Honkai: Star Rail Glossary

The table above splits into 6 layers: Basics, Combat, Gear, Stats, Gacha & Resources, and World & Lore. If you remember one trick: type the exact term you're unsure about into the search box instead of scrolling — it filters instantly by name and by layer. New players should read Combat and Stats first since those decide whether your build actually works; World & Lore is fine to read later, it doesn't affect gameplay.

These three name pairs trip up new players even though the terms sound close:

• Break is not DoT: Break is a single BIG damage hit that fires ONCE the moment an enemy's Toughness bar hits zero, staggering it and delaying its turn. DoT (Burn, Bleed, Shock…) is a SMALL hit that repeats EVERY turn until the effect expires. A team can trigger both at once — they don't exclude each other, but they scale off different stats (Break Effect for Break; DMG%/Elemental DMG for DoT).
• There's no separate "Mastery" stat like in other games — HSR folds that role into Break Effect: players familiar with a "Mastery" stat from another title often go looking for its HSR equivalent. There isn't one named "Mastery"; the closest thing is Break Effect — the SINGLE stat that scales Break and Super Break damage, fully replacing CRIT's role for Break-focused builds. Don't hunt for a stat that doesn't exist.
• DMG% (generic damage boost) doesn't always stack the same way as Elemental DMG (element-specific boost): a Light Cone or Trace usually gives generic DMG%, which stacks with any element; a 4-piece Body Relic set gives Elemental DMG, which only stacks for one specific element. Both fold into the same final damage multiplier, but knowing which source is locked to one element matters when comparing gear or switching a character's element.

Beyond the familiar ATK/DEF/HP/CRIT, four substats rarely get explained clearly despite deciding whether a build works:

• Effect Hit Rate: raises the chance YOUR debuffs land on the enemy — only matters for support/CC characters, close to useless on pure DPS.
• Effect RES: the mirror stat — sits on YOUR character, resisting debuffs the enemy applies to you, boosting survivability.
• Outgoing Healing Boost: only affects the character CASTING the heal (not the one receiving it), doesn't stack with generic ATK% — a dedicated healer-build stat.
• Energy Regeneration Rate (ERR): boosts the % of Energy gained per hit, DIFFERENT from the Energy gauge itself — ERR just makes that gauge fill faster.

Four story terms that run throughout the game, entirely separate from the build system:

• Stellaron: an artifact planted by an Aeon, usually bringing calamity to whatever world holds it — the game's main story throughline.
• Aeon: a god-tier entity, each embodying a single Concept — a character's Path name (Destruction, Preservation…) is named directly after the matching Aeon's Concept. This page only defines the concept; see all 9 Aeons (mythic names Qlipoth, Fuli, IX, Yaoshi, Lan, Nanook, Aha, Tayzzyronth, Nous) on their own page.
• Astral Express: the main vessel carrying the Trailblazer and crew across the game's worlds.
• Emanator: a mortal chosen by an Aeon, carrying a fragment of that god's power/Concept.

→ See all 9 Aeons: Concepts, blessings, mythic names

Three hardest rotating modes that reward jades: Memory of Chaos (successive boss floors), Pure Fiction (AoE score attack), and Apocalyptic Shadow (single-boss score attack). All three hinge on a team's actual stats rather than luck, making them the truest place to check whether a build is solid or just looks good on paper.

Honkai: Star Rail has NO Genshin-style elemental reaction system. An element only determines the damage type dealt and the Weakness Break debuff applied — weaknesses are a property of each individual enemy, not a fixed element-vs-element chart.

• RES by weakness (real numbers from the official game data): an enemy that is NOT weak to the element being used has a baseline 20% DMG RES against that element; an enemy that IS weak to it has 0% RES. Some enemies stack extra RES (≥40%) on top of that 20% baseline. This is why the same character's damage swings sharply between a matching-element enemy and a mismatched one, even with no reaction chart involved.
• Break Effect is nearly useless on Ice characters: Frozen carries no follow-up DoT to multiply against, it only skips the enemy's turn (with their next turn's action gauge advanced 50%) — whereas Physical/Fire/Wind/Lightning all apply an uncapped Break Effect-scaling DoT. Stacking Break Effect on an Ice DPS is close to wasted substats.

Break damage = level-based base Break damage (table below) × element coefficient × (1 + Break Effect%), where effective Break Effect is capped at 3× the base value:

• Instant Break element coefficients: Physical ×2, Fire ×2, Wind ×1.5, Lightning ×1, Ice ×1, Quantum ×0.5, Imaginary ×0.5 — this is why Physical/Fire DPS always chip away Toughness faster than Quantum/Imaginary at the same Break Effect.
• Base Break damage by level (9 confirmed data points from HoYoverse's own game data): Lv1=14 · Lv10=21 · Lv20=35 · Lv30=58 · Lv40=91 · Lv50=194 · Lv60=410 · Lv70=665 · Lv80=942.
• Follow-up DoT per element (applied after Break, NOT present for Ice/Imaginary): Physical → Bleed (coef 2, ~16% max HP/turn on regular enemies, ~7%/turn on elites/bosses); Fire → Burn (coef 1); Lightning → Shock (coef 2); Wind → Wind Shear DoT (coef 1, stacks up to 5); Quantum → Entanglement (0.6×stacks, capped at 5); Ice → Freeze (no DoT, just skips the turn, next turn's action gauge advances 50%); Imaginary → Imprison (no DoT, delays the turn and cuts SPD by 10%).