Bunny’s Follow Their Traces questline is one of the first moments where The First Descendant stops hand-holding and starts testing how well you actually understand your kit. This isn’t just flavor lore for speedrun mains; it’s a character-defining quest that pushes Bunny’s mobility, survivability, and crowd control under real combat pressure. If you rush in undergeared or ignore mechanics, the quest will punish you hard.
How Follow Their Traces Becomes Available
The quest unlocks automatically after Bunny is recruited as a playable Descendant and you’ve progressed far enough through the early main story to access her personal research thread. You’ll receive Follow Their Traces from Albion once Bunny’s character data analysis reaches the required threshold, meaning you can’t brute-force this early without story progression. If the quest isn’t showing, double-check your main campaign milestones and Bunny’s unlock status before assuming it’s bugged.
What This Questline Is Really About
Follow Their Traces blends narrative investigation with combat-heavy instanced missions, sending Bunny back into Vulgus-controlled zones tied directly to her past. Expect dense enemy packs, frequent ambush spawns, and objectives that force you to keep moving rather than bunker down. Stationary play gets you killed here, especially if you mismanage stamina or overcommit to DPS windows.
Core Gameplay Expectations
This questline is designed to teach Bunny players how to chain mobility skills for both damage and survival. You’ll be navigating tight arenas where enemy aggro shifts fast, ranged units punish bad positioning, and elites have hitboxes that demand precision rather than spray-and-pray. Mastering slide cancels, skill timing, and I-frame awareness turns frustrating encounters into clean clears.
Rewards and Why You Shouldn’t Skip It
Completing Follow Their Traces unlocks key Bunny-specific progression, including lore entries and essential character rewards that directly support her late-game build paths. These upgrades significantly improve her consistency in high-mobility content like intercept battles and wave-based missions. Skipping or delaying this quest slows Bunny’s power curve more than most players realize.
Efficiency Tips Before You Start
Bring a weapon setup that complements Bunny’s hit-and-run style rather than competing with it; fast reloads and stable accuracy matter more than raw burst. Make sure your modules support cooldown reduction and survivability, not just DPS padding. This quest rewards smart movement and mechanical discipline, and approaching it prepared saves you from unnecessary wipes and backtracking.
Prerequisites and Preparation: Required Progress, Power Level, and Loadout Tips
Before diving into Follow Their Traces, it’s worth slowing down and making sure your account, Bunny, and gear are actually ready for what this questline throws at you. While nothing here is mechanically impossible, attempting it under-prepared turns what should be a fluid, momentum-based experience into a frustrating grind of revives and checkpoint resets. This quest assumes you already understand Bunny’s core loop and can execute it under pressure.
Required Campaign and Character Progress
Follow Their Traces only becomes available after progressing deep enough into the main campaign to unlock Bunny and advance her character analysis data. If you’ve rushed the story but skipped side content, the quest may remain hidden even if Bunny is unlocked. Make sure her Descendant research and related story flags are fully completed before searching for the quest.
You also need access to mid-game Vulgus-controlled regions, as several objectives take place in zones that don’t unlock early. If those areas are still fogged on your map, that’s your signal to push the main story further. This quest is not intended as an early Bunny tutorial; it assumes you already know how she functions in live combat.
Recommended Power Level and Stats
While there’s no hard power gate displayed, Bunny should be comfortably above the baseline power level of the zones involved. If standard mobs are taking full magazines to drop, you’re under-tuned. You want enemies dying during a single mobility loop, not after you’ve burned all your stamina and cooldowns.
Defensively, survivability matters more than raw DPS padding here. Shields that can recover quickly between engagements and enough HP to survive a stray sniper shot will save you from cheap deaths. Bunny’s strength is momentum, and losing that momentum to constant downs is the fastest way to fail objectives.
Optimal Weapon Loadout for Bunny
Weapon choice should amplify Bunny’s mobility, not slow it down. SMGs and assault rifles with fast reloads, stable recoil, and consistent mid-range accuracy are ideal. You’re often firing while repositioning or immediately after a dash, so weapons that demand perfect ADS uptime or charge mechanics actively work against you.
Avoid slow-firing, high-commitment weapons unless they’re absurdly over-tuned. Shotguns can work in specific rooms, but they punish missed timing and bad spacing. If your weapon forces you to stop moving, it’s the wrong tool for this questline.
Module Setup: Cooldowns Over Greed
This quest heavily rewards frequent skill usage, so cooldown reduction modules should be prioritized early. Bunny’s survivability scales directly with how often she can reposition, trigger damage skills, and reset enemy aggro. Trading a small chunk of DPS for more uptime on abilities is always worth it here.
