Arknights: Endfield Endgame Content and Progression Guide

So you've pushed the main story into Wuling and the mission list is finally thinning out. That's where Endfield's real loop starts. There's no single big tower waiting for you. Instead the endgame is a bunch of systems that feed each other: gated combat zones, a factory that runs while you sleep, boss refights that pay premium currency, and a daily routine that quietly stacks pulls over weeks. Here's how the pieces fit together and what to knock out first.

Unlocking Endgame Combat Zones

Two things gate the late-game areas: story progress and your Authority Level, which is just your account level (it caps at 60 for now). Operational EXP raises Authority, and most of it comes from spending Sanity in Protocol Spaces, finishing daily tasks, and clearing main missions and the node missions in your Operational Manual. So the loop is simple. Play story, hit a wall, farm dungeons, break through, repeat.

Getting into Wuling

The launch story covers the Prologue, all four Chapter 1 processes (The Broken Lands through Smoking Embers), and then the opening Chapter 2 processes once you sail to Wuling. Most accounts arrive there somewhere in the low 40s, Authority-wise. Beyond the story gates, a few systems unlock purely on level:

• Authority 8 / 15 / 20 / 30 / 45 - milestone reward chests from the beginner Authority event, worth Basic HH Permits and a pile of Oroberyl in total.
• Exploration Level 4 and 5 - open up the Severe Energy Alluvium and RE-Crisis dungeon categories (more on both below).

Etchspace Salvage

This is the big one. Once you hit Authority 22 and reach the Mountain Path Slope in Originium Science Park (Chapter 1, Process 3), a priority quest sends you back to the OMV Dijiang, where Aquito walks you through a portal and the mode opens for good.

Etchspace is an extraction mode. You drop into a shifting zone, grab loot while a Derangement meter climbs, and cash out. The main things to know:

• Smash Precipitation Crystals. They drop Nodules, which convert to Aurylene Crystals when you leave. Aurylenes reroll commissions, add new ones, and every converted crystal adds an Operation Metric, the mode's score currency.
• Open only the storage points you need. Packages always drop Classified items, Instrument Safes always hold Gold Statuettes, and Auto-Vendors carry Specimens. Every container you crack pushes Derangement up, so skip the ones that don't match your current commissions.
• Follow the Key Commissions. They push the mode's story and unlock the next Aberrant Zone. Zone 4 alone asks for Authority 40, so this mode stays relevant for a long time.
• Grab the chests. They're scattered around each zone and hold roughly 30-60 Oroberyl apiece. That adds up fast.
• Unlock the ziplines and ropes. They're one-time finds that turn into permanent shortcuts, saving time and Derangement on every later run.

Operation Metrics milestones are the reward track: 50 metrics gets you HH Permits and 10,000 T-Creds, 300 gets you a 400 Oroberyl chunk, and the ladder climbs from there into the tens of thousands. Once you finish the Key Commissions through Zone 3, weekly Focus Commissions open up too, and you can hold four at once.

Protocol Spaces and Area Defense

Protocol Spaces are your instanced farming dungeons. You find them while exploring, then run them from the Index menu. Every run costs 40 Sanity, higher difficulty tiers pay better, and a Sanity Usage Permit doubles the rewards for double the Sanity cost when you're in a hurry. There are five categories:

| Category | What it pays | | --- | --- | | Operator Progression | Combat Records, Cognitive Carriers, promotion and skill materials, T-Creds | | Weapon Progression | Weapon EXP (Arms INSP sets) and Tune materials (Cast Dice) | | RE-Crisis | Skill Mastery materials, boss refights | | Crisis Drills | Advanced Skill Mastery materials, wave defense | | Energy Alluvium | Essences for weapon slots |

On top of those, each region has Area Defense challenges (Valley Pass runs Levels 1-3, Originium Science Park goes to Level 4, Jingyu Valley has three more). They're short hold-the-line fights and they're some of the better skill checks in the game right now.

Gearing Operators for Harder Encounters

Levels and promotions

Operators go from 1 to 90, but they hit promotion walls at 20, 40, 60, and 80. Each promotion costs Protodisks for the first two phases and Protosets for phases three and four, and each one unlocks Talent nodes and raises skill ranks. EXP itself comes as Combat Records up to level 60, then switches to Cognitive Carriers for the 61-90 stretch, so the same dungeon just serves a different shelf.

Skills have their own track: Protoprisms carry you to skill level 6, Protohedrons take over from 7 up. Past that sits Skill Mastery, and its materials only really come from RE-Crisis and Crisis Drills runs. That's the deep end of character investment.

Weapons

Five weapon families exist: Sword, Greatsword, Polearm, Handcannon, and Arts Unit. Weapon EXP uses the Arms INSP Set, Arms INSP Kit, and Arms Instructor items, while Tunes (which rework a weapon's bonus lines) eat Cast Dice and Heavy Cast Dice, selectable from dungeon level 3 onward. You get a free 6-star weapon early, too: Dreams of the Starry Beach arrives on day 14 of the Awakening sign-in, and the New Horizons starter track hands you a pick of any 6-star weapon from its supply. Don't sleep on those, a good weapon carries harder than most gear pieces.

