As I assumed yesterday, the Dawning was in fact waiting on me when I got home from work and logged into Destiny 2. For the uninitiated The Dawning is effectively the Destiny universe Christmas event, covering the tail end of December and the beginning of the new year. It has meant a lot of different things, including really awesome sparrow racing in the past. Unfortunately that event did not make a return, but instead we get a fun mini game that asks us to go out into the world and do various things. It also signals getting bonus seasonal bright engrams each time you level up, so doubling the opportunity for bright dust and related rewards. Unlike past years however this feels way more rooted in game activities and not just another attempt to pry money from us in the cash shop.
The event signals the return of Eva Levante to the Tower, who for those of us that date back to Destiny 1 will remember was the shader and emblem vendor. Weirdly in Destiny 1 she was associated with the Festival of the Lost more than The Dawning… but I vaguely remember her also being the starting place of this event back in the day as well. What Eva asks of us this year is to collect various ingredients and make baked goods for the denizens of the tower and all of the various NPCs scattered throughout the solar system. She also offers a series of daily bounties that reward ingredients and at least one of them rewarded Powerful Gear, but I assume that is a weekly or one time reward only.
Eva has given us a portable oven that fits in our inventory and asked us to go out into the world and start collecting ingredients. She starts us off by giving us the ingredients and a recipe to make Gjallardoodles for Zavala, to sort of show us the ropes of how the system works. After finishing that we are asked to collect the ingredients for Vanilla Blades for Lord Shaxx and Eliksni Birdseed for Hawthorne, and both of the quests tell us specifically what ingredients to go collect. Effectively every recipe has three parts, a common material that drops from a specific enemy type, a rare material that drops based on the sort of damage you are dealing to the mob, and then dawning essence which drops from various activities from Public Events on the planets to match made activities like Gambit or Crucible. Here is a quick rundown of the drops for various mobs and damage types.
Common Items (Green – Mob Based)
- Cabal Oil – Kill any Cabal Enemies
- Chitin Powder – Kill any Hive Enemies
- Dark Ether Cane – Kill any Scorn Enemies
- Ether Cane – Kill any Fallen Enemies
- Taken Butter – Kill any Taken Enemies
- Vex Milk – Kill any Vex Enemies
Rare Items (Blue – Kill Damage Based)
- Bullet Spray – Kills made with “Machine Gun” type weapons – Auto Rifle/SMG/HMG
- Delicious Explosions – Explosive kills aka Class Grenades/Rocket Launcher/Grenade Launcher
- Electric Flavor – Arc Damage based Kills
- Flash of Inspiration – A kill that generates an Orb of Light – Supers or Masterworks
- Impossible Heat – Solar Damage based Kills
- Null Taste – Void Damage based Kills
- Perfect Taste – Precision Damage Kills – aka Headshots
- Personal Touch – Melee Based Kills or Melee Abilities like Thrown Weapons
- Sharp Flavor – Sword Kills… not sure if Hunter Knives can proc or not
These are then combined with Dawning Essence which drops from pretty much anything, and crafts an item that begins a quest chain. Now a lot of these won’t show up on the map as a quest but it will cause the icon for a given vendor to start blinking. You turn in the baked goods and get a package that usually includes some Dawning Essence and a Blue or Purple. There are Triumphs associated with finding each of the recipes and delivering it to the respective NPC. As I said before you are only given three recipes from the start, but as you experiment with putting different items together you start unlocking the specific vendor items. If you put together two items that don’t make a tasty treat… you end up with Burnt Edge Transits which Master Rahool will take off of your hands.
Recipe List
Collecting materials can be time consuming… since they do not by any means drop every single kill. So as a result here is a list of all of the recipes, since if you are like me you are going to ultimately want to craft one of each to get the triumph for the holiday event. All of the recipes will take 15 Dawning Essence to craft so not listing that, just know it is a requirement for everything.
- Alkane Dragee Cookies (Sloane – Titan) – Chitin Powder and Bullet Spray
- Burnt Edge Transits (Master Rahool – Tower) – Any two ingredients other than those of the recipes below aka the failure state item
- Candy Dead Ghosts (The Spider – Tangled Shore ) – Dark Ether Cane and Flash of Inspiration
- Chocolate Ship Cookies (Amanda Holliday – Tower) – Cabal Oil and Null Taste
- Dark Chocolate Motes (The Drifter – Tower) – Taken Butter and Null Taste
- Eliksni Birdseed (Hawthorne – Tower) – Ether Cane and Personal Touch
- Gentleman’s Shortbread (Devrim Kay – EDZ) – Ether Cane and Perfect Taste
- Gjallardoodles (Zavala – Tower) – Ether Cane and Delicious Explosion – This was a freebie though and the mats Eva gives you
- Ill-Fortune Cookies (Petra Venj – Dreaming City) – Dark Ether Cane and Impossible Heat
- Infinite Forest Cake (Failsafe – Nessus) – Vex Milk and Impossible Heat
- Javelin Mooncake (Ana Bray – Mars) – Chitin Powder and Sharp Flavor
- Radiolarian Pudding (Asher Mir – Io) – Vex Milk and Electric Flavor
- Strange Cookies (Xur – Varies Weekly) – Taken Butter and Electric Flavor
- Telemetry Tapioca (Banshee-44 – Tower) – Vex Milk and Bullet Spray
- Traveler Donut Holes (Ikora Rey – Tower) – Cabal Oil and Flash of Inspiration
- Vanilla Blades (Lord Shaxx – Tower) – Cabal Oil and Sharp Flavor
Now yesterday I was musing exactly how we would be getting the Legendary Heavy Machinegun associated with this event, and if it would be some sort of a grind like the Haunted Forest was during Festival of the Lost. It apparently is super easy to get because it becomes your reward for essentially doing the very first quest which is to craft Gjallardoodles for Zavala. Aka you can get this weapon on pretty much all of your characters “just for participating”. As I thought however it drops at 600 light the same as the Festival of the Lost Auto Rifle, but it appears to not be equitable by lowbies the way that weapon was. I am going to try doing the intro quest tonight on some of my alts and seeing how this weapon varies.
One minor thing that I have noticed however is that it is impossible to deliver every recipe if you do not have the DLC content since Ana Bray is associated with Warmind, Spider with Forsaken… and Petra Venj with having beaten Forsaken unless you can turn in to one of her earlier incarnations that hangs out in Spiders Lair. The season of giving challenge however asks you to deliver 12 baked goods… and with Master Rahool not counting towards this because it is a failed state of the quest… that leaves 15 possibilities… so they have effectively made this available to folks without the expanded content. You just cannot get all of the triumphs/achievements associated without expansion access. Largely good on them for allowing vanilla players to be able to get all of the rewards. Ultimately you are going to spend the majority of your time farming Dawning Essence since you need so much to craft any given item.
