Season 1 "KORD BREACH": Seasonal Characters, Modifiers, and Battle Pass

Why KORD BREACH changes how you plan your raids

Patch 1.1.0.0 did not just add content — it bolted a second, self-resetting game onto Escape from Tarkov, and if you log in without understanding it you will waste your first week.

The problem most returning players hit in August 2026 is simple: the launcher now offers you a seasonal character next to your existing profiles, the main menu pushes a battle pass, and nobody in your Discord agrees on whether any of it touches your main stash. Some of your friends say it is a wipe, some say it is optional, and someone always claims you have to pay for the pass. All three takes are partly wrong, and the real answers matter because decisions made at character creation — especially your personal modifiers — are locked for the entire season.

This guide answers the questions that actually cost you progress: what a seasonal character is, what resets and what never does, how the global and personal modifier system works, how the free battle pass is advanced, what the single paid element is, and which rewards vanish forever when the season ends. Where a number is only community-reported rather than written in official patch notes, this guide says so in the sentence that uses it.

Everything here is checked against Patch 1.1.5.0, the live build as of mid-September 2026, with Season 1 running since August 3. Tarkov's balance and economy values wander between patches, so treat specific figures as a dated snapshot and re-check the in-game text after any major update.

At a glance: Season 1 in sixty seconds

If you only read one section, read this one.

KORD BREACH is the first season of Tarkov's new seasonal system, launched with patch 1.1.0.0 on August 3, 2026 and themed around the Black Division faction. It gives you an optional, PvP-only seasonal character on separate servers with a fresh stash, hideout, and economy, plus a free battle pass that all three of your profiles advance together. Nothing about the season touches your permanent PvP or PvE characters except the rewards you unlock, which carry over to every mode once earned.

Timeline: how Season 1 launched and where it sits now

The season system was originally slated for late July 2026, slipped by a few days, and went live on August 3, 2026 at roughly 13:00 BST as the headline feature of patch 1.1.0.0. The same patch also delivered an economic rebalance, squad-shared quest progress, a spectator mode, and a proper game-mode selection screen, so the season launch was effectively a soft relaunch of the whole game loop.

Since then the game has moved on to 1.1.5.0, released September 8, 2026, whose headline item is the Lighthouse rework — the Rogues moved from the water treatment plant to the mountain chalet, the plant lost its fixed weapons and mines, a BTR now patrols the map, and a new transit to Icebreaker opened at the waterfront. None of that changes the season rules themselves, but it matters if your seasonal character plans to fight through Lighthouse for questlines.

Battlestate has said the plan is two seasons per year, and the studio's August 2026 roadmap slots Season 2 for December alongside the 1.4 patch. Seasonal character progress automatically resets every four to six months, timed to land with major content updates and the start of the next season, so think of a season as a fixed-length campaign rather than an open-ended ladder.

The seasonal character: a second account inside your account

A seasonal character is a brand-new PMC profile you create from a dedicated character selection screen. It runs on separate servers, and it is completely independent from your PvP Zone and PvE Zone characters — no shared stash, no shared hideout, no shared rouble balance, no shared quest progress. You start at level one with a fresh hideout and a fresh economy, exactly like a brand-new account on launch day, except you keep your knowledge and your main profiles waiting in the wings.

Two restrictions define the mode. First, it is PvP only: every raid on a seasonal character is against other players' seasonal characters, with none of the PvE safety net. Second, seasonal characters cannot insure their gear at all — as of 1.1.0.0, insurance is only available on PvP Zone and PvE Zone profiles. Every kit you lose on the season servers is gone for good, which should directly shape how much you are willing to carry into a raid.

Because the servers, economy, and player pool are walled off, the season is a genuinely fresh market: everyone starts poor on the same day, early-game ammo and armor are scarce for everyone, and the usual permanent-account veterans cannot import their wealth. If you ever wished you could relive your first wipe with the skills you have now, this is the official way to do it — see /guides/wipes-explained for how this replaced the old system.

How seasons replaced the wipe

During the beta years, every major patch could wipe all progress for all players, and the last full-account wipe in Tarkov history was the 1.0 release itself on November 15, 2025. Since then, your permanent PvP and PvE profiles have never been reset, and Battlestate's stated design is that they never will be again. Your stash, hideout, Kappa progress, and trader standing on those profiles are safe.

The seasonal character is where the wipe experience went. Instead of resetting everyone, the game now resets only the seasonal profile at the end of each season — that character, its stash, and its progress do not carry over. What does carry over are the rewards: anything you unlock through the season or battle pass becomes a permanent account-level unlock that works on all your characters in all modes.

