Flame Captain (Ember)
What Update 4.0 changed
Flame Captain (Ember) is a unit we can place on the Update 4.0 side of the line. Update 4.0 is the patch that renamed the game from Universal Tower Defense X to Z on 9 July 2026: same Roblox experience, same place ID, new name, new Synchro mechanic and a substantially reshuffled roster. A tier list that does not mention Synchro predates this unit and cannot have an opinion about it.
It did not arrive alone. 6 other Bleach units in our list carry the same flag, which is how 4.0 worked. The roster grew in franchise blocks rather than one character at a time.
Being new cuts both ways. A 4.0 unit is tuned against 4.0 content, which is the content you are playing. It also means its tier placement has had days of scrutiny rather than months, so treat any confident number attached to it, including its position on this site, as provisional.
Is it worth building
Flame Captain (Ember) is tier S+, which is the top band of the post-Update-4.0 lists. 18 other units share the band, so the badge is a floor rather than a recommendation: it says the unit is not a mistake, and it does not say it is your best next investment.
The placement starts from the post-Update-4.0 Pro Game Guides ranking, cross-checked against Destructoid. Where the two disagree we keep the post-4.0 verdict and say so, because 4.0 renamed the game, added Synchro and reshuffled the top of the roster, so a pre-patch ranking is a ranking of a different game.
If you already own Flame Captain, build it. If you are deciding whether to chase it, the badge alone is not enough, and the element and placement sections below are the parts of that decision we can actually help with.
The data we have
| Field | Flame Captain (Ember) |
|---|---|
| Tier | S+ |
| Element | Fire |
| Role | Ground DPS |
| Evolution stage | Ember |
| Rarity | Field exists in game. We have not mapped it per unit yet. |
| Franchise parodied | Bleach |
| Parody of | Yamamoto Genryusai |
| Added in Update 4.0 | Yes |
| Synchro | None confirmed |
| Damage, range, deploy cost | We have not measured these. |
Not verified yet. There is no stat block on this page. We have not measured Flame Captain for damage, range, deploy cost or upgrade curve, and the game does not publish them. What would close the gap: one unit alone on the field, a fixed wave, timed, with the upgrade path recorded. That is the test we run before a number goes up here, and until it is run the row stays empty rather than filling with a figure that reads well.
Its element, and what that costs you
Flame Captain is Fire. The game runs an advantage chart across the seven elements, Fire, Water, Wind, Ice, Rose, Light and Dark, which makes this the field most likely to explain why a team that looks right on paper keeps failing one specific wave. 19 other units share Fire, so it is a well-supplied element and you are unlikely to be short of options in it.
The trap is stacking. Six units of two elements is a team that scales beautifully until it meets the thing it is weak to, and then does nothing at all. If Flame Captain would be your third Fire unit, the honest advice is that a worse unit in a missing element will probably clear more content for you than this one will.
Not verified yet. We publish which element each unit is. We have not yet published the advantage grid itself, meaning the exact relationship Fire has with the other six. The chart exists in game and we have not captured it in a form we can stand behind. A plausible-looking matchup table is the easiest thing in the world to invent and the most expensive thing to act on, so it goes up when we have photographed it and not before.
How to get it
This is the section you came for and it is the one where the published record is worst. Units reach your box through a small number of doors: a summon banner, an evolution of something you already own, or a gate behind a mode or an event. Which door Flame Captain sits behind is not stated in any source we can point at.
The one structural clue is the bracket. Ember is an evolution stage, so this form of the unit is reached by evolving Flame Captain rather than by pulling it directly. What that evolution costs, and how you obtain the base form, are both unconfirmed. Note that the bracket says nothing about how rare the unit is, which is the confusion the rarity section below exists to clear up.
Not verified yet. We have not confirmed how Flame Captain is obtained. No summon rate, no banner name, no event gate, no material cost. What would confirm it: the unit appearing in the in-game summon pool listing, or in a mode or event reward table, captured with a date. Guides that give you a confident answer here are, as far as we can tell, working from the same absence of sources that we are.
Synchro partners
Flame Captain is not in any confirmed Synchro pair, and we are not going to invent one for it. Nine pairs are documented for Update 4.0 and this unit is in none of them.
That is worth knowing rather than glossing over, because Synchro is the one mechanic that makes ranking units in isolation the wrong exercise. A lower-tier unit that Fuses with something you already own can be worth more to your team than a higher-tier unit that stands alone, and Flame Captain stands alone. If a partner turns up in a later patch, this section changes. Until then, build it for what it does by itself.
The confirmed pairs are all listed on the unit index, and the Team Builder flags one the moment you place both halves.
Evolution stage
Flame Captain (Ember) is the Ember stage. Somewhere upstream of it there is a Flame Captain that has not been evolved, and the distance between the two is paid for in material rather than in luck. The bracket is a receipt, not a flex.
The labels are not a ladder shared across the roster. Ember on this unit and Ascension on another are not two rungs of one scale, they are each that unit's own named form. Anybody ranking units by how impressive their bracket sounds is ranking marketing copy.
The order you do things in matters more than the destination. Levelling, Etherealize, Evolve, traits and relics all draw from the same finite pile, and doing them in the wrong sequence on a unit you later bench is the most common way to lose a week of farming. That is a systems problem rather than a unit problem, which is why it lives on the systems pages.
Rarity is not the bracket
The bracket is not a rarity, and this is the mistake nearly every guide about this game makes. Ember is where Flame Captain sits on its evolution chain. Rarity is a separate property the game tracks in its own field, with values including Mythic, Legendary, Epic, Secret, Exclusive.
The two come apart in ways that cost real currency. A high-rarity unit can sit at its base evolution, and a lower-rarity unit can be fully evolved, and those two units represent completely different investments: one needed luck, the other needed grind. If you read a bracket as a rarity band, you will chase summons when what you needed was evolution material for a unit that has been sitting in your box the whole time.
Not verified yet. We have confirmed the rarity field exists. We have not yet mapped it to Flame Captain, so this page does not claim one. An all-null rarity column across the site would imply we looked and found nothing, when the truth is that we have not finished looking. What would close it: the in-game unit index, which shows a rarity against each entry.
Where it falls short
The honest downside of Flame Captain is not a stat. It is the decision around it. We cannot tell you the wave where its damage stops scaling, because we have not measured its damage. We can tell you where the reasoning behind building it tends to go wrong.
It is new, so the meta around it has not settled. Update 4.0 landed in July 2026 and rewrote the top of the roster, and the next patch can do it again. Sinking a full evolution chain into a unit whose placement is a few weeks old is a real risk, and it is one that every tier list on the internet, this one included, is structurally incapable of warning you about.
And the flat one, which applies to every unit on this site: no stats. If you want a damage number to compare Flame Captain against the unit you already own, we do not have one, and neither does anybody else who is being straight with you. That is a real cost of refusing to guess, and you should pay it knowingly rather than act on a figure somebody invented.
Our testing status
Not verified yet. We have not tested Flame Captain (Ember) ourselves. Not one wave. This page is built from the post-Update-4.0 community lists plus the parody and franchise identification, and nothing on it is presented as more certain than that.
When we do test it, this note gets replaced by what we found: the wave it was run on, the team it was run with, the upgrade path, and whether the placement we inherited held up. Units we have tested will say so, in those words, with a date. Units we have not say this instead.
There is a version of this page that reads better. It has a damage number, a summon rate and a confident line about the best relic. We could write it in ten minutes, every figure in it would be invented, and somebody would spend a week of gems on the strength of it. A stated gap beats a fabricated number, and it is not close.
Last updated 2026-07-14 · Placement re-checked against the post-4.0 lists