CMDR Ranualf is a respected member of the Mobius PvE group and a long-time player of Elite: Dangerous. He has kindly authored this guide to unlocking the secrets of The Guardians. You can download a PDF version of the guide here. Ranualf's Guardian guide.pdf (1.00 mb)
Greeting commanders.
By now you will have noticed that the tech brokers have some new guardian items to unlock, but just how do you unlock them? Well I have the answer.
It is not just as simple as flying to the tech broker and saying, “bro, gimmie dat!” No, FD wants us to work for it and this is going to involve quite a bit of time in the SRV because it is mostly planeside gathering of items, materials & minerals, and yes it will take several hours of material gathering, shooting rocks and guardian blasting for their bits.
The basics of the journey is that you will need two items that match an obelisk in order to unlock it, as without the correct combination of items, it will remain locked. The picture below is the one I used, there are many other sites, but I used this one, as it is pretty central to the new Ram Tah guardian structures in the Col sector.
So, let’s get rolling shall we, start by looking at the picture below and thinking of which obelisk you would pick to scan, take your time, drink your tea and build your planet explorer.
Ship wise, a small or medium ship with good jump range is recommended because the new sites are 800+ LY out of the bubble and in rough terrain. I recommend at least 2+ SRV’s and a minimum of two tons of cargo. So, a DBS, DBX or an Asp will do perfectly. This is a basic rundown of the Asp I used, and I am glad I took extra SRV’s because you can easily get stuck and then killed by the
guardian sentinels.
Additional notes
Having several refuel, rearm and repair materials for your SRV is highly recommended, because once you are out there, it’s a long way back for a rearm at a station.
A simple Asp Explorer build for you here.
Guide to unlock the new Guardian items
If you have seen or even heard the new Galnet news, Ram Tah has been asking for “stuff” and he even made it into a FD video. Here are the new sites in the news, and yes there are many more sites, and thanks to FD, if you get within 1000LS of a site, it will pop up in your navigation panel now, nice of them to make it easier to find them.
New Ram Tah Guardian Ruins Locations
- Col 173 Sector QU-O d6-25 5 B
- HD 63154 B 3 A
- Synuefe EU-Q c21-10
I assume you have built your planeside explorer and are ready to go, just head off to Synuefe TP-f B44-0 CD 1 or one of the guardian’s other structures and you will need collect the two items that are required to open the obelisk for the scan. Note that I say guardian structure, not ancient ruins, as new structures offer easy access to the items that you will need. Yes, the ruins have some of the items, but they are very large and the items are scattered all over. The guardian structures are much quicker and are a lot smaller.
Once you are at a guardian structure site, hop into the SRV and drive about for a while until you one of the items needed, it will be on the ground pick it up, and stick it in the ship. Now log out and repeat it, because you need two items, and having them on the ship is easier than losing them by getting killed…
These are the items you choose to pick up from the ground & what they look like
Remember that RNG is a factor here, because the items on the ground are random, so you may need to change your initial plan, depending on what you find first. The items that you can find on the ground are Casket, Orb, Urn, Totem, Tablet and these items match the picture and have been shortened to Ca, Or, Ur, To, Ta.
Note, the new sites have guardian sentinels, and they are aggressive! Kill them and loot their bodies, I would recommend that you stay and harvest all the available materials from the destructible panels and guardian sentinels or grab the two items and leave for the data scan site. Note you will need a lot of materials, so you may need to come back to farm materials.
Your new best friend
Once you have the two items such as totem & totem, Orb + totem, etc head to the ancient ruin site @ coordinates 31.96, -99.97 in the picture, be aware there are 3 ancient ruin sites on the planet, so pay attention to your heading once you get into sub orbital. Once you have arrived at the one in the picture, you will be able to unlock the Obelisk with the two items you have picked up, in order to scan it and get the data; this is the most important step.
Without the correct combination of items, the scan WILL NOT WORK. I personally used the 9 toto point (far left in the picture) to do all my scans as this just needed 2 totems, which you can easily pick up off the nearby guardian structure on the other side of the planet.
Now go find the Obelisk that matches the combination of items that YOU picked up and then simply scan the obelisk, and this will give you some data. You will need to conduct many scans in order to get the data required for the weapons and power plant. This means that you have to logout to the main menu, log back in and do another scan, log out, and back in…keep doing this and you should get most of the data needed in about 45 mins to an hour. Keep at it, as this is the fast method!
