Does Honkai: Nexus Anima Have an Artifact System?

Honkai: Nexus Anima does not have an artifact system, a relic system, or any kind of equippable gear. If you are coming from Genshin Impact’s artifact sets or Honkai: Star Rail’s relics and wondering where the equivalent grind is here, the honest answer is that there isn’t one, at least not in the current closed beta. Anima get stronger through leveling, Bonding, Evolution, and the Apex Club reward loop, all systems that already exist and are already documented on this site.

Key takeaways

• No artifact or relic system exists in the current build. Anima do not equip gear with rolled substats.
• Power comes from four systems instead: leveling, Bonding into Evolution, the Apex Club’s Star Anima skill upgrades, and catching duplicates of Anima you already have.
• A CBT1-only system called Nutrition was the closest thing to an itemization layer, and it was cut before the current test.
• A full gear system is unlikely at launch, in our read, because the existing grind (leveling and evolving dozens of Anima) is already substantial without adding substat-chasing on top.
• This makes account planning simpler than a Genshin or Star Rail roster: there is no gear-optimization side quest competing for your resources.

What Nexus Anima has instead of artifacts

Four systems currently do the job an artifact or relic system would do in another HoYoverse title. None of them involve equipping an item to an Anima.

Leveling raises an Anima’s base stats directly, the same way it would in almost any RPG. It is the most straightforward lever and the one every player touches first.

Bonding into Evolution is the system that actually changes a unit’s ceiling. You raise an Anima’s Bond level through Bond Encounters, and hitting the right milestone makes it eligible to evolve into a stronger, sometimes role-shifted, form. This is covered in full in the Bond guide and the evolution guide, and it is the closest thing the game has to a long-term power investment.

The Apex Club lets you name one Anima as your Star Anima and clear repeatable challenges to upgrade that Anima’s skill, with a chance at exceptionally rare Anima on repeat clears. It is also where the CBT2 endgame content lives, including the hardest-difficulty Riddle-style encounters that test a fully built team.

Catching duplicates of an Anima you already own is a real source of account depth in the current build, alongside the free rewards Apex Club hands out for grinding. This is closer to the “constellation” or “dupe” systems in other gacha games than to an artifact system: it strengthens a unit you already field rather than adding an equippable item.

Acquisition, not equipment, is where most of an Anima’s growth budget goes.

The CBT1 system that almost was: Nutrition

During the first closed beta test, the game briefly had an early itemization-adjacent system that testers referred to as Nutrition. It functioned as something closer to an artifact system than anything currently in the game, but it was removed before the current test cycle and does not appear in the build today.

Treat Nutrition as a cut prototype, not a preview of what is coming back. HoYoverse has iterated heavily on core systems between beta cycles (the direct-invite PvP mode is a good example of something added between tests rather than removed), so systems do change test over test. But there is no signal that Nutrition, specifically, is due for a return.

Why a full gear system is unlikely at launch

This is our own read, not an official statement, so treat it as an expectation rather than a roadmap. There are two practical reasons a Genshin- or Star Rail-style gear layer is a hard sell for this game specifically.

The roster is already a heavy grind on its own. The Anima dex runs 84 entries deep, and getting a competitive roster means leveling, Bonding, and evolving a meaningful chunk of that list, not just your five favorites. Stacking a substat-rolling gear system on top of that would mean players need to farm domains or dungeons for equipment on dozens of units at once, which is a much bigger ask than a single-character action RPG asking players to gear five or six mains.

The auto-chess format rewards roster breadth over single-unit optimization. Formation-building in Nexus Anima is about assembling a full nine-Anima lineup with the right Trait rows and Aspect synergy, not about maximizing one carry’s damage output the way an artifact system typically does. A gear system tuned for single-target optimization sits awkwardly next to a format that already rewards spreading investment across a team.

Neither reason rules a gear system out forever. If it arrives, our expectation is that it would be simple (a light stat-boost item with no substat rolling) or added later in the game’s life once most players already have a maxed core roster and are looking for a new resource sink. That is speculation on our part, not a confirmed plan.

How this compares to Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail

If you are coming from either game, here is the practical difference in what your resources buy you.

