HSR 4.3 to 4.8 Roadmap: Mortenax, Blade, Starward & Pier

HSR 4.3 to 4.8 Roadmap: Mortenax, Blade, Starward & Pier

Let me say the quiet part first: only Version 4.3 is firm enough to actually budget around, and for most accounts Mortenax is a skip-or-wait, not a panic-pull. Everything past 4.4 is leak, not gospel. The fastest way to torch your savings this cycle is hoarding against a banner order that gets shuffled before it ever goes live.

Version 4.3 drops June 1, 2026 with Mortenax Blade in Phase 1, per the Honkai: Star Rail Wiki. That's the one nailed-down coordinate in the next ~30 weeks. The rest of this thing (five patches at roughly six weeks apiece, a Blade rerun, the Starward endgame toggle, the Pier zone everyone keeps DMing about) is stitched together from leak compilers, and every row of it deserves a confidence tag. Confirmed gets labeled confirmed, leaked gets labeled leaked, and you get a per-wallet verdict on where the jades should actually sit.

Confirmed rows and leaked rows don't carry the same weight

Most roadmap pieces print one tidy five-row grid and your eyeball just assumes all five carry the same weight. They absolutely do not. The 4.3 launch is wiki-confirmed. The headliners after it lean on leak aggregators with a decent-but-fallible track record.

Source: launch date per Honkai: Star Rail Wiki (2026); headliners per buffbuff.com.

The Phase 1 pairing (Mortenax Blade next to a Yao Guang rerun) is the bit you can pencil in right now, off that same wiki page. And notice 4.8 doesn't even have a firm headliner on the leak grid yet. Anybody handing you a confident 4.8 lineup is a few steps ahead of what exists, so hold any 4.8 "plan" with loose fingers.

On pacing: recent patches have run 42–45 days each, per roadmap tracking on ldshop.gg and buffbuff.com (2026), and that's where the lazy "six-week patch" shorthand comes from. Push it forward and 4.3 through 4.7 lands somewhere near 30 weeks. Why does that number matter? Because your jade income is a function of time passing, not of how many glittery banners get teased, and the gap between two units you want is what decides whether your wallet survives both.

Mortenax: what the leaks are actually describing

Mortenax Blade is a 5-star Fire Nihility unit built on a dual-form kit, per a build breakdown on ldshop.gg. The gimmick is HP consumption feeding a damage boost, with the kit unlocking AoE once it slides into its ultimate state. The fandom wiki tags the role as support / sub-DPS off that two-form structure. So this isn't some all-in carry you reshape your roster for. It's a flex piece that wants the proper Nihility shell to actually pop.

Acaron, a YouTube content creator, puts it plainly in a 2026 video: "Mortenax Blade is a strong universal support/sub-DPS in 4.3," giving the dual-form kit credit for stacking an amp effect on top of its own damage. "Universal" is the rosy reading.

Here's where I land after holding that kit up against what F2P benches really look like. Mortenax is a debut-hype trap for casual players unless it fills a genuine hole on your account. Already running a working Nihility or DoT squad? The amp's a nice bonus, no rush. Running neither? Then you're signing up to build an entire team archetype around one fresh unit, and that's a far steeper jade bill than the banner's 160-pull guarantee by itself.

There's a concrete reason to sit on your hands instead of pulling day one, too. The kit's buggy at launch. A 2026 YouTube bug breakdown flags a Mortenax Blade E2 problem hitting attack-type conversion on certain units like the Remembrance Trailblazer, and the wider read across r/BladeMains threads and creator videos says the same: strong in Nihility teams, but rough around the edges in early 4.3. First adopters are basically unpaid QA. Nobody hands you a medal for sprinting through the door before the interactions settle.

Blade's rerun, and whether nostalgia is quietly overpaying

The original Blade reruns in 4.3 right beside his namesake, per several YouTube roadmaps (2026), which sets up the cleanest "save for this OR that" fork in the whole window. And the community isn't being shy about it.

His rerun viability is rated low for 4.3, specifically because of power creep from Mortenax Blade, according to a 2026 YouTube comparison weighing both banners. That's the unsentimental meta read. The sustain-DPS lane Blade built his name on is crowded now, and a brand-new Fire Nihility unit landing the same patch presses right on his relevance.

