From Apocalypse to Ancient Streets: Once Human Takes Its Strange Journey to Chaozhou

A post-apocalyptic survival game is not the most obvious place to plan a cultural city break, but Once Human has rarely been interested in obvious destinations. Starry Studio is taking its next strange journey to Chaozhou, Guangdong, through a collaboration with Chaozhou Cultural Tourism that brings elements of the historic Chinese city into the game from September 29. Players will be able to visit recreated landmarks, take commemorative photographs and unlock an exclusive Chaoshan Beef Hotpot Recipe, while the accompanying campaign asks the community a much broader question: where should Once Human travel next?

The collaboration deliberately treats Nalcott as a virtual tourism platform rather than forcing Chaozhou into the game’s usual supernatural horror. Traditional architecture, old-city streets and one of the Chaoshan region’s most recognizable dishes take priority over Deviants and apocalyptic ruins. The promotional film leans into that contrast, presenting an increasingly bizarre journey whose destination ultimately turns out to be something wonderfully ordinary: good food.

It is a smaller event than a new Scenario or major combat update, but conceptually it represents another unusual direction for a game that has increasingly experimented with custom servers, player-created environments, social activities and experiences beyond conventional survival.

Chaozhou Becomes Once Human’s First Stop on a New Kind of Journey

The collaboration is being framed as the beginning of a “cloud tourism” journey, with Chaozhou chosen as its first destination. Located in eastern Guangdong, the city is one of the cultural centers of the wider Chaoshan region and is particularly associated with preserved historic architecture, traditional crafts, tea culture and a distinctive culinary identity.

Rather than simply using Chaozhou as a backdrop for promotional artwork, the campaign brings recognizable elements of the city into Once Human. Players are being encouraged to explore these locations in-game, photograph them and share those images as part of the event. The official global promotion specifically identifies the Chaoshan Beef Hotpot Recipe as the exclusive reward attached to photographing Chaozhou landmarks.

That creates a very different rhythm from a normal Once Human event. There is no boss to defeat before the recipe drops and no difficult dungeon attached to the collaboration. The principal activity is sightseeing, turning the game’s camera system and environmental exploration into the central mechanics.

The Ancient City Is the Real Star of the Collaboration

Chaozhou’s historic center provides an obvious visual foundation for the event. The Ancient City preserves a dense mixture of traditional streets, temples, arcaded buildings and monumental structures, with Paifang Street, Guangji Gate and Guangji Bridge forming some of its most recognizable sights.

Paifang Street is particularly distinctive. Running through the old city along Taiping Road, it is lined with historic-style shophouses and 23 memorial archways, creating the type of instantly recognizable visual identity that translates naturally into a videogame environment. The street connects into the wider Ancient City district and leads toward Guangji Gate and the Han River, making it less a single landmark than a corridor through several layers of Chaozhou’s history.

That density makes the location an interesting choice for Once Human. The game normally communicates history through abandoned structures, ruined settlements and environmental storytelling about a civilization disrupted by Stardust. Chaozhou reverses that perspective: architecture is being preserved and celebrated specifically because of the cultural continuity it represents.

Guangji Bridge Is One of Chaozhou’s Defining Landmarks

Among the city’s best-known structures is Guangji Bridge, also called Xiangzi Bridge, crossing the Han River immediately outside the old city. Its origins date to the Southern Song period, with construction beginning in 1171, and its unusual structure combines permanent bridge sections with a central floating section traditionally formed from boats.

That floating component could be opened to allow river traffic through, giving the bridge a character quite different from a conventional fixed crossing. Its pavilions and historic commercial role also helped transform it into more than infrastructure; it became part of Chaozhou’s social and commercial landscape.

For an event built around virtual sightseeing, structures like Guangji Bridge are precisely what make the concept work. Players do not need detailed knowledge of southern Chinese architectural history to recognize that the environment differs radically from Nalcott’s normal industrial complexes, abandoned towns and supernatural wilderness.

The collaboration effectively lets the game temporarily exchange anomalous architecture for a real place whose strangeness comes simply from how unfamiliar it may be to international players.

Then There Is the Beef Hotpot

Of course, the journey was never only about architecture.

Chaoshan beef hotpot is one of the region’s signature foods and provides the collaboration’s central gameplay reward. Unlike heavily seasoned hotpots built around powerful broths, the Chaoshan style places unusual emphasis on the freshness and individual cuts of beef. Thinly sliced meat is cooked very briefly in a comparatively clear broth, with different cuts valued for their specific texture and fat distribution.

