What Is a Character in Genshin Impact: How to Get One, the 6 Ascension Tiers & Total Lifetime Materials

Most characters come from Wishing, but that's not the only path:

• Wishing: a random pull on limited or standard banners using Primogems/Fates — the only way to get most 5-star characters.
• Story/character quests: a handful of early companions are handed to you for free just by finishing the right opening quest chain, no Wishing required.
• In-game events: some limited 4-star characters are given for free after clearing a time-limited event's full quest chain — miss the event, and that free pickup is gone.
• Currency shops: Paimon's Bargains uses leftover Starglitter/Stardust from duplicate pulls, and the Reputation shop uses faction reputation points — both are limited to 4-star characters, never 5-star.
• Gift codes/livestreams: rare, and usually hand out Primogems/materials rather than a full character outright.

Total across all 6 tiers: 420,000 Mora — the exact same figure for every character in our database (added up ourselves from the 116 of 118 profiles with complete data — see the total material table below).

Every character has 3 combat talents: Normal Attack (the melee/ranged combo), Elemental Skill (short cooldown, its own stamina/resource cost) and Elemental Burst (needs enough Energy built up first). Each talent levels independently from 1 up to 10, costing Mora + tiered talent books + common drops + one Crown of Insight for that final 9→10 step — exact figures are in the total material table below. Beyond the 3 combat talents, there are 1-2 passive talents that unlock automatically at Ascension tier 1 and tier 4 — no separate leveling needed.

A Constellation is 6 tiers of extra power, unlocked by getting an additional copy of that same character — pulling a duplicate on the Wish (C1→C6), or for some 4-star characters, redeeming a copy with Starglitter at a currency shop. Each constellation level adds that character's own unique effect (more damage, shorter cooldowns, a special extra effect...) — it's entirely separate from Ascension or Talents, and completely optional: the character is fully playable at C0.

This is a figure we added up ourselves from our internal data (resources/genshin-char-mats.php), computed across 116 of 118 character records that have complete ascension data (2 non-playable entries excluded), and confirmed to be the exact same number repeated identically for every character — nothing copied from any other site.

⚠ We deliberately dropped two rows from this table: character EXP books and the Mora spent leveling 1→90 with EXP — our internal data has no per-level EXP cost table right now, and we refuse to guess or copy that number from elsewhere just to fill a cell. A missing row beats a made-up number.