GENERAL INFO/FAQ FOR NEW PLAYERS

What server do I choose? is there a difference?

All the servers have the same content and started at the same time
Global and SEA have an easier time getting good scores on raids, then goes NA and JP is "Dante must Die" mode.
If you care about ping (only matters in Coop mode) then choose the one closest to you, "Global" servers are in Europe.

I just started, do I reroll? and how?

That's up to how much time do you want to invest, but having top tier units at the start of the game will make the campaign smoother.
You can reroll with salted emails, they disabled guest accounts because the chinks were nuking the servers
Emulator was the way to go for speed but sadly you can't do it anymore
You get a guaranteed SSR on the tutorial pull that can only get you a character from the SSR units from launch, so no newer units nor Pilgrims
Then you have to clear a bit of the campaign to unlock the mail and you can claim free gibs, the amount will differ based on if they are running some sort of promotion or reward

Pilgrims?

Pilgrims are extra rare units that can spook you on any banner but have a lower roll chance than other SSR
Getting Scarlet, Modernia or Red Hood will set you up for most of the campaign

What about buying an account?

Not a good idea on this game unless you really really really (REALLY) want some old collab character.
You get placed on pvp shards based on account creation date so in an old abandoned account it will be nearly impossible to compete for the top spots, losing you from around 2000 easy gems every 15 days to 3000 if you're really keeping up with the pvp meta.

What are all these tickets? which ones do I use?

There are 2 different tickets, blue for the Ordinary Banner and shiny/LGBT for the Advanced Banner (limited)

The blue ones you can use as soon as you get them
Advanced tickets you should save for a unit you really want, they can be used on any limited banner and do not expire
Gems should be generally saved for the Advanced Banner unless you are desperate to get past the wall (more on that later)

I'm clearing the campaign but I ran out of resources and can't level up, what do I do?

Before you unlock the Outpost, a building that gives you resources passively each hour, you'll get most of your XP and credits from claiming challenges on this menu on the top right

What are these boxes with hours in them? do I have to use them before they expire?

No, those boxes give you the amount of resources that your outpost will give you in the time specified on the box

When do I open them then?

Every 5 campaign stages you clear your outpost will level up and give you more hourly resources

Use them when you get stuck on a stage and you'll get some outpost levels out of it to make it worth

Open dust boxes to get past the milestone levels (60, 80,100...) and just the exact amount you need

I Opened some credit boxes, do I level this Academy thing on the Outpost?

Yes, yes and yes.
Every surplus of credits you can get a hold off, WITHOUT STUNTING YOUR LEVELING, should go into the Academy.
You will get percentage increases to your resource generation, free sync slots and on the last levels you will unlock special dispatches that give you doll-related items.

A train just obliterated me. What's going on?

You just found your first EX stage.

Those are special stages that appear as you progress the campaign on which the level of your Nikkes is synced so you cannot overlevel them.
Gear, Skill levels and attraction stats still count so you can come back when you are more powerful, they don't block your way

How do I make a good team?

First, units are categorized by the number and cooldown of their burst (third skill)
designated by roman numerals, for the cooldown you have to click on the skill to see them

The more generalist team consists of a B1 with 20s CD, a B2 with 20s CD, 2 B3 units and a flex spot
Like so

The flex spot can be a healer, another B2 with 40s CD, another dps that doesn't burst but grants buffs when others burst (Privaty, Drake), etc.

When building your team take into account that while on auto the units burst from left to right, so order them with that in mind

For most campaign stages you should prioritize bringing B3s with screen clears (Scarlet, Harran, Privaty, Epinel, Modernia, Maiden...) they'll make your life easier

These are my units (insert picture here). Who do I level up?

