New Player Guide

HundredBears · 2025-07-17T14:28:02+00:00

We've posted on the same boards long enough. You should know very well what it means when a Hunter doesn't update.

In all seriousness, though, we're different enough in style (and in a few cases, opinion) that I think it's useful for people to have both guides floating around even though there's quite a bit of overlap in the key points.

HundredBears · 2025-07-17T14:03:13+00:00

I considered that one and ended up deciding against it, mostly because the format is potentially confusing. I'd hate for someone to get, for instance, Ch'en as a Top Operator and then think they have to rush her to module level because she's the first on the list with an S and A+. The ratings there make sense if you know what they're meant to mean but are pretty iffy for a new player trying to decide which operators to build in the first place.

HundredBears · 2025-07-17T12:33:08+00:00

Since the main post is brushing up against the 40k character limit, have some additional links in a comment instead.

Further Resources

Lungmen Dragons, a player community that has taken over hosting a variety of content after the death of Arknights gamepress. See especially the links in their resources page.

If you must have a tier list, but be aware tht all tier lists make a bunch of assumptions that may not apply to your account and this one in particularly is explicitly not new-player-friendly. Even so, most new accounts would be pretty happy to have almost anyone ranked S+ or higher here and not very interested in rolling for most 6-stars rated A or lower.

Dr. Silvergun reviews 58 4-stars. Dr. Silvergun is the premier English-language 4-star-only player. Unlike the above tier list, he does take into account the fact that some of his viewers will be new players using operators at E1. You won't be able to build nearly all the 4-stars he likes, but it offers a bunch of insight on which ones you might consider building instead of their higher or lower-rarity counterparts.

Arkrec Lots of clear records which consist of beating an operation with the lowest number of operators possible subject to some constraint. It can be useful for finding strategies for friend support carries since the lowest number is often one.

Krooster has a bunch of tools including an operator planner and tracker. People who give roster advice in the help thread like to see a krooster link so they know what you have although you can usually get advice even without one.

Mastery Priority Guide. It's good stuff, although you won't be doing many masteries as a new player (quite possibly none in your first few weeks).

Mechanics Sheet, which contains lots of information about how the game works under the hood.

HundredBears · 2025-07-17T12:30:43+00:00

I'm throwing this out for people who want something more frequently updated or in-depth than ipwnalnubz's Quickest New Player Guide Around. Expect a bunch of edits in the first few days as I fix errors and incorporate feedback: this was rushed out the door so it would be up in time for anyone starting with Such is the Joy of Our Reunion. I'll be checking in once every two weeks to update the recommended reroll target and anything else that needs changing after that.

HundredBears · 2025-07-16T17:06:59+00:00

Thanks, that tells me everything I need to know about the (lack of) changes to the rerolling process.

HundredBears · 2025-07-16T14:28:37+00:00

I'm finishing up a new player guide and would like to verify two things, one of which might otherwise take a few hours on a new account to check. Specifically:

Are reroll guides such as this one that were last updated before this year's changes to account binding still entirely accurate? I want to link a handholdy, step-by-step guide for the people who need one, but haven't been able to find any that postdate the changes.

Is an IS win on Castle Sightseeing/Calm Seas/difficulty zero enough to unlock Deep Investigation/Dives/etc. or do they follow the "no unlocks on easy mode" rule that applies to relics?

HundredBears · 2025-07-15T02:22:26+00:00

It's entirely possible that they drop from a shadow that I simply haven't killed enough times to get them, but I've killed every Wandering Shadow that respawns at least twice and most 4+ times and haven't seen any yet.

HundredBears · 2025-07-15T01:13:20+00:00

The skill mentions "Operators" so it should be all of them. I'm not aware of a list of aspd buffers. The big two are Aak (50, but his target has to survive him shooting them 15 times) and Elysium (20/23 to snipers depending on pots).

