Hello gamers, how are you all doing? I hope you're all doing great and still playing a ton of games! I keep pushing forward in Death Stranding and this time I had to run an errand over to the Junk Dealer, and honestly this character already stands out as one of the most memorable people Sam has crossed paths with so far, and not exactly for warm and welcoming reasons. This guy is the first prepper in the game who genuinely tells you to go to hell the moment you show up at his door. And look, given his story, you kind of understand where that energy is coming from, but we'll get into that. Either way, the mission to reach him was an adventure in itself and his location is something I was not expecting at all. So let's talk about it.
Order No. 30: URGENT Delivery With a 45 Minute Time Limit
So right off the bat, this isn't just a regular delivery. Order No. 30, Old Component Delivery for the Junk Dealer, comes in tagged as URGENT, which means the clock starts the second you accept it and you've got 45 minutes to get those components to his location east of the Distribution Center South of Lake Knot City. Forty five minutes sounds like plenty of time until you look at the map and start planning a route and realize there are canyons in the way, a MULE camp sitting right in the most direct path, rocky terrain on every side, and no road infrastructure to speak of out there. The game essentially hands you this ticking clock and then puts every possible obstacle between you and the destination.
The Reverse Trike helps enormously here, and if you've been building out your equipment properly by this point you'll want to have it ready to go before accepting the order. The recommended path takes you southeast from the distribution center, where you'll immediately hit the first series of canyons cutting across your route. You can use a ladder to cross the smaller gaps or swing around the northern edge to save time if you're on the bike. The key is not wasting a single minute because this terrain does not cooperate with urgency. It's one of those missions that teaches you the value of planning your route before you move rather than improvising on the fly, because every wrong turn out here costs you precious minutes off that clock.
Fighting Through the MULE Camp to Reach the Junk Dealer
And then there are the MULEs. Of course there are MULEs. Right in the most direct path between you and the Junk Dealer sits a MULE camp, and a fairly large one at that. Now you have two options here and neither one is completely clean. You can go straight through the camp and deal with them directly, or you can skirt around the northern edge of the canyons and bypass the whole thing entirely. The problem with going straight through, as I quickly discovered, is that engaging with a full MULE camp on a timed mission is a time sink that costs you more than going around ever would. The scouts start pinging your cargo the second you enter their territory, then the camp erupts and suddenly you're dodging electrified pikes and bola shots while trying to protect your delivery. Messy doesn't even begin to cover it.
Going around is the smarter play here, and the Scanner Nullification tool you receive from the Timefall Farm comes in incredibly useful at this exact moment. When you see that expanding orange ring from a MULE scanner trying to lock onto your cargo, hitting R1 at the right moment shuts it down and they lose your position entirely. It's a small mechanic but in a timed mission like this one it can be the difference between arriving with time to spare or showing up with nothing left on the clock. Once you're past the camp and heading south between the hills, the terrain opens up a little and you can push the trike hard toward the Junk Dealer's location.
The Junk Dealer and His Complicated Story
So you make it, you pull up to the terminal, you complete the delivery, and then the Junk Dealer himself appears in a hologram. And wow, does he come in hot. He doesn't greet you, doesn't thank you, doesn't acknowledge the effort it took to get those components to him in under 45 minutes. Instead he launches straight into a tirade against Bridges, against porters, against the whole operation. He is not happy to see us and makes absolutely zero effort to hide it.
But here's the thing, once you understand his backstory, that hostility starts to make a painful kind of sense. A terrorist attack connected to Higgs and the Homo Demens, carried out using Fragile Express security passes, destroyed part of South Knot City. The Junk Dealer believes that attack killed the Chiral Artist, a woman who was apparently someone very important to him. A hologram of her appears briefly during the cutscene, young and playful, and the contrast between that image and the bitter, resentful man standing in front of you tells you everything about what grief can do to a person over time. He blames Fragile Express for having ties to the terrorists. He blames Bridges for trying to reconnect the country and painting a target on every isolated settlement in the process.
And he blames us, by extension, for showing up at his door representing all of that. What we'll find out later, and I won't go too deep into it to avoid spoilers, is that the Chiral Artist is actually still alive. And when Sam eventually delivers that information to the Junk Dealer, the whole dynamic between them shifts in a way that is genuinely touching given how hostile this first encounter is. Kojima really does know how to build a character moment across multiple missions.
The Junk Dealer's Landscape Looks Like It Came Straight Out of Mars
And before we wrap this up I have to talk about the visual environment surrounding the Junk Dealer's shelter, because it's something else entirely. After the snowy peaks around the Weather Station and the green rolling valleys further east, arriving at the Junk Dealer's location feels like crossing into a completely different planet. The terrain here is marked by reddish brown rock formations, deep canyons cutting through the earth, sharp spires rising out of the ground in clusters, and an overall color palette that is warmer, drier, and more alien than anything we've seen in the game so far. It genuinely looks like you've just landed on Mars. The rust colored earth, the jagged rock shapes, the sense of absolute desolation without even the cold comfort of snow or rain, it creates this visual character for the area that feels distinct and carefully designed. Even the hills and elevation changes around his shelter have this otherworldly quality to them. Death Stranding keeps finding ways to surprise you visually just when you think you've seen what its world has to offer. See you in the next post gamers!