The official event turns that culinary identity into an unlockable recipe. Players who visit the designated Chaozhou locations, take photographs and share them through the event can obtain the exclusive Chaoshan Beef Hotpot Recipe for use inside Once Human.

It is a fitting reward precisely because it would have been easy to settle for an avatar frame or generic souvenir cosmetic. A recipe gives the crossover something connected directly to what Chaozhou is famous for while still fitting naturally inside a survival game where food preparation already has mechanical value.

The final joke of the promotional trailer effectively writes itself: after all the dangers and absurdities that can happen in an Once Human journey, sometimes the destination really is dinner.

Taking Photos Is the Core Global Event

The international announcement keeps the participation requirements straightforward. Players need to find the Chaozhou landmarks represented in-game, photograph themselves at those locations and share the resulting pictures to participate in the collaboration activity and unlock the special recipe.

The emphasis on photography continues a pattern that suits Once Human unusually well. Nalcott may be designed around survival, but the game’s elaborate building system, cosmetics, vehicles and visually unusual environments have created a substantial community of players who treat screenshots and social experiences almost as seriously as combat optimization.

Chaozhou gives that audience an event built specifically around exploration and presentation. The objective is not to arrive at a landmark as quickly as possible but to notice it, frame it and turn the journey into something worth sharing.

It also explains why the promotional campaign asks players where Once Human should travel next. Community screenshots effectively become part of the tourism collaboration’s advertising while giving Starry Studio direct feedback about whether players are interested in seeing more real-world destinations reconstructed inside the game.

The Chinese Campaign Goes Further With a Dedicated Chaozhou Experience

Promotional material surrounding the China-side event indicates that the collaboration extends beyond the basic photo objective. A recreation of Chaozhou Ancient City has been built for a custom-server experience associated with the campaign, allowing players to explore a more concentrated representation of the city rather than relying solely on individual landmarks inserted into normal gameplay.

Community translations of the domestic announcement identify creator Youzi UUZ as being involved in constructing this environment and describe a dedicated “Cloud Tour of Chaozhou” experience. Additional activities reportedly include animal riding and several event rewards alongside the hotpot recipe.

Those details are worth separating from the global announcement, however. The international promotional post currently confirms the landmark photography activity and Chaoshan Beef Hotpot Recipe, while some of the wider National Day rewards and custom-server activities have so far been detailed primarily through the Chinese campaign. Availability may therefore differ between regions.

That distinction is particularly relevant because the collaboration arrives during China’s National Day holiday period, where the virtual-tourism concept has an obvious domestic context.

September 29 Is Already an Important Once Human Update Date

The Chaozhou event is arriving alongside another significant update for Once Human. Starry Studio previously confirmed its next scheduled maintenance for September 28 at 4:00 PM PT, corresponding to September 29 in UTC+8, the same date attached to the Chaozhou Cultural Tourism collaboration in China.

One of the most notable gameplay changes scheduled for that update concerns the recently reworked Beastmaster class. Beastmasters gained direct animal summoning and riding earlier in September, but the initial release temporarily restricted them to one active summoned animal. The September 29 update raises that limit to three simultaneous animals for Beastmasters, while other classes remain limited to one.

Character customization also becomes substantially more accessible. Face and body reshaping and palette-based hair recoloring are scheduled to become free rather than consuming their previous customization items, while the price of changing character sex is being reduced.

These systems are not part of the Chaozhou collaboration itself, but their timing helps explain some of the lighter activities surrounding the event. Once Human is entering the holiday period with more emphasis on animals, personalization and social exploration than a conventional combat-focused patch might suggest.

The Timing Is Particularly Interesting After Once Human’s Console Expansion

The collaboration also arrives only weeks after Once Human completed another major step in its expansion. The game launched on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S in August 2026, bringing cross-play and cross-progression to a much larger audience after its earlier PC and mobile releases.

That means a geographically specific Chinese cultural event is now being presented to a substantially broader global player base than would have encountered a similar promotion during the game’s first year.

For players in China, Chaozhou may be a recognizable tourism destination associated with National Day travel. For someone playing on console in Europe or North America, it may be their first encounter with Paifang Street, Guangji Bridge or even the concept of Chaoshan beef hotpot.

The same environment can therefore work in two directions: nostalgia and recognition for one audience, discovery for another.

