Last Z rebuilds itself every season — new theme, new currencies, new monsters, new collection. But it's the same chassis reskinned every time. Learn the pattern once and you'll never be blindsided by a new season again.
Back to the Field GuideSeasons run about 91 days (13 weeks) in the current era — a player read that straight off the in-game season panel, and the event pacing backs it up (one Season 5 boss runs "weeks 4 through 12", which a shorter season couldn't contain). Older seasons were nearer 10 weeks. Ignore the "71 days" you'll see quoted around the web — that traces back to a season-pass description, not the season. They roll out server by server — your state has its own season clock, so your neighbours may be a whole season ahead or behind. What never changes is the underlying structure.
| The slot | S3 · Everfrost | S4 · Dinosaur Origin | S5 · Moonlit Elegy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Currency from kills | Frost Cores | Cretaceous Scales | Shadow Blood Crystal |
| Passive farm currency | Ice Blooms | Fern Leaves | Holy Water |
| Shop currency | Badges | Ancient Dino Eggs | Moon Tokens |
| Resistance building | Bio Lab | Biotech Lab | Serum Lab |
| Trash mob | Snow Leopards | Velociraptors | Werewolves |
| Elite mob | Frost Banes | Stegosaurus | Succubus |
| Sunday world boss | Glacier Kong | Ancient Dinosaurs | House of Dawn |
| Collection album | Fishing Index | Fossil Album | Moonlight Collection |
| Pet / mascot track | Snowman Mania | Hatch of Legends | Mysterious Witch |
| Siege reskin | kept the name | Dino Egg Defence | kept the name |
| Mastery cap | 50 | 70 | 90 |
This trips up everyone, and it's why two guides describing the identical season will disagree about its number.
Season 2 — the desert season, officially "Clash of Thrones" — was retired and never re-run. Servers that opened afterwards never played it — so for them, everything shifts down a number.
| Season | Older servers (played Desert) | Newer servers (skipped it) |
|---|---|---|
| Grassland | Season 1 | Season 1 |
| Desert · "Clash of Thrones" | Season 2 | never happened |
| Everfrost / ice | Season 3 | Season 2 |
| Dinosaur Origin | Season 4 | Season 3 |
| Moonlit Elegy | Season 5 | Season 4 |
The opening days decide your whole season. Every map resets to neutral, so the land rush restarts — and alliances that stall early struggle for the rest of the run.
Bank diamonds before the season starts. Seasonal shops are diamond sinks with once-only stock — arriving poor means losing the items permanently.
Hoard fuel, orange hero shards, skill books and speedups through the dead zone between seasons. Deliberately stop farming elite mobs late in a dying season to bank fuel for the next one.
Coordinate the land rush before the reset. Have your alliance's city plan agreed before the map goes neutral — not after.
Get one first-kill every day from hour one. That's your mascot currency, and it's the one track you genuinely cannot catch up on.
Hoard targets for the gap — what strong players bank between seasons, with real numbers: around 3,000 orange hero fragments, 90,000–150,000 orange skill books (enough to max a new seasonal hero the day they drop), plus power cores, wrenches, badges and speedups. And fuel above all — each season has needed more than the last, with Season 5 reportedly wanting roughly double Season 3. Once your season buildings are finished, stop farming elite mobs and bank the fuel.
Then don't spend it on day one. Hold the hoard until the matching Alliance Duel scoring day — upgrading heroes on Hero day (and buildings on construction day) scores the same progress twice. You can even finish a building upgrade and delay collecting the reward until a scoring window opens.
Every season hides a collection — an album, index or card deck you fill for real rewards. It's the most-missed system in the game, and missing it is the default outcome unless you go looking on day one.
The most common way to lose a collection isn't playing it badly — it's never noticing it exists. Season 4's fossils came from a Sunday world boss that plenty of players went a whole season without ever opening. No prompt, no nag, no red dot demanding attention: if you didn't go looking on the season's event screen, it simply wasn't part of your game.
Season 4's Fossil Album has 20 slots, and there are layered traps:
Catch fish at the Arctic Icepits — different Icepit levels drop different fish. Duplicates could be gifted to teammates, and milestones paid out Fishing Passes and Red Packets.
20 fossils — 10 from the Sunday Ancient Dino boss, 10 from the weekend Bio Institute Shop. Duplicates convert to Ancient Dino Eggs. Completion pays orange hero fragments + exclusive equipment fragments.
