‘Straight up painful’: The First Descendant players can’t stand tedious Void Shard grind

The First Descendant is all about the grind and getting those rare drops, but it feels like some gameplay loops are designed to make you suffer.

One of the most common grinds in The First Descendant involves void missions, and in a Reddit thread on July 17, players agreed it’s the most annoying aspect of the game. “The entire ‘gameplay’ loop of outposts, farming void shards, and the void bosses is such a terrible loop. It’s horrible how many amorphous materials are wrapped up in this loop,” one player wrote in the thread’s comments.

There are many frustrating things about this grind, starting with the zone recon missions (aka outposts) you must do to get the Amorphous Material. “Zone Recon is just fucking teleport spam for a 5m timer coupled with a shit character (Sharon’s kit sucks ass) wildly varying degrees of difficulty for no discernable reason and frankly shit drop rates,” another player commented.

After you get the Amorphous Material, you must grind Void Fragment missions for Void Shards required to play the Void Fusion Reactor mission. You must find the Void Fragment that drops the Void Shards you need and hope it has the same attribute as one of your Descendants, which fans agree is unnecessary. “If you don’t have the right character for the right void fragment mission, you have to painfully repeat the one of all 4 mission like 11-12 times, it’s not fun,” another commenter said.

The last step of the grind, the Void Fusion Reactor, isn’t terrible, but since the drops from the Amorphous Materials aren’t guaranteed, it often takes multiple runs to get that last Descendant piece. What’s worse is plenty of items in the game are tied to this loop, so you have to face the grind sooner or later.