If you’ve ever tried to take on a high-level Void Intercept Battle in The First Descendant solo, you know how frustrating it can be to get wiped right before you land the final blow on the boss. Co-op play makes every mission easier, more rewarding, and way more fun, but if you’re new to the game, you might be stuck trying to figure out how to add friend on The First Descendant to invite your crew. I’ve been there too — I spent 10 minutes clicking every menu icon right after the game’s global launch before I found the correct path for adding both same-platform and cross-platform friends. This walkthrough covers every step for all supported devices, fixes for the most common friend request issues, and even tips for finding reliable teammates if you don’t have friends who play right now.
Step-by-Step: How to Add Friend on The First Descendant for All Platforms
The process works almost the same across PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and mobile, so you don’t have to learn a new flow if you swap devices regularly. First, make sure you’re logged into your linked Nexon account, because that’s the backend that handles all friend connections, even if you’re playing on a console account. You don’t have to exit a match to add friends either — you can pull up the menu mid-mission if you meet someone you want to squad up with later. The core steps are:
- Press the Escape key (PC) / Options button (console) / hamburger menu icon (mobile) to open the main in-game menu
- Navigate to the Community tab, marked with a two-person icon on the left side of the menu bar
- Select the Add Friend option near the top of the Community screen
- Type in your friend's unique Nexon ID (not their platform-specific username) and send the request
- Wait for them to accept the request, and their name will appear in your online friends list immediately
A lot of people mess up the Nexon ID part, so don’t skip that detail. If you’re adding someone who plays on a different platform than you, you can’t use their PSN ID, Xbox Gamertag, or Steam username to find them. You have to ask for their Nexon ID, which you can find for yourself by clicking your profile icon in the top right corner of the main menu. If you’re adding someone you just played with in a random match, you don’t even have to type their ID manually. Just go to the Recent Players tab in the Community menu, find their name on the list, and click the Add Friend button next to their profile. That saves you the hassle of asking for their ID mid-match, which is perfect if you just had a great run with a random player and want to squad up again later.
Troubleshooting Common Friend Request Issues
Even if you follow all the steps correctly, sometimes friend requests don’t go through, and that’s usually down to a simple fix rather than a major bug. The first and most common fix is to make sure both of you have cross-platform play enabled in your settings. A lot of players turn this off by accident when they first launch the game, and that blocks all cross-platform friend requests from sending or appearing. You can check this in the Settings menu under the Gameplay tab, near the bottom of the list.
Another common issue is hitting the friend limit. You can only have 100 active friends on your The First Descendant friend list, so if you’ve added a lot of random players for co-op runs before, you might need to remove a few inactive accounts to make space for new teammates. If you sent a request to someone and they never got it, ask them to check their pending requests tab, it’s easy to miss because it’s tucked behind a small bell icon in the top right of the Community screen.
If none of those fixes work, try restarting your game and checking the Nexon server status page first. Sometimes friend requests fail to send if the game’s social servers are down for maintenance, which usually happens right before a new content update drops. You won’t lose any pending requests if the servers go down, they’ll just go through once service is restored. Note that if you’re playing on a family shared Steam account, you won’t be able to send or receive friend requests at all, because Nexon blocks social features for shared accounts to prevent spam.
How to Invite Friends to Matches After Adding Them
Now that you’ve added your friends to your list, inviting them to your squad is way simpler than most people expect. You don’t have to go back to the Community tab every time, either. If you’re in the main Albion hub, you can open the quick menu and select the Squad option, then click on any friend that’s marked as online to send them an invite instantly. For mission-specific squads, you can also send invites right from the mission select screen, before you hit launch.
You can have up to 4 players in a single squad for most mission types, including Void Intercept Battles, Resource Collection runs, and Story Missions. If you’re trying to take on a high-difficulty boss fight, it’s always better to fill your squad with friends you communicate with, rather than random players, because you can coordinate your character builds and ability usage to take down bosses way faster. For example, if you’re running a support build with Viessa, you can pair up with a friend who runs a damage build with Bunny to melt boss health bars in half the time.
If you get an invite from a friend, you’ll get a pop-up notification in the top right corner of your screen no matter what you’re doing in the game, even if you’re mid-mission. You can accept it right away, or save it for later when you finish your current run. If you miss the pop-up, you can find all pending squad invites in the Squad tab of the main menu. One small thing to note: if your friend is in a different region than you, you might have slightly higher ping when playing together, but Nexon’s cross-region servers are pretty stable for most players, so you won’t notice much lag unless you’re playing with someone on the other side of the world.
Extra Tips for Finding Reliable Teammates in The First Descendant
If you don’t have any friends who play The First Descendant right now, you don’t have to stick to solo play forever. There are tons of active communities where you can find players with similar skill levels and playstyles to add to your friend list. Always check the in-game Looking for Group (LFG) board first — it’s located in the Community tab, and players post their squad requests for specific mission types, difficulty levels, and character roles. You can filter posts by mission type and difficulty to find exactly what you’re looking for, and send a request to join their squad directly from the board.
If you’re looking for people to run endgame content with regularly, you can also join official and fan-run Discord servers for the game, where players post their Nexon IDs to find long-term squad mates. A lot of these servers have separate channels for different regions and difficulty levels, so you can find people who play at the same time as you and are at the same progression point. When you add someone you met through LFG or Discord, make sure to mention what mission you’re looking to run in your friend request, so they know who you are and don’t ignore your request.
Don’t be afraid to send friend requests to players you mesh well with in random matches. Most people are happy to add other reliable players to their list, because it makes finding a squad for endgame content way faster than scrolling through the LFG board every time you log on. I’ve met some of my regular squad mates this way, and we’ve been running high-difficulty Void Chasm missions together for months now. It’s also a good idea to add players who have complementary character builds to yours, so you have a balanced squad no matter what mission you’re taking on.
Once you get the hang of how to add friend on The First Descendant, the whole game opens up in a way that solo play just can’t match. You can tackle harder difficulty levels, farm rare resources and mod drops way faster, and have way more fun messing around with different character builds with people you enjoy playing with. Don’t get discouraged if you run into issues sending requests at first — 9 times out of 10 it’s just a small setting tweak or a typo in the Nexon ID that’s causing the problem. Before you know it, you’ll have a full list of regular squad mates to take on every endgame challenge the game throws at you.