How to level up the Bardic Needle in Zenless Zone Zero

The Bardic Needle is the Music Shop in Zenless Zone Zero, and it is where you can randomly generate Drive Discs (Artifacts, Relics) for your characters. To make higher rarity Drive Discs, though, you first need to upgrade the shop.

How to upgrade the Music Shop in Zenless Zone Zero

There is an important requirement you need to meet to upgrade the Music Shop. First, you need to reach Inter-Knot Rank 35. This is done by earning Inter-Knot Credit, obtained by practically every type of activity in the game. If you’re just starting out in Zenless Zone Zero, it will likely take a few days to reach this point because of the time-gating portions. Nevertheless, once you’ve reached Inter-Knot 35, you need to speak with the owner of the Music Shop, Elfy.

As just mentioned, Elfy is the owner of the Bardic Needle, and it is she who enables you to upgrade the shop. This sounds pretty self-explanatory, but the process is not as obvious as it seems. If you just go to the Bardic Needle and talk to Elfy, she will only give you the standard options you already had access to. There is no option, nor indication, that will allow you to upgrade the shop this way.

Instead of going to the shop directly, when you reach Rank 35, Elfy will send you a DM requesting to speak with you about the shop. Responding to her DM will begin the short questline to upgrade the shop. You must talk to Elfy through the DM screen in order to upgrade the Music Shop.

Eventually, the DM conversation will end with you going to the shop and speaking with Elfy outside at the entrance. After that brief conversation, Elfy will go inside and unlock Level 2 for you to make use of. This process will repeat one more time once you reach the required level for Level 3, which is Inter-Knot Rank 40.

What does upgrading the Music Shop do in Zenless Zone Zero?

Upgrading the Music Shop will allow you to craft Yellow (Legendary) rarity Drive Discs for your characters.

Yellow rarity discs have significantly more stats than purple (Rare) rarity ones, so it is completely worth upgrading to these as soon as you get good ones. They also require more resources to upgrade, but again, this is completely worth doing. Making Drive Discs through the Music Shop is tied heavily to gacha, but you can get some seriously good gear pieces using it, if you’re lucky.