Honkai Star Rail launch time

Honkai: Star Rail - a character reaches towards the sceren — (Image credit: Hoyoverse)

Update: It looks like Honkai: Star Rail servers are online for a bunch of people. We hopped into the North American servers, but can't verify the others.

The next gacha game from Hoyoverse has nearly left the station: the Honkai: Star Rail launch time is happening on Tuesday, April 25 and April 26 depending on your time zone. This new game from Genshin Impact's developer is another character-driven game of magical attacks and combos but this time everything's slowing down with turn-based battles instead of action combat.

Honkai: Star Rail unlock time

Hoyoverse has announced the launch time for Honkai: Star Rail as 10 am, April 26 (UTC+8) which equates to 3 am in London and 7 pm on Tuesday, April 25 in California. Here's how the global launch time converts to other timezones:

7 pm, April 25 PDT (Los Angeles)
10 pm, April 25 EDT (New York)
3 am, April 26 BST (London)
10 am, April 26 CST (Beijing)
11 am, April 26 KST (Seoul)
12 pm, April 16 AEST (Sydney)

Preloading for Honkai: Star Rail has already started, which you can begin downloading over on the Honkai: Star Rail website. It's a 10GB download on PC, so it shouldn't take terribly long. Honkai will also be available on the Epic Games Store but doesn't offer preloading. It's also available for mobile on the Google Play Store and App Store.

There will also be a launch day livestream that starts 30 minutes before the global launch time over on the Honkai: Star Rail YouTube channel.

We are expecting this to be a busy launch for Hoyoverse, as it announced over two million pre-registrations had been made as of February. That number's sure to have ballooned as launch gets ever closer.

Lauren has been writing for PC Gamer since she went hunting for the cryptid Dark Souls fashion police in 2017. She joined the PCG staff in 2021, now serving as self-appointed chief cozy games and farmlife sim enjoyer. Her career originally began in game development and she remains fascinated by how games tick in the modding and speedrunning scenes. She likes long fantasy books, longer RPGs, can't stop playing co-op survival crafting games, and has spent a number of hours she refuses to count building houses in The Sims games for over 20 years.