Updated October 15, 2026, for patch 1.2: new campaigns can now kill Operators on their first or second Down and add a 20 to 80% death roll, and recruits, Crew Quarters and the top Medical Beds all got cheaper.
In Star Wars: Zero Company, an Operator who takes a third Injury is Killed in Action and gone for the rest of the campaign. That is the default rule, permadeath is on by default, and Hawks is the only Operator it cannot touch. Since patch 1.2 you can make it harsher when you start a new campaign: death on the second Down, death on the first, or a random chance of death every time someone goes Down. Everything below covers how Injuries work, what each rule does, and how to clear Injuries before the fatal one lands.
TL;DR
Health at zero means Downed, not dead, and every Down adds an Injury. On the default rules the third Injury kills the Operator for good. Patch 1.2's Two Strikes kills on the second, Instant Death on the first, and Risk of Death adds a 20% (rising to 80%) roll on every Down; all three are chosen at the start of a new campaign. Injuries carry over between missions and cost about 10% chance to hit each. Clear them in the Medbay: a bed takes a Cycle, the Bacta Tank is instant but works once per Cycle and does not exist on Hard or Expert. Everyone except Hawks can die. Recruits now cost a flat 100 Credits, so the dead are cheap to replace.
How an Operator dies
EA's own help guide lays out the chain, and it is short:
- An Operator whose Health hits zero is Downed. They cannot act, but they are not dead.
- Going Down gives them an Injury.
- Another Operator can Rally them, spending Action Points to get them back into the fight.
- With permadeath on, the third Injury means Killed in Action: the Operator is permanently removed from your squad.
The patch 1.2 notes describe the same default in different words: "An Operator defeated in tactical combat with two Injuries is permanently killed." That is the same event seen from the other side. An Operator carrying two Injuries who goes Down a third time would take the third Injury, and that Down is the one that kills them. The notes call this default Three Strikes.
What catches people is that the count runs across the whole campaign, not per mission. Injuries stay until they are treated, so an Operator who ends one mission on two Injuries starts the next one a single Down from death. A Rally gets them back on their feet; it does not take the Injury away.
Fallen Operators go on the Memorial in the Den, with their stats and what they did. Bit Reactor also wrote conditional dialogue around who is still alive, so a death changes later conversations rather than quietly removing a portrait. Since 1.2, objectives tied to an authored Operator also expire when that Operator dies or is dismissed. Before the patch they could linger.
The new death rules in patch 1.2
Patch 1.2 added Campaign Modifiers, and two of the groups rewrite the rules above. You set them in the Difficulty Settings menu when starting a new campaign, under Additional Campaign Options, on any difficulty. They take effect once you finish the tutorial. The notes say they can only be enabled when starting a new campaign, so a campaign already underway can't add them. The full list of modifiers, and the combinations we would pick, is in our difficulty settings guide.
How many Injuries it takes (Modify Injury Limits)
| Option | When an Operator dies |
|---|---|
| Three Strikes (default) | Defeated in tactical combat while carrying two Injuries |
| Two Strikes | Defeated in a Tactical Mission while carrying one or more Injuries |
| Instant Death | Defeated in a Tactical Mission, however many Injuries they have |
On Two Strikes, a clean Operator survives one Down and takes an Injury. Until a bed or the Bacta Tank clears it, their next Down is fatal. That makes the Medbay the whole game: every Injury is one Down from a funeral.
On Instant Death, a Rally never comes into it, because nobody stays Downed. The one exception is Trick. With Instant Death on, his For My Brothers ability changes so he can be downed and injured once in any given mission. A second defeat in the same Tactical Mission kills him.
Operations are exempt. Operators can pick up Injuries on Operations sent from the Galaxy Map, and neither Instant Death nor Two Strikes kills anyone hurt that way. The notes don't spell out whether an Injury taken on an Operation counts toward a later Two Strikes death in combat. Our reading is that it does, since the rule is about carrying "one or more Injuries," so treat an Operations Injury like any other and heal it before the next deployment.