52 cards, drawn using Moon Watchers from the Mysterious Witch. Duplicates convert to Moon Tokens. Cards equip to troop slots for ATK / DEF / HP / damage buffs — this one is live power, not just a reward.
The single biggest cost in this game isn't playing an event badly — it's never noticing it was running. Nothing nags you to show up. Here's the full roster so you can audit yourself against it.
Open the season/event panel in-game and read every tab — not just the ones with a red dot. Then ask three questions about anything unfamiliar:
| Day | Typically |
|---|---|
| Mon | Duel day 1 · Zombie Siege · seasonal map sites (tier 1) |
| Tue | Duel day 2 · Glory War |
| Wed | Duel day 3 · seasonal map sites (tier 2) |
| Thu | Duel day 4 · Volcano War (season-dependent) |
| Fri | Duel day 5 · Canyon Clash · map sites (tier 3) |
| Sat | Duel day 6 — Enemy Buster · weekend shop opens |
| Sun | The world boss · weekend shop · rest day for the duel |
The most valuable — and most counter-intuitive — rule in the game. Get this backwards and you throw away a season's work.
Sources genuinely conflict here, so read your own in-game text before acting. Some report that individual end-of-season rewards pay out on the seasonal currency you still hold; others report that leftover season resources are simply destroyed with no exchange at all.
What is well-attested: the end-of-season exchange event has been quietly removed. Season 2 had one, Season 3 had one, and by Season 4 players reported it was gone. That makes the mid-season shop (around week 8) the last real sink — and clearing it can cost millions of each seasonal resource, so you bank toward that window rather than past it.
Individual end-of-season rewards are reported to pay out on the seasonal building currency you're still holding when the timer hits zero.
So the play is: burn shop currency to zero before the shop closes, and sit on a fat pile of building currency at the end. Most players do exactly the opposite.
But check each item's own text. Expiry is genuinely inconsistent: some event currencies (snowballs, for example) simply vanish, while unspent Dino Eggs and bones were reportedly converted into resource boxes at the S4→S5 rollover. Items carry their expiry wording in-game — read it before you decide to hold or dump.
A season ending doesn't mean the next one starts. There's a whole transition — and the wait has run anywhere from three weeks to three months.
End-of-season alliance rewards arrive as a bundle the leader distributes by hand — reportedly around 100 reward slots, tiered by contribution. An observed split was roughly 1 leader · 8 backbone · 30 key players · 61 contributors.
Two things follow from that. First, it's real work with real politics — decide and publish your distribution rule before tallying, not after, or you'll spend the break arguing. Second, one reward per player regardless of alliance-hopping, so late joiners chasing a payout is a known move to watch for.
Migration windows open between seasons. The catch nobody warns you about: the passes take months to earn, so the decision has to be made long before the window.
Migration Passes come from the Glory Shop at roughly 5,000 Glory Badges each — one per week, capped, with no way to catch up. How many you need depends on your power tier:
| Tier | Passes | Realistic saving time |
|---|---|---|
| Regular | 10 | ~10 weeks |
| Medium | 15 | ~15 weeks |
| Advanced | 20 | ~20 weeks |
| Elite | 50 | ~50 weeks — a full year |
Your tier is set by power — building and tech power dominate; troop count counts for nothing. Dumping troops to lower your tier does not work — the system reads your historical development. (Unequipping top-tier hero gear before the snapshot is the only lever that reportedly helps.)
Before you can migrate you must:
Higher tiers get brutally few slots — Elite is often one seat per destination state, sometimes zero. The real work happens in the prep phase: talk to the destination president before the window opens.
The gothic, vampire-tinged season — and the one most servers are rolling into now. Not a return to zombies: the map fills with werewolves and succubus, and a Nightfall clock takes over the season.
Currencies: Shadow Blood Crystal (kills) + Holy Water (passive, from Shadow Springs). Shop currency is Moon Tokens, spent at the Night Market — which opens around day 11, so don't panic in week one.
Build order: Serum Lab first (it gates what you can attack), then four Shadow Springs, then the ATK/DEF/DMG buildings.
Go straight at the Mysterious Witch. Feed her Demon Stones daily — Affection thresholds unlock your Moonlight card slots, and those cards are real combat buffs, not decorations.
Fuel is the bottleneck. S5 reportedly needs roughly twice the fuel of S3 — bank it hard. Werewolves cost about 8 fuel, succubus about 16, so lean on werewolves while your Serum Lab catches up.
