In this guide to the best Light Cones buying strategy in Honkai Star Rail, I will discuss the Light Cones that offer the best returns on spending your currency in the shop. Please note that this is not a tier list or a ranking of Light Cone power. But rather it’s a recommendation on how to manage your resources effectively. The goal is to maximize the benefits obtained from your hard-earned in-game currency.

Honkai Star Rail Guide: Best Light Cones To Buy

Not all Light Cones in Honkai Star Rail come from wishing, gacha pulls or RNG. There are shops in the game that sell Light Cones, and players are guaranteed to get some of them over time. So in this guide, we aim to help players pick the powerful Light Cones that upgrade their account. We’ll also look at reaching a high Superimposition tier, to gain the maximum bonuses.

The Forgotten Hall Store

The Forgotten Hall Store is a shop, that sells one four-star Light Cone from each path. These are the same Light Cones you may earn as a reward from weekly bosses. It’s the default source of all free-to-play light cones, where you can equip most characters.

The currency you need to buy Light Cones from the store is “Lucent Afterglow”. You may earn from playing all modes inside the Forgotten Hall, which is from the Forgotten Hall: Jarilo-VI Memory, Xianzhou Memory, and Memory of Chaos. The first two modes grant one-time rewards only, while the rewards of Memory of Chaos reset every two weeks.

Lucent Afterglow Currency

You need 200 Lucent Afterglow for each copy of any Light Cones. Meanwhile, you earn 20 Lucent Afterglow from one-time rewards in Jarilo-VI on each floor, for 15 floors. There is a total of 300 Lucent Afterglow. These are easy to get, and usually, you will max them by Trailblazer level 50 or 55.

Then you earn 40 Lucent Afterglow on each floor in Xiangzhou, on 6 floors, for a total of 240. However this mode is harder, and it may take you longer to clear the top floor.

Memory of Chaos grants only 8 Lucent Afterglow on each floor, but you clear twice a month. It’s the hardest mode in the game, so you can’t clear all ten floors before serious investment in full two teams, and some substitute characters as well. It contains ten floors, and the average player may clear 6 floors comfortably after reaching Trailblazer level 60.

How to Pick the Best Light Cones from the Forgotten Hall Store

As you see, the currency income of Forgotten Hall Store is finite and time-gated. So players better be wise, and choose what Light Cone to buy carefully.

Note that most of the Light cones in this store are not exclusive, and you may earn from weekly bosses. Not only that, but some of them earned as mission rewards, such as Past and Future, The Seriousness of Breakfast, and Woof! Walk Time!

So if you need one copy of each Light Cone as a temporary solution or a placeholder on some characters, you don’t have to buy directly. If you wait, you will eventually get them all. What I recommend is getting the Light Cone with the most impact to Superimposition 5, to get a huge damage upgrade. Then move to the next one.

Star Rail Best Light Cones: The Seriousness of Breakfast

Overall Rating: 5/5

This is usually the best light Cone for characters from the Erudition Path if you don’t count Limited Light Cones. It can hold its own against all the four-star options, and even some five stars. “The Seriousness of Breakfast” gives a generic damage bonus at all times, and a permanent Attack bonus, once the team kills enemies. It reaches max stacks after three kills, and the wearer doesn’t have to deal with the killing blow.

Overall, it’s a great option for Serval, Qingque, Herta, Himeko, and even Jing Yuan. On some of them, it even beats the battle pass Light Cone, “Today Is Another Peaceful Day”, which costs real money.

Three of Erudition Path’s characters are granted for free, so every account has them. Chances are, you will likely build at least one of them for your teams. So The Seriousness of Breakfast will be a great pickup to get them dealing more damage. Especially with the fact that Herta Store doesn’t have an Erudition Light Cone option.

Star Rail Best Light Cones: Fermata

Overall Rating: 3/5

Fermata is a Nihility Path Light Cone, that increases Break Effect, and damage against enemies with shock or Wind Shear. Half of Nihility characters don’t work well with Fermata, as they tend to play as debuffers, with focus on the Effect Hit Rate stat.

The other half who rely on DoTs and pair with Kafka to get easy shocks, have better options. All of Sampo, Luka, and Kafka can utilize Fermata, but it’s still behind other accessible options. Namely “Good Night And Sleep Well”, and “Eyes Of the Prey”. But due to the Damager Over Time (DoT) team building, having more than one damage dealer, there’s still room for one of them to use Fermata.

