If you’ve watched experienced Umamusume: Pretty Derby players build S Rank trainees with seemingly impossible stats, you’ve probably noticed one thing they all have in common: they maximize Rainbow Training, also known as Friendship Training. These special training sessions are one of the biggest sources of stat gains in the entire game and can easily be the difference between an average career and an incredible one.
Many new players don’t realize just how important Friendship Training is. They focus entirely on choosing the stat they need each turn without paying attention to their support cards. While that strategy can work early on, it quickly falls behind once careers become more difficult. Learning how to activate Rainbow Training as early as possible is one of the biggest steps toward consistently building stronger trainees.
Just having one rainbow training during a training session can significantly boost your stats. Stringing together a bunch of them in one shot will make your stat gains even more overpowered. But how do you unlock and use them? Rainbow Training doesn’t simply provide larger stat gains. It also becomes much more valuable later in a career when multiple support cards activate at the same time. A single late-game Friendship Training with several cards stacked together can provide dozens of extra stats compared to a normal training session, making it one of the strongest mechanics in the game.
When you’re picking a stat to train, you’ll notice that some of them have one or more support cards attached to them. Doing trainings that have cards attached to them will give that stat a slight boost, but it also increases the friendship gauge of that support card. Once a card reaches 80 friendship points, it turns orange and will have a chance to randomly trigger a rainbow training. You can casually unlock one or two throughout a career, but training in specific ways can unlock all of them quickly.
You may feel tempted to train just the stats you need, but that might not always be the best way to do things. Maybe a speed card appears in speed training one turn, but then it appears in Wit and Guts training the next two turns. You’ll want to do those three trainings in that order so the speed card gets a lot of points right away and unlock rainbow training earlier. Sacrificing one or two turns of training at the start is always worth it if you can end up unlocking rainbow training five or six turns earlier than you might have. This is one mistake that many beginners make early on, they ignore support card placement altogether.
Thinking a few turns ahead is one of the biggest differences between experienced players and beginners. Sometimes taking a slightly weaker training now results in several Friendship Trainings later, which more than makes up for the temporary loss. In the long run, unlocking Rainbow Training early will almost always produce a stronger final build.
You’ll also want to make sure that you always train a stat if it has four or more cards attached to it, even if it’s Guts. Doing so will give you a huge boost to that stat, but also massive boost to the friendship gauge for all of those cards. Those cards will get overpowered quickly if you constantly do trainings that have lots of cards attached. It’s also worth paying attention to your support card deck. Decks that include multiple copies of the same training type often make it easier to trigger powerful Friendship Training chains later in a run.
While the exact strategy changes depending on your build, the goal is always the same: activate as many Rainbow Trainings as possible before the final stretch of the career. Whenever I do this method, I often get lucky enough to unlock my first rainbow training before I even do my first race. Follow this guide and you’ll be swimming in rainbow trainings in no time.