HoYoverse Opens Sign-Ups for Petit Planet Stardrift Closed Beta Test

The studio that turned Genshin Impact into a global live-service phenomenon is now asking players to farm, fish, and host dance parties on their own planets. Sign-ups for the Stardrift Test, the latest closed beta for Petit Planet, are open now with a fixed target on the calendar: the playtest kicks off April 21, 2026, and access is limited to selected applicants.

To apply, visit the official Petit Planet website, log in with a HoYoverse account, and complete a roughly five-minute survey covering gaming platform preferences and personal interests. HoYoverse will notify selected participants by email. Region restrictions, device eligibility, and NDA terms may vary depending on the tier of access granted, so check the official recruitment page carefully before assuming the process is uniform across all markets.

The Stardrift Test runs on PC, iOS, and Android, a meaningful expansion in platform coverage from the previous Coziness Test, which was limited to PC and iOS. No official end date has been announced. The test supports English, Japanese, French, Russian, Thai, Indonesian, and Simplified Chinese text, with English, Japanese, and Chinese voice-overs available.

Petit Planet is HoYoverse's first title outside the action RPG and gacha framework that produced Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, Honkai Impact 3rd, Tears of Themis, and Zenless Zone Zero. Players take on the role of Planet Tenders, building and customizing their own worlds within a shared galaxy. The core loop blends farming, fishing, cooking, and home decoration with companion NPCs called Neighbors, who can be invited to settle on a player's planet and will shape other worlds in the interconnected galaxy.

The Stardrift Test introduces new interactive Neighbor NPCs, expanded Starsea Voyage exploration where players can travel by vehicle to Islets alongside those Neighbors, and updates to the Galactic Bazaar, a multiplayer social hub built around communal activities including auctions, fortune-telling, dancing, and coffee. HoYoverse released a new trailer alongside the announcement.

Players who secure access will want to watch five things closely. The Galactic Bazaar's social structure is the most direct test of co-op friction: how many players can share a space without performance degradation, and how intrusive the activity prompts feel in practice. The Neighbor invite mechanic will reveal how much cross-player persistence the game sustains before it becomes a management obligation. Daily loop design, specifically how aggressively the game deploys timers and expiring content to pull players back, will be the clearest early signal of where live monetization is headed. The depth of the creation tools, whether they function as shallow decoration or something closer to genuine UGC, will determine whether Petit Planet competes with Animal Crossing or aims for a social layer closer to Roblox. Finally, how the Galactic Bazaar handles chat and moderation at scale will indicate whether HoYoverse has actually planned for the realities of running a social platform, not just a game with social features bolted on.

Petit Planet is HoYoverse's most direct attempt to build a title where community is the product, and the Stardrift Test is the studio's clearest opportunity yet to find out whether that design holds under real player pressure.