Gold & Gears is the recent Simulated Universe event that grants all sorts of useful rewards for your team. In order to get through this challenging Honkai Star Rail Simulated Universe all the way up to Conundrum 6, you will want a stellar team along with a strong strat to ensure your victory.
HSR Simulated Universe Gold & Gears best characters
The Simulated Universe has some amazing Blessings that pair well with several characters that you might already have. I have included some of the best possible characters for running these events, as well as some free characters that you will most likely already have available to you.
- Jingliu: 5-star; She's one of the best characters in the game since she scales off of Crit damage and has the ability to freeze enemies and bosses with the Remembrance Blessings.
- Black Swan: 5-star; if you have some DOT characters to pair up with Black Swan, like Kafka, she can do some massive damage with her kit. Since she can stack arcana, she will help to shred defense through her skill. Her downside is that enemies have to take a turn first, but a well-built DOT team will be able to blow away just about anything you come across, especially with the Blessings and with the Capitalism strat. Also, you can currently get either Guinaifen or Sampo for free until patch 2.1 to make a strong team with her.
- Dan Heng, Imbibitor Lunae: 5-star; DHIL's damage is front-loaded and straightforward, and he's also Crit-based, similar to Jingliu.
- Kafka: 5-star; not available in current Event Warp. Many Nihility Blessings trigger when DOTs go off, so you'll often get those extra blessings both with her Skill and her Ultimates.
- Ruan Mei: 5-star; Ruan Mei is just incredibly powerful. She makes your team faster, gives a team-wide damage increase, and increases break efficiency. Her Ultimate will then let you debuff enemies, basically preventing the enemies from doing anything, and her Technique has bonus effects in Simulated Universe.
- Dr. Ratio: 5-star; Looking for a free character that does well in Gold & Gears? Ratio has some great damage multipliers; his kit also pairs well with the Hunt and Elation Blessings in Sim U. He also plays well with Guinaifen's debuffs with her E1 and certain Nihility Light Cones such as Resolution Shines as Pearls of Sweat.
- Lynx: 4-star; Lynx is a solid healer for Sim U, especially for a 4-star; her Ultimate has an AoE cleanse to help remove debuffs.
The best free team Gold & Gears setup
A great free team for Gold & Gears would be Dr. Ratio, Lynx, Guinaifen, and either Fire Trailblazer or March 7th.
Related: Honkai Star Rail (HSR) Codes – 2.0 Livestream Codes!
Simulated Universe Gold & Gears best strategy - Best dice faces & builds
Conundrum 6 on Torturous is the highest level that you will see Stellar Jades given as a reward for completion, so you want to make sure that you can get at least that high. In order to complete up to this point and beyond, you will want a broken start to help you power through all the hardest parts. Here is a nearly infallible way to get through even the most challenging with halfway decent team comp.
- Pick the path you have the best characters for, and ban the worst paths for your characters.
- Choose the Company Time dice in your Custom Dice Heterogeneity menu. Make sure to unlock the second golden face in the Gold and Gears skill tree.
- Customize the dice faces to make as many transaction domains show up as possible. Therefore, prioritize "Copy Domain" faces and faces that generate Cosmic Fragments. General: Time Trade also works pretty well with this dice setup.
- When you enter the plane, select the Miracle Universe: Gain 1 Curio. In the Curio menu, choose Price of Peace. No other starter combinations will work.
- If you don't get the two items above, reset by running past the first two enemies (killing the third enemy) enter the next room, quit out of the sim, and then head back inside. This will reset the RNG to try to set up both Miracle Universe and Price of Peace again. This is the most annoying part, but it's super worth the grind.
- Play it safe by moving around the Domains that will need you to fight and try to touch as many Transaction Domains as possible. Use the copy dice face to copy as many Transaction Domains as possible.
- Prioritize Blessings that synergize with your team and your path. Basically, always choose Auspicious Star.
- When you move into a Transaction Domain, chat with Herta first. She sells Curios; look for ones that increase Fragments you get or lowers the cost of items in Transaction Domains. Also, purchasing good Curios will take those out of the pool, making it more likely to get items you really want in the future. Screwllum is also there; he sells additional blessings to help make your team more powerful.
- Prioritize getting the Curios like Typical Genius Society Gossip and Vile Mechanical Satellite #900 to get even more Fragments. After getting these, make sure to start aggressively buying Blessings from Screwllum. Any blessings with buffs like additional healing, defense, speed, and damage boosting will be great here.
- Don'ts: When given options for Curios, never choose Rubert Empire Mechanical Cogwheel. Don't spend Fragments on resetting blessings; save them all for Transaction Domains. In the Respite Domain, don't buy from Herta since you won't get the Fragments refund outside of Transaction domains.
- In the final Respite Domain, you will be able to upgrade your most powerful Blessings with Herta to make your team as powerful as possible for the last boss. You will also get Cosmic Fragments back while leveling up the Blessings at this point, so you should be able to upgrade just about anything you want. Increase your team's defense and lower the amount of damage the boss can deal to lower your damage taken as much as possible. Shield boosting is also a great choice here.
For more Honkai Star Rail, check out All Treasure Chest Locations in Honkai Star Rail on Pro Game Guides!
Mina Smith is freelance writer from Richmond, VA who specializes in video game articles, mostly how-to guides. She has been writing about video games full time since 2019, but started part-time in this career almost a decade. Her number one passion has been video games since the 1990s, and her favorites are FF1, Baten Kaitos, and Viewfinder. In the past five years, Mina has written more than 2,500 articles and has garnered about a quarter of a billion views from audiences all over the world.