Limbus Company Beginner Guide: Tips for New Sinners

Limbus Company has a reputation for being complicated, and the first hour mostly earns it. Coins, clashes, sanity, seven different sin resources - the game throws all of it at you before you've figured out the menus. The actual loop is way smaller than it looks, though. And the game is strangely kind to beginners: all twelve Sinners are yours from the start, the story is free, and the weekly currency income is good for a gacha. Here's the short version of what matters early, so your first month of resources doesn't go to the wrong place.

Understanding the Basic Combat Loop

How a turn plays out

Each sinner carries three attack skills plus a defense skill, and they draw from a personal deck every turn - usually three copies of skill 1 down to one copy of skill 3, with the deck only refreshing once it's empty. You slot skills against enemy targets on the dashboard, hit start, and everything resolves. Turn one is thin, one skill slot per sinner, and extra slots open up as the fight runs on. Long battles get busier, not slower.

Every unit rolls a speed value each turn from its own range, and skills resolve fastest first. If your sinner is quicker than an enemy, they can redirect that enemy's skill into a clash. If an enemy is targeting your sinner directly, that sinner can always answer it back no matter the speed gap. Watch the order - the animations lie a little, the math doesn't.

Fights also have a hard ceiling. Pass turn 100 and you lose, period. It rarely comes up, but pure stall strategies get cut off by design.

Clashes and coins

When two skills collide, that's a clash. Each skill has a base power plus a stack of coins, and every coin that lands heads adds its coin power to the total. The two sides compare coin flip by coin flip, and the loser sheds a coin each phase they lose. Once one side runs out of coins, the other swings with whatever's left over. A skill with base 4 and two coins worth +3 apiece rolls anywhere from 4 to 10, so "what's the floor, what's the ceiling" is the question to ask every time you pick a target.

Levels matter here more than the game advertises. For every 3 points of offense level you hold over the enemy, your skill gets +1 clash power, and the gap pumps your damage on top of that. This is why being underleveled feels so bad in Limbus - same kit, worse dice.

Sanity is a damage stat

Sanity (SP) runs from -45 to +45, and each point shifts your coin-flip odds one percent away from a 50/50 base. 27 SP means 77% heads. -33 means 17%. Since heads are literally damage, sanity snowballs: you win clashes, you gain SP, you win more clashes. You lose SP from using E.G.O, from allies dying, and from debuffs like Sinking.

Hit -45 and things go sideways. Sinners get stuck there until the next turn starts, then they either panic or corrode. Corrosion means firing an E.G.O at whoever's nearby, your own team included. So keep SP positive on your carries, and don't spam an expensive E.G.O on a sinner who's already rattled.

Stagger wins fights

Health bars have little tick marks on them - stagger thresholds. Cross one and the unit staggers: no actions for the rest of that turn and all of the next, with every physical resistance (Slash, Pierce, Blunt) flipping to Fatal, which is double damage. Push through two or three thresholds in the same turn and it stacks harder - x2.5, then x3. Focus-firing one enemy across its threshold usually beats splitting damage evenly, since a staggered enemy deals zero damage while it sits there doing nothing.

Resonance, or why sin colors matter

Every skill has a color: Wrath, Lust, Sloth, Gluttony, Gloom, Pride, or Envy. Match two of the same color in a turn and they resonate, handing offense level bumps to the later skills in the chain. Three or more of the same color in a row makes it Absolute Resonance, which gives the whole chain a bigger flat boost - +3 at three links, +5 at four. On top of that, a ton of passives only switch on when you own or spend set amounts of a given sin. A team that shares colors punches above its weight. A rainbow team leaves free stats on the table.

Managing Your Sinner Roster Early On

You already own the whole cast

Twelve Sinners - Yi Sang, Faust, Don Quixote, Ryoshū, Meursault, Hong Lu, Heathcliff, Ishmael, Rodion, Sinclair, Outis, Gregor - and every one is unlocked the moment you finish the tutorial. Gacha pulls are for Identities, which are alternate versions of a sinner with different skills and roles, not for characters. Nothing in the story is gated behind a pull.

Their free base IDs (the LCB Sinner ones) are 1-star, and people sleep on them. Uptie 2 and 3 come free just from finishing Canto I and Canto II, and they carry you through the early Cantos fine. That's your training-wheels roster, paid for with nothing.

Levels are the boring bottleneck

New accounts cap Identities at level 40. The cap rises by 5 for each Canto you clear past Canto V, up to 60 right now. Taking one Identity from level 1 to 60 costs 251,629 EXP, or about 84 Tier IV training tickets, so maxing a sinner is a real project and not a weekend thing.

