Beginner's Guide to Arknights Strategies

First of all, welcome to Arknights. I hope the game was able to make a very good first impression so far, even though in the beginning it might be a little bit overwhelming. In case you have any questions regarding the video or just in general about Arknights, you can use the comment section down below. And if you want a quick response, there will always be Arknights Discord servers you can ask questions in, or for a really quick response, you can just join Twitch, just ask a streamer there, and if you say you're a new player, they will always be glad to help there. Anyway, my name is Sassiv and I played Arknights for around 4-5k hours, if not more. Recently I started to notice an increase in new players trying out Arknights for the first time. That is why I want to share everything I know about how to make your Arknights experience as enjoyable as possible. In this guide I will go in much more detail than most other guides and I will be focusing a lot on efficiency, even though I personally recommend you to play in your own pace and not try to rush the game. So use the timestamps in the video to get to the categories you want to learn more about. Arknights is not your average gacha game. Gacha is important and high rarity operators can make stages a lot easier, but there is also a very good chance that building too many 6 and 5 stars in the early game will slow down your progress massively. Arknights has been proven to be beatable with just 3 stars and 4 stars, Unique about them is that 3 and 4 stars are not much weaker than a 5 and 6 star on the same level, yet they cost far less resources to level. That is why the community always advises to not sleep on them in the early game. Some of the most outstanding 3 and 4 stars are Cruz, Malempha, Cutter, Pinecone and Myrtle. Those are just a few of the very amazing 3 and 4 stars there are, but especially those are really shining in the early game. Pearl especially is even to this day one of the most, if not the most used operator in the game. She gives you enough deployment points that she can do the job of two vanguards pretty much alone. There are obviously more 3 and 4 stars worth building, but for that I would recommend you to watch a tier list to get an idea about which operator is considered good and which operator maybe not so much. But the rule of thumb is, even though we say there are operators that are better or worse, every operator can be used. And if you really tried to make them work, they can work. That is why, wife of a meta is such a common way to play Arknights. Reroll. Maybe you haven't even started your journey yet and want to reroll for the most optimal operator. Even though I personally recommend to just go with the flow of the game and play with what you got, but for those that enjoy rerolling for the most meta operators, then I would recommend you to go for Martin in the beginner banner. Even though he is a furry, He will make your life a lot easier, especially because he is an outstanding laneholder, one of the best at his job and he is super easy to use and understand. Thorns and Orkato are also super good units to get. Thorns has a super huge range for a melee operator and Orkato is just a really good sniper. Flametail on the other hand is possibly the strongest operator in her archetype, but the game will give you Texas and not a Vanguard later in the game for free. by doing all the quests in the quest tab. Therefore I would recommend not re-rolling for Flametail, even though she is probably the second strongest character in the banner to get. As for Zuzuran and Witty, Zuzuran is a great unit, but she starts to really shine once you can promote her to elite 2, which is pretty much limit breaks in other gacha games. Problem with that is that it takes a really long time to get there, and along the way she won't be helping you as much as the other characters on the banner. As for Widhi, I would say she is the worst operator to reroll for. Even though she is the best pusher in the game, her use is the most niche from all of the characters, which makes her the least useful for the early game. In case you are not planning to reroll, but it just hurt your pull was bad, this is only meant for people that are planning to reroll. All of the operators in the banner are really strong and especially in the later game, every character will prove themselves to be a very good character to get. It's just that some shine earlier than other. Arknights does mostly do a very good job at balancing, and it doesn't matter which characters you have. If you try hard enough, you can make every character work. As for the rerolling itself, when creating an account before the ad sign, you can add a number and every time you fail the reroll, you can increase the number by one. And this will create a new number while the verification code will still go to your email. This is how you won't have to reinstall the entire game again and again for every failed attempt. After skipping through the dialogue and the first real stage beaten, you get 3800 Rundo in your mail, which you can use on the beginner banner. In case you got lucky and you're satisfied with the pull you had, make sure you remember which number you were on on your email and to ensure your account won't be lost ever, make a screenshot of your main screen, your friend card and your bound account. So if there is ever a need to retrieve your account, you have everything Yoastar would possibly ask of you. This I would recommend for everyone watching, regardless of if you're rerolling or not. While accounts rarely get lost, rather do it than be sorry if it actually happens. Which banner should you pull on? This question is quite a difficult one, especially because every account is unique. There will always be different banners than the ones I will be showing in this video. As for the beginner banner, just pull on it until it's gone. There is nothing that you can do wrong there. Most of the time there are two different banners, maybe even three. One of them is the colonel banner. I would recommend to not pull on this banner, unless there are either waifus that you really really want, Or that rotation is just super good with 2 good 6 stars and some good 5 stars. The kernel banner mostly consists of older characters, which are still very viable, but since you cannot get any green or yellow certs, which can be used to buy almost every operator you want in the shop, it's still a much better option to go for the regular banner. Most of the time, there is either one or two regular banners. One that comes with the new event and always have new operators in it, and one where there are older operators. Especially in the early game, I would recommend you to try to get at least two great units for every class. Vanguard, Guard, Defender, Medic, Sniper and Caster. Supporter and Specialist can be neglected in the beginning. If you want to fully maximize your efficiency, you can either check out a tier list where it shows how good a character actually is, or you can check out Ace Ships or Game Press and read what each operator can do. More likely though, just seeing the numbers will probably not help you to decide which is actually a good character. Therefore tier lists is a much better option to get an idea of who is good and who is not. Or the third option, just go into it blind and pull from the ones you like and see yourself how good they are. Since there is no pvp, there is no reason to fully maximize and rush the game. Vive whoever meta they say. Recruitments. This feature is one of your biggest friends in building a strong roaster while not having to spend a single dime. So far you might have been selecting tags randomly, and just hope for the best, but