The Dawning returns to Destiny 2 for 2025 with major changes that shake up how you'll approach the event. For the first time, the Dawning integrates with the Portal system, bringing new farming strategies, higher-tier rewards, and a completely different grind compared to previous years. This guide covers everything you need to get the most out of the event, from initial setup to endgame weapon farming.
Event Schedule and Availability
The Dawning 2025 runs for three weeks starting December 16, 2025, and wraps up on January 6, 2026. The event kicks off at weekly reset and stays live until the following reset.
End Time: Tuesday, January 6, 2026, at 17:00 UTC (09:00 PST)
The event is free for all Destiny 2 players regardless of DLC ownership.
Getting Started
Travel to the Tower and find Eva Levante. She'll give you the introductory quest that unlocks the core event mechanics.
Initial Quest Walkthrough
- Receive Eva's Holiday Oven - Eva gives you the Holiday Oven along with enough ingredients and Essence of Dawning to bake your first cookie. You can access the oven through your quest tab, inventory screen (accessories section), or the event page in the Portal interface.
- Bake and Deliver Your First Gjallardoodle - Bake a Gjallardoodle cookie with the provided materials and deliver it to Commander Zavala. He'll give you a gift in return, which is how the cookie-baking reward loop works.
- Purchase Your First Upgrade - Return to Eva and you'll receive Dawning Spirit currency. The quest requires buying your first upgrade, which costs 20 Dawning Spirit and unlocks Boons of Friendship. You can pick up three boons daily from Eva, and they're stored in your consumables tab.
- Complete a Snowball Fight Activity - Access the new Dawning: Snowball Fight through Crucible Ops or the event page. This mode replaces weapons and abilities with snowballs that need multiple hits to eliminate opponents. You'll also build a snowball super for area-of-effect attacks. Finishing this activity rewards loot and advances your quest.
- Claim Your First Event Track Reward - Go to the event home page in the Portal and claim your first rank reward. This introduces the progression track, which includes Tier 5 weapons and other valuable rewards.
- Return to Eva Levante - After claiming your first rank, speak with Eva again. She updates your quest and provides more daily Boons of Friendship.
Cookie Delivery Helper Quest
After finishing the main quest, you'll get a secondary quest called Cookie Delivery Helper. This requires baking and delivering the two new cookie recipes.
First Delivery: Dark Matter Drizzlers
This cookie needs 1 Ether Cane (Fallen enemies), 1 Dark Frosting (Stasis or Strand ability kills), and 15 Essence of Dawning (activity completions). Deliver this to Dean Rebecca on Caldera. Players without Edge of Fate can find her in the Caldera solo ops activity. Edge of Fate owners can load directly into the zone.
Second Delivery: Peanut Butter Paw Prints
This cookie needs 1 Dark Ether Cane (Scorn enemies), 1 Balanced Flavor (bow, sniper, scout, or pulse rifle kills), and 15 Essence of Dawning. Deliver this to Archie in the Tower Annex, opposite Ada-1.
Currency System
Dawning 2025 uses three currencies that work together to drive progression. Managing these efficiently determines how fast you farm.
Cookie Baking System
Understanding ingredients and recipes lets you participate effectively in the Dawning. This year's strategy leans heavily on Portal activities, but cookie baking still matters for extra rewards and Spirit generation.
Ingredient Categories
Cookies need two ingredient types plus Essence of Dawning.
Green Ingredients (Enemy Type-Based)
| Ingredient | Source |
|---|---|
| Ether Cane | Fallen enemies |
| Vex Milk | Vex enemies |
| Cabal Oil | Cabal enemies |
| Dark Ether Cane | Scorn enemies |
| Taken Butter | Taken enemies |
| Chitin Powder | Hive enemies |
Blue Ingredients (Action-Based)
| Ingredient | Source |
|---|---|
| Personal Touch | Melee kills |
| Sharp Flavor | Precision kills |
| Finishing Touch | Finisher kills |
| Impossible Heat | Solar ability kills |
| Electric Flavor | Arc ability kills |
| Null Taste | Void ability kills |
| Dark Frosting | Stasis or Strand ability kills |
| Balanced Flavor | Bow, sniper, scout, or pulse rifle kills |
| Bullet Spray | Auto rifle or SMG kills |
| Multifaceted Flavors | Fusion rifle or grenade launcher kills |
| Flash of Inspiration | Generating Orbs of Power |
| Delicious Explosion | Rocket launcher or grenade kills |
Eva Upgrades
Eva sells multiple upgrades with Dawning Spirit. These have different values depending on your farming approach.
