The Rewrite, the Million, and the Month It All Happened

Published: 2026-05-01
Period covered: 2026-04-01 to 2026-04-30
Source: RaidFollower data, April stream notes, and the April 2026 NotebookLM source document

Contents

• Summary
• The Month in Numbers
• Timeline of the Month
• vedal987's Stream Month
• The One Million Follower Spike
• Outgoing Raids
• Incoming Raids and the Asymmetry of the Network
• Subscriptions
• Hype Trains
• The April 27 Dev Stream
• What Was Still Missing
• 3D Karaoke, Blog, and Branding
• Why April Matters
• Looking Ahead
• Archive

Summary

April 2026 had two stories that would each have carried a normal month on their own.

On April 24 at 9:54 PM UTC, vedal987 crossed 1,000,000 followers. RaidFollower captured the minute-by-minute climb, turning the milestone from a vague "sometime in April" into an exact timestamp.

Three days later, on April 27, vedal hosted the first development stream of 2026 and explained that Neuro-sama and Evil's entire technical system had been rewritten from scratch. The rewrite removed a long-running Unity memory leak that had affected streams for years. The April 20 VRChat stream had already served as the first major public run on the new system.

Around those two anchors, April was also a high-activity community month: 3,085 total raids across the tracked network, 18 vedal987 streams, 8,710 vedal987 subscriptions, and 17 tracked vedal987 hype trains.

This was also the first month RaidFollower could describe the vedal987 ecosystem with nearly every tracking category active from start to finish. Hype train tracking joined on April 14, so it misses the first two weeks, but every other category covers the full month.

Back to top

The Month in Numbers

For comparison, March 2026 had 1,114 recorded raids. April's 3,085 raids were nearly triple that. Some of the increase comes from broader tracking coverage — the project expanded from roughly 40 tracked channels to 52 — but the jump is still large enough to matter.

Back to top

Timeline of the Month

This sequence is why the final third of April stands out. The community was not reacting to one isolated event. The month stacked a technical relaunch, a follower milestone, unusually strong sub activity, and several high-profile streams close together.

Back to top

vedal987's Stream Month

vedal987 streamed 18 times in April. A typical stream started around 6:00 PM UTC and lasted about two hours.

The schedule covered several different modes of content: karaoke, games with Neuro, Evil streams, VRChat, a collaboration with @nihmune, a development stream, a live test, and a new 3D karaoke format.

The top five show the shape of the month. VRChat, development, gameplay, collaboration, and karaoke all appear in the same list. April was not carried by one format alone.

The April 20 VRChat stream was especially important because it was the first major public stream running on the rewritten system. According to the dev stream explanation later in the month, it ran above 100 FPS without the earlier stuttering problems.

Back to top

The One Million Follower Spike

At the start of April, vedal987 had about 973,322 followers. Most of the month looked steady, with roughly 100 to 200 new followers on a typical stream day.

Then April 24 happened.

Between 9:43 PM and 9:54 PM UTC, the follower count moved from 975,850 to 1,001,720. The million mark was crossed during that eleven-minute window.

By the end of April, the count was 1,002,059.

This is one of the cleanest examples of why continuous tracking matters. The interesting part is not only that the channel reached one million followers. It is that the exact moment is visible in the data, down to the minute.

Back to top

Outgoing Raids

vedal987 sent 26 raids in April, carrying a combined 185,739 viewers to other channels.

Outgoing raids ranged in size from roughly 5,500 viewers to 10,943 viewers. The largest single outgoing raid of the month went to lordaethelstan on April 27, carrying 10,943 viewers. That timing matters: it happened on dev stream day, when attention around the channel was already high.

Raid data gives a different view of the community than viewer peaks do. Peak viewers show how large the room became during a stream. Raid data shows where that attention moved afterward.

In April, the outgoing pattern was concentrated around a small group of repeated destinations. laynalazar, cerbervt, zentreya, and shylily were not one-off targets; they were recurring endpoints for vedal987's audience.

Back to top

Incoming Raids and the Asymmetry of the Network

vedal987 received 58 incoming raids in April, totaling 4,615 viewers. The most active incoming raider was minikomew, with four raids and 2,556 viewers.

The interesting number here is the asymmetry. vedal987's outgoing raids carried roughly 7,144 viewers each on average. Incoming raids averaged about 80 viewers each.

