How to Play Private or Solo in The First Descendant

Sometimes, you don’t want to run into other players. Here’s how to play private or sole in The First Descendant.

How to Play Private Single Player in The First Descendant

Loading into a private map and playing solo in The First Descendant is a good idea for a number of reasons, from farming Macromolecule Biogel to avoiding zooming Bunny players. But playing solo can be quite confusing.

To play solo or private in The First Descendant, you’ll need to open your world map and select the area you want to load into. In the top left of the area you’ve selected, you’ll see a button that will usually be marked as ‘Public’. Press this button and it should switch to Private.

You won’t be able to switch Albion to private, however, as it’s the one public forum currently in the game. And once you load into a map, say Sterile Land, as featured above, you can switch it back to public but you won’t be able to switch the area back to private without leaving Sterile Land and repeating the process.

The same idea applies to Public matchmaking as well. If you run into some missions that are proving too challenging, you can always go back to the main hub and toggle the same bar on the map. Only this time it’s in grey to signify that it’s entirely solo. In some cases, there may be scaling problems that can make content more challenging, but most of the time the Private option in The First Descendant will have fewer advantages for you to utilize. If you want to grind out resources to unlock Descendants, it’s always better to be in public and to join ongoing missions to speed things up.

There is a second way to use the solo or Private option as well. Any time you start one of the final dungeons in a sub-region, you have the option to play privately or publicly. Regardless of the instance you’re currently in, this gives you the choice ahead of time to use matchmaking or continue with single-player. I recommend playing public so you can make use of a full party. However, it really is up to how you want to approach the content in the game.

The First Descendant is available now on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.