Honkai Star Rail Currency Wars Explained: How the Mode Works

Currency Wars is Honkai Star Rail's take on the auto-battler: a permanent mode, introduced in version 3.7, that plays by completely different rules from the main game. Forget your carefully built four-person team. Currency Wars fields ten characters at once, hands you the entire roster to recruit from, and asks you to build an economy and an army at the same time. It is more accessible than Anomaly Arbitration and far more experimental than the Simulated Universe — here is how it actually works.

Recruiting Your Army

The mode provides every character whether you own them or not. If you do own a character, your own progression carries over — but if they fall below the mode's minimum gear standard, the game quietly swaps in a template version, much like Divergent Universe. You do not bring a preset team in. Instead, characters are recruited during the run using Coins, earned by winning matches and clearing objectives, so every run is a fresh draft where you ration your Coins between strengthening now and saving for the final boss.

Your ten slots split into on-field and off-field sections. Every character has a preferred plane, and their unique skill only activates in the right one — Jade, for example, is an off-field character whose Debt Collector ability switches on when she sits off-field, and it synergises with specific on-field partners. Characters can be placed anywhere, but a character in the wrong plane is a character wasting their best trick.

Colour, Cost and Stars

Currency Wars ignores normal rarity. Characters instead come in five colours, each with a Coin cost:

The twist is growth. Grey characters start feeble but develop the most — Herta, a Grey, grows stronger with every enemy she defeats, and can end a run outclassing expensive units. Gold characters cannot even be recruited until you level up mid-battle. On top of colour, recruiting duplicates of a character raises their star level from 1-star upward, improving their kit; a 3-star Grey can genuinely beat a 1-star Gold. Characters can also equip Gears, support-card-like items that add effects or stats.

Bonds, Strategies and Winning

Assemble enough characters sharing a Bond and you unlock a Bond skill. The launch set includes Xianzhou (which summons the Lightning-Lord to strike all enemies), Wolf Hunt (a Borisin that levels up and evolves), Follow-up ATK, Bloodflame, Skill Point, Cosmic Scholar and Stellaron Hunters (whose most-equipped member becomes the 'Star Hunter' the others support). Strategies layer further buffs on top based on your composition — for example, rewarding teams stacked with AoE attackers.

A run means fighting through Face Competitors: boss opponents, three at a time, each with several rounds before the final boss. Beat them all and you bank Currency Wars Points; point rewards reset every two weeks on Monday at 04:00 server time, while first-time clears pay out a stockpile including Stellar Jade, a Self-Modeling Resin, a Variable Dice and Star Rail Passes. The mode rewards flexible drafting over memorised teams — buy cheap, grow patiently, and let your Bonds do the talking.