How Potential Works, and How to Raise It

In the first Dev Dispatch, posted on Steam on October 1, the developers take a question from a player whose Irisalis shows “88 Potential” while another player’s shows “99.” Irisalis is a legendary you only get once, so there’s no going out to catch a better one. The developers don’t say what that overall number measures, and as far as we can find, nobody else has worked it out either.

What sits underneath the number is better understood. Two Aniimo of the same species at the same level can have different stats, and the difference is Potential. Part of it is rolled when the Aniimo is caught or hatched, and part of it you add later with materials. The guides agree on that much. But they split on several numbers that matter when you decide which Aniimo to invest in, from how the game hands out a Perfect grade to what a Capafruit does. Where they split, we show both sides and say what we’re going to test. Neither of the last two patch notes, for build 1.0.3616231.0 on September 29 and build 1.0.3629693.0 on September 30, mentions any of these systems.

Innate and Acquired Potential

Every Aniimo has six stats—HP, ATK, P.DEF, M.DEF, REGEN, and BREAK—and each one carries its own Potential, added on top of the base value for the species. At the same level, more Potential means a higher stat. It comes in two parts. Innate Potential is set when you catch the Aniimo or hatch it from an egg, and Acquired Potential is whatever you add afterward. The two together cap at 20 per stat, and the innate part caps at 10.

How much does one point add to the stat itself? We haven’t measured that yet, and the figure that gets passed around has no source we can use, so it stays off this page until we’ve tested it.

A 10 doesn’t seem to need an item. In a letter on Steam on September 3, the developers said they had raised the number of wild Aniimo with high Potential, “9/9” and “10/10.” We read those as the innate values of an Aniimo’s two recommended stats, which we come to below, and three guides agree that a 10 can turn up naturally. One guide says the natural ceiling is 9 and that only items take a stat to 10. We go with the developers.

Grades, and What Perfect Means

A new catch doesn’t show its grade. To see it, take the Aniimo to the Research Console at an Outpost and upload your capture report so it gets appraised. There are four grades, from lowest to highest Common, Good, Elite, and Perfect. The game also marks two stats on each Aniimo with a thumbs-up. Those two are its recommended stats.

The game shows the grade but never says how it’s worked out, and the guides offer two different rules. Two guides look only at the recommended stats and ask for at least 4 innate Potential in both for Good, 6 for Elite, and 8 for Perfect. A third adds up innate Potential across all six stats and puts the lines at 18 for Good, 24 for Elite, and 32 for Perfect. A fourth says the total is what counts but the recommended pair weighs more, and a fifth warns against reading the total as a rarity score at all. The way to settle it is to compare two Elites with the same total and different recommended stats, and we haven’t done that yet.

Under either rule, Perfect doesn’t mean strong everywhere. A Perfect Aniimo is high in its two recommended stats, and the other four can be low. Some Elites are also a single fruit away from Perfect. Several players have spotted Elites with a sparkle on the grade indicator, and for those the game itself points out that a Capafruit would make them Perfect. One player thinks the game looks only at the two recommended stats when it shows that hint, though nobody else has backed that up.

Capability Awakening

Acquired Potential is the part you build yourself. In the training menu, the Capability tab holds Capability Awakening, where you pick a stat and spend a material to raise it one point at a time. There are three materials, and you move through them as the stat climbs, Star Dust first, then Star Sand, then Starcryst Essence, with each point costing more than the one before. Starcryst Essence is the most valuable of the three. It comes from Omegas, Elite Training, the Holo-Battle Interlink, and the Holo-Battle Sim, and one guide adds that 10 Star Shards trade for 1 Starcryst Essence at an Outpost’s Item Exchange.

Only one guide lists the price of every point, so treat its table as a sketch until we’ve read the costs off the awakening button ourselves. By its count, the price depends on the value the stat reaches. Points 1 to 4 cost 1, 2, 3, and 4 Star Dust, points 5 to 8 cost 1 to 4 Star Sand, and points 9 to 12 cost 1 to 4 Starcryst Essence. From 13 to 20, every point costs 5 Starcryst Essence. Taking a stat from 0 to 20 would use up 10 Star Dust, 10 Star Sand, and 50 Starcryst Essence.

If that table is right, high innate Potential saves you the cheap end of the climb. A stat with 8 innate starts awakening at 9, so it skips the Star Dust and Star Sand steps altogether, while the points from 13 to 20 cost every Aniimo the same. That’s our own reading of a single source, not something we’ve measured.

You can’t awaken everything right away, either. The number of awakenings an Aniimo has open grows with its level and its Resonance stars, the developers’ September 3 letter says, and one guide adds growth stage to the list. The same letter says you can reset awakening whenever you like below level 60 and get the materials back. One guide puts a price of 200,000 Credits on the reset and places the cutoff a level later. We haven’t tried a reset yet.

Raising Innate Potential

Innate Potential can still move after the catch. A Capafruit adds 1 point of it, and an Aniimo can take only one Capafruit in its whole life. How far that point reaches is in dispute. Six guides say it raises all six stats by 1, and one of them quotes the item’s description, while two say it raises only the two recommended stats. We’ll read the description in our own game and update the box above.

