What maxing a Blue Archive student actually costs
Roughly 48.3 million credits and 831 Eleph — and that figure is very nearly the same for every student in the game. What changes between them is which materials you farm, not how much you pay.
Taking one Blue Archive student all the way — ★5, every skill maxed, unique weapon fully upgraded, gear tiered — costs about 48.3 million credits and 831 Eleph. The striking part is how little that varies: across all 257 released students the total lands on either 48,267,500 or 48,767,500 credits, and the Eleph figure is exactly 831 for every single one. Which student you invest in does not change the bill. It only changes which materials you go and farm.
Where the money goes
Using Aru as the worked example — the numbers are hers, but as above they are nearly everyone's:
- ★2 → ★5 — 1,250,000 credits and 330 Eleph (10k / 40k / 200k / 1M, and 30 / 80 / 100 / 120 Eleph).
- EX skill, Lv.1 → 5 — 13,580,000 credits. The four steps are 80k, 500k, 3M and 10M: the last upgrade alone is more than the other three together.
- The other three skills, Lv.1 → 10 — 8,812,500 credits each, so 26,437,500 all told. More on this below, because it is the easiest number on the page to misread.
- Unique weapon ★2 → ★5 — 7,000,000 credits and 501 Eleph.
- Gear — 500,000 credits, and only for the students who have a gear tier at all (63 of 257).
The EX skill's final level costs 10,000,000 credits. That one upgrade is about a fifth of the entire bill for the student.
The three-times trap
A student's page lists her skill costs once per distinct price. Her Basic, Enhanced and Sub skills almost always cost the same at a given level, so they appear as a single row — "Basic / Enhanced / Sub skill Lv.4 → 5" — rather than three identical ones.
That is the honest way to list it, and it is easy to read as a total when it is not. You pay that ladder three times, once per skill. The 8.8 million credits shown is one skill's worth; maxing all three costs 26.4 million. If you add up the rows on the page as printed you will get 31.1 million for the student rather than the real 48.3 million.
Where the three skills genuinely differ in price — which does happen — they are listed separately, so a row that names only one skill is a row you pay once.
Why the total is flat, and what actually differs
Skill costs are set by the student's school and her artifact line, not by the student. The credit amounts are shared across the roster; the materials are not. Aru spends Gehenna Blu-rays and the Rohonc Codex line; Airi spends Abydos Blu-rays and the Nebra Disc line.
That distinction is sharper than it first looks. The two lowest skill levels really are shared — there are only about fifteen distinct prices across all 257 students, because those levels want nothing but school Tech Notes. From Lv.3 → 4 upward the student's own artifact enters the recipe, and the number of distinct costs jumps to 254 or 255 per level. By the top of the ladder, almost every student has a bill nobody else has.
So the planning question in Blue Archive is never "who is cheapest" — nobody is. It is "which artifact line am I already sitting on", and that is a farming question, answered by the where-to-farm index rather than by a cost table.
Eleph, and the one number that looks wrong
Eleph are student-specific shards, and they are the genuinely scarce half of the bill: 330 for the stars and 501 for the weapon. Credits are farmable; Eleph for a particular student are gated behind pulling her again, the Eligma shop, or her banner.
One figure is worth flagging rather than quietly passing on. The unique weapon's ★5 step costs 2,500,000 credits and one Eleph — against 120, 180 and 200 for the three steps before it. That is what the game's own data says, identically for all 257 students, so it is not a reading error on our side; but a one-Eleph top tier next to a 200-Eleph one looks like a value nobody has tuned yet. Treat it as provisional and expect it to move.
What this is for
The practical use is not the grand total, which you will never pay in one go. It is knowing the shape of the curve: the first four skill levels are cheap enough to take on any student you like, and everything expensive sits in the last step of each track — the EX skill's Lv.4 → 5, the ★5, the weapon's final stars. Those are the decisions worth being deliberate about, and they are the same decisions for every student on the roster.
Every figure here is exact and always current — updated every patch. Each student's full itemised bill — every step, with the exact materials, in English, Japanese and Korean — is on her own page.