Supplement cooldown modules with stamina efficiency and shield recovery where possible. Pure glass-cannon builds tend to collapse during ambush waves or elite spawns with overlapping fire. Consistency beats theoretical max damage in every encounter this quest throws at you.
Consumables and Quality-of-Life Prep
Don’t ignore consumables just because the missions are instanced. Ammo regeneration, shield boosts, and emergency healing items smooth out mistakes without forcing a full reset. These are especially valuable during investigation-style objectives where enemies spawn in staggered waves instead of clean packs.
Finally, clear your inventory clutter and ensure quick-access slots are set up before launching the quest. Follow Their Traces rarely gives you breathing room once combat starts, and fumbling menus mid-fight is a self-inflicted wipe. Going in clean and prepared keeps the focus where it belongs: movement, execution, and Bunny’s story.
Quest Start Location and NPC Interaction: Where to Begin and What to Expect
Once your loadout is locked and your modules are tuned for uptime, it’s time to actually trigger Bunny’s story. Follow Their Traces doesn’t auto-unlock through progression alone, and a lot of players waste time queuing the wrong missions because they skip this step.
Where to Pick Up the Quest
Head to Albion and make your way to the central command area, near the Descendant management terminals. The quest becomes available only after Bunny is unlocked and you’ve progressed far enough into the main campaign to access her character-specific objectives. If you don’t see the quest marker immediately, double-check that Bunny is your active Descendant, as the NPC interaction will not trigger for others.
The quest icon appears as a distinct Descendant quest marker rather than a standard mission prompt. Interacting with it adds Follow Their Traces directly to your active quest log and unlocks the first investigation zone tied to Bunny’s backstory.
NPC Interaction and Narrative Setup
The opening NPC dialogue is more than flavor text and provides context for why this quest leans so heavily into tracking, ambush encounters, and movement-based objectives. You’ll be briefed on anomalous energy readings and fragmented data trails that only Bunny’s mobility and signal sensitivity can realistically follow. This is the game subtly telling you that standing still or brute-forcing encounters is the wrong approach.
Pay attention to the objective phrasing during this exchange. Keywords like investigate, trace, and pursue are deliberate and hint at how the quest will pace enemy spawns and checkpoints. Skipping the dialogue won’t lock you out of progress, but it does make some mechanics feel abrupt if you don’t know what the mission expects.
What Changes Once the Quest Is Active
After accepting the quest, your world map updates with a new mission node tied specifically to Follow Their Traces. This mission cannot be accessed through random matchmaking and won’t appear in standard activity rotations. You must launch it manually from the quest interface, or you’ll end up in unrelated content.
Enemy behavior also shifts the moment you enter the first zone. Expect delayed spawns, flanking units, and elites that punish overextension rather than raw DPS checks. The game is already testing whether you internalized Bunny’s movement-first playstyle before the real difficulty ramps up in later steps.
Common Mistakes Before Launching
The most common pitfall here is accepting the quest and immediately launching without re-checking your active Descendant. Swapping characters after pickup will soft-block progress and force you to relaunch. Another frequent mistake is assuming this is a co-op-friendly power rush; while it supports multiplayer, the encounters scale aggressively and can become messier with poor team coordination.
Treat this moment as the point of no return for Bunny’s questline. Once Follow Their Traces begins, the game expects precision, awareness, and constant movement. Starting it clean sets the tone for everything that follows.
Objective Breakdown Part 1: Tracking the Initial Traces and Environmental Clues
Once the mission loads in, the quest wastes no time shifting control away from pure combat and toward environmental awareness. Your objective marker won’t lead you straight into a firefight; instead, it drops you into a partially cleared zone with faint energy distortions and incomplete scan data. This is the game’s first hard check to see if you’re actually reading the terrain instead of sprinting blindly toward red dots.
The goal here is not speedrunning the map, but moving deliberately while staying mobile. Bunny’s kit is doing more work than your weapons at this stage, even if the game hasn’t explicitly told you that yet.
Identifying the First Trace Nodes
Your first task is to locate the anomalous trace points scattered through the area. These appear as flickering energy residues on walls, broken cover, and collapsed structures, often slightly off the main path. If you rely solely on the minimap, you’ll miss them; visual scanning and camera control matter more than UI here.
Use Bunny’s natural movement speed to sweep the area in wide arcs rather than hugging corridors. Sliding and double-jumping between elevations helps reveal traces tucked above eye level, which is where many players get stuck wondering why the objective won’t update. Each trace confirms progress, but only if you’re within close proximity when it fully resolves.
