Newbie Tips
Author(s):
Current Version: 1.1.3 | Last Updated: March 28th, 2024
Avoid YouTube Guides
A majority of YouTube guides are often outdated, contain misinformation, and/or clickbait for views (or all of the above). Your best sources of information will come from Azur Lane Discord Servers, and/or people who actually play the game. Good Discord servers for help are Azur Lane Official, English Community Tier List, and English Community Guide Compendium.
Mail is a Bank!
Mail does not expire unless specified in the mail message itself (only has happened once in the entire history of the game). This means your Maintenance Compensations can be hoarded until needed. There is no point in popping them needlessly and capping your coffers, preventing you from claiming your Canteen and Merchant.
Guild Shop
See also: Early Ship Recommendations
Every new player starts with 4000 Guild Coins. Guild Coins are easy to acquire if you are in an active guild.
To get to the Guild Shop, click Shop -> Supply -> Guild.
The following are ships that are HIGHLY RECOMMENDED to get at the start of the game:
| Ship | Location | Description |
|---|---|---|
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Unicorn is the best healer in the game. Retrofit as soon as possible! |
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Helena is a decent damage-dealer early on, and her support capabilities are top-tier for bosses. |
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Portland is a great tank for mid-late game. Retrofit as soon as possible! |
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She is your best easily-accessible BB. |
You buy one of the ships per rarity, then refresh the shop using Guild Coins (top right), then buy the other two missing ships. You will be using these ships (except Pennsylvania) for the majority of the game!
You should have Pennsylvania as the Flagship (middle slot), Portland as the Tank (left slot). It is highly recommended to use your starter for rookie missions as well.
Depending on when you start and/or what rate-up ships you pulled for, you might have better options than the ones listed. In that case, you can replace Pennsylvania or Enterprise. Try not to use too many high-rarity ships, as SR Bulins are very scarce early on.
If you do not have Enterprise, you can use any other ship available as filler.
Example starting fleet.
Other items to buy in Guild Shop:
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T3 Skill Books (Gold Rarity) - grab Offensive (Red).
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T4 Upgrade Parts (Gold Rarity) - grab Aircraft or Main Gun.
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T4 Tech Boxes (Gold Rarity) - grab Eagle Union since they contain the most useful equipment.
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Royal Gourmet / Full Course - optional, but nice to get if you have the spare Guild Coins for them.
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Cognitive Chips - more of a mid-late game investment.
Push Campaign
Your first objective (besides event grinding) is to push to Chapter 9.
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Chapter 9 and above stages have an Oil-Cap, which limits your fleets' oil expenditure to an amount indicated on the stage, massively increasing your oil economy.
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Chapter 9 and above stages also have Clearing Rewards, which give additional coins and other smaller rewards upon a stage clear, massively increasing your coin income.
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A massive EXP gain spike occurs once you reach 11-1.
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On maps with an Oil-Cap: the most efficient EXP farming stages will be X-1, and the most efficient coin farming stages will be X-4.
Once you reach Chapter 12, Cognitive Chips are added to the Clearing Rewards drop pool. It is recommended to farm Chapter 12 and above due to the scarcity of Cognitive Chips as your progress further into the game.
Do not farm 3-4
Farming Akagi and/or Kaga may seem appealing because shiny, but it is one of the worst things a newbie can do.
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They have a really poor drop rate at 0.75% each and the oil spent trying to farm them can easily get you to mid-game.
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Foxes are an expensive investment at 8 Gold Bulins total for a pair of mediocre ships; they require each other to get to that mediocre performance (each on their own are as bad as some commons), and it leads to a fleet imbalance.
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You tend to always want to use Unicorn since she's one of the best investments for a newbie and running foxes with her will lead to a 3 CV fleet, which tends to die to (commonly found) suicide boats very easily.
Any guides that suggest to farm foxes are either outdated (they weren't even great back in the days) and/or misleading. If you really want foxes, it is best to progress and come back when you can farm them with a 1-1 fleet (2 ships).
Permanent URs are a TRAP!
Main Article: UR Ships Construction
Do not pull only for the permanent URs as you will be able to get them indirectly from events. By pulling on the permanent pools. you will wastefully deplete your cubes and you won't have enough cubes to pull the new few events. The permanent UR pity allows you to select a UR after 200 pulls and these pulls include non-UR EVENT banners. Ideally you would want to only pull during events and you will get the permanent URs for free.
Even if you do get a UR ship (either from events or permanent banners), she is not useful until she is max limit broken. This is because non-MLB ships are worse than most every other ship in the game.
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For more information about how to acquire UR bulins, check out the Common Resource Guide.
My fleet is out of ammo!!!!
Main Article: Ammo
Your fleet can still fight with 0 ammo; they just do reduced damage. Read the wiki article above for more information.
Limit Breaks
Limit Break ships you use as soon as possible. Limit breaks are massive power spikes for all ships, and allow for easier and faster progression.
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For Bulin locations, check out the Common Resource Guide. SR (Gold Rarity) Bulins are scarce, so be mindful when you are using them.
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Do NOT spread out Bulins on multiple ships! It is better to have 1 ship MLB than 4 ships at LB1.
Gear
Avoid Farming Gear
Gear drops in Campaign maps are horrendous. It is recommended to not farm any Campaign maps for gear due to their drop rates and mediocrity.
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During certain Events, the gear drop can be worthwhile to farm, but Event Currency is always first priority.
In Early Game, most gear is obtained from Tech Box opening. Always craft up Tech Boxes to at least T3 (Purple) before opening them.
