Halloween 2026 - Light or Darkness?

October 23, 2026Dschi

Hello Damorians!

The days are getting shorter, the nights longer, and suddenly eerie figures are roaming Damoria!

Today our new autumn event begins: the Night of the Turnip Ghosts. Two mysterious beings are competing for your favour, gloomy graveyards appear on the continents, and with the Pact Knights a new unit enters Damoria.

On top of that come the Hedge Watches, a new permanent military feature. Build hidden lookout posts, let your scouts keep watch and collect their reports with your scouting falcon. That way you spot enemy armies before they stand at your walls.

And once again we have implemented many of your suggestions and fixed reported bugs. You will find the overview at the end of this announcement.

🎃 The Night of the Turnip Ghosts

Event period: 23 October to 15 November 2026 (inclusive)

Little turnip children roam Damoria, knock on foreign castle gates and ask for sweet or sour. But there is more behind it: two mighty beings, the Light Elf and the Nightmare, are fighting for your loyalty. Which side will you join?

You can reach the event page through the event box in the left menu.

🍬 Sweet or sour?

In the Turnip children tab you decide what foreign turnip children receive from you:

Sweet: 1, 2 or 3 honey cakes. In return you earn 1 light renown.
Sour: 3, 6 or 9 sour crab apples. In return you earn 1 night renown.

The rules at a glance:

The gifts cost you nothing. They go to the player who sent the turnip children.
Without a choice, nobody visits you. You can change your choice at any time.
You are visited on every continent where you own a castle or a finished hedge watch, as long as you were active in the game within the last 7 days.
This way you collect at most 500 renown per day. So you reach the full 5,000 renown after 10 days at the earliest.

🏰 Sending out your own turnip children

In the same tab you put together your castle list: up to 30 castles, one per continent. As soon as you add a castle via “Add castle”, its turnip children set out.

Duration: Each round takes 2 hours.
Visits: The children knock on the doors of all players on that continent who can be visited. From your own alliance, at most 10 randomly chosen members are visited per round.
Loot: The children bring honey cakes and sour crab apples back to you. The castle list shows the yield of the last round.
Send out again: With “Send all again” you send all returned children out again with one click.
Remove castle: A castle can be removed as soon as its turnip children have returned.

Automatic sending: For 3 gold, the turnip children of all castles on your list set out automatically every two hours for 24 hours, for 10 gold even for 3 days. Further purchases extend the current duration.

⚖️ Light Elf or Nightmare – choose your pact!

In the Pact tab you see your renown on a scale between the Light Elf and the Nightmare. Light renown moves you towards the Light Elf, night renown towards the Nightmare.

From 100 renown on one side you automatically enter a pact with that being.
Each side goes up to 5,000 renown.
There is only one renown value and the two sides work against each other: if you have 100 light renown and receive 1 night renown, you then have 99 light renown. So you can only ever be in a pact with one being.

⚔️ The Pact Knights – a new power on the battlefield!

Once you have sealed a pact, you can raise a new unit: the Pact Knights.

With the Light Elf they are called Lightbringers, with the Nightmare Death Knights. If you switch your pact, all your pact knights change their name immediately.

Combat strength: Pact knights have the same base values for combat, marching speed and carrying capacity as paladins. As your renown grows, they gain a bonus to attack and defence of up to +20 % at 5,000 renown. Opposing renown reduces this bonus. However, they never become weaker than paladins.
Resurrection: After every battle, 20 % of the fallen pact knights rise again.
Recruitment: With an active pact you can raise pact knights in your main castle. Each pact knight costs 1 paladin from that castle and 10 dragon scales, but no raw materials.
Battle simulator: Pact knights have no research. Instead you can enter their combat strength directly. For your own pact knights your current bonus is used, for the enemy +20 % at first, since you do not know their renown. Both values can be adjusted.
Permanent: Renown, pact and pact knights stay with you after the Night of the Turnip Ghosts. You can keep raising the units.

