How Character Planning Compresses Action Value: The 0T Revolution Rewriting Memory of Chaos Rules

Have you ever been here? You spent weeks spending your Trailblaze Power carefully farming Relics, stacked your team’s crit rate and crit damage to the absolute maximum, then fought tooth and nail for 8 full cycles to grab that 3-star clear on the 12th floor of Memory of Chaos. You breathe a sigh of relief, thinking that’s endgame — that’s all there is to earning a full set of stars.

This is “old world” thinking. You treat Memory of Chaos like a 10-cycle marathon, where your only goal is to cross the finish line before the timer runs out.

But at the very top of the Honkai: Star Rail player pyramid, there’s an entire niche most players never understand. Elite players are competing in a totally different speedrunning challenge: they chase 0 Cycle (0T) clears. The boss that takes you 8 full cycles to whittle down? They evaporate it entirely in just 150 action points — before the first cycle counter even ticks over to 1. It feels like they’re playing a completely different game.

The gap between these two playstyles goes far beyond character leveling and Eidolons. It’s an extreme game of math, action value management, and perfect ability timing. This guide will take you deep into the exclusive 0 Cycle (0T) niche, and break down exactly how top players plan their characters and abilities to pull off this rule-breaking revolution.

The 0T Challenge: Why Full-Star Thinking Can’t Measure Extreme Compression

0T play completely breaks the team building logic that most players use for 10-cycle full-star clears. If you look at 0T through an old playstyle lens, almost everything top 0T players do looks like a paradox or a mistake.

The Overlooked Gap: Confusing Cycles and Turns

The biggest blind spot casual players have is mixing up Cycles and individual character Turns. Memory of Chaos in Honkai Star Rail calculates clears based on Cycles. Cycle 0 gives players 150 Action Value (AV), and every cycle starting at 1 gives 100 AV. The standard full-star goal is to finish the fight within 10 cycles, which totals 1050 AV.

0T players’ goal is simple: end the entire fight within 150 AV. This means they aren’t just chasing low turn counts — they’re chasing extreme compression of every possible action point. While casual players ask “how do I survive 10 cycles?”, 0T players ask “how do I fit 8 full character actions into 150 AV?”

The Survival Paradox: Why Healers and Shields Are Dead Weight in 0T Teams

In standard full-star play, survival characters like Fu Xuan, Luocha, Huohuo, and Gepard are the foundation of every good team. They’re the safety net that lets you survive long enough to clear the full 10 cycles. But in 0T play, these characters are straight-up dead weight.

Case Example: A standard 0T team runs one main DPS plus three supports (a common setup is Jingliu + Bronya + Ruan Mei + Tingyun). There are zero survival characters in the party. Why? The core logic of 0T is to kill every enemy before they get a chance to attack. If enemies never get a turn to hit you, you never need healing or shields. Any slot taken up by a survival character is a wasted spot that could be used for a support that adds damage, energy, or action advance.

How 0T Rewrites The Rules: Action Value Economics and First-Cycle Burst

To get into 0T play, you have to throw out all the old rules and embrace an entirely new rule set. At the core of this new system is treating combat like a resource management game, where the resources you manage are action value and energy.

The New Core: Extreme Action Value Economics

0T is, at its core, action value economics. Your goal is to buy as many effective actions as possible within your 150 AV budget. Speed is your purchasing power, and action advance (also called “pulling the turn bar”) is your credit card that lets you get extra actions early.

Case Example: A character with 100 speed needs 100 AV to take an action (calculated as 10000 / speed). That means within 150 AV, they can only take one action. A character with 134 speed only needs ~74.6 AV per action (10000 / 134). That adds up to 149.2 AV for two full actions, which fits perfectly into the 150 AV limit. That’s why 0T players obsess over hitting speed breakpoints like 134 or 161. They use high speed and action advance abilities (from Bronya or Sparkle) to force two or even three main DPS actions into the 0 Cycle window.

The New Core: Energy Planning For First-Cycle Burst

The second core of 0T play is energy management. You can’t just auto attack through the first few turns to build up energy. You need every core ultimate (from your main DPS and all supports) to be fully charged before the fight even starts. That requires incredibly precise pre-fight planning.

How do top players pull off a full ultimate burst right at the start of the fight?

