Mortal Kombat 1 - Invasions "The Spectre" Tarkatan Colony Mesa Guide

Mortal Kombat 1 Invasion mode looks to provide players with season content in an interesting new format for the franchise. Unlike the franchise's previous entry called Krypt, Mortal Kombat 1’s single-player focused content presents a table-top-like game for players to explore, find secrets, and eventually unlock more cosmetics through its Seasonal Koins system and chests.

Throughout these guides, we will be exploring the details of Invasions, how to complete them, tips and tricks, and what rewards you can expect on the season of the Spectre.

The Story

The first season of Invasions provides a very simple story. Hanzo Hasashi, the Scorpion in most other timelines, has been hopping from timeline after timeline, looking for one in which he can be with the love of his life, Harumi.

Eventually, in finding Liu Kang’s timeline and seeing Harumi has found love in Kuai Liang, he becomes enraged, vowing to end this timeline.

Invasions Mesas Guides

If you want to revisit some of the other mesas, here are all our detailed guides on each:

• Fengjian Village
• Sun Do Festival
• Tarkatan Colony
• Shang Tsung's Laboratory
• Living Forest
• Fire Temple

The Tarkatan Colony

You must have completed the Sun Do Festival and travel through the portal to unlock this mesa. If you haven’t already, you can follow our guide here on how to do just that.

The Tarkatan Colony is located in the desert of Outworld, far from the plentiful capital of the Empire, Sun Do. This is where Baraka had been leading a small colony of Tarkat-stricken Outworlders until his meet-cute with the intrepid Earthworld heroes in MK1's Story mode.

You will start at the canyon on the colony's outskirts and make your way into the colony valley and out the other side. Like in all other mesas, a handful of characters will be present for the fights, so feel free to adjust your loadout of talismans, relics, and consumables to tackle them best. It is worth remembering that at any point, you can visit the Wu Shi Academy and pick up a few leveling items from the Kollector there to make your path through this mesa easier.

Takatan Colony Canyon

During the initial nodes, you will be snaking your way through the canyon, and at the very first fork, “Darkside” you can choose to either continue forward or go to the right.

Choosing to go forward is the fastest path to the end of the mesa. Going right will give you access to the forge and the Netherstone gate, which, once again, you need to have completed the final mesa before you have access to the item required to open them.

For now, go forward and then right, to say high to the Kollector; we can travel back to him later. You will want to return to the fork and take a right, going through the more scenic route instead.

Remember that you can always check what nodes you have or have not cleared by the path's color leading to them. Uncleared paths are marked in green, cleared ones in light blue and paths you can’t move into in red. You can also follow the green arrow for directions as to the quickest route to the end of the mesa.

Regardless of choice, the first klue node you should come across is called “Screech” with the simple Klue of “Flipping out”. To complete this secret, you must flip your stance in the node battle at least 20 times. You can flip stances with L2, Left Trigger (LT), or LZ. You can also check your controls in the pause menu to double-check.

Make sure to also go south on the same node, as there is a cheeky chest hidden by the camera. Speaking of treats that might be hidden, we at Dashfight are producing character guides for all Mortal Kombat 1 characters with the help of some of the best players in the competitive scene. You will not want to miss them!

Tarkatan Colony Valley

Moving forward, you’ll meet the mesa’s miniboss, Mileena. Once defeated, you’ll have two choices of paths. Both will converge later into one like before. 

If you stick with going forward and to the left, you will eventually find a second Klue node called “Infected” with the Klue “DADAERHT” which is an anagram like before. This one unscrables into “Threaded”, meaning you need to use Ashrah’s fatality.

Returning to the “survive” node just past the miniboss, you want to take a right and another right. This will lead you to a small node and then a chest. Chests contain palettes and gear in the theme of the invasion season, so you want to make sure to open as many as you can during your travels.

Tarkatan Colony Ruins

Cleaning out of the area will eventually lead you to the tower “Long Road”. Here, you will get the mesa key needed to open the boss gate, the Tribal Key. You will also come across the mesa’s chest portal past this tower.

Chest portals only happen once for each mesa, and only in their specific nodes. They contain a series of three chests and a Test Your Might challenge in the end.

Before heading into the boss gate, you can keep going a few more nodes and land on another shop and forge area. If you feel like upgrading some of your talismans or offloading the ones you don’t care for, this is a good place to do it.

The Tarkatan Colony boss is Ashrah. Like all boss fights, her first phase is just a normal fight. During her second phase, she will surround herself with a dark aura, causing the screen to become almost pitch black for a while every few seconds. Her final phase sees her gaining dark armor and surrounding the whole stage in a dark aura.

After The Tarkatan Colony

Completing the Tarkatan Colony will open the portal to Shang Stung’s Laboratory, a wretched place devoided of ethical concerns, and towers! As you probably know by now, this in-between mesas period is a great time to visit the Wu Shi Academy or the Gateway Portal as a sort of palette cleanser.

Since you are probably close to reaching level 20 at this point, it might be a good idea to start manually assigning some of your stats points. If you’ve been focusing on defense, adding more points to those stats will not be that important going forward.