In this guide you learn the basics of farming Essence as well as how to maximize your rewards and profitability.

When Farming Essence there are a number of key mechanics to watch out for to ensure you're achieving maximum rewards.

Remnant of Corruption - Knowing when to Corrupt your Essences is a key part of maximizing your profits. Essence Corruption outcomes include, breaking the monster out immediately, adding an essence, randomizing the Essences, or upgrading the Essences into a higher tier. First up, when you encounter an Essence Monster with any of the Purple Essences be sure to Corrupt them using a Remnant of Corruption.

Einhar's Memory of Crystal Prisons - This Atlas Memory involves a series of maps with Rogue Exiles imprisoned in Essences! These Exiles are extremely dangerous because they inherit all of the Essence skills and modifiers. Luckily, you can remove your Voidstones and run the Yellow Tier 6 Maps without adding any modifiers (don't use an Orb of Alchemy on these maps!). As the sequence increases so do the number of Essences per Exile. Exiles frequently drop Shrieking and Deafening Essences making them very profitable. To run this strategy you need to find the Atlas Memory or purchase it from other players. Atlas Memories ignore your Atlas Passives and instead provide their own unique bonuses.

Within these Memories, some Essence Exiles without Dread, Envy, Misery or Scorn are worth corrupting. If an Essence Exile has 1 Screaming Essence and 3 Shrieking Essences and you Corrupt it, there's a chance for these Essences to upgrade. When they do, the Exile now has 1 Shrieking Essence and 3 Deafening Essences. These are then doubled (you do need to fight 2 very angry Exiles), so you get 2 Shrieking Essences and 6 Deafening Essences. When you encounter an Exile with at least 1 Screaming Essence, and multiple Shrieking Essences toss a Remnant of Corruption at it!

Combination Strategies - Because Essence provides very high baseline loot but doesn't scale it's best to combine it with other mechanics. This makes Essence a staple part of starter strategies like Alch and Go Harvest, Expedition, or Heist. If you have a strong build, consider Essence with Beasts for even more profit, just be warned Essence Beasts are a thing, and they are thicc!

The most efficient way to farm Essences depends on whether you're adding other mechanics or not. With a pure Essence strategy use Prolific Essence and Kirac's Map Device to add as many Essence Monsters to your Tier 1 or 2 maps as possible. Then run to the Essence Monsters and kill them (corrupting when appropriate). Once you've exhausted all the Essence Monsters in your map leave and launch the next one. For maximum efficiency use a build with high movement speed and ignore other monsters along the way. While not difficult the profit from this strategy scales with character speed so it pays to be fast.

First - Run through the map until you encounter an Essence Monster.
Second - Check to see if it needs Corruption.
Third - Activate the monster kill it, then collect the Essences.
Finally - Repeat until no Essence Monsters remain.

Frequently players combine Essence with other mechanics that don't care about map tier like Bestiary or Heist. Essence is also commonly added into a more advanced Endgame strategies involving Eldritch Altars. In these cases you proceed through the map as normal until you encounter Essences. In high tier Maps clear out nearby monsters as Tier 16 Essence Monsters pose a significant threat. Then Corrupt or kill the Essence Monster and continue Mapping.

First - Run the map normally until you encounter an Essence Monster.
Second - Clear all monsters surrounding the area.
Third - Check to see if it needs Corruption.
Fourth - Activate the monster, kill it and collect the Essences.
Finally - Repeat until no Essence Monsters remain.

Atlas passives are a massive boost to Essence. Understanding how they work and which ones to take is critical to correctly executing the strategy.

Essence farming doesn't scale with the Item Quantity, Item Rarity, or Pack Size of your maps. There are also no Scarabs which add Essence Monsters or increase their loot. Unfortunately this means investing further into your maps only increases the difficulty of Essence monsters and not their rewards. When combining Essence with other mechanics it's still important to invest!

Your Scarabs depend on whether or not you intend to farm pure Essence and the level of investment per map, but a simple Essence Scarab strategy would be 3x Essence Scarab
+ 1x Essence Scarab of Ascent. This gives more high Tier essences while allowing you to blast through maps.

Essence Scarab of Calcification is powerful for enabling endgame farming strategies. Because you get so many Essence monsters you don't want to combine this with Crystal Resonance. Due to its power, this tends to be expensive so it may be better to farm Essence Memories.

Area Contains 2-3 Additional Essences (costs 2-3 Chaos Orbs) - This is one of the only ways to scale your Essence farming strategy so always use the Kirac modifier!

Essences don't really care about Map layout, but your goal is to complete maps as quickly as possible. Therefore the best Map is highly league specific, look for tier 1 or 2 Maps with easy layouts. Below are some examples;

When combining Essence with other League Mechanic Farming strategies, the optimal map from the other mechanics takes precedence.

Here are the drops you can expect to acquire with this strategy, as well as some advice on how to sell them effectively and quickly. It's easiest to sell your Essences in bulk after upgrading most to Shrieking (early league) or Deafening (late league). By doing this you're able to sell hours worth of farmed Essences in a single transaction. Follow our Bulk Selling guide to learn more.

When setting up a filter for Essence Farming, make sure Remnant of Corruption and all Screaming Essences, Shrieking Essences, and Deafening Essences are visible on your filter.

Written by Tenkiei.
Reviewed by Facefoot, Grimro