Can You Change Your Honkai: Star Rail Server? What to Know Before You Try

Short answer first: no, you can’t switch servers in Honkai: Star Rail and keep your existing account progress. Longer answer below because it’s worth understanding what the server system actually does and what your options are.

How Honkai: Star Rail servers work

When you create an account in Honkai: Star Rail, you choose a server – typically America, Europe, Asia, or TW/HK/MO. Your entire account, including your characters, Stellar Jades, gacha history, story progress, and everything else, lives on that server. Accounts are not portable across servers.

The servers aren’t just regional matchmaking pools like in most online games. They’re separate databases. HoYoverse doesn’t offer a migration tool between them, and based on company communications over the years for Genshin Impact (their earlier title with the same structure), there’s no indication they plan to add one.

Why people want to switch servers

The most common reasons:

  • Moved to a different region and experiencing high ping
  • Friends play on a different server and you want to co-op
  • Started on the wrong server by accident
  • One server has less congestion during banner releases

Ping and performance

If ping is the concern, it’s worth actually testing before taking any drastic action. The difference between servers for a turn-based game like Star Rail is less meaningful than in real-time action games. 200ms ping in Star Rail is barely noticeable – it’s not a shooter. Check your actual in-game ping (settings menu) before assuming it’s a problem.

If you genuinely need a different server

Your only option is starting a new account on the target server. Your existing progress doesn’t transfer. This is a bigger deal for some players than others depending on how far in they are and how much they’ve spent.

One thing to check: if you haven’t spent money or significant time yet, starting fresh is painless. If you’re a returning player trying to reconnect with friends on another server, HoYoverse’s in-game friend system also has cross-server limitations – co-op has server requirements.

The new account path

If you decide to start fresh: the early game is faster now than it was at launch. The initial story chapters go quickly and the game gives enough free Stellar Jades early on to get at least one featured character within the first few weeks of new content cycles. It’s not nothing, but it’s not starting from zero in every meaningful sense either.

the ping point is underappreciated. i play star rail on the asia server from the US and my ping sits around 180ms and i’ve never had a single issue. it’s a turn-based RPG, not valorant. unless you’re on a 500ms connection the server region basically doesn’t matter for gameplay.

HoYoverse’s server architecture is a deliberate choice, not a limitation. Separate regional databases reduce infrastructure complexity and let them comply with different regional data laws more cleanly. The tradeoff is user inconvenience, which they’ve clearly decided is acceptable. It would technically be possible to build account migration – they’ve chosen not to.

The early game being faster now is true but worth contextualizing. You still lose any characters or Light Cones you pulled. If someone has a limited 5-star from an early banner that’s never rerun, that’s a genuine loss. For F2P players the sting is smaller but it’s not zero.

I went through this with Genshin before Star Rail existed. Started on Europe by accident, wanted to switch to NA to play with friends. Ended up just convincing my friends to roll an EU alt account because I wasn’t willing to lose my progress. Cross-server co-op would solve most of these cases without needing actual migration.

Worth mentioning that HoYoverse account support has reportedly helped in edge cases – like if your account was clearly created on the wrong server within a very short window. Not a guaranteed path but if you’re in the first day or two of a new account it may be worth submitting a ticket before grinding any further.