Quick answer: Operation Bagel is the permanent "Enigma of the Labyrinth" extraction mode in Zenless Zone Zero. It unlocks at Inter-Knot Lv. 40, not Lv. 20, and has been available since 5 August 2026 at 10:00 server time. Each run is a 25-minute timer at the Omond Research Station in Papago Hollow. There are four difficulties gated by Recommended Equipment Value: Easy, Standard (12,000), Hard (72,100) and High-Risk (258,000). The current season, Operation Bagel II, pays out exactly 18,000 Season Coins and 4,000 Season EXP across its four Commission phases — and it settles when Version 3.2 ends on 21 October 2026 at 06:00 UTC+8, which resets all server rankings and badge tiers. That gives you about 13 days from this article's date.
Search Operation Bagel and the first page hands you a confident unlock requirement: Inter-Knot Lv. 20, clear Chapter 1 Intermission. That is wrong, and it has been copied across most of the commerce blogs covering this mode.
HoYoverse's own Version 3.1 notice puts the gate at Inter-Knot Lv. 40. If you have been bouncing off the Omond Research Station wondering what you missed, that is the whole answer — you are under-levelled, not under-progressed.
This page is the version that does the arithmetic. Every difficulty threshold, the exact Season Coin ceiling, and the deadline the current season actually dies on.
Article status: verified 8 October 2026 against the official Version 3.1 Update Announcement and Version 3.2 Update Announcement on HoYoLAB, plus the 3.1 Special Program overview. Applies to Version 3.2 "Their Secret Histories", live now.
What is Operation Bagel in Zenless Zone Zero?
Operation Bagel is the season-based game mode inside the permanent event Enigma of the Labyrinth, introduced in Version 3.1 and still running in Version 3.2. You enter from the Omond Research Station in Papago Hollow, pick a difficulty, drop into an illusion of New Eridu, and have 25 minutes to loot valuables and leave through an Escape Route before the timer or the map kills you.
That loop is the part that trips people up. This is not a Shiyu-style combat ladder where clearing the last wave wins. Your score is what you extract. Die or time out, and the run's haul is gone.
Two stages exist right now: Suburbs Illusion and Janus Illusion. A third slot sits visibly locked on the stage select screen, labelled as uncharted — HoYoverse has not announced what fills it, and anyone telling you otherwise is reading a leak, not a patch note.
Progress converts into Season Coins and Season EXP through a Commission track, and Season Coins buy permanent upgrades and cosmetics from Boojee's Store. The store runs four counters: a Treasures Counter, a Permanent Store, a Blueprint Direct Sale, and a Season Limited section that rotates out when the season closes.
HoYoverse describes the loop in its own words in the Version 3.1 notice:
"Proxies need to venture into the depths of the Hollow to collect valuable supplies and evacuate in time. These supplies can be used to build infrastructure to repair the research station, or to craft equipment to boost the Agents' combat capabilities within the Hollow."
That same notice names Agent Focus: Pyrois as a Commission redemption from the Store, and the headline Season Commission rewards as Twilight Afterimage plus the Belle: Chipi-Meow and Wise: Dubi-Meow Proxy accessories.
How do you unlock Operation Bagel?
Two requirements, both first-party:
- Inter-Knot Lv. 40.
- The mode has been live since 5 August 2026 at 10:00 server time.
There is no Chapter 1 Intermission gate, no Hollow Zero prerequisite, and no separate event period to miss — Enigma of the Labyrinth is flagged as a permanent event, so the mode itself never expires. Only the season layer on top of it rotates.
If you are short on Inter-Knot EXP, the fastest route is the same one that funds everything else in this game: daily Scratch Cards, Commissions and story chapters. Our Polychrome farming breakdown covers the same daily loop from the currency side, and the active redemption codes are worth clearing before you start grinding anything.
What are the four Operation Bagel difficulties?
Each tier is gated by Recommended Equipment Value, a single number the game computes from your Agents' gear — not by Inter-Knot level alone.
Sourcing note: HoYoverse has never published these thresholds in a patch note. The numbers below are read off the in-game difficulty select and documented by the community wiki. The unlock requirement, the availability date, the permanent status and the version window above are all first-party. The difficulty table, the 25-minute run timer, the Omond Research Station entry point and the Season Coin phase values are in-game and community-documented.