EXP comes from story stages (bench sinners get roughly 70% of what the fighters get) and from Identity Training Tickets, which mostly come from EXP Luxcavation. The Canto IX stage of that mode pays out 6 Tier II, 6 Tier III, and 6 Tier IV tickets per run for 3 modules. You won't unlock that one for a long while - the earlier Canto stages pay less, but the shape of the deal holds.

Uptie: what each tier buys

Thread upgrades an Identity's tier, and the tiers are not equal:

| Tier | What it unlocks | 3-star cost | 2-star cost | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | II | Better skills, resource-hungry combat passives | 20 Thread | 10 Thread | | III | Skill 3 plus the support passive | 80 Thread | 40 Thread | | IV | Full skill upgrades, defense skill gains a sin color | 150 Thread + 50 shards | 100 Thread + 30 shards |

Tier 3 is the big one. Skill 3 is usually an Identity's payoff move, and until you uptie that far you're playing an incomplete kit. Tier 4 is a strong upgrade but pricey, and early on three sinners at Tier 3 will carry you further than one sinner at Tier 4.

So who goes in the core? Pick five to seven sinners you actually field and pour everything into those. A twelve-way split leaves everybody half-finished, and a half-finished sinner is a liability in a clash game.

The free level 60 trick

Mirror Dungeon normal mode sets every sinner's level to 60 for the run. Your level 12 project ID walks in and performs like a level 60 one. Since the Mirror Dungeon is where most of your weekly income lives, this is the best catch-up mechanic in the game - a fresh account can farm real rewards with a roster that would get flattened anywhere else. It unlocks once you finish Canto II.

Priority Gacha Pulls for New Players

What you're actually pulling for

Extraction (the gacha) hands out Identities, E.G.O skills, and announcers. Base rates on a single pull: 2.9% for a 3-star Identity, 12.8% for a 2-star, 1.3% for an E.G.O, and 83% for 1-stars you already own. A 1300-Lunacy 10-pull tweaks the final slot so it can't be a 1-star. That's the only guarantee on a normal banner.

One quiet mercy: E.G.O can't drop twice. Once you own one it leaves the pool, so your E.G.O odds creep up as your collection grows.

Burn the welcome banner first

New accounts get the New Manager's Welcome Extraction. Pulls cost 80 Lunacy instead of 130, and a 3-star is guaranteed within 20 pulls. Worst case that's 1600 Lunacy for a guaranteed top-rarity Identity, and it often costs way less. The banner disappears after those 20 pulls either way, so use it up before touching anything else. It's also why rerolling is basically pointless here - the welcome banner already hands you what a reroll would, without the account deleting.

Target banners beat the standard pool

After that, spend on Target Extraction banners, not Standard. A new-release banner puts a 6.4% combined rate on the featured 3-star or stars. Sinner-specific banners are even stickier: 41.5% of your 3-star hits come from that one sinner, including their event Identities and E.G.O that normally aren't even in the pool. The plain Standard banner carries no pity at all, so treat it as background noise, not a plan.

Limited banners do have pity, called Ideality. 200 pulls on one banner lets you flat-out buy a featured item, and leftover Ideality converts to Thread when the banner ends. Two hundred pulls is a whale number - think of it as a safety net, not a goal.

Walpurgis Night is the one hard limited

Roughly quarterly, for about two weeks, Walpurgis Night runs. Special Identities and E.G.O appear across every extraction table during the event, and older Walpurgis gear becomes shard-purchasable for that window only. Miss it and you're waiting for the next rotation. If something Walpurgis catches your eye, that's the one time saving Lunacy across a couple months genuinely pays off.

The no-luck route: shards

Every sinner has their own Egoshard type, and 400 of them buys any 3-star Identity or E.G.O outright from the Dispenser. A 2-star runs 150. Duplicates you pull melt down into shards, crates come from the battle pass and events, and the pile builds faster than you'd expect. For a new player this is the real answer to "I need this specific ID" - aim shards at that sinner and it's guaranteed, dice be damned. Two catches: brand-new seasonal IDs take about a week before they're shardable, and the previous season's pool stays locked until the current season ends.

Currency and Resource Management Basics

Lunacy

The pull currency. The only repeatable source is the Mirror Dungeon: three weekly bonus clears at 250 Lunacy each, so 750 a week if you show up. Everything else is one-time - 40 per story EX objective, 130 per third of a Canto, 260 for full-EXing a Canto, 40 per first Luxcavation clear, 40 per Identity uptie story you read, plus battle pass tiers and the 300-or-so they mail out with maintenance. Early on those one-times feel like a flood. That's normal, and it dries up.

Refilling Enkephalin with Lunacy starts at 26 and climbs by 26 a pop, up to 10 refills a day. Trading pull currency for stamina in your first weeks is a bad deal almost every time. Let the bar refill on its own.

