Team Bond (formerly Friendship) Explained

If you are looking for “Friendship”, this is it

The stat was introduced in version 1.0 as Friendship and renamed to Team Bond six days later, in patch 1.0.0c on 26 August 2026. The studio’s wording:

“Friendship” has been renamed to “Team Bond” to better reflect the fact of it being a shared total bonus to Cash and Specialization Points gained by the whole team.

Nothing about the mechanic changed in the rename. Any guide, video or wiki page written between 20 and 26 August 2026 will call it Friendship and be describing exactly this system — which is most of the launch-week coverage, and why the old name still gets searched more than the new one.

What it does

Team Bond is the reward layer attached to the mission system that shipped with 1.0. Every mission you finish raises it, and a higher value permanently increases two things at the end of each run:

• Cash — the currency you spend between runs
• Specialization Points — the meta-progression points that feed the skill trees

The studio’s framing for it in the pre-launch post was “Less grind, more lore!” — the point of the system is that pursuing the story is also the efficient way to build your economy, so narrative content and progression are not competing for your time.

Three details worth knowing:

It is a shared, squad-wide total. That is exactly why it was renamed. “Friendship” implied a per-survivor relationship score, like an affinity system. It is not. It is one number for the whole team.

It caps at 250. Patch 1.0.0c states the maximum value is 250, and fixes a bug where the uncapped maximum “made ‘Survivor Crossing’ torment unobtainable.” If you are chasing that Torment, you need to be on 1.0.0c or later — on an earlier build it could not be completed at all.

It has a tooltip now. The same patch added an explanation of the Team Bond mechanic to the second end-of-run screen, because at launch the stat appeared with no explanation of what it did.

How to raise it

Missions are the only documented source. Version 1.0 shipped three kinds, 79 in total:

The repeatable quests exist specifically so Team Bond can keep growing after the finite content runs out — the studio described them as letting you “grow your Friendship with them further” once the personal arcs end. With a cap of 250, that grind has a defined finish line rather than being open-ended.

Two things make this less painful than it sounds:

• Patch 1.0.0c made new missions appear in the Mission Log after reading the brief, without having to play them first, so you can switch between missions and come back to old ones freely.
• The Mission Log lets you manually retry a mission you have not completed instead of waiting for it to be offered again.

The same patch also softened one specific mission: Trauma, the Medic’s first mission, went from requiring three items to two — the patch note dryly says it was “adjusted to hopefully be a bit less traumatic.”

Related achievements

There is an achievement literally called Team Bond in some community lists, which is a naming coincidence worth clearing up: in the live achievement list the mission-completion achievements are named individually (Trauma, Hemostasis, Inflammation, and so on for each survivor), and the repeatable one is Oh Shoot, Here We Go Again — “Complete 10 repeatable missions.” See the full list for all 46 mission achievements.