Arknights — Your First Two Weeks
Sanity, the refund rule that makes experimenting nearly free, and a pity system kinder than the genre standard.
Sanity, and the rule that makes failing cheap
You start with a maximum of 82 Sanity, and it rises as you level. The ceiling is 135.
Operations cost between 6 and 36 Sanity depending on difficulty — a wide enough range that planning a session genuinely matters. Three hard stages can cost more than a dozen easy ones.
Now the rule that should change how you play:
Quitting an operation partway refunds 100% of the Sanity the first time you run it, and 95% (rounded down) afterwards. Challenge Mode and Inferno Mode operations refund half instead.
Trying a stage therefore costs almost nothing. If a squad composition is not working, retreat and rebuild it — you are out a few Sanity, not a run. Arknights is a puzzle game wearing a gacha costume, and it explicitly lets you experiment. New players who treat every attempt as precious make it far harder than it is.
Operators and squads
Operators come in six rarities, 1★ to 6★, and a standard squad is 12 Operators.
Rarity matters less here than the genre trains you to expect. Low-rarity Operators are cheaper to deploy and cheaper to raise, and deployment cost is a real constraint in a tower defence game. A 3★ that lets you place two units early can beat a 6★ you cannot afford to put down until the wave has already landed.
Headhunting is unusually generous
A single pull costs 600, or one Headhunting Permit. Ten pulls cost 6,000, or one Ten-roll Permit.
The pity system is the part worth knowing: a 6★ or 5★ Operator is guaranteed within the first ten pulls on a banner. If nine pulls produce nothing, the tenth will.
The wiki's own assessment is fair — 5★ and 6★ rates here are more reasonable than high-rarity odds in most gacha games, and the distribution favours 4★ over 3★. You will assemble a usable roster faster than you might expect.
The first fortnight
- Retreat freely. The refund makes experimenting nearly free, and this game expects it.
- Raise a few low-rarity Operators. Deployment cost matters as much as raw power.
- Spend Sanity before it caps, and plan around the 6-to-36 range.
- Do not chase one specific Operator early. The ten-pull guarantee means broad pulling builds a squad fastest.
- Build the base when it unlocks. It generates the resources everything else runs on.
Where this comes from
The numbers here were read from these pages on September 5, 2026. Games patch, and a guide is only as current as the last time somebody checked it — so if something below disagrees with what you see in game, the game is right.