Pet Simulator 99 Fiesta Forever Update 89 Guide: Eternal Maze, Cursed Mode & the 400,000 Race (2026)

You load into the Fiesta hub on August 15 and it’s loud again. Last week everyone was smashing Piñatas and running Press Your Luck. This week the chat is a wall of “LF cursed run” and people posting screenshots of a depth counter you’ve never seen before. Update 89 “Fiesta Forever” dropped yesterday, and it swapped the fixed maze for an endless one.

The moment that matters is your first time through the Eternal Maze door. The timer starts at 5:00 and it doesn’t pause. You’re in Zone 1 with four zones between you and a boss, and every second you spend sorting your pets or reading the UI is a second you don’t get back. That timer is the whole event. It decides your depth, your leaderboard rank, and whether you reach the Tier 90,000 gate where Cursed Mode finally turns the maze from a chore into the best pet farm in the game.

This guide walks through all of it: how the Eternal Maze actually works, why Cursed Mode at Tier 90,000 is the real prize, how Fiesta Race Round 2 works as a second chance, and every new Huge and Titanic pet worth chasing. If you’re coming straight from the Piñata Maze, start with the PS99 Piñata Maze Maximization Guide — it covers the Fiesta Points economy this update builds on. Everything below assumes you know that baseline.

The Eternal Maze: 5 Minutes, 4 Zones, and a Depth Counter That Decides Everything

Here’s the scene. You’re at the Eternal Maze entrance, the 5:00 timer is ticking, and you have three free runs today. After those three, the maze costs whatever the game is charging to go again. You clear Zone 1, Zone 2, Zone 3, Zone 4, then a boss. If you beat the boss, you don’t stop — you go deeper, and the zones get harder and the drops get better. The number that matters is your deepest run. It’s your leaderboard rank.

That’s the whole loop. There’s no exit to grab rewards early and no bank to lock in points like Press Your Luck. You either clear the boss and push deeper, or the timer hits zero and your run ends where it ends. The depth counter is the only thing that survives between runs.

Why Your First Run Should Be a Scouting Run

New players blow their three free runs in the first twenty minutes trying to go as deep as possible, and it’s the wrong call on day one. Your first run should answer one question: how far does your current team get before it stops one-shotting things?

The Eternal Maze doesn’t care about your Piñata level from last update. It’s a fresh damage check. If you can’t clear Zone 3 in under a minute, going deeper is a waste — you’ll time out in Zone 4 and net a shallower record than a player who spent the same run learning the layout. Run one, watch where your clear speed drops off, and only then plan your deep pushes for runs two and three.

The damage floor here is the same as every other content gate in the game: it’s about your best few pets, not your roster count. If your top team is behind, that’s the actual bottleneck — the Huge and Titanic drop-rate guide is worth a skim before you burn free runs on a maze you can’t clear fast enough.

Cursed Mode: The Tier 90,000 Gate Everyone Sleeps On

This is the core of Fiesta Forever, and most players won’t touch it for days because they don’t know it exists or they think 90,000 is a typo. It’s not.

Cursed Mode unlocks when your maze hits Tier 90,000. You toggle it on before a run, and everything changes: the bosses get harder, but they pay out 3x XP, 5x Huge and Titanic chance, and 5 boss drops. Read that again. Five times the boss drops. That’s not a minor buff — it’s the difference between the maze being a leaderboard flex and the maze being the best pet farm in the game right now.

Here’s the counterintuitive part most players get backwards: the leaderboard is a side bet, Cursed Mode drops are the main event. A deeper record changes nothing about what you get. It’s a number on a screen. Cursed Mode changes your actual drop table. If you’re grinding the Eternal Maze purely to climb the depth leaderboard, you’re farming a screenshot. If you’re grinding to unlock Cursed Mode at Tier 90,000 and then run cursed bosses, you’re farming Huges and Titanics.

How You Actually Reach Tier 90,000

The tier climbs with your maze progress, and 90,000 is a hard grind — it’s not something you get in an afternoon. Don’t treat it like a goal you hit before you do anything else. Treat it like a passive unlock: run your free mazes every day, push as deep as your team allows, and let the tier tick up in the background while you chase the guaranteed rewards.

The mistake is obsessing over depth to reach the unlock faster. Depth and tier aren’t the same dial. You can hit Tier 90,000 on modest-depth runs if you’re consistent, and burning yourself out on six-hour deep-push sessions the first weekend won’t get you there much faster than steady daily clears. Consistency beats a single heroic Saturday here, same as it does in the luck-boosting stack — expected value lives in the repetition, not the spike.

