See also: story lines summary page.

The Boron story line is entertaining and engaging, but unlike the other major lines it doesn’t produce any fundamental shift in galactic relations. The Boron are isolated in the 6.x version of the Kingdom End DLC, and so while the strengthened Boron presence will cause them to send some ships to Argon space to help out, there’s no option to change their diplomatic stance to something more suited to your plans.

This story line begins when you hear a general broadcast message about a scientific expedition taking place at a dormant gate in Heretic’s End sector. If you miss that message, you can also simply fly to Heretic and accept the mission there.

Join Alliance Expedition

Fly to the gate in the left side of Heretic’s Choice.

If you’ve not already done so, accept the mission offer to join the Alliance expedition.

Fly through the gate and begin exploring. Eventually, following instructions, you’ll reach a broken Boron capital ship. Leave your ship in your spacesuit, and find the cargo container inside the ship hull (inside the front end, easiest to find by entering from above).

Use your spacesuit repair laser to open the cargo container, and fly into the object inside to add it to your inventory. Return to your ship.

Follow the mission, and you will be contacted by a boron in a scout ship. Follow that ship back and dock with the carrier when you reach it.

Propositions and Negotiations

You may want to save your game now, as you’ll be in several conversations and may not be able to get out of one to respond to something bad happening elsewhere in the galaxy.

Dock with the boron carrier, exit your ship, and go to meet the leader of the Provinces Adrift.

Inside, you’ll start a series of very long conversations that for the most part can’t be interrupted. [Very interesting the first time, becomes hellish to sit through by the third time.] Long conversations. You have to bounce back and forth between three parties, gathering information. Avoid any dialog choices about being angry, wanting to use violence, etc. [These are the boron — peace, love and understanding.]

Once you manage to trigger the end of things, you’ll be given a boron light fighter and sent to explore the gate to Sanctuary of Darkness. (Sell the fighter, keep it, use it in what follows or not; it’s conveniently loaded with nav beacons you’ll need, but other wise is just a free ship.)

Leave the carrier and fly through the gate into Sanctuary of Darkness.

Blazing The Trail

Part 1: Find the inactive gate

Save your game now. You may end up wanting to restart.

Important: there are two hazards in Sanctuary. There are Ka’ak hives, and “dangerous space” where your ship will be repeatedly struck with electrical discharges that can easily destroy small ships.

• Avoid the ka’ak completely by just not flying to their Hive or Outposts. This will only cause you trouble, and does nothing good for you. You do not need to fight them or fly near them. You may get roving ships that lock on you, which you’ll have to deal with, but this isn’t common.
• Avoid “open” space to avoid the electrical discharges. Stay near-ish the asteroids (red areas on your map). You don’t have to hug the asteroids, just stay generally in the red band on the map.

You need to find the second gate in Sanctuary of Darkness. (Note that if you have any mods installed that add additional gates in the galaxy, you can end up focusing on the wrong gate here!) The gate is ahead of you when you enter the sector, but to get there safely you need to go up and curve over.

Follow the red asteroids region on your map up to where there are blue resource areas, turn left, continue along the red path which curves down again slightly to the gate. (Again, you don’t have to be super-exact about it, you can drift out into the black a bit, cut corners slightly.) Beware the dead-end red path to the left; keep going north to the blue resource area.

Once you reach the second gate, you’ll be walked through a sequence to download some information (fly to the side of the gate, activate Scan mode in your ship). As you finish this, several (scripted) ka’ak will appear. Hit the boost and travel engines, and follow your same curved path back over and down to the entry gate. You can also just destroy the Ka’ak fighters if you prefer.

Part 2: Marking the path

You now are required to mark a path from the entrance to that second gate. This is where many people get frustrated.

You may want to create a new save point here.

Summary: you have to drop nav beacons, one at time, each inside the range “circle” from the one before. You drop a beacon, fly to the edge of its range, drop another… continuing until you have a chain of them along your “in the asteroids” safe path from the entry gate to the target gate.

