Secret Tasks

How many you get a day

The game’s own rules panel says “N secret missions reset daily” and never fills in the N. It depends on your HQ level, and this is the full ladder.

9 Secret Tasks a day at HQ 27-30, resetting at 00:00 server time.

One exception. In Season 2, between day 71 and day 98, the top brackets each get one extra: HQ 27-30 gets 10 instead of 9, HQ 31-33 gets 11 instead of 10, HQ 34-35 gets 11 instead of 10. Every other season uses the ladder above.

The shiny task

Now and then one of your Secret Tasks is a special one — players call it the shiny task. It runs longer than the rest, pays the most, and it is the one mission you cannot refresh away. It is always 4 hours and it is always set at your own difficulty level.

Once every three days — not once a day

You do not get one every day. The game’s own rules panel says a starred mission turns up every 3 days, and a calendar doing the rounds in the community works out to exactly that — a strict three-day cycle with no drift across a whole month. Two unrelated sources landing on the same number is as close to confirmed as this gets.

Work out your own server’s days

Which three days are yours depends on your server, and no two servers are on the same day. You do not need anybody’s table to find yours, though — one sighting is enough. Put in a date you had a shiny task and the cycle gives you the rest.

Why there is no list of servers here. That community calendar splits servers into three groups and says one group fires each day. It may well be right, and its month is internally perfect. But it is one unsourced picture covering about thirty servers out of something near nineteen hundred, and nothing in the game tells a player what another server is doing. So rather than reprint it, this page gives you the cycle and lets your own sighting do the rest — which works on every server, not thirty. If you do note your server number against the days yours lands, send it in.

When you do get one: will it finish before reset?

At 4 hours it is the one task that can run past 00:00 if you leave it late. Put in the time where your server is now and start it in your head:

Start it any later than 20:00 server time and it crosses the reset.

Which is the practical rule: the moment a shiny task shows up, start it. The four-hour run is free — it costs no march queue and nothing you would otherwise be doing — and leaving it until late evening is the only way to lose it.

The numbers

Refresh odds

What you get when you refresh a mission you have not started yet:

• 68% SR
• 24% SSR
• 8% UR

Those odds are per refresh, so a UR is roughly a one-in-twelve roll. The game asks you to confirm before it refreshes an un-started UR away, which is a warning worth reading.

Every mission, and what it costs you in time

Run time is the only cost a mission has. The four 30-minute Retrieve missions are the cheapest way to clear a slot. The shiny tasks sit at the bottom on four hours.

Mission difficulty scales with your base level, so a level 7 mission is the same job for a bigger reward. The two 2-minute missions only ever appear at level 1.

What this page does not tell you

• Reward amounts. Each mission pays differently and the figures are not something we can state with confidence, so they are left off rather than guessed at. The one reward the game spells out itself: a Mystery Supply Box holds Universal UR Shards and 5,000 Diamonds.
• Seven difficulty levels, not five. The in-game rules panel says five. There are seven, and levels 6 and 7 belong to HQ 31 and above — brackets that did not exist when that panel was written.
• Which days another server is on. The three-day cadence is solid and your own days follow from one sighting, but the per-server offset is set on the game’s own servers and appears in nothing a player can read. So there is no timetable here for servers other than your own. Which shiny task you get isfixed by your difficulty level — level 1 always draws Steal Top-Secret Report, levels 5 and 7 always draw Rescue Test Subject.