But there's a fair counter, and I won't wave it off. Threads on r/BladeMains make the case that the original stays viable in particular comps. He doesn't keel over the second a shiny new unit shows up, and folks deep into his Eidolons or signature Light Cone aren't suddenly staring at a dead account. So the split's real. Creator guides lean "Mortenax is the upgrade," while committed Blade mains point at team contexts where the OG still earns his slot. Where the room's center of gravity sits, though, tilts toward Mortenax as the smarter new buy.

My honest position: if you don't already own Blade, this rerun is not the spot to spend during a patch that's openly creeping him. If you do own him and adore the playstyle, a rerun's real juice often hides in a bundled or refreshed Light Cone rather than the character copy itself. That's the lever that quietly nudges a rerun unit's ceiling, and it's the thing to verify before you commit. Pulling a rerun before you've confirmed whether the supporting cone makes the cut is one of the slickest ways to overpay for somebody you'll bench two patches later.

Starward mode and the Pier question

Starward is the more interesting long game for F2P, honestly, because it's an optional toggle endgame mode introduced in 4.3 that stacks beefier enemy HP and a harder difficulty onto standard content in trade for extra rewards, per a 2026 MrPokke video and corroborating creator analysis. Reddit's r/HonkaiStarRail_leaks reports those rewards include extra Stellar Jades per clear over the standard modes. That's exactly the kind of recurring income that bends your save-timing arithmetic across a 30-week stretch.

And here's the angle most roadmap writeups skip clean over: Starward rewards roster depth, not single-unit obsession. A mode built on a toggleable difficulty layer with fat HP pools wants several competent teams on the bench, not one over-invested carry. There's a tidy little wrinkle, too. Endgame modes of this flavor tend to recycle their buff cycles, which means some off-meta or aging unit you already own can punch above its weight on the right rotation. That's a structural argument for keeping a wide bench over chasing every limited debut. If your jade plan is "pull everything new," you're optimizing for the wrong content.

Which reframes the entire save question. The thing that clears this mode steadily is a deep, flexible roster, so the value of skipping a marginal banner and parking your jades (plus the bench you've already got) often beats one more limited.

On Pier: I'm not about to conjure a region out of thin air for you. Hunting for a "Pier" zone across the 4.3-to-4.8 window turned up no official confirmation anywhere. No map, no quest details, no release date you can trace to an official source. It's a search term drifting around player chatter, but nothing official backs it as a confirmed exploration zone in this roadmap so far. Treat any "Pier release date" piece you stumble on as speculation until HoYoverse says otherwise. New exploration zones do reliably ship free chests and event jades that matter more to F2P pockets than the loud banners do, so if a region lands, that's where the quiet money lives. I just won't stamp a date on a zone the evidence won't back.

How to read these leaks without bleeding jades

The reliability gradient is the single biggest thing to lock in before you budget one pull. One patch is confirmed. The rest is educated leakage.

• 4.3 launch and Phase 1 banners — confirmed via the official wiki version page. Plan freely.
• 4.4–4.7 headliners — leak-aggregated from buffbuff.com and creator roadmaps. Directionally handy, individually slippery. Banner order especially gets reshuffled.
• 4.8 and any "Pier" specifics — unsubstantiated. Don't anchor savings here.

The trap that empties wallets fastest is building a save around an unconfirmed 4.5+ banner that ends up reordered. Special Pass reruns (the Himeko SP, Robin SP, Sampo SP types in the leaked grid above) are famously easy to drop anywhere in a schedule, which is precisely why their leaked slots wander. If the plan is "skip 4.3, save for the 4.5 unit," you're wagering on the flimsiest rows on the board.

One income quirk worth knowing, because it shifts when you pull rather than what: jade income tends to spike at version transitions, thanks to login rewards and any maintenance compensation. If you're a pull or two shy of a guarantee right at a patch boundary, riding out the rollover sometimes closes the gap for free. It's bailed me out of a wallet decision more than once.

