Every October we get the same ticket, worded about six different ways. "Halloween event isn't showing up on my server." Sometimes it's a Rust admin an hour after the patch, sometimes it's a parent running Terraria for a nine-year-old who has been promised pumpkins, and the honest answer changes completely depending on which game we're talking about. For roughly half the games we host the event just happens, and there is nothing at all for you to press. For the other half there's exactly one lever, and it's almost never where people go looking for it.
So here's the operator's version of the Halloween calendar. Not what the events contain, since the wikis cover that far better than I could, but what you have to actually go and do as the person holding the server. Game by game. Shortest useful answer first.
One thing up front, because it quietly explains three of the sections below. Most seasonal content keys off the server's system clock, not the clock on your PC. Your machine can say 31 October all it likes. If the node your server runs on hasn't ticked over into the window yet, nobody sees anything.
Minecraft: nothing to do, and that is the answer
Java Edition has quietly had Halloween baked in since 1.4.2, and it's all date-driven. Between 20 October and 3 November bats spawn at light level 6 or below instead of the usual 3, so your caves get noticeably busier. Then on 31 October itself, zombies, husks, drowned, skeletons, strays, zombified piglins and wither skeletons all get a chance to spawn wearing a carved pumpkin or a jack o'lantern. Kill one with a Looting tool and it drops the hat, which is the only bit of it your players will actually notice, in my experience.
There's no gamerule for this. No server.properties key, nothing in the panel: it is hardcoded against the date and that's the whole story. The only thing worth checking is that you're on Java rather than Bedrock. Bedrock does none of it. If the server is misbehaving for unrelated reasons, the Minecraft troubleshooting guide is the better starting point.
Terraria: date-driven, and the popular fix is for a different server
Terraria's Halloween season runs from 10 October to 1 November. Goodie Bags start dropping off most enemies, hearts and stars become Candy Apples and Soul Cakes, pumpkins spawn on grass, and a handful of enemies turn up in costume. Again, it's the machine's date that decides. Nothing you set changes it.
Now, the thing everyone finds when they search for this: forcehalloween. Half the guides on the internet tell you to drop it into your server config. It isn't a vanilla Terraria server option: it's a TShock setting, and TShock is a separate server application, so pasting it into a stock Terraria config does precisely nothing. On ours there's a second trap on top. The top of config/serverconfig.txt on the Files tab is rewritten from your Manage tab settings every time the server starts, so a line typed there doesn't even survive long enough to be ignored. Put it under Your additions and it'll survive restarts, but vanilla still ignores it, so it's wasted effort wherever it goes. If you want the season out of period on vanilla, the in-game route is reaching wave 15 of the Pumpkin Moon before 4:30am, which switches Halloween on for one in-game day.
Core Keeper: one override, and here it's a dropdown
Core Keeper's Halloween runs by itself from 25 October to 7 November, and unlike the two above it ships with a proper override. On a self-hosted dedicated server that's usually a launch argument: -season Halloween, with -season None to force it off, and the other seasons named the same way. The same switch also lives in the server's config file as seasonOverride.
On ours you don't need to touch either. Open the Manage tab in the control panel, find Season in the World group, and change it from Automatic (by date) to Halloween. Save, then restart so the server picks it up, and set it back to Automatic (by date) once the season's over or the pumpkins never leave. Don't go editing the file directly: config/corekeeper/ServerConfig.json shows up on the Files tab, but it's rewritten from your settings on every start. I'd still try it on a throwaway world before the one your group actually plays on, because I haven't personally watched this take effect out of season and I'd rather you found out on a world nobody cares about. You can spin one up here if you want somewhere to test.
Don't Starve Together: the lever exists, but it's a worldgen setting
Hallowed Nights has run every year since A New Reign, and it's unusually generous with its window: the 2025 run opened on 27 October and stayed up until the middle of December, which is months longer than most games bother with.
