Crimson Desert: How to Get and Use Hernand Refinement Tokens
Hitting resource nodes until your pickaxe shatters is a rite of passage, but Pearl Abyss finally threw us a lifeline.
Crimson Desert does not care about your free time. If you want to survive the absolute beating that the early game bosses happily dish out, you need to engage with the crafting system. Before patch 1.01, that meant spending hours wandering the map, aggressively whacking every single ore vein you stumbled across just to bump your sword up a single tier. It is a grueling loop. You can check out my weapon and armor upgrades guide if you want the full breakdown of the traditional suffering.
Thankfully, the developers realized that maybe we want to spend a little more time fighting and a little less time playing a fantasy mining simulator. Enter the Hernand Refinement Token. This little beauty acts as a golden ticket to bypass the material costs for upgrading your gear. It is not a complete replacement for the traditional refinement system, but it is an absolute godsend for the early game.
What Are Hernand Refinement Tokens?
To put it bluntly, these tokens are a free pass. When you normally go to upgrade a piece of equipment, the game demands a blood sacrifice of crafting materials or a duplicate version of the weapon you are trying to improve. If you are fresh out of the tutorial areas, you probably have neither.
A Hernand Refinement Token completely overrides that cost. You pop the token, hit the button, and your weapon or armor piece instantly jumps up one refinement level. It saves you from consulting a resource gathering guide every time you find a shiny new blade that you want to test out.
There is a massive catch, though. Pearl Abyss is not about to let you max out your endgame gear for free. These tokens only work on equipment that is under Refinement Level 4. If your gear is already at level 4 or higher, the option to use the token vanishes from the menu entirely. You are back to the grindstone for those higher tiers.
How to Get Hernand Refinement Tokens
You cannot just buy these from a vendor, which is honestly a missed opportunity for a gold sink. Instead, you have to earn them by doing what you should be doing anyway: clearing quests in the Hernand region.
Check Your Journal
The primary way to stockpile these tokens is by completing main story quests and faction quests specifically tied to Hernand. Before you blindly accept every task on the map, open your Journal tab. Scroll down to the bottom of the quest summary. The game explicitly shows you what rewards you will get for completion. If a Hernand Refinement Token is on the table, it will be listed right there.
If you are a veteran player who already cleared out the Hernand questlines before patch 1.01 dropped, do not panic. The developers retroactively awarded these tokens. Check your inventory, and you should find a nice little stack waiting for you. It is a rare moment of mercy from an otherwise punishing game.
Regional Variants
Hernand is not the only place with this system. As you push outward and unlock more of the fast travel map, you will discover that other major territories have their own specific tokens.
How to Use the Tokens
Once you actually have a token in your inventory, applying it is straightforward.
First, fast travel back to Hernand City. You are looking for Turnali, the local Blacksmith. Engage with him and navigate to the refinement section of his shop menu.
Select the weapon or piece of armor you want to upgrade. Normally, this is where the game asks for a duplicate item or a massive pile of ores. Look for the "Refinement Tokens" tab on the screen. Select the Hernand Refinement Token, hit the "Refine" button, and watch your stats go up without spending a single piece of hard earned iron.
Do Not Hoard Them
I know exactly what you are thinking. You want to save these tokens for the "perfect" weapon. Stop it.
Gamers have a terrible habit of hoarding consumable items until the credits roll, leaving a massive pile of useful gear rotting in their inventory. Because these tokens hard cap at Refinement Level 4, they are utterly useless in the mid to late game. The moment you find a decent weapon that fits your playstyle, burn your tokens on it immediately. Pushing a weapon to level 4 early on makes a night and day difference in combat, especially when you are still figuring out the best early skills to keep yourself alive.
Use them to experiment. Find a bizarre two handed sword? Token it up to level 4, take it out into the wild, and see if it actually works for you. If it sucks, you only wasted a free token, not three hours of mining ore.