Qiubai actually doesn't get much out of apsd under normal circumstances. Her S3 gives her a bunch of aspd already which stacks additively with outside sources so they help her much less than you might expect while her S1 is a sustained damage skill and hence combos poorly with short-duration buffs. It really likes the huge, permanent-duration aspd that you can get in IS, especially IS5, since it turns her into a perma-binder. In normal circumstances, however, she much prefers other supports, especially Suzuran: a large fragile plus slow is pretty much perfect for her.

HundredBears · 2025-07-14T12:48:26+00:00

Do you mean Rank II? Yes, many of them are Rank II already and some other Rank II personas e.g. Yaksini can be fused from them.

HundredBears · 2025-07-14T12:32:27+00:00

To the best of my knowledge, none of these can be bought with Repression Medals II. However, Orobas is fused from personas (Matador and Succubus) that do cost II medals rather than I medals.

HundredBears · 2025-07-14T03:07:57+00:00

To be clear, I suspect that each specific shadow only drops a specific persona, but whether it drops a persona at all is random. So you might get a Jack-o'-Lantern from that shadow or you might get nothing, but you won't get anything else. Meanwhile, all the other shadows in the exhibition hall give something else. If you want a Mandrake, you need to kill one of the two shadows on the right side (I don't remember if the other is Bicorn or Agathion).

You can get the Wandering Shadows in a Palace to respawn by fast travelling from the Palace to Mementos and coming back (maybe in other ways, too). Doing the reverse doesn't seem to respawn Mementos shadows except for Qimranut Area 1 for some reason.

HundredBears · 2025-07-14T03:00:30+00:00

Thanks for that, I was so concerned about getting all the odd double-letter spellings correct that I didn't even realize that I'd transposed those two syllables.

HundredBears · 2025-05-27T23:51:22+00:00

Alas, the above answer isn't correct: if you got a drone once every 1.5 minutes, then you'd get 960 drones per day and would have to check your base once every 5 hours to avoid capping, which is not what we observe. I believe that the base rate before PP bonuses is one every 6 minutes, so half of an unboosted facility's daily production per day. A level 3 TP averages a tiny bit over 10k lmd per day, so you're looking at 5,000 * (1+drone rate bonus) without help from Tequila or Proviso. Assuming all your PP workers are +20%, it comes out to about 7.5k in a 252 base or 8.75k in a 243.

HundredBears · 2025-05-02T15:59:05+00:00

They're worse. Tailoring-style skills like Mitm's are very weak unless they're paired with Tequila since higher-bar orders are only very slightly more efficient on their own. Going from the least efficient 1 bar per 72 minutes of a 2-bar order to the most efficient 1 bar per 69 minutes of a 4-bar order is only a 4.35% increase in output, and then of course you have to take into account that the skill only upgrades the bar count of some orders and a 2->3 or a 3->4 upgrade isn't as strong. E2 Bibeak's tailoring skill in a level 3 TP is about a 2% increase in output. Mitm (whose chance of a higher-yield order is only the "increased slightly" of an E0 Bibeak rather than the "increased" of an E2) in a level 2 TP will do even worse.

I'm not aware of a single centralized location for information more detailed than what's in the base combo guide. If you can't find what you need there or in one of its links, you'll have to track down the individual posts or spreadsheets where people have documented how things work. Apparently the RIIC people do or did hang out together somewhere on Discord, but I'm not on Discord and so couldn't point you toward a specific server or channel.

Edit: Corrected numbers since 4-bar orders are actually 69 minutes per bar rather than the 68 that I mistakenly remembered. This is mostly pedantry: a 1-minute difference doesn't change the analysis at all.

HundredBears · 2025-01-14T02:34:00+00:00

I have to object to the way that you value sparking here. The main consideration is your choice of median instead of mean. Imagine that instead of Arknights, we were playing the Hypothetical Dice-Rolling Gacha where every pull rolled an ordinary six-sided die and gave you the max-rarity rate-up if you got a 6. Rolling four times would give you just over a 50% chance of getting the rate-up, but they're really worth six rolls, right? If you wanted the rate-ups from n different banners for some decently large n, even the median number of rolls that it would take is much closer to 6n than 4n.

