked. So I got myself all refreshed, ate my dewback steak sandwich and started diving into the lava.

And what do you know, I had fun! I quickly got into the habit of just parking my character with the buffs next to where the encounter usually appears and then relogging her whenever it was up. (Both buffs last half an hour, so if you don't do anything other than spend five minutes on the dynamic encounter every time it's up, you can do several runs in a row without having to go back to Tatooine to refresh the buff from there.) It didn't even require a huge amount of effort, just a bit of patience. (I did make myself a little crazy at times checking the galaxy map every half hour to see whether the encounter was back up yet, but that part's not mandatory.)

Finally, a few weeks ago, I finally dug up the last item I needed for the last achievement, which earns you a special armour set and the title "Truth Seeker". The armour set kind of looks like the hazmat suit you wear during the encounter itself and therefore isn't exactly the most stylish of outfits, but I've been wearing both it and the title on my main for several weeks now because I'm just so proud of having achieved it. It's not proof of great skill or anything, just of patience, but it's such a niche thing that I don't think many people are even aware of it. Which, to be honest, is also why I wrote this post, to spread awareness of this bit of hidden content. I think it's a very fun little puzzle and I appreciate whichever dev came up with it.