Destiny 2 Deepsight and Weapon Crafting Guide

Weapon crafting is one of the best things Destiny 2 has added in years. Instead of begging the random number god for a good roll, you can just build the gun you want and pick the perks yourself. The catch is the whole system comes with its own grind, a stack of odd currencies, and a learning curve that the game does a pretty bad job of explaining.

So here's how Deepsight Resonance actually works, how you turn those red-border drops into craftable patterns, what to choose at the Relic, how to keep your crafting materials topped up, and which guns are worth making first. Most of the craftable pool is older gear at this point, because since The Final Shape Bungie has mostly made new weapons enhanceable instead of craftable. Plenty of strong options are still in there, though, and the ones worth chasing are worth chasing hard.

How Deepsight Resonance Weapons Work

Deepsight Resonance is the doorway into crafting. A weapon with Deepsight on it shows up with a red border around its icon, and you'll hear a sharp little sound the moment one drops into your inventory. That red border is the whole point. It means the gun has a hidden progress bar tied to its crafting pattern.

Only weapons that can actually be crafted drop with Deepsight. So if you see a red border, that gun has a pattern waiting somewhere in the system. A normal drop of the same weapon won't help with crafting at all, no matter how many you pull.

The red-border gun shoots and feels just like the regular version. The only difference is the extra Attunement Progress bar sitting on its detail screen. You fill that bar by getting kills and finishing activities with the weapon equipped. Crucible matches, strikes, patrols, raids, anything counts as long as the gun is in your hands. When the bar hits 100 percent, an extract node lights up in the weapon's perk tray, and you can pull the resonance out of it. That extraction feeds progress toward the weapon's pattern, and it also hands you a pile of crafting materials to boot.

You don't have to keep the gun to get the pattern progress, either. Dismantling a red-border weapon counts too. The tradeoff is materials. Finishing the bar gives you way more of the good stuff than scrapping the gun early does. So if you can stand to equip it for a strike or two, do that first and then extract.

Once a weapon's pattern is fully unlocked, copies of that gun stop dropping with Deepsight. The game figures you're done with it, and it stops wasting your drops on red borders you no longer need. That's a nice touch, because it means the red borders you see later are always for patterns you haven't finished yet.

Unlocking Weapon Patterns Through Extraction

A pattern is the blueprint that lets you craft a weapon at the Relic. You unlock one by extracting Deepsight from a certain number of the same gun. How many depends on the weapon. Some need just one extraction. Others ask for as many as five. Austringer, for example, needs five. A few Throne World guns only need two.

You can watch your progress any time. Open the Triumphs page, then look for Patterns and Catalysts. That menu lists every craftable weapon in the game and shows exactly how many red borders you still owe before the pattern unlocks. It's the single most useful screen in the whole crafting system, and for some reason it's buried under Triumphs.

Each extraction only counts as one chunk of progress, no matter how you do it. Finish the bar or scrap the gun, you get one segment either way. So a five-pattern weapon means five separate red-border drops, not one drop done five times. That detail trips up a lot of new players.

The grind is the real pain point, because red borders drop on a random chance. You might get three in a single activity. You might go dry for weeks on the one you actually want. Raids and dungeons are the worst offenders, since you only get so many drops per week from them.

Where red borders actually come from

Red borders show up on the same guns you'd normally pull from an activity, just with that random Deepsight chance layered on top. Raids, dungeons, seasonal activities, destination chests, and the rotating exotic missions all drop them. The reliable routes are usually seasonal vendors, where you can focus engrams toward a specific weapon and reroll for the red border, plus the exotic mission rotator, which lets you farm older craftable guns on a schedule. If a gun has a pattern, the Patterns and Catalysts screen tells you its drop source, so start there before you guess.

Deepsight Harmonizers: the shortcut

This is where Deepsight Harmonizers come in. A Harmonizer is a currency that lets you slap Deepsight onto a normal copy of a craftable weapon you already own. So if you've got four out of five Cataclysmics done and the last one refuses to drop red, you burn a Harmonizer on a normal Cataclysmic, and that fifth extraction is yours.

