If you’ve ever spent hours farming relics in HSR only to see your characters still underperform in Forgotten Hall, chances are you’re missing a key step in optimizing their loadouts. Learning how to equip relics in Honkai Star Rail isn’t just about slapping on the highest rarity pieces you have – it’s about matching sets, stats, and substats to each character’s unique role on your team. I’ve made this mistake too early on, wasting weeks of Trailblaze Power on relics that looked good on paper but did nothing for my main DPS units. This guide breaks down every step of the process, plus pro tips to get the most out of every relic you farm.
Step-by-Step: How to Equip Relics in Honkai Star Rail for New Players
The basic process of equipping relics is straightforward once you know where to look in the menu, and it only takes a few seconds per character once you get the hang of it. First, open your main menu and select the “Characters” tab. Scroll or search for the character you want to adjust, then click on their profile to open their build menu. From there, select the “Relics” tab on the left side of the screen – you’ll see six empty or filled slots for Cavern Relics (head, hands, body, feet) and two slots for Planar Ornaments (planar sphere, link rope). You can click on any empty slot to pull up all available relics for that slot, or use the filter button at the top of the relic list to sort by set, main stat, rarity, or level.
Once you select a relic, you’ll see a pop-up showing how your character’s stats will change if you equip it. Green numbers mean the stat will go up, red means it will go down, so you can quickly tell if the swap is an upgrade. Always preview the stat changes before saving your relic loadout, because it’s easy to accidentally replace a high substat piece with a higher rarity one that has worse rolls. If you’re happy with the change, click “Confirm” to save the loadout. You can also swap entire sets at once by using the “Recommended” button, though the game’s default recommendations aren’t always optimal for endgame content, so you’ll want to double check those picks.
Key Rules to Follow When Picking Relics to Equip
Just because you can equip a relic doesn’t mean you should. There are a few core rules you should follow every time you’re adjusting a character’s loadout to make sure you’re getting the maximum possible stat boost. First, prioritize set bonuses that match the character’s role. Most characters perform best with either a 4-piece set bonus that aligns with their kit, or a 2-piece + 2-piece combination of two relevant sets. For example, a Hunt main DPS can run 4-piece Musketeer of Wild Wheat for general ATK and speed boosts, or 2-piece Musketeer + 2-piece Firmament Frontline: Glamoth for extra crit damage if they have enough speed to trigger the Glamoth bonus.
Next, remember that Main stats always matter more than substats – a 5 star relic with the wrong main stat is worse than a 4 star relic with the correct main stat, even if the 5 star has better substats. Head and hand relics have fixed main stats (HP and ATK respectively), so you only need to worry about main stats for body, feet, planar sphere, and link rope slots. The right main stat for each slot depends entirely on the character’s role in your team, so use this quick reference to avoid mistakes:
- DPS characters: Body (Crit Rate/Crit Damage), Feet (ATK%/Speed), Planar Sphere (Elemental DMG Bonus), Link Rope (Energy Regen Rate/ATK%)
- Healer characters: Body (HP%/Outgoing Healing Bonus), Feet (HP%/Speed), Planar Sphere (HP%), Link Rope (Energy Regen Rate/HP%)
- Shield characters: Body (DEF%/HP%), Feet (DEF%/Speed), Planar Sphere (DEF%/HP%), Link Rope (Energy Regen Rate/DEF%/HP%)
- Support buffers: Body (Effect Hit Rate/HP%/DEF%), Feet (Speed), Planar Sphere (Elemental DMG if they deal damage/HP%/DEF%), Link Rope (Energy Regen Rate)
After you’ve confirmed the main stats are correct, you can look at substats to further optimize the loadout. For DPS characters, you want substats that boost crit rate, crit damage, ATK%, and speed. For supports, you want substats that boost their core stat (HP for healers, DEF for shields, speed for buffers) or effect hit rate if they need to land debuffs.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Equipping Relics
Even players who have been around for months can fall into bad habits when equipping relics, and these mistakes can cost you tons of Trailblaze Power and resources in the long run. One of the most common mistakes is equipping relics based solely on their rarity. I used to make the mistake of dumping all my relic exp into 5 star pieces with wrong main stats when I first started playing, and it took me almost two months to fix that mistake and get my Jing Yuan to clear Simulated Universe World 6. Don’t make that same error – if a 5 star body piece has HP% as its main stat, it’s useless for your Hunt DPS, no matter how good its substats are.
Another common mistake is wasting high-quality substat pieces on characters that can’t benefit from them. Never waste a perfectly rolled high-substat relic on a character that can’t use its stats – you can always store it for future characters that fit the stat profile. For example, if you get a body piece with 35% crit damage and extra speed substats, don’t equip it to your Natasha just because she has an empty body slot. Save it for your next DPS character pull instead.
You also don’t want to level every relic you equip to +15 right away. Only level relics to +6 first to test substat rolls before investing more resources, so you don’t waste materials on pieces that roll useless stats like effect hit rate for a main DPS. If the first three substat rolls are all stats your character can use, you can go ahead and level it to +15. If they’re not, you can use that relic as fodder for another piece without losing too much investment.
How to Optimize Your Equipped Relics for Endgame Content
Once you’ve got the basics down, you can start adjusting your relic loadouts to fit specific endgame content, which will make clearing tough stages far easier. For example, Pure Fiction stages reward high AoE damage, so you might swap your Erudition DPS’s 4-piece general set for a 2-piece AoE DMG bonus set if you have good pieces available. For Forgotten Hall stages that require you to break specific elemental weaknesses quickly, you can swap some of your support’s HP% substats for effect hit rate to make sure their debuffs land consistently.
You don’t have to manually swap pieces every time you switch game modes, either. Use the in-game loadout save feature to store multiple builds for each character for different game modes – this saves you hours of swapping relics back and forth every week when Forgotten Hall resets. You can save up to 6 loadouts per character, so you can have one build for general open world play, one for Simulated Universe, one for Pure Fiction, and one for Forgotten Hall without any extra hassle.
It’s also a good idea to periodically go through your equipped relics every few weeks to replace pieces you’ve outclassed with better drops from newer farming runs. As you progress to higher World levels, you’ll get more 5 star relics with better substats, so swapping out old 4 star pieces or poorly rolled 5 star pieces can give you a nice stat boost for very little effort.
At the end of the day, learning how to equip relics in Honkai Star Rail is one of the most impactful things you can do to raise your team's power level without pulling for new 5 star characters. You don't need perfect triple-flawless substat rolls to clear all current endgame content – you just need to follow the basic rules of main stat priority, matching set bonuses to character roles, and avoiding common resource-wasting mistakes. Next time you finish a relic farming run, take an extra minute to double check that the pieces you're equipping actually fit the character's kit, instead of just equipping the highest rarity option immediately. You'll be surprised how much of a difference that small extra step makes to your team's performance.
