What to expect in Update 7.6.1 in SWTOR! – LAUNCH DATE: March 11, 2025

The Star Wars: The Old Republic developers have revealed what is coming with Update 7.6.1, particularly about Galactic Season 8!

UPDATE: We have a date!!! 7.6.1 will be launched March 11, 2025.

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Update 7.6.1

What will be in Update 7.6.1?

• Galactic Season 8
• Uprising Special Powers
• New Basilisk Rewards
• New Dynamic Encounter Achievements
• New Cartel Items
• New 6-month Bundle and mount

When will Update 7.6.1 be released?

March 11, 2025.

You can watch the recording of the developer here.

Free Stuff

To get the Stronghold Deco: Ord Mantell (purple frame), watch 1 Hour of any SWTOR streamer on Twitch. (March 12, 2025). By the way, I’m live every morning 8 – 10 am pacific on the weekdays, at twitch.tv/swtorista if you want to come say hi !

If you aren’t familiar with Twitch Drops, here’s the how-to!

SWTOR Twitch Drops Guide

New mount coming with Update 7.6.1!

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Date Night (Delayed)

Date Nights, the companion romance continuations, are likely on hold in addition to the regular story until the SAG-AFTRA strike is resolved. There are about 28 romanceable companions and the developers were hoping to release more date nights in the cadence of 1-2 Companion Date nights per Galactic Seasons, but this is likely delayed until further notice.

“There’s still some things that we’re waiting on, so we’re not going to be releasing date night alongside 7.6.1. We’re going to be pushing that out to a future update,  when the next date night will be releasing. So that won’t be coming alongside 7.6.1.”

“I did get a hint from Ashley (the Cinematics Director) on what this next one’s gonna be – it’s gonna involve maybe a little bit of something sugar, maybe a little spice, but it is very nice. We’ll have more details on that later.”

SAG-AFTRA Video Game Voice Actors Strike: This announcement most likely has to do with the SAG-AFTRA Interactive Media (Video Game) Strike – the actors labor union. From their website, “SAG-AFTRA members went on strike against video game employers on July 26. The strike was called after more than 18 months of negotiations with some of the largest video game companies ended without a deal. The employers rebuffed our proposals for consent, compensation and transparency around the use of A.I., and instead have countered with loophole-filled language that negates any protections they claim to offer.”

Galactic Seasons 8

Galactic Seasons, an ongoing limited-time reward track system, is returning for Season 8 with Update 7.61!

Uprisings will be the focus for Galactic Seasons Seasons 8 and the title will be Rising Powers, with some special changes to Uprisings being added for the season. Uprisings will now be available for everyone (free-to-play, preferred and subscribed) and be available as early as level 10 (previously level 70+.)

Experimental Weapons

In addition to those nice changes making Uprisings accessible to more players, neww mechanics are being added to all the Uprisings, which will be three experimental weapons. “We’re gunna let you break em a bit,” says the developers. The story will focus around a silly returning character named Kai Zykken, who is, “gonna hit you up on the comlink, he’s gonna be like, hey, uh Czerka has handed me some amazing new experimental but totally safe technology and you, as you know, a galactic, famous powerful individual, you seem like the best person to test out this technology for me. Tracks, right?”

The comlink is a new feature that is a different way of presenting quests that don’t have voice-acting, but does allow player choices, much like the KOTOR-style cutscenes. This was first introduced in the last Update, and is designed for side-quests and additional commentary – but it may have to become more of a staple of the game as the Voice Actors strike continues (see the Date Night section above!)

“They are experimental. And so, you know, maybe there might be a drawback that could happen. I don’t know. That’s for just for you to find out, but they’re totally, probably fine, they’re safe. They’re probably totally fine.” You may find enemies are buffed or changed, even as you take advantage of the experimental weapons. You’ll get one of these three buffs randomly.