Fiesta Race Round 2: The 400,000 Grind and the 10x Catch-Up

If you missed the first Race to the Gargantuan — the one that ended around level 150,000 — this is your second shot. Fiesta Race Round 2 raises the cap from 150,000 to 400,000, and the prize is the Gargantuan Sombrero Cat. First place gets the Rainbow Shiny version.

That sounds like a second chance, and it is, but read the numbers before you commit. The last race was decided by players running 16-hour optimized days, and it ended at 150,000. This one runs to 400,000. If you couldn’t keep up last time, the gap is more than twice as wide now.

The thing that actually matters for you is the 10x XP catch-up. If your track level is under 150,000, you level ten times faster until you hit that line. That’s the update handing you a shortcut to the exact point where the first race ended. Most players should treat Fiesta Race Round 2 as a passive reward stream — play normally, collect the track rewards every 1,000 levels, and let the 10x carry you to 150,000 fast. Then you stop caring about the race and go back to cursed boss farming.

Here’s the scene that loses people. You’re at level 90,000, the 10x XP is pumping, and a lobby player announces they’re “going for 400,000.” You check the leaderboard. The gap is six figures. The right move is not to chase. The 10x catch-up exists precisely because 400,000 is unreachable for almost everyone — it’s a design admission that the top is a marathon, and the real gift is the accelerated track rewards on the way up.

New Limited Pets: What to Chase and What to Skip

The update added seven pets worth knowing. Three Titanics and four Huges. Here’s the full board.

The pattern is simple. The Huges mostly come from boss drops and track rewards, which means you earn them while doing things you’re already doing. The Titanics sit behind cursed bosses and deep maze clears, which means they come from the same cursed farm that’s already your highest-value activity. There’s no separate grind for these — they’re payouts on the Cursed Mode you should be running anyway.

Don’t buy these on the trading plaza at launch-week prices. New pet values crater over the first few days as supply floods in, same as every event. If you want one, farm it. If you want one and can’t farm it yet, wait a week and buy it at half price. The trading economy basics haven’t changed — launch hype inflates every new pet.

New Systems: Boosts Machine, Tier III, the Fiesta Boss Key, and a 12-Track Upgrade Machine

Four systems landed with the update, and two of them change how you should think about your time.

Boosts Machine (up to 6 hours). The big upgrade here is duration. Last update’s boosters were 15-minute spikes you had to babysit. The Boosts Machine lets you stack buffs up to 6 hours, which means you can set it and actually play instead of watching a timer. Pop your buffs, then run the maze for a full session without the “is my boost still active” anxiety from the Piñata days.

Tier III maze boosters. A new tier of maze-specific booster. Same logic as every booster tier before it: permanent upgrades beat temporary ones, but if you’re going to run buffs, run the highest tier. Tier III is a strict upgrade over whatever you were stacking last week.

Fiesta Boss Key. This opens a secret room with a boss that’s 5x stronger. Here’s the counterintuitive warning: a 5x-strength boss is not automatically worth 5x the reward, and soloing it is usually the slow way to run it. The secret room shines in a group. A 5x boss with a full team of cursed-run players melts fast and the drops get split efficiently. Solo, you spend the whole 5-minute window chipping one boss down, and your depth record — the thing that actually ranks you — goes nowhere. Use the key, but don’t use it alone.

Upgrade Machine: 4 tracks to 12 tracks. The upgrade machine tripled its track count. That’s a trap if you let it be. More tracks means more places to spread your orbs thin, and a half-ranked track is a partial buff that moves nothing. The rule from the Piñata guide still holds: max one track before you start the next. Twelve tracks is breadth, not depth, and depth is what compounds.

How to Spend Your 3 Free Runs: A Decision Framework

This is the question that decides whether you’re efficient or busy, so here’s the framework. You get three free Eternal Maze runs a day. Split them by goal, not by feel.

Run 1 — Cursed farm (the money run). If you’re at Tier 90,000, this run is cursed bosses for 3x XP, 5x Huge/Titanic chance, and 5 drops. This is your highest-value activity in the entire update, full stop.

Run 2 — Deep push (the rank run). Push depth for the leaderboard. Only do this if you’re within striking distance of a meaningful rank. If you’re rank 10,000, a deep push gets you to rank 9,800, and that buys you nothing. Skip it and run cursed twice.

