Good Morning Friends! I figured I would talk a bit this morning about Honkai Star Rail. I’ve continued to play it in the background but have not really talked about it in a while. I’m still finding this an extremely fun game even though I am mostly playing for however long it takes to complete the daily activities and spend down my activity currency. I wish there was a bit more meat on the bones here, but we are in somewhat of a holding pattern for the next major story drop to land. I’ve contemplated picking back up Genshin Impact as my friend Ace has done, but I find just the concept of trying to ease back into that game overwhelming. There is so much content that I missed and it feels weird trying to find a place to even start.
I pulled Silver Wolf off the current banner and immediately adapted my default team to include her. The whole mechanic of being able to make encounters weak to abilities that they were not already weak to seems extremely strong. Natasha though is doing the heavy lifting of this team. Right now I only have one healer and really wish I had a second. Right now that would be Bailu… which is a five-star and not on a banner yet. The next banner is for Luocha, which is a character that I have no thematic interest in at all… but might still try and get just to have a second reliable healer. I’ve reached the point where I need to attempt to maintain two teams in order to keep pushing some of the content and whichever team does not have Natasha on it… struggles quite a bit. As far as my lineup of spare 60s goes… I have Bronya, March, Asta, Gepard, and Serval. Essentially I tend to make a super shield team and then give the healer to the other team and it MOSTLY works.
Right now in lieu of story content, we are getting several events happening in the game. The best of these is a sim game where you take over management of the Everwinter City Museum. It took me 71 turns to complete all of the activities which is probably a bit long, but there were several turns where I let my current actions ride just to build up the resource used to fund renovations. Essentially someone looted the museum and you are helping out Pela track down the culprits and replace the items. You also spend some time tracking down volunteers and convincing them to help be docents at the museum. All in all, it was a really fun event and I am sort of sad that I am done with it.
Another game that is cycling off in just a few days is the Starhunt Game which is associated with Silver Wolf. You are essentially tracking down graffiti that she tagged the space station with, and decoding it. This involves going through some mini-dungeons and completing very specific objectives. There is this cool mechanic where the boss of the encounter is too powerful to be defeated, so you have to find a specific tag somewhere in the zone that will reduce its level significantly so you can take it down. The biggest thing gained from this event though is a Light Cone that is themed for Silver Wolf and the ability to power it up significantly. It was fun, but nothing really to write home about.
The event that started this week is a “research” event where you just supply the researcher with some basic materials. So far nothing they have asked for has been a challenge and are items I have hundreds of sitting in my vault. These sorts of events tend to be a way of removing some resources from the economy, and if you have played for any length of time you tend to have plenty of whatever the resources are. The rewards are nice even though the event itself is rather boring. I can always use more blue materials to either synthesize into purple materials or to power up characters.
Honkai Star Rail, while largely in maintenance mode for me… is still something that I enjoy doing each day. It maybe takes thirty minutes to complete everything for the day, and then move on to whatever my gaming main course for the evening. This is just enough time to feel like I accomplished something, without the game really overstaying its welcome. I do however look forward to the next batch of story content dropping, and I am enjoying the little daily interludes that take place over the in-game text system. I should probably spend some time trying to farm the Space-China currency so I can pick up the remaining Eidolons for Fire Traveller. I’ve almost completed the battle pass for the month as well, so it still feels like I am making constant progress. Honkai Star Rail is one of those games where it was really fun to mainline it until I caught up with the content… and then still fun playing it in daily maintenance mode.