How to unlock free Honkai: Star Rail characters

You can build a solid Honkai: Star Rail team without using the gacha mechanic and here’s how

Marco Wutz | Apr 25, 2023

How to unlock free Honkai: Star Rail characters /

Honkai: Star Rail uses the same randomized gacha mechanic as Genshin Impact for getting new playable characters. While this is one of the fairest implementations of gacha available, you’re still asked to trust your luck and possibly invest real money into the system, which isn’t something many people want to do.

Honkai: Star Rail does provide you with a bunch of free characters over the course of your journey, though, so you can build a solid team without engaging with the gacha mechanic at all. Here are all the Honkai: Star Rail characters you can unlock for free and how to do it.

Honkai: Star Rail – how to unlock free characters

Trailblazer: Destruction, Physical – starter character.
March 7th: Preservation, Ice – starter character.
Dan Heng: Hunt, Wind – starter character.
Asta: Harmony, Fire – guaranteed pull from gacha tutorial.
Serval: Erudition, Lightning – obtained from in-game message as a pre-registration reward.
Herta: Erudition, Ice – obtained after completing “Simulated Universe: First Closed Beta”.
Natasha: Abundance, Physical – obtained after completing “Lying in Rust”.
Qingque: Erudition, Quantum – obtained after reaching Level 21 and clearing “Forgotten Hall – Memory Stage 3”.

Trailblazer is your main character and will obviously be available right from the start. March 7th and Dan Heng are members of the Astral Express crew and will accompany you right from the beginning as well. You’ll get Asta to complete a four-person team very quickly, as she’s pulled when the game introduces the gacha system to you.

Thanks to Honkai: Star Rail reaching the milestone of ten million pre-registrations, everyone will gain access to Serval. All you need to do to obtain her is to check your in-game messages through the main menu once they are available and tap the “claim” button.

Herta is another early addition you unlock through a Trailblaze Mission, a quest in the main story. The same goes for Natasha, who will become available a bit later on. Qingque is the last addition you can make to your roster for free.

It’s noteworthy that Genshin Impact later made several characters available for free through in-game events, which may well happen in Honkai: Star Rail as well.

Check out our Paths and Damage Types overview to find out more about how to use these characters on your teams.

Published Apr 25, 2023

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg