Destiny: Cryptarch changes coming this week

Bungie will patch the Cryptarch in Destiny on Tuesday so that engrams will only decode at their level or higher. For example, blue/rare engrams will only decode to blue or purple/legendary, and purple engrams will never decode to blue. Rare engrams will also have a higher chance of decoding to legendary. However, Bungie warns in their dev notes that any legendary engrams you find now but wait to decode until after the update will automatically decode into rare, so get them decoded now and look for your legendaries later. 

Daily and weekly challenges will also include more chances for rare and legendary rewards, and ascendant materials now have legendary status. 

Destiny: The Treasure Cave is no more

By Jenna Brown

This article was originally posted on 2014-09-25 13:05 MDT. It was updated on 2022-05-28 for clarity and to provide additional details.

Bungie has rendered the famed “treasure cave” at Skywatch on Earth effectively useless with Hot Fix 5, an update file released to consoles this morning. The patch notes indicate that the spawn time of every cave on Earth was increased to 40 seconds. For comparison, treasure cave monsters previously spawned every six seconds, the shortest on Earth. Three of the other four caves respawned every 10 seconds. The cave with the longest respawn cycle was in the Barrens at 20 seconds.

According to their Dev Notes, farming for loot does not align with Bungie’s tenuous "dream for how Destiny is played." One of the most compelling aspects of video games is when users find new ways to play a game and make it their own. Gaming becomes infinitely more fascinating when a game evolves into something other than its hardware and mechanics, providing a backdrop for a community to grow and greater entertainment value outside the campaigns and arenas.

For as much as Bungie claims that Destiny is a social experience, they certainly make it difficult to socialize. There's no proximity chat to help gamers group up and fight together while casually patrolling the open areas, and the "social" Tower area provides no method to communicate either, besides gestures and dancing. Loot farming was a great way to find a group of people to interact with while picking off the runners and hoping for Legendary drops.

Other popular farming method “waking the Hive” was nerfed with the Sept. 22 Update 1.0.1.4, but clarified with the rest of today’s Hot Fix notes: the engram drop rate is now temporarily reduced after a hard wipe, meaning you will have to wait longer between rounds of waking the Hive if you want any of your kills to drop loot.

Perhaps I'm being too emotional, but this update has certainly made Destiny less appealing to me. In my irrational fervor, I almost feel like organizing a protest, like a sit-in at the cave, or picking a day where no one plays Destiny as a kind of walk-out.

What do you think about the updates? Still in love with Destiny? Were you ever in love with Destiny to begin with? Let me know! 

Destiny: Farming Russia for fun and profit!

If you're playing Destiny, you may be nearing or have already reached the level cap of 20. But where are you going to get some nice loot for the raids that opened last week? Russia. That's right, low-level, introductory Old Russia. Before you begin your farming adventure, you'll need to take care of a few things first.

Make sure your rank with the Cryptarch is at 2 or higher. This will cause more Engrams to drop, the lower level ones automatically decrypted. Next, find someplace like the Moon to kill a bunch of Hive Ultras so that you will get a Black Wax Idol. Idols make dead Hive drop more Glimmer for 10 minutes. Now you're ready to patrol the Cosmodrome!

You're going to Skywatch, near the Hive Seeder. When you arrive in Old Russia, head toward the left, across the Mothyards, where all those rusted airplanes areThrallstunnels in the building on top of the hill will open out at Skywatch, and just on the other side of the short cliffs is the seeder. You will probably see a few people already farming.

If you stand any closer to the cave than these people are, then only Acolytes will come out, but you want Thralls as well for maximum profit. If other people are standing too close, you can try to stand in front of them and do the pointing gesture to get them to back up. If that doesn't work, try melee-ing them in the face a bit.

I can see my engrams from here!

Now comes the fun part! Consume one of your Black Wax Idols. From your vantage point, kill the Hive that come out of that cave and watch your Glimmer count skyrocket. If any Hive make it out of the cave without dying, you have to hunt them down and kill them, or no more will respawn from there.

Eventually, everyone will run out of ammo, resorting to shooting rockets into the cave, at which point, everyone will run into the cave together. Nothing will spawn while someone is in or near the cave.

No shortage of ammo, Glimmer, or Engrams! 

As you can see, there are lots of treasures to be found in the cave. Two people found Legendary Engrams in the ten minutes I farmed this cave. You can farm this cave all day if you want to, and maybe you'll experience the roughly once-per-day surge of ten times as many Hive at one time. You might have to clear out your inventory periodically when you get too much stuff (that's where having Engrams decrypt automatically becomes helpful).

Some additional notes: The public event of "Defend the Warsat" occurs every thirty minutes in this area. You'll know if it's about to happen if the sky turns a weird blue color. I suggest running into the cave at this point, or the Warsat may drop right on top of you and kill every one in the area. It's happened before.

If you're near a group of people that doesn't seem to get how to farm the ideal way, and you can't get them to do it right, you can always return to orbit and try landing in a Russia on another server. Good luck!