Arknights Beginner Guide: How to Start Strong in 2026

Arknights has been out for years at this point, and that's actually great news if you're starting now. The game hands out a ton of free stuff, the story is huge, and the power level of new operators keeps climbing, so a fresh account catches up way faster than it used to. The catch is that a lot of beginner advice floating around is years old and flat-out wrong for 2026. Sanity caps changed, the story got a difficulty selector, and the starter banner works a little differently than old guides say. So here's the current version, based on how the game actually plays right now.

Choosing Your Starting Server and Account Setup

Which server should you pick?

Most people should pick the Global (English/Yostar) server. It's got the biggest English-speaking community, all the guides and memes are built around it, and every event gets covered in English the day it drops. That last part matters more than you'd think, because Arknights stages can be genuinely hard and being able to look up a clear is worth a lot.

The CN server runs about six months ahead of Global. If you read Chinese and you want the newest story the second it exists, that's the trade. The JP, KR, and TW servers sit on roughly the Global schedule with their own languages. The other side of the coin: playing CN means your progress is locked to a server where your friends probably aren't, and account recovery is more of a hassle if you're not based in the region.

One thing you can't do is move later. There's no server transfer in Arknights. Whatever you pick, that account lives there forever. Six months of content difference sounds like a big deal on day one and basically stops mattering by month three.

Link your account immediately

This is the boring part, but do it before anything else. Arknights is an online-only game, and guest accounts die with the device they're on. Get through the tutorial, then bind to a Yostar account (email login) right away. If you play on the CN server, that's SKLand instead.

The good news on the account side: Arknights launched an official PC client for the Global server on August 13, 2026, so you're no longer stuck with an emulator to play on a big screen. Same account, same progress. Download it from the official Arknights site rather than a random mirror, and bind the account before you start hopping between phone and PC. Cross-play between platforms and mobile is the whole point of the setup.

Rerolling: honestly, don't bother

You'll see old posts telling you to reroll for a specific starter. Ignore them. The starter banner guarantees a 6-star in your first ten pulls no matter what, and Arknights is purely PvE, so there's no content that demands one specific operator. Rerolling eats hours and saves you maybe a week of progress.

Level the account, play the story, and pull on whatever limited banner is running when you start. That'll do more for you than a perfect reroll ever will.

Understanding Sanity and Daily Resource Caps

How sanity works

Sanity is your stamina. Operations cost from 6 up to 36 sanity to run, and when you're out, you're done farming for a while.

It regenerates at 1 point every 6 minutes, which is 10 an hour, or 240 a day if you never let it cap out. New accounts start with a max of 127 sanity (it was 82 for years - the cap got raised in the Ending a Grand Overture update in April 2025). The cap climbs as your account levels up: 135 by level 5, 150 around level 20, 170 in the 60s, and it tops out at 180 from level 117. In practice you'll sit in the 130-160 range for your first couple months, and that's fine.

Leveling your account refills sanity by (your new cap minus 45), so level-ups are basically free full bars early on. Don't hoard those - just keep playing.

Where sanity should actually go

• Aerial Threat (CA-5): skill summary farming. Skills are the main power lever in this game, and summary scarcity is a real bottleneck, so this stays relevant forever.
• Cargo Escort (CE-6): LMD, the money. Costs 36 sanity and pays out about 10,000 LMD a run with the bonus. Nothing else comes close per point of sanity.
• Tactical Drill (LS-6): Battle Records, your EXP. Also 36 sanity. You will run this a stupid number of times.
• Resource Search (SK-5): carbon for base construction. Mostly early game, drops off in priority later.
• Tough Siege (AP-5): Purchase Certificates for the cert shop. Watch out, the map drains your operators' HP the whole run.

Practical split for a newer account: mostly LS-6 and CE-6 to keep your operators leveled and promoted, with CA-5 mixed in whenever a skill needs ranks. Aerial Threat and Chip Rescue stages aren't daily - they rotate through the week, so check the schedule in the Terminal and don't dump sanity into the lower tiers when the -6 versions are open. A rule that held up forever: don't farm lower tiers when the -6 version of a supply stage is available. The efficiency gap is huge.

The other half of this: level a small roster, not a wide one. Promoting five operators to Elite 2 will carry you further than getting twenty to Elite 1, and it costs way less sanity in the long run.

