Headscratchers / Horizon Forbidden West

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Raiding the Utaru

• It was stated in the previous game (and reiterated here) that the Carja raided the Utaru for blood sacrifices. However, here we find out that they actually live in the Forbidden West, behind the Tenakth line. The same Tenakth who successfully drove back the Carja. So how did the Carja even get to the Utaru?
  • The Utaru territory actually lies directly between the Sundom & Tenakth territory; the Carja would have raided the Utaru first before ever encountering the Tenakth. The line as it exists in game wasn't established until after the Tenakth drove the Carja out of the west.
  • IIRC Utaru lands becoming a No Man's Land between Carja and Tenakth territories is actually a recent development as part of Avad's work towards peace.
    • Yes & no; before the peace it was still Utaru territory, not Tenakth. The Tenakth had dealings & arrangements with the Utaru & weren't openly hostile towards them, but the Utaru also weren't a Tenakth protectorate where the clans were going to jump into action as soon as the Utaru came under threat, nor were the Tenakth particularly well established in the area only to withdraw back behind the mountains after the establishing of a formal no-man's-land. Zo, Kotallo, and Regalla also make it fairly clear that the raids in the area had been going on for a while before Hekarro finally rallied his forces for a counter offensive to push the Carja back, which makes sense given that the clan lands are huge, ranging from further east than Nevada to the (admittedly deeper inland) coast, and they had to cross a section of the Rockies or the Sierras on foot. Point is, there wasn't a massive Tenakth army sitting at the line waiting for the Carja the first time Jiran set out his raiders from Barren Light to immediately push them back; they would have had free reign to raid & terrorize the area for a not-insignificant period of time before the main Tenakth force arrived.

Quen language

• To explain why all of the tribes speaks English, you can find a datapoint where it has been explained to one of the characters that Apollo was supposed to teach the new humans other languages, but of course, since it was deleted, it couldn't. So all the cradle facilities defaulted to English, and that was the language all the humans learned. Great, fine, that's a reasonable explanation for why initially, all the new humans speak English—but what it doesn't explain is why a tribe from across the sea speaks the same English as the tribes in the area of the game! According to the timeline on the wiki, there have now been humans on earth for about 700 years—more than enough time for languages that are completely isolated from each other to become... if not mutually incomprehensible, at least not easily comprehensible. At the very least, a tribe that’s been out of contact with the tribes of the game space for 700 years ought to have a markedly different accent—but no, everyone just speaks modern English.
  • Said tribe is also the only tribe shown so far to have embraced the usage of the focus, even if an earlier model, allowing them access to the same datapoint recordings Aloy finds which no doubt detailed the ways in which the old ones spoke and communicated to each other, even across the generations. There might be a bit of language drift, but because they have more technological knowledge than many other tribes, the Quen are therefore communicating in roughly the same manner as the tribes of the americas. As for the americas, the Tenakth at least have access to audio recordings that used to comprehensibly repeat public announcements, which they can still understand, so it's not inconceivable that other tribes had similar access to other old world relics that still functioned after the Faro plague in some fashion that prevented the manner of speaking from becoming too distinctive from each other. Depending on how the sequel turns out, this might change with future tribes Aloy has to interact with, but the Quen have more justification than others to be speaking the same language.

Hekarro's vision

• Hekarro's goal of peace between Tenakth clans and Carja are the result of him seeing a recording of an old world general's speech about uniting against a machine threat. Hekarro's description of the event makes it clear what happened; he was in the museum by chance at the moment GAIA self-destructed and AETHER installed itself on the museum mainframe, which futzed with the systems and made the recording play. This means his vision pre-dates the Derangement, and the machines were not a threat at that moment. How did Hakarro become so dedicated to this idea of uniting against a threat that, at that moment, did not exist?
  • There's a lot more evidence of what happened to the Old Ones in the Forbidden West than there is in the Sundom or Sacred Lands, at least obvious evidence; i.e., the fields of exposed Scarabs & Khopeshs, a lot more metal devils. the fight was still going on here before Zero Day. With that context, knowing that the Old Ones had fought a great war against machines, knowing/believing that the Ten fought machines, and viewing all of this information through a religious and somewhat superstitious lens, thinking of this hologram not just as a recording of the past but as a spiritual vision granted to him in his moment of victory, Hekarro came to the conclusion of "what has happened before may well happen again". When the Derangement did finally kick in, Hekarro would have been seen as a visionary which probably helped him get the clans off their asses & united against the Carja.
  • Also remember that, if you want to get technical, the Derangement started right that second, since that's when all the subfunctions escaped. Sure HEPHAESTUS couldn't just instantly turn every machine hostile, but it likely didn't take more than a few months, maybe less, before people started noticing the machines acting weird. Especially since Hekarro would have been keeping an eye out for confirmation of what he saw as a prophecy. So he would have started with a basic idea of unity under the Marshal system, but then as the Derangement progressed he would become more and more dedicated to it, and then he helped fight off the Red Raids, he would become more dedicated to it. Twenty years later, when he's been proven right in every way, both he and his followers are absolutely convinced that uniting the tribe against a machine threat was the right thing to do.