That gap reflects vedal987's position in the network. The channel is a major distributor of attention to other streamers in the Neuro-verse, but it sits near the top of the size hierarchy, so most reciprocal raids come from much smaller channels. The relationship is not balanced, and it isn't expected to be — but the data makes the shape of that relationship explicit.

Back to top

Subscriptions

vedal987 recorded 8,710 subscriptions across 6,479 events in April.

The strongest subscription period was Week 16, covering April 21 to April 27.

Week 16 produced more than three times the subs of a typical week. It also ended with the April 27 dev stream, so the timing lines up with the broader late-April surge.

The composition is worth noting too. Gift subs and mystery gift bundles account for a large share of the total, which suggests April's subscription activity was strongly community-driven rather than only individual renewals.

Back to top

Hype Trains

Hype train tracking began on April 14, so this section does not represent the full month. It covers the second half of April only.

During that tracking window, vedal987 recorded 17 hype trains. The highest level was 19, reached during the April 20 VRChat stream.

The April 20 VRChat stream was the clear hype train highlight. It produced two consecutive high-level trains: level 17 and level 19, with more than 350,000 points combined.

Across all tracked channels, RaidFollower recorded 601 hype trains from April 14 onward. The highest level anywhere in the tracked network was 37.

Because hype train tracking started mid-month, April should be treated as a partial baseline. May 2026 will be the first month where hype trains can be compared cleanly from day one to month end.

Back to top

The April 27 Dev Stream

The April 27 dev stream was the first development stream of 2026, and it became the main technical explanation for what had changed behind the scenes.

The core message was simple: Neuro-sama and Evil's system had been rewritten from scratch.

Vedal explained that the rewrite was driven by a persistent Unity memory leak. He had spent years trying to isolate the cause, comparing features, running tests, and building spreadsheets, but the source never became clear. Eventually, the practical answer was to rewrite the system. After the rewrite, the memory leak was gone.

That makes the April 20 VRChat stream more important in hindsight. It was not just a successful stream; it was the first major public run of the new system. It reportedly stayed above 100 FPS for the session and avoided the older stuttering issues.

The dev stream also made the transition official: future streams would run on the rewritten system.

Back to top

What Was Still Missing

The rewrite was not presented as fully finished. Vedal mentioned several remaining items:

• Channel point redeems were not yet implemented
• Karaoke duets still needed to be added
• Some smaller bugs were still being fixed

That context matters because it frames the rewrite as a working transition rather than a completed endpoint. The new system was already good enough to run public streams, but not all old functionality had returned yet.

Back to top

3D Karaoke, Blog, and Branding

The dev stream also revealed that 3D karaoke was scheduled for April 29. Vedal had apparently planned it about a month earlier and then forgotten about it until realizing during the dev stream that it was two days away.

The 3D karaoke was implemented using vedal's own 3D engine rather than VRChat. That makes it part of the broader technical shift of the month: more of the experience was moving into custom systems.

Another announcement was the public launch of neurosama.com/blog. The site was partly designed by Neuro herself, updates weekly, and had been tested before release.

Branding also came up. Vedal discussed the difficulty of describing Neuro and Evil as a collective. The current split between Neurosama as a channel name and Evil Neuro as a separate character can be confusing. One possible direction was to use "Neuro" as the umbrella term, with Neurosama and Evil Neuro underneath it. No decision was made, but the fact that it came up during the dev stream shows that the naming and presentation layer is still being actively considered.

Back to top

Why April Matters

April 2026 matters for three reasons.

First, it captured a major community milestone with unusually precise timing. vedal987 crossed 1,000,000 followers on April 24 at 9:54 PM UTC, and the data shows the minute-by-minute climb.

Second, the Neuro-sama rewrite changed the technical direction of future streams. The removal of the Unity memory leak and the move to the new system make April 2026 a clear before-and-after point.

Third, it gave RaidFollower its first near-complete monthly picture. The project was no longer only collecting isolated raid history or stream snapshots. It could connect raids, followers, subs, streams, and hype trains into one monthly narrative.

The result is that April was not just a busy month. It was a transition month: technically, statistically, and historically.

Back to top

Looking Ahead

May 2026 will be the first month where every major RaidFollower category is active from the start, including hype trains. That makes it the first clean comparison month — and the test of whether April's late-month surge in subscriptions, raids, and follower momentum was a one-off event or a new baseline.

Back to top

Archive

Archive