Hades 2: How to Get Darkness

Darkness is a returning resource in Hades 2, and anyone who played a good amount of the first Hades game will immediately recognize it. Granted, it’s a lot less common in Hades 2 overall, especially considering all the new materials, reagents, and resources Melinoe has to gather for her Incantations and general Upgrades.

Additionally, it serves a lot less of a purpose in this game than it did in the original. In the original Hades, Zagreus used Darkness to upgrade pretty much all of his abilities and it was almost always sought after regardless of how many hours you had put into the game. In Hades 2, Darkness is used in a couple of specific Incantations and that’s really about it. Still, it’s worth going over exactly how you’re meant to get Darkness in the Early Access of Hades 2 and how you can go about getting it reliably.

Updated November 1st, 2024 by Jacob Buchalter: At the time of writing this update, it’s currently Halloween, and considering how spooky the overall vibe of Hades 2 is, it seemed like an apt time to re-check this guide out. There are a ton of different resources you’ll need to gather, mine, farm, and obtain in Hades 2 for the sake of completion. In fact, just about every unlock in the game demands that Melinoe goes out there and pulls some weeds out in order to craft them. Darkness is by far one of the rarest resources in the game, which might surprise fans of the original Hades considering how frequently Darkness was used as a resource in that game. So, with that in mind, let’s go over exactly how this resource works in Hades 2, what it’s used for, how to make it appear, and more.

Where To Find Darkness

You Got to Embrace Chaos to Find It

To quickly reiterate, in the first Hades you could find Darkness pretty much anywhere but in Hades 2 this resource is entirely relegated to the Chaos Realm. Logically it does make sense, given that Nyx, the personification of night and darkness, is currently being held by Chronos during the events of Hades 2.

Still, Melinoë will need a bit of Darkness to get stronger, in particular, she’ll need 3x Darkness to get her 30th and final Arcana Point. But, to get Darkness to even appear as a resource at all, players will need to progress their game until they unlock the ability to have Chaos Gates spawn in their travels through Erebus, Oceanus, and more.

Once you’ve obtained the ability to both find and access these Chaos Gates, you’ll want to take every Chaos Gate you can find. Once you’re in there, talk to Chaos (and take their Boon). Eventually, after talking to them enough, Chaos will simply hand you one Darkness for free at the end of one of your conversations with them and mention that the resource is a lot more scarce at the moment. After that happens, every time you head down into Chaos’ lair, there will be a chance that a ‘piece’ of Darkness will be sitting there somewhere, ready to grab. Again, it’s only a chance, and not every run will have a Chaos Gate spawn, but thankfully there’s barely anything that this resource is used for, so the inconvenience doesn’t feel too egregious.

Farming Darkness

Do You Really Even Need To?

With most of the materials, resources, and reagents in Hades 2, there’s usually some method to farming them pretty reliably or at the very least a method to gather them efficiently in regards to time spent.

However, with Darkness, there’s no real ‘method’ to farming Darkness in Hades 2, outside of just taking every Chaos Gate you see and hoping that you’ll get lucky and find some Darkness inside.

Most of the other late-game Materials can be bought from the Wretched Broker for an (honestly absurd) amount of Bones, such as spending 1000 for just one Nightmare, but Darkness is oddly enough not one of the Materials available for purchase here.

Additionally, if it wasn’t already clear, Darkness won’t spawn in Chaos’ Lair every time, it’s RNG-dependant. So. it’s a real ‘coin toss’ each time if you’ll obtain even a single Darkness or not in a run. Thankfully, there are very few recipes that actually require Darkness to complete, so you won’t necessarily need a lot of it, at least not in the current state of Early Access the game is in. Thankfully, using the recent (at the time of writing this) Olympic Update to the game as a reference, it’s very likely that Darkness will remain as an incredibly rarely-used resource. That said, this is just speculation, it’s just as likely that Supergiant Games will add more Incantations or recipes down the line that call for Darkness, but they’d probably also increase the methods of obtaining Darkness as well. After all, Melinoë is not just another version of Zagreus, and Hades 2 doesn’t seem to ‘just’ more Hades gameplay.