Equipping Your Shipgirls
In the Beginning
In the beginning, all your gear will come from Gear Boxes, which drop for you while engaging in the content. They appear in your Depot under Items.
Gear Boxes come in tiers. The lowest two levels can be combined five-for-one into the next higher level. At the very beginning, you need whatever gear you can get, but very soon, you should combine the gear boxes up to purple. You cannot combine to get gold or rainbow boxes.
A Gear Box will contain exactly one piece of gear, with a chance of it being the current color (purple, for instance) or one level below (blue). Rainbow boxes always have one rainbow drop (I believe), but they aren't very common.
By Midgame
You can advance fairly far simply by equipping your Shipgirls with the purple and gold drops you get, and you don't need to be very mindful. But eventually, you'll want to be more mindful.
I use the Azur Lane Community Tier List to help me identify the gear I want. When you click on a Shipgirl, it'll give you a list of recommended gear in a sort of tier system. Gear that is considered equivalent will be stacked. You'll see it say "1 / 2" for the stack, and if you click on the second item in the stack, it will cycle through the entire stack for you. Double-clicking the top item in the stack will take you to the official wiki page for that drop
The best quality gear comes from these sources:
- The Core Data Shop
- Research
- The Gear Lab
- Special Event Drops
Core Data Shop
Core Data is provided when you complete Hard Mode stages, of which you can only do 3 per day. It's worth doing all 3 each day. Note that you get different types of retrofit blueprints based on the stage.
| Stage | Retrofit Blueprint Type |
|---|---|
| X-1 | Destroyer |
| X-2 | Cruiser |
| X-3 | Battleship |
| X-4 | Carrier |
For instance, hard maps 4-1 and 5-1 both drop destroyer retrofit blueprints. Thus, if you know which type you'll need for your next retrofit, you can target the correct stage.
Be mindful how you spend Core Data in the Core Data shop. They drop slowly.
Research
Research blueprints drop all over the place. In the Depot, you click on the Craft tab, and you're shown what you can make. Some blueprints only drop in certain places. For instance, all cruisers would like the Aux item Improved Hydraulic Rudder. This is a research-only drop: Acquired through Research (all series), Mirror Involution, Abyssal Refrain as a map drop from D3. In other words, if you want to farm these, you can, but you'll have to go to the War Archives, pick Mirror Involution, and run D-3 over and over and over. You need 25 per completed research. And, of course, you can only run 4 per day.
Some research drops, but rarely the top gear, come from all over the place. My current list of equipment I don't care to use but could create is very lengthy.
The Gear Lab
The Gear Lab is why you farm Operation Siren. This is a confusing page, but you can navigate it if you go to the Azur Lane Community Tier List. I've discussed this above. Pick a Shipgirl, hover over the recommended gear. Find one that says Gear Lab in the popup text. Double click it, and you'll learn more about it.
For instance, Friedrich der Große would like to use a particular DD / CL Main gun: Triple 152mm (BL 6" Mk XXV Prototype). The official Wiki will tell you a few very useful things. This is a Royal Navy gun. (You can use it on Iron Cross ships, though.) Knowing that, go back to the Gear Lab. Click on Royal Navy. Then click on CL MAIN GUNs. Scroll over, and you'll see the gold gun as a choice. Tap it, and you see it takes a variety of drops, including a particular purple gun you may or may not have.
At this point as I'm entering this information, it takes 72 Ultra High-Purity Metals. I have 10. It will be a while before I get another 62. They're not a common drop. It also needs 8 T2 Ordnance Testing Reports. I have 8, although I suspect I'll use them before I have the first drop in sufficient quantity. It also needs 4 SR Main Gun Design Plans. Once you have everything, you can click the big Change button, and you'll have the gear for Friedrich to equip.
Special Event Drops
These are the least reliable sources for drops, as you can only get the drop during the event with an exception: some of the drops are available from the War Archives. For this reason, when a special event is in progress, it's worth gaining the rewards, if you can. You never know when a particular drop will become highly valued or even part of the meta.