Practical consequence: when people ask when the next wipe is, the correct answer in the 1.0 era is when the current season ends, and it only applies to seasonal characters. If you are a returning player worried about losing your main account, stop worrying; if you are a fresh-start addict, the season servers are where the action is.

Season length and the end-date question

Officially, the patch notes commit to a range, not a date: seasonal character progress resets every four to six months, synchronized with big content patches and the next season's start. With an August 3 launch, that window puts the Season 1 finish somewhere between early December 2026 and early February 2027, and the roadmap's placement of Season 2 in December points toward the early end of that range.

Here is the part you must treat carefully: the game has never published an official written end date for Season 1. The in-game main-menu countdown points to December 7, 2026, and third-party coverage and community trackers repeat that date, but as of Patch 1.1.5.0 it remains an in-game timer rather than a documented commitment. Plan around early December, watch the official news feed as the date approaches, and do not assume the countdown is a contract — launch of the season itself already slipped once.

Whatever the exact day, the end-of-season stakes are asymmetric: your seasonal character, stash, and in-season progress are deleted, while every reward you already unlocked — battle pass items, trader offers, Black Division gear access — stays on your account forever. The only true deadline risk is rewards you have not yet unlocked, which become unobtainable once the season closes.

Global modifiers: the season's house rules

Global modifiers are the ruleset Battlestate picks for the season. They exist to reshape or re-tune specific parts of gameplay — making some things harder, some easier — and they apply only to seasonal characters. Crucially, they apply identically to every player on the season servers: you cannot change them, disable them, or pick a subset. They are the weather, not your loadout.

Each new season ships with a new set of global modifiers, so a strategy that thrived under KORD BREACH's rules may be obsolete in Season 2. The studio has also floated the idea of letting the community vote on future global modifier selections, which would make each season's ruleset partly player-shaped — treat that as an intention, not a shipped feature.

One number needs an honesty flag: community sites report six global modifiers active for Season 1, but the official patch notes never listed a count, so treat six as the community tally rather than a confirmed figure. What is confirmed is the design — fixed, universal, season-scoped rules that define the character of the season.

Personal modifiers: build your own hard mode

This is the decision you make once at character creation and live with until the season resets.

Personal modifiers are optional positive and negative effects you select when creating your seasonal character. The system works on a point budget: taking a negative modifier grants you points, taking a positive modifier spends points, and your final balance must be zero or higher before the game lets you create the character. You can also take nothing at all — opting out entirely is legal.

Two published examples show the flavor. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a negative modifier that increases your stamina drain, handing you points in exchange for worse mobility. Bushborne is a positive modifier that reduces the noise you make moving through bushes, costing points for a stealth edge. Your selections appear on the Skills tab of the character screen, so you can always remind yourself what you signed up for.

The hard rule is permanence: once the character is created, your personal modifiers are locked for the entire season with no way to respec. There is no undo, no paid reroll, no support ticket. Choose like you are signing a four-month contract, because you are.

Community reporting puts the pool at roughly 33 selectable personal modifiers for Season 1, but the official notes did not enumerate them, so treat that count as unverified and browse the actual list on the creation screen before committing.

Choosing your modifiers: a field procedure

Start from your honest weakness, not your fantasy build. A negative modifier that punishes something you rarely do is free points; a negative that punishes your core habit will sour every raid for months. If you sprint everywhere, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome will feel brutal; if you already move at a stalker's pace, it barely exists. Read each negative as a question about your actual play pattern over the last hundred raids.

Spend points only on positives that change decisions. A modifier that quietly improves something you never notice is worse than one that opens a new line of play — a stealth bonus like Bushborne only earns its cost if you actually route through foliage and disengage instead of fighting. Before locking in, name the concrete situation where each positive will save or win you a raid; if you cannot, bank the points.

Remember the point floor: the balance must be zero or above, so you are never forced to take a positive. A character built entirely from negatives is legal and effectively plays a harder version of the season for no tangible reward beyond pride — do that only if the challenge itself is why you are here. And since there is no respec, sleep on the decision; creating your seasonal character on day one is not a race that pays anything meaningful.

The battle pass: free, shared, and raid-driven

KORD BREACH introduced Tarkov's first battle pass, and the headline fact is that it costs nothing. It is a free battle pass whose rewards are all earnable through normal play, with no premium track and no paid tier skip in the traditional sense. You do not even need to play the season: players who never create a seasonal character can still progress the same pass.

Progress is shared across all three modes — PvP Season, PvP Zone, and PvE Zone feed one common track and one common reward pool. That design has a quiet strategic implication: you can farm progress on whichever profile is safest for you. If your seasonal character keeps dying to other players, your PvE profile advances the same pass against AI, and the rewards land on both.

