Last week I was playing the second half of Memory of Chaos, with only 10% HP left on Kafka and full star rewards within reach, when a pop-up suddenly said connection to the server failed. By the time I reconnected, the run had timed out, and I almost threw my pastel de nata across the room. I spent three days testing every possible fix, and now my latency sits stable at around 110ms with very few disconnects. Let me start with the core of the problem.
Honkai: Star Rail's Chinese servers are all hosted in mainland China. The physical link from Portugal to China has a base latency of around 150ms on its own. Add to that the frequent congestion on international outlets of local Portuguese carriers like NOS and Vodafone, especially during peak hours from 8 PM to 12 AM. It's extremely common for cross-ocean routes to detour through the US before reaching China, pushing latency above 400ms. The server will kick you offline automatically if it detects unstable network conditions. Many people also use shared apartment networks, where dozens of people streaming and gaming at the same time saturate the bandwidth, resulting in packet loss for requests to China and making it impossible to connect to the server at all.
First, let's cover free methods you can try, perfect for players who don't want to spend extra money right now. First, don't use WiFi — connect directly with an Ethernet cable or use a 5G hotspot. I used to use my apartment's 2.4GHz WiFi, which had terrible interference from three other routers on the same floor, leading to 30% packet loss. Switching to a 5G hotspot dropped packet loss to 2% immediately, and at the very least I could log in. You can also manually change your DNS settings instead of using the carrier's default. Use domestic Chinese public DNS like 114.114.114.114 or Alibaba's 223.5.5.5. After I changed mine, event pages loaded more than twice as fast — pages that used to spin for 20 seconds now load in 3 seconds.
One easily overlooked point is server selection in-game. Don't use automatic allocation; manually select the region corresponding to your account. If you have an official HoYoverse account, select the Astral Express server directly. Automatic allocation often matches you to Southeast Asian nodes, which actually adds more distance to the route. If these methods still don't fix your disconnections, the issue is almost certainly with the international link, which free methods can't solve — you'll need a dedicated China return acceleration line.
I tested four common acceleration tools on the market. Some worked for connection but would disconnect every 30 minutes, others had stable latency but required long queues. I ended up sticking with QuickFox for long-term use. To give you a concrete example, when the new \