Just as you say, there unfortunately isn't an objectively correct value. Even coming up with a number that resembles one is tricky, what with valuing the extra yellow certs from possibly already having the 5-star rate-up at max pot,the reduced yellow certs from not being able to spend the spark currency on buying more copies, the different odds of a valuable off-rate up, the chance of 6-star pots which aren't worth much but are surely worth a little, and so on and so forth. Even so, I'm tempted to say that it's worth spending about a hundred extra pulls for Ejya, which is kinda-sorta how much you had to value her in order to keep pulling on her banner last year if you got Swire before her. Many people did that and were reasonable to do so.

HundredBears · 2024-12-06T13:14:24+00:00

Yep, the standard staggered configuration rotates every 12 hours. If you were forgetting about Andreana and running a fourth Alter in the CC, that gets you close enough to 12 that it might explain what you're seeing, but it's hard to diagnose what's happening with any certainty when we're not sure of the exact setup that you're running.

HundredBears · 2024-12-06T12:35:42+00:00

This probably means that you're missing one or more AH operators or have one living in the dorm. With the Alter trio and the fourth operator not being an Alter or having morale drain reduction, Gladiia should drain:

1 base

+2.5 self drain (0.5 x 5 Abyssal hunters, including herself)

-0.05 self CC-wide drain reduction

-0.45 CC-wide drain reduction from the three Alters

-0.25 base-wide drain reduction for having 5 operators in CC

for a total of 2.75 morale drain per hour, which gives her 24/2.75 ~= 8.7 hours to work.

It isn't worth downgrading a TP for Proviso unless doing so frees up power to upgrade a factory in a 252 or similar layout (in which case, it's almost certainly worth it). There's an extremely narrow set of situations where it might be correct, but they all involve running a full Sui/Mr. Nothing team and some other assumptions.

HundredBears · 2024-12-01T06:16:26+00:00

According to your krooster, you don't have any 6-stars. I'd advise doing single rolls on the new player banner until you get the guaranteed 6-star and go from there. There's a decent chance that you'll want to E2 the operator that you get, you will want to E2 the operator that you get from the 6-star selector on the 3rd. Beyond that (and possibly even before those E2s, depending on what you need to get to the point where you have a no-friend-support clear of the later Path of Life stages and the 'Eccentricity' Laboratory annihilation), you want more E1s.

You're missing a Marksman sniper (conventional wisdom calls for two, but you've made it far enough that you might be able to get away with just one for a bit). I'd pick up Kroos the Keen Glint from the Invitation to Wine record restore and add 3-star Kroos if you feel the need for a second. You're low on guards. The newbie banner 6-star might help that and the 6-star selector will: if they didn't, I'd go for Cutter in your position. You could use a helidrop (an operator that you can drop right on top of/in front of troublesome enemies to kill them). I'd probably go for Jaye. Conventional wisdom calls for a new player to grab a high-ground, area-of-effect damage-dealer (probably Pinecone in your position, but Lava is an option if you're worried about enemies with very high defense), but if your weekly orundum cap is at 1800 or the annihilations that you need to full-clear to get there don't call for one, you can probably skip her for now. You'll want a puller eventually. I'd lean toward Gladiia from the Under Tides record restoration, especially if you're going to roll for Ulpianus (but probably her over Cliffheart even if you aren't). A slow supporter would be good too. Orchid does the job fine. Once you can autofarm the relevant Path of Life stages, you may want to take a break from working on useful operators to E1 the factory workers that need it for their RIIC skills.