They're meant for finishing off stubborn patterns, not for doing the whole grind from zero. You can grab a few each season, mostly through the season pass and Banshee-44's reputation track. Raid weapons also cost Spoils of Conquest on top of the Harmonizer, so save them for patterns that are genuinely stuck. A normal world-drop weapon that needs five? Just keep farming it. A raid gun sitting at four out of five for months? That's your Harmonizer target.

Choosing Perks and Enhanced Traits at the Enclave

Actual crafting happens at the Relic inside the Enclave, which you reach straight from the Director. You unlock it by playing through the first mission of The Witch Queen campaign, where the game walks you through shaping a glaive called The Enigma. After that, the Relic is yours to use whenever.

Shaping a weapon is basically a seven-step checklist:

1. Pick the Intrinsic frame (this bumps a base stat, like range or handling, not the weapon's archetype).
2. Pick a barrel perk.
3. Pick a magazine perk.
4. Pick your first trait, the third column.
5. Pick your second trait, the fourth column.
6. Slot a Memento if you have one (optional).
7. Finalize and pay.

The first three columns are passive perks, the stuff like barrel and magazine. The last two are the active traits, the perks that actually define how the gun plays. Things like Incandescent, Frenzy, Hatchling, Outlaw, the whole point of the build. You spend Resonant Elements on most of this, with a chunk of Resonant Alloy going toward the intrinsic and the initial shape.

A freshly shaped gun doesn't come with every perk open. It starts with a small selection, and you unlock more by leveling the weapon through use. Get kills, finish activities, and the weapon earns XP toward its next level. Most perks open up somewhere in the first 16 to 20 levels, so plan to live with the gun for a bit before it reaches its final form. You can also buy levels outright with Glimmer and upgrade materials if you're impatient and sitting on a pile of cores.

Enhanced traits

The real prize of crafting is enhanced traits. Once a weapon hits certain level thresholds (around level 7 for the enhanced intrinsic, and higher levels for the column perks), you can Reshape it at the Relic and upgrade perks to their enhanced versions. Enhanced perks do basically the same thing as the regular ones, just a touch stronger. A gun with an enhanced intrinsic and two enhanced traits gets a gold border, like a fully masterworked weapon, and that little stat bump adds up over a long fight.

Enhanced traits cost Ascendant Alloy and Enhancement Prisms, which is why those are the rare materials you hold onto. Reshaping also lets you swap perks freely, which is the part random-roll guns can't match. Don't like your roll? Walk back to the Relic and change it, no refarming required.

There's one modern wrinkle worth knowing. Since The Final Shape, Bungie lets you add enhanced perks to a lot of random-roll weapons too, through Enhancement Tiers. Tier 1 swaps the masterwork for an enhanced intrinsic. Tier 2, at weapon level 11, enhances the left-column perks. Tier 3, at level 17, handles the right column. So if a newer gun isn't craftable, it might still be enhanceable. The catch is you can only enhance the perks that already rolled on the gun. You can't pick new ones. That's still the big advantage of a true crafted weapon: you choose exactly what's on it, every column, and you can change your mind later.

Farming Resonant Elements and Crafting Materials

The material economy is the part that trips people up, mostly because half of it doesn't even show up in your inventory. Here's the rundown, plain.

Resonant Elements are the everyday crafting currency. You spend them on barrels, magazines, and traits whenever you shape or reshape something. The main way to get them is by extracting from red-border weapons. Finishing a Deepsight bar gives you about 300 Resonant Elements. Dismantling a red-border gun only gives around 100. The math is simple: complete the bar whenever you can, and only scrap early if you're in a hurry. Since these don't appear in your inventory, you check your balance by grabbing the Relic Tether at the crafting table.

Resonant Alloy is what you spend on intrinsics and the initial shape of a weapon. You get it from dismantling legendary weapons, roughly one per purple gun, which means it piles up naturally as you play and shard loot. Shaping a new gun costs around five Resonant Alloy, and reshaping for an enhanced intrinsic runs closer to twenty.

Harmonic Alloy is the raid version of Resonant Alloy. It only drops from dismantling raid weapons, and you need it to shape raid guns. The cap sits at 50, so if you raid a lot, hang onto raid weapons in your vault instead of shredding them the instant they drop.