🪦 The graveyards

During the Night of the Turnip Ghosts, two to three graveyards appear on every continent with castles. You find them on the world map and on the Hedge Watches page.

You can only attack them with an active pact and only with paladins.
You can attack each graveyard only once. At most 20 of your troop movements may be on their way to graveyards at the same time.
There are four kinds: Overgrown Burial Field (up to 20,000 paladins), Mist Crypt (35,000), Old Grave Grove (70,000) and Black Ossuary (100,000). The bigger the graveyard, the more raw materials and honey cakes await you.
In an attack, at most 10 % of your paladins fall. Some of the fallen rise as Lightbringers or Death Knights and return with the survivors – up to 10,000 pact knights per attack.
Every graveyard has a limited number of attack slots. Once all are taken, it rests and new graveyards appear on the continent.

🔥 The Ember Maw

Only rarely does a mighty Ember Maw open up, spanning 3 × 3 map fields. At most two can exist worldwide at the same time.

It holds up to 1,000,000 paladins and promises the biggest loot of all graveyards, including 250 honey cakes.

Coordinate with your alliance, because a find like this will not stay hidden for long!

🍯 The event shop

You can trade your collected honey cakes and sour crab apples in the sweet or the sour shop. Both offer the same benefits, but in the sour shop everything costs three times as much.

The following bonuses are available:

+100 % raw material bonus for one castle
+50 % troop production
+100 % carrying capacity of your traders
3 additional slots for active masters
Veil of mist: Your armies do not show up in foreign falcon reports.

The benefits are available for 1, 3 or 7 days. When you extend one, you only pay for the additional time needed, even for several castles at once.

Without any purchase limit there are also 1,000 dragon scales for 1,000 honey cakes and 1,000 amber of one kind for 500 honey cakes.

🎁 The spooky packs

In the Packs tab you find the following offers during the event:

🎃 Small spooky pack – free

500 honey cakes and 1,500 sour crab apples, once per account. Don’t forget to collect your gift!

🏰 Big spooky pack – 1,500 gold

3,000 honey cakes, 9,000 sour crab apples and an upgrade to a spooky castle with 1,300 building fields. You redeem the upgrade in the premium area under castle upgrades.

⚖️ Light pack or Dark pack – 1,000 gold each

Your renown immediately shifts by 1,000 points towards the chosen side, without counting towards the daily limit.

In addition you get a Paladin Warden for 30 days. It grants you a 200 % larger build queue and 50 % faster recruitment of paladins and pact knights in all your castles.

The packs can be bought up to three times in total, which lets you extend the duration to a maximum of 90 days. The warden stays active for its remaining time even after the event.

Attention: A pack of the opposing side can switch your pact!

🪦 Oath of the Dead – 3,000 gold

Permanently turns your spooky castle into a fortress with its own graveyard, in light or dark form according to your pact.

There you can raise pact knights just like in your main castle. On the world map your name is shown to everyone as its sole ruler.

The Oath of the Dead is available once per account and only applies to the selected spooky castle.

If another player conquers the fortress, they cannot use its special benefits. For them it is an ordinary Halloween castle. If you conquer it back, your Oath of the Dead takes effect again.

A castle under the Oath of the Dead remains permanently. Nobody can demolish or convert it.

💰 10 % bonus gold

Until 15 November 2026 (inclusive) you get 10 % extra gold on every gold pack, both in the shop and on Steam.

💡 Our event tip

Choose a side early and stay loyal to it. Every renown point of the opposing side reduces the combat strength of your pact knights.
If you follow the Light Elf, choose sweet for the turnip children. Followers of the Nightmare are better off choosing sour.
Lightbringers and Death Knights are equally strong! The difference is purely visual. So simply choose the side you like better.

🌿 The Hedge Watches – a new age of reconnaissance!

Until now you often only saw enemy armies once they were already standing at your walls. That is over now!

Build small, hidden lookout posts on the world map. There your scouts keep watch while your scouting falcon collects their reports.

The Hedge Watches are a permanent feature and stay after the event.

You find them under Military → Hedge Watches.

