Honkai: Star Rail is a big game that will only get bigger and more complicated with all the new characters, content, and mechanics. Learning the basics is therefore incredibly important, as is avoiding costly new player mistakes that will rob you of valuable upgrade materials and cause you no end of frustration. We’ve collected our five most important tips for beginning Honkai: Star Rail players in this guide.
Best Tips for New Players in Honkai: Star Rail
There are dozens of considerations whenever you start a new gacha game, and Honkai: Star Rail is no exception. The big questions are how you spend your gacha pulls, which characters you upgrade, and how to build your team. It gets much more granular at the higher levels, but if you keep these five tips in mind, you’ll do fine.
Related: Does Honkai Star Rail Support Controllers?
Diversify Your Team
Probably the most important thing you can do to make your Honkai: Star Rail playthrough as smooth as possible is to have a team that can do a lot across all four characters. Four damage dealers sounds nice, but you won’t last long without a healer. Ideally, you’ll want some kind of support character, a buff or debuff character (or both), and someone for damage.
Have Damage That Can Weakness Break
Weakness Break is one of the core combat mechanics in Honkai: Star Rail. While it’s possible to out-damage everything without Breaking your enemies, you can’t stun them out of powerful attacks. More importantly, a Break deals massive damage on top of what you’re already doing, so it makes fights faster and safer at the same time.
Use Ultimates as Interrupts
Honkai: Star Rail characters’ Ultimates have the highest priority in the attack order and will activate as soon as you use them. That means you can do so when the character wouldn’t otherwise have a turn giving you a chance to kill it or heal before they act. You would do well to use the likes of Natasha’s Ultimate to provide last-second healing, for instance.
Save Up Your Level-up Currency Early On
You’ll be changing characters a lot in Honkai: Star Rail, if only to try out whatever new option is available from your most recent Warp. And through the first Gold Calyx you unlock, you can lightly farm experience items. We recommend you do this as much as possible at the start, as you won’t unlock the ability to farm other valuable items until very late in the game. And having a huge stock of experience stored up will make getting new characters up to speed much easier.
Use Your Free Pulls Immediately
You get 90 free pulls when you start Honkai: Star Rail, and we recommend you use them. Five-star characters can completely change how the game plays and how easy or hard it is to complete more challenging content. Spending all 90 free Warps will also let you know if you want to reroll for something better, saving you dozens of hours of needless grinding.
Save World Chests Until You Can Equip Relics
Relics are a valuable type of equipment, but you don’t get access to them until midway through the Jarilo-VI story. Save any world chests until Relics are available, as every chest has a high chance of awarding them, and if you collect the chest before you have Relics, they’re essentially wasted.
Complete Every Quest
Trailblaze Experience can be hard to come by sometimes in Honkai: Star Rail, especially when your each one of the level gates during the campaign. For that reason, we recommend you do every quest that comes your way soon after getting it, as they provide experience, currency, upgrade materials, and more for your trouble.
Use Consumables
Don’t underestimate the power of consumables in Honkai: Star Rail. Even the lowest rarity of them can come in handy in a difficult situation. Though you can’t use them in combat, using one or two before what you know will be a tough fight can turn the tide entirely, especially if the consumable gives a significant damage or defense boost. You can stack consumable buffs, so don’t be afraid to use them as you have them.
Use the World Shop on Each Planet
Every destination in Honkai: Star Rail has a World Shop vendor, where you spend that location’s specific currency. World Shops offer Eidolons for your Trailblazer, experience, upgrade materials, and Relics.
Farm Lower-level Difficulty Activities for Quicker Loot
Just because you can access an activity’s highest difficulty in Honkai: Star Rail doesn’t mean you should always do it. If you’re behind on experience and want a quick way to farm up some consumables, do a lower-difficulty Calyx. If you need to get more Simulated Universe Weekly Points but don’t want to do the most challenging version, don’t. You can earn plenty by breezing through the easier content and picking up Curios and Blessings you might be missing.
If you’re a newcomer to Honkai: Star Rail, hopefully, these tips helped get you started on your journey. There’s a lot to learn in this game and plenty of fun to be had. For additional details on some of HSR‘s finer points, check out our guides on the best boss DPS teams, how to unlock Fire Trailblazer, and HSR’s pity system explained. Our guides hub has even more.