You can level whoever you want at the beginning and progress with that, just make sure you can full burst like they showed you on the tutorial

Now, this is important: depending on the number of dupes of a unit you have, they can get to a higher level
For example this is a SR with 2 dupes (LB2) and a SSR with 0 dupes (LB0)

As you can see both can get up to lvl160 but the SR needs 2 dupes to do so

To be able to get past lvl 160 you need an SSR unit at LB3, that means getting that unit 4 times
And you need 5 units at LB3 or you'll be stuck at lvl 160 for MONTHS/FOREVER
You will see this commonly referred as the 160 wall, and the anons stuck there as walled
I'll explain more about the wall after, now we continue with the leveling
After you beat stage 4-15 you will unlock a building called the Synchro Device, and it looks like this:

The device automatically takes your 5 highest leveled Nikkes and lets you sync other Nikkes to that level
So the play is to reset the units you have been using on the campaign until then, for 10 gems each, and level 5 SSR (any level of LB works) or SRs (LB2) EQUALLY
Usually SSRs are better so if you have to choose level the SSRs, this will save you sync slots

You get refunded all the materials except skill manuals, so be careful about that. You can get up to this point with all the skills at level 1 so you can take your time leveling skills until you have a broader understanding of the good/meta units (or someone spoonfeds you)

As you can see on the picture the 5 of them are lvl 40 so our sync level is also 40
That means that we can put other SSR (or SR) units that we want to use on the spots below and they get leveled for "free"

You can get more slots for the sync for free on the Tactics Academy (another building) up to 30 or paying 500 gems for each one

Taking a Nikke out of the bottom spots incurs on a 4 hour cooldown until you can use that spot again

Again, level your Nikkes evenly. It will result on a higher POW for your squad

So, what do I do about this 160 wall thing?

The game has a couple of systems in place to "help" you beat the wall

Wishlist.

It unlocks after you make 40 rolls on the Ordinary Banner

This lets you narrow the pool of units you can roll on the Ordinary Banner to 5 of each of the main Nikke manufacturers (you cannot wishlist Pilgrims but they can still spook you on the banner)
You should add every SSR unit you have at the beginning in hope of getting more dupes of them, but you won't have 15 of them until a while so you can fill the rest of the spots with meta units or the ones that make your dick tingle
It's very recommended you add Privaty and Alice (both on their normal version) because you get one copy of each for free just for completing missions that will more or less guide you through your early and mid days.
You will get Privaty after doing your "Day by Day" missions and then you unlock "Alice's Diary" for Alice.

Also Liter and Naga because you can also get extra copies of them with a new pity introduced in the second anniversary.

Bonus Recruit

This is an extra pity introduced on the second anniversary.
Lets you select one of the 3 featured Nikkes every 100 standard banner rolls (the one that uses blue tickets)

You can get the bonus 6 times before it goes away.
You can easily MLB Alice this way because of the extra copy from her diary.
Liter and Naga are also very meta so getting one copy of each for cheap will be a big boon to your campaign team.

Mileage tickets

This is a spark mechanic, after you do 200 pulls on the Ordinary Banner you can buy a spare body (dupe) of some Nikkes that appear on the mileage store

These are the units that can appear on the mileage store, every day at reset one of each column is present at random

Not every unit is there and the only Pilgrim that appears is Noah, so plan accordingly

You never know what you'll get while rolling or from a mold, the last thing you need is an extra dupe that doesn't help you get past the wall

Spare body selector

You'll get it for free when one of your Nikkes reaches lvl 141

It has more units than those that appear on the store, you can check them by clicking on it on the challenges tab

Anniversaries

Every anniversary (early November) and half anniversary (late April) you can get a free MLB SSR on the event just by playing so this helps immensely

I got stuck on a hard level, what can I do?

The game lends you 3 level 200 nikkes that you can use 3 times each in different modes, and with unlimited uses on events.
Look for the red flag on the interface:
Here you can check the units and how many uses you have of each one.

Early on using just one unit per stage is your best bet as just including them in your team will skyrocket your POW into blue numbers, making the stage a cakewalk.
This means that you have 9 "free" clears per day, use them wisely to keep a steady pace.
Later on if you get stuck on the 160 wall for a while you can still advance by using 2 or even all 3 for each stage.

