Aniimo Tracing the Trail: The Shadow of Legend Event Guide

Aniimo’s Tracing the Trail: The Shadow of Legend is a dispatch board rather than a quest chain. You open a clue, send two to four Aniimo out on a timed investigation, and collect Irisalis Petals and Flux Crystals when the clock runs out. Filling all four slots with Aniimo the area wants is what turns the grade badge from B to S, and the event runs from 20 September to 9 December 2026.

Nothing was published about it before it opened, which is why its calendar entry on this site carried its dates and little else. AniimoSync opened every panel on camera on the day it went live.

Two sources, named in every section. The walkthrough is AniimoSync’s, filmed in the live game on 20 September 2026, and every timestamp points at his footage. The rules, the reward pool and the exact start and end times come from the game’s own data files, build 1.0.0.7. Where only one of the two has a fact, this page says which. Checked 20 September 2026.

What is Tracing the Trail in Aniimo?

Tracing the Trail: The Shadow of Legend is a rotational event in which the Institute asks you to dispatch Aniimo to investigate sightings of Legendary Aniimo, one clue at a time, for materials rather than for a story. No combat, no travel, no map pins. You choose who goes and you wait.

The event screen states the premise itself, and the client carries the same sentence word for word: “Look out! Mysterious Legendary Aniimo have appeared in many places, sending abnormal surges of Vein Energy rippling across the land. The Institute urgently calls on Pathfinders to gather clues and pinpoint the Legendary Aniimo!”

Here is the event at a glance, with the source of each line beside it.

Line	What it is	Where it comes from
Full name	Tracing the Trail: The Shadow of Legend	Event header, 0:06, and the game’s data files
Runs	20 September to 9 December 2026, closing at the 04:00 reset on 10 December	The game’s data files
Clues	Five cards, unlocking on staggered timers	Video, 0:06
Squad size	Two minimum, four slots, first slot is the Leader	Panel text, 1:36, and the client rules
Grades	B, A and S, shown as a letter beside the rewards	Video, 1:36 · 2:31 · 3:19
Run time	4 hours, cut to 2h 48m by the right Leader	Video, 3:15 against 3:17

It also belongs to a family. Idyll Ecology Field Notes, the panel one row below it on the same tab, is a different thing entirely: that one sends you out into Idyll to catch a listed Aniimo. This one never leaves the menu. Worth flagging, because the two sources disagree here: the client’s rule text for Tracing the Trail opens by asking Pathfinders to “bring back valuable photos and complete the field notes”, and nothing in the event does either. Our reading is that the sentence was copied from the Field Notes event, but it is the client’s wording and it is not what the screen does.

The clue board, and when the next clue unlocks

The board holds five cards, and only the first is open when the event starts. The other four unlock a day apart, which puts Clue 2 on 21 September 2026, Clue 3 on 22 September, Clue 4 on 23 September and Clue 5 on 24 September, each at the 04:00 reset. So the whole board opens over four days, and then there is nothing left to wait for until the event closes in December.

Those dates are worked out rather than printed. The client starts the event at 04:00 on 20 September, and on the morning of the 20th the four padlocked cards were counting down to 16h 3m, 1 day 16h, 2 days 16h and 3 days 16h. Each gap is 24 hours, and each lands on the daily reset hour.

The first card is not labelled Clue 1. It carries the name of the place instead, Nimbus Fields, with a New tag in its corner, and the four behind it are numbered. The client’s rules say the pattern plainly: during the event the Institute “will unlock multiple investigation areas over time”, and “each area has different investigation objectives and environmental features”.

Underneath the board sits a separate track, marked 0/5 Progress, with reward pips at one, three and five clues. That is the completion ladder, and it is the only part of the event that pays for finishing rather than for deploying. Its three rewards are Capaseed ×50 at one clue, Capaseed ×75 at three and Capafruit ×2 at five.

The bar along the bottom of the board, headed Possible Rewards, holds four icons: Chance Encounter Gift: Energy Resonance, Starcryst Essence ×1, Capaseed ×5 and Vein Essence ×1. Those four are not the investigation payout. They are the four outcomes of the Chance Encounter Gift, and the same four icons are printed again inside the deployment panel under the words Chance Encounter Gift. The payout proper is elsewhere on that panel, and the next two sections are about how you raise it.

