For the entire five-year span of Destiny’s existence as a series, players have been looking for ways to exploit it. Any old Destiny head will speak fondly of the days we had Loot Caves and cheesed bosses without shame. In the pantheon of cheap Destiny exploits, the latest Destiny 2 scheme for scoring loads of materials might take the cake for the amount of effort it requires, which is about as close to zero as you can get.
Polygon explains how you get it done. It’s a very simple process—you just head to one of the Forges Bungie added to the game earlier this year and do nothing. Just die and let the clock run out. You get rewarded with materials just for participating, and unless you manually leave, you’ll be thrown into another Forge round automatically, letting you repeat the process ad infinitum while you construct a perfect pastrami melt.
You should, as Polygon notes, equip the lowest-level gear in your inventory if you want to run this scam, since Destiny 2 will attempt to matchmake you with other players at the same level as you, and jumping into a Forge match with others at your highest possible Light level means you’re more likely to ruin the match for anyone trying to actually run the Forge challenge honestly.
This grift is appealing thanks to one of the latest challenges added in Destiny 2’s Season of Opulence, this summer’s set of themed game updates. The new Tribute Hall lets you pay a new currency called Tributes (get it?) to unlock coveted gear like the Bad Juju exotic pulse rifle. The rifle requires 18 Tributes, which seems reasonable until you realize how costly some Tributes can be—requiring hundreds of the materials you find on each planet, like the Datalattice you earn on Nessus.
These prices can be brought down by completing new bounties, which will earn you Boons of Opulence. You use these Boons to lower the cost of tributes; each Boon lowers the cost 1 percent. Complete them in succession without dying and the discount stacks, up to 80 percent. The catch, however, is that you are limited in how many Boons you can earn a day: five.
It’s a complicated system with loads of hoops to jump through if you don’t want to completely empty your wallet, and that’s the point: It’s all meant to get you grinding, adding tension with the ever-present danger of losing your days-long process of racking up Boons and making Bad Juju more attainable. Which is why it makes sense that Destiny 2 players would rather just sit back and not do it at all, racking up enough materials to buy the Tributes they need at full price.
Like with any popular loophole, it’s only a matter of time before the powers that be decide to close it. Until then, feel free to (courteously) stock up on Datalattices and Dusklight Shards. You never know when they might come in handy—or be completely depreciated in the next big shake-up to the Destiny 2 economy. Fortunes are always rising and falling in the Last City.