It took 4 years but Genshin Impact is finally adding a new world level in update 5.0 that makes character materials easier to farm – plus 1 million free Mora for all

Since launch, the base difficulty of Genshin Impact has been capped at World Level 8, bottlenecking the strength and loot of open-world enemies and putting them well below the average power of a well-built player. With update 5.0 and the release of the Natlan region later this month, developer HoYoverse is finally releasing World Level 9, upping the difficulty considerably and making character materials much easier to farm.

This change was announced in the latest Genshin Impact developer discussion alongside a few other quality-of-life wins. World Level 9 will be unlocked at Adventure Rank 58, three levels into the soft cap zone where AR levels slow down considerably. Enemies, elites, and bosses will go up "by about 10" levels, and will drop more materials as a result.

The headliner is this: defeating world bosses will "guarantee at least three character level-up materials" in WL9, dramatically shortening the grind for ascending new characters. You need 46 materials to take someone to the max level of 90, and on WL8 you can get two or three for every 40-Resin kill. With "at least three" materials dropping in WL9, seemingly with a chance of four, the average Resin cost of maxing a character will go down significantly. It's a welcome change after years of ending up with 43 materials and somehow always getting two on what could be the last kill.

Normal enemies should drop additional materials as well, and update 5.0 is taking aim at a few notoriously stingy enemies to have them yield even more. This includes Specters, Abyss Mages, Nobushi and Kairagi warriors (whose materials are notoriously overused), and the Ruin Guard variants.

In a similar vein, the process of tracking down the local specialties needed to ascend characters will be streamlined in update 5.0. Currently, the go-to strategy is pulling up the interactive Genshin Impact map to find where these things are located. With update 5.0, an in-game tracking function will be added, marking "the location range of regional specialties with multiple blue circles" and indicating how many more you can collect in that area. Once you've grabbed them all, you can move to a new designated gathering region.

Other new features include expected additions to the artifact strongbox, most notably the Gilded Dreams, Deepwood Memories, Marechaussee Hunter, and Golden Troupe sets; a search function for the food inventory; UI optimizations on crafting and forging; and battle pass missions that will make it easier to gain levels each patch.

"For the above adjustments, the developers will issue 1 million Mora in one go," the dev notes conclude. "Please stay tuned for the official notice on distribution details." Quality-of-life changes and free gold? Oh, twist my arm, Genshin.

Over a dozen Genshin Impact voice actors lay into developer HoYoverse for more inexplicably "pale" characters after Natlan reveal: "You still got time to fix it."