Genshin Impact Beginner’s Guide | Game Tips and Tricks

Genshin Impact has a lot more going for it than its colorful and charming anime looks. It comes with a vast open world that gradually unlocks as you complete quests, revealing more and more of its vistas, characters, and the seven main cities. Beyond its undeniable nature and ease of play lies a game with many possibilities and actions for you to discover and explore. Furthermore, the option to control a party of four character provides it with a remarkable depth, one that entirely dispels the initial and shallow comparisons to Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. These are two very different games, as anyone who has played them can attest, but a Genshin Impact Beginner’s Guide comes in handy if you want to become a popular Traveler in the world of Teyvat.

Genshin Impact Beginner’s Guide | Tips and Tricks For Beginners

While the beginning of your adventure is straightforward, you’ll soon feel overwhelmed by the huge world and all the running that it requires. With no mount in sight, you must carefully explore the land until you unlock teleport waypoints and, crucially, Statues of the Seven, landmarks that uncover a significant portion of the world map. Read our Genshin Impact Beginners Guide below to find yourself well-prepared for the colossal adventure ahead.

Explore the World

Make sure that you take your time to explore your surroundings. Don’t always go in a straight line and avoid focusing on the main quests. There are rewards left and right, including chests that contain useful and diverse material. Besides, having a good knowledge of the world is going to ease your navigation pains, allowing you to trace shortcuts, avoid some dangerous creatures, and grind materials by attacking camps filled with challenging but manageable Hilichurls.

Unlock Teleport Waypoints

Keeping up with the subject of exploration, save yourself from running for minutes by activating teleport waypoints in every region of the map. You’ll thank yourself later for the time that you took to travel the extra mile to unlock that waypoint, granting you a safe place where you can teleport to in case of need – a quest, a world boss, a commission, you name it. Temples, the Genshin Impact dungeons, also work as waypoints, so do your best to complete whatever challenge is within your ability.

Gather Ingredients and Materials

Gather every sort of ingredient and raw material that you can find in the wild – vegetables, fruit, hunt animals, catch fish, mine precious stones, destroy boxes and barrels to pick up what’s inside, be on the lookout for crates floating in the water, and so on. There is no shortage of things to collect, wherever you may roam. With no apparent limit to the number of items that you can carry, use that to your advantage and stack up on supplies – you’ll need them.

Choose a Balanced Party, Level Up and Ascend Your Characters

A few hours in, you should have managed to unlock a few playable characters. You begin as the Traveler, but some charming and well-rounded guys and girls will soon join you. The passionate Amber is one of them, but you’re bound to find a few more such as Lisa and Kaeya in no time. With these four, you have a balanced party that is more than capable of handling most challenges coming your way. However, try your hand at every new playable character to see who you like the most, and choose your preferred party.

 When you have mastered your main characters, start shooting for the skies. This means that you must do your best to Level Up your party, especially the characters that you resort to the most – an educated guess here is that Amber will be among those. With every level up book acquired, give your favorite characters a boost, but don’t neglect the need for having a balanced team. When you reach a certain level, you must Ascend your characters to continue the EXP growth.

Gacha All the Way

Being a free game and a rich one at that, the Genshin Impact Gacha system is a way for the devs to monetize the game. This is also how you earn extra gear to equip or use as leveling up material. However, the more interesting bit is how you can unlock playable characters here.

You may be close to your main party, but nothing beats the joy of unlocking a new character for several reasons. First, the art style is wonderful, and every new party member is a joy to behold, stimulating the collector that lives within you. Secondly, there’s no denying the extra value that some of them add to your group, providing additional means of combat that may come in handy.

Some of the playable characters that you can unlock via Gacha system are Xiangling, Bennett, Noelle, Xiao, Jean, Diluc, Beidou, and Xingqiu, among others.

Find and Worship Statues of the Seven

In a way similar to the teleport waypoints but a hundred times better, the Statues of the Seven are spread across the land of Teyvat. Finding them unveils a new part of the world map, but also opens new opportunities that you just can’t refuse.

For one, this is the go-to place when you need to heal or revive a character. Being close to a Statue of the Seven replenishes your character’s health up to a certain point which you can set, and the statues’ health pool replenishes over time, so it’s a perfect system unless you utterly abuse it. When you are low on health or with a fallen member, just teleport to a statue and revive everyone without wasting precious food.

Furthermore, you can get precious boosts by worshipping the statue, which translates into donating Anemoculi, a blue substance filled with Anemo energy that you can find in your travels. Extra stamina, Primogems, EXP, and Anemo Sigils are some of the valuable trade-offs for leveling up the Statues of the Seven. You’ll know when you are close to an Anemoculi by the small star sign that shows up on the mini-map.

Search for Chests

Chests contain some of the most appealing rewards that you can find in Teyvat. They come in different tiers, from common to luxurious, exquisite, and more. Some chests are hidden in plain sight, while others can only be unlocked after completing a small challenge. This may be shooting exploding barrels or killing enemies in a short time, or finding your way near the chest by discovering the correct elemental to trigger the desired effect. Besides giving you cool rewards, opening a chest also earns you a small bit of EXP for your Adventurer Rank.