SHOP RECOMMENDATIONS

General Shop

Get your freebie and dip, you'll unlock a free reset down the road for 2 freebies a day
Sometimes buying Battle Data is worth if it's heavily discounted, it can get you a couple of levels if you are very stuck on the campaign, but your credits should be going into the Academy lessons and leveling your Nikkes
Never ever buy gear or things that cost gems

Once again, as some people seem to miss this: you will unlock a FREE refresh of the store once you have your Infrastructure Core at level 11

Body Label Shop

Only High-Quality(gold) molds, never ever RE-Energy or consoles. Even if they are heavily discounted
Molds don't get discounted so you can buy them as soon as you get enough DNA

Recycling Shop

Get the gems and raw credits first, you need a very high outpost level for the credit boxes to be worth vs raw

You can get more dust with your remaining currency, starting with the 2h boxes as they are a bit cheaper
And no, those tickets are not for rolling Pilgrims, they are to get affection

Union shop

Here you can either buy bodies for the prisoners (more on that below) or batteries to improve your cubes
None of the prisoners are really meta and their extra bodies are quite expensive so the best use of union chips is buying cube batteries
Bastion and Resilience are the best cubes for general use so you can't go wrong with those

Arena shop

Get the elemental manuals, focusing on the ones that your main team needs.
The selector boxes are also good but they are more expensive so only get them once you start having a surplus of arena tickets.
NEVER ever get gear here, it's always worse that what you can get from normal progression and very very expensive.

There's an event going on. What do I farm on the repeatable stages?

The answer is Core Dust
You may think that getting XP or credits will help you get more powerful faster, but there are several levels that require core dust to get past them (40, 60, 80... you get the drift) and not having the dust ready can stall your progress for days because the outpost generates much less dust compared to credits and XP

If you can clear the hard stages buying the extra entries for gems is absolutely recommended, you get a huge amount of boxes
The item changes every event but the concept is the same

There's a google sheets linked on the OP that you can use to see exactly how much dust you need for each milestone
Also, past level 200 every level is a core dust wall so you'll never have enough

What are these free prisoners I see people talking about? How do I get them?

After you clear stage 5-20 on the campaign you'll unlock the elevator on your outpost, inside there's a mechanic called Liberation that lets you "Rehabilitate" the prisoners
It takes around 2 months of doing daily tasks to get one prisoner, and you can eventually get all 3
There's a trick to get more progress after you reach a milestone: you can change your target to another prisoner and then back to the one you were rehabilitating. You'll get a new set of dailies for you to complete, effectively getting 60 points more for free
Each happy face is a milestone, so you can do this 4 times

As for who to pick, as of now Guilty is the more PvE meta pick, Quency is good on PvP and Sin is uh... for you to sniff her armpits or something
My advice is to pick with your dick
You can get their spare bodies with the currency for participating in Union Raids

Do I really have to clear all these simulation rooms every day?

No, you only need to do the hardest one you can and you get all the rewards from the previous rooms

Speaking of simulation, what is this Overclock thing I just unlocked?

Overclock is an extra way to get some skill book every 2 weeks. I repeat, you only do this once every 2 weeks.
Rewards cap at Ratio 25 and getting further is just for bragging purposes as the seasons get recorded on your profile so if you don't care about that don't go past 25.

You can scroll on that list and choose the modifiers you prefer to make it easier/harder to clear.

LCSMP? what is this Alphabet Soup thing you guys keep throwing around?

Anons referring to the meta units by their initials
LCSMP would be Liter, Centi, Scarlet, Modernia and Privaty
We mostly stopped doing this but you may still see someone doing it

Does Gold Mileage expire when the banner ends?

No, you can save it and use it on whatever banner you want
Pilgrim banners are the best ones to use the mileage on because the Pilgrims have 1% instead of 2% chance on focus

What happens when I reach lvl 200?

The first 5 Nikkes that you level to lvl 200 get permanently fused to the top row of the Sync Device and you can't remove them (as of now).

So if you have many LB3 characters choose wisely between meta/waifus

Every level from then on will be primarily gated by dust and will level all the Nikkes on the Sync by 1
Again, this is why you farm dust on every single event

SOCIAL FEATURES

Unions

Unions hold up to 32 players and let you compete on the Union Raid once a month.
Ours linked on a rentry in the OP, you can try to join one of those or any random one if you don't really care about the raids but make sure they are at least lvl3 so you can leech union chips.