Environmental Hazards and Why Standing Still Gets You Punished
As you move between trace nodes, the environment subtly turns hostile. Expect intermittent energy surges, unstable ground effects, and light enemy harassment designed to break your rhythm. These aren’t meant to kill you outright; they exist to punish hesitation and force you to stay in motion.
Standing still to line up shots or loot will often trigger delayed spawns behind you. Bunny’s small hitbox and movement skills let you slip through these ambushes without committing to extended fights. Treat enemies here as obstacles, not targets, unless the objective explicitly locks progression behind a clear condition.
How Enemy Spawns Are Tied to Trace Progression
Enemy density scales directly with how many traces you’ve successfully investigated. Early on, you’ll mostly face light units and drones that telegraph attacks clearly. As you approach the final trace in this segment, elites begin appearing from flanking angles rather than straight ahead.
This is intentional and designed to pull your attention away from the environment. The fastest clears come from tagging the trace, breaking aggro with movement, and repositioning instead of tunneling on DPS. Burning cooldowns here feels good, but it slows you down and can leave you exposed for the next phase.
Efficiency Tips to Avoid Backtracking
The biggest time loss in this objective comes from missed trace nodes. Before moving to the next marker update, do a quick vertical scan of the area, especially rooftops, ledges, and broken scaffolding. Bunny’s jump chain makes these checks fast and low-risk.
If the objective text stalls at partial completion, you’ve almost always walked past a trace without triggering it. Resist the urge to reset the instance or brute-force enemies; the solution is always environmental. Once the final trace resolves, the mission flow tightens immediately, signaling the transition from investigation to pursuit in the next objective.
Combat Encounters and Mechanics: Enemy Types, Spawn Triggers, and Bunny Synergies
Once the investigation phase locks into pursuit, the quest shifts from passive pressure to structured combat. Enemy waves stop feeling incidental and start enforcing tempo, positioning, and ability usage. This is where understanding spawn logic matters more than raw DPS, especially if you’re trying to clear without deaths or resets.
Primary Enemy Types You’ll Face
Most encounters pull from standard Vulgus infantry supported by shielded units and tracking drones. The infantry exists to box you in, while drones punish straight-line movement with chip damage and status buildup. Elites introduced here have inflated health pools but predictable attack cycles, making them inefficient targets for prolonged gunplay.
Late-phase spawns often include enemies with short-range suppression fields or ground-based AoEs. These aren’t lethal on their own, but they stack fast if you stay planted. Bunny’s kit hard-counters this design, provided you keep moving and avoid overcommitting to single targets.
Spawn Triggers and Aggro Behavior
Enemy waves are tied to invisible proximity thresholds rather than kill counts. Crossing certain terrain markers or activating trace-adjacent objects instantly flags your position and spawns enemies behind or above you. This is why clearing everything before moving forward actually makes the next area harder.
Aggro persistence is short, and enemies leash aggressively. If you break line of sight and gain distance, most mobs will reset or de-prioritize you. The optimal play is to trigger the spawn, force them to cluster, then disengage and push the objective instead of farming kills.
Environmental Pressure and Combat Flow
Several arenas in this quest use narrow paths, elevation changes, and destructible cover to limit safe angles. Enemies are positioned to punish tunnel vision, especially when you’re mid-interaction or recovering stamina. You’re meant to feel chased, not entrenched.
Energy surges and ground effects often coincide with spawn triggers, creating layered pressure. Rolling or sprinting through these hazards is safer than trying to outshoot them. Treat the environment as part of the enemy kit rather than background noise.
Bunny Synergies: Playing to Her Strengths
Bunny’s movement-centric design trivializes most of these encounters if you lean into speed and chaining mobility. Her abilities let you proc damage while repositioning, which is exactly what these fights reward. You should almost never stop moving unless an objective explicitly forces it.
Use her speed to control spawn angles, not to chase kills. Trigger enemies, loop around terrain, and let passive damage and quick bursts thin them out while you advance. If you’re standing still trading fire, you’re playing against the quest’s design and Bunny’s strengths at the same time.
Common Mistakes That Slow Progress
The most frequent error is assuming waves must be fully cleared to advance. Outside of hard locks, most enemies are optional pressure, not mandatory objectives. Burning cooldowns on early spawns often leaves you exposed when an elite drops during an interaction.
Another pitfall is ignoring vertical threats. Drones and elevated shooters are meant to disrupt Bunny’s flow if left unchecked. A quick jump-chain to break their angle is faster and safer than trying to outgun them from below.
