The time-loop system is the structural backbone of Rewinding Cadence. Every story arc, every quest, every social interaction, and every fight sits inside a single forty-two-day countdown. When the countdown ends or when the player chooses to rewind, the calendar resets and the next cycle begins. The system is built so that progress comes from learning across loops rather than from a single perfect run.
The 42-Day Cycle
Each loop covers forty-two in-fiction days. The clock is the loop's hard deadline: the world ends on day forty-two, so allocating time across the cycle is itself a strategic choice. Exactly how the in-game calendar advances during play, whether time passes through specific actions, through real-world clock ticks, through a combination of the two, or through some other mechanism, has not been published in detail and will be filled in here once it is confirmed publicly.
Rewinding
The rewind itself is granted by Chu's contract with the Returner. A rewind takes the calendar back to day one and resets most of the world: many quests are flagged as available again and most loop-bound state restores. What does not reset is the Returner's memory, knowledge of routes and timings, certain relationship flags, and an explicitly curated set of loop-persistent rewards. This is the key separation between a soft reset and a true checkpoint: the world forgets, but the player and the Returner do not.
What Carries Forward
Public material is consistent on the broad shape of persistence even if it has not pinned down every individual rule. The carry-forward set centers on three things:
Knowledge: clues, NPC schedules, dialogue branches the Returner has unlocked, and notes about the world.
Bonds: the Returner's relationships with key recurring characters, including Chu, trend forward across loops even when surface-level NPC dialogue resets.
Cultivation progress: growth invested in spirit companions persists across cycles, which is what gives long-term combat progression any meaning.
Most other state is loop-bound. Item drops, quest acceptance flags, regional populations, NPC moods, the wanted meter, and the calendar all reset. Specific lists of which exact rewards persist and which reset will be added once the developer publishes them in detail.
Branching Stories
Loops are not simple replays. NPC behavior and quest availability shift based on what the player has done in earlier cycles, and the D20 dice rolls applied to dialogue can permanently change a single loop's branches. A failed persuasion roll on day three can lock a recruitment route for the rest of that cycle. A new piece of evidence gathered in one loop can unlock a confrontation in the next that had no entry point in the previous loop. The system is designed so that no two loops play out the same way, even when the player tries to repeat a route deliberately.
Failure States
The cycle ends in one of three ways. The first is the player choosing to rewind voluntarily, usually after collecting enough information to justify a fresh attempt. The second is the calendar reaching day forty-two, which closes the loop. The third is the Returner being defeated in a way that the story treats as terminal, which forces the rewind. Public coverage has not enumerated every individual death-trigger, but the general design treats failure as a narrative beat rather than a punishment screen.
Cycle Strategy
Because progress is cumulative across loops, the practical advice for new players is to treat early cycles as scouting runs. Spending a loop pursuing a single faction's questline, a single region's exploration, or a single companion's recruitment yields more cycle-spanning progress than trying to cover everything. Notes carried in the player's mental model become the most valuable resource the game has, and players who keep their own records of what they tried and when tend to make faster headway than those who rely only on the in-game journal.
Persistent Progression: the Time Tree
In the First Playthrough Test (一周目测试) build, the persistent progression layer that survives the loop reset was named the Time Tree (时之树). The Time Tree is the spine of long-run progression: as the player unlocks later nodes, those nodes grant one-click level growth to existing characters and unlock additional spirit techniques. Crucially, every Time Tree gain stays live across the loop reset, which is what gives a forty-two-day cycle structure long-arc traction.
The Time Tree complements, rather than replaces, the per-loop choices the player makes. Loop-specific currency, in-loop crafting state, and per-loop quest flags reset; Time Tree node unlocks and the persistent cultivation on spirit companions do not. The exact topology of the tree, the cost per node, and any respec mechanics have not been published outside the test build and are not catalogued here until the studio publishes them in a public source.