Newbies Guide: Free to Play approach

This guide is for newbies who cannot or do not want to spend any money at all.

## Is Rising Star truly free to play?

Technically, yes. You can progress and play Rising Star without ever spending a dime.

However, many players do buy Card Packs, singles and/or resources. Spending money does grant you an advantage in progressing faster.

There is currently no PvP system in Rising Star. High level players cannot directly impact your progress. However, high level players or Whales may indirectly impact your experience by:

* Causing Cards to become discontinued by minting them
* Impacting the secondary Market price of things you may want buy using your earned resources
* Controlling the bidding price in the Music Promoter mechanic

## Commit to the Idle Grind

Without jumpstarting your Card collection, you will be in the slow grind for quite some time.

Your Fans stat dictates the amount of STARBITS you make when doing Missions. Significant boosts to that stat will only happen for you when Drunk Fans happen upon your performances. There is a 25% of gaining temporary drunks after the completion of any Standard Mission.

Because you'll only have access to lower level Missions for a while, running out of energy will be a frequent challenge. Occasionally you'll get lucky and random encounter energy boosting events—take advantage of these!

## Early goals

You'll be quite keen to boost your Fan count at this early and slow stage.

Keep an eye out for cheap Common cards with decent Fan stats. You'll probably have to save up a few hundred STARBITS in order to able to afford your first new Common cards. The new Fans will boost your income.

Many people recommend buying up energy booster Cards in the early game. However, these usually start at around 7,500 STARBITS. Saving this amount up with pure free-to-play grinding may not be worth the boost in Missions per day that these Cards enable.

## Get free stuff from Giveaways!

Perhaps the best use of your time will be to participate in as many giveaways as you can.

The Hive and Rising Star communities are very active. Lots of users and Twitch streamers run unofficial and official giveaways, every day.

Official streamer giveaways will appear in your Diary, and/or in the RS Discord.

The Discord server also collects and organizes giveaways that are posted on the Hive blog. Check out the #win-starbits channel.

## Earn Hive native tokens for free

You can take this approach if you're keen to play around with web3 stuff on Hive. It's not easy to start from scratch, but there are a few ways to earn Hive Layer 1 or Layer 2 tokens for free, which you can then convert to Rising Star assets if you so choose.

### Creating content

This is probably the most popular way to earn other Hive tokens. Posting, engaging, and curating on the Hive blog can generate token income. The better your content, the more likely you will be rewarded.

### Playing other Hive games

You could start playing several free to play games at the same time, and focus all your gains into one of them. However, some games are not strictly free to play (e.g. Splinterlands requires a $10USD purchase of a Spellbook to access the main game). It's important to research each game and see if it's worth your time and effort before committing!

### Other ways to earn Hive tokens

There are hundreds of projects on Hive and thousands of users. The potential ways to earn tokens are as limitless as there are ideas. Exploring Hive and all it has to offer may unearth a better way for you to get some tokens. Just be very careful of scams and other too-good-to-be-true offers. Don't ever share your account keys, and don't send anyone money if you haven't thoroughly researched things and assessed the risk.

## Get sponsored

There are gaming guilds and programs on Hive that may help jumpstart your game. If you're accepted into a scholarship or training program, higher level players might share or give you some free resources.