Experimental Weapon #1 will be the Destruction Overload Buff, where every 5th enemy that is defeated will explode, causing a damaging AOE effect.

Experimental Weapon #2 will be the Czerka Combat Drones Buff, where drones will assist you in taking your enemies down.

“Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew.”

Experimental Weapon #3 will be the Experimental Radiation Field Buff, a devestating point-black AOE that will help you mow down your enemies.

“Kai Zykken and Czerka are looking out for your best interests.”

Rewards

The developers showed off many of the rewards for Galactic Season 8.

The most interesting reward by far was the new hair style – Senator’s Consort and Regal Consort (not shown). This is not a Cartel Market hair, instead it is part of the season!

It is clearly inspired by Perrin Fertha’s hair in Andor.

The biggest rewards were two new mounts, inspired by Andor, the Corsuscanti Compact Cruiser and the Kaas Compact Cruiser.

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Here’s the car from Andor that these new SWTOR vehicles are inspired by:

There’s two new little pets as part of the season – D-ROM and CO-RU, flying pets.

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There are new dyes as part of the season. The first set is Metallic Blue and Matte Gray Dye / Matte Gray and Metallic Blue Dye.

The second set is Matte Gray and Metallic Light Copper Dyes / Metallic Light Copper and Matter Gray Dyes.

There’s a whole bunch of really cool new decos being added, that are Coruscant and Dromund Kaas themed! These pedestals are a new design, and the items on them are newer textured graphics of older assets in the game.

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And of course, some new titles.

Legacy Titles: Risen, Powerful / Titles: Czerka Scientist, Dromund Kaas Resident, Coruscant Resident / Stronghold Labels: Seat of Power, The Laboratory

Basilisk Droid Customizations

Four new B3-S1 variants will be added to a new vendor at Lane’s Lab. Turn in Prototype Data, role-specific currencies, and credits to help fund The Curator’s projects in order to obtain the new skins for bessie aka the Basilisk Droid. For players who enjoy the bessie “loop”, you’ll continue on with training modules which will earn you parts to turn in for the new customizations and colors.

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Beginning in 7.6.1, players can also find new B3-S1 Training Modules for completing Dynamic Encounters on Hoth and Tatooine. I’m still waiting for more details on whether this is available while working on bessie or only after you’ve earned her! Her new colors include: Defender (silver), Support (white and red), Combat (black and red) and Aurodium Plating (gold, apparently very expensive).

New Cartel Market Items

As always, new Cartel Market cosmetic items are coming to the game with Update 7.6.1.

Utility Bundles

SWTOR has already released two themed utility bundles, and two more are on the way based on Dromund Kaas and Coruscant.

Peerless Explorers Enviro-Suit

New Cartel Market armor set. This is apparently Skeleton Crew inspired.

It looks a lot to me like the space suit from 2001: A Space Odyssey, haha.

Cartel Market Sale / Items Going Off Market

“For any of you that have ever shopped on the cartel market , a lot of times things can be pretty overwhelming. So this is something that the team that manages that has been kind of taking a look at, is like, as an example you go, ‘I want to buy a blaster pistol’ and so you go to the look at weapons and there’s just a lot of them.”

“One of the things that we’re looking at doing is putting some putting things across the market into retirement. And so what does that mean effectively, what we’re going to do is we’re going to go category by category and we’re going to take a look at older items. You can think of like way back in the day, for those of you that have been around for a while, we have some bronze items [currently on the market] from back when we kind of had a different structure to our cartel market [back when we focused on Cartel Packs rather than direct sale]. There’s just so many things on our cartel market, it can be really hard to find things. We really want to be able to focus where you can find some of our newer stuff.”

