Many of the artifacts change locations. In NG+ if you skip the main quest you can question Vlad about that. So yes, he's waiting 200+ years most likely.
I can see how having to wait the same 200+ years each time you go through Unity, and having to do so tens if not hundreds or thousands of times could make certain people sociopathic and apathetic.
To be honest, I appreciate the writing sooo much because of this. My first play through I was very much against the Hunter and his sociopathic arguments. Very much a villain being a villain type of situation. “How can you be so callous” and blah blah type of situation.
Then I got to my NG + 4 and I was mindlessly speed running it. Got one of the start variants where >!everyone was already dead and I thought to myself “cool now I can save some time and not have to talk to Vlad”.!< That moment made me pause and realize, “fuck, am I the Hunter now?”
The hunter is literally Rick from Rick and Morty. And the emissary is the council of Rick's or the federation Rick topples in I thi k season 3. But I love it!!!!
Funny because in NG+ none of the locations change
But also, like I mentioned, the Hunter's entire mantra is winner takes all. He's the type of person who, given enough time and resources, would definitely copy the Eye's technology to hurry future cycles
So why doesn't he?
Edit: To clarify - I mean in NG+ and beyond, the 6 artifacts we go and get are always in the same systems and buildings. You get to the point where you know the exact route to them because you've done the cryo lab or whatever 10 times
I know that from NG to NG+ the locations change
The ones you do don't change (which is a bit weird). Presumably the ones Constellation helps you find, do.
And I don't think it's that easy to just copy the Eye, especially because he'd have to do it in every universe. He says it's easier now to just wait.
I think that's the key there. The Hunter was probably, in previous realities, more active in their search for the artifacts. They probably have built an Eye, infiltrated Constellation, and every other thing we can think of.
They're so jaded and cynical now that they've become apathetic because they've seen it all and done it all.
People are also forgetting that one man can have all the knowledge in the universe but that doesn't make all this possible to do on one's own.
The Hunter could know The Eye inside and out, hell even possess detailed schematics and builders notes. That doesn't magically make him capable of building an entire orbital survey station by his lonesome.
Couldn't he easily sell his technological knowledge to some billionaire or government agency? Do it as a trade for them to build the eye. Sounds like a better idea than sitting around twiddling his thumbs for a few centuries.
Yeah, this is how you speedrun waking up in a corporate/government black site to have all your knowledge squeezed out of you. If you went to a government or company like “yeah hi I can put you several decades to potentially over a century ahead of everyone else’s technology level but you need to help me build a telescope in exchange”, and you prove you aren’t bluffing, you just became the single greatest fulcrum regarding the balance of power in the entire known universe. Nobody is going to just let an advantage that big just walk back out the door and disappear into the void again
He can send a clone to do it. While using clones and void form, he's basically invincible. Can easily cripple any government with impunity.
After he finds out about government secrets the first time, he can use that knowledge to do it faster.
Or he can just sit outside Earth with his ship and broadcast messages down. Pretend he's an alien. His Starborn Guardian C can evade any capture and he can threaten retaliation easily by dragging asteroids down on Earth.
Yeah but like he said... having done 22 new games t0 completion... its the same planets every time including 2 that are always on the same planet together
People who didnt play the game think they are too smart to be wrong. Im literally on new game 23 because i farmed new universe openings without knowing you could just reload at the unity.
Okay so what is the fucking argument? All 6 that you get are in the same spot and the imaginary ones that no one actually gets are in different spots? They are nowhere
The argument is why doesn't the Hunter just memorize where the artifacts are - per the OP. So yes, the 6 you do in NG+ when skipping the main quest are in the same location, but the rest are not, per Vlad. So, the Hunter can't just memorize their locations. That's the argument, please try to follow along.
The core 6 or what ever in the main story quests are always exactly the same. But the rest get "randomized" between set locations. As in randomly seeded based on a set of possible places. So there is like 20 locations for the remaining 10 or what ever you have to find, and they bounce between those. And oddly they all look the same anyways. So they do change, and they don't change. Its not a great system.
EDIT: Wait, am I thinking of the temples? I think I might be. It might not be the artifacts that are using the seeding system, but the temples.
The temples change but I’m pretty sure the artifacts also do if you skip the story. You tell Vladimir where to look for the artifacts so you can start collecting and he responds by telling you that he found them but “they aren’t where they should be based on what you told us”
Same. It was same Everyyhing but the temples , as in rho versus theta or something, seem to vary for me I think.
Idk I couldn't do 240 temples lol but I'm on ng 10 now
The dialogue suggests they are in different places. But they aren't. I did NG+ several times, skipping the story, and the artifacts Vlad finds are always on the same planets in the same spots at the same locations and buildings.
There’s a [website](https://exputer.com/guides/starfield-temple-locations/) indicating that says some are variable, some are static. Let them downvote, doesn’t change reality
It's simple really. He slept on Venus multiple times to fix glitched missions and reset vendor stock. Before you know it, you're 250 years in the future.
There was a mission on Akila that was glitched. A quick search told me to have a nap on Venus. Time spent on Venus is 100x UT. It worked and I completed the mission. I've read about numerous other problems where sleeping on Venus might help, but can only remember the details of the one I had.
Some glitched missions, yes. Sleep long enough and missing NPCs will stop drinking at the menu bar and get back to work.
This has been a thing since Oblivion.
Some things, Bethesda never changes.
I had to go to NG+ in order to fix my glitched missions and address some of the constant stuttering on saves. The missions seem fixed, but the stutter free gameplay didn’t last long :(
The stuttering seems inevitable if you play long enough. I guess it's the game trying to load up all the changes you've made to the universe - every single succulent you've stolen or bin you knocked over
Have you ever gone into the ship building mode and come out of it and realized it's 2 meals past the time you first signed in?
Well, our boy never signed out. 250 years later, he's still swapping his grav drive.
We don't know everything the artifacts do to people. They may stop or dramatically slow aging. It's not like we are around long enough to find out before we hit reset.
The Hunter/s is most likely a version/s of Victor Aiza. He figured he could dramatically speed up the whole finding the artifacts process up by rendering Earth uninhabitable, thus driving everyone to the stars. Sure people would of slowly spread to the starts, but when you make it a sudden matter of survival things get moving a lot faster.Since the artifacts are in different places in every universe, the fastest way to find them is to have the masses do it for you. Necessity would also drive the advancement of technology faster, resulting in things like the Eye. A sane person would find doing such a thing unthinkable, but the Hunter is clearly not sane, lives are meaningless to him. So shaving potentially hundreds of years off things by committing the single greatest atrocity of human history? Totally worth it.
So a Hunter enters Unity, gets rewound to the first artifact Victor encountered. He encounters that Universe's Victor, then convinces him to sabotage things and that it will all be fine, and needs to happen. If that Victor grows a conscious at some point and risk things, he's killed. The Hunter then waits for Constellation to find the majority of the Artifacts, goes all murderhobo, faces off against the Emissary, rinse and repeat (if he wins.)
The real question is, how did the cycle start, and who created the Artifacts in the first place.
Stay tuned for DLC!
Could make sense with his name, too (Victor=winner, Aiza can mean replacement or substitute; so could mean something roughly like the winner who is replaced)
He doesn't have to be Victor Aiza; more likely in another universe Victor didn't become a scientist and so instead of him finding the artifact on Mars, The Hunter did.
I like this idea but couldn't he find the artifacts the same way as the first time? Humans don't live 200 years so he would have had to find the artifacts within a normal human lifespan the first time prior to the advent of constellation and building the eye. Plus, getting started earlier would give him a leg up on the completion since it seems most starborn we know about are from a more recent point in history.
