Escape From Tarkov adds a free battle pass in its first season

Battlestate Games has confirmed that Escape From Tarkov's first season, Kord Breach, will introduce a battle pass system to the extraction shooter. The developer says the move will not require players to spend money, with every reward in the pass earnable "simply through normal gameplay."

The battle pass arrives alongside Tarkov patch 1.1 on August 3, following a delay from its originally planned late-July release. Kord Breach overhauls the game's traditional wipe cycle with an opt-in league that applies special modifiers, starting every participating player with a fresh character.

According to Battlestate, the new pass is not tied to a single mode: its progression and rewards will be shared "across all game modes - seasonal, PvP, and PvE." Players earn rewards by collecting a new loot type called TerraGroup documentation during raids, which functions similarly to task items and can be picked up as either a PMC or a Scav, even if another player has already found a copy.

Different documentation types unlock different rewards, and each is tied to specific in-game locations - one type turns up on Streets of Tarkov and Customs, for example, while another appears on Factory and The Lab. Battlestate said an exchange system will also let players trade one documentation type for another if they are struggling to find a specific one, though it has not detailed the exchange rate.

The Kord Breach league's modifiers

The Kord Breach season itself is built around a set of global and personal modifiers that players must commit to at the start. Each modifier, positive or negative, carries a points value, and players have to balance beneficial traits against an equivalent weight of drawbacks. Battlestate's examples of positive traits include moving faster, walking through vegetation undetected, leveling the bolt-action rifle skill faster, or gaining painkiller effects from drinking juice, while possible drawbacks include becoming allergic to certain provisions or medication, or losing access to Flea Market trading.

Studio head Nikita Buyanov shared an early look at the Kord Breach modifiers, though Battlestate cautioned that some values may still change before release for balancing reasons. The season's global perks ban pre-raid insurance, remove "found in raid" status from hideout zones, reduce armor availability, strengthen crafting, increase raid experience gains, and add Black Division operatives to the map.

Patch 1.1, which launches alongside Kord Breach on Monday, August 3, also adds new weapons and gear and a range of other changes, including a reworked task system, rebalanced hideout progression and insurance, an observer camera, shared kill objectives across groups, and improvements to game stability and anti-cheat measures.