Destiny 2 Players Have Spent 25 Years Deleting Shaders

That’s right, according to an intrepid user of arithmetic, players of Destiny 2 have spent over two decades deleting shaders.

For the uninitiated, a shader describes an in-game item that recolors in-game items and lets you apply a layer of aesthetic customization to your gear. Shaders have been a tremendous source of irritation for players of Destiny 2. In Destiny 1, shaders applied to your whole armor and each shader was kept permanently as if they were stored in a magic spellbook of colors.

In Destiny 2, Bungie changed shaders so that they applied to only a single piece of gear. That’s fine if you want give your gun a different look than your cape. But the big boner was that they also changed them into consumables. This change was not well received as players have to hoard shaders and manage them within a finite inventory space.

Destiny 2 players end up spending a lot of time deleting shaders they don’t want just to make room for the shaders they do. Last week, Bungie revealed the total number of deleted shaders stood at around 807,635,124. That’s a lot of shaders, considering that deleting is a one by one process that requires you hold down a button and watch a second-long progress bar confirm that yes, you want to erase your 50th New Pacific Rush.

Well, someone on Reddit did the math and calculated that if each shader takes a second to delete, then players have spent 25.59 years condemning unwanted shaders to unwanted shader hell. 

25.59 years! That’s a lot of years! And months! Weeks or days, even! And that number has probably only grown in the days since then. If one and only one person deleted a shader every second over the past five days, about 432,000 additional shaders would have been deleted as of this moment.

Fortunately, the shader deletion system is changing soon. On August 28, Bungie will release a pre-patch for the upcoming Forsaken expansion and with it will come an option to mass delete shaders. Thank goodness.

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