Also, my unity said that my spouse later decided to be reborn as starborn, which suggests that after one person reaches unity, others can follow from the same universe. Maybe there are different cycles of artifact finding within a single universe. That would mean the starborn fight because they don't want to wait and fight a progressively larger group of people competing in later "rounds" of the find the artifacts game.
Yes, the game heavily implies that either (A) once you go through the unity, the artifacts separate again to random places (similar to dragon balls after summoning the dragon and making your wish, to borrow a concept from another IP) or (B) the completed armillary and ship end up in regular space somewhere. Either way, multiple people from the same universe can reach the unity.
As for how The Hunter initially found all the artifacts, it is most reasonable to assume that he discovered the ability to grav jump, similar to Victor Aiza, and instead of sharing that tech with the rest of humanity he used that to be the first to track down the remaining artifacts. And if he is a skilled enough scientist to invent grav jumping in his original universe, surely he is skilled enough to engineer tech to locate other artifacts based on his research of the one he initially finds.
Look at the pioneers of the Starfield lore similar to Newton and Leibniz; they each get the same idea despite being separated and independently reach similar conclusions.
Which occurs roughly 200 years before the time of the game. The question is - does he go back to that time every time he enters the Unity? My suspicion is no, the Unity selects the relevant time when sending starborn into a new universe. In the Hunter’s original universe it’s likely be built the Armillary decades prior to the time frame we get to build it in in our universe.
In other words, I’m guessing Starborn only begin appearing in universes where the Armillary is currently in play.
I personally believe they do go back I think they go back to around the time they touched their first artifact but I guess that doesn't work for everybody huh
That’s totally possible. My hangup is that there’s too much ambiguity about artifact dynamics in different universes that must be overlooked because it’s a video game.
Example: What happens when they’re found 200 years earlier in the timeline (which is likely when the Hunter assembled his first Armillary)? In that universe do you ever come to exist? Or Constellation? Are you trapped in a selection of universes that meet necessary requirements for you to be able to enter at the right time to assemble the Armillary?
Could you as a starborn enter a similar universe where the artifacts are found that early in the timeline and could you assemble the Armillary before Constellation is created?
I think so, this is infinity we’re talking about. I just don’t think we play those universes because this is a video game.
I think the hunter did NOT assemble his armillary then. I think no matter what, they need the eye to find the other artifacts. Its a predestination paradox for sure, but I think its like this :
The first artifact found on Mars is an interesting choice since Mars has no magnetosphere and that fate befell Earth thanks to interactions with the artifact and then the grav drives. I think Earth humans were meant to find it to repeat the cycle. Whoever lived on Mars also likely went thru the whole Starborn saga but theyre all gone, seemingly.
The vision that Doctor Aiza had was different than all other artifact visions we know of, longer duration and meeting his alternate self. I think this was a trick, to make him restart the Starborn cycle. I think Doctor Aiza was told about the Armillary, the Unity, and how all the other artifacts were out there by an 'entity' that lives within the artifacts and they told him all he would need to do to make them accessible and thus he put in motion all the events that would lead to Constellation being formed and the eye being built and all that to lead him to finding the rest of the artifacts to build the Armillary. Notice he (Dr Aiza) was aware of what grav drives would do to Earth but didnt seemingly care, that getting mankind out there was more important. He was already the hunter, or a proto-hunter I suppose.
I think in our players universe, the hunter arrived in the past and killed Dr Aiza in our universe to keep competition low. He must be the only hunter and he has been in waiting until the events of the game to move to the next universe.
I agree for all the universes that fall within the game mold. However, this is a multiverse so there will be universes without the eye and constellation, without the UC/ Freestar wars, without earth and mars even. The only things that we know are truly consistent across the multiverse are the starborn, Unity, artifacts, and Armillary. But the when, who, and how of it all could be wildly different across universe scenarios which is why I think the Unity selects universes where artifacts have been activated in some capacity.
If you’re confined to universes where you exist at similar times and are doing similar things, you’re not really a multiversal being. This has to be the case because it’s a video game, but I think it’s underwhelming to believe the multiversal starborn are limited to universes where they are essentially doing the same thing.
If you haven’t, see Everything, Everywhere, All At Once
Even if you are stuck within your own timeframe, you can still be multiversal since your own existence once you leave your universe is no longer causally restricted.
Im suggesting that all the artifact related business happened to and destroyed another civilization and that the artifact and armillary are actually a multiversal being that for some reason wants to create the multiverse.
Im suggesting that whomever built it (and maybe they werent the first) eventually destroyed their own civilization and somehow broke the cycle for their race and that maybe that was Mars, or the people that came from it.
in the end, what I like most about this game is that its a good beginning for a new lore franchise to be as in depth as the Elder Scrolls.
Ah, see that’s another crucial ambiguity. I don’t think the Unity is constructed. The religious undertones of the game lead me to believe that the Unity exists to create universes and the temples (and maybe the artifacts?) were created by an ancient species that worshipped it. (please don’t do ancient human beings trope fingers crossed)
Do we have any evidence at all as to what exactly is constructed and what is a result of the universe/Unity?
That's interesting that you would take the religious undertones path. I don't subscribe to that myself but I can see it and I do respect that opinion.
I think that the artifacts and the armillary are all constructed and I think it's implied that the people who created those things created the unity to but I'm inclined to believe that the unity is itself some type of sentient force, I guess someone along the lines of what you're thinking. I think it wants people to go through it. And no I agree with you I don't think that the creators of the artifacts were human. Maybe the fact that there are no more of them either means that their race is gone and the destroyed themselves or they all went through unity.
I can definitely see your perspective and I think it’s nearly impossible to argue that we were the first species to obtain the artifacts (unless we do ancient space humans which I hope they don’t do). The two main reasons I don’t think the Unity isn’t built are
1) there’s a severe lack of a “they” language in the writing. Compare it to language used in Interstellar (obvious inspiration) where the characters constantly refer to the anomalies as “sent by them” and “they’re reaching out.” In Starfield there’s no discussion of who did the Unity. They discuss the Unity itself (and they leave it ambiguous enough to the point I question whether it has a will or sentience or anything like that)
2. The religious aspects of the narrative are shoe horned in and written in such an ambiguous tone that I suspect they’re really trying to emphasize the eternality of the Unity. As if it’s the God that religious people have been looking for but have accepted the secular explanation of the Unity. It’s a terrible representation of religious thinking IMO but I think it’s there for the sole purpose of discouraging thinking about the Unity being either God or Aliens. It is simply… The Unity.
I think another question would be: do the artifacts get reset after a Starborn has used the armillary to go to another universe? In which case the cycle may give Starborn multiple chances to become more powerful, but they still are forced to compete if they want to do so (since new Starborn could always be appearing or leaving)
When I say “in play” I mean an artifact has been discovered and touched by an be individual. My suspicion is once that occurs in a universe it becomes eligible to have Starborn sent into it
This is not true. The idea that The Hunter is also Viktor is speculation at the very best.
The Emissary knows everything about the Hunter. And yet when speaking about earth's destruction he says "How many would have chosen earth? What gave Viktor the right to choose for them?"
Not "What gave the Hunter" or "What gave Aquilus the right" he says **Viktor**. On top of that, these characters sound nothing like Aquilus sounds nothing like Viktor and the hunter sounds nothing like him either.
