Deep in the bowels of Destiny, a video game in which players travel through space wondering how the hell Bungie got away with that damn crucible bounty quest, there’s an enigmatic weapon that nobody’s discovered yet.
It’s called Sleeper Simulant, and for the past two weeks, players have been going crazy trying to find it. No luck yet. Destiny secret-hunters have put together their own subreddit — r/searchforthesleeper — where they gather to share theories and don tinfoil hats while reporting on everything from logo analysis to weird noises. There have been theories — oh so many theories! — but as of right now, nobody’s come close to finding it.
Bungie first revealed the existence of the Sleeper Simulant during their Game Informer marketing blitz, describing the gun as a fusion rifle that counts as a heavy weapon and shoots bouncing projectiles. The Game Informer article about the exotic gun remains the only official hint Bungie’s given about how to obtain it. Writes the magazine:
However, in order to unlock the gun, players first have to collect relics of the Golden Age which have been scattered across the various locations of Destiny. After players bring these pieces back to Banshee-44 (the Tower’s gunsmith), the ancient artifacts trigger a memory in the ancient Exo gunsmith, and he will invite players on an odyssey to repair and reactivate one of the Taken King’s most striking exotics. Bungie doesn’t want to spoil the story content of this mission, but it did say that there will be unique tasks and objectives required for completion, which might even include puzzles that are too hard for any one player to figure out on their own.
Right after The Taken King launched, enemies across the game started dropping relics with the prefix “DVALIN” that could be traded to the gunsmith for reputation gains. At first, players theorised that turning in enough of these relics might trigger the Simulant quest, but it hasn’t happened yet, which leads to the question: Have we just not found all the relics? Or is there another trigger?
Last week, we learned that Bungie has a few new tricks up their sleeve with this incarnation of Destiny. Turns out at least one of The Taken King‘s new story missions has a secret challenge that’s only obtainable when they make it the daily heroic. Which got Sleeper hunters thinking — what if the secret to this exotic fusion rifle is actually hidden in one of the story missions?
If it is, nobody’s found it yet. But Destiny players have some ideas. Some think the quest might not be unlockable until people hit higher reputation ranks with the Gunsmith. Others lament that the collective Destiny community just hasn’t done enough hunting yet. Redditor Jofamo, for example, thinks the secret’s got something to do with this week’s Nightfall strike, Fallen SABER. (“Someone very recently managed to glitch [out] of the Omnigul room,” they wrote, “and noticed that below the arena is new geometry. Almost like the floor opens up, or it is meant to be accessible.”)
Here’s where we put on our rubber boots and start stomping around in the wet marshes of Destiny lore. Get ready.
The running assumption is that Sleeper Simulant is linked to the Russian warmind Rasputin — you know, the big AI machine that’s into ballet music? Some Destiny scholars have also theorised that it’s linked to the old fusion rifle Pocket Infinity, and in a massive post on Reddit over the weekend, user echolog wrote an extensive, entertaining theory about what might trigger the Sleeper quest. An excerpt:
So what is the common theme between Rasputin, the Pocket Infinity, the ACD/0 Feedback Fence, and the Sleeper Simulant?
THIS SYMBOL. The diamond with wings looking thing. That symbol is found all over Rasputin’s bunker, as well as the three weapons mentioned above. Here it is on the Pocket Infinity, and here it is on the ACD/0 Feedback Fence before it was changed, for whatever reason. Even more interesting is this image of the Sleeper Simulant itself , which I believe is a poster included in the Legendary Edition of The Taken King. The symbol is there in the top left corner, and if you look closely, it is right there ON the gun itself. Three items, three symbols. All made by Rasputin, using Vex technology and parts of his Warsats to build them, thus the common visual themes between them. This is important to note for later on when we look at what will happen next.
Clearly, the hunt can be exhausting. Yet it’s also exhilarating. Although Destiny has always been filled with secret-hunters, this is the first time in the game’s life where it feels like the clues will actually lead to something substantial, as they did with Black Spindle. (Turns out the clue to that exotic was hidden on a runestone you’d get from dismantling a Black Hammer.)
Here’s my own contribution to the mystery: I noticed that when you turn in DVALIN relics to the Gunsmith, you don’t just push a button and cash them in; instead, you have to hold the button for a long time, as if the game is giving you a chance to reconsider your decision. This is a bizarre UI choice. Usually, items that are designed to be deposited — like the stuff you turn at the cryptarch for glimmer — will just disappear immediately when you hit the button prompt.
So maybe you’re not supposed to turn in these relics? Maybe you’re supposed to hoard them and see what happens when you collect enough? Hmmmm. HMMMMM.
Comments
25 responses to “The Hunt For Destiny’s Most Mysterious Weapon ”
With respect to items that use similar-looking tech seemingly derivsed from Rasputin or other Warmind tech – in addition to the ACD/0 Feedback Fence (a titan-exclusive set of exotic gauntlets), there’s also the Pocket Infinity fusion rifle previously only obtainable via exotic bounty (though it will now only drop from legacy engrams as there is no year 2 version and those old quests have been retired). Some people suspect Pocket Infinity is a key to unlocking Sleeper Simulant, though this is unlikely – as is the prospect that the DVALIN fusion rifle components are required. It’s possible, but Bungie will have screwed a lot of unsuspecting players out of a chance by letting us exchange the items for gunsmith rep since each part (four are known so far) only drop once. I suspect there’s a 5th that will trigger the questline once found, and Bungie have either made this an exceedingly rare drop or not inserted it into the game yet, keeping the Sleeper locked away until they’re ready (much like that Crux of Crota needed to evolve the Necrochasm wasn’t available when Crota Hard Mode first unlocked).
