Destiny 2 Exotic Cipher Guide: Sources and Monument Purchases

Exotic Ciphers are the tokens that gate most of Destiny 2's retired exotics. Hand one to the Monument to Lost Lights and you walk out with a gun whose original quest got vaulted years back. Hand one to Xur instead and you can pick up an extra Fated Engram past his weekly limit. The catch is the drip: once the season pass pays out, you're looking at roughly one a week. So it helps to know where they come from, what they cost to spend, and which gun actually deserves the next one.

Earning Exotic Ciphers

The in-game description is famously vague - "present this to Xur or the Monument to Lost Lights to receive a reward" - but the real headline is the cap. You can hold five ciphers at once, no more. That limit got raised from one back in Season of the Deep, and it should shape your whole week: any source that pays out while you're sitting at five is wasted. Spend before you stack.

Here's the full source list at a glance, and the details follow:

| Source | How often | What you do | |---|---|---| | Xur's Xenology quest | 1 per week | Finish 21 progress points of playlist activities | | Rewards Pass free track | 1 per season | Reach rank 55 and claim it | | Exotic Orders (Seasonal Hub) | Random | Complete Legendary Orders for a shot at an Exotic Order | | Triumphs | One-off | Claim finished Triumphs that pay ciphers | | Master Rahool rank | On max-out | Grind his vendor rank to the top |

Xur and the Xenology quest

The weekly workhorse. Xur lands Friday at the daily reset and leaves at Tuesday's weekly reset, and his camp rotates between a handful of patrol spots and the Tower. Pull up a location tracker if hunting him down gets old (plenty of sites post his spot within minutes of reset).

The quest, Xenology, hangs out on the second page of his inventory. Grab it every single weekend, because the payout is one cipher per week and there's no banking weeks you skip.

The ask is 21 progress points. Vanguard playlist runs tick the bar, exotic playlist missions count too, and Crucible or Gambit matches count as long as you win them. Tougher activities pay extra progress, and so does running with clanmates. Exotic missions like Whisper or Zero Hour chew through the bar fast when they're in rotation, which makes them the lazy shortcut. Finish it, head back to Xur, and turn it in before he packs up Tuesday night to be safe.

The free Rewards Pass track

Every pass puts one cipher on the free track at rank 55, which lands around the halfway mark. Normal play gets you there without any grinding at all. One warning though: pass rewards you never claim evaporate when the season ends. Open the pass screen and actually collect the thing.

The slower taps: Exotic Orders, Triumphs, and Rahool

The Monument of Triumph update in June 2026 added another source. Open the Director, hit Destinations, and the Seasonal Hub shows your Active Orders on the left. Orders come in three rarities: Common, Legendary, and Exotic. Finishing Common Orders builds progress toward a Legendary one, and every Legendary completion has a shot at rolling up into an Exotic Order.

Exotic Orders can pay out a cipher, but they can just as easily hand you materials or an exotic catalyst instead. Treat it as a bonus rather than a plan. Community testing puts a Legendary Order at roughly one per 30 to 45 minutes of Arena Ops, the six-player matchmade playlist, which makes that the fastest order farm right now.

Two smaller taps round it out. Some Triumphs award ciphers, and those sit in the Triumphs menu until you claim them - worth a scroll through your seals every so often, since people finish one and forget to collect for months. Maxing out Master Rahool's vendor rank hands one over too, which mostly matters if you're already drowning in engrams.

Where ciphers go

Two sinks. The big one is the Monument kiosk for retired exotics. The smaller one is Xur: he normally sells one Fated Engram a week, and a cipher buys extras past that limit. Fated Engrams only decrypt into exotics you don't own yet, so if your collection has gaps, that's a decent backup use for a spare. Most people still spend at the Monument, and that's the right call nine times out of ten.

Visiting the Monument

Fast travel to the Tower and head for the vault wall in the Courtyard. The Monument to Lost Lights is the big round terminal sitting between the two vault kiosks (you've probably sprinted past it a hundred times). Interact with it and the whole back catalog opens up.