Forcing it is possible, with a caveat. In worldgenoverride.lua you set specialevent = "hallowed_nights" alongside the usual overrides, and a cluster has two copies of that file, one for the Master shard and one for Caves, so both need it. The catch is printed on the file itself: worldgen overrides only apply when a fresh world is generated. Drop it into a cluster that's been running since June and nothing happens. Nothing at all. If you want the event on a world that already exists you're into console territory with TheWorld.topology.overrides.specialevent, which behaves more like a session change than a setting, so plan on a new shard if you want it to stick around. If you'd rather not edit the files yourself, open a ticket and we'll set it on both shards for you.
ARK: the one game where you're better off than the official servers
This is my favourite of the lot, because the situation is upside down. ARK: Fear Evolved last ran officially as Fear Evolved 6, back in 2022. Wildcard moved on and never brought it back. But the command line argument never went anywhere, so on an ARK: Survival Evolved server you can still add -ActiveEvent=FearEvolved and get the entire thing, in July, if that's your mood. On ours, event flags like this one are set by our team rather than from the Manage tab, so open a ticket telling us which server and which event, and we'll add it (and take it off again when you're done). It's only read at launch, so the server restarts to pick it up. Only one event runs at a time, and -ActiveEvent=None clears whatever's active.
Survival Ascended is the awkward exception. There -ActiveEvent is obsolete, and seasonal content arrives as a mod you add to -mods= instead, so the argument you've been copying between servers for a decade quietly stops doing anything at all. One more thing if you run a cluster: the flag is per-server. Set it on one map and your players get spooky season on The Island and an ordinary Tuesday on Ragnarok, which is precisely the sort of inconsistency that turns into a ticket, so ask us to set it on every map at once. The cluster guide covers the rest of the per-map traps.
Rust: it's a patch, not a setting
Facepunch has shipped a Halloween update every year for about as long as most of us have been running Rust servers. This year it's a mandatory server and client update on Thursday 22 October at 17:00 UTC (6 PM UK time), announced in their Livestock update. Facepunch haven't said it wipes, and they haven't said when the event ends either. The November force wipe would normally land on Thursday 5 November, the first Thursday of the month, but that date isn't confirmed yet, so don't promise it to your players.
There's no toggle to find. Press Update on the Game updates card on your server's Overview tab in the control panel, and do it promptly, because until you do your server is sitting on the old protocol and nobody on the updated client can connect to it at all. You can tune the portal count with the halloweendungeon.population convar. Don't type it into the top of server.cfg: that part is rewritten from your settings on every start, same trap as Terraria. Open config/rust/boot/server.cfg on the Files tab and put the line under Your additions, which is kept across restarts. Honestly though, the event isn't the risk. Oxide or Carbon going down with the patch and staying down for a day while plugin authors catch up is the risk, and it happens most months. Our 2026 wipe schedule has every date, and the Rust Halloween update post has the times in every timezone.
Conan Exiles: don't assume it's on a calendar
This one earns a warning, because people assume Funcom runs an annual Halloween event the way Facepunch does. They don't. Night of Lost Souls (the spooky one everybody remembers, purple torches and a skull moon) was a 2018 one-off, and it hasn't come back since. What Conan runs instead are limited windows announced ad hoc: the current example being the revamped Head Hunter event, which ran from 18 to 30 August 2026. Nothing has been announced for this October as I write this, so don't promise your players anything.
When one does land there's no ini switch for it either. Events ship inside the build, so the operator job is pressing Update on the Game updates card on your server's Overview tab in the control panel, then bracing for the mod fallout, which on Enhanced has been the reliable pattern since the UE5 move. Check the Mods tab before you let players back in. The Enhanced update notes go into what tends to break.
The two things worth checking before October
If you take nothing else from this, take these. Find out what timezone your server thinks it's in, and find out whether the file you're about to edit gets regenerated on start. Between them those two facts explain very nearly every "the event didn't start" ticket we see in October, and both take about a minute to confirm. If you'd rather we just looked, open a ticket, tell us which game, and we'll check the clock and the config template from our side.