there is a way to fully maximize it and increase your chances of getting a 5 or even a 6 star. It is very complicated and it's certainly overwhelming to learn in the beginning with all the things you can do in the game. Rule of thumb though, if there is a color tag, just select the color tag. But in case you want to maximize every recruitment voucher, there are two websites I mainly use for this, A-Ships or GamePress. Both are linked in the description. Both calculators work the same, while when using the A-Ships one, make sure you select the right server. The first thing you do is select all the 5 tags that you got in your recruitment. Once you scroll down, you can see which combination would give you what. If there is a chance to get a 4-star, always use this instead of refreshing. Obviously if you get so lucky and you can select a 5 or 6-star, pick them. But most of the time, You get only 3 stars, and with that in mind, already a 4 star is a victory. Make sure when selecting combinations to put it on 9 hours, to decrease the chance of the tag randomly dropping off. If you've never had that, it can be possible that just the tag you selected drops off if it wasn't going long enough. And even at 9 hours, there's a small chance it might drop off. If there are no combinations for a 4 star or higher, save your recruitment if you're running out of them. or set it to 7000 fodder minutes to save yourself some LMD. By randomly selecting tags, you will make your recruitments more expensive. That only makes sense if you're aiming for a certain class or a character. So if you would want to get a 4-star guard because you don't have one, only selecting the guard tag is a very viable strategy. One important thing to mention are 1-stars. 1-stars are rare and can only be obtained in recruitments. There are certain combinations to get 1 stars, but you can never set the time above 3 hours 50 minutes, since this would make it impossible for 1 star to appear. So in case you get lucky and get a robot tag, only set it to 3 hours and 50 minutes to give it the highest chance that you want drop off, even though the chance of it is still very high. So if it would actually drop off, don't be too sad about it, it happens to all of us. Also, there are 2 5 stars that can only be gotten from recruitments. Those are Vulcan and Indra. While they are not broken, having them at max potential gives you bragging rights. And with that, that is all you need to know about recruiting operators. And with that, I wish you happy recruiting! Friends! Unlike real life, friends are important and having a lot of friends makes your journey a lot easier. While the game doesn't offer you a good way to send friend requests, the best way to get a lot of them is joining an Arknights Discord and ask for friend support, or joining a random streamers chat and tell them you are new and you need help to progress in the game. I guarantee most of the streamer will be glad to help and if not, let me know in the comments who they were so we can cancel them together on Twitter. The reason why friends are so important is because you can use one of their free selected operator in your team. The level is adjusted to the elite level of your strongest operator. So if you don't have a single elite one, level crews a melantha to elite one and now you got much stronger friend support that will carry you. This also allows you to play Y4R meta. If you just build the characters you like the most, you can still borrow very strong operators from your friend tab. and be able to clear most stages. Important to note here is that every stage you beat with friend support will not save the run and in case you want to farm said stage, you would need to beat it again with your own units. What to buy in the store? The store is amazing and offers you various needed materials that you should buy. The first section is the Rhythmium section. Unless you're an upcoming whale, this section will not be of any interest for you. Next up are packs. They might look like another whale section, but it is not completely. If you scroll to the most right, you will see level packs, which can be purchased with Aurigna Prime. This is the yellow currency. Always buy them, because the value you get from these is far better than just converting your Prime normally, while the Aurundum count is the same. The Red currency, only used for pulls. Additionally, you get valuable upgrading materials that will be helpful for quick progress. Also, if you're planning to will at one point, start with the monthly card, because out of anything in the shop, this is the most valuable one. Next are skins. Here you can collect a free Fang skin, if you scroll to the most right. Skins don't give you any in-game advantage, besides making your waifus and husbandos even hotter. There are 4 different skin styles to buy. 15 OP means they have a new design, but no animation in the base. OP by the way means Aurina Prime. 18 OP is with animation in the base. 21 OP means it's a live 2D skin. And 24 OP gives you an animation every time you open the game, as long as this character is an assistant on your main screen. If you are planning to stay free to play, I would not recommend buying skins, unless it's for your favorite character. Keep in mind, the more Arena Prime you spend on skins, the less pulls you can do. 33 to 34 Arena Prime equals to 1 temple. So if you plan to buy one, make sure it's a skin you really really love. The certificate section is the most interesting section for us. Arknights is known to be one of the most generous gacha games out there, and besides the amazing polling rates, this section also played a major factor in getting this reputation. The yellow and green certs are obtained by just doing polls, so you will get them automatically. With the green certs, you should always buy in section 1, the heat hunting permits and the Rundum. Additionally, you can buy the rest as well, if you plan to go for section 2. In section 2 you can buy specific materials you need to upgrade your operators. Or even buy 4-star and 3-star selector packs, where you can decide which operator you want to select that you get guaranteed. Obviously it's rather expensive and I would not recommend going for that. The gold certs you get for pulling a new operator, a 5 or 6-star operator or a 4-star operator once they have max potential. And the yellow certs shop. there are only two really important things to consider buying. Either buy one of the 6 stars if there is one that you really want, or heat-hunting permits, in case you desperately want the new unit in the current banner. Especially in the early and mid game, I would never recommend buying the heat-hunting permits, since the value you get from these is a lot less than just buying a specific operator, you get guaranteed. And if you ignore my warning and want to buy the heat-hunting permits, make sure to have 258 yellow certs ready to get all of them. If that is not the case, the value of buying them is absolutely terrible and you most likely start to regret it once you see the luck wasn't on your side when doing the pulls. The blue certs can be ignored since you probably listened to me and didn't waste any pulls on the kernel banner, but if you did, here counts the same thing as for the yellow certs, only go for the 6 star instead of more pulls. In the red cert shop you can buy operators as well, that are only available in this shop and can't be pulled in regular banners. Here I would recommend to buy at max only one copy of everything in the beginning since especially 5 stars are very expensive to purchase. I would recommend to not get any of the 5 stars in early and mid game, since buying chip catalysts, which is an important resource to elite 2u operators, gives