Arknights doesn’t hand you a guaranteed rate-up like some of its rivals do. Pull enough times on a standard banner and you’re mathematically guaranteed a 6-star operator by pull 99, but that operator could be anyone in the pool, and there’s a real chance it isn’t the one you wanted. The good news: Hypergryph publishes its rates, and once you understand the two-layer system (soft/hard pity for rarity, then a separate coin-flip for the specific operator), the odds stop feeling random and start feeling like a spreadsheet. This piece walks through the actual math, in Orundum, Originium, and US dollars, so you know what a pull is worth before you spend on it.
The short answer: what are Arknights pity odds, really?
Every single headhunting pull in Arknights has a base 2% chance of landing a 6-star operator. That rate holds flat for the first 50 pulls in a pity cycle. If you haven’t hit a 6-star by pull 50, the game starts soft pity: the chance climbs by 2 percentage points with every additional pull, 4% on pull 51, 6% on pull 52, and so on, until it hits 100% at pull 99, the hard pity ceiling. You are never more than 99 pulls from a 6-star.
That guarantees a 6-star. It does not guarantee the specific operator you’re chasing. On a standard headhunting banner, each 6-star result carries only a 50% chance of being one of the featured rate-up operators, with zero pity backstop tied to that specific unit. You could, in theory, pull a dozen 6-stars in a row and never land the one you want, though the odds of that streak are vanishingly small (roughly 1 in 4,096). Limited banners behave differently and are considerably more forgiving, which we’ll get to in the pity-cost table below.
Arknights gacha rates: the official numbers
Arknights, developed by Hypergryph and published internationally by Yostar, has run its headhunting system with almost no changes since its 2019 launch. Because the game operates in markets like mainland China and Japan, where gacha probability disclosure is a legal requirement, its rates have been publicly documented for years and are consistently reproduced by community reference sites such as the Arknights Terra Wiki and independent tools like Pity Calculator. Here is the base rate table for a standard character headhunting banner.
| Rarity | Base pull rate | Pity mechanic |
|---|---|---|
| 6-star operator | 2% | Soft pity from pull 51 (+2pp/pull), hard pity at pull 99 |
| 5-star or better | Guaranteed in first 10 pulls of any 10-pull | Floor guarantee, resets each 10-pull |
| Featured 6-star (standard banner) | 50% of any 6-star result | No dedicated pity, flat coin-flip every time |
| Featured 6-star (limited banner) | ~50-70% of any 6-star result, split if two operators are featured | Focused Selection guarantee at 150 pulls |
These figures are also mirrored on the GachaWiki headhunting reference page, which independently documents the same soft/hard pity curve and banner mechanics. Two things stand out compared to the anime-gacha crowd. First, Arknights’ base 6-star rate (2%) is more than double what you’ll find in most Chinese-developed gacha games, where 5-star rates commonly sit near 0.6%. Second, the standard-banner featured-operator mechanic has no equivalent to the “lose the 50/50, guaranteed next time” system that Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail use. If you lose the coin-flip on a standard banner, the counter simply resets to zero and you start climbing back toward soft pity again.
Standard banner vs. limited banner: the guarantee that actually matters
This is the detail that separates Arknights from most of its competitors, and it’s also the detail most guides skip. There are two distinct headhunting formats, and they behave very differently once you’re past the point of casual spending.
Standard headhunting banners
These run continuously and rotate two “up” 6-star operators at a time. Every 6-star pulled has a flat 50% chance of being one of the two featured units, with no additional protection. There is no ceiling that forces the featured unit to appear. In practice this means a standard-banner chase is an open-ended probability problem: the expected number of pulls trends toward a number, but there’s no hard stop.
Limited and collaboration banners
Limited banners (seasonal releases tied to a new operator, plus most collaboration events) add a real safety net called Focused Selection: if you haven’t obtained the featured limited operator by the time you reach 150 pulls, the next 6-star you pull is guaranteed to be that operator. Collaboration banners use a tighter version of the same idea, guaranteeing the featured unit within 120 pulls. On top of that, since 2024 Hypergryph has layered in a currency called Headhunting Data Contracts, which accumulate at one per pull. Once you bank 300 contracts, you can exchange them directly for a limited operator of your choice from that banner, no RNG involved at all. That 300-pull threshold is the true, unconditional pity cap. It just costs more than most players will ever need to spend, because the earlier guarantees usually kick in first.