“Here’s what we’re going to do starting today. We’re starting with weapons. If you just go to the on sale tab as an example, every weapon that is inside of the on sale tab is going to be retired after two weeks. What retired means is it’s going to be coming off of the cartel market – it doesn’t mean it won’t ever come back, stay tuned for further communications about exactly what would happen past that point. But again, we’re going to go kind of category by category every two weeks and just kind of clean up the great abundance of stuff that we have [on the market] just to make navigating and viewing things on the cartel market a little bit easier. So make sure to keep checking the market over the next few weeks, as we go through each category because now is the best time to pick up those things because everything’s going to be on sale before they go through retirement.”

(They add the caveat of not including dyes, they will be on the ons-ale tab just due to them being on sale. they are not “retiring”.)

Items being retired from the Cartel Market isn’t new at all – items are removed from the Cartel Market over time, they’re just being more transparent about what is leaving and when. And adding a big sale to a few of those items. These items seem to be on the less-flashy side – they are likely ones that sparked less interest by the player base, and were purchased less – so removing them from the direct-sale of the Cartel Market helps players be less lost in a sea of blander items when searching for a new “special weapon” to spend their Cartel Coins on.

New Master the Fight Bundle

A new Master the Fight bundle is coming out.

This bundle will likely contains:

• 180 Days Subscription Time + 600 Cartel Coins per month
• 5500 Cartel Coins
• Storm 1 Mount
  • Rideable at level 1
  • Comes with Speeder Rank 5
  • Has mount flourish pew-pew
  • Gives players a speed boost ability while mounted
  • Mini-pet mount
• Primary Metallic Dye (x5 per character)
• Secondary Metallic Dye (x5 per character)
• Bundle is priced at $99.99 USD

Read more about the Master the Fight last bundle and whether it is worth it.

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Speed Boost Legacy Perk

A new Legacy Perk is being added that allows you to click an ability to give yourself a speed boost while riding your speeder. This is the same ability available on the Starbolt and the upcoming Storm I mount, but will be on all your mounts.

“We’re introducing a new character legacy perk for subscribers, but there’s going to be two requirements. One, it’s the next rank of Speeder piloting, so you have to have rank one through five to be able to get, this is basically Speeder Piloting rank six. The other thing is we do want to be a little sensitive to the people that did buy the master of the fight bundle previously, nd so this is going to be a legacy perk that is only available to subscribers.”

Dynamic Encounter Achievements

New achievements are being added to Dynamic Encounters in 7.6.1.

“The achievements that we added in 7.6 were mostly meta type achievements – complete X amount across the entire planet. The achievements that we’re adding um in 7.6.1, very specifically, are a lot more focused on very specific dynamic encounters – things like you have the stealth snipers on Hoth and you need to complete that dynamic encounter without taking any damage from the snipers.”

There will be new achievements on Hoth and Tatooine, but none related to the Hidden Chain encounters that are more spread out.

Character Modernization (on PTS after 7.6.1)

While the many other technical changes have been widely well-received, including the graphical changes and updates to the planet textures and lighting  Character Modernization has received many more complaints from players. The first update to character graphics came in Update 7.6 after two rounds of testing before its launch on the Public Test Server, but players have continued posting their side-by-sides or pictures of the way they are unhappy with the changes to their character.

While other players hardly noticed any changes, some types of characters especially had noticeable changes to the way they look, with Chiss being the most noticeable with strangely splotchy skin, and complaints about characters and NPCs having “aged” (more defined eye wrinkles) and strangely softened abs muscles.

I took a quick video showing off some of the strange Chiss changes as I didn’t even notice them for a long time until I dressed my character down to take pictures for the website.

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In other cutscenes and lighting, the changes are hardly noticeable at all. I took a side by side before and after 7.6.1 of my characters on the character select and can only tell a difference in a few of them.

Players have been asking for both fixes and more information for a while now and were hoping to get more info from the livestream. Here’s an imperfect transcription of what was said by the developers on the topic. I recommend watching the video if you would like to hear the verbatim wording.

“As a reminder in 7.6, we launched our character modernization initiative to update character models for your player characters. And player models across the game.