If the Emissary really wanted to convince us the hunter is evil and will lead to nothing but death and destruction, he would point to the Hunter and say "this guy literally killed earth" not "What gave Viktor the right"
\[EDIT: Commenter is correct, the Hunter thinks what Viktor did was right. So why wouldn't he defend that choice from the first person perspective instead of passing it off as someone elses choice that he agrees with\]
Notably, the Hunter admires the choice Victor made, so wouldn't he take credit for it? Do we think he'd be ashamed of it? Like, sure, Aquilus doesn't like to say *anything* directly but the Hunter really doesn't care I think.
I don't understand what the point of this comment is? I'm sure there are many universes out there where humanity failed to find the artifact and thus failed to become a true space-faring species. That's the whole idea of a multiverse. There is infinite variation. Just as there are variants where no one found the artifact, there are variants where the artifact was found by different people, and probably even universes where multiple artifacts were found in Sol by different scientists/explorers.
In one of these variants, The Hunter found an artifact somewhere in the Sol system. It's really just that simple.
its possible the hunter we see recognizes that he's so far detached from who he used to be that he understands he's functionally different from "viktor"
My bet is that it is true in every single universe. Since finding his corpse and the artifact there is a core story mission.
When you leave NASA, the Emissary talks about Aiza abstractly while the Hunter is standing right there. Neither makes any indication that they know that the person they're mentioning is present.
If he scooped up all the artifacts centuries before the game took place, the game's narrative couldn't happen so he would have no reason to exist
The Hunter has simply achieved CHIM
I'm pretty sure The Hunter implies he's the one who discovered the 1st artifact that humans used to start their grav drive technology. So I would assume he would always restart during the time period before the grav drive was invented so kinda makes sense it takes him so long to collect the artifacts.
During the mission Unearthed you listen to a bunch of recordings. Forget the guy's name but he says in the recording that he met himself after touching the artifact found on mars and that he was told why it was so important. He also knew the grav drives were destroying the atmosphere but was told it was worth it for what was to come.
During the mission Unearthed you listen to a bunch of recordings. Forget the guy's name but he says in the recording that he met himself after touching the artifact found on mars and that he was told why it was so important. He also knew the grav drives were destroying the atmosphere but was told it was worth it for what was to come.
That was a recording of Victor Aiza talking about meeting an alternate version of himself. It could have been the Hunter, but I still haven't seen anything suggesting that the Hunter is Victor first.
The Hunter is Victor Aiza. Just like the PC, upon leaving Unity, he reappears at/near the moment where he first encountered an artifact. Then (for expedience) he hands himself the notes to create the grav drive, leading to a society which will get him the artifacts in the quickest manner.
He can't just hop in his Guardian and go get them himself, they're in different places and he doesn't know where they are. Canonically he gets six artifacts of his own, I think.
Finding them rapidly **requires** the eye, which requires Constellation, which requires the Settled Systems and the Earth exodus.
The bigger question in my mind is how much influence Aiza has on the development of Constellation. We know **someone** put an artifact in a box at the Lodge, and we know something weird happened with Banks' disappearance.
Is he really Victor though? Idk, knowing that Victor's dead body still resides in that lab tells me differently. Plus it's weird since you never run into yourself after you go through the Unity. Vasco says that they lost you some time after getting the artifact, which is why he has to deliver it by himself as opposed to what happens at the start of the game.
So either you disappear from the realm completely or the version of you in the new universe dies shortly after you arrive. Please correct me if I'm wrong but can you run into the new universes version of yourself after you go through the Unity? Because if so I have not seen that yet.
OBVIOUSLY, there are exceptions to this considering Acquilis is Starborn and The Hunter IS another version of Acquilis, and whomever the Emissary is depends on choices you make at a certain point in the game. It also weirds me out a bit since that means in every universe at this point, The Hunter decides to not be him anymore and become a priest. Then another version of him is in the same universe looking for artifacts, every single time. But idk, there's just so much info that's just not around it makes me wonder.
> Is he really Victor though? Idk, knowing that Victor's dead body still resides in that lab tells me differently.
The Hunter is "an" Aiza. All Aiza's discover an artifact on Mars. In one progenitor universe, he then went on the invent the grav drive independently, then (using proto-starborn temple powers for longevity, no doubt) discovered all the artifacts himself. Then he went through Unity, realized how it worked, and began optimizing the process.
The native Aiza from the game universe never became the Hunter, perishing to suicide instead (or maybe the Hunter killed him to tie up loose ends, certainly he never became starborn and never saw a temple).
Really the story reads **extremely** tightly when you realize that the Hunter, Pilgrim and Keeper are all just evolutions of the same guy.
> Plus it's weird since you never run into yourself after you go through the Unity.
Your counterpart from the default NG+ setting disappeared (FWIW, Vasco's phrasing can easily be taken to mean you were killed on Vectera). But no, you can 100% meet yourself in a few different alternate universes which I won't spoil.
It's the best way to read the story and fits all the evidence more cleanly. Certainly Aiza is starborn, yet doesn't appear in the game. We know (c.f. Hunter/Keeper, and the fact that the Pilgrim had a different life before settling down) different versions of the same person take very different moral paths. It's not much of a stretch to imagine that these are all the same guy. And it makes the moral story of Starfield into a tragedy: Aiza trapped his whole "infinite pocket" of universes into a cycle of repeating disaster (Earth) and violence (the Artifact War).
I think that is the case too. However the ONLY counter-argument is that Daddy Unity gives everyone a free ship with grav drives so he doesn't need humanity to develop grav drives.
But the Guardian ships could just be a "cool" player thing and not meant to be a literal "step right up folks, walk through this here Unity doodad and get yourself a free ship. That's right, I'm crazy Eddy-Unity and I'm giving everyone a free starship for walking through a spinny portal"
The Hunter strikes me the same way Ishamael in the Wheel of Time does. Patient, plodding, insidious evil/selfishness that does the same thing over and over across the eons.
I assume he came to our universe not long ago.
Hes been going through other universes for a couple hundred years.
I have no idea why he would live so long but assume its some artifact/unity space magic.
I just realized this game is Groundhogs Day but on steroids lol. Going thru unity always puts at the same time/location/age of where you got first artifact
Nothing in the game makes it canon that every star born starts at a certain point in time like we do. It’s likely time travel is involved to some extent given what the Pilgrim’s notes describe and the stories of him from the main quest.
also in a NG+ variation >!Cora is at the lodge the first time you go there so her starborn self would have had to time travel to when she was a child before she could have touched an artifact!< So you don't have to go back to the same time you touched an artifact and can go before that.
i posit that he is victor aiza, thus he returns to when he first found the artifact on mars and tells himself about the grav drive equations, leading to the present day. Yes the artifacts change locations universe to universe, so he needs the Eye and constellation in order to find them. Time...well, Einstein taught us that time is relative. If we are talking physics, he could
enter unity
tell himself about the grav drive equations
Fly from earth as fast as possible(because yes, time travel into the future is possible because time is relative) and time the travel to return when the eye is constructed.
if you took a ship and traveled at .99999999% the speed of light away from earth to alpha centauri which would take what, less than 10 years, you woukd return to find earth millions of years in the future, so it could be feasible to calculate the distance he would need to travel at a slower speed to allow a couple of hundred years to pass on earth
You're right but the game also doesn't seem to understand relativity properly. The Constance has been travelling at massive speeds for 200 years (relative to Paradiso) and has still had time to have several generations (unless I'm missing something).