Capafruits come from Capaseeds, and Capaseeds come from the Branch, which you advance by feeding it Lumin Amber. The Breezy Plains Branch, for one, has Capaseeds among its rewards. Twenty of them trade for one Capafruit at the Outpost Vendor. In the menus, open the Shop, then the Corner Shop tab, then Exchange, Outpost Vendor, and Item Exchange. For the amber itself, see our Lumin Amber page.

A Capafruit isn’t lost if a better Aniimo of the same family turns up later, because it moves across with Inherit, according to the developers’ September 3 letter. One event offers another point on top. In Tracing the Trail, the research expedition event, an expedition can give the Aniimo leading it one extra point of innate Potential, two guides say. One of them adds that the point goes to a random stat, that an Aniimo can get it only once, and that the event runs for 80 days.

Inherit

Inherit moves an Aniimo’s training onto a less developed Aniimo of the same family. Level, Resonance, stars, awakenings, and the Capafruit all go across, and it costs 20,000 Credits. Since an update the developers announced on September 21, the Inherit button sits in plain view on the Aniimo’s info screen. That takes some of the risk out of investing early, because the materials you put into the Aniimo you have now can move on to a better roll of the same family. Whether innate Potential moves as well, the sources don’t agree, and we’re not saying either way until we’ve tried it.

Routes That Guarantee Perfect

Rolling for Perfect takes patience, but a few routes take the roll out of it. The Sparkling Cube catches without fail, according to the Probability Details page on the official site, and the developers’ September 3 letter says what it catches is Perfect. Three guides add that it comes out Sparkling, too.

Umbral Aniimo are always Perfect and have colors of their own, the same letter says. You find them in Wild Surges, which come from nurturing the ecosystem, and now and then by chance in the open world. If an Umbral evolves or changes form, it loses the Umbral look but keeps the Perfect grade, and the game warns you before the evolution goes through.

For Irisalis’s season, the September 21 preview announced the Legendary Aniipod: Windchaser’s Departure, which catches every time and guarantees Perfect innate Potential, with the catch coming out Sparkling. The launch login rewards include a Random Perfect Aniimo Egg, according to the September 16 announcement. One step down sits the Aniipod Ultra. The Probability Details page lists its catch as guaranteed, and four guides say the result is at least Elite.

That brings us back to the Irisalis question. Right now its innate Potential is random. From version 1.1, the Dev Dispatch says, it will be fixed at 10 in ATK and REGEN and 5 in HP, BREAK, M.DEF, and P.DEF, and any Potential above those values will be converted into Starcryst Essence. As of October 3, version 1.1 isn’t out.

What Evolution Does

Evolution may move the target. Players report that the recommended stats belong to the form rather than the creature, so they can change when it evolves. One player’s sparkling Elite Pranky lost its sparkle on becoming a Glacy, and another player’s explanation was that the recommended stats had shifted from HP and REGEN to HP and M.DEF. Another player and one guide say that where an evolution line branches, each branch has its own recommended stats. These are a handful of accounts, and we haven’t seen it happen ourselves.

Whether the innate and acquired values themselves stay the same through evolution hasn’t been settled either. The one thing we know survives is the Perfect grade of an Umbral.

Personality

Personality is a separate layer, and an easier one to read. Each Aniimo has a four-letter personality built on the MBTI model, one letter from each pair, E or I, S or N, T or F, and J or P, which makes eight traits in all. Every letter gives one bonus in battle and another for work in the Homeland, where it raises efficiency by 20% at the work stations that match it.

Three guides agree on the battle bonuses. E gives +2% ATK and +2% BREAK, while I gives +4% REGEN. S adds 4% to damage, and N adds 5% to crit rate. T raises P.DEF by 6% and F raises M.DEF by 6%. J adds 4% to HP, and P cuts damage taken by 4%. A fourth guide, the earliest of the four, has different figures for three letters, with E at +1.5% ATK and +5% BREAK, I at +5% REGEN, and N at +3% crit rate.

The trait names are messier than the numbers, because the guides don’t agree on what to call the eight traits in English. We stick to the letters until we’ve seen the names in the game. To change a personality, use a Psyche Fruit, which rerolls all four letters at random. One guide adds that it leaves home skills and the family trait alone.

What We Haven’t Tested Yet

Nine questions are still open, and each one needs the game rather than another guide. We’ll read the Capafruit’s description, compare two Elites with the same innate total to see which rule sets the grade, and look for a wild 10 caught without items. We’ll price awakening point by point, check whether a reset below level 60 costs Credits, and measure what one point of Potential adds to a stat. Evolution needs a before-and-after look at the recommended stats and the innate values, the personality screen will show the bonuses and the trait names, and a test Inherit will show whether innate Potential goes across.

The overall Potential number that started all this is last on the list. The next thing we’re waiting on is the version 1.1 announcement, which the developers say will bring the exact Irisalis rules, with in-game mail to go with it.