The First Descendant patch 1.0.3 brought a massive quality-of-life improvement when farming Void Shards alongside a slew of bug fixes and stability and performance improvements.
While the free-to-play looter shooter from Nexon has gained a large player base within a few weeks of launch, it has received criticism from the gaming community for “aggressive monetization.” It is difficult for the average player to unlock any of the Ultimate Descendant characters in the game without actually making a monetary in-game transaction for any of them.
Patch 1.0.03 is a hotfix for the recently released looter-shooter title. While it doesn’t fix those monetization criticisms, it does include a slew of balance adjustments and sets the stage for the next content drop which is scheduled to arrive in August.
Farming Void Shards made easier in The First Descendent patch 1.0.3
The drop rate of Void Shards was radically increased in patch 1.0.3. The drop rate of Void Shards has been increased by 1.5 times, making the tedious process of running back to the Void Reactor a bit less grueling.
The developers also plan to make Colossus slightly harder to defeat in future updates, as module switching has made killing it fairly easy in the current version. The First Descendant patch 1.0.3 also makes changes to existing in-game icons that share similarities to competing looter-shooter title, Destiny 2, which is undergoing a resurgence.
Optimization remains one of the key focuses of Hotfix 1.0.3, and the newest patch deploys several crash fixes that will, hopefully, ensure the game runs smoothly on all platforms. This is alongside other changes designed to give players more control over the game’s performance, including a new option to turn off other players’ projectile explosion effects. It’s not all fun improvements in the update, though.
Farming the Fortress Outskirts has been made much harder
Monster spawn rates on the Fortress Outskirt have been tweaked in the update to make it harder to farm the area.
With patch 1.0.3, monsters will only spawn when players run and move around rather than just “pouring in from the beginning of the launch,” as The First Descendant‘s developers say. Staying idle will not trigger monsters to spawn, forcing players to actually play the game rather than simply spraying and getting rewarded.
The update is available to play on live servers across all platforms, on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4 and 5 and on PC via Steam. The next massive update for the First Descendant is slated to arrive on August 1, bring new gameplay modes, weapons, skins, and Descendant Luna and Ultimate Valby.
