This guide covers the three best ways to farm Essence of the Dawning, starting with the fastest, then the easiest, then the one that takes the most work to set up. If you’re looking for cookie recipes, look no further.
Where to Find Essence of the Dawning
Almost every activity in Destiny 2 rewards Essence of the Dawning. These include:
Patrols Public Events Strikes Gambit Matches Crucible Matches Story Missions Raids Dungeons Dawning Bounties
There’s a kicker, though. Different Destiny 2 activities grant different quantities of Essence. Where a Heroic Public Event gives 5 Essense, completing a weekly Crucible or Dungeon Challenge gives 22 Essence.
You’ll also want the Essential Harvest upgrade you can purchase from Eva for 40 Dawning Spirit, which gives Daily, Weekly, and Repeatable bounties at 40 Essence, 5, and 2 respectively. Farming Essence, then, is a matter of finding the fastest activity you can do consistently that gives the most amount of Essence for the difficulty.
Best Dawning Essense Farm: Legendary Lost Sectors
Sadly, none of the Seasonal activities available this time around take less than 7-10 minutes, and they only give about 15 Essense per completion, making for a low-efficiency farm. They’re great if you want to gather as many Seasonal currencies as possible to get red border Pattern weapons, but if Dawning Essence is your only goal, they’re not the best option.
The best option is Legendary Lost Sectors, but specifically the ones you can do quickly and consistently. That means two-four minutes tops. There are dozens of Lost Sectors in Destiny 2, and about half of them fall into this category, provided you have the right build to take them on.
Of the Lost Sectors we’ve seen so far this Season, half of them (again) are worth doing.
Sepulcher on the Throne World: 2. 5 minutes. Bunker E15 on Europa: less than 2 minutes. Perdition on Europa: about 3 minutes. All three Dreaming City Lost Sectors: about 3 minutes or so.
Most EDZ and Nessus Lost Sectors are also relatively fast, but there are some you want to avoid at all costs.
K1 Communion, Crew Quarters, and Revelation on the Moon: slogs on the best days; not good for casual play. The Veles Labyrinth on the Cosmodrome hasn’t come up yet, but when it does, never go there.
You’ll want a fairly optimal build to take these Sectors on solo, and you’ll also need weapons that can deal with the Champions scattered throughout each. Provided you have that and work a good strategy, you can make hundreds of Essense an hour and farm some Exotics while you’re at it.
Easiest Essence Farm: Strikes
Here we are again. Yes, Vanguard Ops is once again probably the easiest overall way to get Dawning Essense for the 7,000th year in a row. Every Strike or Battleground you complete provides 17 Essence, with the only limit on how many you can do being your tolerance for the same Strikes we’ve been doing for what seems like forever.
There’s another reason to grind Vanguard Ops these days: the Prolonged Engagement Stasis SMG. It’s got a perk pool to rival the Void Funnelweb, and there are people comparing it, as tends to happen with new, good SMGs, to the infamous Recluse. As the gun is locked behind Vanguard rank-up engrams or end-of-activity rewards, expect to spend a lot of time in Ops. You’re bound to get plenty of other Dawning cookie ingredients doing Strikes, too, which is nice.
Most Involved Farm: Shattered Throne, Investigation
These two methods of getting Dawning Essense take a lot of setup, but award 17 Essence per completion, give or take.
Shattered Dungeon
For the Shattered Throne Dungeon, you need to reach all the way to the final boss, Dul Incaru, then have a member of your fireteam leave to capture the checkpoint, then rejoin on another character. Finish the fight, then join on the checkpoint character and repeat the process.
The Dul Incaru fight is about two-minute affair these days (December 2022), and fairly easy to finish if you know what you’re doing.
The Investigation
Farming The Investigation mission is simpler in theory but about as cumbersome in practice. Make your way all the way to the end of the mission where you fight three yellow-bar Knights and a Lucent Wizard. Then, once the final green mist gate opens and the game asks you to talk to Fynch have a member of your fireteam leave to grab the checkpoint.
Once your teammate rejoins on another character, complete the mission, then load everyone into the checkpointed character. You’ll need to repeat the final encounter, but as you should be doing this on Normal difficulty, the whole process should take about a minute.
Those are your three best ways to farm Dawning Essense during The Dawning 2022. None of it is particularly engaging content, but it is efficient. For more Destiny 2 content, including a rundown of each of the Spire of the Watcher encounters, check out our guides hub for the game.
