Destiny 2’s companion API scheduled to come back online in next update

Destiny 2 players only have a little over 13 hours to go until they can finally use the Destiny 2 companion app and their favorite third-party tools.

Bungie’s API is slated to return with tomorrow’s update, the developer confirmed in a tweet today. This will reenable access to important applications that make Destiny 2 far more comfortable to play and govern vital aspects such as loadout and item management and bounty acquisition.

Bungie took the Destiny 2 API offline on Friday, Dec. 9, when the Spire of the Watcher dungeon released. Alongside the dungeon, Destiny 2 players experienced a stark influx of connection-based errors such as Weasel or Calabrese, even if they weren’t in the dungeon and were in hub spaces, such as the Tower or the H.E.L.M.

On Friday, player support team lead Drew Tucker said the team was working over the weekend to fix the issue. He also listed a litany of necessary steps before pushing out a fix, including testing a solution, creating a new build, making sure the new build works properly and even communicating with platform partners to deploy the update.

“Luckily, we already have a release scheduled for next week,” Tucker said on Friday, “so our goal is to get this implemented into that release.” This refers to Hotfix 6.0.3.1, the first hotfix in Season of the Seraph, and the patch that should fix the issues that caused Bungie to disable the API.

With the developer severing the connection to the companion API on Friday, several external applications ceased functioning, including both third-party tools and the official Destiny 2 app. The functionalities that would be simple with these functions are far more convoluted during the outage, requiring players to swap characters multiple times if they want an item from a different guardian’s inventory and even having to leave an activity to get bounties—tasks that were doable with a few clicks on their computer and even a few taps on their cell phones.

While several vital tools were impaired, the loss of gear-management apps such as Destiny Item Manager (DIM) may be the most disruptive change.

DIM allows players to search items based on name, perks, categories, and other queries, and lets guardians drag-and-drop these items to their inventory almost instantly. This process could take seconds, but since the outage, players have to leave the activity, return to a hub, recover an item from the vault, and return.

It’s a cumbersome process in Destiny 2 “vanilla” at the moment and one that repeated itself several times for Guardians worldwide this weekend with no DIM access.