Arknights Endfield Beginner Guide: Early Game Tips

Navigating Arknights: Endfield’s Complex Early Game

Arknights: Endfield, the latest venture from gacha titan GrifflIne, definitely isn’t pulling any punches when it comes to complexity. For anyone diving in, the sheer amount of interlocking systems – from factory management and combat mechanics to the gacha itself and the frankly busy UI – can feel overwhelming, like trying to juggle three raid mechanics and a debuff at once. It’s a lot, especially for players coming from simpler games.

Having slogged through both closed betas and getting some early access time, I’ve seen firsthand how easy it is to make crucial mistakes that can set your account back weeks, if not months. This isn’t just about optimal progression; it’s about avoiding unnecessary frustration and resource sinks. Consider this a battle-hardened veteran’s perspective on how to tackle the early game without losing your mind or wasting precious currency.

Getting Started: Character, Authority, and Early Progression

Right out of the gate, Arknights: Endfield throws you into one of the most agonizing choices in gaming: picking your administrator. You get the highly fashionable female administrator or… some dude. Honestly, if you picked the dude and immediately regretted it, don’t sweat it. It’s not a permanent commitment, and you can change it later. It’s a minor annoyance, but a real one for those of us who value aesthetics.

Authority Level: Your Account’s Lifeline

Your core progression hinges on your Authority Level, which is basically your overall account level. This increases as you push through the main story, burn through your stamina (or Sanity, as the game calls it), and actively explore the world. You’ll find yourself constantly cycling between these activities, with factory management always lurking in the background, demanding your attention. It’s a classic gacha loop, but with more moving parts than usual.

Cracking the Overworld: Exploration & Resource Gathering

Arknights: Endfield’s overworld is designed around large, instanced maps that feel less like open zones and more like intricate puzzles. Each map requires a mix of story progression, side quests, and pure exploration to fully unlock. The endgame for any given map isn’t just seeing everything; it’s about wiring it up, powering it with zip lines for efficient travel, expanding your factory footprint, and, most importantly, hoovering up every valuable resource. It’s the kind of meticulous grind that would make some raid leaders tear their hair out.

Smart Setup: Relay Towers, Mining Rigs, and Ziplines

Fairly early in the story, you’ll unlock Relay Towers. My absolute top recommendation: always bring some with you. As you move through the story or explore new areas, actively set up your network of Relay Towers. This isn’t just for power; it also unlocks puzzles and generally makes the map less of a slog. Later, when you get Portable Mining Rigs, pair them with Electric Pylons to hit those crucial ore veins in Valley 4. And if you’re feeling ambitious, toss in a few Ziplines to set up your own fast travel network.

Prioritizing ore mining is non-negotiable. These ores are a critical bottleneck for your factory’s production. The whole point here is to kill two birds with one stone. By placing these structures proactively while you quest or explore, you’re massively cutting down on future backtracking. You’ll still backtrack plenty – the game *loves* to make you walk back for random inventory items you mysteriously didn’t have – but this strategy alleviates some of the worst of it. It’s a familiar frustration for anyone who’s had to run back to a vendor mid-raid because they forgot consumables.

Don’t Forget Your Gadgets: Explosives and Map Markers

Once your factory is up and running enough to craft Explosives, always keep a stash on hand. They’re surprisingly useful for many of the game’s environmental puzzles, saving you from hitting frustrating dead ends.

Another pro-tip: if you stumble upon a puzzle or a key exploration item like an Aruine (think of them as Oculuses, but in Arknights: Endfield), and you can’t be bothered to figure it out at the moment, *mark it on your map*. Map markers are your best friend for efficiency. The map itself is actually quite good, showing what you’ve collected and what you’ve missed, so use it to clean up later. No need to waste time deciphering a complex path when you’re just trying to progress the story.