Reading the Quest’s Combat Language
The game communicates escalation through spawn direction and enemy composition. Front-facing spawns signal forward momentum, while rear or flanking spawns indicate you’re lingering too long. Learning this language lets you preemptively reposition instead of reacting late.
When the quest wants you to fight, it locks you in with clear barriers and sustained waves. When it wants you to move, enemies arrive in bursts meant to harass, not overwhelm. Bunny excels here by turning that harassment into background noise while you stay focused on progression.
Objective Breakdown Part 2: Final Trace Location and High-Intensity Engagement
With the quest’s combat language established, the final trace ramps everything up at once. This objective is designed to stress-test your movement discipline, awareness, and ability timing. If you’ve been respecting Bunny’s momentum-based playstyle, this section feels intense but controlled rather than chaotic.
Reaching the Final Trace Zone
The last trace marker pulls you into a denser combat pocket, usually framed by tighter geometry and overlapping elevation. Expect enemies to spawn immediately as you enter the zone, even before interacting with the trace object. This is a soft pressure check meant to punish hesitation, not force a full clear.
Resist the urge to stop and fight at the entrance. Push through, sweep the perimeter once to trigger spawns, and create space before committing to the interaction. Bunny’s speed lets you “set the board” so you’re not activating the trace while boxed in.
Interacting With the Trace Under Fire
Once you initiate the final trace, the encounter shifts into a sustained engagement with mixed enemy types. This is where the quest stops pretending enemies are optional and starts actively contesting the objective. Elites and shielded units are introduced specifically to break your rhythm and drain cooldowns.
Do not tunnel vision the trace progress bar. Use short movement bursts between interaction windows to reset aggro and collapse enemy formations. Bunny can safely disengage mid-progress, clear pressure with passive damage ticks, then snap back to finish the interaction without losing tempo.
High-Intensity Wave Composition and Threat Prioritization
The waves here are deliberately layered: fast melee units to force movement, ranged suppressors to punish straight-line sprinting, and at least one elite acting as a time sink. Killing everything is inefficient. Your priority is anything that directly interrupts movement or interaction, not raw DPS targets.
Vertical threats become more aggressive in this phase. If drones or elevated snipers are allowed to stack, they will shred Bunny during interaction animations. A quick jump-chain to collapse their angle is faster than burning ammo into a bad hitbox from below.
Using Bunny’s Kit to Control the Chaos
This is the section where Bunny’s kit stops being helpful and becomes mandatory. Her ability to deal damage while repositioning turns what looks like overwhelming pressure into background attrition. Keep your movement circular, not linear, so enemies are constantly forced to rotate and re-acquire you.
Avoid dumping all abilities on the first elite spawn. The quest often triggers a second pressure spike just as the trace completes or immediately after. Holding one mobility or burst option in reserve prevents the classic mistake of finishing the objective only to get downed in the cleanup phase.
Post-Trace Engagement and Quest Progression
Completing the final trace doesn’t instantly end combat. Expect a short aftermath wave meant to catch players who mentally disengage too early. Stay mobile for a few seconds after completion and clear only what’s directly blocking your exit path.
Once the pressure drops, the quest advances cleanly into its next narrative beat, rewarding you for momentum rather than perfection. If you reach this point without burning revives or stalling on waves, you’ve played the encounter exactly as Bunny’s questline intends.
Common Pitfalls and Efficiency Tips: How to Avoid Backtracking and Wasted Time
After surviving the final trace encounter, the biggest enemy becomes inefficiency. The Follow Their Traces quest is designed to punish hesitation, missed triggers, and poor routing more than raw combat mistakes. Most wasted time comes from small misreads that snowball into unnecessary resets or map traversal.
Missing Trace Triggers and Soft-Resetting the Objective
The most common failure point is interacting with a trace before fully clearing its activation condition. Some traces won’t register progress if a nearby elite or suppression unit is still active, even if the UI looks clear. If the prompt flickers or cancels mid-channel, stop and eliminate the immediate threats instead of brute-forcing the interaction.
Leaving a trace half-completed often forces a soft reset that sends you back through the zone. Always confirm the progress indicator locks in before moving on. A clean completion saves far more time than rushing to the next marker.
Overclearing Zones That Don’t Require It
This quest heavily favors momentum, but many players instinctively wipe entire rooms. Outside of trace-specific pressure waves, most enemies are disposable and will despawn once you move far enough ahead. If an enemy isn’t actively blocking an interaction or pinning your movement, it’s not worth your ammo or cooldowns.
Bunny excels at slipstreaming through danger. Use speed and passive damage to exit zones early instead of treating every area like a survival encounter. Clearing only what’s necessary keeps the quest moving at its intended pace.