What's actually on the shelf

The kiosk sorts exotic weapons by the era they came from. First archive page: Red War, Forsaken, Shadowkeep, and Beyond Light. Second page: The Witch Queen, Lightfall, and The Final Shape, plus a Legacy Gear section holding old ritual and pinnacle legendaries like Felwinter's Lie, Adored, and The Mountaintop. Anything whose original quest, season, or raid got vaulted lives here, because that content isn't coming back to earn it from.

Licensing matters, annoyingly. Red War guns sell to anyone with the game installed. The Forsaken tab wants the Forsaken Pack. Shadowkeep, Beyond Light, The Witch Queen, and Lightfall tabs each want their own expansion. Tessellation needs The Final Shape with the Annual Pass edition attached, and the game blocks the sale if you don't hold the license. Annoying, but better than saving up for a gun you can't buy.

One oddball worth knowing: Always on Time, a sparrow, sits in the Forsaken raid section priced like a raid exotic. People still buy it, because it's widely treated as the fastest sparrow in the game and there's no other way to get one anymore.

Hover a gun and the full cost list shows up front - Glimmer, materials, shards, the works. No partial payments and no installments. The kiosk takes everything at once or nothing.

Comparing Legacy Exotics

So who actually wants what here? The short version: PvE players grab utility, raiders grab damage, and Crucible folks grab hand cannons.

The PvE all-rounders

Witherhoard is the default answer and has been for years. It's a grenade launcher that plants a blight pool on the ground, and anything standing in that pool keeps taking damage while you shoot something else entirely. Drop a pool under a boss, swap to your heavy, and the two damage streams stack. It works in patrol, dungeons, raids, GMs, everywhere, and it sits in the cheapest cost tier on top of that. Nothing else in the kiosk gives this much general use per cipher.

Ticuu's Divination is the other cheap-tier sweetheart. Hip-fire to slap Sacred Flame tags on a crowd, then land fully drawn arrows to detonate every tag at once. It's great add clear on its own, and it goes from good to genuinely silly once the catalyst is on. Bow fans can also look at Le Monarque, whose poisoned arrows spread damage and shut down recovery in Crucible too.

The damage specialists

Izanagi's Burden is the classic burst pick. Hold reload and the magazine folds into one honed round that hits like a truck, which made it a DPS-phase staple for ages. It costs more than most (150,000 Glimmer, 250 materials, and 2 Ascendant Shards), and ammo changes have knocked it around over the years. Short damage windows are still its home turf.

Anarchy is the lazy king. Stick a grenade on the boss, stick another nearby, then do whatever you want while arc chains tick away. It's been nerfed plenty and it's still dangerous. The tax: 240 Spoils of Conquest on top of the usual bill, and Spoils only come out of raid encounters, so this pick belongs to people who actually raid.

Whisper of the Worm and Outbreak Perfected both live in the top cost tier, and both have a catch: their exotic missions still rotate through the game and drop the guns for free. Check the rotator before spending a cipher. Sleeper Simulant sits a tier down and puts in quiet, dependable work as a linear fusion when rockets bore you.

Two picks that earn their slot in hard content: Leviathan's Breath is the only heavy bow in the game, and it stuns Unstoppable Champions without needing a seasonal mod, which makes it a Grandmaster Nightfall favorite. Eriana's Vow fires slug rounds that punch straight through enemy shields, so barrier enemies stop being a wall. Both sit in the cheap cost tier, too, which helps when your shard pile is thin.

Crucible picks

Ace of Spades is the best PvP gun in the kiosk for most hands. A kill plus a reload lights up Memento Mori, which stacks bonus damage across the next magazine. Thorn poisons and keeps ticking, which punishes anyone trying to recover behind cover. The Last Word melts at close range if hip-fire hand cannons are your thing. Lumina's over in the support lane healing allies, though a Warlock well does that job for free.

The fun bin and the skip list

Jotunn tracks and burns. Devil's Ruin charges up a laser mid-magazine. Duality flips between pellets and a precision slug. Ruinous Effigy turns kills into little orbs you can smack people with. All fine picks once the important stuff is handled.