🏰 Building a hedge watch

The map on the Hedge Watches page shows all fields where you are allowed to build. Excluded are fields with castles, bandit camps, wild animals, graveyards, other hedge watches and mountains.

Choose a suitable field and then the castle your carpenters should set out from.

Cost: 30,000 wood and 10,000 ore from the chosen castle
Build time: 10 minutes plus 30 seconds per field of distance, at most 2 hours
Maximum: 30 hedge watches per player
Sight range: 10 fields around the watch

All players can see your hedge watches on the map, but nobody finds out who they belong to.

Hedge watches cannot be attacked and are also spared by wild animals. You can tear them down at any time, but you do not get the raw materials back.

🦅 The scouting falcon – your messenger to the watches

On every finished hedge watch your scouts keep their eyes open. Your scouting falcon brings back what they have seen.

The falcon starts in one of your castles, flies to the chosen watch and returns. The flight takes 12 seconds per field and direction, at least 1 minute in total.
You have one falcon for all watches. After its return it needs 5 minutes of rest.
During the flight, a display below the map shows the remaining flight time.
In the left menu below the recruitment list, a small box tells you when your falcon returns and when it is ready again. A warning symbol appears when one of your watches is being smoked out.

What do your scouts observe?

The falcon brings information about all detected troop movements your scouts observed within a radius of 10 fields during the 60 minutes before its arrival.

This includes attacks, support, relocations and returning troops. Armies that merely pass through the area can be spotted as well.

Your own troop movements are not recorded.

However, the scouts occasionally miss something: small groups and troop movements between 22:00 and 06:00 are detected less often.

📜 The falcon report

As soon as the falcon has returned, you find its report on the left side of the Hedge Watches overview.

New reports are marked red. A number in the menu shows how many reports are unread.

For every detected troop movement you learn:

Which player the troops belong to
Time, type and direction of the movement
The approximate army size and every troop type with its number

The exact destination remains secret.

Pact knights are shown in the report with the symbol of their side. That way you can tell whether a foreign army follows the Light Elf or the Nightmare.

The reports remain visible for 3 days.

💨 Betrayed watches and smoking out

Every falcon that lands at a hedge watch betrays its position as an active lookout post.

For the following 24 hours the watch is marked red on the map and labelled “Betrayed”. Who it belongs to still remains secret.

If one of your finished hedge watches is no more than 10 fields away from a betrayed foreign watch, you can try to smoke it out.

The attempt takes 6 hours. After that, luck decides:

Success: The foreign hedge watch is destroyed.
Failure: The owner finds out which of your watches the smoke came from. For the next 24 hours they may smoke it out as well, even if it is not betrayed.
Limit: Each watch can only smoke out one foreign watch at a time.

The affected player sees in their overview which of their watches is under smoke and how long it will take. Where the smoke comes from, they do not find out at first.

💡 Our tip

Don’t always send your falcon to the same hedge watch. Every visit betrays it for one day.
During the Night of the Turnip Ghosts, a finished hedge watch counts like a castle for the turnip children. That way you can also be visited on continents where you only own a watch.

✨ More new features

Besides the event and the Hedge Watches, we have made further improvements to Damoria.

🗺️ March lines: You now see your own ongoing troop movements on the world map, both in 2D and 3D. Attacks appear red, support dashed blue, relocations dotted yellow and returns grey. The symbol of the strongest unit moves along live. Arrived movements disappear automatically.
🏗️ Tile view in the construction office: Next to “Buildings” you can switch between the familiar list and a new tile view. Each tile shows picture, level and cost as well as buttons for upgrade, build now and demolition. Your choice is saved on your device.
🎨 New page images: All images at the top of the game pages have been reworked in a consistent style. On many pages you are also greeted by new characters: the master builder in the construction office, the general in the barracks, the craftsman in the catapult workshop, the trader at the marketplace, the stable master in the stables, the senator in the senate, the miner in the mine, the alchemist at the Athanor and the falconer at the Hedge Watches.
🌍 Forum news in your language: Announcements from the forum are now shown to you in the game in your chosen language, with a small note on the original language.
📖 Wiki: The Hedge Watches and Pact Knights are now also explained in detail in the Damoria wiki.

