In Falsus Encounters Explained: Damage, Resonance and Stars

The short version

Some songs are fights. Your five cards and the opponent’s five cards trade damage automatically as you hit notes, so the Encounter is really a test of accuracy scaled by your cards. You win (Connected) if the opponent’s Resolve is below 0 and yours is above 0 at the end. The rhythm result and the Encounter result are separate: you can clear the song and still lose the Encounter, or the other way round.

All numbers below come from the community’s reverse engineering on the Miraheze and Japanese wikiwiki pages, which agree with each other. lowiro has not published them.

Loadout and Phases

You choose up to five cards, one per Phase. The opponent’s loadout is fixed per Encounter.
A song’s notes are split into five equal Phases (total notes ÷ 5). Phase changes happen by notes judged, not by time.
The active card’s Traits work only during its Phase.
You cannot bring two cards from the same Blueprint. An empty slot counts as 100 Power / 100 Defense, no colour, no traits.

Total Power and Defense

Total Power or Defense = (sum of your cards’ Power or Defense) × Difficulty Multiplier, with two adjustments:

Colour advantage: a card facing the colour it beats gets ×1.25. The cycle is Red → Green → Purple → Yellow → Blue → Red. The losing side is not penalised.
Difficulty Multiplier = 1 + 0.05 × chart level. A level 10 chart is ×1.5, a level 12 chart ×1.6. The opponent does not get this multiplier.

Your starting Resolve (the health bar) equals your Total Defense.

Damage per note

Your judgement	You deal	Opponent deals
EXACT	Total Power ÷ notes	Their Power ÷ notes
NEAR	Half of that	Their Power ÷ notes
BREAK	Nothing	5 × their Power ÷ notes

Note that you take damage even on good hits; BREAKs just make it five times worse.

Worked example: cards totalling 10,000 Power on a level 9 chart with 1,000 notes. Total Power = 10,000 × 1.45 = 14,500, so each EXACT deals 14.5 and each NEAR 7.25.

Resonance: the ×5 crit

Each EXACT fills the Resonance gauge by 6.25 ÷ total notes.
That means the gauge fills after EXACTs on about 80% of a Phase’s notes.
Once full, you deal ×5 damage for the rest of that Phase. The gauge resets when the next Phase starts.

So a perfect Phase deals 80% of its share normally and the last 20% at ×5, which is how the Japanese wiki arrives at a theoretical maximum of about 1.8 × your Total Power over a whole song. NEARs and BREAKs do not fill the gauge.

Traits

Traits either fire at the start of their Phase (for example Opening Recovery heals 11% of your Resolve, Opening Surge deals 0.11 × your Total Power) or last all Phase (Inner Concentration raises damage ×1.66, Inner Rigor divides incoming damage by 1.66). The cards page lists the ones documented so far.

Scenario Encounters versus Remembrances

Scenario Encounters are story fights with a fixed song and opponent. If your Resolve drops below 0, the Encounter ends immediately and the story does not move on. Early examples from the community wiki: ZFC against a Detective, and New Vision against Mei, both on Nia’s route in Arc 1.
Remembrances are linked to songs in Music Play and turn a free play into an Encounter with Iota drops. Here you can play to the end even at negative Resolve.

Either way, Iota only drop for a Connected result with at least a Dive Cleared.

Encounter Score and stars

The Encounter Score compares damage dealt and Resolve on both sides and scales it by the Encounter’s Difficulty Rating. The star display rises by 0.2 of a star per step, and each full star is ten times the score of the last:

Stars	Encounter Score
1	10,000
2	100,000
3	1,000,000
4	10,000,000
5	100,000,000

The achievement Encounter Overwhelmed asks for 999,999,999, well past five stars.

Sources: Miraheze Encounter mechanics page and the wikiwiki Encounter page (formulas, stars), read 10 September 2026.

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