Hypixel

Good Morning Folks! If you are floating around social media this week, you have most certainly seen chatter about a new building/survival Minecraft-like called Hytale. If you have no clue where this game came from, then I will attempt to explain. Essentially back in Minecraft proper, there was a group that ran a series of servers called Hypixel, largely known for the quantity and variety of mini-games that they offered. In 2020 Riot Games acquired Hypixel Studios with the purpose of publishing their game idea called Hytale, but that deal ultimately fell apart in June 2025 with the halting of development on the game. In November 2025, Hypixel Studios and with it Hytale was bought back by the original co-founders and since then we have had a rapid series of updates to the game to prepare it for its launch earlier this week. What you ahve not is a traditional early access model with the ability to buy into testing at various price points with the cheapest being around $20.

The real question however being that is Hytale good, and is it worth buying into? One of the challenges that I have with Minecraft is that I can almost never play the game in its original vanilla un-modified state. When I do play I use a tool called Modrinth to install and keep updated over twenty three mods that make the game feel better to play. Hytale out of the box… feels like a deeply modded Minecraft experience. It has slightly more modern combat, better graphics, and way more system depth in that the baseline feels like playing Minecraft with some sort of a technology pack addon. There are so many simple tweaks that just improve your quality of life, like the ablity to carry a torch in your offhand along with your tool or weapon in your mainhand. This makes exploring the dark depths of the world so much more palatable because really… you don’t NEED to torch off every inch of the world when you are down there only for the purpose of seeking resources.

Probably my single favorite thing that Hytale is doing is that it solves the “night one problem”. When you start a new Minecraft world you essentially have a very short period of time that you need to gather certain things. Firstly you need to craft some sort of a shelter, progress through the most basic tools, and locate either a large source of wood to turn into charcoal… or have some luck with surface coal so you can make torches, and spend some time lighting up an area of the world in order to prepare for the coming night. In Hytale you start off in an abandoned structure that quite honestly does an amazing job of serving as your first base. Once you clean it up a bit you have plenty of room to build all of the early progression, and have a safe hidey hole that you can duck into every night.

That is the other big takeaway that I have so far, is that the Night itself does not feel like as bit of an obstacle as it is in Minecraft. You can pretty much roam around freely at night, and so far almost every dangerous thing that I have come across… has some sort of significant glow effect going on. The Skeletons have glowing eyes and are often carrying a torch, and the weird void touched creatures all have some sort of green glow to them. So essentially if you have your head on a swivel, it is very unlikely you will ever be caught off guard by a random mob roaming up to you. There are these weird flying masses of tentacles that I have not tangled with, but look really ominous. You can barely see it in the above screenshot as it flys above the treeline. I have zero clue what these things are but they seem like they are bad mojo, but I was able to get relatively close to them without it aggroing.

One of the most interesting things about the game is that it has way more intentional creation than Minecraft does. This is a bit of a double edged sword. You are going to spend way more time roaming around the world looking for specific types of structures from the surface, than you are digging down and trying to find things. For example right outside of my first spawn point, is a cave system that goes all the way down to the lava layer, which is essentially what spawns in this game right above bedrock or the bottom of the world. You can in theory find all of the resources you need to get started, in one of these first holes. However as you roam around, different biomes have different resources, or at least certain resources might be more readily available. There was a badlands biome that I found that was loaded with surface iron deposts for example, and a swamp region that had these witches hut looking structures that had loot chests in them.

As a result you are going to be spending a lot more of your time roaming around the world looking for specific things. One of the benefits of exploring at night, is that a lot of the enemy camps have fires and lights, and can be seen easily at a distance. For example one of the first nights that I went roaming I stumbled across a troll village of sorts and thought I was doing really well… until I fell into a spiked pit and realized that there was a whole underground warren that I was not prepared to take on. I’ve found Mineshafts, forgotten villages filled with Skeletons, and entire cave systems full of all manner of poisonous creatures… that will ruin your day if you let them hit you. Essentially it feels like Hytale is delivering on the sort of promises that Cubeworld made, of having a really interesting world filled with meaningful drops. I’ve picked up several pieces of armor in my travels that are way better than anything I can currently craft, and dropped with decent stat bonuses on them. Loot feels like it actually matters in the game, and that alone will make the Minecraft experience so much more interesting.