you much more value than an average 5 star. As for the 4 stars, Pudding and Ethan are pretty good characters, and getting at least one copy of them is definitely not a bad choice. Ethan will be more helpful in specific events in the mid game, so there is no rush in getting him. As for Pudding, she is a decent caster, and is not a bad investment even in the early game. In the end the most valuable thing are the chip catalysts. Once you plan to start working on the elite 2s, all the 5 stars and 6 stars need them. Next is the limited banner currency, which if you haven't touched them, you will likely have 200 of them in case you didn't forget to collect them in the mail. I recommend you to save them and use them once you need some of the tier 4 material. Those are the ones with the pink circle around them. You shouldn't waste them on any lower tier material, since the value goes only down, the lower tier the material is. And the intelligence certs are for rerun events, you will likely have 0 of them, but how they work is once an event is done and you bought everything in the shop, it will rerun in a year, and if you clear it again, some things in the shop will be duplicates, and those will be converted into those certs, so you can use them in the shop as replacements for what you already had. Next is the furniture store. This is the only thing I truly beg you to never do. Never use your Orignal Prime to buy any furniture here. I have 60,000k screws on my main account and I could buy anything I want. Obviously, buying furniture is fine with screws. You can speed up the time your units need to recover in the base. It's just that it's never worth spending any Orignal Prime on these. Please, just don't do that. And finally, at last, we have the Orange Third Star. In this shop you can buy various different materials and operators for free. Operators only appear after a certain amount of surges are spent, while career is a decent vanguard. Since you get taxes from the missions, I would not recommend leveling him. As for Gavial, I personally really like her design, and she's also really good gameplay-wise. If you don't have any good healer above 3 stars, she will likely be a good addition to your squad. And the last operator that you can possibly get from there is Donar. It will take a bit more time to get her from the shop, since she will only appear after you have Gavial and Courier max potential. Most likely since then you have been playing for weeks, and by then you will have better defender to use. Especially in the beginning, as a tank she will be struggling to stay alive. Therefore I would not recommend leveling her. Other than the operators, I would recommend you to buy everything in discount if you can. But if you don't have enough to buy everything discounted, you can buy her in the shop. Just go for the materials you want the most. You can almost do nothing wrong here. As to how you obtain the credits, there are three ways. First, every day in the shop, you get a few of them for free. The second way is you can visit your friends. If you go in the friends tab and you visit them, they have an orange mark and you will get per visit 30 orange certs. And as for the third way, you need to have in your base the reception room built. Your goal is to get seven different clues. and then start the research progress. This will take 24 hours. In the process, you will get a lot of clues that you won't need and those can be sent to your friends. Hopefully, they will do the same for you. By completing the research, you get 210 orange certs to use and those are the three ways to obtain them. But with that, this is everything you need to know about the shop. Gameplay I briefly touched on it before. But the rule of thumb is to just have two operators of every category, besides important specialists. Important to understand is that the same team probably won't work for every stage. So every once in a while you just have to make little adjustments. Upon reaching chapter 2 you might realize, hey my snipers are not dealing any damage anymore. This is because the enemies also have stats like your units. It's not that they have a lot of HP, but they have likely a lot of defense. Against those you want to use casters. Casters deal arts damage, which ignore defense. And if you notice your casters are not dealing any damage, then they have likely just a lot of HP or they have high resistance against arts damage, which in that case you want to use the snipers again and deal physical damage. It doesn't matter how good you are, you will get stuck on a stage. But for those that want to clear it themselves without a guide, Try to find the reason why you failed the stage in the first place and check the enemy stats in the info section. If you get run over by enemies, you will likely need more blocks or more aerial damage. If they deal too much damage, you can't out-heal. Try defeating it before it can reach you. Always try to spot the reason why your run fails and try to figure out what you can do about it. There is a chance you're watching this beginner guide because you found yourself stuck on a difficult stage. You might blame your operator's strength. or level as the reason why you are stuck, more than likely though it's just a skill issue. And that's the beauty about it. Arknights is a skill based game, in which the better you get, the more difficult stages you can beat. You can pretty much call it a puzzle game with near to infinite solutions for a clear. But to let you in on a secret, many players use guides from Kyocin V and Echo Chen to beat stages. So in case you are really desperate and you don't know how to beat a stage, One of those two will likely have a guide that will help you beat it. There is no shame in using guides, and I myself used them before as well. Events. Once you beat 1.10, you can now play events. Regardless of when you're watching this, there is likely an event going on or soon is one going to be released. You might find yourself struggling on the very first stages, but don't be frustrated about it and try to go as far as possible. The highest stage you can clear is the stage you should be spending your sanity on when grinding. By doing that, you will get event currency, which you can use for the shop. The value from that shop is amazing. especially when it's not a rerun event. By clearing the first stage of the current event, which is the Chessica Alter event for me, I have to spend 9 sanity for a tier 1 material. On the surface, it looks really bad, but I also get 9 event currency every time I get a clear. With that, even with rounding it down, I get 5k sanity. Beside the bonus material I farm, 5k LMD for 9 sanity is better than the highest LMD stage that you can farm in the game. Don't worry about buying the entire event shop out, but make sure you get the most available things like for example LMD and XP chips and maybe the high tier material. It will speed up your progress immensely if you're able to get at least some of the stuff that is available in the shop. Old events. As well with clearing 1.10, you get access to old events. While you'll be struggling with them and won't be able to clear most things, make sure to use the red discs on the top right. You get every week 1. And once you're able to clear them, You won't have to wait every week to unlock a new one. Also, make sure you unlock them from the top to the bottom to have an easier time beating the events since the old events are at the top. By clearing the old events, you also can get free to play operators that came out with the event and some of them are actually very useful, like for example Baibig or Seen. Important to mention here is that there is no requirement to level any specific operator besides Amiya. You might