Must-Buy Upgrades
- Boons of Friendship (20 Spirit) - Quest Required. Unlocks daily collection of three Boons from Eva. Activate these during activities to grant extra weapons to your whole fireteam.
- Quintessence (20 Spirit) - Activities drop bonus Essence. This tackles the main bottleneck and should be your first purchase after finishing the intro quest.
- Bountiful Harvest (20 Spirit) - Orders and daily challenges drop ingredients. Since orders complete naturally during play, this gives steady ingredients without targeted farming.
- Essential Harvest (20 Spirit) - Orders and daily challenges drop small amounts of Essence. This supplements your gains between major completions.
Secondary Upgrades
- Season's Spirit (20 Spirit) - Activities drop bonus Spirit. Useful but lower priority than Essence since upgrades are one-time purchases and engram focusing is the only ongoing Spirit sink.
- Snowball Upgrades (10 Spirit each) - These modify snowball behavior in Snowstorm modifier activities and Snowball Fight mode. Must be bought in sequence: Long Winter (longer slow duration), Longer Winter (more slow stacks), Stay Frosty (snowballs leave Stasis mines), The Gift That Keeps on Giving (shattering frozen targets drops snowballs), The Longest Winter (snowballs instantly freeze targets). Only grab these if you're spending serious time in snowball content. They don't affect your main farming loop.
Portal Activities Revolution
Previous Dawning events centered on cookie baking for weapons. You baked cookies, delivered them in bulk, and hoped for weapon drops from gifts. The rates were terrible. Players often delivered 50 cookies and got only two weapons.
Dawning 2025 changes this completely. Portal activities now offer guaranteed Dawning Engrams as completion rewards, creating a far more reliable farming path.
Why Portal Activities Work Better
Portal activities give you multiple rewards simultaneously: guaranteed Engrams (amount varies by activity), Essence from completion, ingredients from kills, event track XP, and potential Boon rewards. Every run feeds multiple progression systems at once.
| Portal Activity | Engrams Per Run | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|
| Liminality | 3 Engrams | Advanced/Master |
| Glassway | 2 Engrams | Advanced/Master |
Boons of Friendship
Boons add another weapon drop layer on top of guaranteed Engrams. Using them right multiplies your weapon acquisition significantly.
How Boons Work
Activate a Boon from your consumables during an activity. When you finish, all fireteam members get "Gifts in Return" that decrypt into Dawning weapons, just like cookie delivery rewards.
Smart Usage Pattern
Individual Usage: One player activating a Boon gives rewards to all three fireteam members.
Stacking Issue: Multiple players can pop Boons in the same activity for more rewards, but this wastes your limited supply.
Better Pattern: Coordinate so only one player activates a Boon per activity. Rotate who uses one each run. This spreads your coverage across more activities before running out. Player A pops one on run one (all three benefit), Player B on run two (all three benefit), Player C on run three (all three benefit). Three players with three Boons each can cover nine activities instead of three.
Essence Farming Strategies
Portal activities give Essence as a completion bonus, but targeted Essence farming helps when you want to convert ingredients into cookies for Spirit.
Historical Fast Farm: Shattered Throne Final Boss
The Shattered Throne final boss, Dul Incaru, works as a fast Essence farm. The fight finishes in about 30 seconds with good execution, and checkpoint trading lets you repeat without running the full dungeon. Getting the checkpoint initially requires either completing up to that point or joining someone who has it saved.
Story Mission Checkpoint Farms
Glory Beyond Final Mission (Renegades): Progress to the final section (one minute to leave timer), wait for the checkpoint message, then wipe. To save the checkpoint, one player loads in, swaps to a different character, then rejoins. Complete the mission, skip the cutscene, collect rewards. With Eva's upgrades, this pays about 40 Essence (normal) or 50 Essence (hard) plus 2 Spirit per run.