This is the difference that will cost you if you treat S5 like S4. The Moonlight cards come from Demon Stones — and Demon Stones only drop from your FIRST KILL of the day, under a daily cap.
Season 4's fossils came in weekly Sunday bursts, so a missed week could be partly recovered. S5 is daily attrition: a day you don't log in and land a first kill is gone permanently.
The chain is: first kills → Demon Stones → feed the Mysterious Witch → Affection level → card draw vouchers → cards → equip for buffs. Affection 10 is the milestone that lets you equip anything at all — sprint to it, because until then you're collecting cards you can't use.
Most of Moonlit Elegy's exclusive content only opens once night falls — and night grows about an hour a week until it's permanent around week 8. Build your routine around this:
| Event | When | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Night Ritual | Mon · Wed · Fri | Night Altars spawn; clear the guards, then rally the Night Gargoyle. Opens shortly after nightfall, runs under an hour. |
| Seal the Countess | Tue · Thu · Sat | A Night Countess curses your alliance's highest-level cities, weakening their buffs until she's killed. |
| Fiend Hunter's Requests | Every night | Camps spawn across the map — you have to find them manually, they can't be searched. Limited requests per night and they all vanish at dawn. |
| Night Succubus | Nightly | Has its own separate daily kill counter from daytime monsters — so night effectively doubles your farming ceiling. |
| Endless Night Duke | Sundays, from ~wk 4 | Server boss the President summons; scales up weekly. |
The Cretaceous reskin — the map turned to Jurassic jungle, zombies became velociraptors, boomers became stegosaurus. The longest and most complex season so far, and the least friendly to free-to-play players.
Ancient Dinosaurs — Sunday world boss, no attack limit, no fuel cost. Five species, each appearing twice all season. Top damage on a species' first server kill earned permanent titles.
Hatch of Legends — pick one of three eggs, raise it with daily tasks. +1% troop attack per level to +30% at level 30, with a dino vehicle skin at 16. The best free power in the season, and genuinely F2P-friendly.
Trade Hubs — alliance-owned diamond shops; owners got exclusive stock and diamond rebates as red packets.
Volcano War — Thursday SvS; normal mode against one state, hard mode against three. Expect heavy troop losses.
Bio Institute Shop — weekends only, Ancient Dino Eggs, limited refreshes. Spend eggs every weekend — hoarding them wastes them.
Volcano War — the Thursday state-vs-state event the President organises — paid out Hero Choice Fragments: reportedly around 20 to the winning alliance and 10 to the losing one, with 30 fragments buying a hero of your choice. Stack that with the end-of-season hero lottery and all three were reachable without spending.
The catch: the exclusive weapons were not free — and the community view is that these heroes underperform without them. Also note the lottery can hand you duplicates, so hold your choice fragments until after you see what the lottery gives you, then fill the gaps deliberately.
Two seasons that no longer run in their original form — but they explain how the modern season economy was built, and one of them is where a lot of veteran advice quietly comes from.
The desert season — discontinued and most likely never returning, which is why it's thinly documented and why season numbering drifted afterwards.
It introduced the personal territorial economy that everything since is built on:
Not really a themed season at all — Season 1 is simply the season your account and your state start in. No seasonal overlay, no seasonal currency, no seasonal buildings, and no season-exclusive events. Just the permanent event calendar.
The one thing that matters: end-of-season rewards were scored on the neutral cities your alliance held at the exact moment the clock hit zero — how many, what level, and who had the Capital. That "measured at 00:00" rule has carried through every season since, and it's why last-minute city grabs and final-week truces are a real part of the game.
The ice season — described by the community as "badges galore, new enemies, fishing, and a snowman to build." Widely remembered as the most free-to-play-friendly season.
S3 handed out badges generously — free-to-play players could bank a serious pile over the season. Zombie Siege kept its name and its shape, the mascot was permanent, and collection duplicates could be gifted to teammates.
Every one of those was tightened in S4. If you're benchmarking whether a new season is generous, S3 is the bar.
There ARE official patch notes — most players don't know they exist. The app-store changelog says "bug fixes" every release, which is why everyone assumes there's nothing. But the developer publishes detailed weekly notes on their own site: last-z.com → News (Latest / Activity / Announcement / Strategy tabs). Bookmark it — it's the only authoritative source, and it's where season teasers land first. The rest of this page is assembled from community wikis and players, cross-checked where possible.