have two very good casters, But Amiya is pretty much 2 in 1. With her second skill, she can deal a good chunk of arts damage, while once she is E2, she can deal something called true damage. Regardless of the enemy defense or resistance, Amiya will always deal the same amount of damage with the third skill. Amiya is a very helpful addition to any roaster, and by leveling her early, you won't have to be stuck in the story because Amiya is in E2 yet. What to farm? When there is no event going on, and you don't know what to farm. Make sure that every week you cap out the Aurundum cap in the annihilations. And once this is done, spend your sanity on the research stages. Research stages are the ones where you can farm LMD, XP chips, red certs, skill summaries and base material. You will always need everything from there, besides the base material. So I recommend you to farm that, even if you can't clear the highest stage yet. Farming those stages is usually one of the best things you can do during a dead week, if there is no specific material you need. But in case there's a specific material you need, I will link a spreadsheet in the comment section which will show you which stages are the best to farm what materials. This way you can fully maximize your sanity spend if this is something you're interested in. What to ignore? There are two game modes I would recommend you to ignore for now. One is called Integrated Strategy, short IS. This is the most liked mode in Arknights but it is for end game only. You can try your luck and see how it goes. but likely you will just get your ass whooped there. It doesn't cost any sanity, but to save yourself some real life sanity I would recommend you to not try it over and over. The other thing is SSS. If you find a way to grind it and can max out the reward, that is great for you, but it will likely take a shit ton of time. And you only grind end game material that for a really long time you won't be able to make a good use of. 5 star voucher. You might have noticed that the game gives you two 5-star vouchers, where you can select between various different 5-stars. While it is tempting to use immediately, I would recommend you to wait for a few weeks with using them and then check out your current roster to see what classes and archetypes you're currently missing good units in. Once again, a tier list is a good way to double check how good the operator is that you are planning to select, but going with your intuition and check out it yourself how good a character is is totally fine as well. Possibly even more fun. And at last, and maybe the most important thing, but likely also the most annoying and complicated thing, is the base. The base is pretty much a minigame in itself. On the left there are 3 different centers. First is the trading post center, for either grinding LMD or Rundum. But please, grind LMD only. Grinding or Rundum is possibly the most wasteful thing you can do in the game, and the few pulls you get per week are not making up for the resources spent to get those. So trading post is for LMD only. Next is the factory. A great place to farm gold bars, needed to produce LMD in the trading post. Or XP chips as well. Find a good balance for yourself to be able to farm LMD and XP chips, even though with only 3 facilities in the beginning, this is pretty much impossible. So you might have to wait a little bit longer so you can actually farm both at the same time. And at last, we have the power plant. The power plant is easy to understand. The other 2 facilities need power. And one power plant can only produce so much power, so make sure your power plant produces enough power so you can power the other facilities. The more you progress, the more you can upgrade the base, allowing you to grind more XP chips and LMD automatically. The entire left side of the base can be set up the way you want, while in the middle, there are only dormitories. They are used helping your operators recover from the work they have done for you. And as for the far most right side... There are in total four unique facilities. First we have the reception. Upgrading this gives you more friend slots and more orange turrets you can use to buy materials and operators in its shop. The second one on the right side is the workshop which is one of the most used one. You will use this if you have enough tier 1 materials to combine them to have one tier 2 material. Very nice to have and if you need any specific materials you will always be grateful to have this option that you can convert them up. The third thing you will get is the HR office, which is very nice for the recruitments. By upgrading this, you will have more slots for recruiting operators. And by upgrading this, you will get the ability to refresh the tags that you have already gotten. This is just a nice additional way to be able to have a higher chance of getting something nice from the recruitments. So upgrading the HR office is definitely not a bad choice. And the fourth thing you will get very late in the game is the training center. You don't have to worry about that at all. But once you have a Operator E2, all of those skills can be upgraded even further. This is what we call Mastery. And you can upgrade the skills up to Mastery 3. Those are the dots that you can see when looking at a skill. And if someone is Mastery 3, those skills, most of the skills that you can do there, are very strong after upgrading to Mastery 3. So for endgame, make sure you focus on this a lot. Because it will make your roster much stronger. But as I mentioned earlier, the base is a very complicated system. And there are videos out there that are going into very detail that are about 20 to 30 minutes long. So there is no way I can absolutely fit everything in this. So I would recommend you if this is something you're interested in, in optimizing the base. Once you can build all the factories, trading posts and everything. Watch a guide like that and they will go into great detail of like how you can set it up. But if you want to have an idea of like what is a good setup. What many people use is two trading posts center. 4 factories and 3 power plants. A very good setup, very consistent, you get a lot of xp chips and lmd and also some gold bars. What I personally use is 1 trading post center, 5 factories and 3 power plants. That is very good because I will maybe get a lot less lmd than everyone else but the advantage of this is I will get a lot more xp chips. So I will have to farm a lot more lmd by myself but my xp chip farm is very insane and I rarely have to farm any xp chips. While someone may be thinking now, oh wait, this is not the most efficient way. I'm aware you can have only two power plants, downgrade factories and stuff like that to only live with two power plants. I would not recommend this for any beginner, because it's just so complicated and you have to swap out your base every 12 hours instead of every 24 hours. That is why for the beginning, I think going for the classic setups is way better than the most optimized one. That just takes a lot of time to actually organize. But with that, those were all the categories I planned to talk about in this guide. If you have any other questions regarding the video or anything in general, as I said in the beginning, there's the comment section, there's the Arknights Discord you can ask in all the Twitch chats. So with that, all I can say is thank you so so much for watching to the end. It was quite a long video, but you sitting through everything really is a big honor for me. I really appreciate that. And with that said, I hope you learned something new. And I would say... Have a nice one, have fun with Arknights, welcome to the game once again, and I would say, see ya!

