There's one thing that's puzzled me since the release of HW. Why wasn't an artifact of this size detected by the Luminaries? They only detected the Reclaimer symbols all over Harvest.
It was even directly stated in Contact Harvest that there were no Forerunner artifacts on Harvest, as the Humans were actually the "reclamations" the luminary detected.
Also, the structure must've been submerged prior to the glassing of the planet, as both of Harvest's poles were covered in oceans, and the Relic was located in the nort pole. The seas were of course vaporized as the planet was glassed. But i doubt that the luminary wouldn't detect an underwater structure, but it's one possible explanation.
Although there's one thing in HW that makes this a little more complicated, and contradictory. In the area around the Relic and Alpha Base, there are ruins of human-made structures and roads, indicating that the area hasn't been underwater at all. This is an obvious canon error, cause it was clearly stated in CH that both of the planet's poles were covered in seas. --Jugus 12:07, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
- Perhaps the overwhelming "Reclaimer" readings simply drowned it out, or it was just overlooked. Perhaps being trapped under polar ice made the structure dormant and thus it produced no readings that a Luminary could interpret, only to reactivate when the initial glassing melted some of the icepack. Furthermore the man-made structures around the relic were probably produced only recently as part of Alpha Base or whatever military compound Spirit of Fire put Alpha on. Oh and by the way, the word "sea" doesn't necessarily mean "liquid", even a hot Earth-like world like Harvest is going to have frozen polar regions. EldritchWarlord 05:45, May 3, 2010 (UTC)
Conservation sphere waystation?
It has been pointed out by the Catalog that the Relic on Harvest may in fact be a shield World cartographer facility. This is interesting as that would mean that Arcadia could potentially be a shield world.— subtank 02:29, 7 July 2014 (EDT)
- Or that Arcadia houses another shield world "waystation", which is why the Covenant were directed to 0459 from there? That is disregarding the inconsistency with the fluff from the game guide which stated that the Covenant had already discovered 0459 before the events of HW. Catalog is delightfully vague about some of its statements. --Jugus (Talk | Contribs) 02:36, 7 July 2014 (EDT)
- I don't know if the Covenant forces at Onyx knew what exactly this world contained, but I don't believe they directed any glassing beams towards the planet to uncover any Forerunner facilities. This might indicate that they knew this was a superior type of facility compared to the smaller structures they had encountered throughout the human colonies, and thus were unwilling to damage it. The same could not be said for Arcadia which the Covenant would return late in the war to glass completely. I agree with Jugus that Arcadia was merely another pit stop on the way to SW459. Helianthus — All right. Shoot!