I haven’t been playing Warframe all that heavily lately, mostly just doing Nightwave dailies to progress that reward track and leveling up weapons for mastery. Along the way I’ve slowly accumulated items called “Riven Slivers” which can be turned in to receive something called a “Riven Mod.” That’s basically a mystery mod (item which enhances a warframe, weapon, or other piece of equipment) with randomized stats (usually a mix of some positive and one very negative) that is locked to a given named weapon (any variant thereof).

Earlier this month I got a Riven Mod, and once I revealed its assigned weapon, I was kind of annoyed: It’s for the Sobek, the “normal” version of which is a kind of middling shotgun. I already have a stack of shotguns in my arsenal, do I need another? Probably not, I decided.

Then I noticed this was my 2nd Sobek Riven Mod. Huh. (Mind you, one cannot equip more than one Riven Mod on a weapon. So having two is just pointless… maybe. Kind of. Put a pin in that.)

Immediately afterward during my next mission in the Saturn system, a Kuva Larvling showed up (as they do) and the weapon it offered me if I chose to make that Larvling into a full Lich was…

… yeah, the Kuva Sobek. I guess the game absolutely wanted me to add a Sobek to my inventory. So I went ahead and kicked off the Lich hunting process, more out of a fit of pique than anything else, if I’m honest. But hey, mastery progress is mastery progress, a weapon’s a weapon. It’s all good, baby!

Let the game of interplanetary Mastermind begin!

Thus began a tour of several planets, Earth to Mars and so forth, trying to draw out the Kuva Lich so I could stab it repeatedly and find out which “Requiem Mods” (equipped on my console-hacking spike thingy) belong in what order to unlock the final confrontation which will result in acquisition of the promised weapon.

When we were getting (back) into the game last year, Spud described the Kuva Lich process as like playing the board game, Mastermind: Figuring out one Lich fight at a time which of the mods go into the three slots (there are several mods) and in what position (left middle right). The game will tell you if you have one of the correct selection, and will also indicate if you have the correct position of a correct selection, one by one as you go.

If you’re really good at Mastermind you can zip through this progress in a (relative) hurry. If you just throw random mods at the problem you’re gonna have a bad time.

This afternoon I got a big bundle of help from the kids on this. First Nyx helped me run down the Lich, getting to the point of locking down the requiem mods. Then Spud talked me through the process of completing the quest chain and then getting the best possible stats on one or the other of the Riven Mods available.

Which… well, I now have options. Because both of them ended up with some pretty decent stats, albeit for somewhat different build plans. One of them will probably end up the permanent keeper but until I get some time with each of them in a fully max-level weapon, I won’t know for sure.

Even better? Turns out that the Sobek has three named “augment” mods… and the game had already given me two of them along the way as random drops.

I guess Warframe really, really wanted me to have a Sobek. Now to find out if I can make it competitive with the absolute beast which is the Tenet Arca Plasmor or the Coda Bassocyst or the Kuva Drakgoon…

… damn, I have a growing shotgun collection, don’t I? Huh.