And if you want a quick response, there will always be Arknights Discord servers you can ask questions in, or for a really quick response, you can just join Twitch, just ask a streamer there, and if you say you're a new player, they will always be glad to help there. Anyway, my name is Sassiv and I played Arknights for around 4-5k hours, if not more. Recently I started to notice an increase in new players trying out Arknights for the first time. That is why I want to share everything I know about how to make your Arknights experience as enjoyable as possible. In this guide I will go in much more detail than most other guides and I will be focusing a lot on efficiency, even though I personally recommend you to play in your own pace and not try to rush the game.

So use the timestamps in the video to get to the categories you want to learn more about. Arknights is not your average gacha game. Gacha is important and high rarity operators can make stages a lot easier, but there is also a very good chance that building too many 6 and 5 stars in the early game will slow down your progress massively.

Arknights has been proven to be beatable with just 3 stars and 4 stars, Unique about them is that 3 and 4 stars are not much weaker than a 5 and 6 star on the same level, yet they cost far less resources to level. That is why the community always advises to not sleep on them in the early game. Some of the most outstanding 3 and 4 stars are Cruz, Malempha, Cutter, Pinecone and Myrtle. Those are just a few of the very amazing 3 and 4 stars there are, but especially those are really shining in the early game. Pearl especially is even to this day one of the most, if not the most used operator in the game.

She gives you enough deployment points that she can do the job of two vanguards pretty much alone. There are obviously more 3 and 4 stars worth building, but for that I would recommend you to watch a tier list to get an idea about which operator is considered good and which operator maybe not so much. But the rule of thumb is, even though we say there are operators that are better or worse, every operator can be used.

And if you really tried to make them work, they can work. That is why, wife of a meta is such a common way to play Arknights. Reroll.

Maybe you haven't even started your journey yet and want to reroll for the most optimal operator. Even though I personally recommend to just go with the flow of the game and play with what you got, but for those that enjoy rerolling for the most meta operators, then I would recommend you to go for Martin in the beginner banner. Even though he is a furry, He will make your life a lot easier, especially because he is an outstanding laneholder, one of the best at his job and he is super easy to use and understand.

Thorns and Orkato are also super good units to get. Thorns has a super huge range for a melee operator and Orkato is just a really good sniper. Flametail on the other hand is possibly the strongest operator in her archetype, but the game will give you Texas and not a Vanguard later in the game for free.

by doing all the quests in the quest tab. Therefore I would recommend not re-rolling for Flametail, even though she is probably the second strongest character in the banner to get. As for Zuzuran and Witty, Zuzuran is a great unit, but she starts to really shine once you can promote her to elite 2, which is pretty much limit breaks in other gacha games. Problem with that is that it takes a really long time to get there, and along the way she won't be helping you as much as the other characters on the banner. As for Widhi, I would say she is the worst operator to reroll for.

Even though she is the best pusher in the game, her use is the most niche from all of the characters, which makes her the least useful for the early game. In case you are not planning to reroll, but it just hurt your pull was bad, this is only meant for people that are planning to reroll. All of the operators in the banner are really strong and especially in the later game, every character will prove themselves to be a very good character to get.

It's just that some shine earlier than other. Arknights does mostly do a very good job at balancing, and it doesn't matter which characters you have. If you try hard enough, you can make every character work. As for the rerolling itself, when creating an account before the ad sign, you can add a number and every time you fail the reroll, you can increase the number by one.

And this will create a new number while the verification code will still go to your email. This is how you won't have to reinstall the entire game again and again for every failed attempt. After skipping through the dialogue and the first real stage beaten, you get 3800 Rundo in your mail, which you can use on the beginner banner. In case you got lucky and you're satisfied with the pull you had, make sure you remember which number you were on on your email and to ensure your account won't be lost ever, make a screenshot of your main screen, your friend card and your bound account.

So if there is ever a need to retrieve your account, you have everything Yoastar would possibly ask of you. This I would recommend for everyone watching, regardless of if you're rerolling or not. While accounts rarely get lost, rather do it than be sorry if it actually happens.

Which banner should you pull on? This question is quite a difficult one, especially because every account is unique. There will always be different banners than the ones I will be showing in this video.

As for the beginner banner, just pull on it until it's gone. There is nothing that you can do wrong there. Most of the time there are two different banners, maybe even three.

One of them is the colonel banner. I would recommend to not pull on this banner, unless there are either waifus that you really really want, Or that rotation is just super good with 2 good 6 stars and some good 5 stars. The kernel banner mostly consists of older characters, which are still very viable, but since you cannot get any green or yellow certs, which can be used to buy almost every operator you want in the shop, it's still a much better option to go for the regular banner.

Most of the time, there is either one or two regular banners. One that comes with the new event and always have new operators in it, and one where there are older operators. Especially in the early game, I would recommend you to try to get at least two great units for every class.

Vanguard, Guard, Defender, Medic, Sniper and Caster. Supporter and Specialist can be neglected in the beginning. If you want to fully maximize your efficiency, you can either check out a tier list where it shows how good a character actually is, or you can check out Ace Ships or Game Press and read what each operator can do. More likely though, just seeing the numbers will probably not help you to decide which is actually a good character. Therefore tier lists is a much better option to get an idea of who is good and who is not.

Or the third option, just go into it blind and pull from the ones you like and see yourself how good they are. Since there is no pvp, there is no reason to fully maximize and rush the game. Vive whoever meta they say. Recruitments. This feature is one of your biggest friends in building a strong roaster while not having to spend a single dime.

So far you might have been selecting tags randomly, and just hope for the best, but there is a way to fully maximize it and increase your chances of getting a 5 or even a 6 star. It is very complicated and it's certainly overwhelming to learn in the beginning with all the things you can do in the game. Rule of thumb though, if there is a color tag, just select the color tag.

