Honkai: Star Rail has turned out to be a far less cruel mistress than its predecessors when it comes to grinding. Hoyoverse has blended elements of both Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact 3rd into a new gacha RPG that includes a space train, a huge chicken that squashes enemies, and even more unexpectedly, turn-based combat.
Many were skeptical when we first discovered that Star Rail was using a turn-based combat system. However, adding an auto-battle function means that Honkai: Star Rail is vastly reducing the inevitable material grind that comes with games of this type, and I’m absolutely here for it.
Apart from the gacha system, which was always designed to suck your bank account dry with every new banner, the most common complaint about games like Genshin and Honkai is the huge time sink of grinding various domains. A whole range of materials are required to level characters, weapons, armor, and talents - or in Star Rail’s case, light cones, relics, and traces. Genshin Impact even added an extra timesink because not all the materials you’ll need are available each day. It’s so annoying. I have far too many characters languishing in my Genshin menu at an unusable level simply because I can’t face the grind.
When it comes to Star Rail, the first thing you need to know about grinding is not ‘don’t talk about grinding’, but the opposite, in fact. If you know someone who hopped on the space train, immediately tell them about how to make their grinding less of a chore with the auto-battle option. The simple system means that grinding for anything, be it levels, equipment, or enhancements, is made so much easier.
Don’t get me wrong, you aren’t completely free to grind for hours while afk, but a huge chunk of the time sink and input needed is removed. If I need to level a character, I can click that character, then select the item I am short of, and a nice drop-down menu will tell me exactly how and where I can get it from. Then the magic happens.
If it’s something I can craft or transmute from other items, I can go straight to the omni-synthesizer menu. No more traveling to a capital city to seek out a guy by a fountain with a crafting table. I can cook, craft, and transmute all from one simple menu in just a few clicks.
If the item is in one of the domains, then a couple of clicks will get me into a Calyx, Cavern, Echo of War, or Stagnant Shadow battle with my desired party. Each domain type is clearly marked on the menu, so you know which type of items are in each one, as well as the specific rewards. Then all I need to do is hit the beautiful auto battle symbol and sit back and relax. The game will do the work, and my team will battle at a super-fast speed without my input.
If I need to run the same domain again, one click will repeat the entire process. I can spend my currency and finish my domain grind in just a few minutes, taking a big chunk out of the time it takes to do daily quests. You don’t even need to be active in the game to run a domain either, meaning you can set the fight going and then return to it. In fact, my intrepid team is fighting guards right now while I’m writing about how great it is.
The bad news is that there’s still a progress gate in the form of a currency cost to run the domains, Trailblaze Power, the equivalent of Genshin Impact’s Resin, and it does run out quickly. However, there are two benefits to this currency over resin. The first is that it regenerates faster, and the second is that you can choose to run a limited number of battles in Calyx domains, meaning you can gain rewards for as little as ten Trailblaze Power, and they simply scale up in cost and reward, up to a six-fight per run maximum.
You may be wondering if it really will save you time, but let me assure you that it does. While auto-battle is disabled for story quests, you can also use it to fly through incidental battles along the way. If you’ve ever played Persona 5, the feeling can best be equated to the moment you become powerful enough to run through Mementos and insta-kill shadows with your car, eliminating all the annoying battles you must go through to get to the main event while still reaping the rewards. In this case, the battle still happens, but it’s very fast and requires no thought on your part, something I’m always grateful for. As long as your characters are appropriately leveled for the fight, you’ll come out on top. You cannot cheese a difficult encounter by auto-battling with an underpowered party, but you can reduce the frustration of repeating it a few times.
Honkai: Star Rail’s approach to grinding has truly revolutionized my RPG experience and I hope that by reducing the daily grind I’ll be able to keep up with the main storyline easier. There are still plenty of things to do, but now they don’t include spending an hour running the same fight five times in a row, just to get my latest character from level 39 to 40. I’ll even have time to answer all those random text messages I adore. Just not the ones from Herta. I don’t have time to deal with her [Automatic reply].