Complete Storyline Quests

This goes without saying, but don’t forget to check the quest list and complete the storyline quests before everything else. You’ll eventually reach a stage where you need to level up your Adventurer Rank to unlock the next story quests, and this is where Genshin Impact asks you to do a little bit of grinding. Make sure that you clear everything in your story quest log to progress as much as you can in the campaign.

Cook, Cook, and Cook

Use those ingredients that you gather in the wild to create some delicious dishes. You’re going to need them to restore health to your characters, and some meals also revive a fallen hero (although you should follow our advice and prioritize revivals at Statues of the Seven).

There is a small mini-game to cook a dish consisting of pressing a button at the right time for the perfect outcome, but becoming proficient at a specific meal unlocks auto-cook, which saves you the trouble. Don’t forget to process some ingredients that you’re going to need for your recipes, such as sugar or flour.

Complete Challenges

During your travels, you’re going to stumble upon many weird contraptions and geo pillars. Before moving on to your destination, spend some time using the character with the right elemental mastery to activate hidden challenges – for example, Amber shooting a stone pilar with the fire symbol to unlock a task. The completionists among you will surely understand this option, and your obsessive nature is going to do the rest.

Switch, Enhance and Refine Weapons

Through Gacha or the myriad of quests at your disposal, you’re going to earn new and cool weapons for every character. Be it a claymore, bow, sword, catalyst or some other means of dispensing justice, don’t forget to equip the weapons with better star rating. Compare the stats between similar weapons to see which one suits your needs and enhance your best weapon with specific material and inferior gear. When the time comes, refine your top weapon to unlock even more devastating stats.

Master Elemental Attacks

The elements play a big role… scratch that, a huge role in Genshin Impact’s combat. It’s not just a matter of slicing and dicing enemies, you must certify yourself that you’re not using an element against an enemy forged of the same element, which means that you’re dealing next to no damage.

Let’s take Amber as a case in point. The cute bunny-eared knight loves to use her bow with her scorching Pyro elemental. This means that she can set wood items on fire, like Hilichurl wood shields. It’s so useful to do so, or to set grass on fire and watch enemies take damage when they step on the blazing flames. But she is worthless against fire slimes, who are immune to… you guessed it, fire. On the other hand, she is deadly against water slimes, because fire vaporizes the hydro elemental. Are you following?

How about Lisa giving an electroshock to an enemy and Amber following with a fire arrow? Now that’s an explosive combination right there. Or getting an enemy wet, either by means of an hydro attack or by stepping into a lake and giving them a jolt of electro power, again thanks to someone like Lisa?

You must absolutely learn to master the Pyro (Amber, Bennett, and Xiangling), Cryo (Kaeya), Hydro (Xingqiu), Anemo (Traveler), Geo (Noelle), and Electro (Lisa and Razor) elementals. The characters mentioned are just some examples, because there are others that may also be versed on the same elementals. Practice makes perfect, so do it until you know how to create effective combos.

Time Your Climbing and Gliding

Climbing and gliding play a huge role in your adventures exploring the world of Teyvat. In pure Spider-Man fashion, Amber and friends stick themselves to every wall, rockface or ledge. However, there’s a stamina gauge that you absolutely must pay attention to. While it can be upgraded at the Statues of the Seven, your first hours won’t allow you to climb or glide that far. If you don’t pay attention to it before starting a climb or jumping off a cliff, your character is surely going to plunge to its death.

The inevitable hint here is to wait for a few seconds to replenish your stamina before taking a leap of faith. Furthermore, plan your rock climbing ahead to see if there’s a small slope halfway through where you can rest and recover stamina.

Complete Daily Commissions

An Adventurer Rank is the meter by which your overall progress is measured, occasionally locking future story quests until you reach a required level. There are various ways to grind in Genshin Impact, including unlocking waypoints, finding chests, completing dungeons, and more. One of the things that gives you that extra bit of EXP is daily commissions. Find a Katheryne in a city – yes, there are Katherynes in the various cities – and ask her about the available daily commissions.

These missions often include dispatching a few mobs, but there is a limit to how many you can complete daily. Nonetheless, every little experience increase can be fundamental to unlock the next part of the storyline, so keep at it every day. Don’t forget to return to Katheryne to claim your rewards.

Send Unused Party Members on Expeditions

This is another way to earn a few extra materials and something that many players are familiar with, especially those who know their mobile games. Speak to Katheryne about Expeditions and send your less useful team members. You can choose the duration of the voyage, and the longer it is, the better the rewards. Plan carefully, because you won’t be able to use those team members until they return from the expedition with tons of riches… Well, at least a few pieces of gear and material for your team.

This is everything that you need to know in order to confidently start your adventure. We hope that this Genshin Impact Beginner’s Guide puts you in the right path and clears some doubts that you may have about this wonderful open world anime RPG.