In mid/late game, gear will be coming from Gear Lab and/or Operation Siren.
Gold Gear =/= Good
The rarity of gear doesn't determine its value. There are a lot of gold rarity equipment that are significantly worse than a more commonly available purple or blue gear option.
The equipment below will be what you are looking for in early game, which are all available from T3 (Purple) Tech Boxes.
| Rarity | Ships |
|---|---|
| Elite | |
| Rare |
This also applies to Rainbow (UR) rarity gear; not all Rainbow gear is good. Gear in general are situational.
For other gear guides, check out:
Gearing is situational
People often ask "What is BIS for X?". In this game, gearing is always situational. You want to gear your fleets to what you are facing.
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Every weapon has a specific Ammo Modifier, which increases / decreases their damage against specific enemies.
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Click on a specific weapon category on this wiki page (Equipment List) to roughly compare gear stats / damage / Ammo Modifiers.
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Skills and/or Fight Mechanics affect gearing.
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Ex. Helena's Radar Scan debuffs enemies on 20s intervals, so you want your Main Fleet ships' gear to time with Helena, instead of strictly going by pure highest damage.
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Ex. Kearsarge wants to equip an Eagle Union or Northern Parliament Aircraft, and gives great buffs for meeting that requirement, therefore that has higher priority over the plane's damage.
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For mobbing, you want to spread out your backline damage to prevent overkilling and/or wasted (missed) attacks. Some ships have skills that reduce cooldowns or have very high reload to allow them to strike first.
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A common mistake is to give your healer faster planes to get more heals. What actually happens is you shift your heal timing slightly earlier without getting an extra strike in a fight, losing a significant portion of the healer's damage. Because of this enemies have a higher chance of staying alive longer and you take more damage because of it, resulting in a net negative.
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Upgradable Resources
The following is a list of relevant items that can be crafted to a higher-rarity version of themselves by clicking on them in the Depot:
| Base Material | Crafted Material | Notes |
|---|---|---|
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Amount: x6 |
Amount: x1 |
Craft as many times as needed. |
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Amount: x5 |
Amount: x1 |
Always craft up. Never open T1 / T2 Tech Boxes; only open T3 or higher Tech Boxes. |
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Amount: x5 |
Amount: x1 |
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Amount: x6 |
Amount: x1 |
Upgrading these to higher rarity causes a loss in total exp gained compared to using every book seperately without crafting. Therefore, it is not worth crafting skill books up unless you have a big stockpile that you won't ever finish. |
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Amount: x4 |
Amount: x1 |
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Amount: x8 |
Amount: x1 |
These are very scarce resources and should only be crafted up as needed. |
Basic Fleetbuilding
For a more detailed Fleetbuilding guide, read the Fleetbuilding Guide on this website!
Fleet Positionings
Positions in a fleet matter, as different positions take more damage or affect ship barrage placement.
Specifically, these two positions are the most important:
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Flagship: The Flagship is the middle slot in your Main Fleet (gold-colored square). This slot is almost always a BB, as BBs can use their Secondary Guns to deal with Suicide / Ramming enemies. Many BBs have barrages that require this position to deal their maximum damage output, and will deal significantly less damage when not in this slot.
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Main Tank: The Main Tank is the left-most slot in your Vanguard Fleet. This slot is prioritized for the tankiest ship in your Vanguard since the slot takes the most damage in the fleet.
Faction Fleets SUCK
Faction fleets have a lot of downsides, most notably:
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Often, they require significantly more Bulin investment when compared to other fleet types, slowing down progression.
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There are no special bonuses or synergy from running ships from the same faction together.
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All currently existing Faction buffers are so bad that you get more benefit running a Good ship instead of a ship purely for the Faction buff (ex. Bismarck). The good Faction bufffer ships are ones that don't rely on their Faction buff to be good (ex. Richelieu).
Grind Shipyard EXP MANUALLY
Combat Data packs should NOT be used for completing the EXP grind in Shipyard. Instead, they should be used in the Prototype Shop to buy Gear Blueprints.
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The Gear acquired through this method could take upwards of up to 3+ months to get through normal means, not to mention the opportunity cost of doing Research on other seasons.
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The EXP grind takes a maximum of 1-2 weeks when committing to it, even for mid-game players.
For more information about Research, check out the Research Guide.
Gacha
See also: Construction
Wisdom Cubes should only be used on Event banners, indicated by the text that says EVENT when choosing a build pool. The Event build pool also contains permanent pool ships alongside the rate-up Event ships.
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You should be completing the Daily Mission "Build 1 ship" by building 1 ship from Light Construction. The mission gives you your Cube back, making it a net-zero Cube loss.
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It is not recommended to build on any other Construction Pools, even for the Daily Mission, but its your cubes to lose.
Rerolling
It is not recommended to reroll accounts due to the cube income being spread out instead of frontloaded, especially at the start of the game.
The only exception is if you are starting during a UR event, where the UR ship is a rate-up ship in the Event banner.
Hard Mode Cheese
You can cheese a 3-star clear due to the map mechanics.
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First, kill all the mobs, then kill the boss. (2 stars, 1 attempt)
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Second, kill all the mobs you can, but before killing the boss, leave the stage. This doesn't use up an attempt. Repeat until you obtain the last star, then either kill the boss again (using up the daily attempt) or retreat. (1 stars, 0 attempts)
If you do not see mobs upon entry, be sure to turn Clearing Mode off.
Shop Priority
Main Article: Shop Priority