System	Genshin Impact / Star Rail	Honkai: Nexus Anima
Equipment	Artifacts / relics with rolled substats	None
Main power lever	Character level, talents, weapon/light cone, artifacts	Anima level, Bond, Evolution
Endgame farming target	Domain runs for better substat rolls	Apex Club clears for Star Anima skill upgrades and duplicates
Roster breadth vs. depth	Rewards deep investment in a small main team	Rewards a wider roster for formation flexibility
RNG on gear quality	Yes, substats roll randomly per piece	No equivalent RNG layer

The upshot: if artifact farming is your least favorite part of Genshin or Star Rail, Nexus Anima removes that step entirely. If you enjoy the long-tail optimization that gear rerolling provides, you will not find an equivalent grind here, at least not yet.

Apex Club’s Star Anima upgrades are the closest thing to a gear-adjacent power system currently in the game.

How HoYoverse’s other gacha games handle gear

If you are weighing whether to invest in Nexus Anima based on how much of a second job the gear grind becomes, it helps to see where this game sits relative to HoYoverse’s other titles, all of which do have some form of equippable gear.

Genshin Impact uses artifacts: five equip slots per character, each piece rolling random substats, farmed from repeatable domains. It is widely considered the single most time-consuming system in the game, and a large share of the community’s endgame conversation is about substat efficiency.

Honkai: Star Rail inherited the same idea as Relics and Planar Ornaments, with the same domain-farming loop and the same substat RNG, just reskinned for a turn-based combat system instead of an action one.

Zenless Zone Zero uses Drive Discs, a version of the same substat-rolling gear loop adapted to its own combat pacing.

Every other major HoYoverse gacha built a gear layer with rolled substats into its core loop. Nexus Anima, at least in its current closed-beta form, is the outlier that has not. Whether that holds through launch is genuinely unclear, since the company has a strong pattern of eventually adding one, but it is also the first of these games built around an auto-chess format with a much wider active roster than the four-to-eight characters a Genshin or Star Rail team actually fields, which is exactly the structural reason a gear system is a harder fit here (see above).

What this means if you are free-to-play

The absence of a gear system removes one specific whale-versus-F2P gap that exists in Genshin and Star Rail: substat luck. In those games, a free player and a paying player can own the exact same character and still be meaningfully apart in performance because one rolled better artifact lines. That gap does not exist here, because there is nothing to roll.

A gap still exists, just a different kind. It shows up in roster breadth (how many Anima you have leveled, bonded, and evolved) and in duplicate depth (how many copies of your key units you have caught), both of which paying players can accelerate but F2P players can still reach through time and consistent play. That is a meaningfully different shape of advantage than artifact RNG: it rewards playing more, not rolling better, which is a friendlier trade for anyone planning to stay free-to-play long term.

What actually moves the needle on your Anima’s power right now

If you are trying to plan resource spending without a gear system to chase, here is the practical order of operations.

1. Settle your formation first. Decide the nine Anima you actually want to field, using the formation guide and the Aspect synergy guide, before you commit heavy investment anywhere.
2. Level and Bond your core, not your whole dex. Spreading investment across every Anima you own is slow; concentrating on the handful in your active formation reaches Evolution milestones far sooner, exactly as the Bond guide lays out.
3. Run Apex Club once your core is stable. Naming a Star Anima and clearing challenges upgrades its skill and is one of the more reliable sources of rare duplicates and account depth in the current build.
4. Treat pulls as acquisition, not gearing. Since there is nothing to reroll or re-farm on a unit you already have, most of your currency should go toward acquiring the Anima and Eidos your formation is missing. The gacha guide covers banners, currencies, and pity in full.

None of this requires tracking a single substat, which is the biggest practical difference from Genshin Impact or Star Rail account planning.

Bottom line

Honkai: Nexus Anima has no artifact or relic system in its current form, and the closest thing the first beta had (Nutrition) was cut before this test cycle. Power comes from leveling, Bonding into Evolution, Apex Club’s Star Anima upgrades, and duplicate catches, four systems that are already fully documented on this site. A full gear layer is unlikely at launch given how much the existing roster grind already asks of players, but nothing is ruled out officially.

Start with the formation guide to settle your nine, then read the Bond guide and evolution guide to understand where your leveling and Bonding time actually pays off. Browse the Anima dex and Eidos database for the full roster, and check the tier list once you are ready to decide who earns that investment first.