American Truck Sim – Halloween Event is a Trucker’s Nightmare

Posted on October 23, 2025 by Aywren

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, so when I was browsing Steam news and saw that ATS had launched a Halloween event, Syn and I jumped right in. I’m not sure if this event is new or not, but it’s first year that we’ve driven to the Halloween map of Brackenreach, so it’s new to us.

The concept is not new, however, as ATS has a yearly Christmas event that works quite the same. You pick up holiday-themed cargo as an External Contract. Then, magic portals appear on the map, usually at truck stops or rest stops. Going through these portals take you to the holiday-themed map, where you drive to and from your holiday destination to get credit for the trip.

You have to make a certain number of holiday themed deliveries to be eligible for the personal holiday reward. Then, the community combined has to make a certain number of deliveries as a whole for extra rewards.

We were surprised at first that this event only required 3 deliveries to Brackenreach and 3 deliveries from Brackenreach – but a total of 15 deliveries to complete the individual goal. The Christmas event required all deliveries to be to and from the Christmas map, so we were scratching our heads.

And then we tried to drive it.

Now, for me, Truck Sim is usually a chill time. I put on my favorite music – for this, Lo-fi Girl’s Halloween radio – and we just truck along.

But Brackenreach is different.

You emerge from the portal to look at a map that shows you one straight shot to the castle, where you’re meant to deliver. But the moment you try to make that trip, you find the main road is blocked by fallen trees, and it’s time to go off road through the hidden paths of the winding dark forest where you have no clue what awaits you.

The map itself is fantastic as far as it goes for aesthetics and variety. I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say, it has a bit of everything when it comes to building atmosphere and exploration (if you dare).

But the moment you get in the trenches, you realize this map is out to get you. Not only are the roads invisible until you drive through the area for the first time to unlock the paths, but there are cliffs and swamps and even worse, hair-pin turns, all set on making your delivery a failure.

Driving these paths take patience, precise navigation, and very very slow speeds. Syn even bought a new truck hoping to have a smaller cab would help her get through with less frustration.

One wrong turn can spell the end of your delivery, as it did me on my first attempt to deliver from the castle. I was going a little too fast, I ran across a blocked path and didn’t take the turn in time. I ended up stuck with wheels in the air on a simple rock on the side of the road. All of the pushing and nudging that Syn did with her own truck amounted to nothing and I had to quit the job.

Getting towed from a job on the way OUT of Brackenreach means that you have to take an extra job to the castle to get back IN Brackenreach. This is because the portal to Brackenreach only displays when you take a job to travel to this as your destination.

I also got hit with the connectivity bug when trying to take a job out of Brackenreach. We’ve seen this happen during the Christmas event, too. It only seems to effect one person in your convoy, and only when you’re within the holiday-themed location. Basically, this means you have to drop the job, leave the area, and take another job that sends you back into Brackenreach again.

Sadly, what should have been 3 trips in and 3 trips out through this perilous path turned into 5 trips in and 3 trips out for me. But now that all the trips to Brackenreach are complete, all we have left to do is focus on deliveries outside of the holiday zone.

I do think it’s a little sad that they made it so that I’d rather not go back into the area to finish the holiday event. There were tricky things about the Christmas map – namely ice-slick roads, snow banks that may as well be rocks, and slow-going on hills unless you’ve upgraded your truck – but nothing that made me relieved to not be playing the holiday map.

The Brackenreach map is very cool and very on-theme, but unless you enjoy driving 4 miles per hour around treacherous curves, and driving across a bridge that almost always dings your trailer for 1% damage no matter how slowly you take it… Well, yeah. It’s an exercise in trucking patience for sure.

That being said, it was fun to explore the map and uncover the different paths there were to find. Especially once you were able to pin-point the path that was the “best” to get the jobs done. Thankfully, I found that the first time through. And while we did explore more in order to get the side goal of finding the witches’ house, I stuck to the tried-and-true route from then on.

Anyhow, this event will carry on through November 16^th if you are a Truck Sim player and wish for Halloween accessories!

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