What Is the Simulated Universe in Honkai: Star Rail?

Honkai: Star Rail by HoYoverse has a ton of different activities to participate in to beat and earn rewards to progress your levels and characters. One of the most important activities that you’ll encounter fairly early on in your play through is the Simulated Universe. In this guide, we will explain in full what the Simulated Universe is in Honkai: Star Rail, including how to build a strong party to battle through its difficult worlds and abilities to use to succeed.

The Simulated Universe Is Like a Roguelike Mode in Honkai: Star Rail

Upon first encountering the Simulated Universe mechanic from talking to Herta and agreeing to help her, it may seem like a confusing system that you battle through, as there’s a lot of text and a lot of things to consider as you play through the encounter. It’s actually quite simple to understand once you get used to it though, especially if you are familiar at all with roguelikes, as this Simulated Universe system is essentially a roguelike mode.

Simulated Universes are split up into different worlds, and the higher the world number, the higher the level requirement will be to be able to complete that world, but also the rewards improve accordingly as well. These are quite difficult encounters. To succeed, you’ll want to make sure you have a party at or above the recommended level, as well as a party that matches up with the elemental typing laid out for each world. If you don’t meet these conditions, you’ll have an incredibly tough time and likely won’t make it through the world.

How to Build a Strong Party for the Difficulty of Simulated Universe Worlds

So keeping that in mind, Simulated Universe is a game mode in Honkai: Star Rail that takes a lot more planning, strategy, and investment in your characters than regular content like quests. Making sure your team has one main damage character, one area-of-effect damage character, one offensive support buffing damage or debuffing enemy damage, and one defensive support such as a shielder or healer is the kind of team composition you want to build before heading in.

Once you have your team composition tuned to the weaknesses of the boss encounter, you next need to make sure they’re leveled up as much as possible, both in character level as well as Light Cone level. Otherwise, you’ll be missing out on a ton of survivability and damage you’ll very much need to succeed in this content. Don’t forget about gear either; any relic sets you can give your characters to give them an extra edge really does help.

Using New Abilities and Resonance in Honkai: Star Rail

Once you’re happy with your team, you can get stuck into the Simulated Universes. The first one is pretty easy; you won’t need to worry about too much here and most of the Simulated Universe mechanics are still locked at this stage. However, Simulated Universe World 2 is where things really pick up and you gain access to a whole host of features across the Simulated Universe.

You’ll unlock a Simulated Universe Ability Tree that you can level up with tokens that you earn from defeating enemies in your Simulated Universe runs. This ability tree is important for scaling your power in Simulated Universes and can provide some nice buffs and stat increases.

At Simulated World 2 you also unlock pathing and your resonance ability. At the start of the run you can choose which discipline path you want to follow, and it will give you more of the Blessings of that path type to choose from, as well as a resonance ability of that type to use. The resonance ability is incredibly strong and charges up as you battle like your other abilities, so you’re able to make good use of it.

The Choice of Domain – Combat or Domain – Occurrence

While progressing through the Simulated Worlds, you’ll also likely run into a choice of two portals at the end of most levels, one for Domain – Combat and one for Domain – Occurrence. In general, it’s better to take the combat as each battle you win will gain you another Blessing, and stacking these as much as you can before the final boss fight is crucial. Domain – Occurrence can be useful sometimes though, as you could get a free upgrade for a Blessing or even just some extra tokens to spend on upgrades from Gerta in the rest areas.

Speaking of Gerta and rest areas, make sure you break the healing containers for a healing boost when you enter the area, and there will be a console in certain rooms as well that you can access to download more of your characters to be able to switch between. This is incredibly useful for being able to swap out characters who have fainted or just aren’t good matchups for the element types of the enemy you’re about to face.

That covers how Simulated Universe Worlds work in Honkai: Star Rail — they’re a great challenge with excellent rewards and an interesting new mechanic to work with. Best of luck fighting through them! For more Honkai guides, check out how to get free daily items and all the combat paths.