Honkai: Star Rail 3.8 explained (banners, events, and key changes)

Version 3.8, “Memories are the Prelude to Dreams,” is a long, eight-week patch that closes out the 3.x cycle for Honkai: Star Rail. It brings a new five-star character, an extended banner schedule, a return to Penacony for a Finality Mission, and a wide set of events and system updates aimed at both everyday Trailblaze play and endgame modes.

Honkai: Star Rail 3.8 release time and duration

Version 3.8 is live on all platforms with a staggered regional rollout. NA servers moved up to 3.8 on December 16, 2025 (UTC-5), while European and Asian servers followed on December 17, 2025. The version is planned to run for roughly eight weeks, longer than the usual cycle, and is scheduled to end around mid-February 2026.

During the initial maintenance window, servers were offline for several hours while the patch was applied. Pre-installation was available ahead of time to handle the sizable download on PC, PlayStation 5, and mobile.

The Dahlia, the new 5-star in Version 3.8

The headliner for 3.8 is Constance “The Dahlia,” a limited five-star Fire character on the Nihility Path. She is positioned as a support for Break-centric teams.

The Dahlia’s kit revolves around Super Break DMG. She can apply extra Weaknesses to enemies and boost Weakness Break Efficiency for the entire team, and she is able to start dealing Super Break DMG even before enemies are fully Broken. That makes her a natural fit alongside other Fire units and any lineup that leans into Toughness shredding and Break Effect scaling.

The Dahlia’s personal Light Cone, the five-star Nihility weapon “Never Forget Her Flame,” is available on the Brilliant Fixation banner in Phase 1 of the patch.

Eight-week banner schedule with three phases

To match the extended duration, 3.8 stretches its Event Warps across three distinct phases, with character banners and Light Cones running in parallel.

Each character phase also has its own set of boosted four-star units:

• Phase 1 pairs The Dahlia and Firefly with Gallagher, Luka, and March 7th.
• Phase 2 puts Fugue and Lingsha alongside Natasha, Sampo, and Arlan.
• Phase 3 brings back Aglaea and Sunday with Tingyun, Yukong, and Dan Heng.

On the Light Cone side, the Bygone Reminiscence banner cycles through previous five-star options tied to the rerun characters, while Brilliant Fixation handles the new release. Each phase also rotates in three four-star Light Cones as rate-ups, spanning older staples like Memories of the Past and Good Night and Sleep Well and newer additions such as Geniuses' Greetings.

Across all three phases, the patch effectively compresses a large number of reruns into a single, elongated version, giving players multiple chances to fill gaps in both character and Light Cone lineups.

New story: Finality Mission “Memories are the Prelude to Dreams”

Version 3.8 returns Trailblazers to Penacony with a new permanent Finality Mission called “Penacony — Memories are the Prelude to Dreams.” The story focuses on threads and factions that were left partially unresolved during the main Penacony Trailblaze Missions, aiming to close out that arc before the game moves toward its next major region.

The mission unlocks once you have cleared “Penacony — Stranger in a Strange Land.” From there, it becomes part of the main story backlog and can be tackled at your own pace.

To support the narrative, 3.8 adds a special recap feature called “Oneiric Memoir” within the Finality Mission interface. It lets you rewatch key story beats and refresh context without digging through older mission logs.

New area: Dream of Gnawing Oak

The patch introduces a new Penacony map, “Dream of Gnawing Oak,” described as a Primordial Memory Zone overrun by the Path of Propagation. The zone is accessible during the 3.8 Finality Mission and adds additional combat and exploration spaces to the Penacony cluster.

As with other late-game areas, Dream of Gnawing Oak folds into the existing map structure once unlocked, adding new enemy groups, environmental storytelling, and additional exploration rewards.

3.8 events and calendar

Most of the version’s major events run deep into February 2026, with some staying up for the full duration of 3.8. The lineup focuses heavily on combat scenarios and resource catch-up.

