Fire Emblem: Three Houses players discover the secret for recruiting students

In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the player takes on the role of professor at an officer’s academy, teaching one of three houses. With enough work, the player can convince students in other classes to transfer and work with them in lectures and on the battlefield.

This is usually a stat check — if you want to nab Felix for your squad, you’re going to need high speed and sword skills — but players have found a much easier way to get new students.

A few times every in-game month, players get the chance to wander around school grounds and chat with students — their own and those from other classes. This is usually when players can ask for students to join their chosen house, and get a list of required stats spit back in their face if the answer is no. But players on the Fire Emblem subreddit figured out that all you actually need is a support level of “B” with any student.

When characters grow their relationships with others in Fire Emblem — by talking or battling next to each other — their relationship grows. The more support points they earn, the closer they come to gaining a new support level. For everyone, it starts with level C. But once a character not in your house reaches level B, they’ll ask to join your house randomly during the next month.

Growing the player support level with non-house students is easy as long as they’re willing to spend some cash. When exploring, the player can plant and harvest flowers from the gardens, which become gifts for students. If the player spams a student they want to recruit with gifts, that student’s support level will grow very quickly.

Intelligent Systems, Koei Tecmo Games/Nintendo

We were able to verify this with Raphael, the muscular, dopey-but-lovable, food-obsessed knight-wannabe. Flowers aren’t one of Raphael’s likes, which just meant we needed more flowers to grow his level.

For the sake of speed, we also purchased gifts we knew he’d like: weight training sets or food-related items. After hitting support level B and having a heart-to-heart about his dreams, Raphael interrupted us during the week to formally ask to transfer to our class.

The Reddit post claims you can use this method to recruit other professors like Hanneman and Manuela as well. According to the post, there isn’t a hard limit to the amount of students you can acquire with this method in any given month.

For players really looking to get that new character before an upcoming battle, they can save and quit after hitting support B, play through the week as normal, and quit and reload if the student doesn’t pop up. According to Reddit, the students have a 25 percent chance of barging in each week.

This method makes getting characters for the player army much easier, without requiring the professor to sink skill experience into combat methods they have no intention of using.