But in case you want to maximize every recruitment voucher, there are two websites I mainly use for this, A-Ships or GamePress. Both are linked in the description. Both calculators work the same, while when using the A-Ships one, make sure you select the right server.

The first thing you do is select all the 5 tags that you got in your recruitment. Once you scroll down, you can see which combination would give you what. If there is a chance to get a 4-star, always use this instead of refreshing. Obviously if you get so lucky and you can select a 5 or 6-star, pick them.

But most of the time, You get only 3 stars, and with that in mind, already a 4 star is a victory. Make sure when selecting combinations to put it on 9 hours, to decrease the chance of the tag randomly dropping off. If you've never had that, it can be possible that just the tag you selected drops off if it wasn't going long enough. And even at 9 hours, there's a small chance it might drop off.

If there are no combinations for a 4 star or higher, save your recruitment if you're running out of them. or set it to 7000 fodder minutes to save yourself some LMD. By randomly selecting tags, you will make your recruitments more expensive. That only makes sense if you're aiming for a certain class or a character.

So if you would want to get a 4-star guard because you don't have one, only selecting the guard tag is a very viable strategy. One important thing to mention are 1-stars. 1-stars are rare and can only be obtained in recruitments. There are certain combinations to get 1 stars, but you can never set the time above 3 hours 50 minutes, since this would make it impossible for 1 star to appear. So in case you get lucky and get a robot tag, only set it to 3 hours and 50 minutes to give it the highest chance that you want drop off, even though the chance of it is still very high.

So if it would actually drop off, don't be too sad about it, it happens to all of us. Also, there are 2 5 stars that can only be gotten from recruitments. Those are Vulcan and Indra. While they are not broken, having them at max potential gives you bragging rights.

And with that, that is all you need to know about recruiting operators. And with that, I wish you happy recruiting! Friends!

Unlike real life, friends are important and having a lot of friends makes your journey a lot easier. While the game doesn't offer you a good way to send friend requests, the best way to get a lot of them is joining an Arknights Discord and ask for friend support, or joining a random streamers chat and tell them you are new and you need help to progress in the game. I guarantee most of the streamer will be glad to help and if not, let me know in the comments who they were so we can cancel them together on Twitter.

The reason why friends are so important is because you can use one of their free selected operator in your team. The level is adjusted to the elite level of your strongest operator. So if you don't have a single elite one, level crews a melantha to elite one and now you got much stronger friend support that will carry you.

This also allows you to play Y4R meta. If you just build the characters you like the most, you can still borrow very strong operators from your friend tab. and be able to clear most stages. Important to note here is that every stage you beat with friend support will not save the run and in case you want to farm said stage, you would need to beat it again with your own units. What to buy in the store?

The store is amazing and offers you various needed materials that you should buy. The first section is the Rhythmium section. Unless you're an upcoming whale, this section will not be of any interest for you. Next up are packs. They might look like another whale section, but it is not completely.

If you scroll to the most right, you will see level packs, which can be purchased with Aurigna Prime. This is the yellow currency. Always buy them, because the value you get from these is far better than just converting your Prime normally, while the Aurundum count is the same. The Red currency, only used for pulls.

Additionally, you get valuable upgrading materials that will be helpful for quick progress. Also, if you're planning to will at one point, start with the monthly card, because out of anything in the shop, this is the most valuable one. Next are skins.

Here you can collect a free Fang skin, if you scroll to the most right. Skins don't give you any in-game advantage, besides making your waifus and husbandos even hotter. There are 4 different skin styles to buy. 15 OP means they have a new design, but no animation in the base.

OP by the way means Aurina Prime. 18 OP is with animation in the base. 21 OP means it's a live 2D skin. And 24 OP gives you an animation every time you open the game, as long as this character is an assistant on your main screen. If you are planning to stay free to play, I would not recommend buying skins, unless it's for your favorite character.

Keep in mind, the more Arena Prime you spend on skins, the less pulls you can do. 33 to 34 Arena Prime equals to 1 temple. So if you plan to buy one, make sure it's a skin you really really love.

The certificate section is the most interesting section for us. Arknights is known to be one of the most generous gacha games out there, and besides the amazing polling rates, this section also played a major factor in getting this reputation. The yellow and green certs are obtained by just doing polls, so you will get them automatically. With the green certs, you should always buy in section 1, the heat hunting permits and the Rundum.

Additionally, you can buy the rest as well, if you plan to go for section 2. In section 2 you can buy specific materials you need to upgrade your operators. Or even buy 4-star and 3-star selector packs, where you can decide which operator you want to select that you get guaranteed. Obviously it's rather expensive and I would not recommend going for that. The gold certs you get for pulling a new operator, a 5 or 6-star operator or a 4-star operator once they have max potential. And the yellow certs shop.

there are only two really important things to consider buying. Either buy one of the 6 stars if there is one that you really want, or heat-hunting permits, in case you desperately want the new unit in the current banner. Especially in the early and mid game, I would never recommend buying the heat-hunting permits, since the value you get from these is a lot less than just buying a specific operator, you get guaranteed. And if you ignore my warning and want to buy the heat-hunting permits, make sure to have 258 yellow certs ready to get all of them. If that is not the case, the value of buying them is absolutely terrible and you most likely start to regret it once you see the luck wasn't on your side when doing the pulls.

The blue certs can be ignored since you probably listened to me and didn't waste any pulls on the kernel banner, but if you did, here counts the same thing as for the yellow certs, only go for the 6 star instead of more pulls. In the red cert shop you can buy operators as well, that are only available in this shop and can't be pulled in regular banners. Here I would recommend to buy at max only one copy of everything in the beginning since especially 5 stars are very expensive to purchase. I would recommend to not get any of the 5 stars in early and mid game, since buying chip catalysts, which is an important resource to elite 2u operators, gives you much more value than an average 5 star.

