In most modern progression-focused adventure gacha games like Honkai: Star Rail, the relic system is always one of the most critical factors impacting your character’s overall combat power. Countless players farm for hours to score great relics, only to waste tons of valuable upgrading materials thanks to bad progression habits. Even worse, many accidentally break down their perfect endgame gear by mistake, leaving their power growth stalled and stuck on tough content for weeks. In this guide, we’ll break down the most practical, battle-tested progression tips for upgrading, breaking down, and locking your relics, to help you build the strongest possible team with the least amount of resources wasted.
Relic Upgrading: Prioritize Resources Wisely To Avoid Wasting Materials
The most common mistake new players make is immediately dumping all their materials to max out any good relic they get, only to find a far better, more suitable endgame relic a few days later with no resources left to upgrade it. This leaves your perfect new gear sitting useless in your inventory while you keep struggling with underpowered equipment. In reality, you should allocate different amounts of resources based on how long you plan to use the relic.
For early-game transition relics that you only plan to use temporarily, you only need to upgrade them to +12 to clear all the content you’ll face at that stage. There’s no reason to sink extra resources into maxing them out. Most modern gacha games like Honkai: Star Rail return over 80% of your upgrading materials when you break down an upgraded relic, so you won’t lose much even if you replace it early on. If you max out a transition relic right away, however, the accumulated cost of the material lost to the breakdown fee adds up to a huge amount over time.
Only your confirmed endgame relics — ones you’ll use long-term with perfect main and sub stats that match your character’s exact needs — are worth dumping all your resources into to max out the upgrade level. Additionally, for relics with randomly rolling sub stat growth, we recommend upgrading in batches: stop every time you hit a level that unlocks a new sub stat, like +4 or +8, and check how the stats rolled. If the growth is completely unsuited for your needs, you can turn this relic into fodder early, without wasting a ton of your hard-earned materials.
Relic Breakdown: Smart Inventory Management To Get More Resources
A full inventory is a problem every player runs into eventually. If you break down randomly, you risk losing gear you need, but hoarding everything just clutters up your storage. If you follow a few simple breakdown rules, you can easily clean out your inventory without losing anything valuable.
First off, any low-star relic with no progression value, and any high-star relic with completely mismatched main and sub stats, can be broken down immediately. But there are two types of gear you should never randomly break down. The first is relics from sets with unique special effects: even if their stats are bad, you should keep at least one copy. These will often come in handy for special challenge stages or when you need extra flexibility to adjust your team comp, and re-farming them after you’ve broken them is extremely difficult. The second type is loose single pieces with perfect god-tier stats: even if none of your current characters can use them, they might fit an upcoming new character perfectly. Holding onto them is almost always more valuable than breaking them down for a tiny bit of extra resources.
A great pro tip for everyday play is to never break down your unwanted relics immediately after you get them. Instead, stockpile them in your inventory, and wait until the game runs a bonus breakdown event or a limited shop exchange event, then break them all at once. This will net you far more exchange currency than you’d get breaking them down normally, so your overall progression speed will be much faster than players who break down everything right away.
Relic Locking: First Line Of Defense Against Accidental Mistakes
Nearly every long-time player has had a devastating experience: after months of farming, you finally get that perfect endgame relic you’ve been chasing, only to misclick during a bulk breakdown and watch it turn into fodder instantly. Contacting customer support to get it back is a huge hassle, and it doesn’t always work out. But if you use the lock function correctly, you can avoid this problem completely.
Building a good locking habit is incredibly simple: as soon as you decide you want to keep a relic — whether it’s a completed endgame piece, a god-tier loose piece, or gear you’re saving for an upcoming new character — lock it right away. Don’t wait to do it later, that’s exactly how careless mistakes happen. Most bulk breakdown systems in modern gacha games automatically skip over any locked relics, so as long as you lock everything you want to keep, you can bulk clear your inventory without any fear of accidentally breaking your best gear.
That said, you shouldn’t go overboard and lock every relic you pick up, that will just leave your inventory cluttered and full in no time. We recommend doing a regular inventory clean-up once a month: unlock and break down any gear you’re sure you’ll never use, to keep your inventory flexible. This way you get both the safety of locking your best gear and efficient use of your storage space.
Overall, the correct process for relic progression isn’t complicated at all: when you get a new relic, assess its value first, lock anything you want to keep immediately, upgrade transition gear moderately, only max out your confirmed endgame gear, and periodically sort through your outdated gear to break them down all at once for extra resources. If you stick to these three core habits, you can avoid all the most common mistakes most players make, build the highest possible combat power with the least amount of wasted resources, and easily take on even the hardest endgame content the game has to offer.