Weekly caps you should know about

Orundum, the pull currency, is capped weekly in a couple of places, and this is where the "daily resource caps" bite:

| Source | Cap / amount | Notes | | --- | --- | --- | | Annihilation Orundum | 1,800 per week | The big one. Grind up to 400 kills on an Annihilation map. | | Daily/weekly missions | ~1,200 per week | Do these every day. Auto-complete in minutes. | | Monthly card | 200/day (6,000/month) | Only if you're spending. About 10 pulls a month. | | Base trading post | 20 Orundum per 2-hour order | Slower than missions, but it never stops. |

That 1,800 weekly Annihilation cap is your priority unlock. Annihilation is a 400-enemy gauntlet mode that unlocks around chapter 3-ish, and if you can't clear the full 400 kills yet, you still earn partial Orundum scaled to your kill count - every run counts toward the cap. Even hitting 1,400 of 1,800 as a new player is fine. It resets Monday. Clear as much as you can every single week, because that's the only repeatable Orundum source in the game and it never carries over.

Also: leaving sanity at cap wastes regen, so try to burn it down before bed. An overfull bar while you sleep is the most common silent loss in the game.

Early Operator Priorities from Starter Banners

The Newbie Pool is your first stop

The starter banner (Newbie Pool) is permanently available, and it's the cheapest pulling you'll ever do: 380 Orundum per pull instead of the usual 600. It's capped at 20 pulls per account, then it's gone. A 6-star is guaranteed inside your first ten pulls, and a 5-star is guaranteed somewhere within all twenty. Those pulls also share pity with the standard pool.

Do those 20 pulls first, before anything else. Two guarantees for a discounted price is the best deal on a fresh account, and you want a real roster before you start saving.

One catch: don't use headhunting permits on the starter banner. Permits are worth 600 Orundum each elsewhere, and using them at the discounted rate just throws that value away. Pay Orundum here, save permits for real banners.

The pool is mostly launch-era operators, so think old-school carries: SilverAsh, Exusiai, Siege, Hoshiguma, Shining, Angelina. If you get SilverAsh, you basically won the starter lottery - his True Silver Slash is still a monster nuke that trivializes early waves. Exusiai shreds anything that flies. Any of them will carry you through the first several chapters though, so don't reset hunting for one name.

Standard pity numbers worth knowing

• Base 6-star rate is 2%, and 5-star is 8%.
• Every banner guarantees a 5-star or better within ten pulls.
• From pull 51 onward, the 6-star rate climbs by 2% per pull, hitting 100% at pull 99. That's hard pity.
• 6-star pity carries across banners in the same series, so standard-pool pulls all count together. Limited banners track pity separately.
• Limited banners have a spark: 300 pulls lets you straight-up buy the rate-up 6-star. That's your ceiling on spending for any must-have character.

Who to raise first

Rarity matters less than coverage in this game. You want one operator covering each job, and low-rarity units do those jobs cheaply:

• Vanguards generate deployment points. They're your engine. Fang or Courier are fine for a long time.
• Defenders hold the line. Cuora's skill makes her shockingly tanky for a 4-star.
• Medics keep everyone standing. Hibiscus is boring and reliable. Gavial hits harder.
• Guards and Snipers are your damage. Kroos is a 3-star sniper who quietly out-damages units that cost ten times her investment.
• Casters deal arts damage for enemies with high physical defense. Steward is a cheap single-target option.

Raise two of each class to start, then dump resources into your strongest 6-star DPS once you have one. And don't sleep on recruitment - it's the free operator source people forget. You get recruitment permits constantly, and the HR Office (build it in your base) gives you more slots and free tag refreshes. Set the timer to 9 hours to cut the odds of tags dropping out, and always run at least 4 hours so 1-stars get excluded and 5-stars become possible. The "Top Operator" tag guarantees a 6-star outright - it's rare, but that's the dream pull, and it costs you nothing but a permit you weren't going to use anyway.

Clearing Main Theme Story Chapters Efficiently

The story is long, and that's fine

The Main Theme currently runs 16 episodes across three acts on Global, with Episode 17 (Critical Phase Transition) already out on CN. Here's the arc structure and where Global sits:

| Act | Episodes | Where Global is | | --- | --- | --- | | initium: Hour of an Awakening | Prologue, 01-04 | Complete | | Act I: Shatter of a Vision | 05-08 | Complete | | Act II: Shadow of a Dying Sun | 09-14 | Complete | | Act III: Nexus Point of Future | 15-16 | Complete, waiting on 17 |

Episode 16 (Abnormal Spectrum) hit Global in March 2026. Episode 15 (Dissociative Recombination) landed September 2025. So there's a lot of story in front of you, and honestly, the early chapters are the weakest part of it. The writing gets much better from Episode 8 onward.

Use Story Environment when you just want to see what happens

This is the single biggest time-saver for a new player, and a lot of older guides don't mention it because it didn't exist for years. From Episode 10 onward, every operation has a difficulty setting called Environments:

• Story Environment: your operators get double HP, ATK, and DEF, and redeployment cooldowns are halved. It's basically easy mode. It doesn't cost sanity and doesn't give first-clear Originite Prime, but you still get the story.
• Standard Environment: normal difficulty, normal rewards.
• Adverse Environment: the hard version with extra enemies or modifiers.

