Khvostov, the Exotic auto rifle based on the very first gun players find in the original Destiny, has made a return in The Final Shape. It’s one of the Exotics you can hunt down in the aftermath of the new Destiny 2 expansion’s campaign as you explore the Pale Heart of the Traveler, but unlike the others that provide you with Exotic missions, this one is a puzzle you have to figure out on your own. It requires doing a lot of exploring, fighting, and intuiting, and by the end, you’ll know the new destination pretty intimately.
After spending a whole lot of time in the Pale Heart of the Traveler, we’ve narrowed down exactly how to get everything you need to unlock Khvostov and where it’s all hidden. You’ll first need to find all the hidden Region Chests, then complete all six variations of the Alone in the Dark quests, and then find a bunch more hidden collectibles. Here’s everything you need to know to find just about everything in the Pale Heart of the Traveler and walk away with Khvostov for your troubles.
Step 1: Region Chests
The easiest part of this whole undertaking is tracking down all nine Region Chests hidden throughout the Pale Heart. These are usually in weird and out-of-the-way places, but they’re marked on your map so you’ll at least know where to go when you start your hunt. Region Chests are indicated by the little plus signs on your map, which will give you a good starting point. There are three chests in each of the main Pale Heart areas: The Landing, The Blooming, and The Impasse. Each will give you a piece of an encrypted key. You’re looking for 15 of these, and the first nine come from Region Chests.
The Landing Region Chest Locations
The Landing Chest 1 – From the transmat zone, turn right and go up the stairs. Ahead is a cave and, beside that, a basin area where water is pooling and enemies are hanging out. If you look up, you’ll see a building stuck into the wall with a round facade and a balcony-like space, too high to immediately reach. That’s where you’re headed.
To the left of the building, you should see some ledges jutting out from the woody wall, which you can reach from the high ground across the pool. It’ll take some slightly careful jumping, but you’ll be able to climb up to the round facade and find an opening there that will lead you to the chest.
The Landing Chest 2 – From the transmat zone, head straight out across the open terrace ahead toward a hole in the cliff wall, next to the path that goes over the arched bridge to your left. During Overthrow, you’ll often find a shielded Crystalline Thrall in this spot.
Advance through the tunnel to find a big hole in the floor. If you drop down, you can land on a ledge in the tunnel to enter a small alcove that holds the chest.
The Landing Chest 3 – This one’s obscured but pretty easy to track down. Head to the far east end of The Landing and look for a big waterfall underneath the stylized bridge that crosses the big gap at the edge of the area. You’ll have to get down the cliff a bit so that you can jump into the waterfall and get behind it.
You’ll find the most obvious and best chest hiding behind it, because this is, at the end of the day, a video game.
The Blooming Region Chest Locations
The Blooming Chest 1 – Look for this chest in the northeastern corner of The Blooming, where all those square chunks of land have jutted up into the air, right next to where you start at the transmat zone.
The chest is up on one of those chunks of land, obscured a bit by trees but generally easy to spot.
The Blooming Chest 2 – From the transmat zone, turn to the west and look for the red hand statue sticking out of the ground. Beside it is a large tree. You can’t see it well from the ground, but the chest is in the canopy above.
Use the nearby land masses and the statue to climb to the top of the tree and get the chest.
The Blooming Chest 3 – This one is, somewhat mercifully, on the ground.
It’s just north of the hand statue, behind a rocky outcrop that hides it from immediate view.
The Impasse Region Chest Locations
The Impasse Chest 1 – Just west of the transmat zone in The Impasse region is a section of terrain that drops down below where you start. You’re looking for a square chunk cut out of the land that drops pretty far below ground level.
Look for it among the craggy rocks jutting out of the ground; drop in and you’ll find the chest pretty easily.
The Impasse Chest 2 – To the east of the transmat zone is the big white building constructed of Pyramid architecture, right in front of where you start when you transmat in. Head over to the building and climb up to the roof to find the chest waiting on top of it.
The Impasse Chest 3 – The last chest is near the path up to The Broken Deep lost sector.
When you reach the rock with the lost sector icon on it, turn to the right to find a pass through the rocks going upward.
On the rock face to your left is a hole above you that’s easy to miss. Jump up to it and go inside to find a small cave and the chest inside.
Step 2: Search All Six Cysts
This part’s a little more difficult. Scattered around the Pale Heart are “Cysts,” locations that are a bit similar to lost sectors in that you need to head down into them and kill everything inside. These are part of the Alone in the Dark quest lines you get from Micah-10 to save lost Ghosts. There are six of them in total and each one unlocks a new Cyst, so you’ll need to work through each of Micah-10’s Alone in the Dark quests, which can be time-consuming.
These quests culminate in a search for the Cyst. You’ll see those birds made of Light, manifested by the Traveler, which will lead you to the Cysts’ locations. There are three spots and six Cysts, and interacting with the bird near the Cyst’s opening will let you switch between which encounter you find inside.
Within the Cysts are hidden piles of scrap that, when you interact with them, will give you a piece of the Encrypted Key you’re looking for. So you’ll want to head in, clear out each Cyst of enemies, and then look around for the scrap pile to get your key. Here are the locations of each one inside the Cysts.
