Also… you might find this useful. It's a script for an explainer on how to farm Orthrus at Spires. Planned to release the video already, but got ill.

Anyhow…

Script for TLDR: Elite series

Intro

With Update 17 Frontier introduced Spires, a new location which can be found in Thargoid Controlled Space.

These Spires offer a steady stream of Orthrus', a heavily shielded Thargoid variant without any offences which will pay you 40 million credits per kill.

This video is about how to effectively farm Orthrus' at these Spires.

Finding Spires

The locations of spires change over time. Spires are located in thargoid-controlled space. I would recommend checking in AXI's discord for up-to-date locations. You can find a link in the description.

Prep Work

Farming at the Spires is pretty straight forward… You will first want to prepare the Spire by removing all Banshees around it. Banshees can be seen as the Thargoid variant of Goliaths. They skim the surface, deploy minelet barrages and shoot seekers which temporarily disable your ship.

You can kill Banshees pretty easily with missiles. Mag-dumping 2 or 3 clips from 6 AX Missile Racks should do the job. You can also get out on foot and shoot the sacs located on the bottom side.

Farming

There are two types of Orthrus', inbound and outbound.

Inbound Orthrus' spawn from thargoid wakes and will immediately start their scanning routine where they fly to some landmark locations around the spires. Sometimes they also fly into the spire's portals. As of today, they will not deploy defences when being attacked. This might be a bug and might be subject to change.

This behaviour means that you can make use of Guardian Weapons if you just stick to those Inbound Orthrus', for now.

Outbound Orthrus' spawn from the Spire Portals and fly upwards. They leave at around 10km using a thargoid wake. When being shot at, or when someone flies too close to them, they will start deploying defences.

An Orthrus' defences include:

• an EMP which will shut down any ship in its bubble for about 30 seconds
• loads of Scouts
• an anti-guardian field which will degrade your Guardian Weapons and internal modules.

Besides Orthrus' there will also be Scouts and Cyclopses entering the instance. So do bring something to counter those. Running plasma chargers are an obvious choice, but AX MCs will also work against Scouts and Clopses. AX Missiles are great at exposing Clops hearts, but will do no significant damage against the Hearts.

Hunting Tip - Ignore Outbound

I would highly recommend ignoring outbound Orthrus', mainly because it forces you to use AX Missile Racks and AX Multicannons instead of Guardian Plasma Chargers, but also because in Multiplayer Instances the EMP Field is highly inconsistent and will not deploy predictably. It's generally not worth the hassle as most of the times you — along with the rest of the instance — will be shut down from a random EMP while the Orthrus has enough time to escape. The outbound Orthrus' will also spawn loads of Scouts which you will have to get rid off, all without the use of Guardian Weaponry. Also do note that you have to keep the Scout population in check. If everyone only focuses on the outbound Orthrus', you will quickly have a large group of Scouts dealing damage to you and your group. 5 scouts can be fine, 30 or more however will give you hard time.

Ship Build

Your build needs a few things

• defences against caustic, be it caustic sinks, overheating or decon limpets.
  • if you have caustic sinks unlocked, I would highly recommend using them as you will be constantly flying through caustic
• something to strip shields
  • overcharged cytoscramblers work perfectly for that, but regular lasers will also do
• something to strip the hull
  • if you dont want to use Guardian Modules -> AX Missiles
  • if you can use Guardian Modules -> Modified Size2 Plasma Chargers
  • keep in mind you can use the Experimental Weapon Stabilizer to increase the Experimentable Weapon count up to 6.
• optionally, a shield
  • most damage will be chip-damage from Scouts or you hitting the ground after an EMP, bring a shield to counter that.
  • note that for other thargoid activity you usually want to avoid a shield due to the bigger hitbox, drain on the System Capacitor and the inability to go into Silent Running.
• optionally, Shutdown Field Neutralizer
  • for when a Cyclops spawn or someone shoots the outbound Orthrus'.

The FDL and the Anaconda serve as really good build candidates. You can slap 4 modified plasma chargers or AX missile racks and a beam on the FDL. On the anaconda you can put 6 Plasma Chargers or AX Missile Racks and two cytoscramblers. Do note however that due to a bug, two of the missiles will stop firing after a couple of shots. You can fix this by using Turreted AX Missile Racks for those affected hardpoints and switching Turret Mode to Fire Forward.

In the Comments you will find some links to good builds. Note that you don't need to completely engineer your ships, especially when farming in a big group.

Payout

If you are farming in a fairly populated instance you can expect just shy of one billion an hour when farming inbound Orthrus'. Do note however that the following powerplay factions give you a double payout if you are at Tier 5 with them and hand in your bonds in a Controlled System belonging to that Power.

So if you have 10 Billion on your Left Panel, after hand-in that would result in 20 Billion. So effectively, thats not 40, but 80 million per Orthrus Kill!