Ascendant Alloy is the rare one, and the thing you'll run short on most often. You need it for enhanced traits, exotic crafts, and exotic catalysts. Sources are tighter: Master Rahool sells one per week, you can pull them from Banshee-44's reputation track, weekly Witch Queen campaign missions, Master Wellspring, and various endgame activities. When you find yourself broke on Ascendant Alloy, it's usually because you went heavy on enhancing several guns at once.

Glimmer and Enhancement Cores grease every transaction, and you'll burn through plenty of both over time. Glimmer you get from basically everything. Cores come from dismantling legendary gear, Banshee-44 bounties, and a pile of activity sources.

Keeping the cupboard stocked

The steady-state strategy is to never let a red border go to waste. Even if you've already unlocked a pattern, finishing the bar on a duplicate still hands you those 300 Resonant Elements, which is a better return than sharding it blind. Run your normal activities, hold the gun you're working on, and extract before you delete.

For raid crafting, the bottleneck is almost always Harmonic Alloy and Spoils of Conquest, not the patterns themselves. Vault raid drops you don't need and dismantle them later when you're shaping. For everything else, Master Rahool's weekly Ascendant Alloy and Banshee's reputation track are the two stops you want to hit every week without thinking about it. Do those two things consistently and the rest of the economy mostly takes care of itself.

Which Weapons Are Worth Crafting First

You can't craft everything, and crafting materials are too precious to waste on a gun you'll shelve a week later. So pick a few that cover real roles: add clear, champion and boss damage, and something for PvP if you care about it. Here's a short list of weapons that have stayed strong and are worth the pattern grind.

The Call is a Strand rocket sidearm from the Pale Heart, and it's one of the easiest big-hitting crafts to chase. Rocket sidearms are absurd right now, and this one lets you tailor the roll exactly. Lead from Gold in the first column keeps it fed when you've got a heavy weapon out too, and One For All or Hatchling in the second covers the rest. Pale Heart chests and activities drop the red borders, and they're not hard to come by.

Aberrant Action is the Solar rocket sidearm to build if you like burning everything. It rolls Heal Clip and Incandescent together, which is a brutal combo for Solar builds. You farm it from Episode: Echoes activities. Pair it with the right Solar fragments and it clears rooms on its own, healing your team in the process.

Calus Mini-Tool is still one of the best Solar SMGs in the game for close-range add clear. Incandescent plus Threat Detector is the bread-and-butter roll, and it drops from the Presage exotic mission when that's in the weekly rotation. If your main is Solar, make this early and you won't regret it.

Zaouli's Bane is the budget Sunshot. It's a Solar hand cannon from the King's Fall raid that needs five patterns, so it's a longer grind, but Explosive Payload with Incandescent turns it into a one-gun add-melting machine. Worth it if you raid regularly and want a Solar primary you don't have to pull an exotic for.

For boss damage, Cataclysmic from the Vow of the Disciple raid has been a top-tier linear fusion rifle for ages. If you want something you can get without setting foot in a raid, Taipan is a Void linear fusion you can pick up basically for free from a crafting quest, and a Frenzy roll makes it punch well above its weight for solo content. That free Taipan is probably the smartest first heavy craft for a new player.

Nullify is the pulse rifle to craft if you run the Salvation's Edge raid. Heal Clip or Firefly paired with Incandescent makes it a clean, low-recoil Solar workhorse. And if SMGs are more your speed, Subjunctive is an Arc SMG from the Starcrossed exotic mission with Threat Detector and Swashbuckler (or Golden Tricorn), a strong alternative to the Ikelos SMG.

There are exotic crafts too. Whisper of the Worm is now craftable through The Whisper mission, and its enhanced White Nail perk plus Field Prep make it a serious boss sniper. Crafting an exotic doesn't hand you enhanced traits the way legendaries do, but you still get to pick the roll, which is huge for something like Whisper.

A simple priority order

If you're starting from nothing, build a primary add-clear gun first (The Call or Calus Mini-Tool), then a heavy-hitting special or heavy for boss damage (Taipan or Cataclysmic), then branch into situational picks and raid crafts. Don't dump Ascendant Alloy into enhancing a weapon you're not sure you'll keep. Level it, live with it for a week, and only enhance once you know it's a keeper. The materials are the slow part of this whole system. The patterns come and go, but the alloys are what actually gate how fast you can finish a build, so spend them like they matter.