Friends

Friends can give you up to 3 free daily rolls on the "Social Point Recruit" banner using this currency:
So having at least 15 active friends is quite important (max is 30 but you don't get more social points).
You can get any Nikke that's on the standard pool here, except Pilgrims, at half the normal rates (2%).
You can either drop your ID and region on the thread and see if some anons have slots to add you, add your union mates, or add the randoms that the game suggests to you on this menu:

RAIDS

Each raid happens once a month and there's usually 2 weeks in between them

Solo Raid

As per name you are alone in this one versus a big boss that always has some elemental gimmick.
You get 3 entries per day and the boss gets stronger each time you defeat it up to level 7
If you manage to defeat level 7 you unlock Challenge mode.
You can use 5 teams of 5 Nikkes for each entry, but you can't repeat Nikkes on the teams so to compete you need 25 good built ones.
Don't worry if you get stuck on level 3 or even 2 on your first raid, that's normal. Next month you'll be stronger and slowly get up to Challenge mode.
Each boss is weak to an element and will require at least 1 Nikke that counters that element on each team to be able to clear a QTE, so if you suddenly find yourself unable to do damage to the boss it will 99% be because of this.
Your final ranking and reward will be determined by the best hit you did on that season.
Do not neglect Solo Raid because it's the primary source of Dolls and Maintenance Kits (more on that below) and you can't be carried here like in Union Raid

Union Raid

You face a gauntlet of 5 bosses with your union.
You also get 3 entries per day like in Solo raid.
They start weak and get progressively stronger up to 10 stages. If you're a weak player hitting the early stages is ideal because you won't be doing much once they get to stage 7 or so but even if you're tickling the bosses try to do your 3 hits each day. Any damage is better than 0 damage!
Every Union will tackle this differently so make sure to ask your leader what to do if you have doubts.
When the raid ends and they tally the rankings the whole union will get Union Chips based on the placement that you can use on the Union Shop.

DOLLS AND TREASURES

DOLLS

Dolls are an extra piece of equipment that you can give to your Nikkes once you unlock them.
The game will give you a box with some for free as soon as you unlock them and you can get more from Solo Raid and from your daily dispatch after you level your Academy high enough.
They come in 2 rarities (blue and purple) and there's one for each weapon type:

These dolls give you a hefty amount of raw stats (more POW for that unit) and it comes with a special passive depending on the weapon.
You will have to make a choice: you either level them on your "meta" Nikkes so you can push campaign easier and do better on raids or use them on the units that have a Treasure to unlock it.

Leveling the dolls

To level the dolls you need Maintenance kits.
These come in 3 rarities and you obtain them from the same place as the dolls: Solo Raid and dispatch.

As you will get many more blues than the other ones the best strategy to level the dolls is to first equip a blue doll on your desired Nikke, level it to level 15 using ONLY blue kits and then overwriting that blue doll with a purple doll.
This way you'll end with a lvl5 purple doll:

You can then finish it up with your purple and golden kits.
In true Korean game spirit the upgrades are random so doll will take you the same amount of kits to level.

TREASURES

Treasures are a way to upgrade some old units while patching some weaknesses on their kits to try and bring them up to snuff.
You also get some more bonding scenes with them and a nice background.
To be able to progress on the treasure of a unit you first need a lvl15 purple doll equipped on them and to have the unit at bond lvl30.
For the lvl30 bond you need the unit at LB2 (3 copies total) at the very least.
To facilitate this every treasured unit is added to the mileage store inside some selectors:

The first one unlocks the Nikke for you if you don't have it but it costs precious gold mileage, so it's a very steep price to pay.
The second one gives you extra bodies that you can use to limit break them once you roll them, this is a decent enough use for silver mileage once you're past the wall. Or you can even take advantage of this to break the wall with Nikkes that previously weren't on the silver mileage rotation like Laplace or Viper.

So, once you have the Nikke dolled up and bonded up you also need to acquire that Nikke's favorite item.
And again you get that from Solo Raid (some meager random amount per season) and from the Dispatch (here you can focus on the one you want)
You need 160 of them to max a Treasure.

Just for the sake of an example this ones are the ones for Laplace, Exia, Frima and Diesel in that order.