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, as the game is a lengthy labyrinth of character upgrade systems, side quests, and other content. The game has retained massive popularity since 2020 for a good reason, and if you’re looking to start your journey into Teyvat, there’s a lot to do.
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 our years of playing the game.
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. You’ll be glad you don’t have to go out of your way to find these items down the line.
If you plan on going hard in exploration, keep tabs on what you’ve found
If you love solving puzzles, cracking open chests, and nabbing collectables, then good news: Genshin is a great game for you. However, if you’re looking to really grab everything, you’ll want to start keeping tabs on what you’ve found as soon as you start. We recommend using this unofficial fan-made interactive map to do so. (We like it because users can leave comments, often helping you figure out puzzle solutions or where items are, if you’re feeling lost.)
Take a minute to think about team building
There are multiple things you need to know when going into team building. For one, your team should usually involve one character who mainly focuses on dishing damage, two characters that help support that damage in some form, and one character that will help sustain your team with healing or shielding. Different characters fit into different roles and while you can get away with running whatever you want early on, harder content might end up stumping you if you don’t have a proper team set up.
Image: Hoyoverse via Polygon
The second thing you need to consider is their elemental resonance and reactions. Having more elements doesn’t mean your team is necessarily better, as the elements interact with each other differently, and having two of any element on your team provides a unique buff. Mixing Cryo (ice) and Hydro (water) will freeze enemies, but mixing Cryo with Electro (electricity) will decrease the enemies physical damage resistance. There’s a lot here, so you can mix and match a ton of characters to create worthwhile effects.
Don’t forget to build your characters
As you blast through the story, you might forget to level up your characters, their weapons, and their artifacts (equipment). Much more, characters do have specific weapons and artifact sets that work best on them, so if you have access to these, you should use them. Don’t just slap whatever you picked up off the ground on them without giving the items some thought!
That being said, it can be pretty hard to parse all the game jargon in the equipment descriptions, so we recommend using guides to help you sort out your character builds. Keqing Mains is our build site of choice, maintained by people who crunch the numbers and put in the time to recommend what’s best.
Your characters don’t need to be built to 100% efficiency — there’s plenty of free-to-play options to equip your characters with, so don’t fret too much about it.
Co-op is your friend, especially earlier on
The domains you have to fight your way through to get artifacts and upgrade materials from can be hard early on, especially if you don’t have these characters built — and you need to clear these to build the characters, so it becomes a bit of bizarre ouroboros of a problem. Don’t be afraid to hit that co-op button, which will match you with other players that can help carry you make it through these domains easily.
Prioritize completing limited-time events
Unlike its sibling games, Honkai: Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero, once a Genshin Impact event ends, it’s gone. Even if it was a flagship event with lots of lore in the cutscenes — it’s gone and there’s no way to replay it. That being said, the limited-time rewards from these events are typically pretty good. Some events have dropped best-in-slot weapons for characters alongside its usual handful of Primogems and upgrade materials, so they’re worth doing. Some events will even give free four-star characters, helping you flesh out your roster, so you’ll definitely want to make sure to participate in these events before they’re gone forever.
Image: Hoyoverse
Plan your gacha pulling responsibly
If you are staring at that new, shiny character in the gacha “wish” banner with glossy eyes, with nothing by a few thousand Primogems in your pocket, you should prepare for the worst. It will take at most, 180 wishes (28,800 Primogems) to bring a five-star character or weapon home, guaranteed. While you may get lucky and win your coin flips to win the right prize and win it early, you should always be prepared for the “what if” you don’t get what you want.
We recommend saving your Primos for the characters or weapons you really want. While we cannot outright tell you whether or not you should spend money in this game to help you get what you want, we will remind you that this is gambling, and things can snowball very quickly if you’re not careful.
At this point, Genshin Impact is a huge game and it’ll take hundreds of hours at this point to catch up to everything. There are side quests that can take a dozen hours to complete, thousands of collectables, and so much other optional side content, that it’ll make your head spin if you’re rushing to just catch up. Set reasonable goals and pace yourself. “Catching up” fully in Genshin Impact is no easy feat, and if you’re looking to do so, you don’t want to burn yourself out.
If you’re looking for more to do in Genshin Impact, we have tons of guides to get you started. Our early Genshin Impact guides will list out the free characters you can get, how their elemental reactions work, and explain the battle pass to you.
We have expansive guides on pesky Sumeru side content, like Udumbara Pistil locations and where the Aranyaka Mysterious Clipboard buried chests are. We have content for Natlan, too, explaining how to unlock the various Natlan world quests and how to make the Natlan craftable weapons.
