Azur Lane August 6 Update: Essex-Class Event and Island Season IV

Azur Lane goes down for roughly six hours of maintenance on August 6 at 12:00 A.M. (UTC-7), and the patch that follows is heavier on the Island Planner side than the event side. The headline addition is Call to Arms: Essex-Class, a two-phase campaign running through September 3. But the more urgent item is what disappears before the servers go down: two characters, six skins, and five events all expire at 11:59 P.M. (UTC-7) on August 5, and Island Development Season III takes unclaimed rewards with it. Here is everything in the update, and what to clear first.

All times below are the official UTC-7 reference used by Yostar. Convert to your own zone before planning around them — the gap is significant for players in Europe and Asia.

Clear These Before the Servers Go Down

This is the section that costs players real rewards, so it comes first.

Events ending after 11:59 P.M. (UTC-7) on August 5:

• Development Season III
• Authentic Horror Story: Escape from White Night Manor!
• Commemorative Album
• Rental Outfits
• Top Bidder
• Rapid Training Campaign

Characters leaving: Superb and Surrey.

Skins leaving: Plymouth – An Angelic Physical (L2D+), Ganj-i-Sawai – My Innermost Self (L2D), Superb – Superb Dentistry (Dynamic), Surrey – Feverish and Disheveled, Griffin – Tensest Relaxation Therapy, and Z11 – Cheer Up, Ms. Nurse!

If you have been sitting on event PT you have not exchanged, or a construction budget you meant to spend on the rate-ups, this is the last window. Skins in particular tend not to return on a predictable schedule.

The Island Planner Reset Is the Real Trap

Buried in the notice is the change most likely to catch players out, and it is worth reading carefully rather than skimming.

When Island Development Season III ends after the August 6 maintenance, several things happen at once:

• Materials stored in the Warehouse are automatically converted into Island Development Points. You do not lose them, but you lose the choice of what to do with them.
• Ongoing island requests, transport jobs, character assignments, manual planting, and shop management are cleared and reset. Anything mid-progress is simply gone.
• Island Technology and character development progress are not reset. Long-term investment survives.

And the part that actually costs you something permanent: any unclaimed Development Plan rewards and accumulated PT rewards will no longer be obtainable once the season ends. Yostar's notice states this directly and advises claiming in time.

So the practical instruction is narrow but important. Before the maintenance window, open Island Planner and empty your reward claims. Do not worry about finishing in-progress jobs — those are being wiped regardless — but do collect anything sitting unclaimed. The difference between a player who logs in tonight and one who does not is measured in permanently lost rewards.

Development Season IV: Tales from Autumn

The replacement season runs a long stretch — August 6 through November 4 — under the name Tales from Autumn.

The structure is request-driven. Peary issues requests for specialty products, and completing those orders earns Island Development Points, island character training materials, Stellar Tickets, and progress on Development Plans.

Two gates apply: the season unlocks at Commander Lv. 50, and the development content requires Island Development Lv. 5. If you have been ignoring Island Planner entirely, those are the thresholds to clear before the content is available to you.

Alongside the season, the Stellar Prize Draw returns with new content. Stellar Tickets are spent for new characters, outfits, and furniture, and the tickets themselves come from playing Island Planner or from purchase with Gems.

The end-of-period handling is unusually player-friendly and worth knowing in advance. If the draw period closes while rewards remain in the pool, all your remaining tickets are used automatically rather than expiring unused. If every reward has already been drawn and you still hold tickets, those tickets are refunded based on their purchase price. Both the automatic draws and any refund arrive by in-game mail.

That removes most of the risk from holding tickets, though it does not remove the risk of buying more than you need.

Six new characters join Island Planner: Anchorage, Mogador, Chang Feng, Royal Fortune, Belfast, and Taihou. They can be invited through the Island Development Season, the Stellar Prize Draw, Island Technology, and related features.

Island Planner also picks up a handful of quality-of-life fixes — a fish meat processing entry in the Island Shop, a shortcut button for stamina recovery items on the Assignments screen, a currency display in the shop, a Combo Guide entry under Assignments-Management, and a stamina consumption preview under Assignments-Gathering. None of these change what you can do, but collectively they cut down the menu-diving the mode has been known for.

Call to Arms: Essex-Class

The main event runs August 6 through September 3 and splits into two phases, which changes how you should approach the first week.

Phase I (August 6–12) grants bonus EXP from sorties to five ships: Essex, Bristol, Soobrazitelny, Pamiat' Merkuria, and Saratoga. Critically, these same ships are the ones you will use in Phase II.

Phase II (August 13 – September 3) has you take those Phase I ships into event missions to earn Training Pts, with a limited portrait frame as the reward.

The design intent is clear enough: Phase I is a levelling window, Phase II is where the levelling pays off. If you sortie those five ships during the first week while the EXP bonus is live, you enter Phase II with them already stronger. Ignore Phase I and you will be grinding the same missions with underlevelled ships and no bonus to help.

If any of the five are not yet in your dock, the first week is also when to fix that.

The Other Events

Running alongside the main campaign:

• Blueprint Completion Plan – Daisen (August 6 – September 3) — earn up to 30 bonus blueprints for Daisen by completing research projects. If you run research regularly, this is free progress on a ship you would otherwise chase slowly.
• Fateful Encounter (August 6–26) — two new event missions unlock every day until August 12. Complete them all for the limited gear, Master Detective's Hat. The daily unlock structure means you cannot cram it: log in across those days or you will not have the missions available to finish.
• Rhythm in Depot Rerun (August 6–26) — participate for a special retrofit item for Essex, with new rewards unlocking daily until August 12. Note the overlap with Call to Arms, since Essex sits at the centre of both.

There is also the Cruise Missions campaign season, which began August 1 and runs to September 30 from the previous patch cycle, so it continues through this entire update window.

Everything Else in the Patch

• Augment Modules: Howe – Ovenforged Pride, and Nachi – Wear It With Flair
• New Memory: Santa Fe – Our Eighth Mystery
• FleetChat: Shimakaze added
• System: Juu Ports Updates refreshed, plus assorted UI, text, and bug fixes

Maintenance compensation is Coin ×2000 and Oil ×2500, for accounts created before August 6 at 12:00 A.M. (UTC-7). Maintenance covers all servers on Android and iOS, and Yostar notes the duration may be adjusted according to how the patch progresses — the six-hour figure is an estimate, not a guarantee.

Your Order of Operations

Working backwards from the maintenance window:

• Claim every unclaimed Island Planner reward. This is the only genuinely permanent loss in the patch.
• Spend leftover event PT from the expiring events before they close.
• Decide on Superb, Surrey, and the six departing skins — after tonight, they are gone from the current rotation.
• From August 6, sortie the five Call to Arms ships while the Phase I EXP bonus is active. That week is the whole point of the phase split.
• Log in daily through August 12. Both Fateful Encounter and Rhythm in Depot Rerun unlock content on a daily cadence and cannot be rushed at the end.

Keep Your Fleet Moving on GameMarket.gg

Daily-unlock events are unforgiving if you cannot log in consistently, and this patch has two of them running at once:

• Book Azur Lane hourly services to keep daily missions and event claims ticking over during the weeks you cannot play.
• Browse Azur Lane accounts for fleets with the shipgirls and collab ships that are no longer obtainable.
• Check Azur Lane boosting for levelling and event clears when the calendar outpaces your schedule.

Every order runs through Buyer Protection, with payment released only once you confirm delivery.

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