The Eye of the Earth is the 7th Main Story Quest in Horizon Forbidden West (HZFW). This walkthrough will guide you through all objectives of the The Eye of the Earth main mission.
Starting Location: Repair Bay: TAU
Quest Giver: automatically triggered upon completing The Dying Lands
Quest Level: Level 17
Requirement: having completed The Dying Lands
Reward: +8500 XP, +2 Skill Points
Mission Info: Aloy, Varl and Zo explore a mysterious facility atop the mountain west of Plainsong. Could MINERVA be hiding inside?
Objectives:
- Enter the Facility
- Climb the Elevator Shaft
- Search the Facility for MINERVA
- Examine the Console
- Go to the Lab
- Examine the Fabrication Terminal
- Return to the Control Room
- Talk to GAIA
- Exit the Base Through the West Door
Starting Location: Repair Bay: TAU
Enter the Facility
Enter the facility and climb up around the stairs until you reach a door you can open. You won’t be able to open the second door just yet.
Climb the Elevator Shaft
After the brief conversation with Varl and Zo, pry the second door open to start climbing up the elevator shaft.
Figuring out where you need to go here is tricky due to the blinding red light, so spam your Focus at all times and check out the screenshots below for further reference.
Search the Facility for MINERVA
After climbing up the elevator shaft, pry a new door open. Enter the only opening in the server room and you should see two hatches for your Pullcaster. From the way you came in, the one on the left leads to a small cache, while the one in front of us leads us forward.
Crouch down through the air vent and then climb the wall up to access a new one. While you can crouch down the vent on your right, there’s a door at its end that you cannot access yet.
This leads us back outside, where we will need to climb the mountain wall. Climb up the log (use your Focus for climb points), go back around and pull yourself up to the next yellow climb point.
Spam your Focus here because the next few climb points are nigh invisible and camouflage well with the color of the stalactites. Keep climbing up and around the stalactites and wall of the mountain, making sure you spam your Focus. When you cannot see any more climb points, you’ll notice Aloy reaching her hand out. This means she can leap across to new climb points that are not within the current camera angle.
Perch on the log and activate your Focus to highlight a mountain wall that you can climb on. To easily reach it, jump off the log and activate your Shieldwing mid-air, then climb up. Again, keep spamming your Focus if you need directions.
Pry the rock wall open to get back inside through another air shaft. Climb up the stairs and rappel down.
Examine the Console
Interact with the console to insert GAIA Kernel. However, things don’t go as planned and MINERVA doesn’t seem to co-operate. After some convincing though, she allows Aloy to override her. Finally, MINERVA is back into GAIA’s matrix.
Go to the Lab
Climb down the stairs and open the door Varl and Zo came in from, then enter a second door to access the lab.
Examine the Fabrication Terminal
Approach the terminal to start fabricating.
The Fabrication Terminal shows you how many and which machines can be overridden. You first need to determine a Cauldron’s location in the world. Only then can you create a job to hunt for the materials needed to gain the ability to override the machine you’ve unlocked in a Cauldron. Specifically here, press 
to create a job for the Plowhorn Override, then Yes to set it as an active quest.
The game will now pin the job you’ve just created and activated to the side, allowing you go on the hunt for the required materials. However, we will continue with this main quest instead. To reactivate the main quest, 
, then Quests, then Main, then 
on “The Eye of the Earth”.
Return to the Control Room
Return to the Control Room to talk to GAIA.
Talk to GAIA
GAIA will tell you that the initialization is complete, but in order to restore her core GAIA needs her “Subordinate Functions”. These are: AETHER, DEMETER, POSEIDON, and HEPHAESTUS. While the first three can be “easily” subdued, HEPHAESTUS has evolved and is likely going to be harder to obtain. However, as GAIA states, without him the extinction of the Earth will only be postponed and not definitively prevented. After summing things up, GAIA asks you which Subordinate Function you want to go for first. For AETHER you need to be Level 17, for POSEIDON you need to be Level 22, for DEMETER you need to be Level 24.
It only makes sense then to go for AETHER since this is the level we’re currently the closest to, but feel free to choose any of the other Subordinate Functions. If you go for any of the other, you might have to level up a bit before continuing with the story, especially if you play the game on harder difficulties. Once you choose your preferred Subordinate Function, GAIA will select it as the next main quest in your log. You can always switch to another Subordinate Function at any point, but for the sake of linearity we will keep focusing on AETHER in this guide.
Exit the Base Through the West Door
Time to head further west. Climb down the stairs and open the west door. Open the next few doors until you’re back outside. AETHER, here we come.
This finishes The Eye of the Earth Main Quest in Horizon 2: Forbidden West.
For all other Side Quests and Main Quests, check out the complete Horizon Forbidden West Walkthrough.
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