HoYoLab

Description

Most game companion apps do one thing: they show you your stats. HoYoLAB does not stop there. Open the app for a Genshin Impact session and you can check the resin you have accumulated since you last played, see what exploration materials you still need to farm for a specific character, run a progression calculator that tells you exactly how many days of grinding separate you from your upgrade goal, mark the locations of every collectible on an interactive map, earn premium in-game currency just for checking in daily, and then read a fan-written guide explaining which artifact substats matter most for the character you are building — all before launching the game itself. The companion utility made HoYoLAB a destination for a significant proportion of the playerbases of the games on a daily basis, rather than an optional download.

HoYoLAB is the official global community platform for games published by HoYoverse, including Genshin Impact, Honkai Impact 3rd, Honkai: Star Rail, Tears of Themis and Zenless Zone Zero. It is a forum, a social network for the games fans and a collection of utility tools integrated directly into the games through linked accounts. Users can post articles, share fan art, upload gameplay videos, write guides, participate in discussions, and access game-specific tools from one app. HoYoLAB launched globally on July 15, 2021.HISTORY AND BACKGROUND

miHoYo, the Chinese game developer founded in 2012 by three graduates of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, built its player community infrastructure in two phases that reflected the expansion of the company itself around the world. The domestic version — Miyoushe, internationally known as miHoYo BBS — was launched in November 2018 as an official forum for Chinese players of the Honkai Impact 3rd. It provided news, player discussion, and practical tools such as character calculators, and formed the template that the global version would follow.

The global version launched as miHoYo Forums on January 16, 2020, originally developed as the official forum for the international community of Genshin Impact, in anticipation of the release of that game in September 2020. As Genshin Impact became one of the highest-grossing mobile games of 2021 with hundreds of millions of downloads worldwide, the need for a more comprehensive platform that is accessible globally became apparent. The team rebranded the forums as HoYoLAB and the development team built towards a dedicated mobile application.

The HoYoLAB app was in a closed beta from June 1 2021, with registration from May 18 to May 30 of that year. The beta gave early testing data that influenced the app before it was officially launched on July 15, 2021. The mobile application brought features that the website supported — Battle Chronicle, Daily Check-In, the Teyvat Interactive Map — to a dedicated interface optimized for phones. The mascot Mimo, a rabbit-eared character that appears in the logo of the platform, became the visual identity of the worldwide platform, which is separate from the Chinese platform’s mascot Miyouji.

miHoYo restructured its global operations in 2021 and 2022, creating Cognosphere Pte., Ltd. — trading as HoYoverse — as a publishing company based in Singapore to oversee international releases of its games. HoYoverse officially announced its Singapore headquarters in July 2022, with other offices in Montreal, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Seoul. HoYoLAB is operated under the HoYoverse brand for its global audience.

The platform gradually increased the games it supported. Honkai: Star Rail introduced their own Battle Chronicle, check-in rewards and community sections in 2023 before and after the game’s April 2023 global release. Zenless Zone Zero joined the platform with dedicated sections with the release of that game in July 2024. Each new game included its own wiki pages, interactive maps, progression tools, and community forums within the same HoYoLAB interface, making the platform a one-stop-shop for players across the entire HoYoverse catalog.

Daily Check-In Rewards

The Daily Check-In feature rewards players with in-game items — primarily premium currency and upgrade materials — for logging into HoYoLAB each day. The rewards differ from one game to another: players of Genshin Impact can receive Primogems, Mora, and enhancement materials via the monthly check-in calendar, while Honkai: Star Rail gives Stellar Jade and other resources. The check-in process takes one tap, and does not require the game itself to be launched. For games that use gacha systems where premium currency allows for character rolls, the free daily check-in currency adds up to meaningful amounts over periods of months of consistent use, and so the habit becomes direct economic value for the player.

Battle Chronicle

Battle Chronicle shows a detailed summary of statistics of a linked game account For Genshin Impact, this includes: total exploration percentages by region, the number and constellation levels of owned characters, Spiral Abyss challenge history including deepest floor reached and most-used characters, achievement completion percentages by category, and combat statistics including strongest single strike and total elemental bursts cast. The Battle Chronicle data is by default private and requires players to opt into public visibility if they want other users to see their account statistics.

The feature is used for personal tracking and social comparison purposes. Players use it to audit their own progression, while others use publicly shared chronicles for community discussions to evaluate team compositions and progression benchmarks.

Teyvat Interactive Map

The Genshin Impact interactive map spans the entire in-game world of Teyvat and features the location of resources, collectibles, chests, bosses, puzzles, and points of interest. Players mark items as collected on their personal copy of the map, and this enables farming of materials for character upgrades in a systematic manner. The original location data was contributed by community members; miHoYo officially endorsed and incorporated the map into HoYoLAB, adding features such as the synchronization of inventory, which cross-references collected items with a linked game account. An underwater layer added to the map tracks resources in the underwater zones of Fontaine separately from the surface map.

HoYoWiki

The HoYoWiki, launched May 7, 2022, is an official game database for Genshin Impact and the other supported games, including characters, weapons, artifacts, enemies, monsters and materials. Unlike community wikis where volunteer editors maintain the wiki on third-party websites, HoYoverse maintains the HoYoWiki directly, which ensures accuracy in terms of base statistics and officially confirmed information. Players use it as a reference for character kit descriptions, material requirements and enemy drop tables.

Enhancement Progression Calculator

The calculator calculates how many upgrade materials — character experience books, talent books, ascension gems, specialty materials and Mora — a player needs to reach a target level, talent or constellation for a particular character or weapon. Players choose their present state and their desired state and the calculator returns a shopping list of materials they need. The output can be shared as a link or image, useful for talking about upgrade priorities in community discussions, or sharing goals with friends.

Community Posts and Social Features

The forum and social sections support text post, image post, video upload, and link. Content is split by game into dedicated sections as well as by content type into sub-forums for official news, fan art, guides, gameplay questions, and general discussion. The post discovery system displays trending content, top voted posts and recently published material. Users can follow accounts that they find consistently useful, creating a personalized feed of content from creators whose work they value. The block function enables users to block certain accounts from their content or feed.

Mobile Widgets

The HoYoLAB app supports the home screen widgets for iOS and Android. Widgets show real-time game status — current resin or stamina count, expedition status, remaining daily commissions — pulled from linked game accounts through the app. A character widget rotates through characters owned with voice lines. The widget system allows players to track time-sensitive in-game resources without opening the application or the game.

Card Plaza and Lineup Simulator

Card Plaza, released January 6, 2023, to support Genshin Impact’s Genius Invokation TCG card game mode. Players view, share and import deck builds based on character cards or specific combat scenarios such as Spiral Abyss configurations. The Lineup Simulator was released on October 27, 2022, and it enables players to share their party composition, weapons, and artifact loadouts. Other players can search through lineups based on scenario — boss fights, Spiral Abyss floors, certain exploration challenges — to find team configurations that pertain to their own situation.

HOW IT COMPARES

Most game publishers offer companion apps that display statistics and push event notifications. HoYoLAB goes much further to integrate an interactive map, a progression calculator, a full wiki, a daily reward system and a community platform into the same application. The depth of utility tools reflects the complexity of HoYoverse’s games themselves — Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail are games where resource planning, material farming, and team building benefit from reference data outside of the game. HoYoLAB provides that reference data in an official capacity and ties it into live account data via the linked login system, something that third-party fan wikis and community websites cannot even come close to.