Genshin Impact gives out five free five-stars this anniversary

Genshin Impact anniversaries are always a good time for players, offering primogems, pulls, and plenty of events to partake in. Now, as the game reaches its fifth year, we get five free five-star characters of our choice. And a free four-star in the archon quest, which is nice.

The first free five-star comes as the classic yearly reward of a free standard banner character of your choice. For me, it’ll be another of Genshin Impact’s Diluc, but you could, and maybe should, go for any C6’d characters you have.

“Why on Teyvat would I ever do that?”, I hear you cry. Well, as part of the celebrations, Hoyo has a new feature where getting another copy of a C6’d five-star – limited or standard, it doesn’t matter which – rewards you with a Masterless Stella Fortuna. You may recognize the name, as you unlock constellations with a regular Stella Fortuna item. This item allows you to upgrade a maxed-out character’s level to 95. You can use another to get them to 100, too.

To put this into perspective, my Dehya has all six constellations activated. If I choose her as my free standard five-star, or lose another 50/50 to her, I’ll get a Masterless Stella Fortuna. I can then give this to my level 90 Zhongli, who’ll get upgraded past the cap to level 95. Neat, huh?

Anyway, there’s even better news. Another feature called To Temper Thyself and Journey Far is coming, which offers rewards for completing daily and weekly goals. You get rewards like XP, mora, and Crowns of Insight as you go, but at the end? You can pick a free constellation of a five-star. The best part is you can do this four times, PER YEAR! Maybe a C6 Wriothesley isn’t out of my grasp at all.

The roster of characters that appeared with this announcement seems to include around half of the five-star roster, not including archons. Here is a list of the characters shown in the livestream:

• Six standard characters
  • Dehya
  • Diluc
  • Jean
  • Keqing
  • Mona
  • Qiqi
  • Tighnari
• 18 limited characters
  • Albedo
  • Ayaka
  • Ayato
  • Baizhu
  • Cyno
  • Eula
  • Ganyu
  • Hu Tao
  • Itto
  • Klee
  • Kokomi
  • Nilou
  • Shenhe
  • Tartaglia
  • Wanderer
  • Xiao
  • Yae Miko
  • Yoimiya

You can’t pick a new character you don’t already have, and you can only choose one of each (so you can’t stock up on four Ganyus, sadly), but that’s still four totally free constellations! My Ayato, Wanderer, and Itto are excited already.

As someone who’s running out of ways to grind gems, this is really good news. But as always, you can use the new Genshin Impact codes for more primogems, including those from the Genshin Impact update livestream.