**Winter Contingency — the fleeing Elite, both data pads and the achievement cleanup**

**Winter Contingency — the fleeing Elite, both data pads and the achievement cleanup** **Halo: Reach in MCC. Mission spoilers.** Before you start chasing anything here, use the MCC numbers. **Data Pad 1** is in the farm building. **Data Pad 10** is carried by the invisible Elite at the very start on Legendary. Older guides sometimes call those pads 1 and 2 instead, which is a good way to end up looking for the right object in the wrong place. **Data Pad 10: move immediately** Select Legendary and start Winter Contingency from the beginning. Once you leave the Falcon, run downhill toward the lower path and watch for the cloaked Elite moving away from the structures. You're looking for the distortion of his camouflage, not a bright enemy marker. Close the distance with Sprint, then fire before he gets too far down the escape route. Don't spend the whole window sprinting without shooting, and don't stop to inspect the wreckage with Noble Team. Your starting pistol and assault rifle are enough. The pistol gives you aimed shots; changing to the rifle can keep damage going when the pistol would otherwise need a reload. Track the Elite rather than spraying the entire path. An early hit can interrupt his movement, but his reaction isn't a guaranteed stationary target every attempt. If you have a co-op partner, agree who is watching the lower path before landing. Staggering your fire is more useful than both players reloading at the same moment. Kill him, then inspect the fallen pad and use its interaction prompt. These are two related targets: **Clear and Present Danger** concerns the escaping carrier; **Unreliable Narrator** concerns Data Pad 10. Don't assume seeing one notification means you can ignore the object on the ground. If he disappears, a checkpoint after his escape won't solve it. Restart from the beginning. This is a short repeated attempt, not something that requires completing the whole mission again. You don't have to stay on Legendary for the rest of your cleanup unless another target calls for it. **Data Pad 1: the farm building beyond the bridge** This one is available on any difficulty. Progress through the first infantry fights until the valley opens and the truck becomes available. Cross the bridge into the group of farm buildings, keep to the left-hand approach and check the building on your right. It's the smaller building marked **02**, separate from the larger two-level structure. The pad is on the floor inside, near bodies. Clear the immediate enemies before standing over it, then interact. The MCC achievement is **Hey, You Dropped This**. Do this before boarding the Falcon that takes you to the relay. That flight is a transition out of the farm area, not a convenient way to circle back to the building later. **They've Always Been Faster: leave the trucks alone** Use **Normal or harder**, even though the short achievement description doesn't spell out that minimum. Start from the beginning and travel through the valley on foot instead of entering a Spade. Avoid every optional seat, not just the driver's position. In co-op, agree that nobody gets in; another player deciding to take a quick ride can spoil the attempt. The expected unlock point is around clearing the troopers' landing zone, before the scripted Falcon extraction. Taking that required passenger ride is not the same as driving one of the trucks. If the achievement hasn't registered, don't start treating later optional vehicles as safe exceptions: keep the run clean and finish it. There are longstanding reports of this achievement not registering promptly. That isn't a reason to tell everyone to delete saves or change account settings. First check difficulty, Mission Start and whether anybody entered a vehicle. If those were correct, preserve the result and use the game's support route rather than following destructive troubleshooting instructions from a comment thread. **Keep It Clean: seven Moa** The large birdlike animals wandering the early farms are Moa. Kill seven during Winter Contingency for **Keep It Clean**. Make this a deliberate side run instead of trying to chase birds during the Legendary pad carrier's escape. Count your own confirmed kills and keep moving through the farm areas. Don't shoot civilians or your squad because you're firing at an animal behind them. This is a seven-Moa requirement, not a general wildlife counter across the campaign. **Completion, time and score** - **We're Just Getting Started:** complete Winter Contingency. - **Winter Urgency:** beat the **15-minute** par time. - **Ice In Your Veins:** beat the **15,000-point** MCC par score. The original game's 10,000-point reference isn't the MCC target. For a timer run, leave the pad chase and Moa detours out. For scoring, use a difficulty and scoring modifiers you can handle without repeatedly dying, and don't skip the profitable fights just because a speed route does. Those are different plans. A careful farming-area clear can be good for score while costing the time you needed elsewhere. Finish the level and check the final result; a promising score partway through is not the completed achievement condition. **One easy extra, anywhere convenient** **I'm Sorry, Dave** is not tied to this mission, but the starting assault rifle makes it convenient. Use the zoom/binocular view with a weapon that doesn't have a normal scope and look for the tiny binary signature in the HUD. Keep the view open briefly rather than tapping it on and off. This isn't a data pad or an object hidden in the farmhouse. If you're using the pistol's scope, switch back to the assault rifle and try the unscoped weapon's zoom view instead. Leave the forklift splatter achievement for its own attempt. There's no value in confusing it with a run whose whole purpose was staying out of vehicles.