A HCF L6 (solo)

On dec. 9th 2020 this nice HCF L6 got completed in Dobrich, Bulgaria. Yay!

A HCF L6 is actually a lot of fields and links that combine to full 6 layers, not less and not more, between selected 3 portals. This requires exactly 366 links between carefuly selected 124 portals, that should be linked in a selected order.

A very short recap of how and what i've done, because it was not short at all, although i wanted to be :)

This field was finalized after 3 attempts:

1. dec. 5th - Ingress FS - full run to 365 links - 3.5 hours of walking, missed one link because of a incomming call in the middle of a linking phase, making the key desappear from the interface, but link never happened on the server. Couple of hours later an opposing agent destroyed the middle, a side anchor and several portals more.
2. dec. 7th - restore the field after careful planning and farming another 183 keys this took 2 hours walking - and again one link missing, because a portal was too week and dropped down to 1 resonator :(
3. dec. 9th - fixing the missed link - flipped 2 portals, restore - Success.

* final anchor got its 4xSBUL on nov. 17th by me, couple of hours before the '4 mods by one agent' window closed :)

some stats:

• piled over 3.5M AP on this operation only (with apex mostly)
• used 20 SBUL, 7 Jarvis, 2 ADA
• links 365 + 182 + 45 = 592
• gained 1 level (11 > 12)
• walked 8.9 km
• field size 1.42 x 1.37 x 1.32 (km)

Long version and details

The homogeneous field always was a symbol of perfection, while not bringing you or your faction any in-game benefits, it is quite satisfying to finish one and on top of that it just looks beautiful.

I was part of hcf building of L5 and L6, done L5 solo myself so it was time to take the next challenge - the L6 solo.

Main issue is that one portal needs to have 4 SBUL and this can only happen by one agent if Niantic allows us to do so on an event like this year's EOS protocols phase 1.

I had a rough plan of a hcf6 so it was time I should refine and optimize it to its full potential and so I did before we enter this phase one. The target area was my town, where i have plenty of keys but still i missed more than 50 from the required 366. And with all the 2020 events, restrictions and whatsoever, time was never my friend for these 10 days and the EOS 1 got quickly to its last day with me still missing some keys. Then I just got out and captured one of the anchors of my plan and stack it with sbul hoping it will stay that way - first win - it did!

As the second phase passed by and we entered EOS 3, with all the links/field ap x2, extra sbul and me not long ago recursed, i told myself it was going to be a good playtime. Weather got very nice for the first saturday of december and i used that.

First attempt - dec. 5th 2020 - I purposely didn't played a lot the last week, another agent got to its third recursion during phase 1 and needed a rest so most of the portals were neutral. So for a clean walk of 3.5 hours without any breaks and no cleaning required a did it all - capturing and linking. Then the missing link came to me as a surprise, and I was sure I thrown them all by the plan.

Portal in question was close enough, but required too many keys that i didn't have. So I went home trying to figure out what happened. Then I remembered I got a call that I rejected exactly on linking this particular portal and was sure to check the keys, I remembered the key desappeared and that made me think all was good. But when on a call the data connection goes off, so the server never got my request and the key disappered just visually, but it was too late now - "I will go out tomorrow and fix it quickly". Just a couple of hours later from that moment an opposing faction agent saw the opportunity of collecting some serious and easy AP (x2) and used it. How could you blame him :)
Middle portal, the one with the 48 keys got destroyed, then a side anchor and several other holding good amount of links.

The south anchor - the one with the 4 sbul survived - there is still hope!

The rebuilding planning got me headaches. It was harder than planning it from scratch. There were partially destroyed resonators so i told myself i have to recharge everything. Plan came out to be 183 links (after flipping 4 of the portals), which is somehow funny because it is exactly the half of a HCF6. Checked everything several times, farmed the missing keys and was ready to try it.

Second attempt - dec. 7th - main issue was the middle portal - clearly it will get 2 sbul and 24 outgoing links, so the 24 incoming will get me to walk back and forth a lot but well, it's my only option now. And so i did, just carefully watching every step of the plan and doing it one by one till the end. Then I opened the intel to see this:

This one missing link was not in my plan, and it was there on my yesterday screenshot so the plan was correct, no need to link this one and I clearly remember both portals being blue when I was there, which means one of the portals was partially destroyed and dropped below 3 resonators somewhere after this morning and the link disappeared. When I was there I just refilled it, threw the one link from my plan and moved on.

Again without more keys no point in trying to repair it.

Third attempt - dec. 9th - as seen on the above screen, the missing link was not so deep in the plan, I only needed to open south anchor and one portal more to get to fix it. I did it and completed the HCF L6, no surprises this time :)

It was a great adventure and maybe it was not supposed to happed on the first try just becuase it is a HCF6, it is complex and I needed these walks, well, it was nice.

Gallery