In this First Descendant guide, we’re talking all about external components. What are the best attributes and rolls you can get on each piece, what you should look for, and where to farm them in The First Descendant. I also made a video on the topic if you’d rather listen than read :).

What are External Components?

First, let’s talk about what they are. External Components are pieces of gear, attached to your descendant, that increase your shield, HP and defense. They can also come with unique attributes that boost your loot drops and help you with farming. They each have a unique shape and name: Auxiliary Power, Sensor, Memory, and Processor. 

External components will always drop with either Shield, HP, or Defense in the top slot, and if it’s rare rarity (which is purple) or better, the component will also have 2 attributes on the bottom. The bottom attributes will also have a rarity ranging from common to ultimate, or blue to yellow. These rarities determine the range of the stat that rolls on your external component. We’ll get into that a bit later.

The First Descendant also has some external components with set effects. These will drop from dungeon bosses or colossuses and can be used to enhance your build by proving a 2 piece and 4 piece set effect. You can see those set items and where to farm them in the Access Info section in game.

How do you target farm External Components?

Now that you know what external components are, let me show you how to target farm them in The First Descendant. Once you make it through the base campaign and switch your world to hard mode, you’ll be able to target farm components on a weekly reset. To see what external components are available to farm that week, open your map and select “Difficulty Level Rewards”. This will be at the bottom of the screen and clicking on it will pull up a list of this week’s rewards by location. You can even filter the search to find exactly what you’re looking for. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really help us for external components. To check for this quickly, we’re going to open “All Rewards” to see the full list. Viewing it this way, we can see that you can farm sensors in Echo Swamp and Processors in Fortress. Going back to the difficulty level rewards screen, we can then search for sensors and see that Abandoned Zone is the location to farm them. You can head over there to find the best mission to reap the most rewards. For this week, I would recommend the Abandoned Refinery Unit.

Alright, now that you’ve farmed up some sensors and processors this week, let’s talk about the ideal rolls for each piece and what you should look for. Thanks to Gregarious-JB for posting this infographic on Reddit for all External Components. With this image, you can see that not every attribute can drop on every component. Here are my recommendations for each component.

Auxiliary Power – HP (or DEF) on the top, then Max HP and Fire Resistance on the bottom. For a farming component, you want to keep one with Kuiper Drop Rate and Module Drop Rate. I would also consider MP Recovery out of Combat for Descendants like Lepic and maybe Viessa to get your MP back.

Sensor – HP (or DEF) on the top, then Max MP and Chill Resistance on the bottom. For farming – Character EXP gain and consumable drop rate. MP Recovery in Combat is also a solid atttribute for skill builds.

Memory – HP (or DEF) on the top, then DEF and Electric Resistance on the bottom. For farming – Gold Drop Rate and Firearm Proficiency Gain.

Processor – HP (or DEF) on the top, then Toxin Resistance and whatever else you want on the bottom. Since this one is mostly focused on Shield, you can pick what you like. Shield is fine, but not the most valuable stat unless you’re on a shield-specific descendant.