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Hello there Celeste players! The Halloween Event is finally here.

Once the Event starts (00:01 UTC 2020/10/23), go to your Empire Store in your Capital City and find all the new quests for the event. You don't need to update your game.

You can find every detail regarding what's new in the event in the attached graphics! We hope that you all have lots of fun playing with friends during the event.

We have a couple of objectives with our seasonal events. First, we want to inject excitement into the calendar to break up the year a bit and keep players coming back. Second, we want to use each event’s temporary nature to our advantage as little development laboratories to experiment without committing to anything long term. In this way, events are quite different than every other piece of content we add, all of which is envisioned to remain in the game forever.

Halloween marks the beginning of our 3rd year running them (and our 7th event since the Fall of 2018).

With such a small team, it is our intention to put these events on auto-pilot to free up our bandwidth for other content (like the Romans). And with three events squeezed into the last five months of each calendar year, we've created a bit of a monster. But despite ourselves, every event, we inevitably find ourselves jumping in and building out every event to outshine the last one.

New Quests
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On top of the three Legendary Quests and three mini-game Quests returning from 2019, we are adding two more Legendaries and one mini-game. These will feature familiar Halloween faces like the Headless Horseman, the Emerald Guardian, and of course Bahram, who inexplicably spends this time of year on a Haunted island in the middle of the Caspian Sea. We also are introducing Shiva, a black tiger who serves as a playable event mascot like Snappy the Summer Event Crocodile and Rudolph the Winter Event Reindeer. The estimable Kire has once again taken the lead on quest design and built these three new quests. Kire has really been stepping up for us.

New Capital City Decorations
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With AoEO in general, our largest development bottleneck will always be 3D models. They are wickedly time consuming to create, and there are precious few people with the skills and artistry to meet the professional standards to which we hold ourselves. For instance, the entire Roman civilization (comprising about 100 3D models) was built by the hands of just two people – Happy Smurf and Chaos. So even though we would have killed for unique event models over the last couple years, we have always tried to shush Happy and Chaos away from our events and back into their cramped little Roman workshop.

But we have some very good news.

We are extremely delighted to announce that the 2020 Halloween Event brings no fewer than 11 new capital city decorations (plus even more buried in the Editor). A few weeks ago, the heavens opened and we received a resume.

lemorange is a professionally trained 3D artist who is in his final year of a degree in Game Design at Futureworks School of Media in Manchester, UK. He is looking to cut his teeth, build up his portfolio, and see some of his work go live in a released game. We quickly turned him loose on the Halloween Event, and we are now absolutely swimming in spooky stuff.

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On top of a smattering of coffins and tombstones, lemorange built a Mausoleum and the Prison of Zahhak, which will serve as the Halloween Event’s Archive building. (As an Archive, The Prison of Zahhak, like the Summer Event’s Library of Horus, is a capital city Building that will host discontinued legendary event quests.

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Once the 2020 Halloween Event ends, we plan to place the three legendary Halloween quests we released in 2019.) We cannot understate our gratitude to lemorange for volunteering his time with us. We will eagerly release to all of you anything he is willing to share with us. Please join us in welcoming him!


Now this is not to suggest we love our Happy Smurf and Chaos any less. We love them so much we want to take some pressure off them. And they are no slouches, either. Chaos has been working with lemorange on a few of the models as well as spearheading much of the Roman vocals and music. Meanwhile, Happy Smurf has of course been keeping busy and is responsible for the new Pumpkin Residences.

New Legendary Items
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Now that we have your attention, we need to sit down for a minute and have a quick chat about Legendary Gear. It is a simple fact of life that it is unsustainable for us to keep creating more and more Legendary Gear forever. We need to pace ourselves and find different ways to spread them around.

As we mentioned, our objective with events is to (1) inject excitement into the community and (2) and use the temporary nature of events to experiment with different ideas. And so our event legendary gear should help us in these areas. But if we release the same legendary gear every year, they will eventually feel routine and permanent rather than new and exciting.

And so in order to keep seasonal events exciting, we intend to remove items from events after a year or two and replace them with brand new gear for everyone to chase. (In fact, since the very first event (Halloween, 2018), our intention has always been to cycle things out. Now that we are in our third year, we are finally going to start doing so.)

