The festival starts tonight with the Absinthe Night.
For 11-year-old Natalee Taylor, the festival is an opportunity to celebrate imagination, creativity and fun. Each year, the Fenwick School pupil transforms into different personas - Anna Key, the keeper of the keys, or Penelope Farthing, tea messenger for the Queen, to name just two.
With Natalee as the model, the Taylor family won the supreme award in the inaugural Steampunk Fashion Show and will be having another tilt at the title this year.
In five years, the festival has become the biggest steampunk event in New Zealand and Australia. It was first held in 2010 in a bid to establish the town
as the steampunk capital of New Zealand.
Now, it runs for four days, this year with 18 events and a fringe festival running along side it.
The festival is the brainchild of the Oamaru Victorian League of Imagineers, which now has members around the world - a recent recruit is Scottish comedian Billy Connolly.
Organisers Helen Jansen and Iain Clark are thrilled with the response to this year's event.
With a little bit of encouragement, steampunk enabled people to become something they had never been before, they said.
''We know several people who have come out of their personality shells, metamorphosed into the most glorious dragons, never mind butterflies,'' Ms Jansen said.
On Saturday, the Oamaru Club will host a Victorian Souk, a market with treasures and charms for steampunkers and non-steampunkers alike, which has attracted stallholders from as far north as Whangarei and south as Invercargill, she said.
The Oamaru Club will also be home to steampunk racing of teapots, airships and bots over the weekend, with an ''industrial goth dance-off'' on the side.
The Steampunk NZ Fashion Show, this year hosted by Te Radar, and gala dinner had become more refined over the last four years, Mr Clark said.
Other events over the weekend include cupcake decorating, dance classes, a writers' workshop and steam train rides round Oamaru Harbour.