The pity-cost table: what a guaranteed 6-star actually costs
Every headhunting pull costs 600 Orundum, or you can spend one Headhunting Permit if you’ve earned one from events or mailed rewards. Orundum can be earned for free through gameplay, but the premium currency, Originium, converts into it at a fixed in-game rate of 1 Originium = 180 Orundum. That means one pull is worth roughly 3.33 Originium if you bought it outright. Originium itself is sold in five US pricing tiers through the game’s in-app store, listed on both the Google Play storefront and Apple’s App Store, with per-unit value improving at the mid tiers before flattening out at the largest pack.
| Originium pack (USD) | Originium received | Cost per Originium | Cost per pull |
|---|---|---|---|
| $4.99 – cluster | 6 | $0.832 | $2.77 |
| $14.99 – pile | 20 | $0.750 | $2.50 |
| $29.99 – pack | 40 | $0.750 | $2.50 |
| $49.99 – box | 66 | $0.757 | $2.52 |
| $99.99 – crate | 130 | $0.769 | $2.56 |
Now the part that matters: how many pulls, in Orundum and dollars, does it take to guarantee a 6-star and then the specific one you want? The table below uses the best-value pricing ($14.99/$29.99 tiers, $0.75 per Originium) at the low end and the smallest-pack pricing ($4.99 tier, $0.832 per Originium) at the high end, so you can see the real spread depending on how you buy.
| Milestone | Pulls | Orundum | Originium | Cost (best to worst pricing) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hard pity, ANY 6-star guaranteed | 99 | 59,400 | 330 | $247 – $274 |
| Expected value, featured unit (standard banner, EV model) | ~69 | 41,514 | 231 | $173 – $192 |
| Median case, featured unit (50% of players land it by here) | 57 | 34,200 | 190 | $142 – $158 |
| 90th percentile, featured unit | 142 | 85,200 | 473 | $355 – $394 |
| Focused Selection guarantee (limited banner) | 150 | 90,000 | 500 | $375 – $416 |
| Headhunting Data Contract spark (absolute guarantee, limited banner) | 300 | 180,000 | 1,000 | $750 – $832 |
The takeaway sits in the gap between rows two and six. The mathematical expectation says you’ll land the featured operator on a standard banner around pull 69, for roughly $173-$192. But “expectation” is an average across thousands of players, not a promise to any one of them. If you specifically want a limited operator with zero risk of missing it, the true guaranteed price is the 300-pull spark cap, at $750-$832. Everything between those numbers is you accepting some amount of RNG risk in exchange for a lower expected spend.
Step-by-step: how the expected-value math actually works
Here’s how that 69-pull expected value figure gets built, using only the published rates above. No estimation, just the pity curve run pull by pull.
- Step 1, find the survival probability at each pull. For pulls 1 through 50, the chance of NOT getting a 6-star on any given pull is 98%. From pull 51 onward, that no-6-star chance shrinks by 2 percentage points every pull (96% on pull 51, 94% on pull 52, and so on) until it hits 0% at pull 99.
- Step 2, multiply survival probabilities together. The chance you’re still waiting for a 6-star after n pulls is the product of all the individual “no 6-star” chances up to that point. By pull 50 that cumulative figure is about 36.4%, and by pull 74 it’s under 0.02%.
- Step 3, sum the survival curve to get expected pulls to any 6-star. Summing that survival probability across every pull from 0 to 98 gives the expected number of pulls before your first 6-star: 34.6 pulls on average.
- Step 4, apply the 50% featured-unit coin-flip. On a standard banner, half of all 6-stars aren’t the one you want, which resets your pity counter back to zero and starts a fresh 34.6-pull cycle. This is a renewal process: the expected number of complete cycles needed before a win is 1 divided by the win probability (1 / 0.5 = 2 cycles).
- Step 5, multiply cycles by pulls-per-cycle. Two expected cycles of 34.6 pulls each gives 69.2 expected pulls to land the featured operator on a standard banner, the figure used in the pity-cost table above.
- Step 6, convert to spend. 69.2 pulls × 600 Orundum = 41,514 Orundum ÷ 180 = 230.6 Originium, priced at $0.75-$0.832 per Originium depending on which pack tier you buy, landing at roughly $173-$192.
That math only holds for standard banners, where the featured-unit coin-flip resets on every loss with no memory. On limited banners, the Focused Selection mechanic caps your worst-case scenario at 150 pulls instead of letting the geometric process run indefinitely, which is why the limited-banner numbers in the pity-cost table look more predictable than the open-ended standard-banner tail.
Five worked examples with real numbers
Example 1: The free-to-play grinder. A player saves 34,200 Orundum through daily missions and events, spending zero real money, and reaches pull 57, the median point where roughly half of all players chasing a standard-banner featured operator will have already gotten it. Their odds at that point are a coin flip, not a guarantee.