Inside the Deploy Aniimo panel

Pressing an open clue card brings up a two-page spread: the sighting on the left, and the Deploy Aniimo panel on the right with four hexagonal slots, a Quick Select button and a Deploy button. The rule line under the heading is the one sentence worth memorising: “At least 2 required, lead Aniimo must be deployed”.

Nimbus Fields comes with its own short brief, and it is flavour rather than instruction: “Eyewitness reports claim that a mysterious white figure was seen near the Branch, then was gone in an instant…”. Under it, a block headed Dispatch…?! offers three hints. Two are about the place, “There seems to be a clue underground” and “There’s traces high up on the Branch”. The third is about your roster, and it is the only one that changes anything: “Special Aniimo make investigations smoother”.

That third line is the screen’s shorthand for a rule the client spells out: “Prismana Form and Sparkling Aniimo can sense the residual energy of Legendary Aniimo, which will help speed up the investigation.” If you have been running a Prismana route or have caught a Sparkling, this is a place they pay off outside combat.

Nothing is spent to deploy. There is no stamina bar on this screen, no entry cost and no currency, which makes the four slots the only real decision in the event.

How to get an S grade in Tracing the Trail

Fill all four slots, and fill the three companion slots with Aniimo the panel marks with a small green face. The badge beside the More Rewards box read B with the slots empty, A with one marked companion in, and S with three. There is no bar, no percentage and no score: the letter is the whole interface.

One companion lifts it to A and adds two Flux Crystals to the box.

Counting heads is not the rule, though, and the footage carries its own counter-example. A squad of three read A, not S, because only one of the two companions carried the green marker.

The client is more precise than the screen here. Its rule text reads: “After the investigation is complete, you will receive base rewards according to the dispatched Aniimo. Dispatching Aniimo meeting the area preference conditions increases your reward rating.” The green face is that condition, drawn on the slot, and the letter tracks how many marked Aniimo you have sent rather than how many Aniimo.

The roster picker shows the same condition rather than hiding it: every portrait carries a blue thumb badge in its top corner when the Aniimo qualifies, next to a dark terrain disc. So the practical instruction is not “send four”, it is “send three that the area wants, behind whichever Leader you have chosen”.

What was on screen	Grade	More Rewards
No Aniimo, or a Leader alone (1:36, 2:07)	B	Irisalis Petal ×1, and Deploy disabled
Leader and one marked companion (2:31)	A	Irisalis Petal ×1, Flux Crystal ×2
Leader and two companions, one marked (2:58)	A	Irisalis Petal ×1, Flux Crystal ×2
Leader and three marked companions (3:19)	S	Irisalis Petal ×1, Flux Crystal ×3

Read against each other, those rows say something useful: the whole distance from B to S is three Flux Crystals, and the last step of it, A to S, is worth exactly one. Deploying at B is never right because the button will not let you, but a squad one marked Aniimo short is a small loss rather than a ruined run. The deployment clock is a separate matter entirely, and it has its own section below.

Why the Leader Aniimo matters, and which one to pick

The first slot is the Leader, and it is the only slot with a reward attached to the individual in it: the Chance Encounter Gift an investigation can return raises the Leader’s Potential by one, and that can happen only once in each Aniimo’s lifetime. Choose the Aniimo you actually want improved before you press Deploy.

The tooltip explains its own mechanic: “During the investigation, the Leader Aniimo seems to have briefly resonated with lingering energy from Legendary Aniimo in the area, awakening more of its capabilities.”

The client adds the two limits that decide who should be standing in the slot. The Potential bonus “can only be obtained once in each Aniimo’s lifetime”, and “Aniimo with max Potential cannot obtain” it at all. Potential runs Common, Good, Elite and Perfect in this game, so a Perfect Aniimo in the Leader slot is a wasted opportunity, not an upgrade.

AniimoSync’s own advice at 1:42 is to decide this before deploying rather than after, and it is the right instinct: there is no way to move the bonus afterwards. The practical rule that follows from the client text is to lead with an Aniimo you intend to keep and that is not already topped out. Our guide to Potential and Personality is the place to work out which of your roster that is.

The Leader also does not have to suit the area. AniimoSync picks Lunara at 1:59 and calls it his story Aniimo, not a Nimbus Fields specialist. It carries no green marker at 2:58 or 3:15, and the squad still grades S off the three companions behind it. Lunara is No.9997, a Light element DPS at the Nova stage.

