The initial evidence of astrophysical neutrinos by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory stemmed from the high-energy starting events (HESE) sample: a selection of the highest-energy neutrino interactions that occurred within the detector fiducial volume. Each event was reconstructed based on our best knowledge of the ice at the time, with the latest results published in a description of the sample using 7.5 years of data. Since then, several major improvements in ice modeling have occurred using in-situ calibration data. These include a microscopic description of ice anisotropy arising from ice crystal birefringence and a more complete mapping of the ice layer undulations across the detector. The improvements feed into more accurate descriptions of individual events, and can especially affect the directional reconstruction of particle showers. Here, we apply the latest ice model in an exact manner to reconstruct IceCube’s high-energy events using DirectFit. This reconstruction samples posterior distributions across parameters of interest by performing full event resimulation and photon propagation at each step. We obtain improved per-event descriptions, as well as updates on previously published source searches using the aggregated sample.