Refinement is a flat-rate purchase, not a tier ladder
Every guide tells you to refine to Radiant for the rare part. That advice is directionally correct and arithmetically incomplete, because it skips the only question that matters: what does each void trace actually buy?
The wiki’s odds table answers it.
| Quality | Traces | Common | Uncommon | Rare |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intact | 0 | 76% | 22% | 2% |
| Exceptional | 25 | 70% | 26% | 4% |
| Flawless | 50 | 60% | 34% | 6% |
| Radiant | 100 | 50% | 40% | 10% |
Now compute the marginal return of each step:
- Intact to Exceptional: 25 traces for +2 points of rare chance
- Exceptional to Flawless: 25 traces for +2 points
- Flawless to Radiant: 50 traces for +4 points
Every single step returns 0.08 percentage points of rare chance per trace. Exactly the same rate, at every tier, all the way up.
That is the finding that changes how you should play. There is no efficient tier and no trap tier. Radiant is not a better deal than Exceptional, it is simply a bigger purchase of the same thing. Refinement is a straight line, and the only variable is how many traces you are willing to spend.
Which means the real decision is not “which tier” but “which resource am I short of”.
The relic-versus-trace tradeoff
The same wiki data, expressed as cost per rare drop:
| Quality | Relics needed (avg) | Traces needed (avg) | Relics for 90% confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intact | 12.9 | 0 | 28.5 |
| Exceptional | 6.6 | 166 | 14.1 |
| Flawless | 4.6 | 228 | 9.3 |
| Radiant | 2.9 | 291 | 5.5 |
Read the two extreme rows against each other. Running Intact costs you 12.9 relics and zero traces. Running Radiant costs 2.9 relics and 291 traces.
So the rule is mechanical:
- Relics abundant, traces scarce — run Intact. You are trading a resource you have for one you do not.
- Traces abundant, relics scarce — refine to Radiant. Ten times fewer relics for the same outcome.
- Both scarce — farm traces on a fast fissure with a throwaway relic, then refine the ones you care about.
Most players sit in the first case without realising it. A vaulted relic you own four copies of is worth more run Intact than refined, because refining four copies to Radiant costs 400 traces, and those 400 traces could have bought a rare on a different relic entirely.
Why a full Radiant squad is usually wrong
Four players, four relics, and everyone can pick from the pooled results. The squad composition math:
| Squad setup | Chance of at least one rare |
|---|---|
| 4 Intact | 7.76% |
| 1 Radiant + 3 Intact | 15.29% |
| 2 Radiant + 2 Intact | 22.21% |
| 3 Radiant + 1 Intact | 28.56% |
| 4 Radiant | 34.39% |
Going from all-Intact to all-Radiant roughly quadruples your odds per run, which sounds decisive until you cost it. Four Radiant relics cost 400 traces. One Radiant plus three Intact costs 100 traces and gets you 15.29%, which is a bit under half the all-Radiant odds for a quarter of the trace cost.
If your goal is “see a rare this session”, all-Radiant is correct. If your goal is “see the most rares per hour of trace farming”, the mixed squads win, because the saved traces fund more runs.
The practical version: in a pub squad, refine only if you have traces banked. In a premade squad, deliberately mix — one player brings the Radiant relic being targeted, everyone else brings Intact relics from a different era so the reward pool has more variety to pick from.
Mechanics worth knowing before you launch
Refinement itself requires the Void Relic Segment, which comes from the Mars Junction on Earth and must be installed in the Orbiter. Refining is done at the segment or in the relic selection screen before a mission, and a refined relic separates from its Intact stack, which is why your counts look wrong afterwards.
Exactly one of the six items in a relic is offered when it opens. The blue bars in the refinement preview are not proportional to probability; they rank correctly but they are not a scale, so do not read them as percentages.
Collect 10 Reactant in a fissure to open the relic, and trace rewards come alongside that. Running fissures is therefore self-funding: traces come from the same missions that spend them.
Failure modes that cost real parts
Dying before extraction loses the run’s relic rewards. That is the single most expensive mistake in the mode, and it is why a survivable frame matters more than a fast one.
No relic equipped means no reward and no pick from the squad pool. This happens most often after a build change resets the loadout.
Leaving after the reward screen is fine; leaving mid-mission is not. The relic opens at extraction regardless of how long the mission took, so there is no benefit to rushing a capture over a survival if the survival is safer.
What to do with the parts
Prime parts split three ways: build the item, sell for platinum, or convert to ducats. Ducats come from selling prime parts at a relay kiosk, not from selling relics — an intact relic itself cannot be turned into ducats, which is a common mix-up. The relics and prime guide covers which relics are worth opening versus selling, and the trading guide covers pricing a set.
For the requiem relics used in Lich hunting, see the Kuva and Tenet weapons guide. If you are farming traces specifically, the farming guide lists the fast fissure nodes.