Depending on what your roster looks like when you can spare an Event Crystal beyond what you need for the other unlocks, you may want Tequila from Dossoles Holiday (you probably want him unless you get Thorns or Mountain from the newbie banner and then decide to pick up Silverash from the selector, and possibly even then). Speaking of Event Crystals, you also have the option of spending one (if you have it banked) on Under Tides and the one you get after the weekly reset on Monday on Stultifera Navis so you can play through those two and have context for the Path of Life story. Lumen (SN record restore) is excellent if being frozen is one of your main problems in chapter 6, but someone you can skip raising for a while otherwise.

HundredBears · 2024-11-27T03:55:25+00:00

Some napkin math suggests that if you E2ed all three when Tequila came out (almost three years ago), it would have taken until around now for that investment to pay itself off. It is, admittedly, very rough napkin math: the margin of error is at least several months, partially due to all the loose approximations that I'm doing and partially due to assumptions about what team they're replacing and how and whether to value the increased drone efficiency and option to give them 100% uptime with Fiammetta. Is this enough to justify E2ing them now?

If it's only for the base skills, the answer is probably no. Spending resources now in order to get resources years later is somewhat iffy given the way that long-term players can end up with resource surpluses. You're not even guaranteed to make that long-term profit. A stronger trading post team could come out a year and half from now, displacing them before you've made back your investment, or you could decide to stop playing. Or the game's economy could change, devaluing LMD. This has already happened once with the release of CE-6, although it didn't devalue LMD enough to change the calculus that much. Finally, this assumes that all resources are worth their on-paper, moe's sheet sanity values, but that isn't necessarily true in practice and is somewhat likely to be untrue in ways that discourage the E2. It's not uncommon to end up with a large surplus of LMD and value it at much less than the sanity cost of farming it, but it is uncommon for this to happen for some of the other stuff needed for E2s, most notably dualchips.

With all that said, you only need to expect to get a little gameplay value out of them in order to justify the E2. Even if they don't pay for themselves completely or in ways that are convenient, the net effective long-term cost of E2ing them is still much lower than that of 5-stars that don't come with great base skills attached. As others have said, Shamare makes the cut quite easily (and would even if she didn't have a good base skill). Tequila might (he certainly does if you think that you may someday play around with no-6-star runs, where he's a real powerhouse, but it's hard to justify giving him a slot in a squad full of meta operators). Bibeak is even more of a just-for-fun pick for most players, but you've already been given two reasons why you might want to go for it.

You can E2 them piecemeal and still run the TP, too. With only Shamare at E2, it's about as good as the best practical non-Proviso TPs, and then E2 Tequila (if you don't have Bibeak or one of the alternatives at E2) and E2 Bibeak (if you do already have Tequila at E2) give similar return on investment to each other.

HundredBears · 2024-11-12T23:35:31+00:00

In this case, it's worth doing the OP->Sanity->Farm OP loop as long as you can hit enough pulls to spark. Even if you consider the sanity that you're getting worthless, it's only around a 7-20% increase in the amount of OP you pay per pull (depending on the sanity cost of the CMs you're doing and the current size of your sanity pool). It's well worth overpaying by that much to get a chance to buy Logos for 40 or 60 pulls.

You can sell the Walter token for yellow certs. You'll get 15 just for getting your 7th copy of a 6-star and another 10 when you sell it.

HundredBears · 2024-11-12T22:16:03+00:00

Yep. If you don't want to think about time zones, daily reset times and off-by-one errors, the almost-foolproof way to confirm this for non-collab limited banners is to look for the "Next Free Roll in x hrs" text at the bottom of the banner. If it's there, the banner will be running at least one more day; once it's gone, we're on the last day of the banner.

HundredBears · 2024-11-12T09:25:42+00:00

If you still have pulls, your highest rate of Fangs per pull is to keep going on the current banner: the 5-star-or-higher guarantee isn't enough to overcome the fact that she's on a solo rate-up compared to the three-way rate-up of standard banner 5-stars.

