Best Way to Farm Strange Coins?If you’re like a lot of Year 1 Guardians, ever since The Taken King was released you’ve been singing a very wistful song:

• Where is my Weekly Heroic?
• Where is my farming song?
• Where is that promised loot:
• Where have all the strange coins gone?

Thanks to all of you for indulging me there, and thanks to Paula Cole for twisting my heartstrings. Moving right along…

Year 2 Guardians may not be aware of this, but there was a time when we could run a Weekly Heroic Strike for a guaranteed 9 Strange Coins per character, yielding an easy 27 per week. That time ended with The Taken King, and the question we now ask has echoed through the Destiny community ever since – where, in all seriousness, have all the Strange Coins gone?

How exactly are we supposed to be able to pick up what Xur is laying down without some clear source of currency?

The answer, as it turns out, is: they are everywhere. Strange Coins can now be earned pretty reliably by doing any activity in the game. So how do you take your fun, Guardian?

Let’s begin by outlining your sources…

First, we’ll review some quick hits that occasionally result in big money: Nightfalls. That’s right, Strange Coins are on the loot table for Nightfalls – and not a measly 4 or 5, either, but double digits – I’ve seen as many as 23 drop from a single Nightfall completion. We don’t have exact data on the upper and lower limits, but we can definitely recommend grabbing two friends and getting these out of the way first. If you run it on three characters, your odds go up, and you stand a fair chance of getting at least one Strange Coins drop.

Along those same lines, but for the PVP players, you have a nearly identical loot table in the form of Crucible Weekly Bounties from Lord Shaxx, which can also result in 20+ Strange Coins per character, and only take a few hours of dedicated effort to complete, even for average players. Plus, each bounty earns you a nice chunk of Faction Reputation, which we’ll talk about in a minute.

And if you run three Nightfalls and do the Crucible Weeklies on all three characters as well? That’s six chances to earn 20+ Strange coins. Average that out over a month or two and you should be diving into your riches like Scrooge McDuck!

And it gets even better, because what’s happening while you’re playing those Nightfalls and Crucible Matches? Beyond accumulating Reputation (in a minute, I promise!), you’re also getting your regular drops from both Engrams and the Match-End loot tables. You might have just guessed it: both of those are also great sources Xur’s prized currency. Rare Engrams occasionally decrypt into a Strange Coin at the Cryptarch (and earn you Cryptarch Reputation – we’re almost there!), and you can get one to three Strange Coins directly as a random reward at the end of each Crucible Match.

To pile on top of that, if you’ve remember to grab your regular bounties, you’ve already discovered another source of occasional Strange Coin drops. Both Vanguard and Crucible Bounties can drop Motes of Light, Engrams (often Rare Engrams, which sometimes turn into one Strange Coin), or one or two Strange Coins directly, and with six of each every day there’s a lot of opportunity to accumulate more Coins in your preferred game mode.

Now let’s talk about that Faction Reputation you’ve been earning, because it’s actually a great source of guaranteed profit: four Strange Coins are included as part of every Faction Package from the Vanguard, Crucible, Dead Orbit, New Monarchy, Future War Cult, and Cryptarch.

Also, you can actually get them on Patrol. The “Strange Transmissions” that your Ghost picks up will yield unusual and random patrol missions that could have you doing…well, basically anything! Killing specific enemies, sometimes in specific ways, collecting planetary materials, or even dancing. These multi-part Patrol Missions reveal their instructions only a little at a time and may give greater rewards for faster completion, but among the rewards for completing each one you will receive two or three Strange Coins every time.

These special Patrol Missions are random, but they seem to occur with some regularity if you just spend enough time patrolling a single planet and completing the standard missions from the Patrol Beacons, so you can definitely farm them. Plus, completing Patrol Missions while working on Bounties is perhaps the most time efficient way to gain Faction Reputation (you can gain hundreds of Reputation points per hour with a fireteam of three spread across a planet’s zones), which nets you even more guaranteed Strange Coins, along with the random rewards from Engrams and Bounty completions.

That covers a lot of bases, but there’s more:

The Prison of Elders! You finally have a use for all of those Treasure Keys you stored up during House of Wolves and never got around to using once you burned out on Skolas. The good news here is that A) Prison of Elders Level 28 yields the same coins as any other level and B) it’s super easy now that we’re level 40!

So what kind of results can you expect from Variks’ arena? Well, your guaranteed results only come at the end if you have a key for the big Treasure Chest, which rewards 3 Strange Coins every time you open it. In addition to that, you will randomly see 1-2 Strange Coins drop from the smaller Loot Chests to either side. Add on top of that Engrams from both the chests and the many enemies you killed on your way to them, and you can safely expect 3-9 Coins per run, so long as you have a Key. And yes, you can still get more Treasure Keys – not only are they a (rare) random drop from the Loot Chests, but you are still guaranteed one every week that you complete a single Queen’s Wrath Bounty for Petra Venj.

All in all, it’s like we said, they’re everywhere!