Materials are valuable resources you can use to upgrade weapons and armor in Dragon's Dogma 2. 
Astracite is one such resource, and you'll need it to upgrade a variety of mid-game and late-game gear.
The name and appearance of this material may make you think that you can find astracite in caves or mining nodes, but that's not the case. It's actually a monster resource like goblin horns and beast hides, but you'll need to reach Battahl and explore the desert at night if you want to consistently hunt down the monsters that drop this particular item.
Dragon's Dogma 2: 6 Best Swords, Ranked
Players using Fighters or Warfarers in Dragon's Dogma 2 should seek out these swords, which are the best the game has to offer.
How to Find Phantasms
The one creature that drops astracite is the 
Phantasm . You can find phantasms by exploring Battahl at night. They can show up just about anywhere in the desert, so wait until night in Bakbattahl or a campsite, choose a road at random, and keep walking until you see moving blue lights in the distance or hear their eerie laughter. Phantasms can also appear in western Vermund, but sometimes you'll find phantoms instead. To guarantee phantasm encounters, be sure to stick to Battahl.
Phantasms are identical to the phantoms you can find in Vermund, which means they have the same attack patterns and weaknesses. The main difference is that phantasms are blue instead of white, they have more hit points, and they deal more damage. Here are a few tips to keep in mind while fighting ghost-type enemies:
- They take extra damage from magical sources but reduced damage from regular weapons.
- As undead, ghosts are weak to light-based damage. Combined with the magic weakness, a single casting of Empyrean will destroy most ghosts even when the caster is an underleveled Mage.
- Ghosts can teleport around, and they can move through solid objects. This means melee vocations have a hard time targeting them, but ranged vocations can track them as they move around. On top of that, spells can target them even through objects.
What all this means is that you should always make sure a mage or sorcerer is in the party when you go hunting for astracite.
How to Collect Astracite
Like other monster materials, phantasms have a random chance of dropping astracite when you destroy them. The odds of astracite appearing are about 20 percent per phantasm.
Phantasms leave behind bright blue crystals as "corpses" when they drop something you can collect, but these corpses don't always contain astracite. In fact, sometimes astracite will appear on its own, instead of as a bright-blue crystal. In the image above, astracite is the pale crystal to the right of the Arisen, while the two glowing crystals to the left contain other objects dropped by phantasms.
One other place to get astracite is from wandering merchants. In particular, the merchant Folkes stocks astracite and sells it for 600 gold each. You can find him in or between Checkpoint Rest Town and the Ancient Battleground.
Dragon's Dogma 2
- Platform(s)
- PC , PS5 , Xbox Series X , Xbox Series S
- Released
- March 22, 2024
- Developer(s)
- Capcom
- Genre(s)
- Action RPG
- Metascore
- 88