💛 Your feedback makes Damoria better!

Since our last announcement you have again sent us many suggestions and bug reports, both through the feedback box and via support tickets.

Thank you very much! Here you can see what we have made of them.

⚔️ Troops and combat

Padlock in the recruitment list: A locked castle no longer recruits through any of the available ways – not through the normal buttons, not through “fill troop queue”, the gold fill or the troop master. When its time runs out, it drops off the list. With “Unlock now” you can unlock it again.
Battle simulator and walls: Until now a few rams in the simulator could tear down even high walls. The calculation has been corrected and now matches the actual battle. Real battles were not affected by this bug.

🛡️ Guard

Individual plan for every knight: The Guard Master can now use a separate plan for missions and training for each knight. You find the choice between “Global plan” and “Individual plan” on the knight page above the ranking bar. This way, for example, a knight is no longer trained along by accident after a death mission.
Angel-touched equipment: These items can now be sold to the trader one by one after you have confirmed the “I am sure” option. They remain excluded from bulk selling.
Items won at auction: Only items you found yourself may be auctioned again. Items won at auction now show “sell”, and the trade window only offers the trader.
Trader price: The previous note “70 % of the market price” was not correct. The trade window now directly shows the amount of thalers the trader offers you. The market price on the item card remains the minimum bid in the auction house.
Thaler and fame shop: Both shops now stay open when you switch castles.

🏰 Castles, market and overviews

Order of castles: All castle lists are now sorted the same way, including names with special characters, accented letters and numbers. Under Settings → Personal you can choose between name, name as before, founding and coordinates.
Direct trader shipment: The last chosen target castle stays preselected when you switch castles, just as you already know it from attacks.
Castle demolition: Raw materials from ongoing demolitions and pending deliveries are taken into account when calculating free storage space. Castles that are being demolished themselves can no longer be chosen as a target. A castle with pending raw material deliveries can only be demolished once they have arrived.
Deeds of conquest: Instead of an unaffordably high price, the note “No more deeds of conquest available” now appears.
Construction sites in special castles: The previously empty tab is hidden and only appears when damaged construction sites can be repaired.
Master builder’s build now in the shop: The description now makes clear that the pack only unlocks build now. Each build now still costs 3 gold.

🐞 Fixed bugs

Game became slow on smartphones: A memory leak caused growing delays after many page changes and sometimes a complete reload. The bug is fixed and page changes are now noticeably faster.
Master builder: The entered target level was reset when moving the mouse. In addition, the master builder deactivated itself when saving without the checkbox ticked. Both bugs are fixed. When you enter a target level, the checkbox is now ticked automatically.
Crusade map: White map areas load correctly again. If loading a section fails, it is retried automatically.
Collapsed map menu: The collapsed menu now only shows “DAMORIA” instead of additional symbols and info boxes.
Large map objects: Castles, graveyards and amber symbols are no longer cut off at the edges of map sections.
Start page: The map preview opens reliably in 2D and 3D again.
Dutch translation: “gelicht” has been replaced by “gerekruteerd”. The help text for the Amber Knight has also been updated in all languages.
Stability: Brief outages of the storage system for login data no longer cause the game pages to abort with an error message.

💬 Now it’s your turn!

Will you swear loyalty to the Light Elf or follow the Nightmare?

How do you like the new Hedge Watches? And which improvements would you like to see next?

Feel free to share your opinion in the discussion thread or through the feedback box in the game. As usual, please report bugs via a support ticket.

Discussion: Night of the Turnip Ghosts and Hedge Watches
Hello Damorians! in this thread you can discuss the Night of the Turnip Ghosts, the Pact Knights, the Hedge Watches and all other changes from the current update. Tell us what you…

Thank you very much for your support and your many messages!

We wish you lots of fun during the Night of the Turnip Ghosts and successful battles!

Best regards,
Your Damoria Team