Faro's Final Fate

• Even if one is willing to assume that Dr. Somptow maliciously gave Faro bad advice towards the end because he just hated him that much, surely, a person as intelligent as Faro (true, he's severely lacking in common sense and has very poor decision making skills, but one does not become a trillionaire by being that much of an idiot), who presumably knows the first thing about biology, would understand just how monumentally stupid it must be for a person suffering from rampant mutation to sit for centuries next to a nuclear reactor core for the "energy"(???)? Realistically, even avoiding doing this may not have saved him, since the botched gene therapy has apparently caused irreversible damage and he was all but doomed to turn into a lump of cancer eventually, but sitting on top of the reactor can't possibly have helped him.
  • Ted's ego and desire to greet and "guide" the new humanity trumped all logic. It led to him killing the Alphas, deleting APOLLO, and coming up with the half-cocked attempt at immortality in the first place. It's clear he's, at best, not thinking straight. But even if he realized it was stupid, he was mutating anyway and the only one who could help is dead. It may have seemed like "damned if you do, damned if you don't" to him. Along with those, it's also possible the reactor overcharged the mutations so quickly he was already screwed and immobile before he knew what hit him.
  • The reactor wasn't nuclear, it was geothermal.
  • He seems to have been mentally deteriorating by the time he left that final log. Somptow may have said at some point that the reactor would provide all the power Ted('s bunker) needed, and made a separate, placating statement that with time and energy the mutations would subside, and Ted conflated this. Ted also left a log about the reactor where he calls it a marvel and is pleased that he's set it up to make himself a Load-Bearing Boss. It could have ended up having the most positive associations for him in the whole bunker. It could also be that when he moved for the last time, his mind had deteriorated enough that his only consideration was that the location was large and warm.

Faro's food

• While we're at it, what did Faro eat for almost a thousand years while he existed as a cancerous blob hugging the reactor? While his aging might've stopped "thanks" to Dr. Somptow's gene therapy, even cancer cells require nutrition. Confined to the reactor core, presumably immobile and/or incapable of much human thought, Faro couldn't access the rest of the bunker, where food supplies would've been, and would've eventually ran out of however much he brought with him into the reactor core. Considering that for a period of centuries no other organic life even existed on Earth (so he couldn't be, say, eating insects that crawled-in through the ventilation system, or something, even if we assume for a moment that the bunker wasn't as airtight as it's been implied to be), and that a body that size would've required a great deal of food, this leaves what appears to be a minor plot hole. Now, someone might say "this is what he referred to by needing energy from the reactor" - but there's neither indication nor logical reason to assume that Faro has mutated in a way that would allow him to absorb radiation or electricity and use it as food. This might've been a passable explanation in another setting, but Horizon just doesn't seem to be pulpy enough to go that way.
  • There are three possibilities: 1.) Faro's treatments somehow erased his need for food to survive. This could either mean his body derived energy from the environment somehow, or he was indeed hungry all those years, but didn't die even though he was starving. 2.) There are food printers (mentioned in a couple datapoints elsewhere in the HFW world) in Thebes that fed him somehow. 3.) There really was some "proper" way (like a life support system) for him to derive energy from the reactor outside of walking into it and hoping for the best.
  • It's possible that part of the mutations that were accelerated by the reactor was an ability to feed off the heat and radiation. It's far from impossible—plants feed off sunlight, which is functionally the same thing. Which might also explain why his mind deteriorated; plants don't need brains to absorb radiation.
  • Ted says in one of the audio logs you find that the reactor will give him everything he needs. He's speaking literally.
  • FAS started out making personal butler robots, and Ted had fully functional Scarabs in the bunker with him, so he may have had other robots that he could task to bring him food, clean him, etc before he lost the power of speech. As for why Aloy and the Quen don't see any... well, maybe they were in the reactor room out of sight, or tuck away when not on their rounds.