Our priorities after 7.6, effectively, are these three things: We wanted to rework the source assets, the art itself to kind of focus on the wrinkles and muscle definition. For those of you that didn’t read, I know I posted a very, very long post. Feel free to go back and read lots of words if you want to. But the very short version is in 7.6, we did focus on programmatic solutions around some of these things and we kind of wanted to pull back from that so that the artists themselves could be a little bit more specific in how they address those things. It’s kind of what that first bullet is. Second thing is the neckline scene. You’ll notice on some of your characters you can see that there’s like a line around the neckline. We want to rework some of the textures so that becomes less noticeable. Last, but not least on vibrantly colored species, especially things like Chiss. We wanted to improve the textures on them as well. Those are kind of the three things that were our highest priorities coming off the 7.6 that we wanted to focus on.

Let’s talk about where we are with those. Talk about definition changes. On the left, you can see where we were in 7.6 and then in progress is where we are right now. This is a screenshot that was captured like yesterday yesterday on our development server. A couple of things that’s really important to understand about the in progress though this is even though this is meant to highlight for you where we are around things like wrinkles and skin tone texture, it’s actually a whole bunch of changes. In fact, some changes you don’t even know about yet that I’m going to talk about in a second. But it’s, it’s the culmination of a bunch of changes we’re making at one time. But we really wanted to because we know this is talking about definition changes. That’s kind of what we’re showing in the before and after. That’s kind of where we are right. Now, Quinn came up quite often in a lot of that we got. I just wanted to kind of highlight like one character that was brought up on occasion.

There’s a good before and after neckline seems, this one pretty well speaks for itself, I think. No red circle there, but you can see the improvements in the neckline seam.

[Chiss:] The one thing that you’ll notice we did not include there is Chiss that’s still in progress. We’ll have some more updates on that soon. Just know that that’s still a priority for us and we don’t have some more. We just don’t have before and afters to show you right now, but just know that it’s still a priority for us. As I alluded to a couple of seconds ago, there’s some things that you saw in the before and after that we’re also doing in addition to those other things because again, the focus of what the team is doing is a lot more, is not programmatic and it’s a lot more hands on with the artist doing things. There’s some programmatic things we can actually focus on in the interim.

Here’s some of what those are. We want to work on improving the lighting across the game so that it matches what’s in cinematics because you may not realize this. Some of you might, there’s actually a different lighting between what’s in cinematics and what’s in the rest of the game. We’re trying to bring parity between those two things.

[Preview Window:] Second thing is kind of very similar is that we want to try to improve lighting in the preview window because just like the example I gave on the previous bullet, there’s a lack of parity between what’s in the preview window and what’s in the rest of the game. You might preview something and then equip it and then look at it in the game and go well, that’s not necessarily what it looks like in the preview window. We want to try to bring parity across the entire game so that when you see something, regardless of where you’re seeing it, it generally looks as consistent as possible. That’s not always going to be entirely true. But that’s our goal is to generally make things as consistent as possible across the game.

[Other Species:] Then of course, you can imagine there’s a slight asterisk at this one, but I just wanted to reiterate that our goal is still of course, to just continue moving across additional species as we can. As we lock down these things that are our priorities to improve coming off of 7.6, that we do move on to the next species that we haven’t done yet. Like twele pure bloods, etcetera that we just continue moving always through those. [This is what ‘Additional Species’ means on the bullet point in the graphic screenshot.]

As a reminder in 7.6, as an example, Chiss were impacted kind of because they share some of the textures related to the other species, right? As we were making changes to things like humans and stuff, they share a lot of the textures with humans. That’s why they were treated alongside humans and the other species that we did in 7.6. Whereas things like Twi’leks and stuff are separate and so we need to kind of do those as one offs that we’ll be doing as we move forward. This is kind of like culminating everything that we just that you, you just talked about now that you understand the scope of things that we said were our priorities coming off of 7.6 and the changes that you didn’t know about that we’re working on as well that are more programmatic. We just wanted to kind of show you the before and after again, you can understand that we’re also working on additional lighting changes and those types of things.

