Once Human PC closed beta: How to sign up and play

Once Human is an upcoming PC survival game with an expected release date sometime in late 2024. Despite coming from a smaller developer, Starry Studio, Once Human‘s beta is currently only about 100,000 people away from reaching 10 million registrants.

Shocked? I was too. Keen to help it reach 10 million? I absolutely was too, and can now walk you through exactly how you can go about doing that. Don’t dilly dally: While you can currently still sign up for and play the Once Human beta, the developer has announced a cut-off number, and all of the signs are pointing to that number being reached sooner rather than later.

How to play the Once Human closed beta

While Once Human already has a page on the Steam store, Steam isn’t actually where you need to go to download and play this beta. Instead, you’re going to want to navigate to the official Once Human website, where you will see a few different UI options. One is the option to pre-download the beta launcher for PC.

According to a March 15 announcement from Starry Studios on the game’s Steam page, pre-downloading this launcher ensures participation in the Once Human beta. However, depending on when you’re reading this, it unfortunately seems that you aren’t necessarily guaranteed participation right this instant.

The game’s Discord server is full of more recent updates on the state of the Beta. Here is the rundown:

• The beta went live on April 4 at 10:00PM CT.
• There is a 150,000 character creation limit in the beta, however this cap is NOT in place for the first 24 hours of the beta.
• That means if you download the pre-launcher and make a character before April 5 10:00pm CT, you are guaranteed a spot the beta.

That’s great news for anyone reading this article now—but what about if you’re reading this article at the other “right now” that is actually sometime in the future past April 5 at 10:00pm? Well, all hope might not be lost.

Regardless of when you’re reading this, you’re going to need to make sure you’ve downloaded the pre-launcher. The beta is almost 40 gigabytes, and because the participation cap is on the amount of characters created (instead of number of downloads), you want to get that out of the way ahead of time.

If you’re within the first 24 hours of the beta, you should be able to create a character after downloading the pre-launcher no matter how many others have created characters. If you’re past the 24 hour time limit, you will need need an access key from Starry Studios in order to create a character. The developer will likely be releasing additional access keys to players who missed the 24 hour access period, but there currently is no information available on when that will be.

How long is the Once Human closed beta?

The Once Human beta is scheduled to run for a whopping 42 days, which really makes it feel like an early access kind of gig more than a simple beta. This means the beta will run until around May 16 or so. The beta was initially going to launch on April 3 instead of April 4, and there hasn’t been an announcement on whether or not that slight delay took away one of our beta days or not.

In any event, if you’re reading this before 10:00pm CT on April 5, download that pre-launcher immediately and make a character. If you’re reading this after that time, download the pre-launcher anyway to be ready, and then hold fast for the release of additional access keys. You have 42 days, and your time will come.