Quick Select against picking by hand

Quick Select fills every slot from the Aniimo the area accepts, and it also overwrites the Leader you set by hand, so the order to use is Quick Select first and Leader second. AniimoSync gives that tip himself at 3:02, and the footage shows why it matters.

Two details in that grid are easy to miss. The header says the list is limited to the area you are deploying into. And the pill under each portrait is a number with an element mark beside it rather than a level, so a picker that looks like a squad builder is really a suitability list with no names on it.

At 3:15 AniimoSync has an S grade with Lunara leading. He presses Quick Select, and at 3:17 the three companions are unchanged, the grade is unchanged, and the Leader has been replaced. That is the trap. He puts it the right way round at 3:02: press Quick Select first, then change the Leader to whichever Aniimo you actually wanted. He also qualifies his own claim that Quick Select guarantees an S, at 2:12, with the caveat that it only does so if you own enough Aniimo the area accepts.

Four is the ceiling, incidentally: the client carries a message for a full board, “The current deployment party is full.” And if you are building squads for anything other than this event, none of this carries over. Investigation squads ignore elements, roles and synergy, so the Team Builder and our best squads pages stay a combat tool.

Every reward in Tracing the Trail

A completed investigation pays one Irisalis Petal at every grade, two Flux Crystals at A, three at S, and a Chance Encounter Gift that the Nimbus Fields panel labels “(1 guaranteed)”. The completion track adds Capaseed ×50, Capaseed ×75 and Capafruit ×2 as you clear one, three and five clues.

That petal is the reason the event runs as long as it does. It is the currency for the two Legendary Aniipods and for the exchange stall in the Legendary Journey shop, and Legendary Journey: Walking with Irisalis closes on the same day this event does, 9 December 2026. One petal per investigation is a slow trickle, but it is a trickle that runs for eleven weeks.

Flux Crystal is the part of the reward most people will feel. Its other sources, per its own tooltip, are Elite Training, Upgrade Level, the Companion Handbook, the shop, chests and Holo-Battle Sim, all of which are capped or finite. Three crystals for four button presses, repeated across eleven weeks, is a real amount of evolution material for a menu you never have to leave.

Reward	How much	Where it comes from
Irisalis Petal	×1 per investigation, every grade	More Rewards box, 1:36 · 2:31 · 3:19
Flux Crystal	×2 at A, ×3 at S, none at B	More Rewards box, 2:31 and 3:19
Chance Encounter Gift	Labelled “(1 guaranteed)” on this clue	Panel label, 1:36
Capaseed ×50	First clue completed	Progress track, 0:06
Capaseed ×75	Third clue completed	Progress track, 0:06
Capafruit ×2	Fifth clue completed	Progress track, 0:06

One caution about the milestone track. It reads 0/5 for the five clues of the first board, and the client says the Institute unlocks areas “over time”, so a second board later in the event may well come with a track of its own. Nothing published settles that, and this page will not guess at it.

Read together, the two Capaseed milestones are 125 seeds, or six Capafruit and change, on top of the two the fifth clue pays outright. That matters because the Capaseed tooltip lists exactly one other source in the whole game, the Nurture Branch.

What a Chance Encounter Gift actually gives you

A Chance Encounter Gift rolls one of four outcomes: a random Leader Aniimo Potential +1, Starcryst Essence ×1, Capaseed ×5 or Vein Essence ×1. That list is the client’s own, quoted from its rules panel rather than inferred from a payout.

How often you get one is the one place where the two sources do not quite line up, and it is worth saying so rather than picking a side. The Nimbus Fields panel prints “Chance Encounter Gift (1 guaranteed)” under the artwork, while the client’s general rules say only that after an investigation “you also have a chance to receive 1 Chance Encounter Reward”, and the Select Leader window hedges the same way: “The lead Aniimo has a chance to receive a Chance Encounter Gift: Energy Resonance”. The likeliest reading is that a clue can carry a guaranteed gift as part of its own reward set, but nothing published settles it.

The client gives the list but not the odds, and nothing on the screen shows them either, so no probability appears anywhere on this page. What the rules do add are two footnotes that matter more than a percentage: the Potential bonus “can only be obtained once in each Aniimo’s lifetime”, and an Aniimo already at maximum Potential “cannot obtain” it.

