Fortnitemares 2020: release date and time for the Halloween-themed update and possible skins

Fortnitemares is Fortnite’s annual, Halloween-themed in-game event. It was first introduced to the massively popular battle royale game in 2017, and has taken place every year since.

Fortnitemares brings themed content with it to the game - like skins, challenges, new modes, and changes to the Fortnite map - that allows players to celebrate the holiday in Fortnite’s typical cartoonish style.

Here is everything you need to know about 2020's edition.

When is Fortnitemares 2020?

At the time of writing, Epic Games technically hasn’t confirmed that Fortnitemares will be going ahead in 2020. They have said that a major Halloween-themed update will be coming to the game on Wednesday 21 October.

This is likely to be the last major update to Fortnite before Halloween next weekend, and with Fortnitemares having proved so popular in previous years, it’s almost certain that it will be in this form that this year’s event will take place.

Previous Fortnitemares have run for close to a month, so expect the spooky action to linger until the latter half of November.

What time does Fortnitemares go live?

It's been announced that servers will go down for maintenance at 9pm BST, so expect to be able to login to Fortnite for a couple of hours this evening.

Epic has also confirmed that the patch will be a “larger than normal” 27GB, so prepare for a hefty download.

The upshot of this is that the update will “make optimisations on PC resulting in a massively reduced Fortnite file size (over 60 GB smaller), smaller downloads for future patches, and improved loading performance.”

After that though, who knows what Halloween treats will await players?

What will happen during this year's Fortnitemares?

Again, nothing official has been confirmed, but eagle-eyed dataminers (fans who pour through the game’s code in search of clues for upcoming updates) have found a few intriguing details.

Longtime dataminer HYPEX has discovered a new animation for a so-called "Ghostly Ghost Henchman" NPC, which seems to confirm that AI henchmen characters will play a role in Fortnitemares 2020.

HYPEX also discovered that Midas - a Legendary Outfit first obtainable during Season 2 of Fortnite’s Chapter 2 - may be returning as an NPC.

Since the ongoing Season 4 has been heavy on the Marvel characters, could players end up battling spooky, Halloween versions of the beloved heroes?

Which new skins will be available?

While there's been no official word on which new skins will be made available as part of Fortnitemares 2020, Epic has been re-releasing older Fortnitemares skins in the item shop, like the Big Mouth and Teef skins.

When will there be more information?

While details of this year's Fortnitemares event are thin on the ground, rest assured that we’ll update this page as and when more information becomes available.