Summary
- Monsters Are Coming! launches on XBOX Series X|S on August 6, 2026.
- A new update introduces The Joker, a chaotic new Hero built around randomness, weapon swapping, and unpredictable upgrades.
- The X-Fortress joins the Townhall roster, rewarding precise city organization and powerful tower placement.
- Weekly Challenges, stackable Challenges, new modifiers, and a Codex expand replayability, competition, and build readability.
The City Reaches XBOX Series X|S
Since launch, Monsters Are Coming! has continued to grow through new systems, balance updates, community feedback, and a lot of player-made chaos. The game has always been about one central fantasy: defending a moving city while gathering resources, building synergies, and surviving against a world that absolutely does not want you to reach the Ark.
Today, we’re excited to share two big pieces of news.
First, Monsters Are Coming! is coming to XBOX Series X|S on August 6, 2026.
Second, a new update is arriving with new content, new challenges, and new tools to help players better understand (and break) the game’s many systems.
For us, bringing Monsters Are Coming! to XBOX Series X|S is an important milestone. The game has evolved a lot since release, and this version benefits from the updates, improvements, balancing work, and community feedback that have shaped the experience so far.
Whether you are discovering the game for the first time on console or returning for the new update, the city is ready to roll.
A New Hero: The Joker
One of the biggest additions in this update is a brand-new Hero: The Joker.
The Joker is a Trickster. He does not follow plans, and he definitely does not care about your carefully prepared build.
At the start of a run, The Joker begins with a random weapon. Then, during the game, players can find Joker’s Tricks in chests. These can swap your equipped weapons for new ones or grant random stat upgrades, pushing your run in unexpected directions.
With this Hero, we wanted to explore a different kind of build fantasy. Instead of giving players full control from the beginning, The Joker asks you to adapt constantly. Maybe the run gives you exactly what you need. Maybe it gives you something completely absurd. Either way, the challenge is to embrace the madness and turn randomness into power.
In a game where so much depends on improvisation, The Joker felt like a natural fit.
Tip: To start playing the Joker, quickly pick up a new weapon. Keeping 2 or 3 weapons is a good number. Choose one to build your strategy around, then replace the others whenever you can to get better bonuses!
If you’re happy with your weapon setup, try to collect as many badges as possible to keep increasing your power.
A New Townhall: The X-Fortress
This update also introduces a new Townhall: The X-Fortress.
The X-Fortress is built around organization, adjacency, and powerful placement decisions. Buildings placed at the center can affect the whole city, creating strong strategic opportunities for players who plan their layout carefully.
It also includes four special tower slots. Towers placed on these slots trigger their effects three times, turning the right placement into a huge source of power.
Of course, the Fortress has rules. To make it shine, players will need to think about which buildings deserve the central spots, which towers benefit most from the special slots, and how to shape the city around those constraints.
With The X-Fortress, we wanted to add a Townhall that feels immediately understandable but has a lot of depth once players start optimizing it. It is a playground for players who enjoy clean layouts, strong synergies, and the satisfaction of making the city work exactly as intended.
Or almost exactly. Monsters tend to interfere.
Tip: The Townhall’s grid isn’t ideal for creating long streets, so focus instead on tower placement and finding adjacency supports to place in or around them.
Don’t hesitate to replace the supports you place in the center of the city with more powerful ones as the game progresses.
This Townhall can be tricky to master, so stick with it!
Weekly Challenges and Stackable Difficulty
We know some of you are already very good at surviving.
Too good, honestly.
So this update adds Weekly Challenges.
Each week, when the leaderboard refreshes, a new challenge setup will become available, with its own map, Hero, Townhall, and modifiers. Scores in Weekly Challenges are tracked separately from the global leaderboard, so players can compete under the same conditions and see who makes the best of that week’s rules.
This is a feature we’re especially excited about because it gives the community a new reason to return regularly. Instead of only asking “What is the strongest build overall?” Weekly Challenges ask “What is the strongest build under these specific constraints?”
And constraints are often where the most interesting strategies appear.
We’re also making it possible to activate multiple Challenges at the same time. This opens the door to much harder runs, stranger combinations, and bigger score opportunities.
To support this, we’ve added new Challenges, including:
- Inflation, which makes shop prices increase at each Shelter.
- Small Hangar, which limits your Rock storage.
- Rage, which makes monsters deal more damage to the City.
- Erosion, which makes rerolls cost a percentage of the City’s HP.
- Fracture, which gives buildings life and allows them to be temporarily destroyed.
Challenges now also impact your final score. The harder the run, the more your score can grow.