In any case if there’s something below the Omnigul room, we’ll be more likely to find something in the actual “Siege of the Warmind” mission, which was the first time players entered Rasputin’s bunker and the only mission to actually use that room for anything. All other missions and strikes so far bypass the room and head into the Mine instead.
Siege of the warmind was that the one with the booby traps and you fight an overgrown floater
It’s the one where you enter the warmind bunker and chase away Omnigul at which point she summons waves of enemies at you (not the strike where you corner and kill her).
Don’t a lot of the consumables do that? I used a few motes of light last night and they had that too.
Yeah, but you can use Motes for other things.
So far all you can do with the relics is trade them for rep.
Makes a pretty solid case that there’s more to them.
Has anybody dismantled Pocket Infinity since patch?
EDIT: just went into the destiny reddit linked in the article…first line BEFORE YOU ASK, YES, PEOPLE HAVE TRIED DISMANTLING THEIR POCKET INFINITY, AND NO, NOTHING HAPPENED.
well i feel stupid
In that mission where you get the stealth tech from the warmind if you scan a screen just before the last room didn’t the ghost say someone had been accessing the warmind with the same ID for centuries that wasn’t a guardian
i don’t know about you guys but if an alien apocalypse is going down the warmind a bunker seems like a pretty good place to ride it out.
Not to mention that the name sleeper stimulant sort of implies something to do with waking someone up and some parts of the warmind look cytogeneticly
FYI, it’s Sleeper Simulant, not Stimulant.
Well that blows my theory and my confidence in my read abilities
Don’t feel bad. It’s an exceedingly common reading error that a lot of people have had to be corrected on.
Well, the indication is that it’s someone using the same retinal ID, so speculation is that it’s either some kind of subterfuge or one of the earliest guardians.
It could be the Exo Stranger, since she seems to be connected with time travel tech. If she’s a member of Dr. Shim’s team at the Ishtar collective on Venus, then it might have been her that went there to awaken Rasputin when it was needed – the underlying theory being that a Warmind is too complex for a Vex simulation to perfectly replicate, which would prove whether they were in a simulation or not – and possibly enable the simulated Warmind to reach outside the simulation to call for help from outside.
We still don’t exactly know where the Vex came from either.
Ok so your basic saying the entire game is happening inside a vex simulation
That’s a possible theory but if so its a perfect simulation of the real world. It’s unlikely our guardians are trapped in the simulation, as we believe the Vex can’t simulate something as complex as Rasputin. The Exo Stranger is believed to be a time travelling projection of a simulated Maya, reaching outside for assistance.
Who is maya, is it the queen?
Maya is an unseen character from the grimoire, it’s who some people believe the Stranger is.
Oh ok thank for explaining while my thick skull absorbs it all
Read this if you want the full ishtar sink vex experiment/Eco stranger theory:
https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/128788713/0/0
…maybe she IS Dr. Shim?
I just lost a very long post I typed out when the site suddenly forced me to enter a captcha and I don’t have time to re-type it, but I’d refer you to the grimoire card Ghost Fragment: Vex 4. There are four members of Shim’s team, two verified female. I can’t recall if Dr. Shim is identified by gender but it’s assumed Shim is male, so is unlikely to project into a female proxy body. The females are Maya Sundaresh and Chioma Esi. Maya specifically speculates that it’s possible to go into the future to bring back future tech or knowledge to change the course of the present, since the past cannot be rewritten. The Stranger’s Rifle contains future tech that shouldn’t exist yet. Ergo, speculation that Maya is the Stranger.
I always type long posts in Notepad then C&P them into the textbox for just this reason…
Thanks for recapping your aetheric long post in this shorter one. I really need to look at all the Grimoire in more detail, but it’s so clumsy and clunky. :/
That all seems reasonable. If they’re time travelling though, and she didn’t have time to explain (why she didn’t have time to explain…), why didn’t she arrive earlier? Silly time traveller… 😉
That’s sort of in the grimoire too. The proxy bodies they used to project out of their supposed simulation are technologically primitive. They have latency issues and start to fail/crash and need resetting every few hours. The Exo Stranger appears to be a normal Exo frame but true Exos were all created using Golden Age tech and mostly only exist now in the form of Guardians, who are powered by the Traveller’s light – which as far I know may still need to be reset occasionally, hence names like Cayde-6, Banshee-44, etc. That number reflects the number of resets an Exo has gone through.
In any case, the Exo Stranger is not a Guardian. Now perhaps this isn’t relevant because she could be operating a more advanced frame using future tech (like her gun is future tech), but that’s my working theory for now.
What’s Destiny ?
I don’t have time to explain, why I don’t have time to explain.
I’m just going to put this here: