Honkai: Star Rail Warp Banner Types Explained: Limited and Standard

Honkai: Star Rail runs four distinct warp banner families, and each one uses its own pity counter, its own currency rules and its own guarantee logic. Event Character Warp and Event Light Cone Warp are limited-time and rate-up; Stellar Warp is the permanent standard pool; Departure Warp is the beginner pool that ends after 50 pulls.

Most new Trailblazers discover this the hard way. They save Stellar Jade for weeks, convert it into passes, spend everything on a banner they assumed was shared with another one, and then find out the counter they were building did not carry over at all. Understanding which pool a pass feeds into — and which counters move when you pull — is the single most useful piece of account knowledge in the game, because it turns warping from a gamble into a plan. HoYoverse publishes the full drop rates and pity structure in the in-game Warp Details page, and those numbers are the foundation for everything below.

What are the four warp banner types in Honkai: Star Rail?

Honkai: Star Rail has four banner families: Departure Warp (a one-time beginner pool of 50 pulls), Stellar Warp (the permanent standard pool), Event Character Warp (limited five-star character rate-ups) and Event Light Cone Warp (limited five-star Light Cone rate-ups). Each keeps its own separate pity count.

The distinction matters because HoYoverse treats these as four different systems that happen to share a visual layout. Departure Warp and Stellar Warp both consume Star Rail Passes. Both event warps consume Star Rail Special Passes. The two pass types are not interchangeable, cannot be converted into one another, and are earned from partly different sources. A player sitting on a stack of regular Star Rail Passes cannot spend a single one on the current limited character, no matter how close their event pity is.

The four pools also differ in how permanent their contents are. Stellar Warp's five-star roster is a fixed standard cast that has grown only rarely since launch. Event warps rotate every phase, typically twice per version, and a character that leaves an event banner is unavailable until HoYoverse chooses to rerun it. Departure Warp exists once per account and then disappears from the warp menu entirely.

How do the two pass currencies differ?

Star Rail Passes come from the standard pool's own reward tracks: Assignments, some event shops, Nameless Honor tracks and various one-off mission rewards. Star Rail Special Passes are the limited currency, and the most reliable route to them is converting Stellar Jade at a fixed 160 Jade per pass through the in-game shop. Both pass types can also arrive directly as event rewards, which is why reading an event's reward list carefully is worth the thirty seconds it takes.

Because Jade converts only into Special Passes, the practical currency loop for most accounts is simple: Jade is the savings account, Special Passes are the spending account, and regular Star Rail Passes are a slow trickle you dump into the standard pool whenever they pile up. If you want the full picture of where Jade actually comes from, our HSR progression guide covering levels, warp and characters maps the income sources against account level.

Does pity carry over between banners?

No. Every banner family tracks its own counter independently. Event Character Warp pity, Event Light Cone Warp pity and Stellar Warp pity move only when you pull on that specific pool. Event Character pity does, however, carry across different limited character banners — the counter persists when one character banner ends and the next begins.

This is the rule that costs new players the most resources, so it is worth restating precisely. There are three living counters on a mature account:

• Event Character Warp counter — shared across all limited character banners, past and future. Pull 40 times on one character, skip them, and those 40 pulls are still banked when the next character you want arrives.
• Event Light Cone Warp counter — shared across all limited Light Cone banners, but entirely separate from the character counter.
• Stellar Warp counter — the permanent pool's own count, untouched by anything you do on event banners.

Departure Warp has a fixed structure rather than a rolling counter, which is covered further down. The takeaway is that pulling a Light Cone never advances your progress toward a character, and pulling on the standard pool never helps either. Every off-plan pull is genuinely off-plan.

What is soft pity and where does it start?

Soft pity is the point where the five-star rate climbs sharply above its base value instead of staying flat. On character banners the base five-star rate sits below one percent, and the rate begins escalating steeply in the seventies, which is why the large majority of five-stars land between roughly pull 70 and the hard pity cap at 90. Light Cone banners cap earlier, at 80.

The consolidated probability HoYoverse advertises — the number that includes the escalating soft-pity ramp rather than only the base rate — is substantially higher than the base rate alone, and that gap is entirely explained by soft pity. In planning terms, treat 90 pulls as the worst case for a character and roughly 75 as a realistic average once soft pity is priced in.

How does the 50/50 system work on event banners?

When a five-star drops on Event Character Warp, there is a 50 percent chance it is the featured character and a 50 percent chance it is a standard-pool five-star instead. Losing that roll sets a guarantee flag: the next five-star from that banner family is the featured character, with no roll involved.

The guarantee flag is a property of the account and the banner family, not of the specific character. If you lose the 50/50 on one limited banner and stop pulling, the flag persists. When a character you actually want arrives two versions later, your first five-star on that banner is guaranteed to be them. This makes a lost 50/50 much less painful than it feels in the moment — it converts a coin flip into a certainty you can bank indefinitely.

Event Light Cone Warp uses a more favourable ratio than the character pool: the featured Light Cone wins the roll more often than not, and losing it also arms a guarantee for the next five-star on that pool. The exact percentage is displayed in the banner's own Details panel, and it is worth checking each phase rather than assuming, because HoYoverse has adjusted Light Cone banner behaviour before.

What counts as a "standard five-star" when you lose?

The losing outcome pulls from the Stellar Warp five-star roster — the permanent cast including units such as Bronya, Gepard, Himeko, Welt, Clara, Yanqing and Bailu. These are not consolation prizes in any meaningful sense; several of them remain genuinely strong in specific team roles years after launch. A lost 50/50 that hands you a support you were missing can be worth more to a roster than the featured DPS would have been.

