Anime Astral Simulator Update 12

Update 12 opened on 29 August 2026 at 20:15 UTC and added World 16, Tokyo Ward. Everything below is out of Astral Team's own patch notes, posted by the game owner ten minutes before the update went live.

Update 12 codes

Three codes shipped with it, posted in the studio's #codes channel at 20:14 UTC — a minute before the update's own scheduled slot, which is the first time that channel has run ahead of the release rather than behind it.

Astral Team named a reward for four of its codes ever, all of them Runes Tower cooldown resets in Updates 11 and 11.5. It named none for these three, so the reward column says so instead of guessing. Every code the studio has issued since launch, live and retired, is on the codes page.

World 16: Tokyo Ward

The map is one world, not several. Tokyo Ward brings 10 new pets, 7 new avatars, one questline, one side quest, three pet accessories, one world boss accessory, and a title on its world boss. Its relic is the Ghoul Relic, from the world boss, and its progression track is Ghoul Progression, levelled with the Ghoul Token.

The world's own gacha is CCG Extermination, spun with the CCG Token. It carries an Astral-rarity item, Dragon Eradication Authority — Astral being the tier Update 11 introduced above Divine.

Owl Suppression, the new raid

Owl Suppression runs 100 waves with a boss every fifth wave. Entry is an Owl Key, dropped by the enemies in Tokyo Ward itself, so the world feeds the raid rather than the raid standing apart from it. Hinami's avatar comes from the raid boss.

It is also the only source of kagunes, and it hands them out differently from every other gacha in the game: there is no machine to spin. Every wave you clear rolls one for you, free. The raid and the gacha are the same activity, which means the way to farm kagunes is simply to get deeper into the raid.

All eight kagunes

One per rarity, from Common up to Divine. You equip one at a time from the Vault, and the equipped kagune is visible on your character.

Note what is not there: no Astral kagune. Update 11 put Astral above Divine and the new CCG gacha has an Astral item in it, so the ladder stopping at Bone Centipede is a choice rather than an oversight — though the studio has not said whether that is permanent.

Kagune Upgrade and RC Cells

Kagunes are not fixed at what they roll. Feeding a kagune RC Cells, which also drop from Owl Suppression, makes it stronger — the more cells, the higher its boosts. Each one carries up to three boosts, and the second and third only unlock once enough cells have gone in.

The boost pool is Power, Damage, Yen, XP, Drop, Luck, Kill, Crit Chance, Crit Damage or Shiny. Upgrading is done straight from the Vault, and every kagune keeps its own cells, so switching to a rarer one you just rolled does not throw away what you put into the old one.

Trial Insane

A fourth Time Trial difficulty joined the three in the Lobby Arena. Insane pulls enemies from up to World 15, where the other trials stop at World 11, and it drops the World 12 to 15 tokens on top of everything Trial Hard already drops. It also pays 2 Trial Shards per kill instead of 1, and opens 7 minutes 30 seconds after Medium in the rotation.

Ten new achievements come with it, and twenty more with Owl Suppression.

The Friends leaderboard

Every leaderboard in World 1 gained a Friends tab beside P2W and F2P, showing where you stand against your Roblox friends on that stat. Because friends sit in one combined list, each name carries its own P2W or F2P tag, and the number on the right is that player's global position — or -- if they are outside the top 10,000.

Two behaviours are worth knowing before you decide the tab is broken: friends only appear after they have played at least once, so the list fills in over the first few days, and the board refreshes every five minutes while you stand near it.

Low Mode now turns itself on

Low Mode used to be a switch you flipped. It now switches itself on when your FPS stays under 25 for about twenty seconds, tells you it has done so, and can be turned off in Settings — and if you turn it off yourself it stays off for the rest of that session.

It also strips far more than it used to: shadows and the lighting pass behind them, all particles, trails and beams, the glow outline on enemies, bloom, sun rays, depth of field and atmosphere, and other players' pets, titans, shadows, swords and accessories. Distant enemies stop animating and load in closer, and drop billboards show from half the distance.

Your own pets, titans and shadows are capped at five visible each — and the studio states outright that your boost is not affected. That distinction matters: this is a rendering cap, not a nerf. The trade the studio names is honesty about the look: the game runs flatter with it on.

Defense works like raids now

You can have as many Defenses running at once as there are hosts. Start opens your own; Join lists the ones already running with their host, player count and current wave, and joining one in progress drops you straight into the wave it is on. Auto Start always opens your own rather than joining someone else's, and only the host can change the Defense speed.