The Daily Grind: Rare Gathering & Recycling Stations

Exploration also yields Rare Gathering Sites, which are essential for character and weapon ascension, plus talent upgrades. Make these a part of your daily or bi-daily routine. Setting up a zipline network to these spots can turn a tedious chore into a quick pit stop. Use your scanner gadget (bound to R on keyboard) to see how many resources are left and when they respawn. Neglecting these early on will absolutely gate your progression, making your agents feel weak and your combat encounters needlessly difficult.

Similarly, Recycling Stations will appear, providing critical ship-related upgrade materials. Level these up, and visit them regularly. Again, they replenish daily or so, so factor them into your routine. This constant loop of daily resource gathering is the bread and butter of progression in games like this – it’s inconvenient, repetitive, and absolutely necessary.

Taming the Beast: Early Factory Management

Ah, the factory. The heart of Arknights: Endfield, and probably the source of most players’ early-game headaches. “The factory must grow” quickly becomes a mantra, but the initial setup is a maze. If you’re completely lost, the in-game tutorials are a good starting point, and don’t hesitate to use the provided blueprints.

Getting Started Without the Headaches

The core principle is ensuring you have enough Thermal Banks for energy and that your consumption stays below your maximum potential. The Yield Usage menu is your friend here; it shows estimated inputs and outputs, helping you catch glaring inefficiencies. Early on, this will feel like a messy tangle, much like the first few pulls in a new raid tier trying to figure out positioning.

Don’t Chase Perfection: Early Game Optimization

Here’s the blunt truth: don’t worry about min-maxing your factory from day one. Seriously, just focus on getting the bare minimum up and running. Factories are primarily for Regional Credits and gear, and trust me, you’ll need an absurd amount of both in the long run. Being a bit unoptimized in the early game is far better than burning yourself out trying to build the perfect setup from a handful of modules. Progression through the story, unlocking more ore veins, and leveling outposts provides significantly more account value than pixel-perfect factory layouts in the first few weeks. People usually learn this after wasting an entire reset trying to fix something that didn’t need fixing.

Crafting Gear and Outpost Trades

While mid to late game demands more factory optimization, for now, just get the hang of the basics. As for gear, craft what you need for your active agents. Don’t agonize over “wasting” a few early-game resources; the amount required for endgame gear is staggering, and you’ll be crafting and sacrificing tons of low-tier gear for artificing later. Think of it as throwing away green quest gear in an MMO – it serves its purpose for a bit, then becomes trash.

If you have spare resources, trade with your outposts to help them level up. This also ties into overall account progression, even if it feels secondary at first. There’s no need to rush, the game offers plenty of time to refine these systems.

Building Connections: Friends and Agent Gifting

In most gacha games, the friend system is usually an afterthought, offering negligible benefits. Not so in Arknights: Endfield. Friends are actually pretty damn important, which can be a source of social friction for anti-social players or those with inactive friends lists.

Friends: More Than Just a Social Tab

More friends mean more factory credits. You’ll be able to “flip” goods in a rudimentary stock market system to earn a hefty amount of credits. It’s a core part of your economic engine. Beyond that, active friends generate Friend Points, which you can use to buy stamina-related items and even Arsenal Tickets for weapon pulls. So yeah, don’t ignore that friend list. Find some active players; it makes a material difference.

Boosting Your Agents with Trust

Moving from external friendships to internal ones, Arknights: Endfield features a gifting system for your Agents (operators). You buy gift items with factory credits, and giving them to agents increases their Trust level. This isn’t just flavor; Trust provides a decent power boost by increasing their main stat.

Every day, you can give a few gifts that have enhanced value. Make it a habit, especially for your main damage dealers. It’s a small, consistent power bump that adds up, and neglecting it is just leaving free stats on the table. It’s like forgetting to enchant your gear – a minor oversight, but one that collectively makes your whole team weaker.

Investing in Your Roster: Agents and Team Comps

Like many gacha titles, early leveling for agents is incredibly cheap. Feel free to level up a few characters to try them out, understand their playstyles, and see how they synergize. This initial flexibility is great for theorycrafting without heavy commitment.