So far at least, much of the early gameplay seems to be around building out your tech tree and trying to acquire specific resources. Copper Ore for example seen above, dominates the early things that you can build and allowing you to kit out your character in a full set of armor and items. Right now I am in a phase where I desperately need Iron Ore, which is pushing me to go out further and explore more dangerous places… which often leads to my untimely demise. One of the cool things about this game is that unlike Minecraft you don’t teleport back to your spawn point empty handed. You will lose a lot of the resources that you have found… but will at least keep a small percentage of stuff so that you never end up in a situation where a single death makes the game suddenly unplayable. So while I have lost countless chunks of iron down in the depths, I still managed to limp back home with enough of it to upgrade my workbench, and now am working towards upgrading my backpack size and storage limits.

If there was anything that was lacking in Hytale… I would say that it wouild be some sort of overarching quest structure to guide the player through progression. At least based on the original design for the game, it felt like this was going to be more of a feature than it actually is. Right now we have a really solid Minecraft clone, that feels like playing a really good modded server. However I feel like there could be so much more more, and there are lots of things that could be expanded upon. The look and feel of exploring the depths, and all of the cute and interesing critters that you stumble upon in your journey is pretty great. For example I found this amazing underground lake while exploring yet another cave system, and I was almost afraid to hop into the water for fear that it was acid or something. Turns out that no it was just lighting effects and normal water.

One of the few quests that exists in the game revolves around finding a portal to a forgotten temple, which then teleports you to what is likely going to be a social hub at some point in the game’s lifespan. Inside here are all sorts of cute NPCs that really do not do much of anything at the moment. There are a ton of WIP signs, but there are at least a couple of NPCs that allow you to barter life essence for general useful materials. Sadly they did not have any Iron Ore for me, but if I wanted to skip some steps in progression and buy spices for cooking I could do that easy enough. I would like to see more of this sort of content in the game. Let me stumble across traders out in the wilds that what me to collect region specific resources that I can then trade for interesting stuff. Given that so much of the game is about exploration, I am really hoping that there is some sort of waypoint system that allows me to fast travel between areas so I can build a bunch of forward bases as I explore.

I guess I should talk a bit about crafting. Essentially the earliest progression resolves around setting up basic crafting benches that do different things. For example you want to create a Campfire that will consume wood or charcoal and then produce cooked food. You can dump disparate resources into the input slots so that you can cook up multiple items at the same time. Most of the crafting benches will work like this, and they are capable of drawing resources automatically from chests that are stored within the vicinity of the crafting machine. I believe I read somewhere that this is an eight block radius, which means that you are going to want to optimize the placement of your crafting machines around maybe central column of chests. So far the starter building seems to be a good place for dumping these crafting machines and I’ve yet to encounter not being able to draw resources from the banks of chests that I have created there.

All in all I am pretty happy with what I have seen so far of the game. It is way more baked than I was expecting it to be for this point in its development cycle. Combat feels solid, and there is a ton of stuff to explore and find. Thinking back and comparing this to other Minecraft-likes that I played in early access… I would say that this is way more feature complete than Trove, Vintage Story, Boundless, Creativerse, or Nightingale was when I first played each of those. It is clear that this is standing on the backs of the progression systems built into the Minecraft modding scene, but I think that is okay. Setting up a fully modded Minecraft is only now a simple process, and there are many folks who have never gotten to experience what that came can be with enough effort. Hytale is a pretty great start on that experience. I am swapping it up to try third person mode to see if that makes exploration feel a bit less claustophobic.

Like I hinted at in one of the above paragraphs, I tried to pay the game like Minecraft and dig one of my shafts to bedrock and did not quite get there. In all of my way digging down I did not encounter anything terribly useful apart from some ore spawns. I am hoping at some point this is a viable means of playing the game, but right now it feels like you are supposed to be looking for features above ground, rather than spending all of your time digging around underneath it. There are some cave systems near my base that I really want to spend some time properly exploring and torching them off so that I can know where I have been before. I am not really sure if torches prevent spawns in the same way as they do in Minecraft, but that is half the fun of a brand new game like this. There are new rules about the world to learn and understand. For example in Minecraft I can drop into that game and have diamond weapons within the hour. At some point… I hope to reach that level of progression in Hytale. Have you spent any time playing Hytale? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below. The post Hytale Is Another Minecraft appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.