Halo 2: The Oracle — Famine skull and terminal

Halo 2: The Oracle — Famine skull and terminal Halo 2: Anniversary in The Master Chief Collection. Mission spoilers. Both collectibles are in the same room, but they aren't on the same floor. That's the important part here. The skull is across from your entrance on an upper walkway. The terminal is downstairs, tucked behind a wall toward the side you entered from. Get both before leaving this encounter and you won't need to search the rest of the station for them. **Set up for the collectible you need** - **Famine skull:** play The Oracle on **Legendary**. The MCC achievement is **Skulltaker Halo 2: Famine**. - **Terminal 5:** available on **any difficulty**. Activating it earns **Fascinated**. Use Anniversary graphics to find and interact with it. If you only need the terminal, there's no reason to put yourself through Legendary for it. If you're collecting both in one visit, start on Legendary and leave unnecessary modifiers off. Famine doesn't need a special enemy-kill sequence or a random spawn ritual. These are the Halo 2 collectibles. The Famine skull in Combat Evolved and the one in Halo 3 are different pickups in different missions. **Reach the correct laboratory** Play through the opening Flood encounter and the long, slowly descending lift. The lift fight is **before** the collectible room. Don't jump out of the shaft looking for a hidden shelf. Once the lift finishes its descent, follow the passage containing bodies. You arrive on the upper level of a large laboratory overlooking a fight between Flood and Heretics. Glass separates parts of the upper walkway from the room below. Stop before simply dropping to the bottom. Look across the room and establish where your entrance is. You'll use that orientation for both pickups, even after you've turned around several times during the fight. The later outdoor climb, cable-cutting section and Heretic Leader battle are beyond this stop. Neither collectible requires reaching those sections first. **Famine: cross to the opposite upper walkway** There is a route using the room's central platform and posts, rather than trying to blast yourself straight up from the floor. 1. From the entrance walkway, look right along the glass. Find the third pane, beside a section of wall marked with Flood remains. 2. Break that pane and the windows directly opposite it. Clear the glass before jumping, not while you're already trying to land. 3. Look below for the central platform with four upright posts. Across from it, a column separates the opposite windows. That column is the intermediate landing between the posts and the far walkway. 4. Jump onto the central platform, then onto one of its posts on the far side. Pause to line up your next landing instead of chaining the jumps blindly. 5. Jump from the post to the column between the opposite windows, then through the broken window onto the upper walkway. 6. Turn **left after entering that far walkway**. Follow it to the end, where four twitching Elite Flood bodies surround the skull. Pick it up using your weapon-pickup control. The left turn is relative to arriving through the opposite window. It is not an instruction to search the left side of the room from the original doorway. Active camouflage can give you a brief opening while crossing, but it isn't a substitute for dealing with enemies that are already threatening your landing. Let your shields recover, check the next surface and don't attempt the jumps while a Combat Form is closing on you. Some guides use a grenade jump from the lower floor to the opposite walkway. That's another approach, not a requirement to make Famine appear. The platform route avoids needing a grenade boost; don't assume you've ruined the pickup just because you have no grenades left. **Terminal 5: downstairs on the entrance side** After taking the skull, get down to the laboratory's lower floor and deal with the immediate fighting before searching. Find the side of the room where you originally entered from above. At that end, walk around the wall or partition on the ground floor. The terminal is on its hidden side. Another useful reference is the room's onward exit: the terminal wall is at the **opposite end from that exit**, not beside the doorway you use to continue the mission. Switch to Anniversary graphics if necessary, approach the terminal and interact with it. Looking at the panel or standing next to it doesn't activate it. This is a separate collectible from the skull upstairs, with its own achievement. **Before leaving** Check that you've actually claimed Famine and activated the terminal before following the mission route outside. In MCC, picking up a skull records the collectible; it does not automatically enable its gameplay modifier. Skull effects are selected separately in the pre-mission settings. If you miss a jump and survive on the laboratory floor, don't immediately restart the whole mission. You're still in the correct room. Reassess the route or use a suitable available checkpoint if you need to recover your upper approach. A checkpoint is only useful if it returns you to the section you need; don't assume the game keeps a list of earlier saves to choose from. If you've already moved well beyond the laboratory, revisit The Oracle rather than searching the later rooms for a second copy. And if the only thing missing is Fascinated, that return trip can be on an easier difficulty.