Shadows are Update 1’s biggest mechanical addition to Anime Astral Simulator — the first companions that don’t just buff your power but copy your damage and attack on their own, straight out of Solo Leveling. They’re also the worst-documented system in the game: the official Trello confirms exactly four words (“3 New Shadows”) and everything else comes from launch-week player videos. This guide collects all of it, with every unverified claim flagged instead of smoothed over.
What a shadow actually does
A shadow is an extra combat unit that mirrors a percentage of your damage. That makes it fundamentally different from the other three multiplier layers — fighters and avatars raise your power, weapons multiply it, but a shadow effectively duplicates your final output. At the reported top end (100%+ damage copy), a good shadow is the single largest damage addition in the game, which is why community tier discussions treat shadow setups as the endgame benchmark.
You equip one shadow by default; the +1 Shadow Equip gamepass (540 Robux, added with Update 1) unlocks a second slot. No free path to the second slot has been reported.
Rarity vs rank — the two-axis roll
Every shadow rolls on two independent axes, and confusing them wastes farm time:
- Rarity (the unit itself — Secret, Divine…) sets the ceiling.
- Rank (B / A / S) is rolled per extraction and sets the damage-copy percentage — community footage shows an S-rank Secret copying 100% of the player’s damage, with B and A below that (exact B/A percentages unpublished).
So a Rank B Divine and a Rank S Secret can be closer than their rarities suggest. Re-rolling rank means Arising another copy — there is no reported upgrade path from B to S on a shadow you already own.
The three known shadows
| Shadow | Rarity | Damage copy | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Igris | Divine (community-reported) | ~150% | Multiple streams; one chat called it Mythic — flagged |
| Iron | Secret (community-reported) | 100% at Rank S | One stream chat claimed it “was supposed to be Common” — flagged |
| Tusk | Unverified | Scales with rank; % unknown | A Rank B Tusk appears in launch streams; nothing else confirmed |
Names are community identifications — the Trello never lists them. Tusk at least matches an in-game boss (the Gate boss that drops the Tusk Neck Skull accessory), which is circumstantial support, not confirmation.
Two tangles worth knowing. First, Igris vs Igros: the Trello’s Solo City pet roster has “Igros” (Secret, x5,000), the shop sells an “Igris Bundle”, and the shadow is called Igris in streams — whether these are one object, two or three is genuinely unresolved, and our pages keep them separate until someone proves otherwise. Second, the “~15,000x shadow multiplier” you may see on other wikis: that figure matches Bezu’s pet multiplier, and we suspect it’s a conflation of the pet and shadow systems — shadows copy damage, they don’t carry pet-style multipliers. Treat it as unreliable.
How to farm shadows (the only strategy that matters)
Shadows come from the Arise System inside Gates: clear waves, boss spawns (community testing says roughly every 10 waves, with 3 Arise attempts), extract. Three findings shape the farm:
- Difficulty doesn’t matter. An E-rank gate can reportedly drop an S-rank shadow, so run whatever rank you clear fastest — speed of attempts beats ambition. Even top-power players struggled with D-rank gates at launch.
- The timer is the bottleneck. Gates spawn every ~7–10 minutes (sources conflict — verify in-game), so attempts per hour are capped. Park yourself in Solo City near the craft area and never miss a spawn.
- There’s no pity. Nobody has reported a shadow guarantee at any attempt count. Like Divine fighters, shadows are a windfall to farm toward, not a purchase to schedule — the same asymmetry our summoning guide covers for the gacha.
Auto-Arise exists and was buggy at launch (the prompt sometimes doesn’t appear — community reports say it still misfires). If you’re farming seriously, watch the boss kill manually.
The paid shortcut, priced honestly
The Igris Bundle guarantees the Igros Coat accessory (2x Power / 1.75x Damage, per the Trello card) — note it guarantees the coat, and sources are unclear on what else; don’t assume it hands you the Igris shadow itself without checking the bundle screen. If you’d rather stay F2P, the ~6,300 tickets sitting in codes (see the F2P Tickets guide) out-value the bundle for most accounts, and gates cost nothing but time.
A worked example: what “damage copy” buys you
Abstract percentages undersell it, so walk through a build. Say your stack is a Sung TimeSkip (x800 fighter), a Solo City avatar, and a starred Sungo Dagger — every layer multiplying into one final damage number. An S-rank Iron copying 100% of that doubles the entire stack’s output; a ~150% Igris would do two-and-a-half times. No single fighter upgrade in the game moves your damage that much short of jumping a full rarity tier. The corollary cuts both ways: a shadow on a weak account copies weak damage, so shadows amplify progression rather than replace it — gear first, extract second.
Open questions we’re tracking
For completeness, the list of what nobody has verified: the B and A rank damage-copy percentages; Tusk’s rarity and numbers; whether more than three shadows exist or are planned; Arise success rates per attempt; whether the Igris Bundle includes the shadow itself or only the coat; and whether shadow rank can ever be upgraded in place. Each one changes strategy if answered — this page gets rebuilt when they are.
Are shadows worth the grind?
If you’re past Titan Wall: unequivocally yes — damage copying scales with everything else you own, so every fighter, avatar and weapon upgrade makes your shadow better too (our beginner guide explains why that compounding matters). If you’re earlier: no — gates sit in World 5, and nothing about shadows is farmable before you get there. Push worlds first; the shadows will still be unverified and overpowered when you arrive.