Where Is the Helldivers 2 Retrieve Essential Personnel Mission?

Involving relentless waves of enemies in a small area, Retrieve Essential Personnel is one of Helldivers 2‘ most dreaded mission types. This guide will explain where the Helldivers 2 Retrieve Essential Personnel mission is, as well as why it disappeared in the game previously.

What is the Retrieve Essential Personnel mission in Helldivers 2?

For those who haven’t attempted the mission type before, Retrieve Essential Personnel drops your squad onto a base with the goal of extracting unarmed civilians. It is similar to other missions, such as Emergency Evacuation, but it skips straight to the extraction step and ratchets up the number of enemies significantly.

Once landed, Players will only have a short time to prepare before enemies begin attacking, and a smaller map means more direct action. Civilians are located in two shelters placed in the base, and once a button outside the shelter is pressed, a number of them will begin running to the extraction point. When a certain number has reached the extraction point, the objective is complete, and Helldivers will be able to call for extraction for themselves, but beware, as each civilian that dies on their way to the point will reduce your reward.

Where is the Retrieve Essential Personnel mission in Helldivers 2?

Usually found as a generated mission at many different difficulty levels, the Retrieve Essential Personnel mission has been disabled temporarily by developers Arrowhead Game Studios. In the patch notes for update 01.000.400 the team describes how the mission was “not fun enough or performing as we want it to”, so they have disabled it in order to give it the “proper attention and care it deserves”.

This is understandable since the mission has been the subject of a lot of community criticism and ire, though a date for the mission’s return has not yet been provided. Until such a date appears, Helldivers won’t need to worry about this particular mission appearing during their operations.

For more guides on Helldivers 2, check out Siliconera’s guides on how to deal with Hunters and Chargers. The Retrieve Essential Personnel mission in Helldivers 2 has been temporarily disabled. The game itself is readily available for PC and PS5.

Hellidvers 2 is now available on PC and PlayStation 5.