Halo CE in MCC: the Pillar of Autumn achievement checklist

Halo CE in MCC: the Pillar of Autumn achievement checklist Opening-mission and easter-egg spoilers. This is **CE Anniversary inside The Master Chief Collection**, not Xbox 360 Anniversary or Campaign Evolved. The first mission has more to clean up than the skull and terminal. There are two Legendary restrictions, a hidden room that requires a completely separate detour, and a Marine conversation you can miss by rushing straight past everybody. I wouldn't try to force all of that into one run. Get familiar with the ship first. Then pick the things you're actually trying to finish. **The checklist** These are the mission-specific targets, plus Chips, who can also be encountered elsewhere: - **Pillar of Autumn:** finish the mission. - **Walk It Off:** finish on Legendary without collecting a health kit. - **Overshields are for Sissies:** finish on Legendary without collecting an overshield. - **Didn't Like This Ship Anyways:** finish below the **15-minute** par time. - **Pillar of Awesome:** beat the **17,000-point** par score. - **Skulltaker Halo: CE: Iron:** collect Iron in the opening cryo room. - **Arrival:** activate the bridge terminal. - **Megg:** find the hidden ceiling message, accessible on Legendary. - **My Buddy Chips:** fight alongside Chips Dubbo and hear his dialogue. **He's Unstoppable** and **Feet Firmly Planted** are broader CE challenges you can also work on here. They aren't exclusive to this mission. **The two Legendary restrictions** Walk It Off and Overshields are for Sissies fit together, but neither one means “take no damage.” Their restrictions are about the pickups you collect. For Walk It Off, avoid health kits. For Overshields are for Sissies, avoid overshields, including the ones inside Covenant boarding craft. Watch where you're walking when backing away from a fight. Accidentally crossing a pickup is still picking it up. Your ordinary shield is fine. Let it recharge behind cover before returning to the next fight. Use doorways to limit how many enemies can shoot you at once instead of walking into the middle of the room. A plasma pistol to break an Elite's shield followed by a pistol headshot is a useful combination when those weapons are available. There is no need to make this your speed attempt too. If you're hurt and refusing health kits, patience is doing more for you than trying to shave a few seconds off a corridor. **He's Unstoppable** is different: complete a CE mission on **Heroic or Legendary without losing health**. Shield damage alone isn't health damage. A run can satisfy Walk It Off while failing He's Unstoppable, because refusing a health kit doesn't undo damage already taken. If you're specifically chasing the no-health-damage challenge, Heroic is allowed. Legendary is required only if you're combining it with the two Pillar pickup restrictions. **Megg: make this its own visit** Start The Pillar of Autumn from the beginning on **Legendary**, preferably solo for the documented route. 1. In the starting cryo room, turn toward the storage canisters behind you, opposite the exit. Crouch-jump onto the yellow canister. MCC guides commonly recommend standing there for roughly **15–20 seconds** before continuing. Treat that as a conservative guide procedure, not a proven frame-perfect timer. 2. Continue to the bridge and speak to Keyes. Leave after receiving the pistol, collect its ammunition and deal with the three Grunts outside. Return to the bridge armed. 3. Kill Keyes. This is the deliberate betrayal trigger for the easter egg, not a way to finish the mission faster. It brings out hostile, invulnerable Marines from a previously closed doorway. 4. Stay out of their line of fire, let them move out, and slip around them toward the doorway they used. Don't stand there trying to kill them. 5. Allow the betrayal dialogue to finish; the door farther inside does not immediately open just because the first Marines appeared. Continue into the passage and look up at the ceiling near its end. Use the flashlight to inspect the bloody heart and its central letter M. This detour breaks the normal evacuation flow. Once you've checked the unlock, start a clean mission for your completion challenges rather than treating the hostile bridge as part of your regular route. You do **not** have to preserve your shields throughout CE to find this. The similarly named **The Return of Megg** is a different achievement in Halo 2's Cairo Station. Mixing those two guides makes this much harder than it needs to be. **My Buddy Chips: don't run away from the conversation** Chips Dubbo is the Australian Marine. On Pillar, the first Covenant boarding-pod encounter is a documented place to get this achievement. Help the Marines clear that fight, stay near them afterward, and listen before moving on. Keep friendly fire out of the encounter. Running ahead the moment the last enemy drops can mean missing the dialogue you're there for. This isn't an “all Marines must survive the entire mission” challenge, and it isn't guaranteed to unlock at one exact corner. Guides report it in other CE missions too, including Truth and Reconciliation. If it doesn't happen here, that alone doesn't mean the achievement is broken. Check your unlocked list, then give Chips another opportunity rather than replaying a supposed mandatory trigger that isn't actually fixed. **Time and score are different runs** For **Didn't Like This Ship Anyways**, any difficulty is valid. Easy is a sensible choice once you know the corridors. Don't stop for Megg, terminal viewing or Marine dialogue. Use the mission timer rather than estimating from how long you've been sitting there, and aim comfortably below 15 minutes. For **Pillar of Awesome**, you're trying to finish with enough points, not simply reach the escape pod quickly. Turn on scoring so you can see what the run is producing. Higher difficulties increase scoring opportunities through their multiplier, but a harder setting isn't useful if repeated deaths keep eating into the result. Clear encounters efficiently, avoid friendly-fire penalties and keep moving between fights. If you add skulls, inspect their scoring effects and warnings first. A shortcut modifier that disables the relevant achievement is no help. This checklist isn't a promise that an arbitrary Legendary run or a particular skull combination automatically produces 17,000 points. **Two quick pickups, and the no-jump option** Collect **Iron** behind the cryo-room storage containers and activate the **Arrival** terminal at the bridge's left-hand console bank with the red incoming-message screens. Remastered graphics make both straightforward to identify. Finding Iron doesn't require enabling its modifier. For **Feet Firmly Planted**, finish a CE mission without jumping; any difficulty is allowed. On Pillar, the early pipes can be crossed by walking against their sloped section instead of jumping. Keep this separate from Megg, which requires climbing onto the canister. On PC, don't use a jump-bound Space key to skip cutscenes during this attempt; that input has been reported to count against the challenge. A clean plan is collectibles and dialogue first, Legendary pickup restrictions next, a dedicated Megg visit, then time and score attempts as needed. Check off the actual unlocks afterward. Completing the mission once doesn't prove all those separate conditions were met.