Umamusume: Pretty Derby has been a surprise hit on Steam, as PC gamers flock to its horse girls and surprisingly in-depth management sim systems. While it looks all fun and cutesy on the outside, there are some important nuances the game doesn’t necessarily tell you which can make or break your career runs with each racer.
I’ve been doing a lot of research as I’ve been playing the game and trying to get better myself, and I’ve managed to put together some handy Umamusume: Pretty Derby tips and tricks to up your training game and get your girls the trophies they deserve.
Umamusume: Pretty Derby tips and tricks
Ignore the Guts stat… for now
Umamusume: Pretty Derby has five stats to level up: Speed, Stamina, Power, Guts, and Wit. The most important are the first three—Speed is vital, while you’ll need a good heaping of Stamina and Power depending on which length and position your horse girl specialises in. Wit determines how often you proc the skills you’ve unlocked, so it’s always worth putting a little bit of time into levelling that up.
Guts, however, is very much a nothing stat right now. It’s essentially something the game pulls from when you run out of stamina, rather than contributing actively to a racer’s build. Right now it’s much better to put a few extra points into stamina or grab some stamina-recovering skills. Don’t listen to Tazuna’s yapping: You did not lose that race because your Guts stat was too low.
The way Guts works will change in the future (which we know thanks to the game being out in Japan for four years already) and it will become more valuable. For now, however, you can safely ignore it.
Make rich friends
Okay, I’m only joking here. Well, kinda.
You’ll be prompted to build a deck before starting a career run, and support cards are by far the most integral component of the entire game. While you can mostly get away with using any horse girl you like, support cards can make or break your builds.
Some cards—like the coveted Kitasan Black—are straight-up broken when you have multiple copies. That can get a wee bit expensive if you’re not blessed with incredible luck, and this is where the friend list comes in handy. Since one of your cards in each deck is borrowed from a friend, try and make sure you’re befriending players who’re rocking some souped-up supports.
Having a friend with a maxed out Kitasan Black or Super Creek can give you a huge boost early on when you’re still building strong, reliable horse girls to act as your legacy foundations. You’re gambling the possibility of them switching to a different card when you need them the most, but it still beats swiping your credit card half a dozen times.
Build your friendships early
You might have noticed during training that each stat usually features one or more girls in the top right corner, each with a meter underneath them. Those are the support cards you chose before starting the run, and they’re integral to success in Umamusume: Pretty Derby.
The meter underneath them is your friendship gauge, and you should absolutely prioritise raising them early on. That’s because once the bar turns orange, you get a chance of a rainbow training session which gives a huge stat boost compared to regular ones.
In your early turns each career, try to raise stats where a lot of girls are grouped up together. The faster you level them up, the more quickly you unlock rainbow training and can get those sweet mega boosts. It’s ultimately down to RNG where your support cards will group up, though, so keep your go-to stats in mind as well if your luck is like mine and they all keep bunching up in Guts.
Pick energy-regenerating dialogue
Energy is the most important currency in careers: The less you have, the more likely you are to fail a training session. Resting gives between 30 and 70 Energy back, but it also takes an entire turn away from important things like stat increases and racing.
Minimising the number of turns spent resting is important, and that’s where support card and trainee events come in. They often come with dialogue options with different outcomes—one might give a small speed boost, while the other will grant a hint level towards a skill.
A number of these events can also restore Energy, and I’d recommend selecting those options whenever they appear. The game won’t tell you what each option does, but you can usually guess pretty easily which ones will restore Energy. They often reference things such as eating food, taking a break, going home for the day, or not engaging in an activity.
Keep your girls happy
Happy horse girls are winning horse girls. Next to your energy bar is a mood icon—there are five different moods: Great, Good, Normal, Bad, and Awful. All careers will start out with a normal mood, fluctuating up or down during certain random events.
The happier your horse girl is, the better her training results and overall stats are. A Great mood, for example, sees 20% better training results and a 4% increase to attributes while running. On the flip side, an Awful mood lowers training results and attributes by the same amount.
If your Uma is looking particularly glum, make use of the Recreation function. It’ll boost her mood by one or two tiers depending on the event, and you might even get a small Energy boost off the back of it, too.
Keep an eye out for red exclamation points
Another important element to any horse girl’s build is their unlocked skills. While you’ll start a career with only a handful to spend skill points on, you can grab more via random events or training with a support card when she has a red exclamation point icon next to her.
If you’re gunning for certain skills, watching out for these exclamations is vital. Not only will it unlock the skill for you to buy, it’ll also give you a hint level towards it. The more hint levels you have, the cheaper a skill’s cost, so scooping these up can be really helpful.
Each support card has a set list of skills it can unlock. Long press on a support card to see these: the list in the Skills tab are ones you get via the exclamation point training, while clicking on the ‘i’ icon in the Career Events tab will tell you which skill hints come from the random events.
Prepare for summer vacation
By now you might have noticed that each skill training levels up the more you use it—all five skills start at level one, eventually capping out at level five. The higher level a skill training is, the more it increases that stat.
Summer vacation is an event that lasts for four turns, starting in early July on an Umamusume’s Classic and Senior years. It temporarily boosts everything to the max training level, making this a vital time to get some much-needed stat increases in.
You’ll get a two-turn warning from Tazuna before summer vacation starts, so I recommend prepping ahead of time by making sure your energy is as close to max as possible before it begins. You don’t want to waste too many turns resting during summer vacation—it comes with the benefit of increasing your horse girl’s mood, but you’re also locked to a flat 40 Energy increase—so plan accordingly to maximise your summer training arc.
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