Custom Servers Make Real-World Collaborations Much Easier

There is also a technical reason an event like this makes sense now. Once Human introduced Custom Servers in 2025, giving players considerably more control over rules and allowing specialized experiences to exist without permanently altering the structure of the main seasonal Scenarios.

A detailed cultural recreation no longer needs to justify occupying valuable space within Manibus, The Way of Winter or another standard survival Scenario. It can exist as its own destination, built specifically for sightseeing, social interaction or an event.

That opens interesting possibilities for future partnerships. Real cities are awkward additions to a fixed post-apocalyptic campaign map, but they make considerably more sense when treated as temporary or permanent custom experiences players deliberately travel into.

Chaozhou can therefore be viewed as a test of something broader: whether the infrastructure normally associated with player-made servers can also support official tourism collaborations.

Once Human Has Been Expanding Beyond Pure Survival for Some Time

That experimentation is consistent with the direction Starry Studio has taken over the past two years. Once Human launched with a strong identity around survival crafting, Deviants, territory construction and scenario-based progression, but successive updates have increasingly pushed at those boundaries.

Custom Servers allow communities to modify the experience. Animal systems have evolved into riding and direct companion gameplay. Elaborate construction tools support social spaces that have little to do with efficient survival. Previous collaborations have introduced their own themed mechanics and environments, while the upcoming Isles of Abyss expansion pushes the game toward a major new ocean-based setting.

The Chaozhou crossover sits at the opposite end of that spectrum. Instead of making the world larger through another dangerous wilderness, it makes it broader by treating Once Human as somewhere players can simply visit.

There is something appropriately strange about that evolution. The game started by asking players to survive a world that no longer made sense. Now it can send them sightseeing through a carefully recreated historical city and reward them with dinner.

Chaozhou’s Culture Extends Far Beyond the Landmarks

The event focuses on architecture and food because both translate immediately into a visual interactive medium, but the city belongs to a much wider cultural tradition. Chaozhou and the surrounding Chaoshan region are associated with Gongfu tea, Chaozhou opera, woodcarving, embroidery, ceramics and distinctive culinary traditions, many of which remain active rather than existing only as preserved historical artifacts.

That living-culture aspect is important. Paifang Street may contain monuments and historic architecture, but it is also surrounded by restaurants, shops and daily urban life. Guangji Bridge is both a historic engineering achievement and one of the city’s contemporary tourism symbols. Beef hotpot is not a museum exhibit; it remains something people gather around a table to eat.

Once Human’s promotional material recognizes this mixture. The collaboration is not presented as an archaeological tour. It emphasizes architecture, street atmosphere and food together, treating Chaozhou as somewhere people still live rather than simply somewhere history happened.

“Where Should We Go Next?” Is the More Interesting Question

The collaboration ends its promotional message by asking players where Once Human should travel next and why. That may be ordinary social-media engagement, but it is also the most interesting implication of the entire project.

If Chaozhou performs well as a virtual-tourism experiment, there is no obvious reason the idea has to stop with one city. Custom environments give Starry Studio a framework for interpreting real locations without permanently disrupting Nalcott’s fictional geography, while limited events can attach recipes, cosmetics or other culturally themed rewards to exploration.

The challenge will be depth. A recognizable landmark and a themed recipe can make a charming short event, but repeated collaborations would need enough distinctive material to avoid becoming interchangeable photo quests. Chaozhou works because its architecture and cuisine give the event an immediately recognizable identity.

Future destinations would need the same treatment: not simply importing a building, but finding the object, activity, food or local tradition that makes visiting that location worthwhile.

Sometimes the Strangest Journey Ends at a Hotpot Table

Once Human is preparing for much larger things. Its class systems are being reworked, permanent servers are evolving and the upcoming Isles of Abyss expansion promises a substantial new ocean adventure. Against that roadmap, a tourism collaboration about taking photographs in Chaozhou could easily look insignificant.

That is also why it stands out.

There is no existential threat behind the recipe. No gigantic Deviant needs to be purified before dinner. The objective is to explore a recreation of a real place, recognize some of its landmarks and take home a little piece of its culinary identity.

Once Human × Chaozhou Cultural Tourism begins around the September 29 update, with the global campaign inviting players to photograph the in-game Chaozhou landmarks and share their shots to unlock the exclusive Chaoshan Beef Hotpot Recipe.

For a game built around journeys into the inexplicable, this one has a surprisingly understandable destination.

Cross the ancient streets.

Take the picture.

Then eat.