Farming Glimmer

Glimmer is the currency you never think about until you are out of it, usually halfway through focusing engrams at a vendor. It caps at 250,000, and the cap is the important number: past it, everything you earn is thrown away. Farm when you are low, spend before you farm again.

Where it comes from

Nothing beats dismantling Items. Every weapon and armour piece you break down returns glimmer, and the pile of blues a session leaves in your postmaster is worth more than most deliberate farming routes. Clearing your vault and your postmaster is a glimmer farm that also solves a different problem.

After that, it is volume of activity rather than any one route. Public events, patrol bounties, and anything that ends in a reward screen all pay out, and they pay out faster in destinations where enemies are dense enough that you are never between fights.

Make the same run pay more

Two multipliers are worth setting up before a long session:

• Ghost mods. Your Ghost has mod slots that raise glimmer income, either for a specific destination or across the board. They are cheap, they are permanent once slotted, and they are easy to forget you have.
• A Rainmaker. Consumed for a burst of increased glimmer income while it is active. Save them for a session you already intended to play, not for a dedicated farm — the point is to make an hour you were going to spend anyway pay double.

When to stop

Glimmer is not the bottleneck it looks like. If you are short, you are usually one vault clear away from full, and a run built purely around glimmer is an hour you could have spent on something that drops loot.