How? When playing through the AWE DLC be sure to shoot or lift all vending machines you come across because there is a small chance one of them will be Altered. It will be obvious since it will turn red and start to waddle away quickly. If killed it will then drop tons of loot and materials.
Bug This achievement is buggy and has the chance to never spawn an Altered Vending Machine when playing through the AWE DLC. You may never encounter them due to your save being bugged. There are two workarounds at the moment. The first fix according to
Guile132 down in the comments said, “To die by a hiss if the vending machines aren't appearing as altered.” Note that he had already seen two and then the AVMs stopped spawning. The second workaround that worked for me after never seeing any AVMs spawn after several hours of gameplay and searching requires resetting your save. You should finish all the other achievements and then restart your save by selecting Mission select>Endgame at the main menu. This will put you back at the end of the base game and reset the DLC's progression.
I recommend using the newly added assist mode to have infinite health and one hit kills (Start>options>gameplay tab> scroll all the way down to enable). You only need to run up to the control point "
Active Investigations" to use this method of farming kills. Resetting the DLC will take away some of your abilities and deselect your personal mods and weapon mods, that's why I recommend assist mode.
Resetting your save should be a last resort option. However, you could utilize the cloud save trick method to do this and then revert back to your old save. Pressing start on the application and going to mange game, then your saves, delete from console without closing the game once you have your achievement post reset. This will force a download from the cloud for your most recent save file. The bug appears to be happening in either the case of seeing a couple AVM then none and fixing it by dying by a hiss, or never seeing them and having to reset your save. The most recent update that happened may have also increased the spawning rates making this easier.
MethodFrom the
Active Investigations control point you will want to turn around and make your way backwards through "Operations Center" to damage the three Vending machines on the second floor. Then continue to run south through the "Operations Corridor" and to the "Abandoned Offices" via the service tunnel. There are another three in the abandoned offices one on the right after first entering the offices then two more closer to the control point leading to the firebreak. Once you've damaged those six just return to the main menu and reload which will spawn you back at Active Investigations to run the path again.
Note: Something
Tarot B pointed out in the comments. If you haven’t reset your progress again due to the glitch you can get a
7th vending machine along this route right at the start of the run. In the “Active Investigations” area you spawn at, run forward and to the left, you should find the Vending Machine next to the SHÜM arcade cabinets. Finding this extra one will increase your odds at finding an AVM making this hunt slightly shorter.
This is a clip of the run before I realized my game was bugged showing the locations and path to take.
Clip including Altered Vending Machines post reset via mission select.
You should be finding at least one Altered Vending Machine every 10 minutes using this method. It took less than 30 mins for me to run through the first 5 minutes of the game again and farm the 4 kills needed.
DelayI only had to destroy 4 vending machines, but the achievement took over a minute to pop after killing my fourth.
CreditHuge thanks to
katana409 and
GFreire for their guide and comments. They were a huge help in finding a great path for farming these kills. I didn't discover the bug or workaround either, I only suffered from it and wasted 5-6 hours before I had realized they were never going to spawn.
Good Luck Hunting!