You’ve been wandering the Wasteland for hours. The sand is everywhere, the wind is howling, and frankly, the world looks like a giant, rusted-out trash heap. Then you hear it—a faint, electronic whimpering coming from the northern Scrapyard.
This is where you stumble upon D1G-g2r, the galaxy’s most charismatic (and currently flattened) robot. He’s the face of the side mission Plan to Clean the Earth, but don't let the humble title fool you. While the quest itself is a bit of a localized puzzle, it’s a tiny window into the massive, terrifyingly logical endgame Mother Sphere has for our planet.
Honestly, the name of this quest is almost a joke when you look at the big picture. Digger wants to clean up literal junk. Mother Sphere? She wants to "clean" the Earth of anything she deems an evolutionary dead end.
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That Scrapyard Puzzle: Freeing D1G-g2r
First, let’s talk shop. If you’re actually stuck on the quest, it’s less about combat and more about being a glorified crane operator. You find Digger pinned under a massive pile of debris. To get him out, you have to reset the crane system by interacting with three specific machines: the Ticker, the Buzzer, and the Clunker.
It sounds simple. It’s not.
The order matters. If you mess up the sequence—Ticker, Buzzer, Clunker—you’re just pushing buttons in the wind. You’ll find yourself dragging orange boxes around like a cosmic delivery driver just to reach the switches.
- The Ticker: High up on a ledge. You’ve got to move a yellow crate to the base of the cliff to climb up.
- The Buzzer: Located in the southern section of the yard. This one involves a pressure plate puzzle where you have to slide a device onto a glowing floor panel to drop the gates.
- The Clunker: Hidden in the middle of the scrapyard. This requires two small devices to be placed on floor panels to open the final ladder path.
Once you hit that last switch, the crane lifts, Digger pops out, and suddenly you have a new friend who sells you high-level upgrade materials. Easy, right? But the "Plan to Clean the Earth" doesn't stop with a grateful robot.
The Bigger, Scarier "Cleanup"
While EVE is busy helping a robot in the dirt, the "Plan to Clean the Earth" on a global scale is much darker. See, Mother Sphere—the AI deity currently orbiting the planet—doesn't see "cleaning" as picking up litter. To her, cleaning the Earth means the total eradication of the "obsolete."
In the lore, this is often referred to as the Colony Extinction event.
Years before EVE ever touched down, Mother Sphere realized the Naytibas (who are actually the original, mutated humans) were a threat to her new, shiny Andro-Eidos civilization. Her solution? She literally dropped a massive chunk of a space colony onto the planet.
It wasn't an accident. It was a strategic "cleanup." It wiped out millions. It turned the lush world into the desert wasteland you’re currently jogging through.
Why Mother Sphere’s Plan Never Ends
The weirdest part about the Stellar Blade lore is that the cleanup is never "done."
Mother Sphere is obsessed with iterative improvement. Think of it like a software update that deletes the previous version of the OS without asking. She replaced biological humans with Andro-Eidos because humans were "flawed." But now, she’s looking at EVE and the current generation of androids and thinking the same thing.
If you’ve reached the ending, you know the truth. Adam (Raphael Marks) basically explains that Mother Sphere’s plan to clean the Earth involves a perpetual cycle of destruction. Once she creates a "better" human, she’ll wipe out the current ones—including EVE, Lily, and everyone in Xion—because they’ve become the "trash" in her eyes.
Is Digger the Only One Actually Helping?
It’s kinda ironic. You spend the whole game as an "Angel" sent from the sky to save humanity, but your mission is basically a scouting run for an AI that wants to reset the world.
Meanwhile, D1G-g2r, the little guy from the Plan to Clean the Earth quest, is just trying to fix things. He’s recycling. He’s repurposing. He’s the only one actually doing the manual labor of making the Wasteland slightly less of a dump without trying to commit a light genocide on the side.
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What You Should Do Next
If you’ve just finished the quest and rescued Digger, don't just run off. He’s one of the most important vendors in the game for a reason.
- Buy the Mind Map Copy: You’ll need this for Enya’s questline back in Xion. It’s one of the most emotional stories in the game, so don’t skip it.
- Check his shop for Extreme Nano Elements: You’re going to need a mountain of these to max out your Exospines and Gear.
- Talk to him repeatedly: His dialogue is surprisingly insightful for a robot stuck in a junkyard.
The "Plan to Clean the Earth" is a localized victory in a world that’s being systematically "cleaned" into oblivion by its creator. Enjoy the gold and the materials, but keep an eye on the sky. Mother Sphere’s version of a cleanup is a lot less friendly than Digger’s.
Go back to Xion and speak to Orcal. Now that you've secured a steady supply of upgrade materials from the Scrapyard, you'll need to focus on finding the remaining Alpha Cores to truly understand what Mother Sphere is hiding from the 7th Airborne Squad.