Rewards you have unlocked are available immediately in every mode, which makes the pass the main bridge between your seasonal grind and your permanent accounts. The catch sits at the end of the season: any season reward still locked when KORD BREACH ends becomes permanently unobtainable, so the pass doubles as a countdown you should not ignore.

TerraGroup documents: the fuel of the pass

The battle pass advances by collecting TerraGroup documents and turning them in. Documents appear in raids in every mode, and both your PMC and your Scav can find them, so scav runs are legitimate pass progression, not just a money method. Beyond looting, you can also earn documentation through the KORD BREACH special taskline and by killing specific Black Division operators.

The spawn rules are friendlier than you might fear. Documents that spawn for you in a raid are personal: other players cannot steal them from the world or pry them off your PMC's corpse, so a bad raid does not donate your progress to the lobby. Documents dropped by killed Black Division operators are the exception — those are shared with your whole squad, which makes hunting operators a team activity.

There is a daily ceiling on how many documents you can earn, counted separately per mode while feeding the same shared pass. Community sources report the current caps as 30 per day on seasonal PvP, 20 on permanent PvP, and 15 on PvE, raised from an earlier 25/15/10 after a balance adjustment — but Battlestate never published these numbers in writing, so treat them as community-measured values that can shift with any hotfix.

Practical routine: run your highest-cap mode first each day, then top up elsewhere if you have the hours. A scav raid on a permanent PvP profile is a low-risk way to bank documents when your seasonal PMC is between kits.

Classified Documents and TarCoin: the only paid element

One item in the whole battle pass ecosystem touches real money. Classified Documents are a universal document type that can substitute for any other document when unlocking pass rewards, and they are purchasable with TarCoin in the Expansion Hub, the new in-game storefront area that 1.0.6.0 prepared and the season update opened. TarCoin is the premium currency, so buying Classified Documents is effectively buying pass progress.

Everything else is earnable. The pass itself is free, the regular TerraGroup documents drop in raids for everyone, and the season rewards are gated by play — levels, quests, and tasklines — not by payment. If you never spend a single TarCoin, you lose access to nothing except speed.

Treat Classified Documents as a catch-up mechanic, not a requirement. They make sense in exactly one situation: the season timer is nearly done and you are a handful of documents short of a reward you care about. Buying them early just to skip raids is paying to avoid the part of the season that is actually fun, and the daily caps mean the free route is generous if you play regularly.

Season rewards: trader offers that outlive the season

Season rewards take the form of unique trader offers — special trade deals you unlock by playing your seasonal character. Each offer has one or more unlock conditions drawn from a short list: reaching a specific PMC level, completing a specific quest, or finishing a full quest chain. Once the condition is met, the offer unlocks permanently and becomes usable in all three modes on all your characters.

The flagship unlock for Season 1 is trade access to Black Division equipment — the gear of the season's themed faction — as a permanent account-level gameplay unlock. Black Division fields operators on Terminal, the endgame map, where they serve as the resident hostile force; their detailed drop table is not verified in current research, so this site deliberately does not list one. For what is confirmed about the map itself, see /maps/terminal.

The permanence rule cuts both ways and is worth restating in full: unlocked offers survive the season reset forever, but any season reward still locked at season end can never be obtained again, on any mode, by any means. If a specific Black Division trade or quest-chain reward matters to you, treat its unlock conditions as your season objective and schedule backwards from the expected early-December finish.

The KORD BREACH taskline

Alongside the battle pass sits a new quest chain named after the season itself. Completing stages of the KORD BREACH taskline unlocks an achievement, new Operational Tasks, high-value item trades, and new weapon trades — and the chain doubles as a document source for the pass, so progressing it advances two systems at once.

New Operational Tasks matter beyond the season because daily and weekly tasks are steady sources of XP, roubles, and trader reputation on every profile. Dailies open at level 5 and weeklies at 15, and the season's extra task pool feeds the same habit loop — see /guides/daily-and-weekly-tasks for how to work that system efficiently.

Because the taskline is season content, assume its season-exclusive pieces share the season's deadline. Knock out the early stages while the servers are quiet and loot routes are uncontested; the later stages that require hunting Black Division operators are easier with a squad, since operator-dropped documents are shared with the whole team.

What else 1.1.0.0 changed while you were reading the patch title

The season arrived inside a patch that reshuffled the economy and the rules for everyone, not just seasonal players.

