How to add friends in Honkai: Star Rail
And, no less importantly, why it's good to have friends in Honkai: Star Rail
How can I add another player to my friend list in Honkai: Star Rail? Honkai: Star Rail doesn't feature multiplayer, but you can still buddy up with other players and add them to your friends list in the game.
There are some real benefits to doing this, which we'll go into below, but before you can do anything, you need to know how to make contact in the first place. So read on for instructions on how to find new friends and contact players you already know in Honkai: Star Rail.
How to add a friend in Honkai: Star Rail
The Friends feature in Honkai: Star Rail unlocks when you complete "The Voyage Continues". This is the quest that sees you board the Astral Express for the first time at the very end of the prologue. After looking around the train and chatting with your crewmates for a while, talk to Conductor Pom-Pom after they announce that the Express is about to warp jump. This will end the quest and unlock the Friends feature.
From now on, you can open your character's phone to access the Friends menu via the icon showing two figures and a heart.
From the Friends screen, you can select from a list of Strangers to send a friend request to, or search for a known friend using their User ID to bring up their profile and send them a request.
The other tab in the Friends screen allows you to view your current friends list, as well as any friend requests you have received from other players.
How to play with friends in Honkai: Star Rail
Unlike its big sister Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail is a single-player-only game that doesn't allow you and your friends to party up in multiplayer. However, there are still tangible benefits to having in-game friends.
Once you and another player have mutually agreed to be friends, you can effectively "borrow" one another's characters to complete certain challenges. In Version 1.0, you can borrow a support character when you enter Calyx mode, the resource farming challenge areas you'll encounter for the first time soon after arriving on Javrilo-VI in the first post-prologue story questline.
A borrowed support character will come with all the stats and levelling that your friend has invested in. You'll be able to take direct control of this character in battle alongside your own party, and it can be a very useful way of plugging gaps in your own team's expertise.
How to lend your characters in Honkai: Star Rail
Lending out support characters to friends benefits the lender as well as the borrower: you'll receive 2,000 Credits whenever one of your friends takes your support character into Calyx mode.
To set up your support characters, open your in-game phone and click "Trailblazer Profile" near the very top. Here, you can select one of your unlocked units to be your chosen Support Character, who your friends can borrow for Calyx mode. You can only feature one character at a time, so choose wisely! You can, however, change your support character whenever you'd like.
You might also have noticed the "Starfaring Companions" portraits underneath your "Support Character". This is where you can feature up to three of your favourite characters to add a bit of individual flair to your profile. However, these characters aren't available to lend out to your friends as support.
Now that you know how to set up Support Characters to help out your friends in Honkai: Star Rail, your next thought might well be that you want to build your loaner characters to be the best they can possibly be. Check out our best Honkai: Star Rail March 7th build, and best Honkai: Star Rail Trailblazer build, and best Honkai: Star Rail Natasha build guides for just a few ideas on how to put together some of the free characters you'll unlock in HSR's early game.