Under it sits a networking fix that explains why this was not possible before: the server had been broadcasting every Defense enemy's position twenty times a second to every player on the server, including players sitting in a different world. It now sends the whole walk once when the enemy spawns.

2x Exp is now a gamepass

Update 12 put 2X Exp on sale — the nineteenth gamepass in the game, and the only one that was sitting in the store unbuyable until now. It doubles the XP you get from everything and is included in the All Gamepass Bundle. The studio also tags it F2P in the notes without explaining what that buys you.

It costs R$299, which the notes do not say — that comes from the game's own store listing, where the pass reads isForSale: true with a last-updated stamp of 20:08 UTC on 29 August, seven minutes before the update opened. The same listing has carried it since 14 July 2026, flagged not for sale that whole time. Its ticket price field is empty, so whatever F2P means here, it is not a listed ticket price.

One caveat if you want to compare it with the others: it will not appear in an ownership table for a while. Every other pass got its badge on 23 July, which is what makes the ownership-rate table possible, and 2X Exp has no badge at all yet.

Battlepass, bundles and rewards

The new battlepass lives in Tokyo Ward and levels by reaching higher waves in Owl Suppression. Free track: the pet Femto and the Femto Helmet accessory. Premium track: the pet Guts and the Guts Cape.

Three bundles arrived — Update 12 Bundle (Eto, the new Divine pet from the new world), Waifu Bundle 5 (Mitsuri) and Mount Bundle 3 (the Shark Fiend mount) — and the Starter Pack's pet was swapped to Juuzou, the new world's Secret. Astral Team does not print Robux prices in its changelogs, so this page does not carry any.

Welcome Rewards were reset and everyone can claim them again, new player or not. The new set is Netero (Astral pet), Chrollo (Secret avatar), the Admin Sword (Divine), the Arcane Mask (Mythical accessory), 250 F2P Tickets and ten of each Summer Potion.

The smaller changes

Player level cap rose to 250, up 25. Thirteen global quests and two promotions were added, along with new Exchange entries for the HxH Token, Hunter Badges Token, Nen Coin and Hunter Shard. Auras were added to every Limited and Exclusive pet and mount and almost every Secret and Divine one, with more promised.

Two settings pairs joined the list — Hide My Kagune / Hide Others Kagunes and Hide My Mount / Hide Others Mount — and other players' mounts are now hidden by default, the same as pets, titans and shadows already were. Hiding your own mount no longer costs you its walkspeed, which it previously did.

Every world boss now shows the title it drops in its drop list, from Itachi in World 1 to Arima in World 16; only the Z City boss did before. And the Tower was added to the gamemode popups, sent only to players who can actually enter it, for the 25 seconds of its entry window rather than the usual minute.

The fixes that say something about the game

Most of the fix list is routine. Three are not, because the studio explained what was wrong and the explanation is a performance story.

Every raid, tower and boss rush map was being loaded twice. The arena you play in is a copy, and the original was still sitting in the same spot underneath it — Timeless Raid alone was 226 duplicated parts, the Tower 189, Cursed Rush 424. Worse, the maps were loaded into the world permanently, more than 8,000 parts across every gamemode, even with nobody playing them.

Enemies stopped animating after a while in a long session. Each enemy can only run so many animations at once, and finished ones were left running instead of stopped, so an enemy that filled up froze for good — no idle, no hit reaction, no death animation. The same fix stopped walk, idle and hit all playing at once and stopped every animation being reloaded from scratch on each hit.

The Backpack was rebuilt internally. The studio's reason is that it had grown into a single file large enough to hit a hard engine limit, so no new tab could be added without risking the whole inventory. Nothing about using it should change, and the owner asked players to report any tab that looks off.

One fix worth reading if you own gamepasses: your multiplier bars were not updating after a purchase. 2x Yen and the three Luck gamepasses painted the new number only on your next rejoin. And pets were re-equipping themselves on every join, because joining was being read as if you had just bought the +2 Equip gamepass.

Where this came from

Astral Team posts full patch notes for every version in a #game-logs channel in its own Discord, written by the game owner. The Update 12 notes went up at 20:05 UTC on 29 August, ten minutes before the update's own Roblox event was scheduled to open, and the follow-up at 20:16. The codes come from the separate #codes channel.

The two timestamps that do not come from Discord are the ones that check it: the Roblox experience event for Update 12 lists 20:15 UTC on 29 August, and the World 16 badge carries a creation time of 20:10 UTC the same day. Both are public and neither is something the studio wrote as an announcement.

Every other version, back to the 30 May 2026 release, is in the full update archive.