First Contact Mission (Neomuna): Progress to the drop pod section, wipe for the checkpoint, use the same character-swap method. This works for all players regardless of campaign ownership.
Shadowkeep Mission AFK Farm
When "In the Deep" is the weekly Shadowkeep mission, you can set up a passive farm. Progress until you need to take the Hive Cryptoglyph, pick it up, wait for the screen fade, then wipe. After respawning, take the cryptoglyph again and position in a corner.
On Titan with sunspot builds (Loreley Splendor works well), Thrall spawn continuously and die to sunspots, dropping ingredients and triggering Starfarer Spirit generation. You can stay mostly AFK while accumulating Hive ingredients, Essence, and Spirit. Alternative farms exist at Whisper and after Golgoroth in King's Fall, but Shadowkeep offers the best ingredient variety for self-contained baking loops.
Event Track and Rewards
The Dawning Event Home uses the same structure as Festival of the Lost and Solstice, with daily challenges, weekly challenges, and a numbered progression track.
Challenge Rewards
Daily challenges give 5 Spirit and reset daily for steady income. Weekly challenges give 30 Spirit plus 30 Essence, reset weekly, and should be prioritized for the resource boost.
Event Track Contents
Weapons: Tier 5 Dawning Engrams (random weapons), Tier 5 Holofoil weapons with random rolls, three perks per column.
Cosmetics: Exotic ship, exotic sparrow, ghost shell, shader (final rank), emblems.
Currencies and Materials: Enhancement materials, Iridescent Engrams (Eververse cosmetics you don't own, like Reign of the Nine).
Consumables: Aurora Trail consumables.
Dawning 2025 Weapon Pool
Three weapons make up the core loot pool, all reissued with refreshed perks.
This sidearm is the Arc option in the pool. It's a precision frame with new perk options compared to previous seasons.
This wave frame GL brings Stasis crowd control with strong new rolls.
Linear fusions aren't meta right now, but Mistral Lift has strong rolls that could become relevant if the weapon type returns to prominence.
The Secret Weapon: Gizmo Weft
Beyond the three standard weapons, a fourth ultra-rare weapon can drop during the event.
This special ammo Strand GL uses the Micro Missile frame and is tied to the upcoming Call to Arms event. It works like Submersion (the Stasis heavy crossbow) during Edge of Fate, dropping as an ultra-rare bonus from event activities.
Snowball Fight Activity
The Dawning adds a new Crucible mode called Dawning: Snowball Fight, accessible through Crucible Ops or the event page.
Gameplay Mechanics
The mode disables weapons and abilities, giving everyone infinite snowballs that need multiple hits to eliminate opponents. A super meter builds during play for a large area-of-effect snowball attack. Matches happen on standard Crucible maps in third-person perspective.
Rewards
Snowball Fight drops multiple Tier 5 items per match: Dawning weapons, Crucible gear, about 29-32 Essence per activity (with Quintessence), and Dark Frosting ingredients from snowball kills.
Complete Farming Route
Here's the full approach for maximizing weapon acquisition.
Foundation Setup (First Session)
- Complete both Eva quests (intro and Cookie Delivery Helper)
- Buy the three critical upgrades: Quintessence (bonus Essence), Bountiful Harvest (ingredients from orders), Essential Harvest (small Essence from orders)
- Equip Starfarer 7M if you own it
- Discover all recipes and masterwork your oven
Primary Farming (Ongoing)
- Coordinate with a fireteam for Portal farming, focusing on Liminality (3 engrams) and Glassway (2 engrams)
- Rotate Boons so one player activates per activity
- Maintain B-grade or higher
- Decrypt engrams as you go, save ingredients for later
Cookie Baking Sessions
- Use accumulated ingredients to bake in bulk
- Deliver to NPCs for Gifts in Return
- Open gifts for weapons
- Convert Spirit into focused engrams from Eva (50 Spirit each)
Essence Top-Up
When Essence runs low but ingredients are plentiful:
- Run Shadowkeep farm for passive generation
- Complete dailies and weeklies
- Use story checkpoint methods with rotation to avoid lockouts
Completion Focus (Final Days)
- Finish remaining track ranks for guaranteed Holofoils
- Complete triumphs for Star Baker
- Buy desired cosmetics
- Stockpile materials for next season
Time Investment Estimates
Casual Daily Minimum (30-60 minutes): Collect three Boons from Eva (2 minutes), complete one daily (15-30 minutes), run one Portal activity (15-30 minutes).
