Mathias of Stern’s Hoyte News initially tips Lost Ark players off on the frigid and isolated Glacier Isle, where they discover a polluted landscape buried in Toxic waste. Rumored to have floated north from Arthetine, this waste is traced back to the Origin of Stern, where Mathias offers to cooperate by breaking a story on the corruption occurring within Arthetine’s technology branch.
The leads within Arthetine initially draw the player toward the oasis of Nebelhorn, whose adjoining lab is responsible for all of the water flowing into and out of Stern. The director of this lab, Yulia, reports that the oasis had recently been giving off unusually high-temperature readings, and tasks the player with scanning the area around the oasis with a Magick Flow Detector to find anything out of the ordinary.
The sequence of events that follows can be unusually difficult for many players to operate. While the tracts of land surrounding the oasis — and by extension, the area of the map indicated by the quest as searchable — can be rather broad, the range of the Magick Flow Detector only encompasses a comparably small circle around where it was deployed. Coupled with how the detector can only be used once every five seconds —plus all hostile enemies that prowl the quest area — the time spent trying to find the “correct” position to deploy the detector can quickly add up. Here’s where to find them all.
Location 1: Ribs by the narrow pass
As a general rule of thumb, all of the correct positions to plant the detector are under some rather ominously protruding creature bones scattered near the oasis. The first position is no exception to this rule, lying near a smaller pile of bones.
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Location 2: Somewhere near a spine
A much larger rib cage stands as a sort of natural fence to the north of the tree settling in the middle of the oasis. The placement for this detector can be particularly finicky though, so players should aim their cursor at the rightmost vertebra.
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Location 3: Under the waterfall
The waterfall to the north splashes down onto yet another rib cage, which is coincidentally the site of the third and final detection. If players aim slightly to the left of the two innermost ribs, the detector will reveal a hidden employee of the technology branch.
When confronted and interrogated, the employee confesses that he was ordered by the technologists to operate outside the jurisdiction of Arthetine’s administrators. Traveling back to Stern’s municipal district with this information, the player then seeks the cooperation of Sasha, Arthetine’s treasurer, to investigate the tech branch undercover. This completes A Nose for News and begins the next quest in Glacier Isle’s quest-line, The Sickly Sea.
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