Eternal Strands Guide: How to Harvest Ark of the Forge
Across Eternal Strands, you’ll come across various giant bosses, coming in the form of Arkons or Great Beasts. Ark of the Forge is a towering Ark that moves slowly but can hit hard if you don’t have your wits about you. You’ll first encounter it in the Arkon’s Hearth area, but after your first encounter, it can move to different areas on your map.
Ark of the Forge is one of the easiest boss fights in Eternal Strands but also one of the longest to complete too, requiring you to destroy very specific points in order for its Locus Point to show up.
There are two types of victories here, one coming from just straight-up killing these guys and the other (which is a lot more valuable and the purpose of this guide) stemming from defeating enemies in specific ways to “Harvest” their core power. Thankfully, we’ll take a lot of the guesswork out for you and help harvest Ark of the Forge!
This lumbering enemy does do significant damage if it catches you, and unlike the other Arkons, it can actually run at you too. However, it does have a couple of seconds delay between attacks too, so the chances are you’ll be able to out-manoeuvre it without too many issues.
Ark of the Forge Weak Points
While attacking the enemy’s weak points, each limb will eventually Harden and become impregnable to attacks. Here, you’ll need to change to a different limb to inflict damage. However, as we’re harvesting, it doesn’t matter too much how much damage you’re doing, just be sure not to deplete that HP bar before you’re done!
The key to defeating Ark of the Forge is to render its hammer completely useless, and remove some of the armour coating Forge’s body. All you need to do is approach the enemy and hold onto its body, climbing around just like you would a vertical surface, and then pressing Square to hack away with your sword. If you’re doing 0 damage, be sure to switch to your sword by pressing L1 and Triangle, just in case you’re holding onto your bow!
For Ark of the Forge, there’s one weak point on its body, coming in the form of the shoulder armour. Climb onto the left shoulder and destroy 1x Bolt from the front and 1x Bolt from the back.
On top of trying to shake you, this Arkon will also try to grab you. It can sometimes be a good evasive manoeuvre to press X and jump up to a higher area if you can when it tries to grab you as you’re climbing. If timed right, you’ll avoid the Arkon grabbing and doing damage by squeezing and throwing you on the ground.
The Arkon also has basic stamp and knee-drop attacks, but both of these have very obvious wind-ups so it should be easy to dodge.
If you end up fighting from a distance, do be mindful that Ark of the Forge will throw debris at you. You can throw these projectiles back, which can be handy to weaken the armour.
After removing the first bit of armour, drop back down to the ground and wait for Forge to activate its Berserk Mode. This will see Ark of the Forge start glowing red, and turning the arena into a fiery inferno. At this point, it will hit the ground with a wall of fire, along with slamming round with its hammer.
Harvesting Ark of the Forge
Wait for the hammer to hit the ground after a three-hit combo and approach when the hammer is left on the ground. This will see four cores show up and begin steaming. At this point you need to break all four for the locus point to show up. It can be a bit fiddly to attack, so you may need several goes to get all four vials destroyed.
Once you’ve removed all four of them, and the armour plating on its shoulder, the Locus will show up in the exact spot you removed the armour. Now all you need to do is climb up and hold triangle to harvest.
Once you have harvested the Arkon, you’ll gain the Molten Barrage power, which can be exchanged with Dahm to upgrade your powers.
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You can check out our full walkthrough and game guide here! |