Heart of the Swarm Campaign- Zeras: Waking the Ancient

Your initial mission on Zeras is of the most essential sort- establish a foothold on the planet and begin learning what you can of the primal Zerg found here.  You will gain access to mutalisks through this mission, and bonus objectives here can gain Kerrigan an additional three levels.

As you begin, Sarah and Zeratul have a conversation about a particularly ancient Zerg which can be found here, from whom Zeratul believes Sarah can learn important things.  As Izsha warns the former Queen of Blades about the gathering primal Zerg, who intend to keep her from meeting the ancient, Zeratul declares that Kerrigan has been pointed in the right direction, and so he should and must take his leave of her- supposedly for good.

With the mission beginning, the location of the ancient is revealed- with only its head protruding partially from the ground.  Creatures called 'quillgor' will provide what is needed- enough meat to feed the ancient that it can be provoked to awaken.  Drones are needed to gather and deliver this meat, and the primal zerg are not amiable to the ancient's awakening.  Primal fliers come to the base, but are fended off by a quartet of mutalisks.  Your goal here is to collect enough flesh to feed the ancient awake while keeping Sarah and your base intact.

Right off the bat, some quillgor are located just to the East of your encampment.  Take your forces and a drone there to slay them and start gathering meat.  The drone will take a bit of time to gather, which you can use to fortify and improve your base- be sure to be ready on defense as well as offense.  More quillgor are located to the South of your base, conveniently surrounded by minerals and gas that you can use to establish a secondary gathering/unit-generation outpost.  Make this your first priority quickly, so that you can have its defenses ready by the time the locals attack.  The increased resource generation has a huge impact on the difficulty of the mission overall.

With the first batch of meat fed to the ancient, two interesting things will happen- Kerrigan will become aware of an unusual essence nearby, which is in actuality a pool of primal 'soup' containing DNA from primal Zerg, and a number of other quillgor locations will be revealed on your minimap.  The primal Zerg dna is your bonus objective- two other pools with the material in it are elsewhere in the map.  The quillgor locations are equally valuable- without them, you would spend a lot of time dithering around and exploring less-important areas.