Habbo 2026: Fixing the Foundations

Habbo 2026: Fixing the Foundations

Hi Habbos!

Over the past several months, you’ve shared a massive amount of feedback with us. We’ve spoken with the Community Council, read your comments in Town Halls, talked to players in our voluntary programmes, and had many internal discussions about what we need to improve. We hear your frustrations loudly and clearly: you want a smoother experience, fewer bugs, and more meaningful things to do.

For 2026, our primary goal is fixing core pain points and heavily improving the Unity and mobile experience. In addition to that, we are releasing three bigger updates out of which one is a new feature called Habbicons (previously called Emojis). Other big features are a Marketplace revamp and an overhaul of the Navigator.

Where is Habbo heading?

Where do we want Habbo to be in a year? Or in five years? Short term, the answer is easy: we want to fix the foundations. Improve the gameplay. Make Habbo fun. There are several things that touch on this: bugs, Quality of Life improvements, and new features. We have picked a bunch of these from the feedback you have given us and prioritized them based on the amount of work required to accomplish them. As for some new features, the goal is to improve the early gameplay as well as Live Operations (events, quests, Shop, and everything related to making the game fun) by giving more progression goals and improving the quests during the events.

Where do we want Habbo to be in five years? Our vision is to keep Habbo’s sandbox identity where players can create fun activities for others. Ideally this will include a creator economy where the best builders, content creators and core players get rewarded with something of real value. We want most of the work we are doing to support this: for example, Daily Tasks could be completed in player-run games. The Navigator could clearly show the best content available at that time. We could better support room builders so they can create the best possible rooms. We want there to be a variety of different games, social interactions and content for everyone to enjoy.

I truly believe that Habbo could be the ultimate pixel-art social sandbox with the player-run events, games and content. That is the goal we have set ourselves and where we aim to be.

What we did in 2025

In 2025 we did address some of the issues the community has voiced as well as improved various other things:

• Daily Tasks: The Daily Task system was introduced that combined with the Ducket Shop to give everyone more progression goals in the game.

• Making Duckets matter: The Ducket Shop was improved as well as more frequently updated.

• FurniMatic and CollectiMatic: We released two recycling features that have seen a large amount of usage.

• Trading: We improved trading by reducing the “tax” when buying credit furni. We also changed it so that rare credit furni does not auto-redeem when traded.

• Star Gems: We removed Star Gems and reintroduced Respects.

• Events: The 25th Anniversary events was well received and boosted the game activity.

• Beta client / mobile app: The main UI received a big overhaul. Multiple missing features were added with many general improvements, including inventory scroll system rework, inventory filters and sorting, click accuracy, and many more.

• Wired: We are continuing to expand Wired with more tools to create awesome games.

• LTDs: We addressed the botting issues around LTDs and made the LTD sales much more fair.

• Achievements: Last year, we introduced a range of new achievements, including ones for trading and recycling.

• Safety features: We added blocking to the game – a long requested feature – as well as a personal word filter.

Even though we haven’t been able to address all the issues you have raised, we have listened and tackled several of the issues.

Quality of life and other improvement

We are starting the year by clearing out the "easy wins" that have been bothering you for far too long. These are tasks our developers have slated as something we can tackle in the first half of this year:

• New Clothing Slots: We added a “Misc” slot and Pet slot to the Looks Editor to improve the customization. This has been an anticipated addition and was released in February. The Pet slot gives you the ability to wear more items together with your favourite companions! The Misc slot is for items that are not really a jacket or necklace, but a whole other thing.

• Economy & trade barrier removals: We are completely removing the "Travelling Salesman" achievement requirement and the Trading Pass requirement to use the Marketplace. This should give everyone easy access to the Marketplace and give a boost to the trading economy.

• Group management: You will be able to leave frozen or banned groups, provided you do not have furni in the group rooms. We are also looking to add new group icons.

• Wardrobe fixes: We are fixing the bug where clothes do not auto-wear after binding.

• New user experience: We are fixing the issue preventing new players from confirming or choosing their names.

• Scam prevention: To combat impersonation scams, we are adding a prominent warning indicator to the trade screen ("There's someone with a similar name in the room, this might be a scammer!").

• Builder QoL: We are greatly improving the search and filtering capabilities within Builders Club (BC) and the in-game Shop. This aims to improve the builder experience by making items easier to find. Also, Collectibles syncing will be improved this year so that syncing issues will not remove furni from the room.

• Visual Tweaks: There are several visual tweaks that the community has requested and we aim to address most of those, especially for the beta client.

• Ducket Shop items: For collectors low on Duckets, we made a load of older Ducket Shop items purchasable with diamonds.

