Introduction

IS Central

IS Central is a discord community formed by a number of advanced IS players who want to spread awareness of high-level IS gameplay in the EN Arknights community and help improve the overall skill level among EN IS players. Several IS Central members have participated in multiple international IS tournaments, such as LTA Disjoint 1 and 2, Skywalking Global League IS3 and IS4 edition, EBA tournaments, and IS Bingo Lockout, to name a few. The IS Central discord was established so that these players could share their expertise, and this website aims to collect that knowledge in one place.

IS Central welcomes people of all backgrounds, experience levels, and goals. Maybe you’re a casual player just trying to get every ending once, maybe you cleared D15 once by the skin of your teeth and want to become more consistent, maybe you’re just sick of starting with the same operators every time and want to learn something new. We aim to provide a centralized space and community for people who are interested in playing and getting better at IS, regardless of what your current skill level is.

Tournament-oriented IS

Every few months, a big IS tournament is hosted in which players get the chance to participate and showcase their gameplay. These tournaments typically have a pre-established set of rules that force the player to play at max difficulty and incentivizes them to complete hardest endings within a single run. Moreover, the rules generally allow the player to prepare a start for the run, or reroll certain bad starting RNG outcomes. This mitigates some unavoidable losses due to bad starting RNG, such as not getting a specific F3 buff, a pre-promoted operator, or a specific ending related or essential encounter (such as Fated Encounter in IS5). Many of our guides are written with these restrictive tournament conditions in mind, which are widely accepted by the community as fair reasons to reset a run. However, that doesn’t mean these guides are useless for more causal players, though. Since the guides generally assume you’re working in the most punishing conditions possible, the advice usually also works when you have more leeway.

Global IS tournaments are staffed by casters who provide live commentary to the gameplay. The caster’s job is to explain the choices made by the tournament player to an audience that might not be familiar with advanced IS, which means watching commentated IS live events is an easy and entertaining way to learn about the kind of thought processes behind high level IS gameplay.

External resources

Playlists

The site’s squad guides and our discord server link to various playlists that showcase standardized references for a large number of IS stages. A playlist guide is essentially a set of example clears for a number of relevant stages using a particular starting character (in conjunction with common other picks with that starter.) Some of these playlists have an introduction section describing the common drafted operators paired with said starting character, or possible synergies.

These playlists are useful both as something that might be copied directly, and as a reference for particular timings, skill cycles, placements, and general approaches to the stage that can be incorporated into your own strategies. The exact conditions shown in the video can rarely be replicated directly, so remember to take these videos as a guideline and adapt to your own situation.

Tomimi.dev

Tomimi.dev is a dedicated website for IS map information built by CN players. Here are a number of functions that tomimi.dev provides:

• Enemy stat calculation, with the ability to account for difficulty multipliers, collectibles, stage modifiers and other conditional effects (for example, epochs).
• Enemy spawn timing and pathing simulator.
• Enemy spawn permutations.
• Number of enemies that signal a hidden enemy is present.
• Emergency stage conditions.
• Numbers and probabilities for various stage drops.
• One click buttons to search up video references of a given stage.
• An operator list that allows filtering for specific functionality and various collectible synergies.

Map.arknights

Map.arknights collects map information for all maps in Arknights. The main advantage of map.arknights over the map information on tomimi.dev is the ability to select and deploy operators on a pseudo-map with coordinates, making it easy to communicate operator placements with other players when discussing strategies. Most other aspects of map.arknights in the context of IS are subpar compared to tomimi.dev

A certain three letter application

There are some third party applications made for emulator users to automate certain IS procedures such as farming for ingot investment balance, starting bonuses, or initial promoted operators. IS central is neutral towards the use of these third party applications. Use them at your own risk.

FAQ

• I’m new to IS, where do I start?
  Our Getting Started guide explains all the fundamentals of IS a new player should familiarize themselves with, and gives some insight into what top IS gameplay is like.

• The guides here are all about the hardest difficulty but I’m more of a casual player, is there anything for me?
  Many guides are written for players doing the hardest possible clears, but the same strategies will generally work at lower difficulties, and they will have more room for error and operators may be more easily replaced.

• I can’t find what I need to clear x stage, what do I do?
  The site is a perpetual work in progress. If our stage guides don’t provide what you’re looking for, you can always join our discord and ask more experienced players there. Don’t be afraid to ask even if you’re at the lowest difficulty or are only a new player, we’re here to help!

• I have been playing IS for a while and I want to take it to the next level, what do I do?
  There is only so much we can teach through guides, the best way to develop your skills is through constant practice. You can join our discord and interact with fellow players that share your interests and are happy to help each other. We also act as a central space for announcements and notifications of IS tournaments, which are where every player showcases the results of their practice. Watching and participating in tournaments is a good way to push yourself into further improving your own IS skills.

• Can I contribute to the site?
  You can help our web development team, which you can contribute to by helping format and publish guides other people write, or alternatively by writing guides yourself if you have the necessary knowledge. If you have a personal playstyle, operator core, or approach to a given stage or ending that you would like to share, we would greatly appreciate a guide documenting this. If you have knowledge on website development, your insights would also be greatly appreciated. The first step is checking out our contribute guide.