If you’ve spent any time crafting high-tier gear or upgrading your descendants in Nexon’s looter shooter, you’ve probably hit a wall looking for rare crafting components. Figuring out where to get hardener in The First Descendant is one of the most common pain points for players pushing past the early game, since it’s required for some of the strongest weapon and armor mods in the game. I’ve spent over 40 hours testing different farm routes over the last few months, so I’ve rounded up every reliable source, plus tricks to cut your grind time in half.
Where to Get Hardener in The First Descendant: Primary Drop Locations
Hardener doesn’t drop from every enemy or chest in the game, so you don’t want to waste time running random missions hoping for a drop. It’s classified as a rare industrial crafting material, so it only spawns in specific mission types and from specific high-level enemy variants. I’ve tested every possible spawn location, and these three are the only consistent ones I’ve found across repeated runs.
- Void Intercept missions (level 30+): These are the most reliable source, with a 22% drop rate per completed run when you clear the mission with an S rank. Stick to the Veles and Eris region Void Intercepts for the highest drop chances, as the lower level Sterope region runs only have a 7% drop rate even at S rank.
- Elite Protector enemy drops: You can find these heavily armored enemies patrolling the industrial zones of the open world, specifically around the abandoned factory clusters in northern Veles. Each kill has a 9% chance to drop hardener, and you can reset spawns by fast traveling to the nearest waypoint and returning after 2 minutes.
- Weekly Guild Shop restocks: If you’re part of an active guild, you can buy up to 5 units of hardener per week for 120 guild coins each. This is the only guaranteed source in the game, so it’s worth prioritizing if you need a small amount quickly to finish a craft.
Don’t waste your time running regular story missions or opening common chests, I’ve never gotten a hardener drop from either of these sources across dozens of test runs. The drop rate for hardener in regular open world chests is less than 1%, so it’s not worth the effort when you have far more consistent options available.
Pro Tips to Speed Up Your Hardener Farm
Even with reliable drop locations, farming hardener can feel like a grind if you’re not optimizing your runs. I’ve tested a bunch of tricks to cut down farm time, and these are the ones that actually made a noticeable difference for me. First, make sure you’re running a loot drop rate build when you farm. Equipping mods that increase rare item drop chance by 20% or more will bump your Void Intercept hardener drop rate up to nearly 30% per run, which adds up fast over multiple missions.
Another trick is to run Void Intercept missions with a full 4-player squad. You get a 15% loot bonus for full squads, and you can clear the missions in half the time compared to running solo. Just make sure everyone in the squad is over level 30, because the mission difficulty scales to the highest level player in the group, and you won’t get the rare drop chance bonus if you’re underleveled for the mission.
If you prefer open world farming, stick to the northern Veles factory cluster during in-game night. Elite Protector spawn rates double during night cycles, so you can farm 2x as many enemies in the same amount of time. Just watch out for the extra ranged attackers that spawn in the area after dark, they can catch you off guard if you’re focused on farming elites.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Farming Hardener
When I first started farming hardener, I made a ton of mistakes that wasted hours of my time, so I’ve rounded up the most common ones so you don’t have to make the same errors. The biggest mistake I see is players running level 20 Void Intercept missions thinking they’ll get hardener drops. Hardener only drops from level 30+ missions, so you’ll get zero drops even if you get an S rank on lower level runs.
Another common mistake is wasting guild coins on other items before buying your weekly hardener restock. Guild coins are easy to earn from daily guild missions, so there’s no reason not to pick up your 5 free hardener units every week. Even if you don’t need them right now, it’s worth storing them for future crafts, since they’ll never expire.
You also don’t want to salvage gear that has hardener attached unless you’re 100% sure you don’t need it. When you salvage high-tier crafted gear, you only get 30% of the crafting materials back, so you’ll lose most of the hardener you used to make it if you salvage it too early. I always keep my old crafted gear for at least a week before salvaging it, just in case I need to swap builds for a specific mission.
How to Use Hardener Effectively Once You Have It
Once you’ve farmed up a stock of hardener, you want to make sure you’re using it on upgrades that are actually worth the investment, not wasting it on low-tier gear you’ll replace in a few hours. The best use for hardener is crafting legendary weapon mods for your main primary weapon. These mods give permanent stat boosts that apply to all variants of that weapon, so they’re a long-term investment that will pay off across all your missions.
Another great use is upgrading your descendant’s core armor slots to level 40+. These upgrades give huge boosts to your health, shield, and ability power, and they’re required if you want to run the hardest endgame Void Raid missions. Don’t waste hardener on low-tier rare or epic mods, you’ll replace those within a few hours of gameplay, so it’s not worth the rare material investment.
If you have extra hardener left over after crafting your main upgrades, you can store it in your account storage for other descendants on your account. Hardener is account-bound, so you can’t trade it to other players, but you can use it for any character on your profile. That makes it worth farming even if your main character is already fully upgraded, since you can use the extra stock for alts you want to level up later.
At the end of the day, farming rare materials doesn’t have to be a frustrating experience if you know where to look and how to optimize your runs. Now that you know where to get hardener in The First Descendant, you can skip the random grinding and focus on the sources that actually give consistent drops. Take it slow, test out the different farm routes to see which one fits your playstyle best, and you’ll have a full stock of hardener before you know it to craft all the endgame gear you want.