So we are announcing that we are removing our first two event items -- Zahhak's Sword of the Undying and Zahhak's Amulet of the Undying. They will not be joining us this year. But in their place, we are releasing two brand new items -- Zahhak's Axe of the Undying (a Great Axe) and Zahhak's Idol of the Undying (a Religious Item). Players will need to craft a total of 18 of these two items to have enough for all seven civs (you will want to save a few for the Romans).

Please appreciate that we see this as a necessary evil. If players knew every item would always be available every year, then many players would grow complacent. It'd be OK to miss an event since there would always be next year. Not only does removing items create more demand and hype for events, but removing items from our events gives us as developers a ton more freedom. If we are able to remove items, then we can relax a little and experiment with stats, knowing that we aren't committing to a lifetime of marriage to every single item. Removing items also opens up space for us to create new ones without feeling like we are jamming in too many items into the game. We now are also able to allow players to craft more of the items each event, which itself is good for player motivation. If we were required to keep every single item in circulation, then we would handcuff ourselves while players would all grow bored. But if we burn some down every year, then we can grow new ones in their place. And we can really use these events to inject excitement.

And, of course, removing items from circulation gives us yet another extremely powerful tool in our belt: the power to bring them back. By removing supply, we can increase demand and use those cherished, long-desired items at the perfect times and in the perfect ways later. To be clear, absolutely intend to bring every item back again.

So get out there and get crafting. Craft 18 of them. Then craft even more. Save some for your friends. Or sell them down the road when they are scarce. They will be collector's items. New players will arrive and want them.

We are super excited for the Halloween Event. It launches this Friday and runs for 4 weeks. We‘d love to hear your thoughts and ideas about future events below. Thanks for reading!

Let's break down the details of the event in a question-based list:

1. How do I access the special event content?

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2. What are the new contents available in the event?

• New mini-game style Quests and 5 difficult Legendary Quests, with awesome rewards.
  • Legendary: The Dead of Night
  • Legendary: Fright Club
  • Legendary: Your Finest Horror
  • Legendary: Bring Out Your Dead
  • Legendary: Only The Gourd Die Young
  • Don't Let Bahram Be Embalmed!
  • Tomb Sweet Tomb
  • On Your Gourd!
  • Dead in Your Tracks
• New special Event Bosses: Soul Guardians and Emerald Guardians (from last year) and a new Boss: The Headless Horseman

• New PvP Quests with AWESOME rewards.
• All-new Gear, Vanity Gear and Capital City decoration: The Black Cat Vanity Set is back! And The Floating Scarehouse Capital City warehouse, entirely new and exclusive to Celeste.
• All-new Region with an exclusive store: Haunted Isle (P.S. You might want to enable in-game music when you visit this region!)

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3. Where do I find the new Quests?
In Haunted Isle.

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4. Where can I get the new PvP Quests?
Both in Sparta, and in Haunted Isle. (The Quests have two questgivers who will give you the same quest.)

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5. Can I get every event Item playing only PvP or only PvE?
Yes! Everything is obtainable by playing either mode.

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6. What are Halloween Points, what can I get with them and where do I spend them?
Halloween Points are the special currency of the Halloween Event. You can use them to buy Vanity Gear, Capital City Decoration, Consumables.

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7. What are the Global Quests?

They are quests that can be done in any game mode and inside any quest. They include, but are not limited to, the following types of quests:

• Play Repeatable, Elite or Legendary Quests
• Play Co-op Quests with your friends
• Play PvP matches for a certain amount of time (Daily and Weekly Quests)
• Defeat special treasure guardians (Emerald Guardians, Soul Guardians and Mummies)
• Exchange materials for Halloween Points

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8. How long will the event last?

The Event is planned to last until 2020/11/20 00:01 UTC. There has been a timer added to the sidebar on the Forums with a countdown, indicating how long you will have to play the Halloween Event.

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All current and future content will stay 100% free and accessible to everyone.

Thank you for reading, and we will see you all in the game soon!

Project Celeste Development Team

Project Celeste is completely free and always will be. However, we gladly accept donations for our overhead costs, which are larger than we have budgeted. If you want to support us, you can do so HERE.

Tell your friends! Join our Discord HERE.

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VERY IMPORTANT: Creating additional accounts and multi-accounting is FORBIDDEN and will result in permanent bans for ALL OF YOUR ACCOUNTS, including your main account! One account per player only.

Abusing the Sparta Quests is also FORBIDDEN and will result in a ban.

Let us know what you think about the event in the comments below!