Searing Light Cyst Encryption Location
The Searing Light Cyst is located in The Seclusion. You’ll know it by the big Hive Seeker that blast Solar energy into the area, cooking you if you stand within it. Once you’ve killed the boss and made things safe for you to move around, look for a cave around the outside edge of the room that’s lit in purple. It’s actually another entrance into the Cyst you’ll drop down through in its alternate form.
In the purple cave, jump up to a ledge to find the scrap pile you’re looking for.
Slayer Lost Cyst Encryption Location
Through the course of Alone in the Dark missions, you’ll swap that same Cyst arena in The Seclusion to a different encounter. In that same location, search the area for another side cave. This one will have some tree roots around the edges and sprouting in front of it. Head inside and go behind the column of stone to find the pile of tech.
Aerial Ace Lost Cyst Encryption Location
The encounter in this Cyst fills both the floor and the ceiling with lava, so you won’t be able to walk on the ground in the main room. That makes it a bit tough to reach this scrap heap, so you might want to equip a Strand Grapple to make it a bit easier on yourself.
After clearing the room, look for the cave at the bottom of the room that goes underneath the main platform opposite of where you came in from. It’ll be marked by a purple rectangle of glowing crystal set in the wall. Avoiding the floor so you don’t die, make your way into that cave and continue past the two blue horizontal rectangles set into the wall ahead. On the right, look for a small hole in the cave wall, near a couple of stalagmites rising out of the floor. Slip inside to find the Encryption Key.
Pervading Darkness Cyst Encryption Location
The alternate version of Aerial Ace fills the place with Darkness that makes it tough for you to jump and maneuver. Once you’re done with the encounter, look for a cave opening with stalactites jutting from the ceiling of the opening that look a bit like teeth.
Head through there and continue to the right through an opening between two rocks. The Encryption Key is just on the other side.
Sword Dance Cyst Encryption Location
This one can be tough because of how dark it is. Enter the Cyst and continue until you reach a room with two round gazebo-like platforms joined by a staircase. You’ll find more Hive Knights to kill here with your sword, as well as an Ogre. When you’re in the clear, use the sword relic to and look for a small opening in the wall beneath the round platforms and the exit passage. Jump over to it and use your sword to clear the Hive gunk and find your Encryption Key.
Moth-Infested Cavern
The same crystalline cavern you explore in Sword Dance composes the Moth-Infested Cavern Cyst too, but it’s full of those exploding moths the Lucent Hive use. Early on, you’ll find a room with stairs that spiral downward, in which you’ll fight an Ogre. Head down to the bottom of the stairs to another round crystalline platform and look for a cavern opening in the wall near you. Inside that is the last pile of scrap and the last Encryption Key.
Step 3: Claim The Legendary Version Of Khvostov
Finally, it’s time to get a gun. Head to The Divide, entering from The Impasse so that you’ll find yourself inside a version of the Wall from the Cosmodrome. Keep moving on the linear path until you find a golden chest that looks like the Region Chests you opened earlier. If you’ll notice, despite its frozen and blue coloring now, this is the same spot in which you got your first gun when you started playing Destiny (or Destiny 2), in the original Cosmodrome mission when Ghost resurrects you for the first time.
All 15 Encryption pieces should have given you a new item that lets you unlock this chest. The good news is that you now have Khvostov! The bad news is that it’s the Legendary version of the gun, not the Exotic version. To earn that, you have a lot more stuff to do.
Step 4: Collect All 8 Visions Of The Traveler
Time for another item hunt. Hidden around the Pale Heart of the Traveler are collectible little Traveler objects–they look like white beach balls. They’re all in slightly obscure locations, but you can get clues to find them if you head to the north end of the Tower in the Lost City. Go through the door there and follow the path until you reach a round room full of pedestals. Each of these includes a description of where to find a Vision of the Traveler–one for each area of the Pale Heart. You might also recognize this as the room where the Speaker for the Traveler used to hang out in the original Destiny, before the Red War.
Luckily, we have a Visions of the Traveler guide for finding each of the locations. Place each Vision on its corresponding pedestal in the Tower, and once you have all eight, a second golden chest will appear. You can’t open it just yet, though: you lack something.
What you’re looking for are Motes of Light–17 in all. You get one Mote for each Vision of the Traveler you find, for a total of eight. As for the rest, you’ve got one more big set of objectives to complete.
Step 5: Complete Overthrows In Each Pale Heart Location
There are nine more Motes of Light you need. Each one drops from a boss in Overthrow, the new patrol activity you can complete in the Pale Heart. To get them, you just need to run complete, four-stage Overthrows in each of the Pale Heart locations that feature them: The Landing, The Blooming, and The Impasse.
While these can take a while to complete, you don’t have to do anything special to get through them, nor do you have to wait a particularly long time to get all those Motes. Each consecutive Overthrow you run in a location will rotate the boss, so you can do three Overthrows in a row in one location to get all three Motes for that spot. The bosses drop them, so look for them on the ground (they’re purple diamonds).
Bungie has noted that if you get your final Mote from a particular boss in The Landing, it can bug the process, so do that set first, just to be safe.
Step 6: Open The Golden Chest
With all the Motes in-hand, you’ll get a new version that combines them into a single item. Return to the Tower in the Lost City and head to the room where you dropped the Visions of the Traveler. You should now be able to open the final golden chest, finally earning you the Exotic Khvostov 7G-0X.
Check out our Final Shape guide hub for even more coverage of the latest Destiny 2 expansion.
