Honkai: Star Rail hands free players a hard budget every patch, not a suggestion. Across dailies, events, Simulated Universe, and the three endgame modes (Memory of Chaos, Pure Fiction, Apocalyptic Shadow), most F2P and light-spending accounts land around 80 to 100 Warps per six-week patch cycle. That's roughly one banner's worth of soft-pity range, not two. As of version 4.5 — currently running Aventurine's Waveflair rerun alongside Ashveil, with Pearl's banner arriving September 27 — the accounts pulling efficiently are the ones following a strict priority order, not the ones chasing every shiny splash art. Here's that order.
Rule One: Supports Before DPS, Almost Always
This is the single most underrated piece of HSR pull advice, and it's underrated because it's counterintuitive — everyone wants the flashy limited DPS. But a universal support (a healer, a buffer, or a hypercarry enabler like Pela, Tingyun, or their modern equivalents) slots into every team you build going forward, while a limited DPS is only ever as good as the one team you build around them.
Practical priority order for a new or rebuilding account:
- A universal support that buffs your whole team (ATK%, DMG%, or Break Effect buffers). These characters extend the value of every DPS you pull afterward.
- A sustain unit that fits multiple team archetypes — a shielder or healer that doesn't need niche investment to function.
- Your first limited DPS, chosen for whichever damage type (Follow-up, Break, DoT, or standard) your current roster is weakest in.
- A second DPS or hypercarry-enabling niche support, only after the above three are secured.
Light Cones sit below all of this. Standard Light Cones and 4-star Light Cones cover 80-90% of a character's performance; only pull a limited signature Light Cone once the character themselves is secured and you have genuine Jade surplus.
Rule Two: One or Two Priority Targets Per Patch, Never More
With an 80-100 pull budget and 5-star soft pity typically landing around pull 74-80 (with hard pity at 90), a single 50/50 gamble already eats most of a patch's income if it's lost. Spreading that budget across three or four "I kind of want them too" characters is how F2P accounts end up with a wide roster of undeveloped 5-stars instead of two or three fully realized ones.
Before a patch's banners go live, decide in advance:
- Which single character is your must-pull this cycle.
- Which second character you'll pull only if you win the 50/50 with jade left over.
- Everyone else, you skip — no exceptions, no "just in case."
This is the discipline that separates accounts with a functional Memory of Chaos clear team from accounts sitting on seven half-built 5-stars that don't synergize with anything.
Rule Three: Farm Every Free Jade Source, Every Day
The difference between an account pulling 60 Warps a patch and one pulling 100+ comes almost entirely from consistency on free income, not luck:
- Daily Training — full completion every day for its jade and Trailblaze Power refills.
- Simulated Universe / Divergent Universe weekly rewards — don't skip these; they're a meaningful jade chunk for one clear a week.
- Memory of Chaos, Pure Fiction, and Apocalyptic Shadow — each mode pays out jade for clearing its stars, and all three refresh independently, so under-investing in one mode's team is leaving free currency on the table.
- Event quests and login calendars — patch events routinely add several thousand jade in free rewards on top of the base income; skipping events is a direct pull loss.
Redeem every livestream and social media code the moment it's posted — HoYoverse codes are time-limited and stack meaningfully over a year of patches.
Rule Four: Don't Buy the Battle Pass Blind, Do Buy Express Supply Pass
If you're spending anything at all, the Express Supply Pass (the $5-ish monthly jade subscription) is close to the best jade-per-dollar value in the game and should be the first purchase any semi-committed F2P account considers. The Nameless Honor battle pass is next — it's nearly pure value for the price if you're already playing daily. Skip full-price character-adjacent bundles unless you've already committed to that character via the priority system above.
Putting It Together
A disciplined F2P Star Rail account in version 4.5 looks like this: one flexible support pulled early, one sustain unit that isn't situational, one or two limited DPS units chosen deliberately per patch rather than impulsively, and a jade income maximized through unskipped dailies, weeklies, and events. That's not a slower path to a strong roster — over two or three patches, it's actually the faster one, because every pull goes toward a character that fits into a real team instead of sitting in your showcase unused.