A chance of death on every Down (Add Risk of Death)
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
| No Risk of Death (default) | Operators die only when the Injury rule above says so |
| Static Risk of Death | Every defeat in tactical combat carries a 20% chance of permanent death |
| Escalating Risk of Death | 20% on the first defeat. Survive it and that Operator's risk rises to 40% permanently, then to 80% after a second defeat, and every defeat after that stays at 80% |
Injuries from Operations don't trigger the roll, and on Escalating they don't raise the risk either.
Two consequences worth knowing before you pick one:
- Escalating risk is permanent. The notes say the increase never comes back down, so healing an Operator's Injuries in the Medbay leaves their risk where it was. A veteran who has gone Down twice walks into every mission on 80%. The Operators you have relied on longest become the likeliest to die.
- The roll stacks with the Injury rule. On Three Strikes with Escalating, an Operator can die on their first Down (20%) or their second (40%), and if neither Injury has been healed, the third kills them outright. On Instant Death the roll adds nothing, because every defeat already kills.
How much Health your Operators grow into (Health Progression)
| Option | Maximum Health from Focus Points |
|---|---|
| Standard Health Increases (default) | +1 for every 3 Focus Points |
| Reduced Health Increases | +1 for every 6 Focus Points |
| No Health Increases | None |
This one sounds like a stat tweak and plays like a survival rule. Less Maximum Health means more Downs, more Downs mean more Injuries, and on Two Strikes or any Risk of Death setting each extra Down is another chance to lose someone. Reduced halves the growth; No Health Increases leaves late-campaign Operators going Down about as fast as they did in the first act.
What an Injury costs before it kills
Each Injury takes roughly 10% off the Operator's chance to hit, and the penalty stacks. Two Injuries is 20% off every shot, on the Operator who is also one Down from gone. The Operator most at risk is the one least able to shoot their way out of trouble.
Healing: the bed or the Bacta Tank
Injuries clear in the Den's Medbay, one of two ways.
| Standard bed | Bacta Tank | |
|---|---|---|
| Speed | Takes a Cycle, and the Operator sits it out | Instant |
| Cost | Credits | Credits, and players call it overpriced |
| Limit | None | Once per Cycle since patch 1.1 |
| Difficulty | Every level | Story and Normal only; Hard and Expert disable it |
Credits are tight in this game, and the Bacta Tank is the price players complain about most: one of the biggest week-one threads called it "way too pricy" (the rest of that list). The rule we would follow: beds for anyone the next mission can do without, the Bacta Tank for the one Operator it cannot.
Before patch 1.1 on September 9, the Bacta Tank could be used more than once a Cycle. That was a bug, and it is closed. On Hard and Expert there is no choice to make: every Injury waits for a bed, which is one of the quieter reasons those difficulties bite.
Patch 1.2 changed three things here:
- The Bacta Tank comes back when you drop difficulty. A bug kept it unavailable after switching from Hard to an easier level. That is fixed, so stepping down to Normal for a rough stretch now gets you the tank.
- Medical Bed III and IV cost 500 Credits each, down from 600 and 700.
- Solo Operations pull Operators out of the Medbay. Before 1.2, an Operator in the Medbay sent on a solo assignment for an Operation wasn't removed from the Medbay. The fix means that Operator now leaves it, so check who is healing before you hand out Operations.
Who can die
Hawks can't. If Hawks falls in battle, the mission fails and you restart it. Lead designer James Brawley put it plainly before launch: "an automatic mission failure if Hawks dies in combat." Patch 1.2's death rules don't mention Hawks, and nothing in the notes changes this.
Everyone else can, including the story Operators. That is where permadeath costs the most, because some of them carry a class nobody else can. Tel-Rea Vokoss is the only Jedi Padawan in the game, and the developers' advice was "be careful that nothing unfortunate happens to her!" Cly Kullervo is the only Mandalorian. Exotic specializations cannot move to another Operator, so losing either one loses the class too (what each class does). On Instant Death that risk arrives with their first Down, so think hard before taking either into a fight you aren't sure about.
Beskar Mode raises the stakes again. It is a separate switch from permadeath: one constantly updating save, no reloads, and hard campaign-enders if Hawks dies, another critical squad member dies, or a crucial mission fails. With both on, a bad turn is permanent and can end the run.