Intensive Farming Session (2.5-3 hours): 10 Portal activities with coordinated Boons yields 20-30 Engrams, 20-30 Gifts in Return, plus substantial Essence and ingredients.
Weekly Commitment (5-9 hours): 1-2 hours for three weeklies, 3.5-7 hours for dailies across seven days.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Don't bake cookies before masterworking your oven - the 33% Essence cost reduction means mass-producing early wastes resources
- Don't stack multiple Boons in one activity - spreading them across activities multiplies your total buffed runs more efficiently
- Don't farm story missions exclusively without rotation - the lockout will interrupt your Essence gains
- Don't skip Eva's resource upgrades (Quintessence and harvest upgrades) - these directly impact farming speed
- Don't run Portal activities below B-grade if you want engrams - the bonus loot requirement applies
- Don't leave Starfarer 7M unequipped if you own it - this wastes substantial passive Spirit generation
- Discover all recipes first, then masterwork oven before mass baking
- Coordinate Boon usage with fireteam - one player per activity
- Mix activity types to avoid story mission lockouts
- Prioritize Quintessence and harvest upgrades immediately
- Maintain B-grade or higher in all Portal activities
- Equip Starfarer 7M throughout entire event
Platform and Activity Access
- Dawning is cross-platform and available to all players
- Shadowkeep mission farm needs Shadowkeep ownership or must be the weekly featured mission
- Caldera access works through solo ops for everyone (free), while direct zone access needs Edge of Fate
- Shattered Throne checkpoint is free but must be acquired through completion or joining someone with it saved
- Portal activities need appropriate power level for selected difficulty, and some may require specific expansions
Why This Year Is Different
Previous Dawning events centered cookie baking as the main progression. Players identified which NPCs wanted which cookies, farmed specific ingredients, baked in bulk, delivered in bulk, and hoped for weapon drops from gifts.
Dawning 2025 flips this. Portal activities provide guaranteed engrams with repeatable farming. Cookie baking becomes supplementary, a way to convert activity byproducts (ingredients from Portal runs) into extra rewards.
This shift makes Dawning 2025 feel more like endgame farming with festive theme than a holiday event with weapons attached. The Tier 5 quality reinforces this. These aren't limited-viability "event weapons." They're genuine endgame loot with full perk selections that compete with raid and dungeon drops.
Boons of Friendship amplify this endgame feel. Coordinated fireteam play with scheduled boon usage resembles raid farming or dungeon checkpoint strategies.
Priority Checklist
To get the most out of Dawning 2025:
- Complete foundation quests and masterwork your oven for full efficiency
- Buy the resource-boosting upgrades from Eva (Quintessence, Bountiful Harvest, Essential Harvest) before anything else
- Focus farming on Portal activities with high Engram rewards (Liminality and Glassway specifically)
- Coordinate Boon usage in fireteams with one player per activity for maximum coverage
- Bake cookies using ingredients from Portal runs to convert byproducts into extra rewards
- Maintain B-grade performance in Portal activities since it's required for engram drops
- Equip Starfarer 7M if available for passive Spirit generation
- Complete dailies and weeklies for consistent Spirit and Essence income
- Claim track ranks regularly for guaranteed Tier 5 Holofoils
- Watch for Gizmo Weft drops throughout your farming - it's ultra-rare but rewarding
Dawning 2025 represents a new approach to Destiny 2's holiday event. Understanding Portal integration, currency relationships, and farming patterns lets you acquire Tier 5 weapons efficiently while enjoying the festive content. You're chasing god rolls, collecting cosmetics, or earning Star Baker. These strategies give you the foundation for success during the three-week window.