If you’ve ever spent hours running Cavern of Corrosion runs only to walk away with flat DEF relics for your main DPS, you’re not alone. Relics are the single biggest factor in how strong your Honkai: Star Rail roster feels, and bad rolls can leave even a fully ascended, E2 5-star character feeling underpowered in endgame content. We’ve put together this guide based on 12 months of regular gameplay and meta testing to break down how to get good relics honkai star rail without wasting all your Trailblaze Power on useless drops that will just collect dust in your inventory.
How to Get Good Relics in Honkai: Star Rail by Prioritizing the Right Caverns First
New players often make the mistake of farming niche relic sets for their favorite 5-star character as soon as they unlock the Caverns of Corrosion, and that’s almost always a waste of resources. Until you hit Equilibrium Level 4, 5-star relic drop rates are so low that you’re better off using 4-star sets to fill gaps while you focus on ascending your core team and leveling their light cones.
That's the first key rule for how to get good relics in Honkai: Star Rail: only farm sets you can use across multiple characters until your core team is fully built. The most universally useful sets to target first are Musketeer of Wild Wheat for physical DPS characters, Guard of Wuthering Snow for tanks and survivability-focused supports, and Sprightly Vonwacq for any support that needs extra energy regen or speed.
You can even use these sets as placeholder pieces for characters that need more niche sets later, so none of your farming goes to waste. I made this exact mistake when I first started, spending a full week farming the Ice DPS set for Herta when I didn’t even have a fully built healer for my MoC runs. That wasted Trailblaze Power set my account progression back almost two weeks, and I ended up replacing all those Herta relics a month later anyway.
Optimize Your Trailblaze Power Usage for Higher Quality Relic Drops
Trailblaze Power is your most valuable resource in Honkai: Star Rail, and wasting it will slow down your relic farming progress by weeks. You only regenerate 240 Trailblaze Power per day naturally, so you want to make every single unit count when you’re farming relics.
Always run the highest difficulty Cavern of Corrosion that you can clear consistently, even if it takes an extra turn or two to beat. Higher difficulties have significantly higher 5-star relic drop rates, and the relics that do drop have higher minimum stat rolls, so you’re far more likely to get a usable piece from a level 60 cavern than a level 40 one.
You should also save your Immersifiers (the Trailblaze Power equivalent rewards from Forgotten Hall and Pure Fiction) for double relic drop events. When these events run, you get twice as many relics per run, so dumping all your stored Immersifiers and extra fuel into the caverns you need can cut your farming time in half. I got 3 perfect 5-star relics for my Jing Yuan during the last double drop event, saving me almost three weeks of regular farming.
Learn Which Relic Stats Are Worth Keeping to Avoid Wasting Upgrade Materials
Even if you get a 5-star relic drop, it’s not always worth upgrading. A lot of new players dump thousands of Relic Exp into every 5-star they get, only to end up with a piece that has the wrong main stat and useless substats that don’t benefit any of their characters.
The first thing you should check when you get a new relic is the main stat, not the substats. A 5-star relic with the correct main stat and bad substats will always be better than a 5-star relic with perfect substats and the wrong main stat. For example, a CRIT DMG chest piece with only DEF substats is still better for your DPS than a flat ATK chest piece with CRIT Rate, Speed, and ATK% substats.
Follow these simple rules to avoid wasting Relic Exp on bad pieces:
- Always prioritize main stat over substats when evaluating a new relic: for DPS characters, look for ATK%, elemental DMG%, or CRIT stats as main stats on chest pieces, and Speed or ATK% on boots.
- Only upgrade relics that have at least 2 useful substats to start: for a DPS, that means any combination of CRIT Rate, CRIT DMG, ATK%, or Speed.
- Stop upgrading a relic at +6 if none of the first two level ups rolled into useful substats: you’ll save thousands of Relic Exp that you can use on better pieces later.
Substat rolls are completely random, so don’t get discouraged if you don’t get a perfect roll right away. Even top meta players only have 2-3 fully perfect relics per character after months of dedicated farming, so you don’t need god rolls to clear all endgame content.
Use Planar Ornaments and Craftable Relics to Fill Gaps in Your Builds
You don’t have to get every single relic piece from Caverns of Corrosion. A lot of players forget about the other sources of high-quality relics in the game that can help you fill gaps in your builds without endless grinding.
Planar Ornaments from the Simulated Universe are a great source of powerful set bonuses for both DPS and support characters, and you can farm them while you’re farming for Cosmic Fragments to unlock blessings and other rewards. You can also get guaranteed Planar Ornament drops from the weekly Simulated Universe World clears, so make sure you do those every week.
You can also use the Synthesizer to craft specific relic pieces once you have enough leftover Relic Remains from disassembling bad drops. The best part about crafting is that you get to pick the main stat of the relic you’re making, so it’s the fastest way to get that missing CRIT Rate chest piece or Speed boots you’ve been farming for weeks. I spent two months farming for a CRIT Rate chest piece for my Kafka with no luck, so I just crafted one using 100 Relic Remains and it rolled 3 useful substats. I kicked myself for not doing it earlier.
At the end of the day, relic farming is a slow, grindy part of Honkai: Star Rail, but you can cut down on a lot of frustration by following these simple tips. You don’t need perfect relics to clear all the game’s PvE content, even the hardest Memory of Chaos stages, so don’t burn yourself out chasing perfect substats. Take it slow, prioritize useful sets and stats first, and you’ll figure out how to get good relics honkai star rail without wasting all your free time on bad drops. If you have your own favorite relic farming tips, drop them in the comments below to help other players out.