Quid Pro Quo

Overall Rating: 4/5

Quid Pro Quo is an Abundance Light Cone, but instead of healing stats, it generates energy for the team. In every turn the wearer takes, it picks an ally with energy lower than 50%, and gives him or her a fixed amount of energy.

This Light Cone can be used by any healer, especially if said healer has high speed, to proc the passive more often. It plays a great support role, and in some cases, allows characters to get their Ultimate one turn faster. This in turn increases the team’s overall offensive power.

All of Luocha, Bailu, Natasha, and Lynx may use Quid Pro Quo. Though for pure healing power, other options such as Post-Op Conversation are better.

Past and Future

Overall Rating: 2.5/5

For a Harmony Light Cone, Past and Future have very little synergy with most characters. Its passive strictly buffs the next ally taking action after the wearer uses a skill. So applies two limitations, with too little of a reward. Some Harmony characters don’t use skill often enough, and use Normal instead to generate SP. Such as Asta and Tingyun.

Some other ones may use Skill, such as Yukong. But since Yukong buffs the next two allies, this light Cone will buff only the next ally, and leave the second one unbuffed. Finally, it’s a decent pick for Bronya, if the team has spare SP to use Bronya Skill more often than not. Though the Harmony Path has a wide variety of good Light Cones anyway, even three-star ones. So there’s still little reason to buy Past and Future instead of a stronger option from another path.

River Flows in Spring

Overall Rating: 2/5

The Hunt Light Cone in Forgotten Hall shop is River Flows in Spring, which have Yanqing featured on its art. It truly fits him only among the Hunt roster. It gives a damage and speed bonus, as long as the character doesn’t take damage. So with the frequent enemies that attack in AOE, this Light Cone only functions with a shielder on the team. Who also works with a shielder? Yanqing.

But even though, Yanqing has a much better free option available, from another shop. A five-star Light Cone from Herta’s shop, that has easier-to-meet conditions and better stats. For other Hunt characters, this Light Cone is also worse than other four stars such as Swordplay.

We Are Wildfire

Overall Rating: 2/5

We Are Wildfire is the type of Light Cone that’s good in the early game, but falls off rapidly at higher levels. As a Preservation Path option, it packs some decent team protection, for 5 character turns. So it’s good on lower levels, while battles end faster. There are also resets between each battle in memory of Chaos 1~5.

Later on, the battle gets much longer, with three waves of enemies. Characters grow faster and take more turns in a short time. So they will burn through the duration of this buff pretty fast, and the team stays vulnerable afterwards.

It doesn’t give a bonus Def for Def scaling characters such as Gepard, March, or Fire MC. It also doesn’t give HP either for Fu Xuan. It has a heal that procs only once at the start of a battle, which in MoC, is while characters have 100% HP anyway.

Overall, it’s not a great pick for competitive game modes, but a great option for pushing through Simulated Universe. This is because the heal at the start of battle can counter some mechanics that leave your team HP at 1 HP before battle.

Woof! Walk Time!

Overall Rating: 2.5/5

The last Light Cone in the Forgotten Hall shop is of Destruction path. It gives good Attack and damage buff to the wearer when attacking the enemy with Burn or Bleed.

This makes it the best choice for Hook, since she inflicts burns in AOE, and keeps them for a long enough duration. But aside from Hook, it only fits other characters if you pair them with a consistent source of Bleed or Burn. Burn is easier to get through Asta, Himeko, Hook, or Guinaifen in the future.

But there’s very little reason to pair any of these characters with a Destruction character in the first place. So Woof! Walk Time! is still a niche option that only fits one character only, and a less popular one at that.

Herta Store

Herta’s Store is tied to the Simulated Universe, instead of Forgotten Hall. It sells five-star Light Cones, that’s usually stronger. The store doesn’t have all paths at launch, but only three starter ones. These are Destruction, Hunt, and Preservation. With a fourth one of the Nihility path being added as of the 1.3 patch.

Herta Bond Currency

You need 8 Herta Bonds for each copy of any Light Cone in the Herta Store. However, you only need 2 Herta Bonds to get material for Superimposition. So you need 8 for S1 Light Cone, and another 8 to reach S5. This helps new players get one five-star Light Cone to max Superimposition pretty quickly. It’s a great boost for starters so don’t miss out.

Meanwhile, you can earn one Herta Bond per week, from reaching 8000 points rewards. But the first-time rewards in the Simulated Universe are 2 per world, so 14 in total from the seven worlds.

