A journey to the stars in HoYoverse’s epic sci-fi odyssey Honkai Star Rail isn’t exactly lonely. You’ll have plenty of colorful companions to accompany you throughout your spacey adventure, but actual players are another story. Honkai takes a different approach from Genshin Impact when it comes to co-op, but it’s not exactly anti-social, either. Here’s what you need to know about co-op multiplayer in Honkai Star Rail.
Playing with Friends in Honkai Star Rail
(Updated on August 23, 2024 – updated explanation, links, images, and format)
While you can add friends in the game, Honkai Star Rail doesn’t have a co-op mode. That’s a bit of a letdown after Genshin‘s co-op mode, but Honkai does try to blaze its own path (it has multiple Trailblazers to prove it). That said, you can access limited multiplayer features; they just might not work the way you imagine. That’s because Honkai Star Rail features a Support Character system instead of co-op multiplayer. Here’s what that lets you do:
- Designate a character as a Support to help your friends on their missions
- Bring a friend’s Support Character along to help you
- Diversify your team composition (but no to having two of the same character)
You can use Support Characters in Calyxes and Caverns of Corrosion, but don’t expect to get carried by an OP Support. Honkai scales the levels of incoming Support Characters to match those of your characters. No free level handouts today, it seems. On the plus side, you can benefit from the Support Character feature even if you have no friends in the game. You’ll just pull from a random list of players instead, refreshing this list if none of the available characters catch their interest. You also earn Credits through this system, proving yet again that crime might not pay, but friendship does.