Gear and artificing

Gear covers three slots: Armor, Gloves, and Kit. Rarity runs white, green, blue, purple, gold, and you craft pieces at the AIC out of processed components plus Stock Bills. Artificing is how you push a piece's stats, and it has one rule worth learning early: the fodder gear's target stat needs to be equal or higher than the stat you're upgrading. Higher counts as a Good Match and boosts your success odds, equal is a Standard Match, and lower can't be used at all. Say you're pushing Strength on MI Security Armor (Strength 58): feeding it Frontiers Armor (Strength 87) is a Good Match. Artificing eats Artificing Catalysts, Gear Components, and Stock Bills, so Good Matches genuinely save money over dozens of attempts.

Essences

Each weapon has three Essence slots, and a Flawless Essence's passives should match your weapon's three lines. Flawless Essences only drop from Severe Energy Alluvium runs, which unlock at Exploration Level 4 after the Beyond the World's Expanse I side mission. Etching pushes one of an essence's three stats toward level 6. Odds start Very High at 1 to 2 and slide down to Very Low by 5 to 6. A failed etch eats the fodder essence but pays 10 Coolant Gels, and Coolant Gels can force a success, at 30 Gels for the first level and 450 by the last. Bank your Gels for the levels with ugly odds.

Teams worth building

Elements are Physical, Heat, Electric, Cryo, and Nature, and reactions between them (Solidification, Electrification, Combustion) do a lot of the damage math for you. A few launch-era cores worth aiming for:

• Heat: Laevatain as the carry, Wulfgard enabling, Antal amplifying. Probably the strongest single damage comp right now.
• Cryo: Yvonne fed Solidification stacks by Xaihi, with Fluorite blowing up stacked targets and Gilberta buffing.
• Electric: Avywenna dealing, Arclight's Intelligence-scaling Electric buff, Perlica enabling.
• Physical: the Endministrator themself, with Pogranichnik as the SP battery, Lifeng enabling, and Ember shielding plus knocking enemies down.

If you're free-to-play, Endmin or Da Pan with Akekuri as the battery gets you surprisingly far. A "battery" just means someone who refills the team's shared Skill Point pool, and since every skill costs SP, more casts usually just wins.

One rule of thumb before anything else: take a single carry to 90 with weapon and essences done before you spread resources across three half-built operators. One finished character clears more content than three decent ones.

Tackling High-Difficulty Boss Fights

The launch boss roster

Chapter 1's story throws Ereignis at you in the Prologue, then Rhodagn the Bonekrushing Fist (Nefarith's right hand among the Landbreakers), the Walking Chrysopolis, and a pair of Aggelos constructs in Marble Aggelomoirai and Triaggelos, with elite fights like the Bonekrusher Ballista along the way. Over in Wuling you run into Ruan Yi of the Cangzei Pirates. Triaggelos is the wall for most accounts, its halo shifts as it makes tactical decisions, so treat any change in its behavior as a tell.

RE-Crisis refights

Every boss comes back in RE-Crisis, a set of refight rifts you queue from the Operational Manual at climbing difficulty tiers. Each tier cleared for the first time pays one-time rewards: Oroberyls, T-Creds, and promotion materials. These rifts also drop the Skill Mastery materials, which makes them your endgame Sanity sink once levels and skills are close to done. They're pricey on Sanity, so save the top tiers for a team that's actually ready.

Habits that win hard fights

• Interrupt the big casts. Attack interruptions stop most charging ultimates. When a boss resists stagger, the fight becomes a dodge-check instead, so learn which is which.
• Use perfect dodges. The timing window is generous once you've practiced, and the payoff usually feeds your damage window.
• Match elements and stack reactions. Solidification feeds a Cryo carry, Electrification pumps Cryo damage further, Combustion carries Heat teams. Fighting into a weakness chart you like is half the battle.
• Watch your SP. Dumping the whole pool on the opener leaves you with nothing for burst windows later. Batteries help here.
• Keep Tacticals stocked. These consumables work in normal content, and a well-timed one saves a refight attempt.

Pre-fight checklist

Promotions current, weapon leveled and tuned, gold-rarity gear with the right main stats, three matching essences slotted, and either Ardelia (healing), Gilberta (buffs plus healing), or Ember (shields) in the back line. That checklist alone clears most difficulty tiers a lot of players assume they need more raw power for.

The Etchspace zone bosses deserve a mention too. Fighting one while Derangement climbs and the clock runs is its own kind of pressure, more of a routing test than a raw DPS test. And if you enjoy this stuff, timed boss challenges with engraved medals (Umbral Monument) are announced for later in this version, so the boss skills you build now will get a proper scoreboard.