Example 2: The $30 spender. Someone buys one $29.99 Originium pack (40 Originium, converting to 7,200 Orundum, or 12 pulls). That covers roughly 17% of the expected 69-pull journey to a standard-banner featured unit. It’s a reasonable top-up, not remotely close to a guarantee.
Example 3: The average spender chasing a standard banner. Hitting the expected-value mark of 69 pulls means buying roughly 231 Originium. The cheapest way to reach that is stacking $14.99 and $29.99 packs (both $0.75/Originium), landing around $173. Buying only $4.99 packs to hit the same 231 Originium costs about $192, an 11% markup just for choosing the smaller, less efficient tier.
Example 4: The limited-banner completionist. A player wants total certainty on a brand-new limited operator and decides to bank Headhunting Data Contracts straight to the 300-pull spark exchange, skipping RNG entirely. That’s 1,000 Originium, or roughly $750 at the best per-unit pricing, and $832 buying only the smallest pack. It’s the single most expensive path in this article, but it’s also the only one with a 100% success rate stated up front.
Example 5: The unlucky standard-banner chaser. A player reaches the 90th percentile of bad luck, needing 142 pulls (about 473 Originium, $355-$394) before landing their featured operator on a standard banner. That’s more than double the expected-value spend, and it’s the real-world reminder that “average” outcomes and “guaranteed” outcomes are two very different promises on a standard banner specifically.
Myths vs. facts about Arknights pity
Myth: “Pity guarantees the operator I want.” Fact: on standard banners, pity only guarantees some 6-star by pull 99. It does not guarantee the featured one. That requires either winning the 50% coin-flip or reaching a limited banner’s separate 150-pull Focused Selection or 300-pull spark systems.
Myth: “Losing the 50/50 makes the next one guaranteed.” Fact: that’s how Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail work, not Arknights. On a standard Arknights banner, losing the coin-flip simply resets your rarity pity counter to zero. There’s no memory of past losses tied to a specific operator.
Myth: “Arknights’ 2% base rate makes it cheaper than other gacha games.” Fact: the higher base rate does shorten the average wait for a 6-star (34.6 pulls vs. 60-90+ in games with 0.6% base rates), but the 50% featured-unit split and the lack of a compounding guarantee on standard banners can offset that advantage when you’re chasing one specific character rather than any 6-star.
Myth: “You have to spend real money to hit pity.” Fact: Orundum is earned through normal gameplay, dailies, and story progress. Spending accelerates the timeline, but it isn’t required to eventually reach hard pity or, on limited banners, the Focused Selection and spark thresholds.
Myth: “These odds are unregulated marketing numbers.” Fact: because Arknights operates in markets with legal gacha-disclosure requirements, its in-game rate text is a compliance document, not a promotional one, and the numbers used throughout this article trace back to that disclosed system as reproduced by community reference sites.
Why Arknights’ system is structured this way
Arknights launched in 2019, well before “soft pity plus guaranteed rate-up” became the industry default that Genshin Impact popularized a year later. Hypergryph’s design keeps the two layers, rarity pity and featured-unit odds, mostly separate, which is friendlier to players chasing a 6-star for team-building but tougher on players chasing one specific limited character. The 2024 addition of Headhunting Data Contracts reads as a direct response to that gap: it gives long-term players and heavy spenders a hard ceiling on cost without changing the underlying probability system for everyone else. It’s a patch on an older design rather than a rebuild, and that shows in how the numbers land: generous on rarity, comparatively stingy on guaranteeing the specific unit, until you’re willing to pay for the spark exchange outright.
How Arknights compares to the rest of the pity-system field
Against the broader gacha field, Arknights sits in an unusual spot. Its base 6-star rate (2%) is far higher than the roughly 0.6-0.8% rates common in games like Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Wuthering Waves, and its hard pity at 99 pulls arrives faster than the 90-pull ceilings typical elsewhere. But those other games compensate with a guaranteed-next-featured mechanic after a lost 50/50, something Arknights’ standard banners simply don’t have. Limited banners close most of that gap with the 150-pull Focused Selection guarantee, landing closer to what players of other pity systems would recognize, and the 300-pull spark cap functions similarly to a spark or exchange system seen in several other long-running gacha titles. The practical result: Arknights rewards patience and general roster-building more than it rewards chasing one specific unit on a standard rotation.
Is a pull worth the money?
Judged purely on expected value, a single Arknights pull costs $2.50-$2.77 depending on the pack tier, for a 2% shot at any 6-star and a 1% shot at a specific featured one on a standard banner. That’s a worse per-pull specific-unit rate than games with lower base rarity rates but a guaranteed-next-loss mechanic, because Arknights’ 50/50 has no memory. Where Arknights earns its reputation as comparatively player-friendly is the ceiling: 99 pulls guarantees rarity, and on limited banners, 150 pulls guarantees the actual operator you’re after, both well below what many competing systems require. If you’re chasing a specific limited character and want price certainty going in, budget for the 150-pull Focused Selection mark (roughly $375-$416) rather than the expected-value average, since half of all players will need more than the median 57 pulls to get there.
