Destiny 2 Dawning ingredients: How to bake cookies and farm essence

The Destiny 2 Dawning event is here and space granny is back forcing us to make cookies with the flesh of our enemies—Merry Christmas! There are festive weapons to grab, including that fancy stasis sword Zephyr that can slow enemies on strike with its Cold Steel perk. And good news for those that did The Dawning last year, too: there's only one new cookie you have to bake. 

The event is slightly more complex than usual, since weapons aren't dropped as gifts this time around, and you'll instead have to purchase upgrades from Eva in order to be able to focus them. If you've just started the season, you might want to know about Resonance Amp locations so you can get some red border Seraph guns. Otherwise, here's how the Destiny 2 Dawning event works this year, how to get ingredients, and the best way to farm Dawning Essence. 

How to bake cookies in The Dawning

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If you haven't played the Destiny 2 Dawning event before, then it's pretty straightforward to understand. Once you speak to Eva at The Tower you'll be given an oven that appears in your quest menu with which you bake cookies for characters in the game. This will reward you with gifts and Dawning Spirit, which can be used to purchase upgrades with Eva and focus the new Dawning weapons. 

As Tim pointed out in his Dawning PSA yesterday, there is a ship you can equip to sometimes get extra Dawning Spirit when you find ingredients. You can also get it by completing bounties for Eva. Another change this year are the boons, consumables that you can use in playlist activities to give your fireteam members a Dawning reward. If you purchase the first node upgrade from Eva you can get one of these for free daily.

How to get Dawning ingredients

Same as last year, ingredients are broken up into two main categories: Uncommon Ingredients and Rare Ingredients. The first comes from defeating enemies of a particular type, while the second comes from the way in which you defeat them, i.e melee attacks, Arc damage, explosions, and so on. Here's every ingredient and how to get it. 

It really isn't too hard to get the Uncommon Ingredients, since you don't have to be in an activity to farm them. For example, to get Cabal and Fallen ingredients I went to the point where they fight by Devrim's church in the EDZ and farmed them there. You can farm Hive at the Altars of Sorrow on the moon, Taken at The Blind Well in the Dreaming City, and even though the Tangled Shore is gone, there's a Scorn-specific public event at The Strand in the Dreaming City. 

If you bring lots of weapon types and switch up your subclass as you farm them, you can get most of the Rare Ingredients without too much hassle, though a few may prove trickier or take longer to drop than others. The good thing is that you don't need many of each. That said, it may be worth eliminating other potential drops if you can. If you're trying to get Balanced Flavors, for instance, maybe use a kinetic weapon so you don't drop the Arc, Solar, or Stasis damage ingredients instead.

How to farm Dawning Essence

The real tricky thing to get this year is Dawning Essence, an event currency that comes from completing activities and is used to bake each cookie. It costs 15 Dawning Essence to make a cookie at first, but once you bake them all and masterwork Eva's Oven, it'll cost you 10 instead. If you've done The Dawning event before, then there's only one new cookie to bake this year, which is the Lucent Crunch, for Fynch. 

The best way to farm Essence of Dawning seems to be Legend Lost Sectors, which can be completed pretty fast with a fireteam, and reward you with around 15 essence, which is more than strikes, crucible, or gambit will get you. Another way to get a big chunk is to complete Eva's two weekly bounties, which will get you 60 overall: four cookie's worth. 

Destiny 2 Dawning recipe cheat sheet

Here's a handy shopping list of what you'll need overall to craft one cookie for everyone and masterwork Eva's oven, as well as a brief reminder of what you need to do for each: 

• 330 Dawning Essence (225 with masterwork oven)
• Five Ether Cane (Fallen)
• Three Cabal Oil (Cabal)
• Three Vex Milk (Vex)
• Three Taken Butter (Taken)
• Four Dark Ether Cane (Scorn)
• Four Chitin Powder (Hive)
• One Delicious Explosion (Grenade/rocket kills)
• One Finishing Touch (Finishers)
• One Multifaceted Flavors (Rapid kills)
• One Superb Texture (Super kills)
• One Dark Frosting (Stasis kills)
• One Sharp Flavor (Sword kills)
• Two Flash of Inspiration (Generating orbs)
• Two Null Taste (Void kills)
• Two Bullet Spray (sub, auto, and machine gun kills)
• Two Personal Touch (Melee kills)
• Two Perfect Taste (Precision kills)
• Two Impossible Heat (Solar kills)
• Two Electric Flavor (Arc kills)
• Two Balanced Flavors (bow, pulse, scout, and sniper kills)

Since each cookie takes an inventory slot, if you bake too many they'll be sent to the postmaster for you to collect later. Once baked, deliver them to the character to get some Dawning Spirit and a potential reward.