How to Unlock Hard Mode in The First Descendant

The First Descendant’s normal mode takes roughly 20 to 30 hours to finish, and it still depends on how you tackle the missions or the farming. Then, you’ll have to go through the hard mode, which isn’t a complete repeat of the normal mode, and most players aim for the rewards in Hard mode that they want to unlock hard mode as quickly as possible. Here’s how to unlock hard mode in the First Descendant.

Unlocking Hard Mode in The First Descendant

To unlock hard mode, you have to go through the whole campaign or the main story missions. These are highlighted in pink when you go through the latest region. Each main story mission in a region will go through the following steps:

1. Introduce a new region with simple battlefield missions
2. Unlock a new battlefield within the region for more missions
3. Finishing a Duty of the Descendant mission (dungeon)
4. Repeat steps two or three.
5. Go back to Albion and defeat the latest Void Intercept Battle.
6. Repeat step one.

If you do these missions consistently, you’ll eventually reach the Fortress, which is the last region on normal mode. The last Duty of the Descendant mission will be the Heart of the Fortress, and you must finish it to complete the Destroy the Ironheart mission.

Once you finish the last duty, you’ll get a cutscene and return to Albion as the hero. After talking to all the NPCs in Albion to finish the whole normal mode campaign, you’ll receive a prompt as seen in the image above.

How to Change Difficulty to Hard Mode in The First Descendant

Now that you have unlocked the hard difficulty, go to the main city entrance (the waypoint or the main spawn point in Albion). Beside the main entrance, you’ll see a Movement Management Terminal called the Ingris Search Device. You can open the map and look at the closest icon next to the City Entrance waypoint.

Interact with the Ingris Search Device and choose “Change Difficulty.” Choose hard mode, and it’ll change your instance or world to hard mode. Now, all that is left is to grind for those level 100 weapons and Reactors and upgrade them to complete your builds.