Honkai: Star Rail Sensitive Beings Quest Guide: How to find the Memetic Virus host
Like many single-player RPGs Honkai Star Rail has a good number of side quests scattered around its game world. However, one wrinkle to keep in mind is that Star Rail is a live-service title at heart, which means that a few of the available side quests incorporate the game's daily play rhythm into their structure.
One such quest is "Sensitive Beings", a side quest found early in the game on Herta Station. This quest takes three real days to complete, so you won't get it done all in one go. It's also pretty funny and blends Honkai Star Rail's rich space fantasy with the frustrations of trying to get help from the tech support department.
Read on for a quick and spoiler-free guide to completing the Sensitive Beings quest.
How to Unlock the Honkai Star Rail Sensitive Beings Quest
The quest trigger is a text message from someone called "The Crackup Conch" that reads suspiciously like trolling or spam. Answer them however you like, and you'll receive the quest prompt for Sensitive Beings I (it's a three-part quest).
How to complete Sensitive Beings I
Follow the objective to speak to Asta in the Master Control Zone.
Asta will inform you that the Crackup Conch, one of Herta's curios, has infected someone on the station with a "memetic virus", which is causing them to send cheeky texts to people on the station.
To find the infected person, she instructs you to eavesdrop on three individuals: Mare, Chris, and Joanne, to find out if they're behaving unusually. Do so. Mare and Chris are located in the Master Control Zone, while Joanne is in the Base Zone, in the medical clinic on the second floor.
Return to Asta, and she'll tell you to take advantage of Herta Station's ethically dubious IT security panopticon to sift through each candidate's search history looking for suspicious patterns. You can do so from a certain terminal in the Supply Zone.
When you attempt to access the terminal, it won't work, but a maintenance engineer will be on hand to help. Once he does so, you'll be teleported to the entrance of the room and have to solve a simple movement puzzle to access it.
The rules of the puzzle are simple: Find a path to the other side, crossing over all tiles only once. Here's a solution to the first puzzle.
Crossing over nets you a chest full of goodies and a look at peoples' search history.
The terminal will then break. Speak to the maintenance engineer, who says you'll need to come back tomorrow. And he does mean tomorrow. Unlike Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail doesn't have a day-night cycle, so you'll have to wait until after the next daily reset to continue to the next phase of the quest.
How to complete Sensitive Beings II
Luckily, you can start straight at the terminal to continue the next phase of the quest.
Just speak to the maintenance engineer, who will reset the terminal and give you another puzzle to complete.
Here's a puzzle solution. You'll get another chest of goodies and a new page of search results to peruse.
Another technical problem will stymie your progress. Talk to the maintenance engineer yet again, and he'll have you come back the next day.
How to Complete Sensitive Beings III
The final phase of the Honkai Star Rail Sensitive Beings quest begins much as the previous phases did. Head over to the terminal, speak to the engineer, and see the final puzzle to solve.
Here's the solution.
You'll see the final page of the search log, and if you've been paying attention, the identity of the memetic virus' host should be clear. Speak to the maintenance engineer to close out the support ticket, and return to Asta to report. This should clear the quest and unlock the "Unearthly Marvel" achievement. Congratulations!