FarmVille Count Duckula's Castle: Everything you need to know

Truly kicking off the Halloween event in FarmVille (if the slew of decorations, trees and animals already released this month wasn't enough), Count Duckula's Castle has been released for building. This new castle can be built and upgraded through one of six stages, and you'll be able to "harvest the castle" - think the Haunted House from last year - in order to receive 1-4 Tickets every day for your "Halloween Ticket Basket." This basket hasn't come out just yet, but you can now build the Castle in full to get prepared.

To complete the initial construction of Count Duckula's Castle, you'll need to collect three new building materials in bulk:

• 12 Haunted Bricks
• 12 Goo
• 12 Knockers

As usual, you can gather these materials in a variety of ways, the most prominent of which is simply asking your friends to send them to you. You can send requests to friends for any of these three parts once every four hours. You can also send (and receive) gifts to/from friends by using them on the Free Gifts page, or you can purchase them outright for Farm Cash. Finally, it looks like you might be able to earn these items by opening Special Delivery Boxes, but this doesn't normally happen with new buildings, so don't be surprised if you open a few with no luck here either.

After the initial construction of Count Duckula's Castle is complete, you'll be able to immediately start upgrading it. Upgrading the Castle requires the same building materials you used before, but in larger quantities. For instance, to upgrade to level 2, you'll need to collect 14 of each item, rather than 12. Furthermore, upgrading to level 3 requires 16 of each item, and so on until you eventually get to level 6 (requiring 22 each). However, for Levels 4, 5, and 6, the Haunted Bricks are replaced with Creepy Candles. The process, however, is the same.

As one final note, while you can simply stick with harvesting your own Castle for Tickets, you can also visit your friends' farms and harvest their Castles for extra Tickets as well.

Again, the Tickets earned in from this Castle are apparently available immediately, so you'll need to hang onto them for a few days before we see the "Halloween Ticket Basket" itself release (that could happen sometime this week - perhaps Sunday). Either way, we'll make sure to let you know when the Halloween Ticket Basket launches, and what you can earn in side, so keep checking back!