Valley 1:Everything You Wanted To Know About Missions, But Were Afraid To Ask

Types Of Missions

Missions come in three primary flavors:

World Map Missions

These missions are seen clearly on the world map, with the text "mission" under them. You can read about what a specific mission requires you to do, and what the rewards from it are, by looking at the details window of the region itself and hovering over the mission icons.

World map missions expire every so often, and are replaced by new missions. So if you don't like a particular mission (either in terms of what it is offering as a reward, or what you have to do to earn the reward), then you can just ignore the mission and after some time has passed it will expire and be replaced by something potentially better.

World Map missions can only appear in regions that are within the protective fields of the Settlement and Wind Shelters.... anywhere that's not under the constant battering of a windstorm. Using Wind Shelters to expand your boundaries will produce more possible areas that missions can spawn in. Since enemy and boss types vary from one region type to the next, the type of region a mission takes place in can have a big impact on the mission itself, causing it to become more difficult, or perhaps easier.

These missions mostly grant you new spell gems equal to the current World Level. However, they only produce the most common variety of spell gems, and wont show you what kind of extra effect will be on the gem you recieve. Common spell gems are also the weakest... in order to get stronger versions of the same spells, you'll have to craft the spells. That, however, can take much longer to do, as you must find materials and orbs first, so there is a trade-off there, and it's up to you which way you want to go about getting which spells.

In addition, these missions have a small chance of also giving out a Guardian Power Scroll as an added bonus, which includes things like the basic citybuilding structures, as well as the many "personality structures" that allow you to get continent-wide buffs and effects.

Secret Missions

Secret missions can be found through exploration. They can be different types of missions than the ones currently available on the world map. Instead of spell gems, secret missions will ONLY give Guardian Power Scrolls as rewards, which includes city structures like farms and profession buildings, wind shelters, buoys, and all of the personality structures, as well as "special" scrolls like "Seek Survivor" or "Look for Trouble", both of which can be used on the world map to generate missions.

These missions can be found in any type of area: surface, building interiors, or caverns. They appear as a yellow node on your dungeon map, brighter than the color used by stashes and gem rooms. Each region is guaranteed to have one secret mission area appear on the surface, and they are very often found in caves as well, each floor of the cave having a high chance of producing one secret mission. Finding them in buildings is much more rare, but if you're doing alot of building exploring to search for stashes, you'll still find them in there often enough.

Finally, these always give you TWO scrolls as a reward, not just one. Which is pretty nice, really.

Rescue Missions

These are special missions that give you a chance to rescue an NPC, who will then return to your settlement, ready to undertake missions for you, or even do some adventuring if you use a Glyph Transfer Scroll. The catch: Unlike all over missions, you only have ONE chance to complete these. Screw it up, and the survivor is lost for good!

In this mission type, you have two goals. Your first goal is to battle your way through all of the monsters, to reach the area where the survivor is. Talk to them, and you begin the second part of the mission: escorting them safely to the exit, which is the same door you arrived by. Spawners will appear all throughout the mission zone, and will constantly be summoning more and more monsters. You'll have to do everything you can to prevent the survivor from getting killed by them as you make your way back.

These missions can be found either in buildings, or in caves, with their own unique chunk acting as the staging area, just like secret missions. They are the same color as secret missions when seen on your dungeon map. Hover over it with your mouse to see if it's a secret mission or a rescue mission. Unlike secret missions though, these are not normally found in surface chunks, unless you used a "Seek Survivor" scroll to generate the mission, at which point it will have a mission entrance in the first surface chunk somewhere, just like World Map missions do.

Guardian Power Missions

Some missions can only be found by using a guardian power first. For example, the missions that let you erect a wind shelter can only be created via guardian power.

Mission Rewards

Missions give a variety of rewards, depending on their type:

Spells

Worldmap missions will always have a spell as the reward. These are always of the "common" rarity, and always equal to the current world level.

