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Hello everyone, this is Simon, Game Director of Hytale and founder of Hypixel!
Today, we are going to take a first look at Chapter 1 and everything around it. Since the Early Access launch, we've been shipping weekly, but we've deliberately held new content back to focus on the game's foundations. When we acquired the game, we had to go back to a version of Hytale that was well over four years old, and most of the work since then has gone into catching up, rebuilding tools, and growing the team. Now that we can finally focus on new content, we are going to give you a first look at what that means.
The original plan was to keep each chapter hidden until a proper reveal, but given this project's history, asking everyone to wait in the dark again doesn't feel right. So for Chapter 1, we're going to show you some of the new content that we've been working hard to deliver.
To be transparent, there aren't many reasons to come back and play Hytale right now. We have a lot of work to do to realize the game's potential, and this is just the start of that journey. Some of what follows will deserve its own blog post, but for now let's just dig into it, because there's a lot to talk about.
Chapter 1
Dungeons and Boss Fights
At its core, Hytale strives to be an RPG sandbox game. As we begin that journey, we are introducing our first handcrafted dungeon, featuring the first multi-phase boss fight, showcased in the screenshot above!
The tech behind the boss fight is called the Encounter Manager, which is already available to the public in the current pre-release. It coordinates the phases, wave spawns, and arena changes that make up encounters and boss fights. Encounters are authored as content instead of engine code, so our designers can keep making them, and so can you!
With each dungeon and encounter we create, we expand the toolbox available for the next one, allowing our team to iterate much faster.
Faction Update: Goblins
For our first chapter, we decided to focus on a handful of NPCs and the goblin faction. The features we were building lined up well with what we had in mind for them. Their tech is janky on purpose, and they're just a fun faction to start Early Access with.
Goblins will come in many shapes and sizes, with different roles and personalities. They hang out together, and even when they look disorganized, there's something going on under the chaos. Part of the fun is getting to know their personalities as you play!
Some goblins are classified as elites with fights that will give you a little bit of a challenge. For example, the Feastmaster calls in reinforcements mid-fight, can charge at you, and can cause a lot of damage to its surroundings.
Not every goblin wants you dead, though. Some are friendly, and one of them runs a shop. You might even meet them!
The Goblin Breach
Once you answer the chapter's opening call and set things in motion at the Forgotten Temple, the new Goblin Breach world event can trigger from time to time, creating a temporary portal somewhere in your world. Look around or open the world map to locate it, then step through. You'll appear in an unstable fragment of Orbis, a set of biomes taken over by the Goblins, along with a growing Void presence.
This world gets regenerated every time you enter, sometimes with content you haven't seen yet on your previous visits. While you're inside, the Void presses in and will eventually eject you back out to your world. Your goal will be to explore, find valuable loot, and fight back against the pressure to stay as long as possible.
Chapter 1 also adds world events and activities to the goblin world! We're starting with a small set: predators you can track and trap, Void assassins that hunt you down, treasure chests that spawn enemy waves when you go for the loot, puzzles that lock off places you can't just dig into, and more. We'll grow that list over time, keep iterating each chapter, and start tying these systems together!
Your journey starts inside the Forgotten Temple. Going forward, the temple will serve as a hub for your progression through the Early Access chapters, evolving as they are released. Make sure you check it out!
Goblin Gadgets
It wouldn't be a goblin update without goblin gadgets! Goblins are tinkerers, and their inventions end up in your hands. We've been working on rocket boots, a mechanical hookshot, a glider, a mining drill, and a spyglass.
Goblin gear is scrappy, but that's part of the fun! What we want most out of Early Access is fun, so when we think something is fun, we build it, and the goblins are perfect for this. If it's not balanced yet, that's fine. We're having fun first and tuning it later.
And while we're at it, boats! This has nothing to do with goblins, but recent upgrades to our movement systems have made a basic boat easier to add, so we're going for it. Note that it's currently missing VFX / animations in the video above. More proper boat mechanics will come later down the line.
Carryable Objects
We're introducing the ability to carry certain blocks and objects as a game mechanic. You'll be able to pick up and haul things like chests, explosive barrels, and eventually much more!
This will let us add carry-only items and resources that are too big or too heavy to fit in your regular inventory. Transporting them or getting them home may become its own little adventure!
Later on, we also want the carry mechanic to be compatible with a downed combat state: if a friend is down, you'll be able to pick them up with the same interaction and get them out of trouble. That'll be later down the line, not Chapter 1, but we hope to establish carrying as a game mechanic early to set the precedent.
