The holiday season landed with a bang to survival shooter Once Human last week, as the game has launched a new patch that is just full of Christmas cheer. Which of course means events that involve decorating trees, killing enemies, and smashing alpacas with hammers. Yes.
The latest patch has begun multiple seasonal activities, including a thematic island where players can submit decor items to collectively decorate a Christmas tree, a bunch of login rewards to gather, and unique hammer drops from killing deviations in-game to use in a Wish Strike minigame where players bash alpacas with hammers for goodies. Entry into this minigame requires tickets gifted from the Christmas tree, while the silver and shimmer hammers that can drop from enemies increase damage against alpacas to earn a higher score.
Naturally, there are a whole bunch of goodies available from these linked events, such as furnishings, starchroms, mods, currencies, and other goodies. Players are also being promised special gifts if the Christmas island tree is fully decorated, but players have until January 7th for all of the festive cheer.
Finally, December 30th will bring a New Year’s gala in-game, with an area done up in festive style and featuring a stage that players can perform on, the promise of more freebies offered on a first-come first-served basis, and a photo area for maximum holiday picture-taking.
While Christmastime is the main feature of the latest patch, other additions have been made as well, such as a new trading market for non-RaidZone servers that lets players buy and sell resources across regions, a dungeon delving event for Visional Wheel Season 2 servers that challenges players to push past 10 floors in each encounter for rewards, and a wide host of RaidZone server tweaks to gathering and territory construction. Speaking of PvP servers, the permanent PvP servers will be shut down on January 8th, 2026, owing to low populations.
Finally in Once Human news, NetEase-owned developer Starry Studio is also planning a full overhaul of its mods system that will remove randomly rolled benefits in favor of boons associated with a mod’s core traits, a field guide to track what mods have been found, and ways to gain mods by spending mod dust and energy links, as well as a higher chance at better mod drops from higher difficulty dungeons. These changes and many more will be arriving on January 21st, 2026.