The community skip list, more or less: Legend of Acrius (pure sentiment these days), The Manticore, Cryosthesia 77K, and Lorentz Driver, which fell off hard after its nerfs. Somebody in every thread defends each one, and that's fine. Just don't make any of them your first buy.

Checking Other Currency Costs

The cipher gets all the attention, but it's barely half the bill. Here's the full price structure off the wiki tables:

| Cost tier | Glimmer | Cipher | Planetary materials | Ascendant Shards | |---|---|---|---|---| | Cheap: Sturm, MIDA Multi-Tool, Witherhoard, Ticuu's Divination, Eriana's Vow | 100,000 | 1 | 150 | 1 | | Mid: Ace of Spades, Thorn, Jotunn, Bad Juju, Truth | 125,000 | 1 | 200 | 1 | | Top: Whisper of the Worm, Outbreak Perfected, Izanagi's Burden | 150,000 | 1 | 250 | 2 | | Witch Queen and Lightfall era: Trespasser, Delicate Tomb, Verglas Curve | 100,000 | 1 | 200 | 1 | | Vaulted raid exotics: Anarchy, Tarrabah, Legend of Acrius | 150,000 | 1 | 240 Spoils of Conquest instead | 2 |

A few notes on the side bill:

Glimmer caps at 250,000, so a top-tier gun eats more than half a full wallet. Run strikes or patrol a bit beforehand if you're broke. Glimmer comes from basically everything, so this is rarely a wall for long.

The planetary material changes per gun and matches the destination its original quest lived on. Patrol the right spot, smash nodes, run public events, and stacks pile up quick. Boring but fast.

Ascendant Shards are the real second chokepoint. They come from Master Nightfalls, Trials wins, pass ranks, and the occasional Banshee-44 or Ada-1 sale for Legendary Shards. If you're saving shards to masterwork armor, remember every kiosk gun wants one or two of them too.

Spoils of Conquest drop from raid encounters, period. Active raids pay them out as you clear, so a few full clears banks most of what Anarchy costs.

Two footnotes. Ritual weapons at the kiosk don't cost ciphers at all: 75,000 Glimmer, 100 materials, 2 Enhancement Prisms, and 1 Ascendant Shard each, with the big Crucible pinnacles (The Mountaintop, Not Forgotten, Redrix's Broadsword) running 150,000 Glimmer, 7 Prisms, and 2 Shards. And if you bought the Forsaken Pack, check for Forsaken Ciphers in your inventory - those cover the full price on the Forsaken tab, and spares can be swapped for Ascendant Shards at the kiosk.

Choosing a First Purchase

The flowchart is short. Mostly PvE, new or returning? Witherhoard, full stop - cheapest tier, one shard, works in every activity in the game. Raid regularly with Spoils piling up? Anarchy first, Izanagi's second. Live in the Crucible? Ace of Spades. Want a bow that carries both modes? Ticuu's Divination, or Le Monarque if poison sounds fun.

If Ascendant Shards are what you're short on, lean cheap-tier. The gap between one shard and two doesn't sound like much until you need those shards for masterwork slots. Better to buy two cheap guns across two weeks than one fancy gun that leaves you broke.

Run three checks before you tap buy:

1. Is the gun still earnable somewhere for free? Whisper and Outbreak come from their missions when those rotate back in, Tessellation comes with the right edition purchase, and Quicksilver Storm comes with buying Lightfall. Anything you can farm or claim for nothing can wait.
2. Do you own the expansion the tab needs? No point saving up for Ace of Spades with no Forsaken Pack on the account.
3. Are you at or near the five-cipher cap? If yes, spend something this week even if it's not your dream gun, because overflow ciphers just vanish.

And when in doubt, the math is friendly: Witherhoard runs one Exotic Cipher, 100,000 Glimmer, 150 planetary materials, and a single Ascendant Shard, and it'll pull weight everywhere from patrol to Grandmasters. That's the safest first receipt in the kiosk.