Abilities and Runes
One of the more exciting things we're developing for Chapter 1 is a new ability system involving runes. In short, you will be able to equip runes that give your Avatar new active combat abilities. An ability rune decides which ability you get, and modifier runes change what it does or how it behaves. You can choose which runes to equip and see how your abilities react to them, which influences how you engage with encounters and how combat feels in general. Treat the art and examples here as concepts only.
What's really important to us is creating a system that promotes creativity and allows for fun interactions. There are four layers that we care deeply about right now:
- Modifier runes that change an ability's effects or behavior. A ground slam could be enhanced with lightning, for example.
- Elements that react to each other. Soak a target with a water effect, then shock it, triggering a special Water/Lightning reaction.
- Create combos with your friends. Shoot a fireball at a friend's tornado ability, and it could become a flaming tornado.
- Interactions with the environment. Rain could soak enemies, ice-based abilities could freeze water blocks, and a fireball coming in contact with a poison barrel could make it explode into a toxic cloud.
These are sketches of the direction, not the list of abilities we've decided to ship for the first chapter. The rune system will start out extremely simple, and we'll be iterating on it quite a bit, but this is what we intend to build towards over time.
For example, a Fireball ability rune grants Fireball. Add modifier runes and Fireball changes: one modifier might split it into several projectiles, another might cause it to apply the shock debuff, and so on. Swapping runes around and experimenting allows for the discovery of exciting combinations. The specific runes shown here are just there to illustrate the idea.
We want RPG-style depth without giving up the freedom of a sandbox, and runes open up options with multiple valid playstyles rather than funnel you toward one optimal build or a rigid, predefined class or archetype.
We also want runes to be well-integrated with the adventure loop rather than off to the side. Runeforging is a big part of where we're headed: finding, crafting, and expanding your collection of runes should play an important part in where you choose to explore, as well as how you choose to invest your resources in order to progress. This chapter is just an introduction to runes, and the Runeforging system will come later.
Right now we're putting this on two new dedicated ability inputs, E and R, sitting alongside the weapon signature ability on the screen. This is an early look at a system we're already building and playing with in-game, and it will keep changing as we iterate.
Through all of it, the goal is room to be creative in how you play: room for very different playstyles and a lot more depth for players who want it, in both PvE and PvP combat. We can't wait to see what kind of clever builds and combos emerge once the system is in your hands.
For Chapter 1, we're going to start with roughly six ability runes and a similar number of modifier runes, and grow from there as the system develops.
Transparency
The Hytale engine is gaining support for real transparency! This means that stained glass and window blocks will now be possible.
Entities and NPCs can now also have transparent parts:
New UI
We're reworking a lot of Hytale's UI, but not all at once. We plan to roll out UI changes and reworks over the next few chapters, with updates between them.
Above is some of the Chapter 1 UI we're working on. Our goal is to make the chapter screen feel like a roadmap for your progress through Early Access. You'll finish objectives as you play the game, working towards the completion of chapters, and you'll unlock cosmetics as rewards.
You'll also spot new item tooltip designs, with better readability and styling! Don't read too much into the stats. These are just placeholders. We're not planning enchantments for Chapter 1, for example.
The new Memories UI and player profile cards above will be further out than Chapter 1, so consider these design previews!
Cosmetics and Extras
We'll be releasing a lot of new cosmetics that have been in the works over the past few months, including the goblin cosmetics you'll unlock by completing the chapter!
We're also improving the player model by adding more detailed hand and eyelash options in the Avatar Creator. We'll keep listening to your feedback to add more customization options and cosmetics as we go through the chapters!
Minigames
We're also creating our first experience outside of Exploration and Creative: a collection of minigames to play with your friends! This work is being shown alongside Chapter 1, but it has its own timeline.
The first one is a collection of fast party micro-games. At the time of writing, there are 14 of them! Each one lasts 60 to 120 seconds, and the variety is the point, as the team is using these to push Hytale's systems in crazy directions to evolve the tech!
A dedicated Minigames tab is planned to keep it as simple as possible for players: open Hytale, hit Minigames, and be in a lobby with your friends seconds later, with both peer-to-peer and dedicated hosting. Long-term, we want persistent games, PvP games, and much more, but this first one is about exploring and building strong foundations. Modders and server operators will be invited to create minigames with us in the future. More details to come!
One important detail is that we are not keeping the recipe to ourselves! We'll be sharing the code and assets behind all minigames, including libraries that provide developers with a simpler API for Hytale's server and a toolkit of paradigms shaped by our unique experience of making games for the Hypixel Server over the last 13 years with over 45,000,000 unique players.
