Recent updates
Update July 24, 2024: As of hotfix 1.0.4 the cooldown timer on Vulgus Outposts has been reduced from five minutes to one minute. As such, this method no longer needs to be applied, as it would probably take close to a minute to teleport out and back in again. Instead, simply step outside the Outpost mission area, wait 60 seconds, then go back in.
Everything in The First Descendant requires an element of farming. Whether its materials, blueprints, parts for new characters, Kuiper Shards, to make your stuff better you need to farm. For those of us who like a game to grind, The First Descendant is absolutely perfect to scratch that itch.
One of the 'missions' you'll find you need to farm a lot are the Vulgus Strategic Outposts. Like other sources of rewards in the game, each of these drops loot, and some of this loot can't be found elsewhere. So you have to dig in and grind it out. The problem is that Outposts have a five-minute cooldown, which can seriously hurt your efficiency.
It doesn't have to, though. There is a way to farm these missions quickly and without having to worry about that timer. Here's what you need to do.
How to get round the Outpost cooldown timer and farm them fast
Vulgus Strategic Outposts are crucial locations in acquiring the right materials to research new weapons and Descendants. They don't take long to complete at all, but the fly in the ointment is the five-minute cooldown timer. This is a big hindrance to fast farming, which is the name of the game.
Fortunately, you can work around that fairly easily. The first thing to do is set your lobby to private. Why? Because on a public lobby you might run into other players trying to do the same thing you are, and it'll conflict with your own farming runs. To do this, open the map, hit the top left-hand corner and change public to private. But you can't do this once you've loaded into the zone, so remember to do it in Albion before you head out.
Private lobbies don't mean you can't team up with your actual friends, it just means you won't be dropped in with random players. It's essential, because if they're triggering the Outpost and you miss it, the timer is back to five minutes.
Once you're on private, head out to the Vulgus Strategic Outpost you want to farm. You may have to wait a little while initially for the timer to clear, but that's OK. As soon as you can, head over, clear it, and kill the mini-boss.
Next, open your map, and teleport to a different zone. Once you load in, open the map back up, and teleport back to the zone your chosen Outpost mission is in. The timer will now either have completely cleared, or will be significantly lowered.
The video clip above shows an example of this method in action. Here I was hitting an Outpost in Vespers, trying to farm Amorphous Material as part of my never-ending quest to unlock Gley.
In around a minute, I've cleared the Outpost once, teleported out and back, and then cleared it a second time. Through the rest of this run I was lucky enough the timer had completely cleared each time I came back, but on a different Outpost elsewhere, I did encounter some small waits. So it isn't perfect, but it's certainly better than hanging around for five minutes to spend another 15–20 seconds clearing the mission again.
That's all there is to it. Long term, hopefully Nexon significantly reduces the cooldown on these missions, because frankly, five minutes is ridiculous. But for now, we can work around it at least.