When to Level and When to Be Picky

However, around level 30 or 40, resources become tighter, and the cost of leveling skyrockets. At this point, you absolutely need to get picky. By then, you should have a clearer idea of your preferred teams, especially after a decent number of pulls on the beginner and standard banners. Committing resources to an agent you won’t use later is a real setback, much like leveling a crafting profession you’ll never touch again.

The Numbers Game: Main Stats and Unexpected Scaling

Agents have various roles, weapons, elements, and stats. While a deep dive isn’t needed here, always keep an eye on their main stat (0.5% Attack per point) and secondary stat (0.2% Attack per point) when crafting gear or assigning weapons. This is pretty standard stuff.

What’s less standard, and where many players will mess up, is when agents *don’t* scale purely off their main stat. Take Antel, for instance. His damage is usually underwhelming, but his healing scales directly from his Strength, not his Intellect (his main stat). So, don’t blindly optimize; read abilities carefully, because some unexpected scaling can radically change gear priority. This is the kind of counter-intuitive design that leads to endless Discord arguments over builds.

Navigating Complex Team Building

Team building in Arknights: Endfield is, frankly, pretty complicated and unintuitive. The ultimate goal is to enable everyone to combo skill effectively, while also contributing in other ways. For now, just focus on some basic functional teams. These aren’t necessarily meta-defining, but they’ll get you through the early content without pulling your hair out. The game doesn’t hold your hand much here, making composition decisions feel like a constant experiment.

Don’t Sleep on Antel and Ardelia

There are two characters many will overlook, and it’ll be a mistake. First, Antel. Yes, he looks like a weird furry convention lizard man, but he’s incredibly strong for any electric and heat team. If you’re building Leverin or Awena, Antel is your guy. He buffs damage significantly and provides healing. Many will dismiss him because he’s a four-star, and honestly, his portrait doesn’t scream “powerhouse.” But he is a fantastic damage buffer, and missing him means struggling more than necessary.

Second, everyone gets Ardelia for free on day three. *Do not* forget about her. Every account should build her. She’s a universal buffer for both physical and arts damage and provides healing. Getting a free, universally useful support agent is a huge boon, and it’s frustrating when people ignore such obvious value.

Managing Your Sanity: Stamina and Premium Currency

Stamina, or Sanity as it’s called here, is your primary gateway to valuable character progression resources and a huge chunk of account level experience. This means the cardinal rule of gacha games applies: never overcap your stamina. It’s a waste of potential resources.

Keeping Your Sanity from Overflowing

There are specific missions for burning stamina, and it regenerates at a rather specific rate of one stamina per 7 minutes and 12 seconds. You can always check your timer to see when you’re about to cap out, which is standard procedure. Also, keep an eye on any timed stamina potions and use them before they expire. Ignoring these small efficiencies adds up over time, feeling like you’re constantly behind the curve.

The Gacha Economy: Free-to-Play Discipline

For free-to-play players, this is crucial: *do not* spend your premium currency (Originite) on stamina refreshes. Just don’t. While time eventually grants you more stamina, your premium currency is the main bottleneck for pulling the characters you actually want. Wasting it on stamina is a rookie mistake that will absolutely crush your gacha pull economy. Patience is key here; the pulls are where it’s at.

The Gacha System: A Veteran’s Warning

Alright, let’s talk about the gacha. This is where most of the frustration and psychological traps lie. GrifflIne deserves some credit for letting me discuss its intricacies, but you *need* to understand Arknights: Endfield’s gacha system to avoid making costly mistakes.

Understanding the Banners

First, there’s the Beginner Banner, which guarantees a standard six-star character. You get tickets for this free through story progression, so use them when you get them. Then there’s the Standard Banner, offering standard six-star characters. You’ll get some tickets for this, use them too. At 300 pulls on the Standard Banner, you get a six-star selector – a nice safety net.

Finally, the Featured Character Banner. This is where things get spicy. One character is featured with a 50% chance. The other two featured characters, along with standard six-stars, make up the other 50% pool. Crucially, these featured operatives *do not* get added to the standard pool after their banner ends. So, if you lose your 50/50 and get Gilberta or Yavon instead of the main featured one, that’s it for the current banner.