Poor Route Planning Between Trace Locations
The map layout encourages looping paths, but not all routes are equal. Players often follow the most obvious corridor, only to realize it dead-ends into a vertical climb or forces a long backtrack. Before committing, check elevation changes and sightlines to confirm you’re moving toward the next objective marker efficiently.
Bunny’s mobility lets her bypass terrain that other Descendants struggle with. Use jump chains and lateral movement to cut corners, especially in multi-level zones. Saving ten seconds per transition adds up fast across the full quest.
Blowing Cooldowns Too Early
Another classic mistake is unloading Bunny’s kit on the first sign of resistance after a trace completes. As covered earlier, the quest frequently spawns a delayed pressure wave meant to catch players on cooldown. If you burn everything immediately, you’re forced into defensive play or risk a down.
Treat every post-trace moment as a potential follow-up encounter. Keep at least one mobility or burst option available until you’re safely moving toward the next objective. This keeps your tempo intact and avoids revive penalties.
Ignoring Ammo and Resource Flow
While Bunny isn’t ammo-hungry compared to other Descendants, inefficient weapon usage can still slow the run. Spraying into elites with poor hitboxes or elevated enemies wastes time and resources. Let passive damage and movement do the work whenever possible.
Quickly scoop ammo drops while repositioning instead of stopping to reload in place. Staying stocked without breaking stride prevents awkward pauses later when the quest ramps back up.
Advancing Before the Quest Updates
Finally, don’t outrun the quest scripting. Bunny’s speed makes it easy to leave an area before the objective officially updates, which can cause confusion or force a return trip. Always wait for the audio cue or UI confirmation before sprinting off.
Once the update hits, move immediately. The quest rewards clean transitions, not impatience. Staying synced with the objective flow ensures the entire Follow Their Traces quest unfolds smoothly, exactly as Bunny’s design intends.
Quest Completion Rewards: Bunny Lore Unlocks, Materials, and Progression Impact
If you’ve managed your tempo correctly and stayed synced with the quest scripting, Follow Their Traces ends on a clean, satisfying note. This isn’t just a checkbox objective either. Completing Bunny’s questline delivers meaningful rewards that directly feed her long-term performance, lore depth, and early-to-midgame efficiency.
More importantly, nothing here is filler. Every reward ties back into Bunny’s identity as a high-mobility DPS Descendant and nudges her progression in a way that rewards players who leaned into her strengths during the quest.
Bunny Lore Unlocks and Character Context
The biggest immediate unlock is Bunny’s character lore entries, expanding on her origins, motivations, and relationship to the larger Ingris conflict. These logs aren’t just flavor text. They contextualize why Bunny plays the way she does, reinforcing her hit-and-run combat philosophy and reckless momentum.
For players invested in Descendant-specific storytelling, this quest adds some of the clearest insight into Bunny’s mindset so far. It also unlocks additional voice lines and Codex entries, which helps flesh her out during future missions and hub interactions.
Materials and Upgrade Resources
On the mechanical side, Follow Their Traces rewards a solid bundle of mid-tier enhancement materials. Expect Descendant upgrade components, weapon enhancement resources, and currency that’s immediately usable rather than gated behind RNG-heavy crafting loops.
These materials are especially valuable if you’re refining Bunny’s survivability mods or pushing her skill cooldown reductions. The quest effectively offsets the resource drain from leveling her aggressively early, letting you stabilize her build without diverting into side farming.
Progression Impact for Bunny Mains
From a progression standpoint, completing this quest quietly accelerates Bunny’s viability in harder content. The experience payout and materials combine to push her closer to the thresholds needed for smoother dungeon clears and faster open-zone rotations.
This is where Bunny starts feeling less fragile and more self-sufficient. With smarter mod investment and the quest rewards backing you up, she transitions from high-risk sprinter to reliable DPS engine that thrives on constant movement and pressure.
Why This Quest Matters Long-Term
Follow Their Traces sets the foundation for how Bunny should be played going forward. The quest teaches pacing, cooldown discipline, and environmental awareness, then rewards you with the tools to double down on those lessons.
If you rushed through it sloppily, you’ll feel that later. If you played it clean, the rewards reinforce that efficiency and make Bunny even more lethal in subsequent content.
As a final tip, don’t immediately dump the materials into random upgrades. Review Bunny’s current pain points first, whether it’s survivability, cooldown uptime, or burst consistency. Investing with intention here pays off fast, and it’s the difference between Bunny feeling chaotic and Bunny feeling unstoppable as The First Descendant opens up.