Run a 1250 Lost Sector. It’s like 17 Essence and takes something like 8 minutes, and there are ways to do them much faster (like under 3 minutes) depending on which one it is.

And if you’re just doing it for Essence instead of exotics, doing it solo doesn’t matter, so you can take a friend a knock a bunch of them out in a row pretty quickly.

I'm trying to finish up the six cookies I'd never made before so I can masterwork and reduce the Essence cost. Damn man, I really wanna enjoy playing Destiny but every time I log on I'm already tired. I just wanna finish the content.

Seems like something's going wrong here. While I was having a hard time getting Cabal Oil the other day, once I just stopped trying to grind it out in Patrol and just ran some strikes/Gambit to work on Pinnacles/Bounties it all just took care of itself. I'd recommend just identifying which weapon-style ingredients you have the least of (solar, sword kills, etc.), working those into your playstyle, and just doing the stuff you want to do.

I'm trying to finish up the six cookies I'd never made before so I can masterwork and reduce the Essence cost. Damn man, I really wanna enjoy playing Destiny but every time I log on I'm already tired. I just wanna finish the content.

I'm playing Genshin Impact right now, which is conceptually a much grindier game than Destiny, but I'm still happy to do so most days. I only need to spend like, 30 minutes a day tops of straightforward play in Genshin: Go do these four brief (5 min) commissions and do a few 5 min. dungeons. I'll play an hour plus of Destiny, having to figure out what activities to do to optimize my time/bounties, and feel like I barely scratched the surface of what I should be doing daily.

I was annoyed by lack of essence, at first, as well.

Then I found a post that suggested that the fastest way to earn it was Wrathborn hunts. I agreed that they were fast - from start to finish is a few minutes, max - but it was the buy-in (a Lure) that was killing me. This post, though, showed me how to get around that.

If you have just one lure, you're golden.

Start the hunt, make the first Wrathborn disappear. Find the post to continue the hunt, use it.

Once you're out of blackscreen, open your lure and reset it. (This will put the one lure, and whatever mods you added, back in your inventory.) It doesn't reset the current hunt, though. Finish the hunt, you get 15 essence (10 if you've masterworked your oven). You don't get any other rewards for killing the Wrathborn... but who cares?

I picked Xillox, because she's pretty close to where you start the whole process, so travel time is minimized. Xenophage makes really quick work of her (8 shots).

If you start to run out of ammo, plant a raid banner. Do this until you have enough essence for the cookies you need. (I did it for a couple of episodes of a TV show, and earned a couple of hundred essence - what I needed for whatever I was shooting for.)

The DEFINITION of grindy - but at least it's an efficient grind.

I masterworked the over and finished the quest that gets you the ship at roughly the same time. When you finish that quest, you get a big bonus of Dawning spirit or whatever. Also you get a bonus from the ship that gives a chance to receive Dawning spirit whenever you get an ingredient through play.

So the combination of masterworking the oven (which means cost goes from 15 to 10 for each cookie), getting the bonus amount of Dawning for finishing the quest, and then getting even more Dawning from normal play for using the ship, it goes from super grindy to only mildly grindy.

On top of that, if you have the glimmer you should buy the bonus bounties and make those cookies because then you basically get a free ingredient and a negligible amount of bright dust for making cookies that you probably want to make anyways. I did this today for all 25 cookies to get this week's weekly bounty.

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