How to get and use Cipher Decoders in Festival of the Lost 2020 – Destiny 2

As Festival of the Lost returns to Destiny 2, it brings with it a new mechanic. The Haunted Forest is now full of treasure caches that you can find as you run around smacking all the ghouls and ghosts. You will need Cipher Decoders to open them, however, you cannot just get at that sweet loot for free.

To get your hands on these Cipher Decoders, you will need to complete activities in the game. Pretty much anything that isn’t the actual Haunted Forest itself should net you a Cipher Decoder, including Crucible match, Strikes, Gambit matches, and Nightfalls. After some testing, it also seems like you will need to be wearing on the Festival of the Lost masks to get them to drop, but the default one you get from Eva is fine.

Finally, they do not seem to be guaranteed drops. We have now run quite a few Crucible games, and some Strikes and they are not definitely not dropping after each completion. So it looks like we need to grind these out as well. Thanks, Bungie.

The good news is that Guardians have discovered that you can get these Heroic Story Missions. Deadly Trial and Ice and Shadow are both in today’s playlist, and will not take long to finish at all. At the moment, this seems to be the quickest way to try and farm them.

It is important to note that they can only be earned after you get a Mask from Eva, then go visit the Spider on the Tangled Shore. He will send you on a brief quest to do a Gambit match, Crucible match, or a Strike.

If you are wondering if these caches are worth opening, the answer appears to be yes, they are. They can contain random Legendary Gear, Festival of the Lost Shaders, and most importantly they can drop randomly rolled Braytech Werewolf and Horror Story auto rifles. As it is still basically the Season the Auto Rifle, this is certainly a good way to farm a nice weapon. We don’t know just yet what kind of Power Cap these will have with regard to weapon sunsetting, but they should be good for a few seasons.

You will only need one Cipher Decoder to open a cache, but multiple caches can appear in a single run, so make sure you farm up plenty of them before heading into the Haunted Forest. If you don’t find any of the caches while you are on your run, don’t worry, there will be plenty of them that spawn in when you get to the final section and get to your rewards chests. Just interact with them, and as long as you have a Cipher Decoder, you will be able to open it.