Aether Story
The founding Zombies narrative: Group 935, Element 115, the Ultimis and Primis crews, and the multiverse conflict between Edward Richtofen, Doctor Monty, and the Shadowman. It concludes with Revelations.
The Zombies story
Zombies is not one story. It is three that matter and a few that stand alone. Start with the continuity you are playing.
Continuities
Chaos Story
A self-contained story introduced in Black Ops 4, following the Chaos crew across ancient and mythological settings as they pursue the Sentinel Artifacts and confront the Order.
Dark Aether Story
The rebooted timeline starting with Black Ops Cold War, following the Requiem strike team and the Omega Group as they investigate breaches to the Dark Aether. It continues through Vanguard, MWZ, and Black Ops 6.
The standalone continuities
Zombies modes that tell their own story and never join the main three.
- Dead Ops ArcadeA recurring top-down twin-stick shooter mode hidden across several titles, offering a distinct arcade take on surviving endless waves.
- Exo ZombiesA four-map story set in the Advanced Warfare universe, following survivors using exo-suit technology against an Atlas-created outbreak.
- Infinite Warfare ZombiesA tongue-in-cheek continuity framed around a 1980s film director, Willard Wyler, trapping the crew in themed movie worlds.
- Nazi Zombies (WWII)A darker, survival-horror take beginning with The Final Reich, following a group recovering stolen art and resisting the Third Reich’s undead army.
The concepts behind it
All of themElement 115, the Aether, the Apothicons — the things every crew keeps running into.
- AetheriumCrystallised Dark Aether energy, harvested from outbreak zones since the Cold War era. It is the modern continuity’s upgrade currency — Requiem refined it into the crystals that rank up skills, and every game since has kept some form of Aetherium tooling for weapons and abilities.
- Element 115A fictional element (also called Divinium) at the heart of the mythology. Its energy reanimates corpses, enables teleportation, and powers Group 935’s wonder weapons.
- The AetherA dimension of immense power that connects the maps and characters of the original storyline and is central to its conflicts.
- The ApothiconsMalevolent, otherworldly entities central to the Aether saga’s later chapters, opposed by the Keepers.
- The Dark AetherA dangerous parallel dimension whose breaches into our world drive the Cold War-era storyline and the organizations racing to control it.
- The KronoriumAn ancient text whose pages rewrite themselves as history changes, holding the full account of the cycle, the Aether, and the blood-sacrifice mechanics the finale turns on. Richtofen reads it in the Alcatraz pocket dimension and walks into his own death because of what it says; Nikolai follows its final page to end the saga at Tag der Toten.
- The Mystery BoxA rune-carved wooden crate that trades points for a random weapon — the only consistent source of most wonder weapons since 1946. Roll a teddy bear and the box packs up and moves to another spawn, taking your points with it. In fiction it runs on Element 115; at the table it is the franchise’s oldest gamble, unchanged in spirit from World at War to today.
- The Summoning KeyA small blue orb said to predate the universe around it, able to capture, hold, and release souls. Primis spends the Black Ops III arc filling it — four rituals in Morg City hand it to the Shadowman, and the crew spends the rest of the saga taking it back. It ends the story as the container that traps him for good.