Other People in Faro's Bunker

• According to Kanya Somptow, there was a harem of girls in the bunker aside from Grigori, Kanya, and her father. Grigori and Brianna (one of the harem) died because they found out Ted killed the Alphas. But what about the others? By the time Kanya and Grigori kill themselves, they were the only other people in the bunker. Did Ted kill the other bunkmates besides Brianna beforehand for whatever reason, or did they get driven to suicide like Kanya and her father? Maybe I missed something, but we don't get any background on them besides knowing that there were other people.
  • The implication is that he killed them one by one as they realized he was killing everyone. Other possibilities are that Faro killed them en masse once he lost the doctor so that they wouldn't interfere with him while he was in the reactor, or they all killed themselves once they realized their sugar daddy was a mutant monster sitting on a reactor. Hell, maybe some of them even survived the craziness and just died of old age.
  • In the log where Faro talks about finding Somptow and Kanya dead he says they've left him alone - so, everyone else is already dead. Given that Brianna told Kanya she may have told others, or maybe Ted just believed she had.

Ninmah cliffs

• How did the team get Beta back to base? They presumably didn't bring a stretcher, they don't have modern climbing technology, and she didn't wake up until after the journey was over. In sidequests, there are plenty of times Aloy finds someone dead on a mountain/other isolated point, and she doesn't bring their corpses back (because she physically can't?).
  • An inconsistent answer, but: Aloy could have just overridden a mount like she always does. The situation was definitely important enough for that.
  • In the final mission, Erend carries around a huge lump of tech by strapping it to his back, even climbing several walls with it on. Presumably they did the same thing with Beta, since rope is a common survival tool.

Melee Pit

• Why exactly can the Pit Masters use their special hi-tech weapons while Aloy cannot?
  • perks of being the pit master you can break the rules? or you can go with for the challenge?

Where do the Quen come from?

• I am trying to figure out where the Quen come from? They mention being from across the sea, at first I thought it was Hawaii? But the keep mentioning being large, and having enemies? Plus the hints of having an Emperor and something about a great delta?
  • China is the most likely answer. There are a few famous deltas in China that could be the one they're from. It's also big enough to have plenty of enemies for an empire, and far enough away that their travel across the ocean would be suitably fraught.
  • China being the most likely homeland for the Quen raises the question of how tribes got established in the area in the first place. The Faro Plague broke out in the Malay archipelago. Was there really enough time for Cradle facilities to be established in East Asia before the region was overrun by the Swarm?
    • A datapoint from the Zero Dawn shows that the first Cradle, ELEUTHIA-1, was completed and sealed in the nick of time. It's located somewhere around Xinjiang, China.
  • Depending on how exactly the Swarm functioned, that might have been the safest place. If the Swarm ate it first and then passed through onto greener pastures, it might have been relatively empty of machines.
    • As mentioned above, ELEUTHIA-1 is located around the area of Xinjiang, which in real life is one of the harshest deserts in the world in the form of the Taklamakan Desert with its relative lack of biomass probably something that made it well-suited as a location for a cradle.

Why can't the Quen use the stars to get home?