The economy took the biggest swing: trader selling prices rose by roughly 25 percent on average, trader buyback prices fell by roughly 20 percent, and the flea market tax went from 3 to 5 percent. Side quests were reassigned to unlock in batches by trader loyalty level, the old money-spent requirement for loyalty was gone by this point, and squad members now share quest progress — all of which rewires early progression planning, covered in /guides/trader-loyalty-guide.

Insurance changed by mode: on PvP Seasonal characters it is simply unavailable, while PvP Zone and PvE Zone keep the normal insurance system. If you are moving between profiles, re-read /guides/insurance-guide with that split in mind, because a habit formed on your permanent account will quietly cost you gear on the season servers.

The armoury grew too. New weapons include the Norinco QBZ-191 chambered in the new 5.8x42mm round family, the Howa Type 20 in 5.56x45, and an HK 416A5 in the RAL 8000 finish, plus fresh attachments for the PKM, PKP, AKS-74U, FN SCAR, and AR-15 platforms — check /gear/weapons for platform context. Two new tactical outfits, USEC Corsair and BEAR Airborne Infantry, arrived alongside new environmental interactions: padlocks on doors and containers, openable elevator doors, destructible bottles, flammable fire extinguishers, and smoking vehicles. EFT: Arena also gained one-way synchronization into the main game.

Seasonal character strategy: surviving the fresh economy

The first two weeks of a season are the cheapest gear will ever be relative to player wealth, and the most dangerous the maps will ever be, because everyone is undergeared and hungry. Prioritize quest XP over loot value early: levels gate trader loyalty, loyalty gates the good stock, and the 1.1.0.0 price hikes make trader purchases painful for longer than you remember. Every rouble saved on ammo is a rouble toward the next loyalty tier.

One widely-reported season change deserves your attention with a caveat: community coverage of Season 1 states that hideout upgrades on seasonal characters no longer require found-in-raid items, letting you feed the hideout with flea-bought materials. That claim traces to a single guide source rather than official notes, so verify it in your own hideout screen before routing your economy around it — but if it holds for you, it dramatically compresses the early upgrade curve. Upgrade order advice lives in /guides/hideout-upgrade-priority and the module overview at /hideout.

Play like insurance does not exist, because for you it does not. Bring kits you can replace from trader stock in one purchase, pre-build two backups before a session, and treat every death as a full write-off. The players who thrive on season servers are the ones whose raid budget assumes a loss streak, not the ones whose best kit is irreplaceable.

Do not neglect your other profiles. The battle pass is shared, so an hour on your PvE character is still season progress, and your permanent PvP account can farm documents at its own daily cap while your seasonal PMC waits out a bad streak. The season rewards the player who uses all three modes as one system.

Season end: the keep-versus-lose ledger

When KORD BREACH closes, the seasonal character is deleted along with its stash, hideout, roubles, and in-progress quests. That deletion is the price of admission and the source of the season's tension — nothing you build on the season servers is a long-term asset except the unlocks.

What survives is everything you converted into account-level rewards: battle pass items you unlocked, the trader offers earned through levels and quest chains, Black Division gear access, and the achievements from the KORD BREACH taskline. All of it works immediately in PvP Zone and PvE Zone and persists across future seasons. The rational endgame of any season is therefore a conversion sprint: spend your final weeks unlocking, not hoarding, because hoarded wealth evaporates while unlocks compound.

The mirror-image risk is the locked reward: anything still locked at the moment of reset is permanently unobtainable. Check your outstanding season rewards the moment the end-of-season window is announced, rank them by how much you actually want them, and burn your remaining daily document caps and Classified Documents on the shortfall in that order.

Expected outcome and what to do next

If you follow this guide, you should finish week one with a seasonal character whose personal modifiers you chose deliberately rather than regretted, a daily document routine that keeps the battle pass moving even on bad days, and a clear ranked list of season rewards to convert before the reset. You should also have zero anxiety about your permanent accounts — they were never in danger.

Your next reads depend on where you stand. If the wipe-replacement design is still fuzzy, /guides/wipes-explained gives the full history. If you are weighing whether to farm the pass on PvE instead, /guides/pve-vs-pvp breaks down the mode split. For the post-1.1.0 progression rules that govern your seasonal climb, /guides/trader-loyalty-guide and /tools/trader-loyalty carry the verified requirements, and /guides/flea-market-guide explains the market you will be taxed on.

For the season's physical battlegrounds, /maps/terminal covers the Black Division's home turf and /maps/lighthouse reflects the 1.1.5.0 rework. Keep an eye on /updates as December approaches: the moment Battlestate puts an end date in writing or announces Season 2, that page changes, and your conversion sprint begins.