• Relic Set Planning: Every support (like Tingyun or Ruan Mei) runs either the Sprightly Vonwacq set, which gives a 40% action advance at the start of combat, or the Penacony, Land of Dreams set, which gives 5% energy back on combat start.
• Energy Regeneration Rope (ERR): This is mandatory for every 0T support. Players sacrifice all other offensive and defensive stats just to get the maximum energy regeneration efficiency.
• Pre-Fight Energy Stacking (Critical): 0T players save energy on the last enemy of the previous chamber (for example, the second half of floor 11). They intentionally let supports auto attack to fill their energy bar without casting their ultimate, so they bring full energy into the next boss chamber.
• Pre-Combat Techniques: Before starting the boss fight, players use their characters’ techniques in order (Tingyun, Ruan Mei, Sparkle, etc.) to make sure they have full damage buffs and full energy right as the fight starts.

Beyond Base Stats: 3 New Metrics To Judge 0T Planning

If you only use crit stats and attack to evaluate 0T players, you’ll miss everything that matters. You need a whole new set of metrics to measure what makes a good 0T build and plan.

Core Metric: Speed and Speed Tuning

Speed isn’t “higher is better” in 0T — it’s all about precision. 0T speed tuning is an art that requires a calculator to get right. Two common setups are:

• High Speed Advance Build: Sparkle at 161 speed paired with a slow main DPS wearing attack boots. Sparkle gets two actions within 150 AV, and pulls the main DPS forward twice, giving the main DPS two actions in 0 Cycle.
• Precise End Speed Build: Main DPS at 135 speed paired with Bronya at 134 speed. The sequence goes: Main DPS action -> Bronya acts immediately after, uses her skill to pull the main DPS forward -> Main DPS gets a second action. This is the classic way to fit two full burst damage rotations into 150 AV.

Core Metric: Perfect Alignment Of All Damage Multipliers

0T damage comes from stacked multiplicative buffs. Top players calculate how to line up every buff and debuff to all hit at the same time on the same main DPS action. That means attack buffs from Tingyun, damage buffs from Ruan Mei, crit damage buffs from Sparkle/Bronya, defense reduction debuffs from Pela/Silver Wolf, and vulnerability debuffs from Dr. Ratio/Kafka all activate at once. In 0T, a single delayed buff means the entire run is a failure.

Q&A: Do You Need Max Eidolons To Do 0T Clears?

This is one of the most common misconceptions about 0T. The answer is a hard no. High Eidolons (like E6 Dan Heng • Imbibitor Lunae or E2 Kafka) do drastically lower the barrier to 0T, and make your calculations much more forgiving. But 0T is fundamentally a math problem, not a pay-to-win problem.

Plenty of 0T clears (especially on older versions of Memory of Chaos) have been done by players with E0S1 (0 Eidolons, 1 Refinement signature Light Cone) or even E0S0. These players repeatedly reset the run to get lucky crits, and use the pre-fight energy stacking and extreme speed tuning we covered above to hit their goal. 0T is a proof of knowledge and patience, not a flex of how much money you’ve spent on the game.

Side By Side Comparison: Full-Star Teams Vs. 0T Teams

Let’s break down the core differences between the two playstyles across every key metric:

• Core Goal: Full-Star (10-Cycle) play: Survive and clear within 10 cycles. 0T (0-Cycle) play: Kill the entire enemy team within 150 AV (before Cycle 1 starts)
• Team Composition: Full-Star play: 1 main DPS + 1 support + 2 survival characters. 0T play: 1 main DPS + 3 supports (zero survival characters)
• Core Prioritized Stats: Full-Star play: Crit stats, attack, HP/defense. 0T play: Speed, energy regeneration, crit stats
• Skill Point Management: Full-Star play: Focus on sustainable cycles, balancing skill point gain and use. 0T play: Focus on maximum burst, use all 3 starting skill points for maximum damage immediately.
• Nature of Combat: Full-Star play: Marathon. 0T play: 100-meter sprint

The Future Of 0T: A Choice Between Relaxed Play And Extreme Challenge

The 0 Cycle (0T) niche is the Mount Everest of Honkai: Star Rail’s turn-based combat. There are no extra Stellar Jades or exclusive rewards for pulling off a 0T clear. The only reward for reaching the top is knowing you pulled off something almost no one else can.

At the end of the day, 0T comes down to a choice about how you want to play the game. Do you want to be a relaxed full-star player, enjoying the story and casual content, and happy just to clear endgame content? Or do you want to be an extreme challenger, treating the game as a complex math puzzle, and chasing the glory of perfection within the 150 AV limit?

The door to the 0T niche never opens for the biggest wallets — it only opens for top players who truly understand character planning and ability timing.