# Dota 2 The Dark Carnival

- Product: Dota 2 (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/dota-2)
- Vendor: Valve
- Date: 2026-06-25
- Original notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/570/view/695390213817504687
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/dota-2/releases/2026-06-25-the-dark-carnival

What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog.

Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

---

- **added** — Added The Dark Carnival, a new ongoing event in the Dota universe
- **added** — Added Midnight Run, the first part of The Dark Carnival featuring a fully-voiced story with Legion Commander and Hoodwink
- **added** — Added five new Automaton Personas with new animations, effects, and icons
- **added** — Added 20 new hero cosmetic sets, including items in a new treasure and items earned by exploring the map and story

Don't you hate it when you wake up in a prison car with no memory of how you got there and, worse, no way to escape, only to discover you've been captured by an evil puppet-man as part of some dark bargain with an ancient world-conquering evil? We've all been there.

We're pulling back the curtain on [the Dark Carnival](http://dota2.com/darkcarnival), a new ongoing event in the Dota universe. This first part, "Midnight Run", lets you navigate Legion Commander and Hoodwink through a massive, fully-voiced Dota story featuring a spider-legged convoy of deadly robots, heartstopping secrets, and unique rewards.

Today's update features five all-new Automaton Personas (mechanical reimaginings of classic Dota heroes with new animations, effects, icons, and more), 20 new hero sets (some in a brand new treasure, and some that can only be earned by exploring the map and story), and much more. There's [a comic](http://dota2.com/darkcarnivalcomic) if you're the kind of person who likes backstory.

But if, much like Legion Commander and Hoodwink themselves, you'd prefer to be thrown into the action without a lot of pesky memories of how you wound up in Ringmaster's prison train, the first stage of Midnight Run is now live in-game and free for all players. This is just the beginning: There are plenty of surprises in Midnight Run, and we're just getting started.