That heavily encourages choosing the Light Cone wisely and picking only the one that gives a huge upgrade to an important character. If you don’t have an immediate use for any of the Light Cones in the store, you better save your Herta Bonds for a future Light Cone.

Star Rail Best Light Cones: Cruising in the Stellar Sea

Overall Rating: 4.5/5

The Hunt Light Cone is usually the best pick in the Herta Store, for several reasons. First, every account starts with several free Hunt characters, and at least one of them would be a main DPS. In addition to that, Cruising in the Stellar Sea gives a strong Crit stat, and scales perfectly with Superimposition tiers.

At S5, it gives a 32% Crit Rate against enemies below 50% HP, and half that against enemies with higher HP. On top of that, it gives a 40% Attack buff for two turns after defeating an enemy. Most Hunt characters will kill an enemy quickly enough since they focus on dealing damage to a single target. So they would at least have good uptime on the buff.

It’s a powerful option, that gives a great boost to your main damage dealer. However, it’s not the strongest pick in the long term. Some four-star Light Cones such as Swordplay will eventually surpass it upon reaching high superimposition. Swordplay at S5 is generally hard to beat, but it takes a very long time to get the required six copies. The gacha four-star options take a few months of pulling or more, due to the RNG nature of the pulls.

Even upon getting powerful S5 Swordplay, you may pass Cruising in the Stellar Sea down to another hunt character. So it’s still valuable for the mid to long term.

On the Fall of an Aeon

Overall Rating: 4/5

A Destruction Path Light Cone gives an attack bonus and a conditional damage bonus. The condition to meet is inflicting weakness Break, by the bearer himself or herself. This condition prevents “On the Fall of an Aeon” from being top-tier because it would have uptime issues on Bosses, and requires a lot of planning to ensure the wearer inflicts the breaking hit.

Clara for example is a character that’s hard to inflict the breaking hit, so she has almost zero uptime on her second passive. However, “On the Fall of an Aeon” is still her second-best option. So if you play Clara, and don’t plan on getting her signature Light Cones from the Starlight Exchange shop, it’s a decent pick.

On Arlan, it’s the best pick besides limited LCs. But on Hook, it falls behind Woof! Walk Time!, which is a free option. On Blade, it’s outright bad, due to Blade having poor Attack stat scaling. It’s a good option for the Imbibitor Lunae though, since he has very good breaking capabilities, and scales pretty well with an attack. It’s his second-best option, behind his signature LC.

Texture of Memories

Overall Rating: 4/5

This Light Cone belongs to the Preservation Path. However, it doesn’t suit the kit of most Preservation characters that scale with Def. Instead, it pops up a shield that scales with HP, when the wearer gets hit. If the wearer has a shield to begin with though, it reduces damage they take by a lot. on top of that, it gives Effect Res.

This can virtually work on any character that has a shield and taunt, as a pure damage reduction. However, characters who scale with HP are the true stars who can unlock this LC’s full potential. From Preservation Path, only Fu Xuan scales with HP, so it’s a natural fit for her.

It can be used on Fire MC, to help them get more tanky when they use their taunt. Some teams can’t afford to use another defensive character besides MC, and without a healer, this damage reduction is invaluable. The buff stacks with Fire MC damage reduction, and high Def value, to mitigate a lot of damage.

Star Rail Best Light Cones: Solitary Healing

Overall Rating: 3.5/5

Solitary Healing is a Light Cone from Nihility Path, that has been released in version 1.3. It fits the DoT playstyle, similar to Fermata, though it has its flaws. It increases the Break Effect, DoT damage, and refund energy upon defeating enemies.

Without defeating enemies, this Light Cone falls behind. On characters who can’t utilize the few extra energy to charge Ultimate one turn faster, it also falls behind. The alternative “Good Night Sleep Well” is mostly a better pick on all characters. Unless you know exactly how to optimize energy regeneration to do two turns of Ultimate rotation.

However, if you rely on a DoT team with more than one DoT damage dealer, you can use Solitary Healing on one, and Good Night Sleep Well on another.

So that’s it for the Best Light Cones to obtain in Honkai Star Rail. What did you think of the list? What are your favorite Light Cones from the shop? Let us know in the comments below!

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Stay tuned for more Honkai: Star Rail Guides. For more Honkai: Star Rail content, check our Honkai: Star Rail Kafka Build Guide. Honkai: Star Rail Luocha Build Guide, and Honkai: Star Rail Blade Build Guide. As well as our guide for Yukong Mono Imaginary Team Guide