Optimizing Your Factory for Endgame Materials

The AIC runs 24/7, offline included, and it quietly becomes your main material source once story rewards dry up. Each region holds one full PAC plus smaller Sub-PAC satellites, and every depot in a region is shared. At launch you're working with The Hub PAC in Valley IV, Sub-PACs at Valley Pass, Aburrey Quarry, Originium Science Park, and Power Plateau, then the Wuling City PAC and its Jingyu Valley Sub-PAC. Spots like Origin Loadspring have no factory at all, so you reach those mining nodes with relay towers from the nearest powered site.

Power first, always

Thermal Banks make your electricity, and the battery you feed a bank sets its output. The ladder is LC, SC, then HC Valley Batteries, with a Sandleaf Powder line (five Sandleaf grinding into powder at 90 a minute) as the big late-Valley IV power setup. Keep the supply chain at 100 percent efficiency. A starved grid stalls machines, and a stalled factory burns nothing but time.

What to produce

Early on, run the Amethyst chain (Fiber to Part to Component). From Authority 18, switch to component lines that feed gear crafting: Ferrium Components, Cryston Components, Packed Origocrust. Wuling's backbone is Xiranite, which cooks out of Carbon and Clean Water, and from there you branch into Yazhen Syringes, Jincao Tea, and SC Wuling Batteries. Keep a small meds line running too. Combat medicine is cheap to make and it keeps long exploration sessions from turning into corpse runs.

Stock Bills and factory space

The AIC Steward sells permanent factory expansions for Stock Bills. Bills trickle in from Outpost Orders, but the real printer is Stock Redistribution, the in-game stock market. Unlock the Elastic Bond training, buy low, and sell high to friends whose prices swing daily. There's a daily limit on trades, which is really just a reason to log in every day. Assign operators as Outpost Liaisons while you're at it, and match their traits to each outpost's qualities for better output.

Regional Development

Every mining rig you place, outpost you upgrade, and Recycling Station you unlock adds Regional Development metrics. Higher development means purer mining nodes and extra resource spawns, so exploration and factory growth literally feed each other. It's the closest thing the game has to a world completion meter with mechanical teeth.

Index upgrades and blueprints

For the AIC Index tree, the working priority is Mining, then Power, then Processing, then Logistics, with Exploration and Combat last. Early on, just follow the "Rec" markers the game gives you. Once your factory hums, grab community blueprint codes, which drop in whole pre-connected belt-and-machine layouts. One warning though: an imported layout can jam the moment you swap an input it was built around. Understand the power draw and belt flow before you paste in someone else's megabase.

Don't forget the ship, either. The Dijiang's Manufacturing Cabin and Reception Room produce daily, and the Recycling Station's aerospace materials go toward expanding the Dijiang itself.

Long-Term Goals After the Main Story

The daily spine

Daily reset hits 5:00 AM server time, and the weekly reset lands Monday at 4:00 AM. The core routine:

1. Hit 100 activity points for 2,000 Pass EXP and 200 Oroberyl.
2. Spend your Sanity, all of it, ideally on whatever material wall you're facing. Never let it sit capped, capped Sanity is burned regen.
3. Claim 300 FP at the Acquisition Center and browse the credit shop.
4. Collect the Dijiang's cabins and sell your outpost goods for Stock Bills.
5. Grab timed rare spawns like Pink Bolete and Kalkonyx, they're ascension materials that gate late upgrades.

Weekly, knock out the event objectives and your seven Protocol Pass missions. The Pass has a Vacation Tag that banks up to three days of missed EXP, so one skipped day won't hurt you.

Completionism with a payoff

Hundred-percenting each region means chests, fast travel points, orites, hidden crafting recipes, Protocol Dataloggers, and the side mission chains hanging off every Valley IV hub area. Exploration Level gates real content (Severe Energy Alluvium at 4, RE-Crisis at 5), so map cleanup isn't just for the checklist.

Account systems to max

Regional Development, Outpost Prosperity, the Dijiang expansion, your ship's Control Nexus, and operator Trust all have long grinds attached. Trust is the easy one to sleep on: gifts through the Contact Terminal unlock operator stories and Talent nodes, and some of those nodes are genuinely strong.

Roster and pulling goals

Work toward two or three element-specific teams so no weakness chart stonewalls you. The standard banner guarantees a 6-star within 80 pulls and hands you a selector at 300, which is slow but compounds for free alongside the Oroberyl that drips from Authority milestones, Etchspace metrics, and events. Later this version brings Gilberta's banner in Phase 2 and Yvonne in Phase 3, so bank pulls with that in mind.

The honest read on Endfield's endgame right now: it's a preparation game. Umbral Monument and Delver of the Cryptic are both coming this version, and everything you build today, the level 90 carry, the humming factory, the Stock Bill cushion, is exactly what those modes will ask for. Set your belts, dump your Sanity, and let the factory grow your account overnight.