Guardian Power Scrolls

Worldmap missions will sometimes add these as an extra bonus, but the main way to find them is to go after Secret Missions, which give 2 at once every time. These include all types of buildings, wind shelters & buoys, and the various special scrolls such as Seek Survivor.

Mystery Clues

Completing a mission will also unlock the next piece of one of the currently available mysteries that you have, in addition to the normal rewards.

Rescued NPC

There are special "rescue survivor" type of missions that you can find underground and in buildings, and which you can create via guardian power scrolls. These missions involve your running into a building or a cave, meeting the NPC in question, and leading them to safety while monsters try to kill you both. If you succeed, the NPC will join your settlement. Fail, and they are dead forever.

Wind Shelter

Using guardian power scrolls, you can create "Erect Wind Shelter" missions that are challenging overland excursions past buffed monsters and bosses to put up a new wind shelter building. Wind shelters magically push the windstorms back, giving you freer passage in more regions on the world map.

Mission Activities

Except in the case of the specialized mission-specific rewards (putting up wind shelters, rescuing NPCs, that sort of thing) the type of reward you get for a mission is mostly unconnected to the activity that you are asked to perform. That gives you some latitude in the types of activities you can perform, and you can focus on what you enjoy more and avoid those you like less.

Example Mission Activities

There are quite a variety of types of mission activities, and that list is continually growing, but here are a few varied examples:

Boss Gang

Basically a mosh pit in a giant cave or interior room, with 3x the normal number of minibosses all concentrated at once. You're tasked with killing them all without dying yourself.

Battlefield

Your allies' base is to the left of the battlefield, and the enemy's base is to the right. Enemies spawn from their base, and there are a series of enemy towers covering the middle of the field that must be destroyed before you can even damage their base. However, you are not alone in this fight: minions of your own spawn from your base, and come along to help you turn the tide and push across the battlefield to ultimately destroy the enemy base.

Umbra Vortex

A collection of micro-bosses (basically elite regular enemies) has been caught in a swirling vortex of evil inside a cavern. Inside this cavern, you have the ability to jump infinite times, which gives you an edge... at first. The more times you play this kind of mission, the more it changes (via unlockables). You'll wind up fighting more microbosses at once, and they also gain the infinite-jump ability, and it gets pretty crazy.

Lava Escape

Inside a building or in a cave, you've got to run like heck for the switch at the top. Lava is rushing up through the floor from below, and if you get caught in it you're pretty much done; you'll be knocked out of the mission zone, back to the staging area, and will have to start again. You can see how close the lava is getting to you via a little counter near your feet, but don't let that lull you -- there are many dead-ends, and so you need either a Greater Teleport spell or quite a lead on the lava in order to survive inevitably going down a few dead ends.

This is a mission specifically for hardcore platforming enthusiasts, and anyone who doesn't fit that description is mostly advised to stay away from this one. It's an entirely optional form of mission, and only shows up as a secret mission. By the by, since it's so hot in these areas and you have to wear a heatsuit, your normal jump-improving enchants won't work in this mission, and you can't just turn into a bat and fly upwards, etc. You have to actually be good at platforming to make it, in areas like this!

Stealth Assassination

All the smaller monsters are really buffed up and deadly, but are unusually blind as well. Avoid them as much as you can while you search either a building or a cavern for a hidden miniboss. This miniboss has extra low health, fortunately, so you can finish him quickly if you can avoid having the guards kill you. Quite a different flow from normal combat!

Journey To Perfection

During this mission, any damage any enemy takes is instantly fatal. So you can one-shot enemies of any size -- hooray! But they can do the same to you, and if you take the slightest bit of falling damage, or so much as graze some acid water... it's all over. You wont actually die from this, but the mission will end in defeat, and you'll be booted back to the staging area, and have to start all over again. Where lava escape is for the platforming enthusiasts, this one is for the combat perfectionists.

Fix The Anachronisms

You're in a building or a cavern with a variety of enemies in it. Some come from the time period of the region you are in, and others don't belong. Kill all the enemies that don't belong, and you win. Kill even a single one that is from the proper time period, and suffer defeat!

A Valley Without Wind