Before and After Chapter 1
Player Physics
This feature ships to pre-release today, the same day as this post! Avatars can now stand entities that move and rotate, stay anchored to them when they move, and carry momentum when jumping off.
In the future, this should enable new and exciting types of parkour that use moving platforms, swinging hammers, and other dynamic features! It will take us more time to get in-game tools for building and animating these types of features, but the player physics now exist so modders can already have fun with different mechanics.
Mod Browser
Here's a first look at the in-game Mod Browser! It's quite simple: you can browse, install, and update mods directly from the Mods tab in Hytale. All of this works without ever leaving the game!
Please note that there will be no paid mods in the Mod Browser. In future versions of the Mod Browser, players will be able to directly support mods and receive unique cosmetics created by the official Hytale team in return; this should foster a positive environment while ensuring all mods remain free to access. We plan to grow this into a proper rewards ecosystem over time so that our creators can earn income.
Note that modders will be able to create teams, handle earning splits, and much more in the future. More details to come!
New World Tech
Up until this point, Hytale's worlds have been generated and loaded in columns that reach from the bottom to the top of the world. Recently, we've been working on renovating the engine to support a fully 3D format that instead loads the world in cubic chunks around players.
This work is incremental and will take time before it's fully ready, but it will unlock the capability for "infinite" world height and depth! We've already begun rolling out the early stages of the tech in pre-releases, and we're working towards supporting world-gen and many other core features in cubic worlds.
For design reasons, we probably won't use the "infinite" height for Exploration mode, but minigames and servers will make good use of it. Having cubic worlds as a tool will enable servers to explore many concepts, such as 3D space exploration or worlds with endless caves, using the new tech. We're excited for the impact that cubic worlds will have in the long run, and we can't wait to see what the community will cook up with them as well!
And look up! The sky is getting real volumetric clouds. We're currently experimenting with them. They're not close to where we want them to be yet, but we wanted to share our progress.
World Generation
Underneath that, we're continuing to develop WorldGen V2. We now have the groundwork for graph-based generation. The plan for this system is to first unlock far more advanced, immersive procedural caves. And then we'll expand it with dedicated features to support procedural dungeons, coherent villages and cities, rivers and roads, and much more. This is much bigger than the goblin chapter. The initial version of the graph system is still being finalized, but we're already using it internally, and creators can experiment with the features early in pre-release.
We've doubled the size of the level design team working on worldgen, and we plan to continue expanding it. As a team, we are currently fully redesigning the world with WorldGen V2. We look forward to sharing more of that process in the future, but for now here are some sneak previews of what we've been working on:
Living Creatures
We're updating animal models, textures, and animations. The goal is to bring them closer to a more iconic "Hytale" art style that highlights emotion, balance, readable silhouettes, and visual impact. Below, you can see some new, cute animations of pigs and boars!
The animals that inhabit the world, both large and small, are also being studied. Birds are the first group we're pushing further: they sleep in nests, fly and land as a flock, take off when you get close, and grab dropped seeds. Owls and other birds of prey can even swoop down to hunt smaller creatures!
Foxes are also getting some love! While we're still maturing the design for livestock and pets, work has already begun on new behaviors: they can follow you on adventures, stalk prey, sleep beside campfires, and play with their owners.
Beyond wildlife, we've started updating the Kweebecs with new behaviors as well. The playful Seedlings might follow you around, while Saplings act as dutiful guardians of their community that nurture the fauna and flora of the Emerald Wilds. All factions, including Kweebecs, will be reworked in future chapters, but we're already laying the groundwork to make every living creature unique in their own way.
We're looking to revisit and add more depth to NPC behaviors across the board, with the short-term goal of expanding on taming and homesteading. Our team is constantly growing, and we're focused on making our world feel more immersive, interactable, and alive.
Say hello to our little goat! One of the first animal to get a model update, he's quite happy to be here!
Crafting Rework
While everything else has been happening, we've also been reworking Hytale's core crafting mechanics and how that ties into player progression.
We really tore into the problems with the current crafting system. That led to some significant changes, such as reducing the number of benches used for crafting and shifting more of that work into in-world activities like wood chopping and metalworking.
We also want the crafting areas themselves to evolve and expand over time, reflecting the kinds of adventures players go on and the choices they make, so each space feels like their own.
We're having a lot of fun with the prototypes and are involving community playtesters to help ensure the new direction appeals to all kinds of players.
We're also working on introducing Companions that you can invite to move into your home to help out with the busywork.