[Timeline:] When is all of this coming? First up our plan is that as soon as 7.61 ships, which is targeting March, we’re going to put this on PTS immediately thereafter.

It’s important to note that there’s not the 7.7 PTS, I’ll come back to that a little bit later in the stream. But as soon as 7.6.1 ships in March targeting March, we’ll then put the character modernization changes by themselves on PTS, just like we did before so that you can get your hands on them. Give us your feedback, let us know what you think. That we can figure out what to do beyond that. Because then the next question is going to be, when are they going live. Right now, this bullet is vague, obviously because it just says we’re going to roll them out throughout the year. What does that actually mean? For us, the answer is still as soon as humanly possible.

These changes could come in 7.7, they could come faster than 7.7, they could come later than 7.7. We don’t know yet. It really depends on again, but these, these changes are going to be ready for you to test basically as soon as 7.6, some of them are going to be ready for you to test as soon as 7.6 one is out the door. If they’re good, if they’re feeling good, if we’re comfortable with them and they’re in a good place. Some of them could roll out pretty quickly. Some of them can roll out in the 7.7 timeline. We’ll keep you informed on where this is, obviously you’re going to get to get your hands on them and let us know what you think. We’ll just keep telling you where we are and how things are going and you’ll do the same for us. We’ll just keep moving forward. That’s where we are with character modernization on the time line right now.”

Some interesting things I’ve learned from talking to other players:

• Some really notice the changes, others don’t notice them at all.
• Some players don’t feel the characters didn’t need any changes at all – other players say they characters look bad, especially compared to newer models like Valkorion.
• Neck seams are apparently a really difficult issue to solve, in many games. This is why many older games have costumes that have high necks or necklaces or collars that cover the neck seam. SWTOR even did this with its dancer outfits, and the seam was less noticeable before we had outfits that were more revealing or had more interesting necklines.

Star Wars Celebration (April 2025)

The developers will be having a special login reward and a special subscriber reward, both of those will be themed around Star Wars celebration, a Star Wars convention in Japan in April 2025.

Update 7.7

“7.6.1 will go out sometime in March. right after that, we will put character modernization on PTS – that is not going to be 7.7 PTS, but our plan is 7.7’s PTS is also going to happen really shortly thereafter as well – late March, early April or something, with Master Mode of XR-53 Replicator. So that’s coming in 7.7. We’re gonna try to get that on PTS as soon as possible after 7.6.1 goes out the door.

Also in 7.7, we’re looking at um some more um plans to expand dynamic encounters to some other places that we’re very excited about.

Beyond that, we’re obviously continuing development of stories, so stay tuned for more details when we communicate more about what’s going on with that.”

After  7.6.1

What will be coming up after 7.6.1? While we don’t have many hints yet, we do know that there will eventually be…

The Galactic Threads Story

The Galactic Thread storyline is under production and very well underway, but the developers currently do not have all the elements they need to complete the story and to deliver it to us. They are delaying the Galactic Threads storyline that was supposed to come out with Update 7.6 until they can “complete the story to the art quality standards and what you’re expecting when you play the story”. They said, “the moment we have everything we need to finish this story, we will get it in your hands, but we’re very excited for you to check it out. There’s so much here and we are very, very happy to, to give you this chapter.”

SAG-AFTRA Video Game Voice Actors Strike: This announcement most likely has to do with the SAG-AFTRA Interactive Media (Video Game) Strike – the actors labor union. From their website, “SAG-AFTRA members went on strike against video game employers on July 26. The strike was called after more than 18 months of negotiations with some of the largest video game companies ended without a deal. The employers rebuffed our proposals for consent, compensation and transparency around the use of A.I., and instead have countered with loophole-filled language that negates any protections they claim to offer.”