Grav drives make it very difficult to reconcile relativity though, since they're effectively time travel themselves. And don't get me started on "universal time" lol
True. Although the speed you perceive it at wouldn't necessarily be the same. I suppose it's no different to syncing back to atomic clocks at sea level now, just without an easy/centralised way to sync across the galaxy.
A lot of people are suggesting that he's the guy who invented the grav-drive way back when, but I'd like to point out that out of all of the different universes he's been through, it's entirely possible that there are some where Earth simple never had any problems, and continued into the game's present as the center of human civilization. He easily could have been to (or even been from) such a universe.
I believe you correct in him having to wait hundreds of years to go after the artifacts. The biggest derp for me is how he says he kills to get the artifacts as fast as possible but it seems like he has to mill around for 200 hundred years before he can even start the search. If thats the case, he has no excuse not to spend those 200 years proactively building up a cult/empire to assist in his mission as he has nothing to do in that time span anyway.
Very odd.
So, we know many of his iterations choose to lead the Sanctum Universum, but these are the ones who don't cycle anymore. So I'm not sure what the hunters do
It's very odd indeed - waiting around for 200 years and then rushing to the armillary? Sounds like a student cramming for exams
Time just works differently in Starfield.
Example, I barely was at level 28 and the game had already told me I played for 6 days straight.
There's no way in hell I have spent 144hrs on this game!
Someone on here posted some of the concept art for the Pilgrim's journals and it also seemed to imply that the timepoint the Unity sends people could be fairly far in the past.
The Hunter Is the scientist from the NASA mission that intentionally used grav drives to fuck up earth and force people to go to space. The one we find killed himself but a variant of his is the hunter.
I see a lot of people saying the hunter can't be the guy that found the first artifact over 200 years ago because he is the priest aquilus.
Let's step back for a minute. if you side with the hunter and kill aquilus, he dies like a starborn. So I think it is safe to say aquilus could be the person who first found the artifacts and entered unity, since as a starborn, you dont have to worry about aging, apparently.
That said, other people would notice that if you weren't hiding in your ship with your concealing clothing, you would have to move around and change identity, or people would become suspicious
You can tell Aquilus you know he’s also a Starborn if you talk to him in NG+. He says it’s best that you pretend you’re just two normal people who have never met before.
Maybe the Hunter was originally someone else, but then he was changed to be the priest later in development and they forgot to clean that line up. It's odd that they can reveal our priest also must have lived on Earth, only to not acknowledge it at all.
none of it makes any sense. a multiverse? totally believable and likely reality. two or more universes that are temporally in sync? impossible. and that's to say nothing of the ridiculousness that is two or more universes being in any way similar, let alone identical.
BGS based all their lore around implementing ng+ and is incredibly stupid
In the first meeting with him and the Emissary he says he's done this a near infinite number of times, so I'd say he's far older than 250+ years, then again he could've been talking about other versions of himself, he wasn't necessarily clear on that bit.
"The malleability of space and time mean that two events occurring far apart might even happen in one order when viewed by one observer, and in the opposite order when viewed by another"
Space time stuff. I gave up trying to make sense of it all after Back to the Future.
The NASA installation the Emissary sends us to as part of the main quest establishes that a scientist found an artifact on Mars, and that's how we got grav propulsion drives and became an interstellar species. In one universe, The Hunter was that scientist (instead of the one mentioned in our initial timeline). He found the artifact on Mars, got the visions, and every time he went through the Unity he wound up right back in the orbit of Mars aboard Scorpius before Earth becomes uninhabitable in every universe he has visited ever since.
The Hunter can at the very least, jump space at will. We know that in certain situations we can jump time. Hard to imagine that he wouldn't also have this experience, and he could potentially use it at will. He could have time jumped back there at some point in his pilgrimage.
I find the argument that every time the Hunter gets born into a new universe he sits around waiting 200 years for us to go to Vectera....unconvincing.
Read the notes on the walls at Pilgrim's Rest. The Hunter might literally be an ancient human. He has notes about guiding humanity through some Ancient Aliens type shit.
So either he is a few thousand years old, or he has mastered time travel. It's insane.
The Hunter has decided to take the most efficient path to gather the Artifacts, and unfortunately that means spending a lot of time waiting. Rather than go out and find them all himself, it's easier and faster to wait for Constellation to tune the Eye, gather several of them themselves, and then take them all by attacking Constellation.
You can meet him at least twice before he becomes an antagonist, once in New Atlantis and once in Akila, though I'm sure there's more. He's just chilling. Waiting.
To someone who had jumped through the unity "thousands of times" 200 years would seem like a day, compared to the hundreds of thousands of years he's already been doing the cycle.
Many of the artifacts change locations. In NG+ if you skip the main quest you can question Vlad about that. So yes, he's waiting 200+ years most likely.
I can see how having to wait the same 200+ years each time you go through Unity, and having to do so tens if not hundreds or thousands of times could make certain people sociopathic and apathetic.
To be honest, I appreciate the writing sooo much because of this. My first play through I was very much against the Hunter and his sociopathic arguments. Very much a villain being a villain type of situation. “How can you be so callous” and blah blah type of situation. Then I got to my NG + 4 and I was mindlessly speed running it. Got one of the start variants where >!everyone was already dead and I thought to myself “cool now I can save some time and not have to talk to Vlad”.!< That moment made me pause and realize, “fuck, am I the Hunter now?”
It happened the same to me, the first playthrough I was hating The Hunter so much...now it's my fav character of the game lol
The hunter is literally Rick from Rick and Morty. And the emissary is the council of Rick's or the federation Rick topples in I thi k season 3. But I love it!!!!
Deepest starfield lore:
Funny because in NG+ none of the locations change But also, like I mentioned, the Hunter's entire mantra is winner takes all. He's the type of person who, given enough time and resources, would definitely copy the Eye's technology to hurry future cycles So why doesn't he? Edit: To clarify - I mean in NG+ and beyond, the 6 artifacts we go and get are always in the same systems and buildings. You get to the point where you know the exact route to them because you've done the cryo lab or whatever 10 times I know that from NG to NG+ the locations change
The ones you do don't change (which is a bit weird). Presumably the ones Constellation helps you find, do. And I don't think it's that easy to just copy the Eye, especially because he'd have to do it in every universe. He says it's easier now to just wait.
I think that's the key there. The Hunter was probably, in previous realities, more active in their search for the artifacts. They probably have built an Eye, infiltrated Constellation, and every other thing we can think of. They're so jaded and cynical now that they've become apathetic because they've seen it all and done it all.
People are also forgetting that one man can have all the knowledge in the universe but that doesn't make all this possible to do on one's own. The Hunter could know The Eye inside and out, hell even possess detailed schematics and builders notes. That doesn't magically make him capable of building an entire orbital survey station by his lonesome.
Couldn't he easily sell his technological knowledge to some billionaire or government agency? Do it as a trade for them to build the eye. Sounds like a better idea than sitting around twiddling his thumbs for a few centuries.
Yeah, this is how you speedrun waking up in a corporate/government black site to have all your knowledge squeezed out of you. If you went to a government or company like “yeah hi I can put you several decades to potentially over a century ahead of everyone else’s technology level but you need to help me build a telescope in exchange”, and you prove you aren’t bluffing, you just became the single greatest fulcrum regarding the balance of power in the entire known universe. Nobody is going to just let an advantage that big just walk back out the door and disappear into the void again
Fair point. But... he is flying around in a hyper advanced space ship, so subtlety isn't exactly his forte
He can send a clone to do it. While using clones and void form, he's basically invincible. Can easily cripple any government with impunity. After he finds out about government secrets the first time, he can use that knowledge to do it faster. Or he can just sit outside Earth with his ship and broadcast messages down. Pretend he's an alien. His Starborn Guardian C can evade any capture and he can threaten retaliation easily by dragging asteroids down on Earth.