The same roster governs the standard pool, which means a long-running account will slowly accumulate duplicates there. Duplicates of five-star characters become Eidolons, and duplicates beyond Eidolon 6 convert into Starlight. Whether chasing those duplicates is ever worth a plan is a separate question — our breakdown of how HSR Eidolons work and which ones actually matter goes through the ones that change a kit versus the ones that just add numbers.

Is there a separate pity for four-stars?

Yes. Every banner runs a four-star guarantee at most 10 pulls, which is why a ten-pull always contains at least one four-star item. On event banners, a four-star drop has a 50 percent chance to be one of the three featured four-star characters, with the same losing-arms-a-guarantee logic applied at the four-star tier.

This smaller counter is easy to overlook but it shapes how ten-pulls feel. Because the four-star guarantee resets on any four-star, not only on a featured one, most players sit in a rhythm of one four-star per ten pulls with occasional clusters. The featured four-stars rotate each phase and are frequently the cheapest route to a specific character — a four-star you can push to Eidolon 6 through repeated event banners will often outperform a five-star sitting at Eidolon 0 in the same role.

Four-star Light Cones follow the same structure on the Light Cone banner, with three featured Light Cones sharing the rate-up. If you are unclear on how Light Cone rarity and superimposition interact with all this, the HSR Light Cones guide on paths, superimposition and rarity covers where duplicates stop being useful.

What is Departure Warp and when should you use it?

Departure Warp is a one-time beginner banner limited to 50 total pulls, offered at a discounted rate of 8 Star Rail Passes per ten-pull instead of 10. It guarantees a five-star character within those 50 pulls and draws from a restricted standard pool. Once the 50 pulls are used, the banner closes permanently.

The discount is the entire point: 50 pulls cost 40 passes' worth of currency, and the guaranteed five-star lands no later than pull 50. For a new account, spending regular Star Rail Passes here before spending them anywhere else is almost always the correct sequencing, because the same passes on Stellar Warp carry no such guarantee and no discount.

Departure Warp also has a smaller five-star pool than Stellar Warp, which slightly concentrates the odds of receiving a unit that is useful early. It does not consume Special Passes and it does not interact with any event banner counter, so clearing it out has no downside for a player also saving for a limited character.

How does Starlight and the exchange shop fit in?

Every warp returns Undying Starlight as a secondary currency, scaled by rarity and by whether the item is a duplicate. Starlight is spent in the Starlight Exchange, which sells Star Rail Passes, Special Passes, some standard characters and a rotating stock of materials. It is a slow but real conversion of dead duplicates into pulls.

Three-star Light Cones — the overwhelming majority of what a warp returns — convert into small Starlight amounts automatically. Four-star duplicates past superimposition 5 and five-star duplicates past Eidolon 6 convert into much larger amounts. Over hundreds of pulls this accumulates into a non-trivial number of extra passes, and the Exchange occasionally stocks a standard five-star that can be bought outright with enough Starlight, which is one of the few fully deterministic ways to add a specific unit to a roster.

Treat the Exchange as a background system rather than a plan. Check it when a version begins, buy the pass stock if you have Starlight sitting idle, and otherwise ignore it.

How should you plan warps around versions?

Plan in version cycles, not in individual banners. Each version runs roughly six weeks and contains two banner phases. Estimate your Jade income for the cycle, decide which single phase you are committing to, and treat every other phase as a skip unless you finish the target with pulls to spare.

The mechanics above make this planning tractable. Because event character pity carries between banners and the guarantee flag persists indefinitely, saving is never wasted — there is no expiry on progress. A player who reaches pull 60 on a banner they abandon starts the next one 60 pulls ahead. This is meaningfully different from gacha systems that reset counters between banners, and it rewards patience in a very direct way.

Two practical habits follow. First, know your counter before a phase starts; the Warp Details screen shows your current count and guarantee state, and guessing is how people end a phase 12 pulls short. Second, account for income you have not collected yet — Nameless Honor rewards, Assignment stockpiles and the current version's event Jade all land at predictable times, and forgetting them makes budgets look tighter than they are. Your access to some of those income streams is gated by account level, which our guide to HSR Equilibrium Level and what changes when you raise it explains in detail.

Does region or server affect warp behaviour?

No. Drop rates, pity thresholds and guarantee logic are identical across all HoYoverse servers. What differs by region is the local pricing of Oneiric Shards and the timing of daily and weekly resets, which shifts when your Trailblaze Power and Assignment income actually arrives relative to your own clock. Reset timing is worth knowing if you are planning a final push before a banner closes — the practical details are covered in our overview of HSR servers and cross-progression.

What are the most common warp mistakes?

The four recurring ones are: spending Special Passes on the Light Cone banner while saving for a character, ignoring an armed guarantee flag and skipping a banner you could have won cheaply, forgetting Departure Warp entirely, and converting Jade into passes before deciding what the passes are for.

The last one deserves emphasis. Jade converts into Special Passes one-way; passes never convert back. Converting early does nothing except remove your ability to change your mind, and there is no in-game benefit to holding passes over Jade. The correct default is to hold Jade until the moment you intend to pull, then convert exactly what the session needs.

A fifth mistake is subtler: treating a lost 50/50 as a reason to keep pulling immediately. The guarantee does not decay. Stopping after a lost 50/50 and banking the flag for a character you genuinely want is, in expectation, a better outcome than spending down the guarantee on someone you were lukewarm about. Nothing about the system punishes stopping.

If you are still building the fundamentals underneath all of this — what to level, what to farm and where warp fits into the wider account — the HSR beginner's guide to warp, characters and Stellar Jade is the right place to start.

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