Metal Gear Solid’s Hidden Fast Travel Mechanic, Explained
If you’ve been playing the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection, then you know 1998’s MGS1 is all about staying hidden. The game gives you a number of tactics to remain out of sight, but one of the most signature of techniques in Snake’s arsenal is simply hiding in a cardboard box. But boxes don’t just let you stay hidden from cameras and guards. You can also use them to fast travel around Shadow Moses Island.
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MGS’s nuclear disposal facility isn’t the largest of gaming spaces, but the game does sometimes have a bit of backtracking that can feel a little annoying to manage. That’s where the cardboard box comes in.
How to fast travel in Metal Gear Solid
You can fast travel between three different areas in Metal Gear Solid. They are as follows:
- Heliport
- Nuclear Storage Building
- Snow Field
You’ll need to find corresponding cardboard boxes to get to these places. Each box tells you where it will send you. You can find the boxes in the following place:
- Cardboard Box A: Tank Hangar 2F in a room on the left side of the area (requires Key Card Level 1)
- Cardboard Box B: Nuclear Warhead Storage Building B1 in a private office (requires Key Card Level 4)
- Cardboard Box C: Snow Field in a building on the left side of the area (requires Key Card Level 6)
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Once you have these boxes, just hop in the back of the trucks in either the Heliport, Nuclear Storage Building, or the Snow Field. A guard will come by shortly and drive you to your destination.
Be sure to learn about cardboard boxes from Nastasha
What would a Hideo Kojima game even be without some random trivia? Call up Nastasha Romanenko on the Codec at frequency 141.52. If you ring her up while wearing the cardboard box, she’ll tell you a bit about how they’re made. Additionally, you can always call Nastasha with various items and guns equipped to get some trivia about those items as well.
Fast traveling is a speedier way to round up last minute items
Before you head down into Metal Gear Rex’s hangar for the final few boss fights, you’ll want to be sure you have all of the items you can grab. While the distance between the Nuclear Disposal Building truck and the Heliport truck aren’t terribly long, the Snow Field location is a bit of a longer hike, so it’s worth using the boxes to go to and from there.
Fast travel via cardboard boxes also exists in Metal Gear Solid 2!
To fast travel via cardboard box in MGS2, head to the warehouse in Strut F on Big Shell 1. This is the area with the conveyor belts and moving boxes. Simply hop up on one of the platforms in this area while wearing a box, and you’ll notice the conveyor belt slowdown. You can then walk onto the belt while wearing ght ebox, which will then startup and send you somewhere else in the Big Shell. Note: this becomes unavailable once you progress on to Big Shell 2 This is only available for Raiden’s chapter of the game as the Tanker Chapter isn’t nearly as big as the Big Shell.
Oh, and MGSV has cardboard box fast travel too!
Released many years after both the first MGS and MGS2, MGSV lets you fast travel around a map or even back to Mother Base without calling in a chopper by equipping a cardboard box and stepping on a loading bay. You’ll spot these around the map as orange metal platforms with rails. Check out a demonstration of it here.
Backtracking toward the end of MGS1 can be a bit of a pain. The cardboard box trick makes that way easier, even if Snake won’t admit to Nastasha just how important some flimsy corrugated paper really is to him.