SWTOR: Pursuing the matrix

Hunt for the datacrons

I should stop writing about datacrons. Really, it starts to sound like some sort of fetish of mine. Truth to be told, datacrons are just very addictive, even though I'm extremely bad at finding them. Right after my first Star Wars raid ("operation"), I and my guildmates took the art of datacron hunting to the next level by roaming the galaxy to find a dozen of them. On Corellia, we passed through a hologram of a door that I doubtlessly had passed without noticing a thousand times... and found a datacron. On Nar Shadaa, we jumped up some crates and then some tubes... and found a matrix cube. Aargh! You know those crates I talked about when I was so determined to find at least one datacron on Nar Shadaa? I had jumped those exact same crates back then, saw the tubes and thought "Nah, that's too high, there's no way I get up there and there's nothing there". Turns out there was. Gah, so close!

Matrix cube or datacron?

So that evening, we hunted both matrix cubes and datacrons: two things that look almost the same, but have a different effect. Datacrons (from "data holocron") are easy to explain: they give you a permanent bonus to an attribute (willpower, strength, presence... etc, you know the drill). Matrix cubes are another story. I had vaguely heard about them before, but didn't really know how they worked. So, just in case you're a noob like me, here's a short explanation.

Some datacrons will not give you an attribute, but will give you a colour shard instead. A combination of three of these shards can be used to make an item (also called a "matrix cube") that fits in a relic slot. There is one matrix cube for each class/role and it will have the best stats of all relics you will encounter in the game, so it's definitely worth getting one. The level 50 matrix cubes (there are also lower level ones) require three shards of the same colour. This is what you do:

1. Find out which shard colours you need for the (level 50) matrix cube of your choice:

* Note how force users and non-force users may pick cubes with the same name, but with different stats. 

** The stats of these cubes are from various websites, I haven't checked them all myself.

2. Find out where to get shards of the colours you need:

For instance, I found a very easy red shard in a hut on the roof of a base on Illum. There might be easier and harder places depending on what colours you need. It's probably best to just look it up in this post from Gallitin on Starwarzone.net.

3. Go to the Jedi temple on Coruscant and combine your shards into a relic. (Or, if you are evil, the Sith temple on Dromund Kaas.)
Republictrooper.com has a guide in case you don't manage to do it by yourself.

Tadaa! You got a relic!

Athletic tricks

While looking for datacrons on your own can be quite frustrating, it was major fun with my guild. Some places where so horribly hard to get to! Some would no doubt have taken hours to do without mistakes, but luckily we used to some tricks:

• Rescue (Jedi sage skill): pulls the target towards you
• This was great for pulling other people up to some hard-to-reach buildings. We were with two sages, so we could pull each other up if something went wrong. Ideal!
• Guardian leap (Jedi guardian skill): jumps towards the target
• Handy for guards who accidentally jump down at the wrong spot. As presented by my boyfriend on the picture below.

My favorite place was a crawler on Tatooine, where you could only get up if one person stood in front of it and pulled you, and you jumped when you were just above that person. Once one sage was up, we used Rescue to pull the others up (this apparently was the alternative to the buggy balloon ride). A bit complicated, but so much fun.

Own discovery

While "datacron hunting" was great, finding a datacron all by yourself still is the best experience. Yesterday I was doing the Tatooine bonus quest series on my sentinel, when I noticed a pink datacron on a rock wall. It was out of reach (too high), but it looked like there was a cave leading to it. In the evening, I returned to look for the cave entrance together with my boyfriend. It was well hidden, but we did find it, hurray! It even turned out to increase my will, which is always a good thing for a sage. To the right you see the location details, just for personal future reference (spoiler). You can see the datacron from the road, but you'll have to jump down on some rocks in the gorge west of it to get to the cave entrance.

Valuable?

I don't know how much it's worth to really go find all those datacrons. Finding that will datacron yesterday gave me +3 willpower, and on the 1500+ I already got, that really isn't so much. I wonder how much of a stats boost you would get by finding all the datacrons.  Would it be something like +50 to all stats? In that case it would be a good thing to do, but finding a single one doesn't immediately make a noticable difference. Nevertheless, I'd like to get them all eventually, for completionist and fun reasons.  

Okay, that was the last time I talked (at length) about datacrons, I promise!