The October 17 update for 99 Nights in the Forest is called Trick or Treat, and it brings back last year's door-knocking event with one new rule: if you turn up at a house with no costume, you get a trick and zero candy. Dress properly and the same house pays out. This guide covers how that works, what the wiki says about costumes, houses and furniture, the three new badges, and what nobody has confirmed yet.
Our source is the game wiki's Update Log, Badges and event pages. We are a data site, not a team that played every house, so anything the wiki has not written down for 2026 is marked as unknown or as a 2025 carry-over.
What the Trick or Treat update adds
The wiki's Update Log lists the 2026.10.17 update as "similar to the 2025 Trick or Treat event" and describes it like this: you visit the houses of various characters around the map, light the candles around each house to activate it, and receive either a trick or a treat. Some bonuses are great and some are not.
Here is the full change list from the log:
- A new Halloween-themed lobby, including Happy's shop.
- Trick or Treating returns.
- A new mechanic: collecting costume pieces.
- A costume closet you can build at your crafting table for 3 wood.
- Roughly 10 houses on the map.
- Furniture you buy with the candy you collect.
That is a short list, and it is worth saying plainly: the log does not give candy prices, drop rates or an end date. Anything more specific than the list above is either from last year's wiki pages or a guess.
How costumes change trick or treating
This is the one genuinely new mechanic, so it is worth reading slowly.
A full costume is four pieces: hat, torso, pants and shoes. Per the update log, wearing all four gives you a greater chance of getting candy instead of a trick at the house door. If the four pieces match, you receive a greater amount of candy. And if you arrive with no costume at all, you get a trick and no candy.
Compare that with 2025. According to the wiki's Trick or Treating page for last year, a trick still paid out 3 candies. In 2026 a costume-less trick pays nothing. So the safe habit changed: you do not knock until you are dressed.
The wiki names six outfits: dinosaur, pirate, astronaut, werewolf, lobster and mummy. Pieces come from three places:
- costume boxes
- chests
- random drops from wolves, cultists and other enemies
What the log does not say is how many pieces each outfit has, whether pieces from different outfits can be mixed (it says matching pays more, which implies yes), or how rare each piece is. We would rather leave that blank than invent a drop table.
The costume closet is the other half. The log says players can build one in their crafting table for 3 wood. The wiki does not describe its interface, so treat it as a place to store and swap costume pieces, which is what the name suggests, and check it in game.
The three Halloween 2026 badges
The wiki's Badges page has a new "Halloween 2026" table with three entries. Each pays diamonds.
| Badge | What you do | Stars | Diamonds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Candy Collecting | Collect a candy at a house for the first time while trick or treating | 1 | 2 |
| Carving | Carve a pumpkin: find one and bring it to a carving station | 1 | 2 |
| Costuming | Trick or treat wearing 4 costume pieces that match | 1.5 | 5 |
Costuming is the one that tells you the mechanic works as written. The requirement says four pieces, and that they must match. It is also the best payout of the three at 5 diamonds, so build your first matching set before you spend your first candy.
The carving station is new information too. The wiki does not say where it is. If you find pumpkins near your base, you are probably close to one, but that is a guess. These three badges sit alongside the earlier Helping Happy badges, which paid 5, 8 and 8 diamonds. Our badge list tracks all of them.
Furniture, Happy's shop and the lobby
Candy is the currency again. The update log says furniture "can be purchased with collected candy" and lists examples: Halloween decor, a spooky crock pot, fancy dressed clothes, a coffin chair, a pile of skulls, spooky braziers, standing coffins and a shrapnel grenade, plus more.
Happy the Halloween Guy runs the shop in the new lobby. His wiki page describes the 2025 version, where the shop took candy, and items with a clock icon were usable only during the event and then removed from every inventory when it ended. Last year you needed 4,255 candy to unlock everything in his shop, and his own cosmetic cost 200 candy as of the third Halloween part. We cannot confirm that any of those numbers carry over to 2026, so use them only as a rough scale for planning.
If you want a fuller picture of how last year's loop paid out, our 2025 Halloween event writeup goes week by week.
What carries over from 2025 (and what is unconfirmed)
The Trick or Treating wiki page has not been rewritten for 2026. Its text describes the 2025 event, so this section is a carry-over list, not a promise.
In 2025, according to that page:
- You needed a Halloween Candle to light a house. Candles dropped from chests, cultists, cultist strongholds and cultist raids.
- You dropped the candle at the door, then knocked once night fell. The owner thought for a few seconds and chose trick or treat.
- Treats gave an item, candies, or a heal, speed or hunger boost. Tricks included dropping everything in your sack, a pumpkin covering your screen, a metal ball chained to your leg, being turned into a frog, being flung away, or inverted controls.
- There were 10 house types, each tied to a character.
- The Trick or Treater class cost 30 candies, paid 4 candies per house instead of 3, and improved your treat chance and candle drops as you leveled it.
The 2026 log mentions lighting candles around each house, which sounds like the same idea, but it does not mention the Halloween Candle item by name. Whether the class returns is not stated either. Our classes page will show it if the wiki adds it.
Two old tips from the wiki are still worth keeping in mind, since they are about the world and not the event: bringing tamed animals lowered the chance of getting ambushed by night wolves, and trick or treating on a cultist raid night kept The Deer from attacking as long as the raid was still going. Night wolves still spawned either way.
When does Trick or Treat end?
The wiki does not say. Last year's event ran from October 18 to November 8, 2025, which is three weeks. A guide we read elsewhere gives either October 31 or November 15 for this year, and a "next phase" on October 25, but none of that is in the Update Log, so we do not treat it as fact.
What the wiki does confirm is the rhythm: since the June 2026 update "The Forest Wakes Up", updates arrive every two weeks on Saturday at 1 PM EST, and an update party happens every Saturday at that time whether or not there is an update. The last three dates in the log are September 19, October 3 and October 17. Counting two weeks forward gives November 7, but that is arithmetic, not an announcement.
Is Helping Happy still in the game?
The Helping Happy content from October 3 (the webs, Happy's Scythe and its three levels, and the three badges) was marked temporary in the wiki. The Trick or Treat entry does not say whether it was removed. If you were halfway through the scythe, our Happy's Scythe guide has the numbers: level 1 does 15 damage and needs 10 hits per web, level 2 does 40 damage and needs 4, level 3 does 55 and needs 1.
Trick or Treat questions
Do I need a costume to get candy?
According to the update log, yes. Arrive without one and you get a trick and no candy. With four costume pieces your chance of a treat goes up, and matching pieces raise the amount.
How many houses are there?
About 10, per the update log. The wiki lists 10 house types for the 2025 event as well.
What are the costumes?
Dinosaur, pirate, astronaut, werewolf, lobster and mummy.
Are there new codes for the update?
The wiki's codes page was last edited on October 20 and does not tie any code to Trick or Treat. See the codes page for the current list.
Sources
- 99 Nights in the Forest Fandom wiki: Update Log (entries 2026.10.17, 2026.10.3, and the update cadence note), Badges (Halloween 2026 table), Trick or Treating, Halloween Candle, Happy The Halloween Guy and Trick or Treater pages. 99-nights-in-the-forest.fandom.com
- Wiki pages last read on October 24, 2026. Where a page describes the 2025 event we say so in the text.
