Wanting to play Genshin Impact without spending a penny? Here are our suggestions to maximize your experience!
Utilize Free Characters
Genshin Impact gives a surprising number of 4-star characters to the player for free, after achieving certain milestones. Here’s a list of all the characters you can earn for free outside of events:
Traveler - Start the game
Amber - Complete the ‘Wind-Riding Knight’ quest
Kaeya - Complete the ‘Crash Course’ quest
Lisa - Complete the ‘Sparks Amongst the Pages’ quest
Barbara - Complete the ‘A Long Shot’ quest
Xiangling - Clear Floor 3, Chamber 3 of Spiral Abyss
Noelle - A guaranteed pull in the ‘Beginner’s Wish’ gacha
Collei - Reach Adventure Rank 20 and Clear Floor 4, Chamber 3 of Spiral Abyss
Lynette - Reach Adventure Rank 25
While not all of these characters are particularly strong (sorry, Amber), some are absolutely worth raising! Xiangling, Liyue’s top chef, is actually an incredible addition to any team, and one of the best Sub-DPS characters in the game. She can apply tons of Pyro with her Elemental Burst, Pyronado, even while off-field: this allows her to combo extremely well with Hydro and Cryo characters for Vaporize and Melt reactions. Due to the great accessibility of the resources needed, Xiangling is a really easy character to raise to a high level, making her an easy carry for free-to-play gamers! Kaeya, Barbara, Collei and Lynette are also characters we absolutely recommend building for free-to-play players, unless you have characters that already fill their roles.
Maximize Your Primogems
Saving up free Primogems is an important part of obtaining new characters without spending money. Therefore, you’ll want to make sure you’re getting as many as you can! This means making sure to play Events as they come around - not only do they reward players with tons of Primogems, but also other super useful items like weapon and character enhancement materials. Not only that, but Events sometimes give out exclusive weapons that are very strong, such as the Luxurious Sea-Lord and Dodoco Tales.
We also suggest always completing your Daily Commissions - 60 Primogems every day really adds up! If you did just this every day for 30 days, you’d have 1800 Primogems, more than enough for a 10 pull! You should also do your best to power through what you can of the Spiral Abyss each time it resets - this can yield a lot of free Primogems, with every 3 stars you earn landing you 50 of them!
An effective method of gathering Primogems is also to hunt down chests and achievements during normal gameplay - chests can give anywhere between 2 and 40 Primogems depending on what type, and achievements can give 5 to 20 each. This may not seem like a lot, but they really rack up!
Check out our other tips on secret ways to get free Primogems here.
Learn to Love Fishing
Nothing makes a game great in the same way fishing does! Or at least, that’s what some people say. Regardless of how you feel about it, we recommend getting comfortable with Genshin Impact’s fishing mechanics, as there are some great rewards for becoming a proficient fisherman.
The frontrunners here are the three fishing-exclusive 4-star weapons: The Catch (Polearm), End of the Line (Bow) and Fleuve Cendre Ferryman (Sword). These are all cool and unique weapons, with The Catch and Fleuve Cendre Ferryman also being particularly strong. You’ll also be able to fully refine these weapons with materials earned through fishing, making them stronger than many 4-star gacha weapons. We recommend trying The Catch on Raiden Shogun, Zhongli, Xiangling or Rosaria, while we’d suggest equipping the Fleuve Cendre Ferryman to characters like Bennett and Furina.
While the fishing minigames can get repetitive, we really do recommend taking advantage of these free weapons! They can be extremely helpful in powering up your weaker characters, and it can be fun to have a goal to aim for, too. We recommend making use of Thoma if you have him, as his Utility Passive provides a 20% chance for a double catch when fishing in Inazuma.
Use Fragile Resin Wisely
Fragile Resin is a super precious resource within Genshin Impact, used to create more Original Resin, the resource used for farming many of the important materials in the game as well as Artifacts. Fragile Resin is incredibly important, as it’s the only way to artificially replenish Original Resin without using Primogems. Therefore, you should save it for when you really need it.
You can earn Fragile Resin from lots of different sources, such as Events, Log In Rewards, Mail, the Battle Pass and more. However, it is still quite a rare resource, especially given how useful it can be when farming for a specific Artifact or trying to otherwise develop a character or weapon.
We have a guide on how to effectively utilize your Original Resin that you can read here.
Hold Onto Starglitter
Masterless Starglitter is a valuable resource in Genshin Impact - you only obtain it from pulling a weapon or duplicate character while Wishing. However, it can be exchanged within the Paimon’s Bargains shop for lots of rare and useful rewards such as Intertwined Fates and Acquaint Fates. The real value of Masterless Starglitter, however, is that you can purchase characters and exclusive weapons within the Paimon’s Bargains shop too. These are expensive, though, so you’ll need to save up for them!
Every month, the shop rotates to feature two 4-star characters and one of two sets of weapons. The Blackcliff weapon set (with a Crit Damage main stat) and the Royal weapon set (with an Attack main stat) are alternated every month, and cost 24 Starglitter for each weapon. These weapons, specifically the Blackcliff set, have strong stats and are a very useful free-to-play alternative to some of the stronger limited 5-star weapons. We recommend picking them up if you’re lacking a weapon for one of your DPS characters!
Characters cost 34 Starglitter each and will provide a Constellation if you already own them - this can be a great way to get Constellations for characters you need them on, or for characters hard to get Constellations on normally, like Kaeya and Lisa.
That concludes our 5 best tips for free-to-play players in Genshin Impact! We believe that everyone should be able to enjoy this game, regardless of how much they want to interact with its gacha mechanics. What tips would you give to a free-to-play player, or what things have helped your free-to-play experience? Let us know in the Paidia Community Genshin Impact Forum.
