Best Ways to Spend Your Battery Charge in Zenless Zone Zero

Stamina system? In my gacha game? Well, in Zenless Zone Zero, yes, the daily Stamina system is back and is called Battery Charge in this new title. You get 240 Charge per day, so it’s not as stingy as other games, but you still need to know the best ways to spend it to maximize your progression.

Where to Spend Battery Charge in Zenless Zone Zero

You unlock the various ways to use your Battery Charge as you progress the main story quest of Zenless Zone Zero, and you can spend Charge on the following materials and gear:

• Investigator Logs (Agent XP)
• W-Engine Power Supply/Batteries (W-Engine XP)
• Dennies (ZZZero’s in-game currency)
• Agent Ascension materials (Character type Certification Seals)
• W-Engine Ascension materials (W-Engine type Components)
• Agent Skill Upgrade materials (Character type Chips)
• Inter-Knot Level 30 materials (likely Disk Drives)
• Core Skill Upgrade materials (Higher Dimension Data per character type)

You can eventually spend up to 100 Batter Charge per day on a single Training challenge for Agent and W-Engine improvement materials, and all Core Skill XP items cost 40 XP per attempt at a given story boss. There are escalating difficulties for each challenge, with rewards commensurate with the level of the enemies you’re fighting. A level 10 Training challenge only awards green-rarity materials, where a level 20 awards some blue-rarity, and so on.

What to Spend Your Battery Charge on in Zenless Zone Zero

Of course, simply knowing where to spend Battery Charge doesn’t tell you what you should spend it on. The endgame of every HoYoverse gacha game eventually devolves into farming for the perfect set of Relics, Artifacts, or, in the case of ZZZero, Drive Discs. Thankfully, you don’t unlock the ability to farm those until after the first major experience gate, so you’re left with what remains.

Of the seven remaining ways to spend Battery Charge, you should only focus on the four Ascension material sources. Leave Dennies and XP items out of it. You get plenty of those just by playing the game, and none of your characters or their gear will be of a high enough level to much through your whole stack, provided you settle on a core team of three characters and don’t waste additional resources on leveling every Agent and W-Engine you get your hands on.

Here’s my priority for farming the four Ascension material types:

1. W-Engine Ascension Materials
2. Skill Upgrades
3. Agent Ascension Materials
4. Core Skill Upgrade Mateirals

Of the four ways to improve your character, leveling your W-Engine is most important, followed closely by Skill enhancement, as these have a much more direct effect on your damage output than either your character or Core Skill level. They’re also much easier to come by than Core Skill upgrades, and you’ll need a lot of them. Breaking the level 20 gate on an A-Rank W-Engine costs 10 blue-rarity Components or 30 base-level ones. For S-Rank equipment, those costs only go up.

Your Skill upgrade Chips are a bit less grindy to acquire, but I put them above Agent Ascension Seals because of the effect they can have on your damage and, by extension, your survivability. If you massively oversimplify Zenless Zone Zero‘s combat, it all comes down to a DPS race. The faster you kill your enemy, the less time they have to kill you. And without any dedicated healing units as of 1.0, losing HP means a lot more than in other gachas with RPG elements.

All that is not to say Agent Certification Seals aren’t valuable. Because they are. The higher the rarity of the Agent, the more expensive they are to upgrade, and like with W-Engine mats, you’ll need a metric ton of Seals to get even one of your characters up to par. That becomes doubly true when you consider all the new characters that will release in the future. Having a slightly easier time bringing them to level parity with the rest of your teams is vital if you want to use them on an endgame-ready account.

I’ve also put Core Skill upgrade materials last because it takes significantly less of them to improve your Core Skills, and, more importantly, you don’t even gain access to the highest rarity for more than a dozen hours after you can start spending Battery Charge. Don’t neglect putting a few bits of Charge into Core Skill Dimension Data every day or so, but don’t focus on it as a matter of progression.

One more thing: use all of your Battery Charge every day. It refills one every six seconds, so you get 10 every hour, or a full supply every 24 hours. Zenless Zone Zero doesn’t have a Stamina overflow system like Honkai: Star Rail yet, so any Battery you don’t spend when at max is wasted. Spending them is also key to increasing your Inter-Knot level, as story missions just won’t cover it after a certain point. You can use the Ether Battery items to refill 60 Charge at a time or spend 50 Polychrome to do the same, though I’d advise against either early on.

You’ll be spending plenty of Battery Charge on farming Drive Discs in due time, so build up a nice collection of Ascension materials in the meantime.

For more on Zenless Zone Zero, check out our guides hub.