Both of the essences in that pool are otherwise bought. Starcryst Essence and Vein Essence are both among the progression materials the shop sells for real money, which is exactly why the free-to-play reading of the shop cares about every free source of them. A guaranteed gift box per investigation, several investigations a day, is a quiet but genuine addition to that list.

One naming trap worth flagging, because searching for it will mislead you. The item tooltip in the live client calls this a Chance Encounter Gift: Energy Resonance, filed as a Quest Item. It has nothing to do with the Gift of Encounter that friends send each other for Credits and affinity. Different item, similar name.

Deployment timers, Recall, and what cancelling costs

An investigation runs four hours at the base rate. The 2h 48m figure people see is a discount, it has nothing to do with the grade, and on this footage it follows the Leader Aniimo: the same S squad ran four hours under one Leader and 2h 48m under another. Recall exists, but it terminates the run rather than pausing it.

Two seconds of footage settle what the panel never explains. At 3:15 the squad is Lunara plus three marked companions, grade S, four hours. AniimoSync presses Quick Select, and at 3:17 the three companions are the same three, the grade is the same S, the rewards are the same, and the only change on the whole screen is the Leader. The clock now reads 2h 48m with the four hours struck out.

The client names the reason without naming the mechanism: “Prismana Form and Sparkling Aniimo can sense the residual energy of Legendary Aniimo, which will help speed up the investigation.” The panel repeats it as a hint, “Special Aniimo make investigations smoother”. Our reading of the two frames is that the discount rides on the individual rather than on the count, and that the blue face marker on that second Leader, where every other qualifying Aniimo carries a green one, is how the panel says so. The exact size of the cut is not published: 2h 48m against four hours is 30 per cent, on this squad.

Two small corrections to the commentary, offered politely, because the screen is the authority. AniimoSync reads the timer aloud at 2:46 as “2 hours and 28 minutes” while the panel says 2h 48m. And at 3:13 he attributes the drop to Quick Select itself. Quick Select is what he pressed, but the thing that changed between the two frames is the Aniimo standing in the flagged slot, so pressing the button on a squad that already has the right Leader will not shorten anything.

Once a squad is out, the Deploy button is replaced by a single Recall button and the countdown ticks down inside the panel. On the board outside, the clue card swaps its artwork for the word Investigating.

Recalling is not expensive, though, as far as the footage shows. AniimoSync confirms the dialogue at 3:44, the panel empties, and by 3:52 he has pressed Quick Select and deployed the same Aniimo again with no cooldown and nothing consumed. What you lose is the elapsed time, which was six minutes in his case. The client does carry a general warning that Aniimo deployed for exploration cannot be selected elsewhere, so treat a squad that is genuinely out as busy.

There is one end-of-event guard in the client worth knowing before December: it refuses a new dispatch that could not finish in time, warning that the event is about to end and you “won’t have enough time to complete the Investigation Dispatch”. Since the base run is four hours, plan the last deployment for at least four hours before the close rather than counting on the discount.

What to do each day, and when it all ends

Open the event, press Quick Select, put the Aniimo whose Potential you want raised back into the flagged Leader slot, then press Deploy and come back when the clock runs out. That order matters, because Quick Select overwrites the Leader and the Leader is the only slot with a personal reward on it.

The dates are the part worth writing down. The event runs to 9 December 2026 and closes at the 04:00 reset on 10 December, on the same daily clock as everything else in the game, which our menu and reset guide covers in full. It shares that closing date with the Irisalis Legendary Journey, and since this event pays the petals that shop spends, finish the Legendary Journey side first if you are ever short of time.

Three open questions remain, and it is better to name them than to fill them. AniimoSync only ever has one clue card open, so whether several investigations can run side by side once Clue 2 to Clue 5 unlock is not something this footage answers, and it decides whether a cycle pays one petal or five. The client says areas unlock “over time”, but only the five cards of the first board are visible, so whether a second area arrives later is likewise unsettled. And the odds inside the Chance Encounter Gift are not published anywhere: the four outcomes are listed, the weights are not.

Everything else on this page is either on AniimoSync’s screen at the timestamp given, or in the game’s own data files. Our events calendar carries the dates for the rest of the season, the season events guide covers the neighbours on the same tab, and Who’s That Aniimo? is the other launch event that looks harder than it is.