This is part of a broader direction for the game: giving players more control over the kind of pressure they want to face, while rewarding those who push further.
A New Codex to Help Read the Chaos
As Monsters Are Coming! has grown, so has its vocabulary.
Families, effects, keywords, synergies, special rules, status effects — we know it can become a lot to track, especially when you are trying to make quick decisions in the middle of a run.
So we’ve added a new Codex.
The Codex is accessible from the pause menu and the progression menu. It explains keywords and unclear elements of the game, helping players better understand how systems interact.
Codex entries are also accessible from shops and level-up screens when hovering over buildings, so you can check information directly when making build decisions.
This is not the flashiest feature in the update, but it is an important one for us. The deeper the game becomes, the more important clarity becomes. We want players to feel that when they create a powerful build, they understand why it works (and when everything collapses), they understand why that happened too.
Mostly.
Balancing Endless Power
With every major update, players find new ways to push the systems further than expected.
That is part of the fun. It is also part of the challenge of developing a game built on scaling, synergies, and increasingly absurd builds.
In this update, we are adjusting the Ice family’s primary effect. Previously, it could ignore enemy life scaling too efficiently, especially in Endless Mode when combined with very high attack speed. This could make late-game runs too easy once the build was online.
The statue transformation chance now only applies to enemies under 30% of their maximum life. To compensate, Frostbite’s impact on the chance to transform enemies into statues has been increased.
The goal is not to remove the fantasy of powerful Ice builds. We want those builds to remain strong. But they should still require players to maintain good damage scaling and interact with the difficulty curve, especially in Endless Mode.
We are also reinforcing the impact of difficulty on score. Difficulty now multiplies the total score instead of adding a percentage bonus, with Normal set at x1 and Nightmare at x1.5.
This should make harder runs more rewarding and give competitive players a stronger reason to take risks.
Looking Ahead
This update is about replayability, challenge, and clarity.
The Joker adds chaos. The X-Fortress adds structure. Weekly Challenges add competition. Stackable Challenges add danger. The Codex adds readability. And together, these systems help us continue building Monsters Are Coming! as a game where every run can become its own strange story.
We’re very excited to see what players do with these additions (especially the combinations we did not predict) the leaderboard scores that look unreasonable, and the Joker builds that should absolutely not work but somehow do.
To everyone already playing, testing, sharing feedback, and helping us improve the game: thank you.
And to XBOX Series X|S players joining us on August 6: welcome to the Ark.
The monsters are coming.
So keep the city moving.
Glory to the Ark!
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– Fortify: The city must endure! Choose from a selection of town halls, place towers and create your own builds to maximise destruction. Equip defensive structures to repel monsters from the gates and keep the city moving forward, else the darkness will consume you!
– Forage: Gather wood, stone and gold as a persistent, multi-tasking hero. You must constantly balance risk vs reward while fighting back endless armies of monsters. Stray from the beaten path to find richer rewards or keep heading due south towards the safety of shelter.
– Fight: Beat Bad-Ass bosses, improve your abilities, overcome environmental obstacles and take charge of special weaponry to continually adapt your strategies. Or see your city turned to ash!
You’re the last hope for humanity, but it’s a long road to the Ark.
FORTIFY
– Build your city your way. Reach shelter and buy new districts from the city shop. Then strategically choose where to place them based on the needs of each run.
– Defend yourself. Choose from a variety of unique Town Halls, then add archery outposts, necromancer towers, and even fire-breathing dragons to protect it from the dangers beyond the walls.
– Unlock new possibilities: Find a build that works for you, keep upgrading and try to stay alive against increasingly powerful monsters the closer you get to the Ark!
FORAGE
– Keep the city stocked: Gather wood to keep the engines burning and increase tower efficiency, chisel stone to help repair and rebuild, and mine gold to expand your moving fortress of destruction.
– Never stop moving: Collect compasses at the end of each run and pay your attempts forward, making it easier for future cities to find their way to the Ark!
– Explore for bonuses: Look for hidden secrets in shelters and tackle side hordes to find richer, rarer rewards. Just make sure you get back to your city in time!
FIGHT
– Progress to Prevail: Level up, increase your potential through vast player progression, and protect the city at all costs, even at the hero’s expense!
– The City Still Stands: Even if the Hero falls, it’s not game over! A run only ends once the city is destroyed, so quickly jump back into the fight before all hope is lost.
– Bad Ass Bosses: Getting to the Ark won’t be easy and there may be some larger monsters waiting for you at the periphery…
The post Monsters Are Coming! Launches on XBOX Series X|S on August 6 — With a New Update Built for Challenge Seekers appeared first on XBOX Wire.