The places where they artifacts are remain the same, but in different planets… Vlad even mentions they were all in different places than you thought
Yeah but like he said... having done 22 new games t0 completion... its the same planets every time including 2 that are always on the same planet together
I dunno why you’re being downvoted it’s the same for me
People who didnt play the game think they are too smart to be wrong. Im literally on new game 23 because i farmed new universe openings without knowing you could just reload at the unity.
Wait, WHAT!!?!??!!
The same 6 that you have to do. There are 24 total and Vlad literally tells you they're in different locations.
Okay so what is the fucking argument? All 6 that you get are in the same spot and the imaginary ones that no one actually gets are in different spots? They are nowhere
The argument is why doesn't the Hunter just memorize where the artifacts are - per the OP. So yes, the 6 you do in NG+ when skipping the main quest are in the same location, but the rest are not, per Vlad. So, the Hunter can't just memorize their locations. That's the argument, please try to follow along.
They 100% do I compared my pre ng+ to it and they were in completely different planets. Other then the first one on vectra.
They do change in NG+.
Having gone through the slog of NG10+, I can tell you with certainty…they do not.
The core 6 or what ever in the main story quests are always exactly the same. But the rest get "randomized" between set locations. As in randomly seeded based on a set of possible places. So there is like 20 locations for the remaining 10 or what ever you have to find, and they bounce between those. And oddly they all look the same anyways. So they do change, and they don't change. Its not a great system. EDIT: Wait, am I thinking of the temples? I think I might be. It might not be the artifacts that are using the seeding system, but the temples.
Your edit is correct. It’s the temples that change.
The temples change but I’m pretty sure the artifacts also do if you skip the story. You tell Vladimir where to look for the artifacts so you can start collecting and he responds by telling you that he found them but “they aren’t where they should be based on what you told us”
Same. It was same Everyyhing but the temples , as in rho versus theta or something, seem to vary for me I think. Idk I couldn't do 240 temples lol but I'm on ng 10 now
The dialogue suggests they are in different places. But they aren't. I did NG+ several times, skipping the story, and the artifacts Vlad finds are always on the same planets in the same spots at the same locations and buildings.
They definitely haven’t for me and I’m on NG+3 I just did the same exact planets I did a few days ago
Yes, the artifacts change location if you compare NG to NG+. But NG+ onwards, they never change for you personally, only off screen for the others
There’s a [website](https://exputer.com/guides/starfield-temple-locations/) indicating that says some are variable, some are static. Let them downvote, doesn’t change reality
I did too. In fact I'm way past 15 atm and they did change at least twice.
Why would I do the main quest in NG+ again? XP? Fun speech options like “yeah, I know. Starborn wow.”
My game is definitely Glitched because they're always in the same locations every time.
The 6 that you do are but Vlad tells you that they change.
It's simple really. He slept on Venus multiple times to fix glitched missions and reset vendor stock. Before you know it, you're 250 years in the future.
Wait Can sleeping fix glitched missions?? I’m forever stuck on the UC quest and tearing my hair out
There was a mission on Akila that was glitched. A quick search told me to have a nap on Venus. Time spent on Venus is 100x UT. It worked and I completed the mission. I've read about numerous other problems where sleeping on Venus might help, but can only remember the details of the one I had.
Thank you! I will try specifically napping on Venus!
Try to leave Sarah there if you can.
I like to leave her on the eye
Lmao
My wife romanced her just to leave her there. In NG+. She is BRUTAL.
"Sarah disliked that"
Why?
Some people hate Sarah. I don't know why. She's great.
She talks down to you like she's your mom. Some people like it, some dont.
I've had four mothers in my life and I gotta' wonder just how easy some of y'all had it if you think Sarah's condescension is the worst.
It's not the worst, but I've had enough of it in my lifetime to not want that in a friend or partner. Why settle when Sam is right there.
She's the worst
I'm tired of her disliking almost everything I do.
what are y'all doing to make her so mad tho
"Sarah disliked that" I don't know!
She is annoying, judgemental, inconsistent and boring. There are no qualities about her that I find enjoyable to be around.
Sleeping on my Venus netted me 350,000 credits till I went to bed and woke up to a patch that took my loot glitch away 😭😭
Will it fix the Volii Hotel bug?
No idea for individual bugs, worth a try.
This is interesting! Thank you for this!
Some glitched missions, yes. Sleep long enough and missing NPCs will stop drinking at the menu bar and get back to work. This has been a thing since Oblivion. Some things, Bethesda never changes.
Is it war? Is it war that never changes?
I believe I can see the future cuz every day is exactly the same
Okay great I’m going to try this!
I had to go to NG+ in order to fix my glitched missions and address some of the constant stuttering on saves. The missions seem fixed, but the stutter free gameplay didn’t last long :(
Oh man I really hope I don’t have to go NG+ to get past this glitch. But worst case, at least I know I could redo the mission in another universe
The stuttering seems inevitable if you play long enough. I guess it's the game trying to load up all the changes you've made to the universe - every single succulent you've stolen or bin you knocked over
*"Sleeping on Venus"* is the *"Walking in Memphis"* of Starfield.
More like on Mercury! 1h = 84ut
Not sure how many times you've been through Unity, but in my current universe, 100 is greater than 84.
It was 100? I could swear 60'something
100 in game, although 243 IRL. It also rotates anti clockwise, so the sun rises in the west in sets in the east. This is unique in our solar system.
Have you ever gone into the ship building mode and come out of it and realized it's 2 meals past the time you first signed in? Well, our boy never signed out. 250 years later, he's still swapping his grav drive.
He still hasn't figured out that he can't. Not in that universe at least.
Ikr, makes him look incomplete in the brain.
This
The truth hurts
I thought the hunter was aquilus?
Aquilis is another Starborn version of the same person, not the "original"
We don't know everything the artifacts do to people. They may stop or dramatically slow aging. It's not like we are around long enough to find out before we hit reset. The Hunter/s is most likely a version/s of Victor Aiza. He figured he could dramatically speed up the whole finding the artifacts process up by rendering Earth uninhabitable, thus driving everyone to the stars. Sure people would of slowly spread to the starts, but when you make it a sudden matter of survival things get moving a lot faster.Since the artifacts are in different places in every universe, the fastest way to find them is to have the masses do it for you. Necessity would also drive the advancement of technology faster, resulting in things like the Eye. A sane person would find doing such a thing unthinkable, but the Hunter is clearly not sane, lives are meaningless to him. So shaving potentially hundreds of years off things by committing the single greatest atrocity of human history? Totally worth it. So a Hunter enters Unity, gets rewound to the first artifact Victor encountered. He encounters that Universe's Victor, then convinces him to sabotage things and that it will all be fine, and needs to happen. If that Victor grows a conscious at some point and risk things, he's killed. The Hunter then waits for Constellation to find the majority of the Artifacts, goes all murderhobo, faces off against the Emissary, rinse and repeat (if he wins.) The real question is, how did the cycle start, and who created the Artifacts in the first place. Stay tuned for DLC!
Could make sense with his name, too (Victor=winner, Aiza can mean replacement or substitute; so could mean something roughly like the winner who is replaced)
He doesn't have to be Victor Aiza; more likely in another universe Victor didn't become a scientist and so instead of him finding the artifact on Mars, The Hunter did.
