Wandering in the desert, Eshe comes across a crumbling temple and awakens a dark intelligence, the Shining Trapezohedron. It pulls her under, to ancient, subterranean cities teeming with monsters. She may be able to slash, jump and dodge side-to-side, but her human capacities aren’t worth much against armies of sentinel killbots, undulating anemone-beasts, masked cultists and cyborg brains. Combat in Sundered often pits Eshe against dozens, the screen filling up with writhing horrors and your flashing blades, until Eshe is overwhelmed and killed. Better tactics could win the next encounter, but practice will never be enough. You need shards. Hundreds of thousands of them.

Shards spill from some dead monsters and can be spent to unlock nodes on the skill tree in the Sanctuary. Each node incrementally improves a stat and must be activated three times, paying the price in shards, before moving on to the next node. There are many paths to take in upgrading Eshe’s damage, armor, luck, cannon, shields and energy bar. Enhancing Eshe’s abilities takes a lot of shards, especially to pursue the more advanced upgrades to your combat capabilities. Incremental attrition works just fine, but these shard farming techniques can give you an edge in Sundered ’s jaw-dropping boss encounters.

Ride the Line

If you’re after shards — perhaps hoping to grind out a few upgrades before tackling a tough objective — then you’ll need to seek out a sweet spot between areas that are hard enough to have enemies with large shard drops and easy enough that you aren’t too quickly overwhelmed. If you have access to all three regions, but struggle, for example, against a small handful in Region 3, then farm in Region 2 (the subterranean holy city of the Eschaton priesthood). You want to fight the hardest enemies you can survive en masse, maximizing the size of shard drops and multiplying those yields with a big pile of dead things. Unexplored edges of a region you’ve mostly mastered is a great place to start, since far-flung locales tend to have undiscovered Perks guarded by large hordes.

Perk Builds

It’s easy to become reliant on just a handful of Perks in Sundered, sticking to useful bonuses but otherwise not actively managing your Perks to match the objective of every foray. But it’s easy to stick with perks like the Health Charm to your detriment, since its disadvantage — 20 percent smaller shard drops — handicaps your experience farming. Avoid Rebirth too.

Golden Charm, The rare Perk with no disadvantages, increases the percentage of dead monsters dropping Shards.

Magnet attracts drops from three times farther away, pulling in Shards you’d otherwise have to chase down. But really, this is only useful in Region 3, where the vertical gameplay would otherwise cause a lot of Shards to fall out of reach after killing enemies.

The ultimate farming Perk must be Monstrous Lure. Its advantage — “corrupted treasures drop 45% more shards” — is fine, rewarding exploration in particular, but it’s disadvantage may be even better. Monstrous Lure is like a dinner bell for monsters, increasing horde spawns. This could be tricky if you’re in a Region where you struggle to stay alive, but a great way to liven up treasure hunts in Region 1 or 2 once you’ve mastered them.

A great Perk build isn’t just about direct Shard bonuses, but about empowering yourself to fight endlessly against swarms of Shard-dropping baddies. Here Harvester, Shield Absorb, Life Absorb and Berzerk come in handy. Each is particularly useful against large hordes, particularly with massed groups of easily killed enemies mixed with more powerful forces. Berzerk stacks an attack bonus, allowing you to kill enemies much quicker. The two Absorb Perks convert each kill into shield or life. Harvester does the same, but for damage. Against the right group of enemies, an Absorb Perk could allow you to fight and farm indefinitely, the Perk bonus keeping you alive without the careful management of health elixirs. If only there were places on the map where you could find endless hordes...

Endless Hordes

Each Region has one or two areas that come with a special warning when you enter: ENDLESS HORDES. Often the rooms are a gauntlet of sorts, forcing you to fight your way through to reach the prize at the end, typically a new Perk. They’re hard as hell — getting through an Endless Horde area feels like an accomplishment. But even better than the prize at the end of the room is the combat zone itself. So equip Golden Charm, Berzerk and Shield or Life Absorb and head out to an Endless Hordes room.

In Region 1, endless hordes can best be found in the far, bottom right corner of the map. You’ll need the hookshot to reach a zone of intensive, endless combat. At the end can be found a special Spear Attack combo. It’s awesome. But just as good are the thousands, even tens of thousands, of Shards that can be had in each run down here. Make sure to stop by the Valkyrie Cannon Ability Shrine on the way, it’s full of Shard crates.

Region 2 has a few Endless Hordes areas, all located on the far left of the map, beyond the immense open chamber (indicated by the Open Eye on your map). Some are better than others. This one ain’t great:

Though its choked with thorns and shield-shredding slime cannon, giving it a high environmental difficulty, the room only spawns low-yield, flying screamers.

You want this room instead, which is as far left on the Region 2 map, but higher up:

It’s just as tricky an environment, but the two endless enemies are the elephantine, cthulhu-oid devourers and Eschaton cultists, both tough enemies that spill lots of Shards. The combination of devourer tentacle slams and hard-to-avoid cultist explosives makes farming here challenging, but the rewards are high: farming upwards of 30,000 Shards can be accomplished in a few minutes.

Region 3 has a few options for hurling yourself against innumerable enemies, but they’re both remote and difficult. One is alllllll the way to the right. Just keep going right on the ground level until you arrive at a land of red Notoctuses. The giant anemones and their spiked tentacle attacks can quickly overwhelm even high-powered characters. Plus, they’re huge — you only fight a few at a time — resulting in some surprisingly low Shard yields. There’s another Endless Horde room up here, at the very top of the map:

To get there, go to the top level of the elevator, keep climbing, then head right instead of left, away from the Hiram Macias Valkyrie Hunter miniboss. It’s also super tough, spawning endless cultists and flamethrowing, brain-shaped Medusozoa.

Unless your Eshe is closed to maxed out already, the Endless Horde rooms in Region 3 may be more trouble than they’re worth.

Treasure Hunting

So far we’ve only looked at combat options for Shard farming, but exploring every nook and cranny can also yield lots of Shards. You also get a big wad of Shards for torching Elder Shards in the Region 1 Incinerator. Exploration is best done with the Scavenger upgrade, which reveals treasure on the map. Combine with the Monstrous Lure Perk and you have a one-two combo that will turn out lots of Shards from those gooey treasure sacs.

Sundered is all about killing, slowly winning new ground through a combination of skill and incremental upgrades to your abilities. But while Sundered will always present opportunities to improve yourself, going out and strategically farming can ease some of the frustration of beating your head against the same areas over and over, providing you with that extra edge quicker.

Sundered is available on Steam and PS4 starting July 28.