Today, the fine folks over at Valve working on Team Fortress 2 have released the 2013 Scream Fortress event. It should now be available for everyone. If you see an update in your Steam client for TF2 with a size close to ~575 MB, you've likely downloaded the right update. If you're on a data cap of any form, I'd advise holding off on downloading the update all at once.

Helltower and Spell Books

Deviating from past Scream Fortress events, Helltower is a Payload Race map, based on the original version, plr_hightower. Speculation was focused on yet another King of the Hill reskin, but a Payload Race map comes as a nice surprise from Valve.

Spells can also be used on other players, which spices things up. These spells can be found by pushing your team's cart; this prevents the map from being a carbon copy of what Hightower is normally called, tdm/dm_hightower (as people rarely push the cart, especially when given no time limit sans the server's).

Spell books will be given to you the next time you start up the game during the event, so don't miss out!

100+ New Items

Due to the fact that the system used to add new items to the game has been overhauled, the TF2 team is now capable of adding many more items more quickly than with past updates. This is shown in this update, which has added over 100+ new items from the Steam Workshop, made by community contributors. For those interested in looking for craft numbering for these items, the new items added in this update have not been marked as craftable, so don't go wasting that refined metal (or other craft hats)!

There are far too many of these items to list here, so if you want to see what was added, check out TheAnthal's analysis on the reddit post for a list, SteamDB's own xPaw for images of these items, or as always, TF2B for everything at a glance.

Grave Matters

Released last night, Grave Matters is the comic that teased today's update, and continues to follow the "Click image or use space bar to advance" style that Valve has been using in favor of making you click on each and every page, with comics before Blood Brothers. If you haven't figured it out already, if you want to see Grave Matters, just click on the image above.

The associated blog post said that the update would be "not "right now" coming — but you know, we're working on it.". Due to today's release date, this may have came as a surprise, but "we're working on it" may have been "we're just fixing up bugs".

Grave Matters does NOT appear to be the sequel to Ring of Fired, so we may have up to two more comics to go before 2013 wraps up. A Christmas event comic is likely in the woodwork down the line.

Everything else...

Here's everything else we haven't highlighted but Valve has:

Added Spooky Crate and Spooky Key to drop list and Mann co Store respectively
Added class Transmogrifier's to covert Scream Fortress 2013 items of one type to another
Added item Enchantment: Eternaween
Enabled Halloween event maps in quick play
Enabled Halloween gifts on Halloween event maps
Enabled Halloween Spell Potions
Enabled Mann Vs Machine event map Wave 666 in bootcamp
Enabled Halloween themed Unusual Effects to be found from Mann Co Supply Crates
Haunted Quality Items can now be listed on the Steam Market place

Map : Ghost Fort

Lowered Merasmus's base health

Weapon Changes

Medic's Crusader Crossbow now silently reloads when unholstered, similar to Pyro flaregun
Fixed the charge rate for the Bazaar Bargain when the player has 0 heads
In PvP Medics can now see the clip status of a patient’s active weapon

Item Fixes

Updated The Air Raider so it can be painted correctly
Updated The Bone Dome so it doesn't hide Pyro backpack
Strange Part: Kills While Ubercharged can no longer be applied to Strange Equalizers and Escape Plans
Fixed the backpack panel using the wrong "drop_sound" when items are moved around

Virtual Reality changes

Improved readability of the UI in VR
Removed the IPD calibration tool. TF2 will now obey the Oculus configuration file. Use the Oculus calibration tool in your SDK or install and run "OpenVR" under Tools in Steam to calibrate your IPD.
Added dropdown to enable VR mode in the Video options. Removed the -vr command line option.
Added the ability to switch in and out of VR mode without quitting the game
By default VR mode will run full screen. To switch back to a borderless window set the vr_force_windowed convar.
Added support for VR mode on Linux

Misc Bug Fixes

Fixed an exploit that allowed unlimited uses of noisemaker items
Fixed not being able to earn the Brotherhood of Steel achievement in MvM (play with 5 friends)
Fixed the camera target not always being visible when using the replay editor
Removed some servers that forged player counts from quickplay and the server browser

That's a wrap!

If you've reached this far, thanks for taking the time to read this post. You can find me on reddit, Facepunch, and the Steam forums (where I cover various updates for various games, TF2 included), or on Twitter as well.

TF2's 5th Annual Scream Fortress Event is out!