How to get inside Pinwheel Base in Marathon

The Marathon Pinwheel Base point-of-interest on Outpost is loaded with good loot, but getting inside requires special items and keycards. I count three distinct methods for unlocking a way into the base across five unique entrances, so there are plenty of options. However, they have their pros and cons, so it's worth knowing about all of them so that you can be adaptable during your Marathon runs. Here's everything you need to know about getting into Pinwheel Base in Marathon, including how the keycards work.

Use keycards in Flight Control, Dormitories, or Processing

Start by heading to either Flight Control, Dormitories, or Processing, then look for the sealed bridge that leads towards Pinwheel Base.

You'll find a shutter blocking the bridge with a blue locking device next to it, which also indicates the types and quantities of keycards you need to provide to open the way forward – for example, you might need two yellows and a green, three yellows, or even just two greens. The best approach is to pick up any keycards you find while looting, and you should hopefully get enough to unlock the way into one of these bridges.

Once you've used the required keycards to open the shutter, head across the bridge and be prepared to fight some UESC bots. After you've killed them, interact with the blue UESC terminal near the red laser barrier that blocks the end of the bridge where the lift is. This will start a long hacking process to bring down the barrier, which also causes an onslaught of UESC bots to attack. There aren't really many options for hiding in the bridge area, so you'll likely just have to fight the bots – plenty of ammo and healing is essential!

After a while, the barrier will fall and the UESC forces will stop coming, letting you call a lift down to take you up to the center of Pinwheel Base – in the case of Dormitories, you need to climb the scaffolding instead. The bottoms of these lift shafts also have two vents on either side that lead to ladders, so you have the option of taking a slightly less obvious and quieter route into the base.

Overall, gathering keycards and taking them to one of these places around Outpost is perhaps the most obvious way to get into Pinwheel Base, but it's far from the easiest, particularly for solo players – unless another team has done all the work for you, letting you freely call the lift or use the ladders without having to submit any keycards.

Use a Conveyance Request at Drone Wing

Conveyance Requests are a rare type of Priority Item that you can loot on Outpost. To use it, you need to head over to the small white control room under the Drone Wing arm of Pinwheel Base. On the in-game map, it's northwest of Processing and just south of the 'E' in 'DRONE WING'.

Inside this room, you'll find an orange terminal, exactly like the one you need to use in the Marathon Introducing NuCaloric contract and several others. Interact with this terminal and your Runner will activate a drone lift. Look out the window and up and you'll see a lift lowering into the bay below. You can hop on top of this lift and ride it back up into the Drone Wing, which has lots of things to loot but there are usually plenty of UESC bots and turrets patrolling, so be careful.

This method of getting inside Pinwheel Base in Marathon is incredibly safe but also highly unreliable as it's completely dependent on you finding a Conveyance Request. If you happen to find one very early in your run, this should definitely be your entry point to Pinwheel Base, otherwise, it's worth focusing on one of the other two methods.

Climb the Destroyed Wing

If you want to get into Pinwheel Base using the Destroyed Wing, which requires no special keycards, you first need to head to Orientation.

The path into the Destroyed Wing is blocked by more red barriers, but these are removed by shooting four white, square-shaped control boxes with a large red light on them – these appear in the other Marathon maps as part of contracts, so should hopefully be somewhat familiar. These particular ones are found on both the exterior of the Destroyed Wing and its ruined interior.

You'll essentially want to sweep the entire outside of the structure, shooting any of these control boxes you find, then climb up to the roof of Orientation and continue looking. You also need to climb into the Destroyed Wing from the roof of Orientation and look for more of these control boxes in the nooks and crannies in the floor and ceiling. I found Thief's drone to be excellent for quickly sweeping the wing's exterior and destroying any boxes with its grabber.

After destroying all four control boxes, power to the red barriers will be lost, causing them to fall and open the way into Pinwheel Base. It's tricky finding all the control boxes at first but once you know where they can appear, this quickly becomes the easiest way of getting into Pinwheel Base.

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