You will now need material components in order to fulfil the requirements for the tech broker.
Use INARA to make your shopping list of the items you need. Now head off to any guardian structure (where you first collected the 2 items) and kill anything that moves or glows blue. Hoover up all the materials (you made the shopping list, right?), shoot the destructible panels on the spires and tops of the arches and walls, kill them all! Remember to grab a few extra for there are plans ahead….
Next you will need the raw material components, which means more time in the SRV and you will need to locate Manganese (30) & Chromium (28) use EDDB to find them or if you have several highgrade materials you can head off to the material broker and trade down for the items. Note that they are grade 2, so it is not going to be cheap.
Once again INARA has a perfect solution to our closest material trader needs!
Lastly you are going to need 10 magnetic emitter coils (buy from here ) and 12 micro weave cooling hoses, and these are mission rewards only.
I found one of the best places to find a mission for the hoses is Shinrarta Dezhra, as it is a Hi-tech system and with a decent population. Make sure you check both the mission board & the passenger lounge to locate a mission. Remember if it is a passenger mission, you will need a passenger module on your ship.
Additional note, if you do not see a mission you can to flip the board (log out and back in) and you can filter the reward on the right side of the mission, under the text description of the mission now, to help speed up the search. After completing all the above steps, you can now go and see the tech broker and say “Yo, bro, gimmie dat ting!”
Additionally, I have been to the two new Ram Tah guardian structure sites and have solved new puzzle locations there. Here are the tower location & pictures that have been highlighted to show where the towers are. All the of the new guardian structure sites that I have been to so far (8) are located on top of a hill, or stuck in very rough high ground. Which makes landing in a large ship virtually impossible, I suspect that FD are working with the guardians to troll us, as the missiles from the guardian sentinels can easily launch you up into the air and get you rolling down the hill, that coupled with the fact the AI hides up and down the hill… Sneaky bastards.
The puzzle solve is quite easy, all you have to do is to find the control pillars and activate them and then activate the “control box”.
The best way is to drive up to the control box and the two towers will push out of the ground, this will let you activate the rest. If you do not go to the box first, the rest of the pillars will not push up and thus you will just be driving about. You can then drive about and push the rest of the pillars up, and then start to activate them. To do this, you need to shoot the “light” until you get the message that the pillar is charged. This will start the timer countdown, so you don’t have all day cupcake. The sequence I used started with the bottom left, then middle, far left, far right and then the 2 at the console. Note, several sentinels will activate once you start this process.
After you have done all six pillars, you will need an ancient relic (the blue thing from the top of a pillar), simply shoot it down and then pick it up. Head back to the console and there will be a blue mark on the floor (go external camera and you will see it better) X marks the spot. Drive onto it, and eject it out of the SRV, this will activate the console, and the orb will pop up.
Go into turret more and scan the orb, with will give either a weapon blueprint or a module blueprint, depending upon which location you are at.
See for a full drive through.
System HD 63554 planet B 3 A
This puzzle hands out Weapon blueprints. Just land at the right side of the pic (loads of room) and drive up the hill.
System SYNEFE EU-Q C21-10 planet A 3
This site hands out module blueprints
It is a real pain to land here, even in a small or medium ship as it is on the top of a very large hill. I managed to landed my DBX as the bottom of the picture, just south of the arch. Please note that Large ships are very hard to land, due to the terrain and will end up parked over 10k+ away!
Fly safe and get the new guardian stuff
CMDR Ranualf.
OH WAIT…
I have some news
Sneak peek – SPOILER ALERT!
Ed [Edward Lewis at Frontier] let something drop as the Frontier Expo last year and several commanders have confirmed that he said this, and was hushed up quietly. It has now resurfaced… We are going to get more guardian modules for our ships, these include:
- Guardian power plants
- Guardian power distributors
- Guardian hull reinforcement packages
- Guardian module reinforcement packages
- Guardian shield reinforcement packages
- Guardian Frameshift Drive boosters
For more information on this click here.
o7 CMDRs
For a more detailed Ancient ruins guide (old Ram Tah guide) go to CMDR Nicou's remlok-inustries.fr site here.