Game Modes

Zenless Zone Zero features several game modes that will be showcased in this guide.

In Zenless Zone Zero, you will have to clear instance based stages with either the bosses we met during story or just regular enemies, to obtain resources and materials needed to progress your account. However, Battery Charges (Stamina) must be used in order to enter the stages and claim your rewards.

The different stages are:

Combat Simulation

This mode is basically the Zenless Zone Zero equivalent of Golden and Crimson Calyx from Honkai: Star Rail. These are your basic resource stages and provide one of the following material depending on what stage you are farming:

• Basic Material - Character EXP material, Dennies (in game currency) and Weapon EXP material,
• Agent Promotion - Ascension materials for characters,
• Agent Skill - Ascension materials for character skills,
• Modify W-Engine - Ascension materials for character weapons,
• Custom - Here you can basically pick any combination of materials you wish to farm and mix them into a single stage.

It costs 20 Battery Charges to do one Combat Simulation stage.

You can queue up to 5 Combat Simulation runs at a time. Essentially, this allows you to repeat the same Combat Simulation stage without having to exit and re-enter. Each run will cost you 20 Battery Charges (100 Battery Charges total if you queue up 5 runs).

Driver Validation

This mode is basically the Zenless Zone Zero equivalent of Cavern of Corrosion from Honkai: Star Rail.

• These are your gear farming stages, each stage offers a combination of 2 different Drive Disks as well as EXP used to upgrade them or exchange at the music shop.
• It costs 60 Battery Charges to do one stage.

Expert Challenge

This mode is basically the Zenless Zone Zero equivalent of Stagnant Shadow from Honkai: Star Rail.

• Here you will farm materials used to ascend characters and upgrade the Core Skill of characters.
• There are different bosses here to farm, each dropping different materials, so make sure you're farming the right one.
• It costs 40 Battery Charges to do one stage.

Reckless Challenge

This mode is basically the Zenless Zone Zero equivalent of Echo of War from Honkai: Star Rail.

• These are your weekly boss stages that reward W-Engine EXP, materials for Advanced Core Skill upgrades for characters, and currency used to buy W-Engines.
• You can only do 3 Reckless Challenge runs every week. However, you can do the same Reckless Challenge stage multiple times.
• You can also bring your friends to do this mode together since it offers a co-op mode as well.
• It costs 40 Battery Charges to do one Reckless Challenge.

This is the Main Menu of the gameplay section. From here you can access story, combat commissions, exploration commissions as well as Shiyu Defense, Hollow Zero and Rally Commission.

Each story chapter has a different map, including combat commissions and exploration commissions. To progress to the next story chapter, you will have to collect tokens that drop from successfully clearing story, combat and exploration commissions, each stage can drop 3 tokens.

This mode is basically the Zenless Zone Zero equivalent of Memory of Chaos from Honkai: Star Rail.

Shiyu Defense is a game mode where the objective is to defeat a group of enemies in limited amount of time. After completing a Shiyu Defense stage you will be awarded between 0 to 3 stars for that stage depending on how long it took you to defeat the enemies in that stage. The more stars that you are awarded, the better the rewards you receive.

It is a more challenging game mode with the final stages being considered the end game content.

• Shiyu Defense consists of 10 stages and reward 300 Polychromes each upon clearing it with 3 stars.
• Later stages will require 2 teams of 3 units to enter.
• Shiyu Defense resets periodically, allowing the player to complete them again for Polychromes.

This mode is basically the Zenless Zone Zero equivalent of Simulated Universe from Honkai: Star Rail.

Hollow Zero is a roguelike game mode where the player will select a team of 3 Characters to venture inside a Hollow Zone to collect a random set of buffs that they can use to enhance their team and fight the enemies inside. The player will progress through zones made out of TVs that have both positive and negative encounters with the goal of defeating the boss in the final zone. Each time when you start a new run, you will only start with 1 Character out of the 3 picked, rest of the Characters will be available to obtain from encounters in the zones.

• Corruption is a debuff that gets accumulated when you move through the zones, you can lower it by interacting with specific nodes. Upon getting corrupted, you will gain a debuff which is also removable.
• This game mode does not require the player to spend any Battery Charges to play it and there is no limit to how many times the player can start a run in Hollow Zero.
• Resets each week, has weekly commissions that give you Polychromes and other materials used for upgrading Bangboos.
• There is also a License Pass which gives Inter-Knot EXP, Polychromes and other materials mostly used for anything Bangboo related. The pass is leveled by obtaining Investigation Points which are limited to 5000 per week.

This is another weekly mode where you enter a stage thats filled with combat challenges. After clearing the initial 2 stages, you unlock a weekly stage.

Players can obtain Inter-Knot EXP, Coup-En, Disc EXP and Dennies each week.

There is also a one-time stage clear reward which gives Inter-Knot EXP, Polychromes, Coup-En, Disc EXP, Dennies and Mini Cargo Trucks.