Honkai Star Rail 2.0 Confirmed to Bring Penacony, Black Swan

Honkai Star Rail has just officially confirmed that Penacony is coming in the Honkai Star Rail 2.0 update. The latest Developer Radio — named Penacony Special Edition, gave us a brief look at the upcoming 1.6 and 2.0 update. We also got a new look at Black Swan with some of her lore updates.

We were all excited after the Penacony trailer release from HoYoverse in The Game Awards 2023 and it’s great to finally get an official update on the upcoming 2.0 version, with the Honkai Star Rail 1.6 Livestream set to release in a few days.

Black Swan’s New Drip Marketing

Black Swan’s new drip marketing was announced alongside the Developer Radio: Penacony Special Edition. The tweet mentions her as ‘A Memokeeper of the Garden of Recollection’ and describes her as a mysterious and elegant soothsayer, who bears a warm smile and is willing to patiently heed the words and feels strongly about collecting unique memories.

She uses her smile and willingness to heed the words of another as a “pretext to enter ‘memories’ and gain a comprehension over the flow of all information”. Overall her character looks very stylish and has already created quite a stir in the fanbase.

Honkai Star Rail Penacony Special Edition Updates

The latest Developer Radio from Honkai Star Rail featured a ton of new updates, including new Light Cones, a new Relic Salvage feature, much-needed changes to the Filter and Relic leveling function, and much more. Let’s take a detailed look at each of the updates.

New Light Cones Coming to Forgotten Hall Store

The latest Developer Radio revealed that a new batch of Light Cones will be introduced in the Light Cone Manifest store within the Forgotten Halls. This is amazing news for F2P players, as they can buy new better light cones with Lucent Afterglow (in-game currency).

The Light Cone Manifest Store already features some amazing 4* Light Cones, like The Seriousness of Breakfast and Quid Pro Quo, so I expect some of the new Light Cones to be equally good.

New Relic Salvageable Items

The Honkai Star Rail 2.0 update will also allow players to Salvage relics into Lost Gold Fragments, which are used for leveling Relics. Currently, Relics can be directly used for leveling other Relics, but they take too much space and make the leveling process take a lot more time than needed.

Being able to convert the Relics into Lost Gold Fragments will make leveling Relics a lot quicker while also keeping your Relic inventory clean. Additionally, the update will also add the Discard Relic function.

Changes to the Relic Leveling & Inventory Filter

From the 2.0 Honkai Star Rail update, players will be able to select the ‘Enhance to the Next Stage option’, which will only level the Relic past the next level threshold of the new Sub stat roles— this way players can quickly role for random entries on their new Relics.

The relic inventory filter will also get an update. The Filter function will now be able to filter specific sub stats of the Relics and it will also work when filtering a specific Relic set.

They are also planning to introduce a new Relic Set Recommendation function (release date still unknown). The current Relic recommendation system is not very useful and HoYoverse plans to improve on it by analyzing the big data of other Trailblazers’ Relic usage.

Orlay Crossroads System

Orlay Crossroads System is another cool new update coming to Honkai Star Rail 2.0. It will organize every mission in the game — Trailblaze missions, Companion missions, Trailblaze Continuances, and certain Adventure Missions — based on their timeline and locations.

It will be available as a tree diagram, and players will be able to access each mission and clarify the relationships between the different missions.

New Path Materials and Calyxes

The Honkai Star Rail 1.6 update will introduce a new Path material — Tears of Dreams. This is a universal material and can be used to replace Path Materials for Traces or ascending Light Cones. So, when you have insufficient Path materials, you can simply use the Tears of Dreams instead. With the 1.6 update, all players will get Tears of Dreams as a gift through their Mailbox.

Other than that, the Honkai Star Rail 2.0 update will also introduce several new Calyx (Crimson stages). The update will also add 6 new Calyx (Golden) stages across Xianzhou Luofu and Penacony. Also, Calyxes (Golden) will drop materials that are obtainable through defeating regular enemies, on top of the ones obtainable currently.

Honkai Star Rail 2.0 update will bring many much-needed changes to the game. We would love your thoughts on the upcoming updates and the new characters.