- Easy — Suburbs Illusion only, recommended Agent Lv. 5. A tutorial pass. Ulidim, the roaming threat, cannot be killed here.
- Standard — 12,000 Gear Coin Recommended Equipment Value, recommended Agent Lv. 20. Ulidim still cannot be killed; you avoid it or you lose the run.
- Hard — 72,100 Recommended Equipment Value, recommended Agent Lv. 40. The Cacophony Soundscape corruption now spreads and caps your HP at 1 inside it, Escape Routes progressively close, and Ulidim becomes killable once 5 minutes remain on the clock.
- High-Risk — 258,000 Recommended Equipment Value, recommended Agent Lv. 60. Cacophony spreads faster, exits shut sooner, Ulidim becomes killable at 8 minutes remaining, and the Tycoon Investor payout unlocks in 500,000 Gear Coin intervals up to a 3,000,000 ceiling.
Note the jump from Standard to Hard: 12,000 to 72,100 is a six-fold gear requirement, and it is the single biggest wall in the mode. High-Risk is another 3.6x on top of that.
Experienced players in the official subreddit are blunt about where to sit. The consensus phrasing, lightly paraphrased from two threads this week: stick to Hard, not High-Risk, because the extra Tycoon ceiling does not pay for the run failures. One comment put the gear question even more simply — "all you really need is the Pyrois pieces."
If your Equipment Value is the blocker rather than your skill, that is a Drive Disc problem, and our best Drive Discs guide is the faster fix than re-running Standard.
How many Season Coins does Operation Bagel II actually give?
This is the number nobody else has published, and it is simple arithmetic once you lay the Commission phases side by side.
Operation Bagel II runs four documented Commission phases, each with five tiers:
- Phase 1 — 5 tiers at 600 Season Coins = 3,000
- Phase 2 — 5 tiers at 800 = 4,000
- Phase 3 — 5 tiers at 1,000 = 5,000
- Phase 4 — 5 tiers at 1,200 = 6,000
Total: 18,000 Season Coins and 4,000 Season EXP for a fully completed season. That figure matches the stated per-season cap exactly, which is the useful confirmation — it means there is no hidden fifth phase and no repeatable overflow. Eighteen thousand is the ceiling, so you can plan Boojee's Store purchases against a known budget instead of guessing.
What is not confirmed: some reference pages list the season as "Season Lv. max 6" while documenting only four phases. Those pages carry an under-construction flag, and the two claims cannot both be true. Treat the four-phase, 18,000-coin structure as the verified figure and the Lv. 6 line as unresolved until HoYoverse publishes a season-settlement summary.
On top of the Commission track, four tied story missions each pay Polychrome x40 and Denny x20,000: Bangboo Lost, Disappearing Eous, The Great Aquarium Rescue, and Hematite Mystery. That is 160 Polychrome and 80,000 Denny in one-time pickups most players skip entirely.
What did Version 3.2 change in Operation Bagel?
A lot more than the patch summary implies. The Version 3.2 notes carry roughly 40 separate Operation Bagel adjustments, and most of them are interface fixes.
That number is worth sitting with, because it validates the loudest player complaint about this mode. The recurring description in the official subreddit is that Operation Bagel plays like a "menu simulator" — more time in inventory grids than in combat. Forty UX changes in one version is HoYoverse agreeing.
The functional additions:
- Tactical Prisms added for Claret, Roxy, Tsukishiro Yanagi, Zhao, Banyue, Yidhari and Starlight - Billy.
- Armorer General Gear, supporting Claret's new Armorer specialty.
- A Break-Even Beacon obtainable from Briefcases on Hard and High-Risk.
- New Season Coin store stock: Pink Pony Bub, Pink Pony Gal, The Time is Neigh, and an Inventory Expansion Plug-In marked seasonal.
- Z-Rank Valuables, a new top loot tier.
- A dedicated season settlement interface.
- The Tycoon Investor cap raised to 3,000,000 Gear Coins.
- Early retreat while paused, which removes the old "stuck in a dead run" trap.
The Version 3.2 notes also state that the update resets all server rankings and badge tiers. That is the line that makes the deadline below matter.
When does Operation Bagel II end?
HoYoverse's Version 3.2 announcement is unambiguous about the version window:
"Please note that Version 3.2 will run for 42 days, ending on 2026/10/21 06:00 (UTC+8)."