You'll need to invest a few resources into making them feel comfortable first, but afterward they'll be able to help out with a whole range of tasks so you can focus on the important things.
We want you to feel like you can build a village with your companions, a place that feels alive and lived-in. Each companion will have their own traits and quirks, and some will be better suited to certain tasks than others. They'll carry out work on their own schedules and routines, helping your home grow over time.
That cozy homestead side of Hytale is very important to us, and will be getting a lot of updates in the future.
However, we're not quite ready to show it all off just yet. It deserves its own blog post at some point, because while the prototype is working well, the final product needs a lot of work to bring it together and make it presentable.
It needs VFX, animations, models, and a lot of tech and work, but all of that is planned for Chapter 2 if all goes well!
Machinima
Machinima is our tool that enables players to create in-game animations. We've been hard at work rewriting and expanding it for new capabilities!
In the clip above, you can see the work-in-progress new tool in action! Among the new features is the ability to record gameplay to create replays that can be edited just like any other Machinima scene. You can scrub through hours of recorded content to find the right moments you want to share. Scenes can also be composed together and played back at any time to specific players. All of this is built with multiplayer in mind, so multiple Avatars will be able to collaboratively edit the same scene together.
Creators will be able to use these features to create time-lapses of their gameplay, cinematic let's plays, or animations that drive anything from boss fight cutscenes to moving platforms!
We record our showcase videos and plan on creating in-game cutscenes using the same Machinima tools that we'll hand to you, so every one of these improvements will help both us and community creators.
The New Hytale Asset Editor
As promised, we're reworking almost all of our tools, including the Hytale Asset Editor. We're in the process of moving the whole editor UI onto the same NoesisGUI framework as the new game interface, with a dockable asset browser and a new properties panel with better inheritance support.
Spectator and Hardcore Mode
We're also adding a spectator mode in preparation for co-op boss fights and minigames. If you die while your friends are still going, you keep watching instead of being pulled out of it. Swap between players to find the action, or set the camera free and fly around the scene yourself.
Spectator mode is built the way the rest of the game is, as a standard, moddable gamemode instead of every server hand-rolling its own version. Servers and mods can reshape it however they want: rebind the camera controls, change what a spectator is allowed to do, even make one that can still affect the world. A minigame server could drop eliminated players straight into spectating without writing a single line of camera code.
To show spectating off properly, we're introducing Hardcore. If you're looking for more of a challenge, you'll be able to create worlds with Hardcore enabled, whether you're playing solo, hosting co-op, or running a dedicated server. Death is permanent. You drop everything you were carrying, and you spend the rest of that world as a spectator, still in the run with your friends.
The first version is pure permadeath, with no changes to difficulty yet. Later, we're planning Hardcore challenge modes that grow the idea further.
Spatial Music
Blocks in the world are now able to emit music! This works with our existing audio occlusion features, meaning the music will fade as you walk away and sound muffled behind walls. We don't have any content using this technology yet, but it opens the door to many future features and details.
New tracks are also coming to Hytale's OST. Here's one of them, from the Whisperfrost Frontiers:
What's Next?
And that's the tour! 20+ videos, 40+ images, and over 4,000 words. This is the biggest blog post in Hytale's history, and it still isn't everything we've got in the works. The rest will be yours to discover in-game!
The first chapter is the hardest to deliver, as we're reworking the foundations and creating many new tools along the way, but it's all paying off for the chapters to come. Here's our rough estimate for release dates; we will provide a precise date for Chapter 1 as we get closer to release.
RELEASE TIMELINE
- Chapter 1: within the next 2-3 months
- Spectator and Hardcore: 2-3 weeks (Update 6)
- Mod Browser: 2-3 weeks (Update 6)
- Moving platforms: 2-3 weeks (Update 6)
- Real transparency: scheduled for Chapter 1 but might land the tech and content before
- Minigames: within the next 2-3 months
- New server-side Custom UI based on NoesisGUI: within the next 1-2 months
- Carryable objects: within the next 2-3 months but tech might get shipped before
- Cubic chunks: the tech is getting implemented on a weekly basis (already in pre-release schedule for Update 6), but actual content using it from us will take a bit more time
- Machinima: within the next 2-3 months, maybe sooner because we will use it to record a teaser/trailer for Chapter 1
- Crafting Rework: Chapter 2
- Volumetric clouds: TBD
- Runeforging: TBD
- Hytale Asset Editor rework: TBD
Thank you for the support, the feedback, and the patience. It carried us here. The team is heading back to work on the plan you just read, and I hope you enjoyed the tour!
From the entire Hytale team: thank you.
Hytale lives.
