Arknights is a tower defense RPG game that is making the rounds these days on mobile gaming. Unless you’re a PUBG clone or a mobile RPG like Fate: GO, odds are you’re playing Arknights or are at least curious about it.

What sets this apart from other games are its cast of furries and its many class roles that are situational with each map and scenario you play in. We’ll be sorting out general tips and characters in this two-part guide.

Be sure to experience the tutorial first before diving right into this quick guide.

Do Story Missions First

When starting out with Arknights, it’s best to focus on clearing story missions as quickly as your Sanity points allows (ie: the game’s energy meter). Not only is the narrative engaging, but story progress gates a number of features and valuable rewards.

Chief among these are key upgrades to the game’s base-building system, and the weekly “Annihilation” missions that generate valuable “Orundum” currency used on the character headhunting gacha.

Create The Best Team With What You’ve Gacha’ed So Far

Arknights blends the traditional map-and-layout focused style of tower defense games with the progression and character focus of RPGs. Unlike some RPGs, though, single power-leveled characters can’t quite “carry” a whole team through an encounter alone.

Every Role Is Important

Just as Arknights‘ team focus emphasizes collective tactics and positioning, it behooves you to have team members capable of pulling their weight. When upgrading Operators, try to focus your initial use of resources on raising one or two of each class of Operator.

Most missions will call for deploying multiples of each class. You don’t want to go into a mission where the only other unit of a class you have is grossly under-leveled.

Pick The Right Role To Promote

Though Arknights’ general progression favors leveling up as a team, upgrading an Operator to their maximum potential can take a ton of resources. This is especially true of high-rarity, 5- and 6-Star Operators.

Getting them to Elite 2, the maximum level cap, can take days or even weeks of focused activity. Consider a character’s stats, skills, and role to see if it fits your playstyle before setting them on the path to be Elite 2.

Know The Differences Between Yellow & Red Currencies

There are two important “premium” currencies in Arknights.

Originite Prime (OP) is the yellow-coloured gem and can only be acquired by microtransactions and through first-time mission completions. It’s the main currency used to pay for cosmetic skins from the shop, and it can also be used to buy packs of upgrade resources. Hold onto the OP you get, after you catch up with the story, it’ll be a lot harder to come by without paying.

The red-coloured gems are Orundum, and it’s used almost solely for rolling on the premium character gacha. OP can be converted into Orundum for Headhunting rolls. Try not to convert OP unless you’re sure you’re going to roll, as you can’t convert it back.

Do Your Dailies

Arknights has a plethora of daily and weekly objectives to tackle, and these are your key to maximizing your resources as you play. Daily and weekly objective completion will generate a significant amount of Orundum and other key resources, so try to get as much done as you can while playing. It won’t take much time, either, especially once you’ve composed auto-deploy teams for your resource missions.

Build Your Base Right

As if the tactical strategizing wasn’t enough, Arknights includes a base-building and development system in the veins of XCOM. Don’t ignore upgrades to the base, as its facilities, once built, will generate a significant chunk of the resources you’ll use to upgrade your Operators.

Base upgrades also unlock things like recruitment slots, support slots, and other game systems. Usually an optimal build would be 4 – 2 – 3: 4 Factories, 2 Shipments and 3 Power Plants for a fully-built base.

Why do this? With 4 Factories, you’d be generating just enough gold for your shipments to have consistent supply to ship off. Normally, if you try to go 3 – 3 – 3, you may have a surplus of orders, but insufficient gold bars.

You’ll need 3 Power Plants because when you max deck out your entire ship, you will have JUST enough to pull through efficiently.

Farm Lungmen Dollars When You Can

Lungmen Dollars (LMD) are the primary in-game currency of Arknights. Most upgrades in the game costs some amount of LMD. You gain LMD from completing missions, but also can get it by selling resources generated by base facilities.

Take every opportunity to build up a stockpile of LMD when possible, as high-end Operator upgrades can empty your fictional coffers. In fact, you will need to do this for 12 of your favoured Operators.

Protip: You’ll have to try really hard to try and finish the 5th mission to farm for LMD as quickly as you can. Make this a priority.

The moment you are able to complete this mission, your LMD issues should be easier to handle from now on. Just beware when you want to E1 or E2 your units when you set the game on autoplay. Do keep in mind the autoplay may fail due to DP cost differences, so you may need to replay the mission to ensure a guaranteed win.

Headhunt More Operators

Arknights includes multiple ways to gather up new Operators, be it the free way or the paid way (gacha).

The free system is called “Recruitment” and costs Lungmen Dollars and Recruitment Permits. It uses a tag system to generate new Operators over time semi-randomly. It’s extremely rare to score a 5- or 6-star Operator from the Recruitment system, but we’ve seen it happened. So don’t give up!

Even if you’ve got as many low-rarity Operators as you need, keep using your Recruitment passes each day. This is because even recruiting duplicate characters can generate other currency used for shop purposes or tokens to strengthen the copies you already have.

Protip: If you want to farm green/yellow certs faster, try to aim for 4-Star guaranteed tags (Debuff, Shift, Fast Redeploy) as they will always yield 40 Green Certificates on recruitment duplicate and 1 extra Yellow certificate if max potential.

Here’s a site that can help you see what combinations will confirm a 4-Star Operator and above: https://aceship.github.io/AN-EN-Tags/akhr.html

Pay Attention To Banner Events

“Headhunting” is the premium system, and functions similarly to gacha banners in other games. You pay Orundum (or Headhunting Permits) to roll on the gacha for limited characters. If you can scrape together the resources for it, consider trying to gather as much as you need to roll at least ten times on each new banner.

Arknights’ headhunting system guarantees a 5-Star character within the first ten rolls on any new banner. In other words, if you get lucky, you could get that 5-Star on the very first roll, thus saving Orundum for next time.

NEXT: The best furries & waifus for your Arknight team