The jade arithmetic, and where each spender tier should commit

Let's get concrete, because "save your jades" is hollow without the figures.

A guaranteed limited 5-star runs 160 pulls / 24,000 Stellar Jades including pity, under standard HSR banner mechanics. F2P income from events and dailies sits at an estimated 80–100 pulls per patch, per community consensus across 2026 roadmap videos. Call it a rough working band, since it isn't an officially published number and event payouts swing patch to patch.

Stack those together and the picture's blunt:

Source: guarantee cost per standard HSR banner mechanics (2026); F2P pull income per community estimates in 2026 roadmap videos. Per-patch income is an approximate working range, not an official figure.

The numbers force a verdict F2P coverage usually tiptoes around. Across five patches, a pure F2P account can guarantee roughly two limited units, not five. Which means you're choosing which three-plus banners to skip whether you plan it or not. Skipping is the default state of free play. The only real question is whether you skip with intent.

So, per tier:

F2P — bank straight through 4.3. Mortenax is wait-and-see unless it plugs a literal gap, and the same-patch Blade rerun is power-crept, so neither earns your stockpile. Saving across two patches to land one unit you've actually vetted (after the bugs cool off and the kit's understood) beats spreading thin chasing debut hype. Your real engine here is event and Starward income, not any single banner.

Low-spender ($5/mo pass) — the monthly pass loosens things up enough to weigh one committed pull this window, but I'd still pass on day-one Mortenax. Let that E2 conversion bug and the team-building bill resolve first, then strike on whatever genuinely deepens your roster.

Mid-spender (~$30/mo) — you can realistically chase most of the priority banners, so the question is order, not affordability. Don't pre-commit jades to leaked 4.5+ rows that might reshuffle. And if you've already decided a specific banner's worth funding ahead of Mortenax's debut, comparing where you top up is the one genuinely useful money step. Honkai: Star Rail top up is one transparent option to weigh once you've actually settled on a banner. The point holds no matter the channel: pick the banner first, fund it second.

The line I'll plant my flag on for this specific window: skipping Mortenax is plausibly the higher-EV F2P move, and the Pier/Starward free-reward stream matters more to your account than the headline banner most coverage leads with. Depth clears the new mode. One more limited doesn't.

Frequently Asked Questions

When exactly does Honkai Star Rail 4.3 go live?

June 1, 2026, with Mortenax Blade headlining Phase 1, per the official Honkai: Star Rail Wiki version page. That's the one date you can hard-commit to. Just remember Phase 1 and Phase 2 split a six-week patch, so the rerun and any second-half banner sit deeper into June rather than landing at launch.

Should I save jades for Mortenax or the Blade rerun?

Neither earns your stockpile in 4.3. The rerun's rated low-viability this patch precisely because Mortenax creeps his niche, per 2026 creator comparisons, and Mortenax itself shows up with a documented E2 conversion bug. If you're forced to choose, the new unit's the better long-haul investment, but waiting out the early-patch jank is smarter for F2P than pulling either one on day one.

Is the Pier region actually confirmed?

No. Searches for a "Pier" region across 4.3–4.8 turned up no official map, quest list, or release date you can trace to HoYoverse. It circulates in player talk but isn't substantiated as a confirmed zone. Treat any "Pier release date" you see as speculation, and watch official channels rather than leak roundups for the real word.

How reliable are the 4.4 through 4.8 banner leaks?

Directionally handy, individually slippery. Only 4.3 is wiki-confirmed; the 4.4–4.7 headliners come from aggregators like buffbuff.com and are solid but not guaranteed. Special Pass rerun positions especially get reshuffled. Don't anchor a multi-patch save plan to any single leaked banner past the live version, and treat 4.8 as basically unmapped right now.

Does Starward mode lock its rewards behind the newest characters?

Not in the gatekeeping way folks fear. It's an optional higher-difficulty toggle with elevated enemy HP that pays extra Stellar Jades per clear, per r/HonkaiStarRail_leaks reporting (2026). Since modes of this type tend to recycle buff cycles, older or off-meta units you already own can over-perform on the right rotation, so a deep bench clears it more reliably than any one limited debut.