The combat-heavy events, Chrysos Awoo Championship and Remnants of Twilight, both target Trailblaze Level 21 and above. Chrysos Awoo plays as a themed tournament in Okhema built around chimera trainers, while Remnants of Twilight is a straightforward sequence of fights with reward tracks tied to clearing higher tiers.

Treasure Hunt arrives late in the patch and converts a cumulative Trailblaze Power sink into a gacha-like reward board. You consume Power to acquire Treasure Hunt Tickets, spend them for random rewards, and unlock extra milestones such as Self-Modeling Resin and Stellar Jade as you hit draw thresholds.

Gift of Odyssey continues the now-standard login event pattern: seven individual days of check-ins over the event window grant a total of 10 Star Rail Special Passes.

The three double-reward campaigns — Planar Fissure, Realm of the Strange, and Garden of Plenty — are spread across the middle and back half of the patch to give additional windows for farming Simulated Universe ornaments, combat relics, and Calyx materials.

Endgame and Treasures Lightward changes

Treasures Lightward, the umbrella for modes like Apocalyptic Shadow, Pure Fiction, and Memory of Chaos, gets a small structural change in 3.8. Instead of three endgame phases, the version adds an extra Apocalyptic Shadow rotation near the end, for a total of four phases across the patch.

The rotation for this version looks like this:

• Apocalyptic Shadow: Primate Knight (Dec 22, 2025 – Feb 2, 2026): enemies with “Steadfast Safeguard” grant ally-wide debuff cleanses, action advances, and Skill Point recovery when Broken, while all enemies take increased Break DMG and Memosprite Skill DMG gets a boost.
• Pure Fiction: Epic Collection (Jan 5, 2026 – Feb 16, 2026): Skills that hit enemies generate Grit Value across all affected targets, shaping team choices around multi-hit and multi-target actions.
• Memory of Chaos: Breached Nest (Jan 19, 2026 – Mar 2, 2026): each wave opens with Skill Point recovery, and using Skills builds up “Memory Turbulence” hits that convert into periodic True DMG at the start of each cycle.
• Apocalyptic Shadow: Dominance of Netherveil (Feb 2, 2026 – Mar 16, 2026): repeats the Steadfast Safeguard interaction from Primate Knight with the same Break-focused bonuses.

Anomaly Arbitration is also active in 3.8 under the theme “Dissonance,” offering high-difficulty combat for rewards such as Lone Stardust, Interference Keys, Self-Modeling Resin, and limited-time avatar frames. Its duration lines up with the version length.

Divergent Universe and Synchronicity updates

Divergent Universe: Protean Hero receives a content refresh. A new adventure domain called Balloon Bonanza joins the mode, along with new Equations, Curios, Weighted Curios, and Occurrences. The Synchronicity level cap climbs to 120, which extends the reward ladder for players who regularly engage with this roguelike-style activity.

Several Equations get text corrections and behavior fixes, including Oathkeeper and Berserker, and some enemy behaviors inside Divergent Universe are corrected to behave properly under edge cases.

New boss: Harbinger of Death: Swarm Nightmare

3.8 adds a new boss, Harbinger of Death: Swarm Nightmare, also referred to as the Iron Cavalry Knight. The encounter appears during the Finality Mission “Memories are the Prelude to Dreams” and then slots into the wider boss roster with its own materials and challenge structure.

The fight ties into the Swarm Nightmare theme that has run through earlier content, adding another late-game check for teams with strong Break and sustain tools.

System QoL and team management tweaks

Several small but meaningful quality-of-life changes land in 3.8, most of them centered on team setup and event information.

• Team Lineup Path switching lets you change multi-Path characters’ Paths directly from the lineup screen. You no longer need to open each character’s detail view to swap Trailblazer elements, for example.
• Team Presets now lock in the active Path for multi-Path characters at the time you save the preset. That prevents Path changes in one team from unexpectedly affecting the same character in a different preset or context.
• Event Notes tags in the Travel Log now show each limited-time event’s type (Story, Casual, or Combat) and display the total amount of Stellar Jade you can earn from it. That makes it easier to prioritize events when time is limited.