Run 3 — Tier climb (the unlock run). If you’re not at 90,000 yet, this run is dedicated to climbing tier toward the Cursed Mode unlock. Steady progress, no heroics.

Here’s the decision tree in plain terms. Under Tier 90,000: every run goes to tier climb — Cursed Mode isn’t available to you yet, and nothing else matters until it is. At or above 90,000: run one becomes cursed farm, and you decide between a deep push and a second cursed run for the rest. Most of the time, the second cursed run wins, because drops beat a rank that doesn’t pay.

The only reason to go all-in on deep pushes is if you’re already top 100 and defending a spot. For everyone else, the leaderboard is decoration and the cursed drops are income.

Failure Autopsies

Three mistakes are quietly bleeding players in Fiesta Forever, and none of them feel like mistakes in the moment.

Wasting Free Runs on Shallow Day-One Pushes

Mistake: You burn all three free runs in your first twenty minutes trying to go deep before you know what your team can clear. Why it fails: The maze is a fresh damage check, and you timed out in Zone 4 with a shallow record while a patient player spent one run scouting and two runs pushing a properly-routed depth. Recovery: Make run one a scouting run. Note where your clear speed drops, then route runs two and three around that wall. Free runs are a daily resource — don’t spend all three before you have any information.

Grinding the Leaderboard Before Cursed Mode

Mistake: You chase depth for the leaderboard while ignoring the Tier 90,000 gate, because a deep record feels like progress. Why it fails: Depth changes your rank and nothing else. Your drop rates stay the same, so you’re farming a screenshot instead of Huges and Titanics. The 5x cursed drops are the entire pet economy of this update, and you’re skipping them. Recovery: Check your tier before every session. Under 90,000, everything you do should be pushing toward that unlock. Above it, run cursed. The leaderboard only matters to the top 100.

Hard-Grinding Fiesta Race Without the 10x Catch-Up

Mistake: You’re at level 160,000 and you hard-grind the race to 400,000. Why it fails: The 10x XP catch-up only applies under 150,000 — once you’re past it, you’re on the normal curve for the next 250,000 levels, and that’s a marathon built for 16-hour players. You’ll burn a week and end up nowhere near the Gargantuan. Recovery: If you’re under 150,000, ride the 10x to that line passively, then stop treating the race as a goal. If you’re already over it, the race is effectively over for you. Go back to cursed farming, which pays real drops instead of a track number.

FAQ

How Do I Unlock Cursed Mode?

Reach Tier 90,000 in the Eternal Maze, then toggle Cursed Mode on before a run. Cursed bosses hit harder but pay 3x XP, 5x Huge and Titanic chance, and 5 boss drops. There’s no shortcut and no way to buy it — just keep climbing tier on your daily runs.

Is Fiesta Race Round 2 Worth Grinding to 400,000?

Not for most players. The Gargantuan Sombrero Cat goes to the top, and 400,000 is more than twice the cap of the first race. The real value is the 10x XP catch-up under 150,000 — ride that, collect the track rewards, then move on.

What’s the Fastest Way to Get the New Huge Pets?

Cursed Mode bosses. Once you’re at Tier 90,000, the 5x Huge and Titanic chance and 5 boss drops make cursed bosses the main source of the new Huges. The leaderboard doesn’t change your drop rates; cursed mode does.

Should I Use My Fiesta Boss Key Solo?

No. The secret room’s 5x-strength boss is a group activity. Solo, you spend the whole timer chipping one boss down and your depth record goes nowhere. Save the key for a full team of cursed-run players and melt it fast.

Fiesta Forever is the same event you already know, with the one mechanic everyone wanted: a reason to keep going after the maze stops being new. The Eternal Maze is the treadmill, and Cursed Mode at Tier 90,000 is the payout. Everything else — the leaderboard, the 400,000 race, the 12-track upgrade machine — is either a side bet or a trap dressed up as progress.

Run your three free mazes daily, climb to 90,000, and from then on let cursed bosses do the farming for you. The Huges and Titanics will come from the drops, not the depth counter.

Good luck in the maze.

Related Guides

• PS99 Piñata Maze Maximization Guide — Fiesta Points, Press Your Luck, and Every Limited Pet
• PS99 Plant & Combine Update 87 Guide — Combine-o-Matic and Super Rebirth
• PS99 RNG Event Guide — Dice, Weather Stacking, and Huge Drop Chances
• PS99 Huge & Titanic Guide — How Drop Rates Actually Work
• PS99 Luck Boosting Guide — How Lucky and Huge Hunter Stack