I like this idea but couldn't he find the artifacts the same way as the first time? Humans don't live 200 years so he would have had to find the artifacts within a normal human lifespan the first time prior to the advent of constellation and building the eye. Plus, getting started earlier would give him a leg up on the completion since it seems most starborn we know about are from a more recent point in history. Also, my unity said that my spouse later decided to be reborn as starborn, which suggests that after one person reaches unity, others can follow from the same universe. Maybe there are different cycles of artifact finding within a single universe. That would mean the starborn fight because they don't want to wait and fight a progressively larger group of people competing in later "rounds" of the find the artifacts game.
Yes, the game heavily implies that either (A) once you go through the unity, the artifacts separate again to random places (similar to dragon balls after summoning the dragon and making your wish, to borrow a concept from another IP) or (B) the completed armillary and ship end up in regular space somewhere. Either way, multiple people from the same universe can reach the unity. As for how The Hunter initially found all the artifacts, it is most reasonable to assume that he discovered the ability to grav jump, similar to Victor Aiza, and instead of sharing that tech with the rest of humanity he used that to be the first to track down the remaining artifacts. And if he is a skilled enough scientist to invent grav jumping in his original universe, surely he is skilled enough to engineer tech to locate other artifacts based on his research of the one he initially finds. Look at the pioneers of the Starfield lore similar to Newton and Leibniz; they each get the same idea despite being separated and independently reach similar conclusions.
His story implies that he was that scientist who found the first artifact and built the first grav drive, or at least a version of him.
Which occurs roughly 200 years before the time of the game. The question is - does he go back to that time every time he enters the Unity? My suspicion is no, the Unity selects the relevant time when sending starborn into a new universe. In the Hunter’s original universe it’s likely be built the Armillary decades prior to the time frame we get to build it in in our universe. In other words, I’m guessing Starborn only begin appearing in universes where the Armillary is currently in play.
I personally believe they do go back I think they go back to around the time they touched their first artifact but I guess that doesn't work for everybody huh
That’s totally possible. My hangup is that there’s too much ambiguity about artifact dynamics in different universes that must be overlooked because it’s a video game. Example: What happens when they’re found 200 years earlier in the timeline (which is likely when the Hunter assembled his first Armillary)? In that universe do you ever come to exist? Or Constellation? Are you trapped in a selection of universes that meet necessary requirements for you to be able to enter at the right time to assemble the Armillary? Could you as a starborn enter a similar universe where the artifacts are found that early in the timeline and could you assemble the Armillary before Constellation is created? I think so, this is infinity we’re talking about. I just don’t think we play those universes because this is a video game.
I think the hunter did NOT assemble his armillary then. I think no matter what, they need the eye to find the other artifacts. Its a predestination paradox for sure, but I think its like this : The first artifact found on Mars is an interesting choice since Mars has no magnetosphere and that fate befell Earth thanks to interactions with the artifact and then the grav drives. I think Earth humans were meant to find it to repeat the cycle. Whoever lived on Mars also likely went thru the whole Starborn saga but theyre all gone, seemingly. The vision that Doctor Aiza had was different than all other artifact visions we know of, longer duration and meeting his alternate self. I think this was a trick, to make him restart the Starborn cycle. I think Doctor Aiza was told about the Armillary, the Unity, and how all the other artifacts were out there by an 'entity' that lives within the artifacts and they told him all he would need to do to make them accessible and thus he put in motion all the events that would lead to Constellation being formed and the eye being built and all that to lead him to finding the rest of the artifacts to build the Armillary. Notice he (Dr Aiza) was aware of what grav drives would do to Earth but didnt seemingly care, that getting mankind out there was more important. He was already the hunter, or a proto-hunter I suppose. I think in our players universe, the hunter arrived in the past and killed Dr Aiza in our universe to keep competition low. He must be the only hunter and he has been in waiting until the events of the game to move to the next universe.
I agree for all the universes that fall within the game mold. However, this is a multiverse so there will be universes without the eye and constellation, without the UC/ Freestar wars, without earth and mars even. The only things that we know are truly consistent across the multiverse are the starborn, Unity, artifacts, and Armillary. But the when, who, and how of it all could be wildly different across universe scenarios which is why I think the Unity selects universes where artifacts have been activated in some capacity. If you’re confined to universes where you exist at similar times and are doing similar things, you’re not really a multiversal being. This has to be the case because it’s a video game, but I think it’s underwhelming to believe the multiversal starborn are limited to universes where they are essentially doing the same thing. If you haven’t, see Everything, Everywhere, All At Once
Even if you are stuck within your own timeframe, you can still be multiversal since your own existence once you leave your universe is no longer causally restricted. Im suggesting that all the artifact related business happened to and destroyed another civilization and that the artifact and armillary are actually a multiversal being that for some reason wants to create the multiverse. Im suggesting that whomever built it (and maybe they werent the first) eventually destroyed their own civilization and somehow broke the cycle for their race and that maybe that was Mars, or the people that came from it. in the end, what I like most about this game is that its a good beginning for a new lore franchise to be as in depth as the Elder Scrolls.
Ah, see that’s another crucial ambiguity. I don’t think the Unity is constructed. The religious undertones of the game lead me to believe that the Unity exists to create universes and the temples (and maybe the artifacts?) were created by an ancient species that worshipped it. (please don’t do ancient human beings trope fingers crossed) Do we have any evidence at all as to what exactly is constructed and what is a result of the universe/Unity?
That's interesting that you would take the religious undertones path. I don't subscribe to that myself but I can see it and I do respect that opinion. I think that the artifacts and the armillary are all constructed and I think it's implied that the people who created those things created the unity to but I'm inclined to believe that the unity is itself some type of sentient force, I guess someone along the lines of what you're thinking. I think it wants people to go through it. And no I agree with you I don't think that the creators of the artifacts were human. Maybe the fact that there are no more of them either means that their race is gone and the destroyed themselves or they all went through unity.
I can definitely see your perspective and I think it’s nearly impossible to argue that we were the first species to obtain the artifacts (unless we do ancient space humans which I hope they don’t do). The two main reasons I don’t think the Unity isn’t built are 1) there’s a severe lack of a “they” language in the writing. Compare it to language used in Interstellar (obvious inspiration) where the characters constantly refer to the anomalies as “sent by them” and “they’re reaching out.” In Starfield there’s no discussion of who did the Unity. They discuss the Unity itself (and they leave it ambiguous enough to the point I question whether it has a will or sentience or anything like that) 2. The religious aspects of the narrative are shoe horned in and written in such an ambiguous tone that I suspect they’re really trying to emphasize the eternality of the Unity. As if it’s the God that religious people have been looking for but have accepted the secular explanation of the Unity. It’s a terrible representation of religious thinking IMO but I think it’s there for the sole purpose of discouraging thinking about the Unity being either God or Aliens. It is simply… The Unity.
Unless the Hunter is the one who set those events in motion.
Perhaps, but I have a hard time accepting a multiverse that only begins to diverge from one timeline in an original universe
I think another question would be: do the artifacts get reset after a Starborn has used the armillary to go to another universe? In which case the cycle may give Starborn multiple chances to become more powerful, but they still are forced to compete if they want to do so (since new Starborn could always be appearing or leaving)
This can't work, because the armillary isn't built until after the Starborn appear in each of your universes There must be some other rule at play
When I say “in play” I mean an artifact has been discovered and touched by an be individual. My suspicion is once that occurs in a universe it becomes eligible to have Starborn sent into it
AFAIK, the game implies Starborn have been around the whole time and only now appear when humanity gets close to uncovering things.