• For thousands of years humanity has used the stars for sailing, and you're telling me the Quen can't? But they can use a GPS?
  • It's likely the Quen are so obsessed with technology that they don't trust anything less advanced. Imagine telling an expedition- one that already took a lot of losses on the first trip- conditioned to idolize Diviners and artifacts that their only sure compass is gone and they'll have to rely on stars to get home. There would be a lot of people refusing to go along. There might even be a revolt, since the expedition's blood-sanctioned leader isn't around anymore.
  • Alternately, you could say the Quen don't have detailed knowledge of astronomy. The data they've gleaned comes from what people were saying in the 23rd century, and they don't even have all of that. Yes, some people would still be using low-tech navigational techniques, but they would be few enough (and likely too poor to own a Focus) that their knowledge could have been realistically destroyed. Even if it wasn't, the Quen definitely wouldn't have the technology that goes along with astronomy (sextants, astrolabes, etc), might have lost it when the ships got sunk, or not have star charts relevant to their region.
  • Alternately alternately, the expedition's sailors might know how but be too restricted by class to tell its leaders what to do. The Quen navigators can publicly ask Aloy for help because she's a Living Ancestor. But relying on common sailors for something as big as an ocean journey goes against their culture (and possibly the navigators' egos) too much.
  • In the Burning Shores DLC, Seyka notes that her sister is a navigator and the only one in the tribe that has a talent for celestial navigation techniques, though that still leaves it open as to why Kina is the only one that knows such things.
  • That portion of the fleet suffered serious losses; they also don't have any surviving Diviners. Considering Kina's youth, she was probably the apprentice to one of the more experienced navigators, and all the others died.

What exactly is the time line for both games?

• Confused on the time line? The writing for Zero Dawn makes its seem like the fight between Gaia and Hades along with the signal triggering everything happened in the past (like 2 or 3 generations before Aloy.)However the writing in Forbidden West makes it seem like it all happened right before Aloy was created (like Rost and everyone would have seen the fight between Gaia and Hades. so which is it?
  • The "fight" between GAIA and HADES took microseconds. The alien signal came in, HADES tried to take over, and GAIA detonated. The giant explosion is mentioned a few times in the first game; it was definitely noticed. This is also the moment GAIA initiated Aloy's creation. Then HADES and all the rest of the subroutines escaped. No one particularly noticed this until the knock-on effects like the Derangement started. So in short: It all happened right before Aloy was created, but most of it was invisible.
  • HADES in Forbidden West gives certain dates when he activated during GAIA's early attempts at recreating the biosphere: 2154, 2161 and 2168. So, after Zero Day, it took GAIA around 70 years to crack the swarm's shutdown code and start rebuilding the biosphere - assuming that 7 year pattern holds, GAIA's first attempt at terraforming would've started around 2147. Then in Zero Dawn, there's an operations log you can find in the ELEUTHIA-9 cradle that gives specific dates for some events; The adolescent humans were released on March 16th, 2326. GAIA Prime receives the extinction signal on August 26th, 3020 at 08:45, almost 700 years after the humans were released. GAIA initiates her self-destruct, instructs the ELUETHIA-9 cradle to gestate Aloy and place her outside for the tribe to find, and records her message to Aloy, however HADES unexpectedly escapes with the other subfunctions. GAIA prime self-destructs at 8:45 - they're Ais, so all of that only took microseconds. The cradle facility starts gestating Aloy at 12:08 that same day, then Aloy is born and placed outside the cradle door on April 4th, 3021. The bulk of Zero Dawn happens when Aloy is 18/19. All in all, GAIA self-destructed around 20 years prior to the time of the games. GAIA prime’s destruction was heard over quite a distance and some of the debris ended up scattered surprisingly far away, but there would have been nothing for a human to see before the mountain suddenly exploded.

What was Adamantine Wreath meant to accomplish?

• Aquino was working on making plants that the Swarm couldn't perform bioconversion on, which Aloy encounters as indestructible vines that seal off caves and passages. GAIA says in passing that this represents one of several non-Zero Dawn attempts to avert extinction - all the best and brightest people got kidnapped to either work on ZD or occupy cells and ZD got all the funding, so naturally other attempts wouldn't have been as impressive, but Adamantine Wreath's "plants the Swarm can't eat" seems very limited. What was its goal?
  • There may have been some function to purify air or produce crops. The Metal Flowers from the first game have poems in them and are surrounded by more normal plantlife so maybe these can also seed new plants? But she describes wanting the wreaths to give the Swarm "indigestion", suggesting that they're meant to directly interact with the machines somehow.
  • Are they indestructible enough to be meant to protect habitations and Enduring Victory forces? Given that bioconversion is done with a haze of nanites and the vines don't make an airtight shield, the safety they might offer is limited.
  • Random Side Quest believes the indestructible vines were meant to tie the machines down. We never see how fast they grow, so maybe they're quick enough. At least one of the Metal Flowers in HFW is caging up an Apex machine that gets released when Aloy deactivates it.
  • It's possible that the vines were intended to act as "nanite flypaper." The nanites consume whatever biomass they first encounter; if a Faro machine deployed its nanite supply against something that they could not break down and which did not let the nanites return to the machine which deployed them, that machine would be deprived of the ability to use biomass conversion to refuel itself and eventually shut down for lack of power.

