Four games, four updates, and a very full news inbox. Here’s what’s worth knowing.
Dinkum: Spooky Event and a Hotfix
Dinkum’s October update is live, which means the Spooky Event is here and runs from October 1 to November 7 based on your system clock. At night, Spectral Bats appear around your island. Catch one with a Bug Net to get a Ghoul Drop, then take your drops to the cauldron at Clover’s Tailoring to craft event items.
There are 17 new decorations, 14 costumes (including a bat costume that flies a bat around your head), a Flying Broom Stick that works like the Helicopter, and a Spooky Pack. Sally’s Salon also gets four Fantasy Skin Tones, plus Spooky Eye Colors and Mouth Options during the event. The Farm Animal Bell is new at Irwin’s Barn and shows where all your animals are on the map, which I suspect will save a lot of wandering. Visitors in multiplayer can now save their progress even if they get disconnected.
A hotfix landed on October 22 that restored the Tin Pergola’s original look after it started showing up as the Spooky Pergola, fixed the broomstick appearing as a helicopter icon on the map, fixed Tele-Tower destination selection, shortened the Ghoul Drops buff and removed the Spooky mouth option from random character generation.
There’s also a Dinkum and inZOI bundle on Steam with 10% off each until December 1, and inZOI is getting a Dinkum T-shirt and a “Play Dinkum” interaction to celebrate. Always nice to see an Aussie outback game getting some love.
Palia: Spiritfest Now, Hearty Homecoming Next, Echo Expeditions Coming
Palia has plenty happening. Spiritfest is back with Patch 0.207 and runs through the end of October.
- The Spooky Moon Store is open with coffin beds, gargoyles, bottled poison and a bat roost
- Ectoplasm drops from forageables and Tattered Cloth drops from Ghastly Jaakcats, both turned in at the Bulletin Board
- There’s a new 21 level Lunar Path called Path of the Ghastly
- Palcats join the ranch and are great at digging up herbs
- Friendship Level 5 quests are here for Sifuu, Hassian, Taylin and Ulfe
- There are four new player titles, but you only get one of the three store titles (Vampire, Werewolf or Witch) each year, so choose carefully
Next up is Fall’s Faire: Hearty Homecoming, launching Tuesday, October 27. It brings the Beasts Unburdened group quest, A Feast for Thought Bulletin Board quest, Lunar Path: Path of the Classics, a secret skate spot in the Tower, a Corgi ranching animal and Simple Sundries decor.
The big news is Echo Expeditions, a new feature arriving this holiday season on all platforms at once. It’s a cosy dungeon crawling mode with solo or co-op play, deep progression, no PvP and shared rewards. It’s mostly optional and sounds approachable for people who don’t usually go near dungeon crawlers.
Factorio: 2.1 Is Now Stable
Exactly two years after the Space Age release, Factorio 2.1 has left experimental and is officially stable. The team describes it as a big collection of quality of life changes, small features and polish rather than new planets or enemies.
Highlights include:
- Space logistics: rockets can carry mixed items, platforms can trade items with each other, and you can leave “Import from” blank to pull from anywhere
- Landing pad unloading bay: inserters can unload directly from your landing pad
- Circuit network: more things to wire up, including labs, boilers, pipes and land mines
- Quality: Space Age can now be played without Quality, and the Recycler has been split into its own mod
- Flipping and fluids: pumpjacks and burner miners can be flipped, and fluid mixing prevention is back
- Biters: expansion groups now scale with evolution
- Platform: it now runs natively on ARM64 Linux
Worth knowing before you update: 2.0 saves will load, but the circuit Input/Output split may break existing designs, and you can’t downgrade once you’ve updated. Back up your saves and blueprints first.
Enshrouded: Steam Deck Verified
Enshrouded 1.0 is now Steam Deck Verified, so Embervale can go in your pocket. Keen Games has also pushed hotfix 1.0.0.3, which fixes a batch of crashes (water simulation, leaving the game, factories), improves save migration for characters with invalid backpack entries, fixes an endless black screen when loading multiplayer games, and helps with V-Sync stuttering on AMD cards. Players who were missing Early Access rewards should now find them redeemable in the pause menu.
That’s the roundup. Cosy spooky season is in full swing across a lot of these, which suits me just fine.