How to keep everyone alive
Check the roster before every deploy. Anyone on two Injuries stays home, and on Two Strikes, anyone on one. You start with room for seven Operators and can grow to 20 while fielding four, so there is almost always someone healthy to send instead.
Grow the roster early, because it is cheap now. Since patch 1.2 every recruit costs a flat 100 Credits; before, the price rose as the roster grew. The four Increased Crew Quarters upgrades, which raise your roster limit, now cost 0 Credits (they were 400 to 1,000). A deep bench lets injured Operators sit out without leaving you short, and replacing a loss costs 100 Credits instead of a price that keeps climbing. How recruiting works, and whether you can sign more clones: our recruitment guide.
Bring a Medic when permadeath is on. The Medic's First Responder passive gives a permanent Medpac without using a utility slot, and anyone the Medic Rallies comes back fully healed and able to act. Community guides say a Rally from anyone else returns the Operator with only part of their Health, which is how an Operator goes Down twice in one mission and takes two Injuries from it. The Medic's ultimate, Morale Boost, adds health to nearby allies at the start of each turn on top of that. On Instant Death the Rally half of this stops mattering, and the healing half matters more.
Pull a hurt Operator back before they drop. As EA's guide describes it, the Injury comes from going Down, so an Operator who finishes a mission on low Health in cover has nothing to treat. Retreating one Operator for a turn costs you damage; losing them costs you the Operator. Under any 1.2 death rule this is the single most important habit.
Know that reloading is allowed outside Beskar Mode. Permadeath on its own still lets you load a save from before a mission went wrong, and that is how the default game is set up. The 1.2 modifiers don't change that. Whether you use it is your call.
On a Beskar run, trust your machine first. A crash mid-battle can cost you permadeath progress. Patch 1.1 fixed a Beskar Mode crash and a bug that temporarily deleted Beskar saves, and our crash-fix guide covers the rest.
Should you turn it off, or turn it up?
Bit Reactor built the campaign around permadeath. The team's pre-launch answer was that it is on by default, can be switched off, and is there because loss is "a core theme of Star Wars." The options screen only promises that difficulty can change mid-campaign, and community wikis say the permadeath choice holds for the whole campaign, so make it before you start. The 1.2 notes don't say how the new Injury rules behave with permadeath switched off, so if you pick one, leave permadeath on.
Our advice is to leave it on. On Normal it barely bites: we finished our review campaign without losing a single Operator, and PCGamesN reported the same. One week-one thread argued three Injuries is too generous even on Hard with Beskar Mode, where the poster finished with one name on the Memorial and said it should have been two. Patch 1.2's Two Strikes is that rule, now in the game.
If you want permadeath to feel like permadeath, start a second campaign on Hard with Two Strikes. Hard takes the Bacta Tank away, and Two Strikes turns every Injury into a decision. Add Escalating Risk of Death if you want your veterans to feel mortal. Bit Reactor's own advice is to play the default rules on Normal first, and we agree.
Turn it off if losing a favorite would make you stop playing. That is a fair reason, and the rest of the game is unchanged.
The details
- The Downed, Rally, Injury and Hawks rules come from EA's turn-based tactics guide and Bit Reactor's pre-launch Q&A (July 21, 2026). The Bacta Tank's difficulty limits come from the in-game options screen, and its once-per-Cycle rule from the patch 1.1 notes.
- Instant Death, Two Strikes, Three Strikes, the Risk of Death numbers, Health Progression and the recruiting, Crew Quarters, Medical Bed and Medbay changes come from Bit Reactor's patch 1.2 notes, posted October 15, 2026 on Steam and on EA's site. Where we read between the lines (Operations Injuries counting toward Two Strikes, healing leaving escalating risk in place), we say so above.
- The 10% chance-to-hit figure, the Medbay costs, the Memorial and the partial Health on a non-Medic Rally are community documentation, cross-checked between the Fextralife wiki and Zero Command's wiki. Anything our own campaign contradicts gets corrected here, visibly.
- Current as of patch 1.2, which kept three Injuries as the default and made the harsher rules optional for new campaigns. When a patch touches Injuries, this page changes the same day. The Zero Company hub collects everything else, including the starter guide.