On the account side, Express Supply Passes now generate mail reminders when they are about to expire or have already expired, reducing the risk of losing track of active passes.

Graphics, audio, and platform-specific upgrades

Several technical updates in 3.8 target stability and visual consistency across platforms.

• PC in windowed mode now prompts a confirmation dialog when you click the close button, with a shortcut to bypass it if you click rapidly multiple times. That’s a small safeguard against accidental exits.
• Mobile gets a new “Pre-compile Shaders on Login” option under Settings → Graphics. Once enabled, the game compiles shaders during the first login after future updates, which reduces hitches from on-the-fly compilation during gameplay.
• Environment visuals are polished in certain late-game scenes, such as puzzle flows in “Nightmare's Echo: Great Tomb of the Nameless Titan,” map displays in Radiant Scarwood, and character models in story cutscenes.

Audio work in this version is substantial. The English voice actor for The Dahlia is changed in earlier Version 2.1 missions to match the new performance. English voice-overs are added or extended for Firefly, Asta, Hook, Arlan, the Trailblazer, and other characters in several backlogged missions and side stories. Japanese and Korean voice lines are adjusted in multiple Amphoreus and Penacony missions, and PS5-specific audio issues are addressed.

Beyond voice, a large pass on text cleans up item descriptions, story summaries, gameplay tooltips, and achievement names across 13 languages, bringing terminology in line with how mechanics actually function. One example is the achievement “A 4-Star Daydream,” which is renamed, and several Light Cone and Planar Ornament descriptions are corrected to better match their in-game effects.

Currency Wars: Zero-Sum Game rebalancing and fixes

Currency Wars: Zero-Sum Game, the autobattler-style mode, receives a dedicated balance and bug-fix patch bundled into Version 3.8.

On the balance side, multiple characters, Bonds, and pieces of equipment are strengthened to perform better at higher difficulties. The game also corrects a range of anomalies affecting Empowerments, memosprite interactions, and Investment Strategies. These include fixes to how units like Jade, Hyacine, Feixiao, Yunli, Evernight, Sparkle, Silver Wolf, Fu Xuan, Mydei, Jing Yuan, and others behave under specific conditions.

Several environment affixes and Bonds — such as Economic Overheat, Economic Hyperheat, Quantum Resonance, Express Cohort, and Diversified Team — are adjusted so their effects and on-screen text align. UI elements for Cyrene’s Poems, Speed Amplification displays, Skill Point tracking, and match records are also corrected.

Because 3.8 runs longer than usual, the display for the mode’s “next expansion” timing is updated in-game to match the special schedule. The underlying point rotations for Currency Wars and Simulated Universe continue on their normal cadence.

Bug fixes across combat and missions

Alongside the headlining features, Version 3.8 cleans up a long list of smaller bugs in core combat and mission flows.

• Super Break interactions are fixed so that additional Toughness-reduction effects no longer apply incorrectly to Super Break DMG.
• Enter-combat triggers are corrected so that Toughness-reducing passives fire reliably when initiating fights.
• Camera behavior is improved in specific enemy abilities, such as the Ichor Memosprite: Pheasant’s “Hemotort Graze”.
• Several boss fights in Amphoreus and Penacony have their Enemy Details and Stage Information text corrected and cutscene sequencing issues resolved.
• A cluster of issues in character Talents and Techniques is addressed, including abnormal stacking, damage caps, and buff behaviors for units like Cyrene, Dan Heng • Permansor Terrae, Cerydra, Cipher, and Blade.
• The achievement “You Can Always Trust Dan Heng” is made completable again after being blocked by a previous logic error.

UI glitches, missing icons in Travel Log events, incorrect decoration descriptions, and mismatched track durations in the Phonograph are also fixed. The cumulative effect is a smoother experience across late-story content, endgame combat, and everyday menu navigation.

The net result is a version that stretches the current cycle to its limit. For players, that translates into a long runway to pull for The Dahlia and a dense calendar of events and endgame rotations, all wrapped inside a final return to Penacony before the game steps into its 4.x era.