Suggestions:

• Make sure the mission is active.
• Drop a beacon.
• Wait until you get a fresh mission range circle, centered on that just-dropped beacon.
• Make sure mission is still active, so you can see that appear.
• Set yourself a guidance mission in the map to somewhere near the edge of the range circle. Fly to that point and stop.
• Re-activate the mission, and drop a beacon (if you drop a beacon without the mission active, it likely will not get used/counted and won’t advance the mission).
• Again, wait for mission to note that new beacon, set you a new range circle.
• Fly to a point near the limit of that range, stop, drop another beacon… Repeat until told you’re done.

The important parts are to make sure the mission is active when you drop beacons, and pause for the mission to “notice” the beacon and update the mission target. Also, of course, each beacon you drop has to be inside the range-limit circle of the previous one.

The difficulty is that Sanctuary of Darkness is nearly impossible to navigate a level flight path without setting guidance missions for yourself. But a guidance mission makes the main mission inactive… And if you drop a beacon while the main mission is not active, not only will it not “count” but picking it up to re-drop it can reset and invalidate all the beacons you’ve dropped!

If anything gets fouled up, leaving Sanctuary of Darkness sector and re-entering will restart the “place beacons” status back to the beginning and you can try again. (You can collect previously-dropped beacons; leaving them out there won’t help you as the mission will ignore them.) Easiest if you have a save you can just reload instead.

Conclusion

Once you’re all done, you get a message that the expedition fleet is moving to the gate, and maybe in a few years you’ll hear about some progress.

Yes, “years”.

Go about your business, mission is over for now.

Astronomical Observations

Eventually Boso Ta at your headquarters will ask for some help with something. He’ll have you fly around, blow up an asteroid, fly around some more. It’s a real treat being his assistant, right?

Follow what you’re told to do, which mainly consists of flying around listening to Boso and Nila Ti talking. You get to blow up an asteroid with spacesuit bombs (provided to you), which is the mission’s way of trying to introduce you to some game concepts.

Eventually, you’ll end up back at the gate in Sanctuary of Darkness waiting for them to use your new information to attempt to open the gate. This will make the Ka’ak angry, so be prepared to do some fighting (not particularly dangerous, you have plenty of allied ships there helping out, but be expecting a fight and don’t arrive in a flimsy scout ship).

Note that you do need to be able to dock with a destroyer here, so that means either an S-size ship or flying over to the destroyer in your spacesuit to dock.

Making Connections

You’ll need to land and talk to the expedition leader (so S ship or space suit). You’ll get some information, and when you’re ready use the dialog option to start the next step.

You may want to save here. It’s safe to say “I’m not ready yet” and then leave this mission indefinitely and return later once you’ve dealt with anything else in your empire needing attention.

Once you start, Kha’ak will appear, and will need to be defeated. You can stay somewhere safe and let others do the work, or take part yourself. Either way there’s plenty of loot to collect so one strategy is to have an M ship to fight in, and a scout docked on the expedition vessel and ready to launch to do collecting once most of the resistance is eliminated.

Eventually the gate successfully opens, and, hey, Boron!

Fly through to discover Kingdom End. Follow the mission to arrive at the main boron homeworld and carrier carrying the boron queen. Have an audience with her.

You’ll be appointed a Queen’s Herald and several new missions will appear (after a small task for Boso, delivering some food). Pursue those new Herald tasks in whatever order you like, or simply ignore them if you’re not interested.

The boron in Kingdom End are now reconnected with the Provinces Adrift and they all are members of the BOR boron faction from here on out.

Additional Missions

Once the boron are united into a single new faction, and you’ve met the queen, you’ll have Queen’s Herald missions you can pursue. Each of these is independent, and can be completed in any order or ignored completely.

Eventually a mission will appear in your mission offers related to helping the Queendom establish a new superhighway system through the Sanctuary of Darkness sector. This is also completely independent and can be completed or ignored as you choose.