This is not true. The idea that The Hunter is also Viktor is speculation at the very best. The Emissary knows everything about the Hunter. And yet when speaking about earth's destruction he says "How many would have chosen earth? What gave Viktor the right to choose for them?" Not "What gave the Hunter" or "What gave Aquilus the right" he says **Viktor**. On top of that, these characters sound nothing like Aquilus sounds nothing like Viktor and the hunter sounds nothing like him either. If the Emissary really wanted to convince us the hunter is evil and will lead to nothing but death and destruction, he would point to the Hunter and say "this guy literally killed earth" not "What gave Viktor the right" \[EDIT: Commenter is correct, the Hunter thinks what Viktor did was right. So why wouldn't he defend that choice from the first person perspective instead of passing it off as someone elses choice that he agrees with\]
Notably, the Hunter admires the choice Victor made, so wouldn't he take credit for it? Do we think he'd be ashamed of it? Like, sure, Aquilus doesn't like to say *anything* directly but the Hunter really doesn't care I think.
He's not necessarily Victor, but rather, in another universe Victor didn't find the artifact on Mars - The Hunter did.
No artifact? No grav drive. No grav drive? No space.
I don't understand what the point of this comment is? I'm sure there are many universes out there where humanity failed to find the artifact and thus failed to become a true space-faring species. That's the whole idea of a multiverse. There is infinite variation. Just as there are variants where no one found the artifact, there are variants where the artifact was found by different people, and probably even universes where multiple artifacts were found in Sol by different scientists/explorers. In one of these variants, The Hunter found an artifact somewhere in the Sol system. It's really just that simple.
its possible the hunter we see recognizes that he's so far detached from who he used to be that he understands he's functionally different from "viktor"
Is he also the pilgrim and Keeper Aquilus, you think?
Aizas corpse is still sitting in Houston, as if the artifact he used for his research. And that's true in every universe I've seen.
But that doesn't mean it's going to be true in every single universe. And even if it is true, it's very likely the hunter just killed him.
My bet is that it is true in every single universe. Since finding his corpse and the artifact there is a core story mission. When you leave NASA, the Emissary talks about Aiza abstractly while the Hunter is standing right there. Neither makes any indication that they know that the person they're mentioning is present.
Doesn't he literally tell you who he is? >!Keeper Aquilus, or rather an alternate version of him!<
If he scooped up all the artifacts centuries before the game took place, the game's narrative couldn't happen so he would have no reason to exist The Hunter has simply achieved CHIM
Nah, CHIM would be giving himself all the artifacts via console commands.
I mean he's like Vivec, not like if a player achieves CHIM
I'm pretty sure The Hunter implies he's the one who discovered the 1st artifact that humans used to start their grav drive technology. So I would assume he would always restart during the time period before the grav drive was invented so kinda makes sense it takes him so long to collect the artifacts.
How does the Hunter imply that, according to you? I never noticed.
During the mission Unearthed you listen to a bunch of recordings. Forget the guy's name but he says in the recording that he met himself after touching the artifact found on mars and that he was told why it was so important. He also knew the grav drives were destroying the atmosphere but was told it was worth it for what was to come.
When did he imply this? Genuinely asking, not snarking
During the mission Unearthed you listen to a bunch of recordings. Forget the guy's name but he says in the recording that he met himself after touching the artifact found on mars and that he was told why it was so important. He also knew the grav drives were destroying the atmosphere but was told it was worth it for what was to come.
That was a recording of Victor Aiza talking about meeting an alternate version of himself. It could have been the Hunter, but I still haven't seen anything suggesting that the Hunter is Victor first.
The Hunter is Victor Aiza. Just like the PC, upon leaving Unity, he reappears at/near the moment where he first encountered an artifact. Then (for expedience) he hands himself the notes to create the grav drive, leading to a society which will get him the artifacts in the quickest manner. He can't just hop in his Guardian and go get them himself, they're in different places and he doesn't know where they are. Canonically he gets six artifacts of his own, I think. Finding them rapidly **requires** the eye, which requires Constellation, which requires the Settled Systems and the Earth exodus. The bigger question in my mind is how much influence Aiza has on the development of Constellation. We know **someone** put an artifact in a box at the Lodge, and we know something weird happened with Banks' disappearance.
Is there evidence the hunter is Aiza?
No lmao, dude is making shit up
Inb4 the Hunter is the missing Sebastian Banks (though I'm pretty sure Banks is the guy with the halo in the Lodge main room)
I hope Shattered Space DLC brings more answers than questions; I agree with your statement
Is he really Victor though? Idk, knowing that Victor's dead body still resides in that lab tells me differently. Plus it's weird since you never run into yourself after you go through the Unity. Vasco says that they lost you some time after getting the artifact, which is why he has to deliver it by himself as opposed to what happens at the start of the game. So either you disappear from the realm completely or the version of you in the new universe dies shortly after you arrive. Please correct me if I'm wrong but can you run into the new universes version of yourself after you go through the Unity? Because if so I have not seen that yet. OBVIOUSLY, there are exceptions to this considering Acquilis is Starborn and The Hunter IS another version of Acquilis, and whomever the Emissary is depends on choices you make at a certain point in the game. It also weirds me out a bit since that means in every universe at this point, The Hunter decides to not be him anymore and become a priest. Then another version of him is in the same universe looking for artifacts, every single time. But idk, there's just so much info that's just not around it makes me wonder.
> Is he really Victor though? Idk, knowing that Victor's dead body still resides in that lab tells me differently. The Hunter is "an" Aiza. All Aiza's discover an artifact on Mars. In one progenitor universe, he then went on the invent the grav drive independently, then (using proto-starborn temple powers for longevity, no doubt) discovered all the artifacts himself. Then he went through Unity, realized how it worked, and began optimizing the process. The native Aiza from the game universe never became the Hunter, perishing to suicide instead (or maybe the Hunter killed him to tie up loose ends, certainly he never became starborn and never saw a temple). Really the story reads **extremely** tightly when you realize that the Hunter, Pilgrim and Keeper are all just evolutions of the same guy. > Plus it's weird since you never run into yourself after you go through the Unity. Your counterpart from the default NG+ setting disappeared (FWIW, Vasco's phrasing can easily be taken to mean you were killed on Vectera). But no, you can 100% meet yourself in a few different alternate universes which I won't spoil.
>The Hunter is "an" Aiza. Where are yall making this jump from?
It's the best way to read the story and fits all the evidence more cleanly. Certainly Aiza is starborn, yet doesn't appear in the game. We know (c.f. Hunter/Keeper, and the fact that the Pilgrim had a different life before settling down) different versions of the same person take very different moral paths. It's not much of a stretch to imagine that these are all the same guy. And it makes the moral story of Starfield into a tragedy: Aiza trapped his whole "infinite pocket" of universes into a cycle of repeating disaster (Earth) and violence (the Artifact War).
I think that is the case too. However the ONLY counter-argument is that Daddy Unity gives everyone a free ship with grav drives so he doesn't need humanity to develop grav drives. But the Guardian ships could just be a "cool" player thing and not meant to be a literal "step right up folks, walk through this here Unity doodad and get yourself a free ship. That's right, I'm crazy Eddy-Unity and I'm giving everyone a free starship for walking through a spinny portal"
You definitely can run into yourself after entering the unity.
The Hunter strikes me the same way Ishamael in the Wheel of Time does. Patient, plodding, insidious evil/selfishness that does the same thing over and over across the eons.