Glossary: Arknights gacha terms explained
A few terms come up constantly in Arknights pity discussions, and mixing them up is the fastest way to misjudge your own spending. Orundum is the standard, farmable headhunting currency. You earn it through dailies, story missions, and events, and 600 of it buys a single pull. Originium, sometimes labeled Originite Prime in the client, is the paid premium currency, sold in the five USD tiers listed above and convertible into Orundum at a fixed 1-to-180 rate. A Headhunting Permit is a ticket-style item, usually earned from events or the New Year celebration, that covers exactly one pull without touching your Orundum balance.
Soft pity refers to the window (pulls 51-98 in Arknights) where your 6-star odds climb but haven’t yet hit certainty. Hard pity is the guaranteed point, pull 99. Focused Selection is the limited-banner mechanic that guarantees the featured operator by pull 150 if you haven’t already gotten it through normal luck. Headhunting Data Contracts are the spark currency added in 2024, banking one unit per pull and redeemable for a chosen limited operator once you reach 300. None of these terms are interchangeable, and guides that blur soft pity with the featured-unit coin-flip are usually the ones giving readers an inflated sense of how “guaranteed” their spending really is.
Common mistakes that inflate what you actually spend
The single most expensive mistake is buying only the smallest Originium tier out of habit. Stacking $4.99 clusters instead of $14.99 or $29.99 packs adds roughly 11% to the total cost of reaching any milestone in the pity-cost table, purely from worse per-unit pricing, with no change in odds. The second mistake is treating the expected-value figure (69 pulls) as a spending target rather than an average. Because the underlying process has no memory on standard banners, roughly half of all players chasing a featured unit will need more than the 57-pull median, and a meaningful share will land past 142 pulls at the 90th percentile. Budgeting only for the average leaves no room for a below-average run.
The third mistake is confusing standard and limited banners when planning a budget. A player aiming for a brand-new limited operator who budgets using the standard-banner EV math (roughly $173-$192) can end up short, because that number assumes an open-ended 50/50 with no ceiling. The actual worst-case backstop on a limited banner, the 300-pull Headhunting Data Contract spark, costs closer to $750-$832. Knowing which banner type you’re pulling on, and which guarantee actually applies, changes the real budget by a factor of four.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Arknights pity system in simple terms?
It’s a two-layer system. Layer one guarantees a 6-star operator by pull 99 at the latest, with the odds climbing from 2% to 100% starting at pull 51. Layer two decides whether that 6-star is the specific featured operator you want, which on standard banners is a flat 50% chance with no additional pity attached.
How many pulls until hard pity in Arknights?
99 pulls guarantees a 6-star operator of some kind. That’s 59,400 Orundum, or 330 Originium, costing roughly $247-$274 depending on which pack tier you buy from.
Does Arknights have a 50/50 system like Genshin Impact?
Only in the loosest sense. Both games split featured-unit odds roughly 50/50, but Genshin guarantees the featured character if you lose that coin-flip once. Arknights’ standard banners don’t carry that guarantee forward, since losing simply resets your rarity pity counter. Limited banners add a separate 150-pull Focused Selection guarantee that functions more like a true backstop.
What is the Headhunting Data Contract spark system?
It’s a currency introduced in 2024 that accumulates at one unit per pull on limited banners. Once you reach 300 contracts, you can exchange them directly for a limited operator of your choice from that banner, guaranteed, with no RNG involved. It’s the single most expensive but most certain path to a specific limited unit, at roughly $750-$832.
How much does it cost to guarantee a 6-star operator in Arknights?
Guaranteeing any 6-star costs $247-$274 (99 pulls). Guaranteeing a specific featured operator on a limited banner via Focused Selection costs $375-$416 (150 pulls). Guaranteeing a specific limited operator with zero risk, via the spark exchange, costs $750-$832 (300 pulls).
Does pity carry over between Arknights banners?
The rarity pity counter (the 50/99 soft/hard pity curve) carries over between consecutive standard headhunting banners. The Headhunting Data Contract spark counter does not transfer between different limited banners. Each new limited banner starts that count back at zero.
Is Arknights’ gacha rate legally disclosed?
Yes. Arknights operates in markets, including mainland China and Japan, that legally require gacha probability disclosure, and the game’s in-game rate details reflect that requirement rather than a purely promotional figure.
