Old School badges completion, double onyx to finish

40079 · August 2023

Shortly after I started playing ingress 8 years ago, I became aware of people discussing the attainability of reaching the onyx badge on all the medals that existed then. Seer had already gone out of the window and many were struggling against nefarious activities preventing the achievement of the guardian badge. Those difficulties aside, in theory nothing could prevent an agent, eventually, reaching onyx on the rest, in agent stats order:

Explorer

Builder

Connector

Mind-controller

Illuminator

Recharger

Liberator

Pioneer

Engineer

Hacker

Translator

Sojourner

Purifier

Trekker

Specops

(Guardian)

These have become known as the “old school” badges- we won’t mention the recent new badges for scanning pavements or voting for stuff from your laptop etc! Some might even argue for a shorter list, excluding translator and sojourner for example.

Well, whatever the list should be, that became my tick list.

As my stats steadily progressed the threshold for some of the easier ones quickly came and went but others still stayed firmly in the “miles away” category on the agent stats prediction.

Time and continuous playing moved them on and slowly but surely the more difficult badges started to look achievable. Just to add a little spice in the mix, my crazy brain in some idle moment of madness came up with the idea of doing two onyx badgers at once, at the same portal……

So it was, that in August 2020 I found myself at a nature reserve hitting double onyx pioneer and explorer on the same portal. Lovely!

However, some kind soul immediately pointed out that my builder/liberator ratios were about on track to do it again….

Roll on to October 2020 and those two onyx were achieved at the same portal at my local sculpture trail.

That left purifier and connector, which still looked a fair way off- time to focus and grind out those stats!

Love it or hate it, the red stuff, machina, then appeared on the scene. Yet another example of ingress easy mode but it did accelerate the scoring of purifier points and the connector stat in the form of oodles of keys falling to the floor at the merest hint of a burster anywhere near them.

And so the day approached, aided by a few trips to the blue haven of Sheffield and the pervasive red stuff.

Now the problem was how flimsy those red resonators are- could I **** exactly the right number of resos to hit 300k precisely without some far flung red R1 deciding to give up the ghost…..

My faithful ingress companion Ruby accompanied me to the local sculpture park again, here the remaining 17 links and 64 resonator kills were (luckily) successfully completed.

Ta-da!! All old school badges now onyx.

Thank you to @grid58 for introducing me to this game (at a preserved railway of course!), to Niantic for providing this multi faceted game that can keep people’s interest on many multiples of levels, to the frogs of Derby, Nottingham and Birmingham and the wider anomaly team mates for making the social side so enjoyable and to the NW xfac FS for keeping me sane through lock down and beyond.

There’s always a postscript to these write ups, and this one has to be that I haven’t quite done it properly yet….. When the purifier stat is exactly 300k excluding the current 25,577 machina purifier, and I’ve done probably another ~2,000 links, then I’ve done the old school onyx properly!

The first double onyx:

https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/12002/pioneer-and-explorer-double-onyx