Zenless Zone Zero Polychrome Farming Guide

I've been playing Zenless Zone Zero for a while now, and here's my biggest takeaway — the game makes you feel like Polychrome is flowing in pretty generously, right up until the moment a character you actually want hits the banner and you're suddenly twenty or thirty pulls short. When I first started, I made a genuinely stupid mistake: every time I hit 160 Polychrome I'd blow it on a single pull, convinced I was riding a hot streak. Two months later I had barely any characters to show for it, my Polychrome was completely drained, and I hadn't even sniffed pity. Eventually I forced myself to sit down and actually map out every Polychrome source in the game, and that's when I realized — the stuff is scattered across a ton of places you'd never think to check in your daily routine. Nobody's ever really gathered it all in one place for you.

Version updates and limited-time events are your biggest paydays — don't leave them until they're gone

The week or two right after a version update is when you can quietly stack up a huge pile of Polychrome without even realizing it. Events drop in clusters, maintenance compensation lands in your inbox, and first-clear rewards for new content all pile on top of each other. You don't even have to grind hard — just clearing all the red notification dots that pop up after an update already nets you a decent chunk.

• Maintenance compensation on update day is basically guaranteed, usually somewhere between 300 and 600 Polychrome. Stack the version livestream redemption codes on top of that — all three codes together add up to roughly another 300. That's nearly a thousand right there before you've even done anything. But the codes usually expire within 48 hours. Miss them by a day and you've literally thrown away several pulls for nothing.
• The major and minor events in each version cycle combined cover more than half the days in a patch. Big themed events are the densest Polychrome source in the game, often handing out over a thousand each. Smaller events only give two or three hundred a pop, but they show up constantly. The key to maxing these out isn't grinding — it's not procrastinating. A lot of people rush to clear events in the last three days. The difficulty doesn't drop, but your patience has already been burned through by everything else you did that week.
• Hollow Zero first-clear rewards and rating settlements each cycle all pay out Polychrome. This is basically the daily staple for veteran players. But there's one thing a lot of people overlook: the difficulty setting you choose directly affects how much Polychrome you get at settlement. If you can handle the higher difficulty, don't camp out in the comfort zone of the lower tier. One difficulty level down over an entire version cycle can easily mean over a thousand Polychrome you never even knew you were leaving on the table.

Permanent-mode Polychrome adds up quietly — the trick is doing it every single day

This category has the lowest barrier to entry, but it's also the easiest one to be inconsistent about. Dailies and weeklies — the fixed-income stuff — don't look like much on any given day. But the gap between doing them consistently for three months versus not touching them at all is roughly enough to land you an extra S-rank agent.

• Daily commissions and daily activity rewards only hand out a few dozen Polychrome at a time, easy to dismiss. But over a full month, plus the extra Polychrome stashed inside the weekly activity chests, the cumulative total is genuinely solid. Spending three minutes on your phone clearing dailies probably has the best time-investment-to-reward ratio of anything in this game.
• Keep pushing through the Proxy Network missions. Every chapter's first clear gives Polychrome directly, and the difficulty is generally pretty low. Most players finish the main story and then leave the Proxy Network sitting there collecting dust, but the first-clear rewards in the later chapters aren't that far behind what the main story gave you. When you're short on pulls, going back to clean these up often comes with pleasant surprises.
• Agent trust missions and invite events — every full route you complete pays out Polychrome, and this type of content doesn't care about your combat power at all. Zero investment threshold. Pick an afternoon and burn through all the trust missions you've been ignoring. There could be several hundred Polychrome sitting there quietly waiting for you. You just never clicked on it.

Hidden sources that are easy to skip — every single one is money you left behind

There are a few Polychrome sources in the game that aren't exactly buried deep, but they have no red notification dot attached to them. If you don't go looking for them, they'll never come looking for you. Most players either don't know about this stuff or know but can't be bothered. Picking it up is pure free currency.

• The total Polychrome in the achievement system is way higher than I initially estimated. Combat achievements, exploration achievements, collection achievements — all those little bits scattered around add up to a genuinely surprising number. Flip through your unfinished achievement list. A lot of them are one tiny step away from completion. Spend half an hour focused on cleaning those up and you'll pull in Polychrome faster than farming anything else.
• Livestream and offline collaboration redemption codes — keep an eye on the official accounts and community posts around each version update. Missing one code is one pull gone. Build the habit of following a couple of reliable info accounts. You don't need to stare at them all day, just glance at the push notifications.
• Collection compendiums, Bangboo paint unlocks, Hollow Zero codex completion rewards — this category is stuff you were already going to be farming anyway. The Polychrome attached to it is basically free. The problem is most people have no idea these collections even have rewards. Open up the compendium screen and you might find progress bars that are nearly full, just waiting for that last little nudge.

At the end of the day, Polychrome farming comes down to two things: don't miss the big sources, and don't stop doing the small ones. Version events and story first-clears — those big injections — decide whether you've got the confidence to chase pity on each banner. Dailies and achievements — the small steady drip — decide how often you get surprised by an early pull. A lot of the time when you feel like you "can't pull anything," it's not luck you're short on. It's the few hundred Polychrome that daily consistency would've stacked up over weeks and months. Don't stress about it, and don't treat it like clocking into a job. But at least know where the Polychrome is and which sources are worth your time. Don't wait until the character you want is already on the banner to start regretting that you did nothing for the two months before.