As for the 4 stars, Pudding and Ethan are pretty good characters, and getting at least one copy of them is definitely not a bad choice. Ethan will be more helpful in specific events in the mid game, so there is no rush in getting him. As for Pudding, she is a decent caster, and is not a bad investment even in the early game.

In the end the most valuable thing are the chip catalysts. Once you plan to start working on the elite 2s, all the 5 stars and 6 stars need them. Next is the limited banner currency, which if you haven't touched them, you will likely have 200 of them in case you didn't forget to collect them in the mail.

I recommend you to save them and use them once you need some of the tier 4 material. Those are the ones with the pink circle around them. You shouldn't waste them on any lower tier material, since the value goes only down, the lower tier the material is.

And the intelligence certs are for rerun events, you will likely have 0 of them, but how they work is once an event is done and you bought everything in the shop, it will rerun in a year, and if you clear it again, some things in the shop will be duplicates, and those will be converted into those certs, so you can use them in the shop as replacements for what you already had. Next is the furniture store. This is the only thing I truly beg you to never do. Never use your Orignal Prime to buy any furniture here. I have 60,000k screws on my main account and I could buy anything I want.

Obviously, buying furniture is fine with screws. You can speed up the time your units need to recover in the base. It's just that it's never worth spending any Orignal Prime on these.

Please, just don't do that. And finally, at last, we have the Orange Third Star. In this shop you can buy various different materials and operators for free. Operators only appear after a certain amount of surges are spent, while career is a decent vanguard.

Since you get taxes from the missions, I would not recommend leveling him. As for Gavial, I personally really like her design, and she's also really good gameplay-wise. If you don't have any good healer above 3 stars, she will likely be a good addition to your squad.

And the last operator that you can possibly get from there is Donar. It will take a bit more time to get her from the shop, since she will only appear after you have Gavial and Courier max potential. Most likely since then you have been playing for weeks, and by then you will have better defender to use. Especially in the beginning, as a tank she will be struggling to stay alive.

Therefore I would not recommend leveling her. Other than the operators, I would recommend you to buy everything in discount if you can. But if you don't have enough to buy everything discounted, you can buy her in the shop. Just go for the materials you want the most. You can almost do nothing wrong here.

As to how you obtain the credits, there are three ways. First, every day in the shop, you get a few of them for free. The second way is you can visit your friends. If you go in the friends tab and you visit them, they have an orange mark and you will get per visit 30 orange certs. And as for the third way, you need to have in your base the reception room built.

Your goal is to get seven different clues. and then start the research progress. This will take 24 hours.

In the process, you will get a lot of clues that you won't need and those can be sent to your friends. Hopefully, they will do the same for you. By completing the research, you get 210 orange certs to use and those are the three ways to obtain them.

But with that, this is everything you need to know about the shop. Gameplay I briefly touched on it before. But the rule of thumb is to just have two operators of every category, besides important specialists.

Important to understand is that the same team probably won't work for every stage. So every once in a while you just have to make little adjustments. Upon reaching chapter 2 you might realize, hey my snipers are not dealing any damage anymore.

This is because the enemies also have stats like your units. It's not that they have a lot of HP, but they have likely a lot of defense. Against those you want to use casters.

Casters deal arts damage, which ignore defense. And if you notice your casters are not dealing any damage, then they have likely just a lot of HP or they have high resistance against arts damage, which in that case you want to use the snipers again and deal physical damage. It doesn't matter how good you are, you will get stuck on a stage.

But for those that want to clear it themselves without a guide, Try to find the reason why you failed the stage in the first place and check the enemy stats in the info section. If you get run over by enemies, you will likely need more blocks or more aerial damage. If they deal too much damage, you can't out-heal.

Try defeating it before it can reach you. Always try to spot the reason why your run fails and try to figure out what you can do about it. There is a chance you're watching this beginner guide because you found yourself stuck on a difficult stage. You might blame your operator's strength. or level as the reason why you are stuck, more than likely though it's just a skill issue.

And that's the beauty about it. Arknights is a skill based game, in which the better you get, the more difficult stages you can beat. You can pretty much call it a puzzle game with near to infinite solutions for a clear. But to let you in on a secret, many players use guides from Kyocin V and Echo Chen to beat stages. So in case you are really desperate and you don't know how to beat a stage, One of those two will likely have a guide that will help you beat it.

There is no shame in using guides, and I myself used them before as well. Events. Once you beat 1.10, you can now play events.

Regardless of when you're watching this, there is likely an event going on or soon is one going to be released. You might find yourself struggling on the very first stages, but don't be frustrated about it and try to go as far as possible. The highest stage you can clear is the stage you should be spending your sanity on when grinding.

By doing that, you will get event currency, which you can use for the shop. The value from that shop is amazing. especially when it's not a rerun event. By clearing the first stage of the current event, which is the Chessica Alter event for me, I have to spend 9 sanity for a tier 1 material.

On the surface, it looks really bad, but I also get 9 event currency every time I get a clear. With that, even with rounding it down, I get 5k sanity. Beside the bonus material I farm, 5k LMD for 9 sanity is better than the highest LMD stage that you can farm in the game.

Don't worry about buying the entire event shop out, but make sure you get the most available things like for example LMD and XP chips and maybe the high tier material. It will speed up your progress immensely if you're able to get at least some of the stuff that is available in the shop. Old events. As well with clearing 1.10, you get access to old events. While you'll be struggling with them and won't be able to clear most things, make sure to use the red discs on the top right.

You get every week 1. And once you're able to clear them, You won't have to wait every week to unlock a new one. Also, make sure you unlock them from the top to the bottom to have an easier time beating the events since the old events are at the top. By clearing the old events, you also can get free to play operators that came out with the event and some of them are actually very useful, like for example Baibig or Seen. Important to mention here is that there is no requirement to level any specific operator besides Amiya. You might have two very good casters, But Amiya is pretty much 2 in 1. With her second skill, she can deal a good chunk of arts damage, while once she is E2, she can deal something called true damage.

