Huge Performance Fixes, Void Shard Buffs

The First Descendant has issued another hotfix patch today after maintenance, where Nexon is showing that they very much are listening to player feedback and acting as quickly as they are able. Albeit some of these fixes are half-measures with more work to be done in the future. Let’s go through themL

• The main change to Void Shard farming is that the amount of shards for dual drop pylons have been increased by 1.5x, meaning you have to do less of those runs in order to go and activate the reactor, shortening the farm loop at least a little bit.
• That is indeed the only main change for now, though they ask players to “please wait a little longer” and they will “significantly improve Fragment farming routes” in a patch on August 1. This farming loop continues to be the most exhausting in the game, and I’m hoping there are further changes to outposts timers, Sharen requirements and other issues.
• There is now an option to report players for being AFK and racking up experience for doing nothing in many missions, but they are cautious in terms of how they enforce penalties for outright kicking players for the behavior right now, as AFK systems could easily bypass periodic moving or shooting requirements they add.

• They have reduced explosion effects from Gley’s Infinite Launcher build which made what you (or your team) was targeting almost impossible to see.
• Monster immunity spheres will not change in position as monsters move or rotate making them easier to hit.
• Drops have increased in Hard mode by a factor of 1.5. This does not appear to be materials, only loot drops, I believe.
• They changed the icons that looked too similar to ones in Destiny 2.
• The stack limit for consumables is now 100 million, up from 1 million. The number of attached items is now 1,000 for weapons, reactors and external components. This is not your inventory space, but overall.
• One of the most important fixes is patching memory leaks that occurred in both windowed mode and when using Frame Generation, plus frame drops when in that mode. This is already making the game run much better which was absolutely one of its biggest problems since launch.

There are a lot more bug fixes you can check out here if you want to see the full list.

For me, the biggest change in the list is probably that last one, the performance fixes, which have been my #1 complaint about the game. Cannot say how much this has improved things, it’s almost a miracle.

I do appreciate the buffs to Void Shard collection, though I don’t know how much I want to keep beating my head against that wall if they are making further changes in two weeks that will hopefully improve it even further. Those farms are exhausting and if they make them better, that will be the time to run them, not now. With this buff I assume the materials from the pylons are not going away altogether, however, so you may want to farm those up after the buff.

I continue to be hopelessly addicted to The First Descendant, a game I have done a complete 180 on and have now put 100 hours into in a little over two weeks. Yeah, it’s a problem. But clearly it is doing something right.

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