Enkephalin and modules

Enkephalin is stamina: 1 point every 6 minutes, about 240 a day, capping at 60 on a fresh account. The cap climbs with Manager level, eventually to 216. The moment it hits cap, regen stops - a full bar overnight is a night of stamina gone for nothing.

The fix is modules. Twenty Enkephalin crafts one module, and modules are what actually pay for content: entering or skipping Luxcavations, story dungeons, and claiming Mirror Dungeon rewards (5 for a normal claim, 6 per hard-mode weekly bonus). Crafting only goes one direction, so don't mass-convert, but do top the bar off into modules before bed.

Thread

Thread is the uptie fuel, and it stays scarce forever. Thread Luxcavation stages are day-locked by sin - Sunday Wrath, Monday Lust, Tuesday Sloth, Wednesday Gluttony, Thursday Gloom, Friday Pride, Saturday Envy - with difficulty tiers that unlock as you clear Cantos. The important part: your first three runs each day get a doubled bonus. At the level 60 tier that's 12 Thread per bonus run instead of 6. Skipping a run costs double modules but adds 50% rewards, which is usually right once you outlevel the stage.

Three minutes a day, every day. That's the whole Thread game. Skip it and your upties take months instead of weeks.

A weekly spending order

1. Mirror Dungeon weekly bonuses, three of them, first thing after reset. 750 Lunacy plus battle pass XP plus the end-of-run loot table - nothing else comes close.
2. Thread Luxcavation daily bonus runs, all three, every day of the week.
3. EXP Luxcavation while you've still got sinners worth leveling.
4. Bank leftover modules instead of spending to zero. Refraction Railway reward claims and story dungeons pull from the same pool.

The daily paid pull, if you spend at all

One extraction a day costs 13 Paid Lunacy instead of 130, resetting early morning Korea time. Over a month that's roughly thirty discounted pulls for about 390 Paid Lunacy, which is easily the best value in the shop. It needs paid currency to work, so it only matters if you've bought some. Free-to-play accounts can skip this whole paragraph.

Common Mistakes That Slow Your Progress

Letting Enkephalin sit at cap. The game doesn't warn you. A capped bar is silent bleed - check it before you log off, convert the surplus into modules, and keep the regen running.

Skipping Mirror Dungeon weeks. 750 Lunacy a week is more than most gachas hand out for full-time play, and it's locked behind three runs. The mode unlocks after Canto II and you should start clearing immediately, even on normal, even with the free base IDs. Remember, everyone's level 60 in there.

Ignoring the Thread daily bonus. Covered above, worth repeating because it's the most common "why am I broke" cause in this game. The bonus doesn't bank. Miss Monday's Lust runs and that Thread is gone for good.

Spreading resources across all twelve Sinners. Half-built sinners lose clashes, and losing clashes drains sanity, and low sanity loses more clashes. Depth beats breadth here. A core of five or six built sinners clears way more content than twelve mediocre ones.

Rushing Tier 4 everywhere. 150 Thread plus 50 shards per 3-star adds up brutally fast when your weekly Thread income from daily bonuses is somewhere in the 85-250 range depending on which difficulty tiers you've unlocked. Tier 3 unlocks the actual kit. Grab that across your core first, then circle back for Tier 4s on your favorites.

Mashing the win-rate button. The auto-targeter plays it safe and dumb. It'll throw skills into clashes they can't win, ignore a body part that's about to nuke you, and leave your best skill unspent. Manual targeting in boss fights - especially aiming across stagger thresholds - is often the difference between a clear and a wipe at equal levels.

Ignoring resistances. Every enemy sits somewhere on the weak, normal, or resistant scale for each damage type and each sin. On a Fatal matchup you deal double, on Ineffective you're tickling. Two seconds in the enemy info screen saves a whole retry. And staggered enemies take double from all physical damage types, so pile on then.

Blowing Lunacy on Enkephalin refills in week one. The early story is free to retry and hands out plenty of natural stamina. Refills are for the mid-game grind crunch, not for chapter three.

Forgetting the free Lunacy lying around. Uptie stories pay 40 each, EX objectives pay 40, full-Canto EX clears pay 260. It adds up to a couple thousand Lunacy of one-time rewards sitting in menus people never open. Cheapest pulls you'll ever make.

Letting sanity spiral. Dead allies cost SP, and E.G.O costs SP, and suddenly your carry is at -20 flipping tails three times out of four. If a fight's going sideways, feed that sinner a clash you know they'll win and let the meter climb back before the boss phase.

One last number to plan around: a Tier 4 uptie on a 3-star costs 150 Thread plus 50 shards, which is more or less a full week of daily Thread bonuses at the mid tiers. Pick the sinner you actually field before you spend it.