You can mix and match. Read the story on Story Environment, then come back for the Originite Prime rewards on Standard once your roster is stronger. Clearing a higher difficulty retroactively awards the lower difficulty's rewards, so nothing is ever lost by taking the easy road first.

From Episode 15 on, the system changes names to Standard Combat / Adverse Combat / Strategic Simulation, but the idea is the same: easier clear for story, harder clears for extra rewards, and you can jump straight into the hard version to collect everything at once if your squad can handle it.

Actually clearing chapters fast

1. Do the tutorial and Prologue first. It's gated and fast.
2. Run Episode 1-4 on normal. These are genuinely easy and mostly exist to teach you deployment.
3. Slow down at Episode 5-6. The difficulty actually starts here, and Episode 6 is a notorious wall for new players (the boss uses real mechanics, not just stats).
4. Use Story Environment past Episode 9 if you're stalling on story alone.
5. Farm supply stages on the side to keep your core team leveled - the story doesn't wait for you.

Two more tricks that save real time. First, the first-clear Originite Prime from story stages is your early income - each stage hands out premium currency the first time you 3-star it, and stages you clear on Adverse count retroactively, so you can grab those rewards later without re-running anything. Second, failing or quitting an operation refunds your sanity in full (that wasn't always true - it used to be a partial refund). If a clear is going badly, quit out and retry rather than watching it play out to a loss. The exception is Annihilation, where the refund scales with how many enemies you killed, so bail early there if a run's doomed.

Also grab a support unit. You can borrow one operator from a friend per stage, and dragging a max-level carry through a wall stage is completely legitimate. That's what the feature is for.

Common Mistakes New Commanders Make

Spending Originite Prime on sanity

Originite Prime is the premium currency, and the game will happily let you convert it into sanity refills. Don't, at least not as your habit. One Originite Prime restores 135 sanity, and the same stuff buys outfits and pulls long-term. Early on, when your sanity cap is low and stages are cheap, the temptation is real. The value just isn't there - refills early game barely buy you anything, and you're burning currency you will absolutely want later. If you're going to spend money at all, the monthly card ($4.99 for 200 Orundum a day plus a 60-sanity potion, 30 days) beats sanity refills by a mile.

Spreading resources across too many operators

The classic. You pull a new 6-star, so you raise them. Then the next one, and the next. Now you've got nine half-built units and none of them can carry a stage. LMD and Battle Records are the real bottleneck in Arknights, not pulls. Pick a core of about six to eight operators and max them before touching anyone else. A fully-raised 4-star beats a half-raised 6-star almost every time.

Ignoring the base

The RIIC (your Rhodes Island base) is basically a second job that pays you while you sleep. Trading posts make LMD, factories make Battle Records, and the whole thing runs offline. New players rush past the base tutorial because the interface is clunky, then wonder why they're always broke. Spend an afternoon on it. Getting the trading post and factories running early funds everything else you do, and a leveled base is the difference between affording promotions and grinding CE-6 forever.

Skipping recruitment tags

Recruitment is free operators, and it's easy to let permits pile up because the UI makes it feel like a chore. Slots refresh continuously, tags rotate, and a lucky "Top Operator" tag is a free 6-star. Set a 9-hour timer, pick your tags, come back later. Two minutes a day, forever.

Pulling on every banner

The standard pool is always there and always tempting, and the first ten pulls of any banner guarantee a 5-star. That's a fine deal if you want a specific rate-up. It's a bad deal if you're pulling "just because." Here's the honest framing: limited operators only come back rarely, standard operators show up again and again, and the Kernel banner lets you pick old favorites directly. So save for limited banners that matter to you, take the cheap guarantees elsewhere, and don't drain your Orundum on the standard pool hoping for something specific. Standard rate-up odds are only 50% anyway - half your 6-stars will be off-banner.

Ignoring skills and masteries

Levels are the visible number, but skill ranks are where the actual power is. An operator's second and third skills unlock at Elite 1 and Elite 2, and ranking those up with skill summaries changes their damage output massively. It's tempting to promote a new unit and call it done. Take the extra day to rank their skills, especially on your main DPS, and every stage after that gets easier.

Being afraid to borrow

The friend support system exists specifically so you can drag one strong unit through a wall. There's no penalty, no cost, no shame in it. Add active friends early (the friend list caps out, but filling it with active players gives you support options and friend credits for the shop), and borrow a carry for the boss stages that stop you cold. The most common self-inflicted wound in Arknights is bashing your head into a stage solo for a week when a borrowed max-level operator clears it in one try.