No shields for Spectres?

• Given how effective Zenith shields are, I'm surprised they never installed any on their Spectres. Are they just really costly in terms of resources?
  • Maybe. They could require all sorts of exotic materials that aren't easily obtained. But the real question is, is a single shield worth more than replacing a spectre? Spectres are ultimately cheap and mass produced. They don't need to be invulnerable, they just need to be tough enough to do their jobs, and the Zeniths can handle things personally when that's not enough.
  • The Zeniths had been massacred by NEMESIS taking control of their systems. Perhaps they wanted to keep shields to themselves in case the Spectres were turned against them.

Londra's plan

• The Burning Shores DLC is all about stopping Walter Londra from his plan, which is launching into space at the cost of irradiating 1000 miles of land with fatal nuclear fallout. He will create a colony of loyal followers. However, it seems he intends to make this colony on a distant world. The other Far Zeniths attempted that, but they needed GAIA to terraform whatever future planet they called home. Londra seems to not care at all about GAIA. Why doesn't he need GAIA, when the other Zeniths did?
  • Maybe instead of a whole world he was content to have a colony in a dome or something? That does raise the question of why the other Zeniths wanted GAIA and terraforming capabilities, they didn't seem interested in creating civilizations that would need an entire habitable planet.
  • I'm buying that he just wanted an isolated colony, but on the other thing: whether the other Zeniths wanted to Terraform the planet or a colony, they needed GAIA because their whole everything was wiped out by NEMESIS.
  • Don't forget that the main Zeniths assumed this would be a milk run. Drop in, use Beta to open some doors, maybe vaporize nosy primitives. They certainly didn't expect Aloy, or the Sons of Prometheus, or Beta escaping. If they had known how much trouble they'd have, they'd likely have just skipped Earth, grabbed some resources in the asteroid belt, and then fled again. Yes, GAIA is everything they need to terraform a new world, but they have enough nanotech that they could get the job done on their own eventually.

What was inside Londra's head?

• After you defeat Londra Aloy takes a quick scan of him and there is something inside his head, the game quickly glosses over what it is. I don't think its a focus as I remember him wearing a focus in other cut scenes? So what is it?
  • In the epilogue Sylens goes through the data and it was kind of like a diary of sorts where Londra muses on ways to defeat Nemisis. It could be a more futuristic version of the focus.
    • That thing in Londra's head is an implant, Beta had one she removed when she escaped. It *is* their version of a focus.

Ancient battlefields

• Much of the map is littered with Old World battlefield wreckage from Operation Enduring Victory. So far, so good, but almost all of it is staged like the battle was suddenly frozen in time, with Faro machines poised to tear open tanks or force themselves through bunker doors, and human armor arrayed in defensive lines and positions that still visibly correspond to enemy positions and approach vectors back then. This would've made sense if Zero Dawn shut down the Faro Plague in the middle of a battle, but that battle had been over for centuries when the Swarms' encryption was finally cracked. There's no sensible reason why the Faro bots would be posing in this way, and any salvaging they might've been doing would've been finished long ago, considering how quickly they advanced and multiplied during the war. Rule of Cool at its finest, or did I miss something that explains this?
  • I think it's mostly just Rule of Cool, although if you want an in-universe justification maybe HADES arranged them like during the three times that it was undoing the unsuccessful terraforming attempts. I could see Travis Tate programming something like that into HADES for his own amusement.
  • You're missing the obvious - the robots and vehicles that were left behind on battlefields were the ones that the other side managed to disable, left there after the battle moved on. The others, as seen in Zero Dawn, dug down into the ground as part of the shut-down that MINERVA sent out.

Old World relics

• Why are there so many artificial heart implants lying around in Old World crates? The occasional find in abandoned medical facilities would be justified, but these things are found damn near everywhere.
  • It makes sense that they'd be lying around, since the swarm's biomass conversion would have devoured the person and left the implant intact. That doesn't explain how they ended up in crates, though. Maybe some of the early tribal people collected them and put them in the boxes as a stash but never came back for them?