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1-The Star-Wanted system is the heat meter that tracks player aggression in populated areas of Rewinding Cadence. It draws an explicit line of inheritance from the wanted-level systems used by long-running open-world crime games: the more violence the player commits in front of NPCs, the higher the meter rises, and the more aggressive the world's response becomes, with specific escalation tiers and reset behavior not yet disclosed.
1+Rewinding Cadence has a wanted mechanic that reacts when the player breaks the rules in populated areas. The in-game term is 通缉, and the escalated form named in official material is 全域通缉, a wanted state that applies across the whole region rather than only where the offence happened.
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3-Overview
3+"Star-Wanted System" is a descriptive label used by English-language coverage and adopted as this page's title. It is not a name the studio uses. The studio has published no English name for the system at all.
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5-The system is the world's reaction layer for the open-ended combat allowed in towns, cities, and other populated regions. Most NPCs in Rewinding Cadence will react to the Returner using force, with witnesses raising the wanted meter, faction enforcers responding when the meter crosses thresholds, and ambient services such as merchants suspending business while the heat is up. The system is not a punishment for aggression, it is a way for aggression to have consequences that persist for the rest of the cycle.
5+What Raises It
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7-How it Rises
7+Two triggers are confirmed in official material.
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9-Public material is consistent on the broad triggers even if the exact thresholds have not been published. The meter rises from:
9+TriggerSourceFailing a Deft Hands (巧手) check while concealed. Lifting an item telekinetically is a dice check, and botching it in view of others can escalate straight to a region-wide wanted state.Official press release, April 2026Open aggression toward characters in towns. The game permits combat in populated areas, and NPC behaviour responds to what the player does.Gameplay showcase and official material, 2025 to 2026
10+See Exploration for the concealment and theft techniques these checks belong to, and D20 Dice System for how the checks resolve.
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11-Attacking civilians or non-combatant NPCs in front of witnesses.Killing faction-aligned NPCs in their home territory.Robbing or looting in clear view of others.Provoking faction enforcers and refusing to disengage.
12+How It Escalates
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13-How the World Responds
14+Coverage of the eight-minute gameplay showcase describes the meter climbing through star tiers to a five-star state, at which point the player is forced out of the encounter and moved into a separate instance as a fail state. That is the extent of what has been shown publicly.
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15-As the meter rises, the response escalates. Lower tiers usually mean fewer services, scared NPC routines, and small-scale pursuit. Higher tiers escalate to dedicated faction patrols, blocked travel, and pursuit that does not stop with a single fight. The exact tier names, the threshold numbers, and the per-faction reaction tables have not been published outside the closed beta, so the wiki will fill in those specifics post-launch.
16+What Is Not Known
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17-How it Resets
18+A great deal about this system remains unpublished, and this page deliberately does not fill the gaps:
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19-The meter is loop-bound, not save-bound. It resets along with most other world state when the cycle ends or the player rewinds. This is the key difference between Rewinding Cadence's wanted system and a more conventional crime-game implementation. Within a loop the heat compounds and shapes how the rest of the cycle plays out, which means a player who attracts attention on day five will spend the next thirty-seven days in a more hostile world. Players who want a clean run through a faction's questline will often rewind specifically to clear the meter rather than try to grind it back down. See the time-loop system article for what does and does not persist.
20+The exact thresholds for each tier, and what each tier is called.Which specific actions raise the meter and by how much, beyond the two triggers above.How the meter is cleared, and whether it persists across a rewind or resets with the cycle.Whether merchants, fast travel or other services are affected while the meter is up.Whether different factions or regions respond differently.
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21-Strategic Use
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23-Because the meter is cycle-bound, the system can be used deliberately. A player who knows a region's enforcers will appear at a fixed tier can use that knowledge to bait specific encounters, farm resources from enforcer drops, or test combat against a stronger opposition than the open world would otherwise present. This kind of intentional aggression is then traded against losing access to that region's services for the rest of the cycle.
22+Both public tests to date were limited, wipe-on-end builds carrying an in-development disclaimer, so any figure that does surface should be read as provisional. This page will be expanded when the studio publishes the detail. See Closed Beta for the build history and Time-Loop System for what is known about persistence between cycles.