Genshin Impact beginner’s guide, tips, and tricks

Genshin Impact is an RPG gacha game that thrusts players into a huge open world. While there are guided quests to complete, players can easily find themselves lost.

Our Genshin Impact beginner’s guide provides some tips that will help you successfully navigate the world of Teyvat, using the knowledge we’ve gained from many hours (and many deaths).

Pick up everything

As you walk around, you’ll notice sparkling environmental items just about everywhere. You have an inventory limit of 10,000, so just pick up everything you can. Flowers, food ingredients, and other items that might seem useless will be useful down the line to craft into various foods and power-ups for your characters.

Flowers and some other ascension materials only respawn after a certain number of real life days, so you don’t want to be in a situation where you have to wait real time to upgrade your characters.

Use Elemental Sight to find missing Seelies

Image: Mihoyo via Polygon

As you travel around Teyvat, you’ll notice these blue glowing creatures called Seelies. When you follow them, they’ll lead you to a base that they’ll sit in. Once you arrive, you’ll be rewarded with treasure. If you ever see one of these Seelie bases, but you can’t find the Seelie that belongs there, you can get a hint using Elemental Sight. A glowing blue stream will come from the base, pointing you in the direction of the Seelie.

Heal up at Statues of the Seven

Eating food will heal and revive your party, but you can run out of it quickly if you’re not careful. Between fights, consider teleporting back to any of the Statues of the Seven. These are large statues where you donate Amenoculus, Geoculus, and Electroculus to power up your character. They’ll revive and heal your party members when you approach them.

You can also manually heal your party by interacting with the statue and selecting “Statue’s Blessing.” Note that you can only heal so much — the amount the statue can heal will be depleted the more you do it — but it does replenish at a fairly quick rate, so don’t stress too much.

Some events are locked behind the story

While you should take your time exploring the regions, solving puzzles, and doing quests at your own pace, you should know that some events are locked to certain regions. This means that you have to be able to access those regions to participate in events for Primogems and other loot.

While it’s not the end of the world if you miss out on the rewards, you’ll want to get to Inazuma (the newest region, which unlocks at Adventure Rank 30), to be able to get the full experience.

Some characters from Inazuma also require materials that can only be farmed there, so if you get them from the gacha, you won’t really be able to use them until you get to their homeland.

The Adventurer’s Handbook will tell you where to find certain bosses

Image: Mihoyo via Polygon

You’ll eventually need materials to upgrade your characters and weapons, which only drop from certain enemies. Don’t waste your time roaming around looking for bosses. The “bosses” tab in the Adventurer’s Handbook will guide you to whatever boss you need if you just hit the “Navigate” button. It will also tell you what elements the boss uses and what rewards they can drop.

Keep track of the “-culus” you find

Amenoculus, Geoculus, and Electroculus are objects hidden around Teyvat. They can be found floating in caves, above cliffs, and many other locations. There are hundreds of them, so you’ll want to keep track of them as you find them, since you need all of these hidden blobs to increase your stamina. This fan-made interactive map allows you to check off orbs you’ve found, making hunting them down easy.

Use Wishes carefully

Wishing is the gacha element of Genshin Impact, allowing you to randomly receive weapons and characters of varying rarity in exchange for premium currency. Players are able to do one Wish at a time, or do 10 Wishes at once.

The only bonus associated with pulling 10 Wishes at a time is that it’s faster. The gacha banners say, “Every 10 wishes is guaranteed to include at least one 4-star or higher item,” but this does count for single pulls as well. The 10 Wishes required to pull a 4-star item refreshes every time you get one, so even if you pull a 4-star on the first or second Wish, the 4-star Wish count will still reset.

That being said, if you’re aiming for a specific character and you have limited funds, you’re better off pulling one by one until you (hopefully) get them, rather than wasting your Wishes pulling 10 at a time.

Diversify your team’s elements to an extent

Combat in Genshin Impact is element-based. You can mix two elements together to deal bonus damage or create a bonus effect, like freezing a target inflicted by water. Because of these combat considerations, you want to make sure you diversify your team with multiple elements. By swapping between your characters and using their abilities, you can command combat with elemental explosions.

But there are also reasons to keep numerous characters of the same element on your team. The Elemental Resonance system gives you a bonus based on doubling up on an element or diversifying. If you have four separate elements, you’ll get a bonus to your elemental resistance. But if you have two Pyro characters, you’ll gain a constant 25% damage buff.

Each elemental pairing comes with a different effect, so experiment and find out which combo works best.