Zero Company's first patch, version 1.1, went out on every platform on September 9, and it is almost entirely bug fixes. Save corruption, the Beskar Mode crash, the preorder items that never arrived and the 100 percent shot that could still miss are all fixed. None of the balance complaints from launch week are touched: Cly, the Infinite Coil, the economy and the timers work exactly as they did. If a bug drove you away, go back. If Expert got too easy, this patch will not change that.
EA's patch notes list 57 fixes and five small feature changes, for the EA app, Steam, Epic, PlayStation and Xbox. Here is what matters, sorted by how much you will notice it.
The fixes you will notice
Saves. Four separate save problems are fixed: corruption when the game closes suddenly or is forced shut, Beskar Mode saves being temporarily deleted, characters corrupting if you used the Databank while the game was saving, and a Databank bug where renaming one operator renamed another and broke that operator's customization. The first two matter most on Beskar Mode, where you get one save file and no reloads.
The 100 percent miss. "Fixed an issue where shots can be missed, even when the chance to hit is 100%." It was on EA's own pinned known-issues list with no workaround, and it is gone.
Crashes and softlocks. "Various crash issues" and "various visual stutters," with no more detail than that, plus a crash specific to Beskar Mode and three softlocks: one on the main menu, one in the Medbay tutorial, and one that blocked progress if you opened inspection mode while moving in and out of squad selection.
Drivers. The game's minimum suggested Nvidia and AMD drivers are now the current game-ready versions, and the warning prompt now says plainly that you need to update. Crashes with DLSS on older Nvidia drivers were the first item on EA's known-issues list, so if the game warns you, take it seriously.
Preorder and Deluxe Edition items now arrive for players who never got them.
The rest is presentation: Fathom's hair, clone trooper and Kabb animations, Trick swapping back to his default helmet and outfit in Stillwatch, Hawks going missing from the Bespin closing cinematic, and a handful more.
The fixes that change the numbers
Nothing in 1.1 is labeled a balance change, but about a dozen fixes correct damage and resource math, and some of them move your build. If you picked up a trick in the first two weeks, check it here.
| Fix | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| Tier 2 to 4 Scatterguns were using Tier 1 values | Upgraded Scatterguns now hit as hard as their tier says. A straight buff. |
| The DC-17m Anti-Armor shot could not crit or take grenade damage bonuses | It can now. Buff. |
| Ion Blasters doubled their Critical Damage | They no longer do. Nerf. |
| Tel-Rea's Force attacks applied the Ranged Damage Cross Training bonus twice, and ignored Critical Damage bonuses | Both corrected: less from the doubled bonus, more from critical hits. |
| Droid Dismantler granted Harmony on every enemy death | Now only on droid deaths. Nerf. |
| A Life of Labor's second tier stacked forever if bought repeatedly | Closed. |
| The Bacta Tank could be used more than once a cycle | Once a cycle now. |
| Sweeping Salvo hit enemies outside its cone | It no longer does. |
| The Immovable status applied but gave no bonuses | It gives them now. |
| Secondary Specializations were not adding their passive Cross Trainings at Relationship +8 | Fixed, and they now count toward specialization requirements in Operations. |
Overwatch got four fixes of its own. The one worth knowing: enemies on Overwatch no longer fire through solid objects at operators they could not see.
What 1.1 did not touch
Measured against the week-one complaints:
- Cly and the action economy. No changes to the Mandalorian, the Gunslinger's Quick Draw or any other ability's design. Nothing that makes Expert easy was redesigned; if your combo leaned on Ion Blaster crits or A Life of Labor stacking, see the table above.
- The Infinite Coil. Their health, heals and retaliation are unchanged. The only Coil line fixes a Coil Captain healing a target Overwatch had already killed.
- Missions, post-game and New Game Plus. Nothing.
- The economy. No prices changed. The only Bacta Tank change stops it being used twice in a cycle.
- Timers. Unchanged.
- Permadeath's three-injury rule. Unchanged.
- Intel 13th and 14th generation crashes. Not mentioned. EA's earlier advice, a BIOS update or Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility, is still the route; our crash-fix guide has it.
This is the patch Bit Reactor described in its Discord on September 3, a release for "bugs and performance issues," and that is what it delivered. Neither EA's patch page nor the community wiki's update log says anything about a 1.2 or a balance pass. With most of the studio furloughed before launch, whether one comes depends on people going back to work, and as of September 11 we have found no announcement that anyone has. Play it, or buy it, for the game as it stands today.
If you are on an older graphics card
The one piece of new advice in the notes: on a GTX 10-series or RTX 20-series card at minimum spec, open Options, then Graphics, and set Environment Geometry Detail to Off. EA says those cards carry extra rendering overhead on complex scenery. That settles a split in the testing we cited in our PC settings guide, which now reflects it.
Did the patch bring players back?
Not in anything our tracker can see. Zero Company's daily high on Steam was 21,497 on Tuesday, the day before the patch, then 17,027 on patch day and 16,538 on Thursday, in line with the weekday slide it has been on since its second weekend. Steam reviews have edged up, from 80 percent positive across about 14,000 on September 4 to 82 percent across 18,697 on September 11, but there is no way to tell how much of that is the patch.
Sources
EA's patch notes page and the matching Steam announcement, both September 9. The Zero Company community wiki's update log for the September 3 Discord announcement and the absence of any later one. Steam's store page for review counts at the time of writing. Concurrent players from our own tracker, which reads Steam every two hours.
