Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate was released on July 15, 2025, and ever since then developer Bungie has been fire-fighting one of the expansion's many unpopular additions: unstable cores.
Forgive the Destiny jargon, because this thing loves an in-game currency, but unstable cores are how you infuse gear, increasing its power level beyond the seasonal cap. The problem with the currency was relatively simple though, to the extent you wonder how it ever released in this state: it cost huge amounts of cores to do more or less anything at higher levels, compared to the small amount you'd earn for dismantling loot.
Anyone still playing Destiny 2, it's fair to say, is probably also running multiple builds, and so the problems with unstable cores quickly became exponential: the higher level infusions could add up to tens of thousands of cores.
Bungie is now taking the opportunity, with the release of Destiny 2: Renegades on December 2, to correct its mistake. Having previously said it intended to "rebalance the economy" of unstable cores, it's now just admitting this was a bad idea all along.
"We have landed on a plan to fully deprecate this currency," says Bungie. "Once deprecated, infusion will cost an amount of Enhancement Cores and Glimmer."
"Overall, we've found that Unstable Cores have been too restrictive across power levels and fail to drive interesting buildcraft decisions, whether they be powering up through Campaign missions and wanting to try different weapons, or going into Endgame content and looking to infuse lower-level gear to higher power levels."
Bungie has not yet removed unstable cores but says it is "working rapidly" to do so. In order to "help players with smaller amounts of unstable cores infuse gear alongside Power and Progression changes going live tomorrow," it's offering some not-insignificant sops:
- We have added a one-time reward of 777,777 Unstable Cores to the catch-up chest that will be available in the Tower tomorrow at reset. We highly recommend signing in and using these before they're removed!
- We are shipping a minor change that reduces the number of Unstable Cores needed for infusion at higher power levels until they are deprecated.
Giving everyone 777,777 cores sure is some sort of temporary solution, the kind of fix that makes you wonder how things ever reached this point in the first place. That and the reduction in infusion costs should at least placate players while they wait for the system's removal, though I'm sure there are some demons of the grind out there who're now irked that all their hard work is for naught.
"Bungie Suggestion: Have an intern hover over the game designers holding a rolled-up newspaper," says player Britinsb, "and every time they suggest a new in-game currency would be cool, the intern can swat the designer on the nose and firmly tell them 'NO, USE GLIMMER.'"
To which Antares428 replies: "That would be the most overworked intern in the world."
It's not going fantastically well for Destiny 2, and the changes being made ahead of Renegades arguably don't go far enough. Bungie recently had to execute another U-turn on its plans to reset power levels, and Destiny 2 in general feels in a very bad place right now. When Bungie's still fixing problems it introduced months ago and having to revert major changes… yeah, that hard reset can't come fast enough.
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