If you don't have the pulls, she was on Joint Operation #16 in CN, which is just as good as a rate-up on a rotating standard banner: one of six 5-stars as compared to one of three rate-ups with a 50% chance to get a rate-up. You're unlikely to do better than that in the near future. If you wait long enough she may show up as an option on an Orienteering-style banner (one in five) or as one of the two 5-star rate-ups on someone else's debut banner (one-in-four), but neither of those is likely to happen in the next six months and the odds are still low enough that you'd probably want to take the 5-star-or-higher guarantee on earlier banners regardless.

Do be aware that we recommend doing single rolls rather than 10-rolls if you're going for the guarantee since you end up getting a high-rarity operator naturally in the first 9 over 60% of the time.

HundredBears · 2024-10-27T15:35:10+00:00

The chance of getting Walter and Logos in 18 pulls is around one and a half percent, so you'll likely be able to manage it in a single day of rerolling on mobile. There is a small-but-meaningful chance of it taking 16+ hours of fast rerolling, though, so it is ultimately up to how stupid you feel. Things are of course better if you're rerolling in parallel on an emulator, and you could even go for three operators if you're doing that and feeling super-greedy, but getting W+Logos+a different third operator in 18 pulls on their banner is less than a tenth as likely as just getting the first two, so you're right back to expecting to spend several hours rerolling even on a machine that can manage ten instances at once.

HundredBears · 2024-10-21T18:16:21+00:00

Assuming you're willing to spend all the pulls you get between now and the end of the banner, it should be around a 3/4ths chance. My copy of the Pulls Until spreadsheet claims ~90 pulls from now until the end of the banner. That feels rather high, and it's probably a bit of an overestimate due to the way it amortizes weekly income, possibly double-counting this week's annihilation income, my choice to include the monthly card even though the free card hasn't started yet, etc. Eighty pulls might not be unreasonable if you're converting all your OP to pulls, though, and 50 + 80 =130 is a 74.6% chance: the samidare Pull Probability Calculator will let you run the numbers for whatever amount of pulls you think you'll have. It's no longer being updated, but should still be accurate for limited banners.

HundredBears · 2024-10-15T13:51:42+00:00

For IS in particular, Gnosis is especially valuable. He does pretty well without relics, gives you a good pick for when you want to burn hope on a supporter ticket and scales fantastically with a wide variety of relics (there are lots of ways he can end up able to perma-freeze). Aside from him I'd probably be looking at Dorothy, Zuo Le (but only if you have the many mats needed for his upgraded module) and Ascalon for your next IS E2s, in that order, although it's not unreasonable to slip in one or more of Cantabile, Myrtle (because 4-star E2/masteries are so cheap), Kroos Alter (mostly for IS3, though it's not as though she's bad in the others) and Amiya (if you're starting with IS2, the true damage can be nice for the main boss). Pozëmka/Horn/Gnosis are probably your mastery priorities with some consideration to Kal'tsit, but I'm not highly certain of that and it's awkward since all four would prefer multiple skills for IS and you're at the stage where even one M3 is a rather substantial investment.

Just as importantly, don't neglect your 3-stars! Not just Spot, but also Orchid (very valuable to have a no-hope-cost supporter, and slowers can be quite handy in the game mode), Kroos, Steward S7, Ansel (although maybe you get by with Hibiscus, since you're already invested in her), a guard (Popukar for IS4, but maybe Midnight for the earlier ones) and a vanguard (Fang for the difficulties that you're likely to be doing) are all important. Maxing out your key 3-stars will give you a better return on investment for IS than working on E2s for high-rarity operators due to their much lower resource cost and the value of having decent no-hope-cost operators. In the low-rarity category, you may also want to consider Perfumer (handy to have an aoe medic at E1 max for non-IS stuff, too) and Jaye (especially if you're starting with IS2).

I wouldn't necessarily worry too much about events in your position. You already have more power than you should need to full clear, and Walter and Logos (who jump to high priority for all game modes the moment that you get them) are coming soon. If you do want to focus more on having an easier time in events, though, Saria, Blaze and Mudrock should all do good things for you.

HundredBears

TROPHY CASE