Star Wars Zero Company keeps a soft cushion under your squad. As long as an operator’s health never touches zero, they walk out of a mission untouched no matter how much fire they soaked up. Mortal Wounds, a mod from Nexus user jayman273, removes that cushion by turning raw damage into injury risk, pushing the tactics game closer to the permadeath tension XCOM veterans expect.
Quick answer: Install Mortal Wounds and every hit an operator takes has a 0.40% chance per point of damage to inflict an injury, on top of the injury they already take when downed. Bigger hits mean higher odds, so heavy damage can now end a run even without a knockout.
How Mortal Wounds changes injuries
In the base game, injuries only appear when an operator is Downed. Mortal Wounds rewires that trigger so injuries can land from ordinary damage. Each point of damage carries a 0.40% chance to leave an injury, and because the roll scales with the size of the hit, a single powerful shot is far more dangerous than a light graze.
| Behavior | Base game | With Mortal Wounds |
|---|---|---|
| When injuries trigger | Only when an operator is Downed | On any damage taken, plus when Downed |
| Injury chance | None from surviving hits | 0.40% per point of damage |
| Effect of a big hit | No injury if health stays above zero | Higher injury chance the harder the hit |
This matters because Star Wars Zero Company normally lets you grind an operator down to slivers of health and still finish clean. Standard difficulty only kills an operator after three injuries, which is a bar you can go an entire campaign without reaching. The mod makes each firefight a genuine gamble.
The safety rail that stops cheap deaths
Mortal Wounds includes one guard against unfair losses. It will not add an injury to an operator who already has one. That rule prevents a healthy operator from soaking three bad rolls in a single enemy turn and dying to pure chance you could not have played around.
The threat is still real. An operator with no injuries can still stack two in one enemy turn, one from taking damage and a second from being Downed. So a unit you thought was safe can drop closer to death faster than the base game ever allowed.
How to install Mortal Wounds
SteamLibrarysteamappscommonStar Wars Zero CompanySWZeroCompanyContentPaks
Other mods that raise the stakes
Mortal Wounds sits alongside a small family of difficulty mods aimed at making squad loss matter again. If you want more control over the pressure, these pair well with it.
| Mod | What it does |
|---|---|
| Reduced Injuries Before Death | Lowers the injury-to-death threshold from 3 to 2, so losing a squadmate becomes possible. Load it only after finishing the tutorial mission. |
| Tactical Advantage | Halves per-hit Advantage gain for a slower, more deliberate build-up of your resource meter. |
Note: Reduced Injuries Before Death carries a warning to install it only once the tutorial is complete. Stacking it with Mortal Wounds sharpens the risk further, since fewer injuries are needed to lose an operator and injuries now come from ordinary damage.
Together these changes rebuild the sense that every trooper is expendable, which was always part of the pitch for Zero Company’s authored and custom operators. With Mortal Wounds running, the safe playstyle of tanking damage no longer works, and each firefight forces you to weigh cover, positioning, and retreat far more carefully.