Big features

• Marketplace rework: Many players feel that a full Marketplace overhaul should be our priority #1. Therefore we are picking it as the second big feature for this year. We will have to decide whether to rebuild it from the ground up, both client and server-side, or focus on smaller individual tweaks. There are several things to address: UI improvements, better filters, add new and missing features, and so on. In addition, you should be able to buy and sell Collectible items from the marketplace.

• A complete Navigator overhaul: Currently the Navigator isn’t working as a way to find fun and engaging content. We feel that this is one of the major issues currently in Habbo and aim to correct it later this year. We don’t have a design for this yet but when we do, we aim to work closely with the Community Council to get it right.

• Habbicons: We have discussed a new feature that has been under development for a few months now. Going back a few years I had a discussion with a player who came back to Habbo. He mentioned that had a hard time finding things to do when he started playing again so he focused on collecting paintings. That stuck with me and created the seed for this feature. One of the most important things games need to get right is to give players something to progress towards, especially in the early game. This was the main motivation behind Habbicons: you collect icons, try to complete a page of them and get a reward for your troubles. But not just for new players, we can utilize this also in our LiveOps and events: release event Habbicons that give you a clear progression path through the event.

LiveOps improvements

There are several things we can address without any development need, or with very little development. This includes things like making Collectibles more accessible, making Quests and Daily Tasks more fun, adding storylines, and releasing more engaging events and items.

• Tasks and Quests: We are aware that the tasks we have had in the past haven’t been great. We aim to address this by tying more of these tasks to games and Wired furni. The LiveOps team is working hard on improving this and finding ways we can make the events more interesting and engaging. Our big goal for this year is to make Habbo fun!

• Events: We are also going to start adding more story lines to events. This is a great way to add depth to the events and make them more interesting.

• Seasonal events: We aim to improve seasonal currency and the seasonal events we run by introducing better Daily Tasks and Quests, but also with an improved seasonal currency shop.

• Permanent activities: We are working on different types of permanent activities that players play and spend their time on. We are currently in the design and investigation phase so we don’t have any additional information about this at the moment.

• Outfits: Outfits are a new form of Habbo wearable where our art team can really unleash their creativity. Based on the Habbo Avatar tech, the idea here is to create looks that differ from normal: for example, a Habbo floating on a cloud.

Reworking Core Systems

Once the quick wins are out of the way, we are tackling several massive structural updates that will completely change how you interact with Habbo.

• Botting: We agree that botting is one of the biggest issues killing day-to-day enjoyment and trust. However, anti-bot measures (like custom CAPTCHAs) are a massive undertaking. If implemented poorly, we just make the botting tools stronger and hurt the legitimate players. We will be implementing some further anti-bot measures and investigating others.

• Wired: The first big update to Wired is Chests. This will provide new tools for traders and all types of builders to build more rewarding and engaging rooms. After this is fully rolled out, we have a long list of Wired improvements we will be working on.

• Moderation: We keep improving our moderation and Call for Help systems to better address the issues around sanctioning and moderation. In the past six months we have switched to a new moderation system which should be a major improvement from the past. We are also improving the sanction paths and have given players more self-help tools to address some of the issues themselves. This work continues throughout the year.

• Age verification: As we have already communicated, we are releasing age verification in Brazil. This is due to local laws and we will extend the use of Age verification wherever the law requires us to do so. It is becoming clear that this will probably become a global requirement some time in the future, and we want to be prepared for that.

The beta client and mobile app focus

We know the beta client has core architectural issues. However, if we want Habbo to grow and attract new players, we have to nail the mobile experience first. As we keep improving the beta client we will look into the mobile experience more closely in the short term.

• Our beta client development efforts in 2026 will be heavily focused on optimizing and stabilizing the mobile app.

• Login and registration flow will be improved this year.

• The Builders Clubs Warehouse and the in-game Shop will get the same new scroll system that inventory already uses leading to major performance gains and bug fixes (like icons being loaded to wrong items, etc.)

• Improvements to Profile pages, making them more customizable.

• Support for lots of old furnis: Mannequins, Sound furnis, Freeze etc.

• Memory usage and performance improvements

Final thoughts

We want to hear your feedback about our plans for Habbo in 2026 – head on over to the Welcome Lounge and fill in the poll there, or tag us on X @Habbo. We have a long backlog of improvements that we haven’t prioritized for this year. If you think this article is missing something crucial, let us know.

We will post regular development updates on X and here on our website so you can keep track of how we are progressing. Our focus this year is about giving Habbo a stable foundation to build upon and we are excited to get to work!

- Muumiopappa