Soft Pity, Hard Guarantees, and Why it Matters

Here’s the critical breakdown:
You’re guaranteed a six-star at 80 pulls, with soft pity starting at 65 pulls. This six-star has a 50% chance to be the featured operator, and a 50% chance to be *any* other six-star in the pool, including the other two “side” featured operators.

Concurrently, there’s a 120-pull “spark” system. At 120 pulls, you’re guaranteed the featured banner character. *However*, this 120-pull guarantee disappears if you get the featured character *before* 120 pulls. And this is the most important part: pulls toward this 120-pull guarantee *do not* carry over to the next banner. This is a massive trap for casual players.

Arsenal Tickets and Time-Sensitive Freebies

There’s also a Weapon Banner, which uses a separate currency called Arsenal Tickets. You primarily get these from pulling characters, plus some other methods. The same basic gacha advice applies here: save for guarantees. Aim for around 80 pulls (15,840 Arsenal Tickets) to guarantee a featured weapon.

Also, always use your free pull tickets for their respective banners before they expire. This applies to both character and weapon banners. Forgetting these is just throwing away free progression.

The 120-Pull Rule: A Hard Truth for Your Wallet

Given the non-transferable spark, it is *highly* recommended to save at least 120 pulls (60,000 Originite or 800 Ore) if you’re targeting a specific featured character. If you get them early, great! If not, you’re guaranteed. The free 10 pulls we’re getting at 30 pulls *do not* count towards this 120-pull spark, so factor that into your calculations.

The good news is that for version 1.0, we’re estimated to get a fair number of pulls, likely over 200 total, assuming you complete most content. Character dupes (Potentials) also seem pretty “mid” right now, which is a blessing for free-to-play players. Just be mentally prepared for the gacha’s pitfalls and psychological traps. If you’re a YOLO gambler, go for it, but at least know the risks. Losing your 50/50 and then not having enough for the spark is a surefire way to induce burnout.

The Battle Pass: A Smart Investment?

Before you dive into the Battle Pass, if you plan on logging in daily and completing all the missions to finish it, there’s a particular optimization. Spending 29 Originite (which you’ll get enough of just by playing) to unlock the second tier actually refunds you 32 Originite, netting you three extra, plus a six-star weapon selector. This makes it incredibly worthwhile if you have the time to complete the pass. It’s a rare instance of a gacha game giving you more back than you put in.

It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint: Avoiding Burnout

Imagine running a full marathon, but you start by sprinting as fast as you can. You’ll crash and burn long before the finish line. Gacha games are exactly like that. Rushing leads to poor financial decisions, and trust me, I’m an expert at those. It’s incredibly easy to fall into the psychological traps these games lay: refreshing stamina, pulling on banners you shouldn’t, and eventually, swiping that credit card.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with spending if you have the means, but for free-to-play players, patience is paramount. In most gacha games, dedicated F2P players can eventually clear endgame content, and Arknights: Endfield will likely be no different. Even if you miss out on a few endgame rewards early on, it’s not the end of the world. The game might be shiny, and Yvon’s horns might gleam, but time flies. You’ll get there. Avoid the pressure to keep up with whales; it only leads to burnout.

Final Takeaways

So, here’s the ultimate truth: don’t sweat it too much. Yes, I’ve just given you a ton of slightly min-maxing tips and warnings about major mistakes, but at its core, Arknights: Endfield is just a game. As long as you follow the advice about not wasting money on impulsive gacha pulls or stamina refreshes, everything will likely turn out okay. Or not, and you can just uninstall.

Ultimately, the goal is to have fun. Embrace the complexity, learn from your mistakes (because you *will* make them), and enjoy the journey. It’s a gacha game; there will be grind, there will be frustration, and there will be moments where you just want to scream at your factory layout. But approach it with the right mindset, and you’ll find it far more rewarding.