Honkai Star Rail relics explained (April 2023)

Promotional art showing a group of characters in Honkai Star Rail.


Promotional art showing a group of characters in Honkai Star Rail.

Honkai Star Rail relics are farmable items that boost your character’s stats and offer passive perks. They are similar to Artifacts in Genshin Impact and can be obtained for free.

Some characters have relic sets designed around their kit, and benefit greatly from the two-piece and four-piece set bonuses. While relics are powerful, they should be farmed only when you are in the mid or late-game.

What are relics in Honkai Star Rail?

Relics in Honkai Star rail work similarly to Artifacts in Genshin Impact. You can equip relics to create 2-piece or 4-piece sets with bonus perks. Each relic has its own set of random stats that can help boost your character’s overall stats.

Here is a breakdown of all of the different main stats you can get in each relic slot:

Relic Slot
Main Stats
Head
HP
Hands
Attack
Body
Defence
Feet
ATK%/DEF%/HP%/Speed
Neck
ATK%/DEF%/HP%/Elemental Damage Bonus
Article
ATK%/DEF%/HP%/Crit Rate%/Crit Damage%/Outgoing Healing Boost/Effect Hit Rate

You also have substats for each relic, which can feature the following:

  • Attack
  • HP
  • Defence
  • Elemental Damage Bonus
  • Crit Rate
  • Crit Damage
  • Outgoing Healing Boost
  • Effect Hit Rate

You want to mix and match different relics to form set bonuses, while also having the right substats to give your character the perfect stats.

How to get relics in Honkai Star Rail

If you want to start farming relics, you can do so from Trailblazer level 15 onwards. There are Caverns of Corrosion located throughout the map which drop relics of different rarities, which you can farm using 40 Trailblaze Power per run.

There were 20 relic sets in the beta, and more are likely to be introduced to the game in future patches. The drop rate and rarity of relics increase depending on your Trailblazer level.

When to start farming relics in Honkai Star Rail

We do not recommend farming relics in Honkai Star Rail until you are a high enough Trailblazer level. You should farm relics only when you are guaranteed to get the highest rarity relics upon spending Trailblaze Power, which is a limited resource that refreshes over time.

Focus more on levelling up your characters, their abilities, and light cones instead of relics when you are in the early and mid-game. Once your characters are properly levelled, you can start focusing on your relics. Feel free to use the random relics you receive from missions or world drops instead.

When you do start farming relics, focus on the two-piece and four-piece bonuses first, before moving on to substats. Getting the set bonus is more important, and you can switch pieces around as you get better substats on each slot. Luck plays a very major role when it comes to relics in Honkai Star Rail, and you can spend several weeks trying to get a functional relic set for a single character, so you need to be patient.

Now that you know how relics work in Honkai Star Rail, you should be able to power up your characters by farming for the right relics. For more on the game, consider checking out our list of Honkai Star Rail codes to get yourself some Stellar Jades and other in-game resources. We also have a Honkai Star Rail Silver Wolf build with relic recommendations.

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