What the New Small Update of The First Descendant Brought
Late on March 12, following the roadmap for the first 4 months of 2026, the Korean looter‑shooter The First Descendant slipped in a fairly small patch: version 1.3.21. It ties into episode three of season three and, despite its modest size, adds a new mission, a weapon, a few fresh systems, tweaks to existing ones, and the usual grab-bag of minor fixes. Below I poke at the bits that felt worth noting — some practical, some just odd, and one or two that made me go, huh.
New Mission
A fourth mission appears in Axion Plains: Legion Laboratory. You unlock it almost immediately through a short quest called Legion of Breach Research Facility — talk to an Albion instructor, run the mission, then report back. The entrance sits close to the third mission, Exposed Underwater Base, so you’ll likely stumble over it if you’re already exploring that area.
The mission is set inside a buried research complex where an enemy faction breeds fighters. It’s not fiendishly clever, but it isn’t tiny either; length depends heavily on your build or the squad you bring. Key points:
- Six main stages make up the run; a few stages split into multiple parts.
- Roughly halfway there’s a long traverse best handled with personal transport — without it you’ll eat a lot of downtime.
- Most stages task you with mowing through large numbers of regular mobs (100+ in places), finishing off several elites, and occasionally dealing with a special Axion Plains elite from the spikers family. One stage swaps that out for destroying three enemy stationary devices.
- Those special elites carry a "Tyrant" prefix. They look slightly different and have extra attacks. For example, a Tyrant Void Discharger can briefly trap you in a cube (seems like you must hit it to break out), while a Tyrant Spiker Pincer will dash at a random player and hurt anyone unlucky enough to be in the path.
- The final boss, a small humanoid called Sculptor, isn’t the beefiest Axion Plains boss in HP or raw damage, but it throws in some neat mechanics.
- Phase 1: Sculptor stays put, uses timed special attacks and summons Axion elites.
- Phase 2: It teleports to the arena center, starts sprinting and leaves a fiery trail. Huge mechanical arms summon elites and, at certain moments, fire a beam toward the arena center. If you don’t destroy an arm within a short window, it spawns an elite type determined by the beam color (i.e., color = elite):
- Yellow - Tyrant Spiker Pincer.
- Red - Tyrant Shadow Claw.
- Purple - Tyrant Void Discharger.
Activity drops include the usual loot plus some specific things:
- Components for crafting parts of the new weapon.
- New red character mods.
- Kuiper Bio Adhesive — a new resource used to craft those weapon components.
- Master Token — a temporary event currency.
New Weapon
A new ultimate weapon arrives: Crime and Punishment, the game’s first dual swords. They fire green ammo, deal fire damage, and have a quirky build mechanic tied to an alternate-attack gauge.
- Dealing damage with regular attacks fills an alternate-attack gauge and increments a unique counter shown as a letter on the right side of the HUD (DMC‑style). The counter cycles through 6 ranks: E, D, C, B, A, S.
- Triggering the alternate attack grants extra damage plus a stash of special ammo. The alt attack scales with that letter counter: each rank gives +20% damage.
- Special ammo buffs the damage of regular attacks.
Small note: you’ll want to watch that letter closely — it’s literally the difference between “meh” swings and something that hits like a truck.
New Daily and Weekly System
A new interface helps you track dailies and weeklies without bouncing between menus. It lets you:
- See all daily tasks — e.g., complete two Sigma sectors, run four missions at 400% difficulty, and clear one segment of the mysterious ship Void Vessel-072.
- See all weekly tasks — for now this covers all Axion Plains missions.
- Open the activity UI for any listed task and launch it directly from the tracker (nice QoL).
New Hard Colossus
There’s a fresh colossus for Void Abyss / Challenge modes: Ice Maiden, a modified take on the Dead Bride colossus. It also links to a themed costume, The Frozen One, which can be bought per character for 300 special green tickets — those tickets drop from Ice Maiden. Personal impression: the costume fits female characters better; on some male models it looks awkward.
Balancing
Patch notes include balance work across characters and ultimates:
- Sharen got a fairly large rework — many abilities changed and several red mods were revised.
- Keylan, Gley, and Lepic received smaller buffs.
- Ultimate weapons King's Guard Lance and Wave of Light got tweaks. King's Guard Lance sees a notable quality‑of‑life change: turret charges now regenerate when dealing damage, so you don’t have to manually recharge them as often.
Changes and Improvements
- The weekly task that required farming 20 Ancestor Mod boxes was adjusted: now all 20 can drop from any of the four Axion Plains missions. In practice, you can spam one mission 20 times or mix them up.
- All Axion Plains missions are available in the random Axion Plains mission mode. Besides the usual rewards, there’s a 5% chance to receive a box containing a red Ancestor mod. Oddly, there’s no daily cap on how many such boxes you can get.