Date Nights

Date Nights, the companion romance continuations, are likely also on hold until the SAG-AFTRA strike is resolved (see above). There are about 28 romanceable companions and the developers were hoping to release more date nights in the cadence of 1-2 Companion Date nights per Galactic Seasons, but this is likely delayed until further notice.

Romanceable Companions

• Akaavi Spar
• Andronikos Revel
• Arcann (Update 7.4.1)
• Aric Jorgan (Update 7.5.1)
• Ashara Zavros
• Corso Riggs
• Doc
• Elara Dorne
• Felix Iresso
• Jaesa Willsaam
• Kaliyo
• Khem Val
• Kira Carsen
• Koth Vortena (Update 7.4.1)
• Lana Beniko (Update 7.4.1)
• Lieutenant Pierce
• Lord Scourge
• Mako
• Malavai Quinn
• Nadia Grell
• Raina Temple
• Risha
• Tharan Cedrax
• Theron Shan (Update 7.4.1)
• Torian
• Vector
• Vette (Update 7.5.1)
• Zenith

Dye Changes

In the 7.6 Developer stream, the developers mentioned some changes to dyes might be coming.

Seasons

We will see the continuation of PvP Seasons and Galactic Seasons – Galactic Seasons Season 8 will be starting in Update 7.6.1,  and PvP Seasons Season 9 will start some time after Season 8 finishes (it finished late March).

Graphic Updates

The developer have been working on graphical updates on multiple planets. So far we have seen graphical updates on…

• Character Modernization (lighting, textures – ongoing)
• Metallic Dyes and Textures
• Tython (waterfalls and trees)
• Korriban (lighting and textures)
• Hutta (lighting, ambient fog and trees)
• Ord Mantell (newer area)
• Ilum (ice and textures)
• Hoth (ice and textures)
• Banks / Cargo Holds

We will likely see more in future updates over time!

Dynamic Encounters

Dynamic Encounters were added for Hoth and Tatooine in Update 7.6.1 – but it’s clear they are meant to be added across other planets as well in the future.

DirectX 12

In a previous developer post, the devs said…

With 64-bit now in the game, and DirectX 12 is the next item on the lsit the developers are working on in the background. They posted some updated information on the progress in late 2024.

GTN Changes?

In addition to the recent changes to the GTN, the developers spoke in the past about potentially adding a buy-order system – you can put in a request to buy an item at a certain price, and other players can fulfill the order. Whether this will be added or not still is unclear, now that the new GTN is up and functional.

Additional Servers?

All SWTOR servers are now on the cloud, and the Shae Vizla server has been running for a while as the APAC server, with transfers opened with 7.4.1. A new Fresh Start server may come in the future, players have been asking for one in North America. Read More

Crafting Update

New level 80 high-end Augments were added to Crafting in Update 7.6, but will there be a significant rehaul of the crafting system in the future?

From an interview by Vulkk.com with the developers:

The official answer stated that while the developers “cannot provide a definitive timeline right now, a change to the Crafting system will not be implemented in the immediate future. At this time, players can continue spending credits on augments.” When the time comes that a crafting revamp will happen, BioWare said that they will give everyone plenty of time to adjust to the changes accordingly.

Based on BioWare’s answer, it seems that they are planning a more significant rework to the crafting system in line with other modernizations we’ve gotten with 7.0. Furthermore, it should theoretically be pretty trivial to just add another crafting tier if that’s all they wanted to do. – August 2022

Master Mode R-4?

It is unclear if Master Mode R-4 is still coming out, due to the large delay in launch of both 7.0 and the R-4 Anomaly operation in both story and veteran mode, but it is currently the only outstanding item on the list from the tenth anniversary, originally shared on a livestream July 1, 2021. Since then, another single-boss Operation called the XR-53 Propagator has come out, so it seems unlikely that a Master Mode version of the R4 operation will be worked on / released.