Halloween Spotlight 2026
This week, Anthony and I are holding down the fort to bring you the latest news from the Roblox metaverse. We have a packed schedule covering the spooky new platform-wide event and some significant technical upgrades that are set to improve the lives of developers everywhere.
The Halloween Spotlight Event
Tis the season for scares, and Roblox is celebrating with the Halloween Spotlight, running from October 23rd through November 3rd.
Unlike some previous years where Halloween felt a bit more decentralized or focused solely on catalog sales, this year introduces a dedicated hub world: the Cursed Clearing (also referred to as the Cursed Forest). This spooky hub serves as your central point of operations, where you can teleport to 31 featured experiences.
Runes, Keys, and Quests
The core loop of the event revolves on collecting Runes and Keys. Each of the 31 participating experiences offers two distinct quests:
- Runes: Awarded for completing an easier quest. These unlock standard paths in the Cursed Forest.
- Keys: Awarded for completing a harder, "elite" quest. These unlock elite paths and more exclusive rewards.
For example, in Driving Empire, the Rune quest might task you with knocking over 150 zombies, while the Key quest ramps that up to 300. In Doors, you might need to open 50 doors for a Rune, but reach Room 50 in the special "Trick or Treat" mode for the Key.
This structure encourages players to hop between games, potentially discovering new favorites or revisiting classics. The lineup includes heavy hitters like Dress to Impress, Welcome to Bloxburg, and Doors, alongside a variety of genres labeled as "Survive the Frights", "Harrowing Escapes", and "Not So Scary" (for those who prefer a lighter Halloween vibe).
Exclusive Avatar Items
The rewards for your efforts are permanent avatar items—keepsakes you can wear for Halloweens to come. Interestingly, there is a monetization twist this year: players can pay Robux to "curse" their unlocked items, transforming them with unique, spookier textures and effects.
For the completionists out there, collecting 27 Runes and 27 Keys unlocks a mysterious grand prize. Rumors (and teaser videos) have hinted at a high-quality Ram's Head item, though you will have to grind through the quests to find out for sure!
While some developers might miss the days of open applications for events, from a player's perspective, this curated approach ensures a polished experience with high-quality games they likely already know and love.
Developer Quality of Life: Default Properties
Moving on to developer news, Roblox has released a feature that has been on wishlists for years: User Provided Default Instances.
We have all been there—you insert a new Part into your workspace, build a beautiful structure, hit "Play", and watch in horror as everything collapses because you forgot to anchor the parts. With this new beta feature, those days are over.
Developers can now customize the default properties for any object type in Studio. Want every new Part to be Anchored by default? You can do that. Want your UI elements to default to Scale instead of Offset? Done. Need specific collision settings or custom activation distances for ProximityPrompts? You can set those up too.
These defaults are stored locally, allowing you to tailor your Studio environment to your specific workflow without affecting other team members. It is a small change that will save countless hours of repetitive tweaking.
WebSockets Support in Studio
In a major leap for tooling, WebSocket support has officially arrived in Roblox Studio. This allows for persistent, bidirectional communication between Studio and external servers.
Previously, tools that needed to talk to the outside world had to rely on HttpService polling—essentially repeatedly asking an external server, "Has anything changed?" This was inefficient and slow. With WebSockets, data can flow freely in real-time.
The React DevTools Use Case
One of the most exciting applications for this is React DevTools. As many of you know, Roblox has been adopting React Lua internally for their own UI (like the Universal App). Now, developers can potentially hook into the powerful debugging tools used by web developers to inspect their React components in real-time.
While the current setup for React DevTools in Studio is a bit "hacky"—involving older versions and specific binaries—the introduction of WebSockets paves the way for much smoother, first-party support in the future. It opens the door for a new generation of live debugging and syncing tools that were previously impossible.
Open Cloud Uploads for Models and MeshParts
Finally, the Open Cloud API continues to expand, now supporting the upload of Models (.rbxm), Animations, and MeshParts.
For teams using advanced workflows like Rojo or continuous integration pipelines, this is a game-changer. Historically, automating the upload of a model file meant using "bot accounts" and risky cookie-scraping methods that were insecure and technically against terms of service.
With this update, you can now use secure, scoped API keys to upload these assets directly via the Open Cloud. This moves us closer to a future where developers never need to juggle cookies or fake user sessions to automate their deployment processes. It is safer, more reliable, and much more professional.
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