One Honkai Star Rail player has gone to extreme lengths to squeeze every last Stellar Jade and gacha Pass out of the launch build, earning just under 300 pulls worth of resources in a week.
Insomniac gacha grinder Gotruto shared their findings in a recent Reddit post, and I reached out to them to talk through their methods and get an update on their progress. As of today, at Trailblaze level 38, they say they've been able to scrounge up 150 Special Passes and 144 normal Passes (counting the 10 bonus passes you get from the Departure Warp beginner banner). They note that they have purchased the game's login and battle passes, so they aren't free-to-play themselves, but these extras have only contributed a handful of pulls that didn't affect their F2P calculations.
"I have completed the story, done every quest I've gotten, done every puzzle that I could find, and have 159 achievements done," they said in their post. "I have all the zone shops done except the last, which is only missing the final Eidolon purchase. Finally, I have done Simulated Universe World 5 and three-starred Forgotten Hall up to and including Floor 10."
"I've really enjoyed being on the Astral Express with all of the characters and with the people on this subreddit. I'll continue riding along, but at a more leisurely pace in the future," they said, understandably adding that "I need sleep."
I asked Gotruto about good sources of Stellar Jades and Passes that might be easy to overlook, and they advised players to pay close attention to Honkai Star Rail's many open-world-ish zones. Once you clear the story quests, many zones will spawn in extra puzzles, challenges, or one-time treasure pigs that award extra resources, and you might miss these if you don't backtrack or triple-check the map. I found a three-part challenge in Jarilo-6 just last night after clearing the main story.
"In particular, Xianzhou has a number of puzzles which respawn for two more days in a row after doing them, for three total rounds of those puzzles," Gotruto says. "Also, you can get quite a lot of pulls from doing the shop for each zone. Completing the shop for Xianzhou requires a lot of exploring and finding hidden bits of the currency, including a lengthy chain of hidden objectives."
"I come from Genshin Impact, and I am used to saving up well in advance for characters. This was far more generous than Genshin at launch, in my experience," they add.
This post also prompted an outpouring of tips from other players, many of whom say they're just behind Gotruto's F2P pull count, presumably because they've slept more in the past few days. You can get an easy normal Pass or two just by ascending new characters once or twice, for example, and those Honkai Star Rail codes add up quickly.
It's important to note that most of the Stellar Jades and Star Rail Passes accounted for here are one-time things, which means Honkai Star Rail's free-to-play resources will slow down dramatically once you get through the new content. Repeatable dailies and weeklies, not to mention limited-time events, do offer some resources, but far fewer. It is, after all, a gacha game, and therefore a game explicitly monetizing FOMO.
Still, it's nice to have a fairly complete estimate for how many pulls you can expect to earn while 'finishing' the launch version of the game. If you really dig down deep, you'll get approximately enough pulls to hit soft pity twice on both the rate-up and normal banners, theoretically guaranteeing four F2P five-stars with reasonable luck. And if you play relatively heavily, you might be able to polish all of that off before the Seele rate-up banner even ends, but you'll have to take that up with your sleep schedule.
Genshin Impact players are in shambles after seeing Honkai Star Rail beat them to quality of life features they've wanted for years.
