What are Special Operations in The First Descendant?

When completing regions in The First Descendant, you’ll unlock more and more missions and side objectives before unlocking the next region and continuing the story. This is a fairly standard mission structure for this sort of game, but what might immediately throw you off is a new mission appearing later on. Here’s what Special Operations are in The First Descendant.

How to complete a Special Operation in The First Descendant?

Special Operations in The First Descendant are a mission type that’s added to your map upon completing all main missions in that region. These are a special type of multiplayer mission where you must deal with waves of enemies, each wave lasting about two minutes. You can complete up to 21 waves, but will periodically receive rewards and be able to abort the mission with the loot you’ve collected so far. The first Special Operation, found in Kingston, has you defend an objective against two waves of enemies to the left and right and a few enemies that occasionally spawn straight ahead.

The rewards from these Special Operations are typically quite good on their own, including Shape Stabilizers and Anomalous Materials. You can see the rewards for each Special Operation on the queue screen upon selecting it. For example, the Special Operation in Kingston offers Anomalous Materials 004 and 005, Shape Stabilizer Form 1, and 19,000 Gold as potential rewards.

Are Special Operations worth running?

If your goal is just to get Anomalous Materials and Shape Stabilizers, there are better things you could do. Unless it’s for specific resources, these only give about two rewards every half hour, which isn’t a great rate of return. However, Special Operations are one of the best ways to level your Descendant and weapons. I got a good handful of levels off my first run for both Bunny and the Thunder Cage, meaning I can slap one or two more Modules on each without worrying about capacity limits.