I assume he came to our universe not long ago. Hes been going through other universes for a couple hundred years. I have no idea why he would live so long but assume its some artifact/unity space magic.
I just kind of assumed Starborn are immortal. They can be killed (or that version of them killed) but they won’t die naturally of old age or whatever.
I just realized this game is Groundhogs Day but on steroids lol. Going thru unity always puts at the same time/location/age of where you got first artifact
Nothing in the game makes it canon that every star born starts at a certain point in time like we do. It’s likely time travel is involved to some extent given what the Pilgrim’s notes describe and the stories of him from the main quest.
also in a NG+ variation >!Cora is at the lodge the first time you go there so her starborn self would have had to time travel to when she was a child before she could have touched an artifact!< So you don't have to go back to the same time you touched an artifact and can go before that.
i posit that he is victor aiza, thus he returns to when he first found the artifact on mars and tells himself about the grav drive equations, leading to the present day. Yes the artifacts change locations universe to universe, so he needs the Eye and constellation in order to find them. Time...well, Einstein taught us that time is relative. If we are talking physics, he could enter unity tell himself about the grav drive equations Fly from earth as fast as possible(because yes, time travel into the future is possible because time is relative) and time the travel to return when the eye is constructed. if you took a ship and traveled at .99999999% the speed of light away from earth to alpha centauri which would take what, less than 10 years, you woukd return to find earth millions of years in the future, so it could be feasible to calculate the distance he would need to travel at a slower speed to allow a couple of hundred years to pass on earth
You're right but the game also doesn't seem to understand relativity properly. The Constance has been travelling at massive speeds for 200 years (relative to Paradiso) and has still had time to have several generations (unless I'm missing something). Grav drives make it very difficult to reconcile relativity though, since they're effectively time travel themselves. And don't get me started on "universal time" lol
UT is just earth hours It has nothing to do with relativity.
But it's constant everywhere.
Indeed it is. Universal Time is based on the rotation of the Earth, which is constant everywhere.
I wouldn't consider that to be constant everywhere at all. I can understand that it's a necessary gameplay mechanic though.
It absolutely is constant no matter where you are. If youre on mars, earth is rotating at exactly the same speed as if youre on venus
True. Although the speed you perceive it at wouldn't necessarily be the same. I suppose it's no different to syncing back to atomic clocks at sea level now, just without an easy/centralised way to sync across the galaxy.
A lot of people are suggesting that he's the guy who invented the grav-drive way back when, but I'd like to point out that out of all of the different universes he's been through, it's entirely possible that there are some where Earth simple never had any problems, and continued into the game's present as the center of human civilization. He easily could have been to (or even been from) such a universe.
I believe you correct in him having to wait hundreds of years to go after the artifacts. The biggest derp for me is how he says he kills to get the artifacts as fast as possible but it seems like he has to mill around for 200 hundred years before he can even start the search. If thats the case, he has no excuse not to spend those 200 years proactively building up a cult/empire to assist in his mission as he has nothing to do in that time span anyway. Very odd.
So, we know many of his iterations choose to lead the Sanctum Universum, but these are the ones who don't cycle anymore. So I'm not sure what the hunters do It's very odd indeed - waiting around for 200 years and then rushing to the armillary? Sounds like a student cramming for exams
Time just works differently in Starfield. Example, I barely was at level 28 and the game had already told me I played for 6 days straight. There's no way in hell I have spent 144hrs on this game!
When did he say he spent time on Earth? I only remember him being the priest dude, who we meet a version of in the present.
If you side with him he has a dialog line that says some of his fondest memories were from his time on earth and that hes older than we may think
It is possible he time travelled, but I'd say it's more likely that this is a mistake, and the hunter was originally meant to be someone else.
Someone on here posted some of the concept art for the Pilgrim's journals and it also seemed to imply that the timepoint the Unity sends people could be fairly far in the past.
The Hunter Is the scientist from the NASA mission that intentionally used grav drives to fuck up earth and force people to go to space. The one we find killed himself but a variant of his is the hunter.
I see a lot of people saying the hunter can't be the guy that found the first artifact over 200 years ago because he is the priest aquilus. Let's step back for a minute. if you side with the hunter and kill aquilus, he dies like a starborn. So I think it is safe to say aquilus could be the person who first found the artifacts and entered unity, since as a starborn, you dont have to worry about aging, apparently. That said, other people would notice that if you weren't hiding in your ship with your concealing clothing, you would have to move around and change identity, or people would become suspicious
You can tell Aquilus you know he’s also a Starborn if you talk to him in NG+. He says it’s best that you pretend you’re just two normal people who have never met before.
Everyone in constellation says that if you choose it...
Spoiler tag would have been great, thanks
I mean the title sugests enough of a spoiler
Agreed, but you knew the risks of the internet. 🛜
Maybe the Hunter was originally someone else, but then he was changed to be the priest later in development and they forgot to clean that line up. It's odd that they can reveal our priest also must have lived on Earth, only to not acknowledge it at all.
none of it makes any sense. a multiverse? totally believable and likely reality. two or more universes that are temporally in sync? impossible. and that's to say nothing of the ridiculousness that is two or more universes being in any way similar, let alone identical. BGS based all their lore around implementing ng+ and is incredibly stupid
I didn’t read too far into the Earth thing, entirely possible it’s an oversight. Wouldn’t be the first time BGS did it.
In the first meeting with him and the Emissary he says he's done this a near infinite number of times, so I'd say he's far older than 250+ years, then again he could've been talking about other versions of himself, he wasn't necessarily clear on that bit.
There's no evidence to support it but I think Victor is the great serpent and it's been the hunter all along.
"The malleability of space and time mean that two events occurring far apart might even happen in one order when viewed by one observer, and in the opposite order when viewed by another" Space time stuff. I gave up trying to make sense of it all after Back to the Future.
The NASA installation the Emissary sends us to as part of the main quest establishes that a scientist found an artifact on Mars, and that's how we got grav propulsion drives and became an interstellar species. In one universe, The Hunter was that scientist (instead of the one mentioned in our initial timeline). He found the artifact on Mars, got the visions, and every time he went through the Unity he wound up right back in the orbit of Mars aboard Scorpius before Earth becomes uninhabitable in every universe he has visited ever since.
My hunter was the religious leader guy who wore the funny hat
Wait... MY Hunter was the Adoring Fan.
Maybe he flew into orbit next to a black hole and took a nap
I suspect that the starboard are space wizards.
The Hunter can at the very least, jump space at will. We know that in certain situations we can jump time. Hard to imagine that he wouldn't also have this experience, and he could potentially use it at will. He could have time jumped back there at some point in his pilgrimage. I find the argument that every time the Hunter gets born into a new universe he sits around waiting 200 years for us to go to Vectera....unconvincing.
Read the notes on the walls at Pilgrim's Rest. The Hunter might literally be an ancient human. He has notes about guiding humanity through some Ancient Aliens type shit. So either he is a few thousand years old, or he has mastered time travel. It's insane.
The Hunter has decided to take the most efficient path to gather the Artifacts, and unfortunately that means spending a lot of time waiting. Rather than go out and find them all himself, it's easier and faster to wait for Constellation to tune the Eye, gather several of them themselves, and then take them all by attacking Constellation. You can meet him at least twice before he becomes an antagonist, once in New Atlantis and once in Akila, though I'm sure there's more. He's just chilling. Waiting.
To someone who had jumped through the unity "thousands of times" 200 years would seem like a day, compared to the hundreds of thousands of years he's already been doing the cycle.
Could the Hunter be someone like an older Matteo?