Regardless of the enemy defense or resistance, Amiya will always deal the same amount of damage with the third skill. Amiya is a very helpful addition to any roaster, and by leveling her early, you won't have to be stuck in the story because Amiya is in E2 yet. What to farm?

When there is no event going on, and you don't know what to farm. Make sure that every week you cap out the Aurundum cap in the annihilations. And once this is done, spend your sanity on the research stages.

Research stages are the ones where you can farm LMD, XP chips, red certs, skill summaries and base material. You will always need everything from there, besides the base material. So I recommend you to farm that, even if you can't clear the highest stage yet. Farming those stages is usually one of the best things you can do during a dead week, if there is no specific material you need. But in case there's a specific material you need, I will link a spreadsheet in the comment section which will show you which stages are the best to farm what materials.

This way you can fully maximize your sanity spend if this is something you're interested in. What to ignore? There are two game modes I would recommend you to ignore for now.

One is called Integrated Strategy, short IS. This is the most liked mode in Arknights but it is for end game only. You can try your luck and see how it goes.

but likely you will just get your ass whooped there. It doesn't cost any sanity, but to save yourself some real life sanity I would recommend you to not try it over and over. The other thing is SSS.

If you find a way to grind it and can max out the reward, that is great for you, but it will likely take a shit ton of time. And you only grind end game material that for a really long time you won't be able to make a good use of. 5 star voucher. You might have noticed that the game gives you two 5-star vouchers, where you can select between various different 5-stars. While it is tempting to use immediately, I would recommend you to wait for a few weeks with using them and then check out your current roster to see what classes and archetypes you're currently missing good units in.

Once again, a tier list is a good way to double check how good the operator is that you are planning to select, but going with your intuition and check out it yourself how good a character is is totally fine as well. Possibly even more fun. And at last, and maybe the most important thing, but likely also the most annoying and complicated thing, is the base.

The base is pretty much a minigame in itself. On the left there are 3 different centers. First is the trading post center, for either grinding LMD or Rundum. But please, grind LMD only.

Grinding or Rundum is possibly the most wasteful thing you can do in the game, and the few pulls you get per week are not making up for the resources spent to get those. So trading post is for LMD only. Next is the factory.

A great place to farm gold bars, needed to produce LMD in the trading post. Or XP chips as well. Find a good balance for yourself to be able to farm LMD and XP chips, even though with only 3 facilities in the beginning, this is pretty much impossible. So you might have to wait a little bit longer so you can actually farm both at the same time. And at last, we have the power plant.

The power plant is easy to understand. The other 2 facilities need power. And one power plant can only produce so much power, so make sure your power plant produces enough power so you can power the other facilities.

The more you progress, the more you can upgrade the base, allowing you to grind more XP chips and LMD automatically. The entire left side of the base can be set up the way you want, while in the middle, there are only dormitories. They are used helping your operators recover from the work they have done for you.

And as for the far most right side... There are in total four unique facilities. First we have the reception. Upgrading this gives you more friend slots and more orange turrets you can use to buy materials and operators in its shop. The second one on the right side is the workshop which is one of the most used one.

You will use this if you have enough tier 1 materials to combine them to have one tier 2 material. Very nice to have and if you need any specific materials you will always be grateful to have this option that you can convert them up. The third thing you will get is the HR office, which is very nice for the recruitments.

By upgrading this, you will have more slots for recruiting operators. And by upgrading this, you will get the ability to refresh the tags that you have already gotten. This is just a nice additional way to be able to have a higher chance of getting something nice from the recruitments.

So upgrading the HR office is definitely not a bad choice. And the fourth thing you will get very late in the game is the training center. You don't have to worry about that at all. But once you have a Operator E2, all of those skills can be upgraded even further.

This is what we call Mastery. And you can upgrade the skills up to Mastery 3. Those are the dots that you can see when looking at a skill. And if someone is Mastery 3, those skills, most of the skills that you can do there, are very strong after upgrading to Mastery 3. So for endgame, make sure you focus on this a lot.

Because it will make your roster much stronger. But as I mentioned earlier, the base is a very complicated system. And there are videos out there that are going into very detail that are about 20 to 30 minutes long.

So there is no way I can absolutely fit everything in this. So I would recommend you if this is something you're interested in, in optimizing the base. Once you can build all the factories, trading posts and everything. Watch a guide like that and they will go into great detail of like how you can set it up.

But if you want to have an idea of like what is a good setup. What many people use is two trading posts center. 4 factories and 3 power plants. A very good setup, very consistent, you get a lot of xp chips and lmd and also some gold bars.

What I personally use is 1 trading post center, 5 factories and 3 power plants. That is very good because I will maybe get a lot less lmd than everyone else but the advantage of this is I will get a lot more xp chips. So I will have to farm a lot more lmd by myself but my xp chip farm is very insane and I rarely have to farm any xp chips. While someone may be thinking now, oh wait, this is not the most efficient way.

I'm aware you can have only two power plants, downgrade factories and stuff like that to only live with two power plants. I would not recommend this for any beginner, because it's just so complicated and you have to swap out your base every 12 hours instead of every 24 hours. That is why for the beginning, I think going for the classic setups is way better than the most optimized one.

That just takes a lot of time to actually organize. But with that, those were all the categories I planned to talk about in this guide. If you have any other questions regarding the video or anything in general, as I said in the beginning, there's the comment section, there's the Arknights Discord you can ask in all the Twitch chats. So with that, all I can say is thank you so so much for watching to the end. It was quite a long video, but you sitting through everything really is a big honor for me.

I really appreciate that. And with that said, I hope you learned something new. And I would say...

Have a nice one, have fun with Arknights, welcome to the game once again, and I would say, see ya!

Transcript for:Beginner's Guide to Arknights Strategies

Transcript for:
Beginner's Guide to Arknights Strategies