Version 3.2 both introduced Operation Bagel II and reset the previous season's rankings and badges. Observed behaviour, not a first-party promise, is therefore that the season closes at the Version 3.3 update — 21 October 2026 at 06:00 UTC+8. As of 8 October 2026 that leaves roughly 13 days.
Practical reading: if you want the Season Limited counter stock at Boojee's Store, or the seasonal Inventory Expansion Plug-In, buy it before the 21st. Permanent Store and Blueprint purchases survive the reset. Season Limited, by name, does not.
Version 3.3 arrives the same day, and if you are budgeting pulls around it, the Version 3.3 banner schedule is the companion page.
How should you actually run Operation Bagel?
Four things come up repeatedly from players clearing the mode efficiently, and all four are about route discipline rather than team power.
Start on Janus Illusion, not Suburbs. The most-repeated newcomer advice in the official subreddit is to stick to Janus Illusion to start — its layout is more legible and its loot density is less spread out.
Prioritise the random play area and the Lumina central area. These are the two zones named most often as worth the clock. Everything else is optional once the timer gets inside ten minutes.
Etheric Phantoms are a resource, not an obstacle. The player framing is that they "are intended to be abused" — their mechanics are generous enough that avoiding them costs you more than engaging them.
Leave early rather than greedily. With Version 3.2's early-retreat-while-paused change, banking a partial haul is now a two-click decision. An extracted run at 60 percent of the loot beats a timed-out run at 100 percent.
Is Operation Bagel worth it, or should you just run Hollow Zero?
A common claim in the subreddit is that you should abandon Operation Bagel and run Hollow Zero because "you get the same rewards from there." That is not accurate, and it is worth correcting directly.
Hollow Zero and Operation Bagel pay out of different pools. Hollow Zero feeds Hollow Zero's own currencies and investigation rewards. Operation Bagel pays Season Coins and Season EXP, which only Boojee's Store accepts, plus the Polychrome and Denny bundles on its four tied missions, plus a badge and ranking track that no other mode touches. Skipping Bagel does not redirect those rewards elsewhere — it forfeits them.
Where the sceptics have a point: Operation Bagel's reward-per-minute on Standard difficulty is genuinely poor, because the mode front-loads menu time. If you are only clearing Standard, the complaint is fair. The mode starts paying once your Equipment Value clears the 72,100 Hard gate and Ulidim becomes killable.
For raw per-run efficiency against a weekly clock, Deadly Assault remains the better time investment, and your best team compositions carry over to both modes unchanged.
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FAQ
What Inter-Knot level do you need for Operation Bagel? Inter-Knot Lv. 40, per HoYoverse's Version 3.1 announcement. The widely copied "Inter-Knot Lv. 20 plus Chapter 1 Intermission" requirement is incorrect.
Is Operation Bagel permanent or a limited event? The parent event, Enigma of the Labyrinth, is permanent and has been live since 5 August 2026 at 10:00 server time. The season layer on top of it — currently Operation Bagel II — rotates with game versions.
How long is one Operation Bagel run? 25 minutes on the in-run timer. You must reach an Escape Route before it expires or you lose the run's extracted value.
How many Season Coins can you earn in Operation Bagel II? 18,000 Season Coins and 4,000 Season EXP, from four Commission phases of five tiers each at 600, 800, 1,000 and 1,200 Season Coins per tier. That matches the stated per-season cap, so there is no overflow to farm.
What Equipment Value do you need for Hard difficulty? 72,100 Recommended Equipment Value, with recommended Agent Lv. 40. High-Risk needs 258,000 and recommended Agent Lv. 60.
Can you kill Ulidim? Not on Easy or Standard. On Hard it becomes killable when 5 minutes remain on the timer, and on High-Risk when 8 minutes remain.
When does the current Operation Bagel season reset? Version 3.2 ends on 21 October 2026 at 06:00 UTC+8 per HoYoverse's official announcement, and the version update resets all server rankings and badge tiers. Buy Season Limited stock from Boojee's Store before then.
Which stage should a new player pick? Janus Illusion is the stage experienced players point newcomers to, ahead of Suburbs Illusion, because its layout and loot distribution are easier to read inside the 25-minute limit.
