Hytale New Worlds Modding Contest Closes: $100,000 in Prizes, Finalists May 5

The Hytale New Worlds Modding Contest closed its submission window yesterday, April 28, 2026, ending an eight-week stretch of community work that has visibly reshaped the modding ecosystem around the game. The official contest page on CurseForge now reads "Submissions Closed," locking in the entry pool that will move into next week's finalist selection. The contest opened to submissions on March 3, and the door has been open continuously for the 56 days since. What happens next is a tightly scheduled two-week run. Finalists are revealed on May 5, with community voting opening the same day. The 65 total winners across all categories are announced May 12. Hypixel Studios and CurseForge are putting up a $100,000 prize pool, split across three competition categories plus a separate Community Favorites pool, and the gap between deadline and finalist reveal is the longest quiet stretch the Hytale modding community has had all month. What Closed Yesterday, and What Is Confirmed The submission deadline passed at the end of April 28, 2026. The CurseForge contest hub at hytale.curseforge.com/newworldscontest now displays the "Submissions Closed" state, and no further entries will be accepted. The contest ran for the full advertised eight-week window from March 3 through April 28, with no extension. Hypixel Studios has not published an official submission count, and we are not going to invent one. What is publicly visible is that the contest sustained two distinct mid-contest spotlight moments: the official Hytale YouTube channel ran two batches of mid-contest winner Shorts during the submission window, highlighting standout entries before the formal judging began. Those Shorts function as a soft-confirmation that the contest attracted enough quality entries to justify a multi-stage spotlight cycle, even before the finalist round. The contest is run as a partnership between Hypixel Studios and CurseForge, with all entries hosted on CurseForge under the New Worlds tag. That hosting choice matters because it means every entry is a real, downloadable mod that any Hytale player can install today — not a private submission that only a judging panel ever sees. The Path to May 12 The next milestone is May 5, exactly one week from the close. On that date, Hypixel Studios will announce the finalists in each category. Community voting opens the same day, which means the public has a direct hand in deciding the final ranking of the entries that make it through the first cut. The voting round runs for one week. Winners are revealed May 12, with the full prize distribution and the Community Favorites picks announced together. The two-stage structure — judges pick finalists, community picks winners — is one of the things that has kept engagement high during the submission window itself, because contestants and players alike know the audience vote will matter. For the modders involved, the May 5 finalist announcement is the high-leverage moment. Every entry that makes the finalist list is going to see a download surge during the community vote week, regardless of whether it eventually places. Being a finalist is itself a meaningful prize. Three Categories, $27,000 Each, Plus Community Favorites The contest splits its prize pool across three competition categories. Each category has the same internal structure: $27,000 in prize money, ten paid placings, and a clear top three. The first category is WorldGen V2 packs. These are entries built on Hytale's WorldGen V2 system — biome packs, structure packs, full custom-terrain experiences. WorldGen V2 has been one of the headline tools of the Update 5 pre-release cycle, and the contest is the first major moment where the wider community has shipped at scale on top of it. The second category is NPC-driven experiences. This is the category for entries that use Hytale's NPC system as the core of the gameplay loop — quests, factions, dialogue-driven adventures, simulated towns. NPC entries have been some of the most ambitious work in the modding scene this year because they require not just content but systems design. The third category is Full Experiences. This is the catch-all for larger modpack-style entries that combine custom worlds, custom NPCs, custom items, and custom progression into a complete play experience. Full Experiences entries are the closest thing the contest has to a "best in show" track, because the bar to compete is meaningfully higher than in either single-system category. The per-category breakdown is identical across all three: 1st place takes $10,000, 2nd takes $7,500, 3rd takes $2,500, and 4th through 10th each take $1,000. That structure rewards depth as well as the top entry, and it means a category produces ten paid winners rather than a single headline name. On top of the three categories, a separate Community Favorites pool pays out $2,000 each to five additional entries chosen by community vote. Those Community Favorites picks are independent of the category rankings, so a mod that does not finish top-ten in WorldGen V2 can still win a Community Favorites slot if the audience pushes it. Across all of this, 65 winners share the $100,000 prize pool. LevelingCore and a Modding Scene That Leveled Up The strongest signal that this contest has accelerated the wider Hytale modding scene is the trajectory of frameworks like LevelingCore. AzureDoomC's RPG class framework — the system that lets a mod define classes, levels, abilities, and progression in a reusable way — has now crossed 41,800 downloads on CurseForge. That is a six-figure-trajectory framework appearing inside a window where Hytale is still officially in pre-release. LevelingCore is a building block, not a content mod. Its real value shows up in the sub-mods that build on top of it. Hylamity, the Calamity-inspired class mod that ships on top of LevelingCore, has crossed 1,700 downloads since launching during the contest window. Other sub-mods have followed. The pattern looks like the early stages of a healthy mod-on-mod ecosystem: someone ships a framework, the framework attracts content built against it, and the content drives more downloads back into the framework. That kind of layered ecosystem is exactly what a contest like New Worlds is supposed to catalyze. Even if LevelingCore itself is not a contest entry — it is a framework, not a finished experience — the contest window provided the energy that pushed it to a download number it would not have hit on a quieter month. What About Update 5? It is worth being direct about what has not happened. Update 5 stable has not shipped. The most recent patch is Update 5 Part 5 from April 23, 2026, which delivered the Extrude Tool rework, the /locate command, sound diffraction, and Social Sidebar v2 polish — all still on the pre-release branch. If the studio's weekly cadence holds, Update 5 Part 6 would land around April 30. As of writing on April 29, it has not shipped. We will cover it when it does. Simon Collins-Laflamme's teased Chapter 1 groundwork blog, mentioned alongside the Part 3 patch notes on April 9, has also not been published. The most likely landing spot for that post remains alongside an Update 5 stable cut, where a "what just shipped and what is coming next" framing fits the moment. None of that takes anything away from this week's actual story, which is that the largest organized modding event in Hytale's history just closed its submission door on schedule. But it is worth being honest about which dominoes have fallen and which have not. What This Means for Hytale Server Owners The May 5 finalist announcement and the week of community voting that follows are a window of unusually high attention on the Hytale modding scene. For server operators on HytaleCharts, that attention is something you can plan around. Server admins running modded experiences should think about which contest entries fit their server's identity and consider building them into a featured rotation during the voting week. A WorldGen V2 finalist pack as a temporary world, an NPC-driven experience as a limited-time event, a Full Experiences entry as a weekend showcase — each of those is a low-effort way to give your existing players something contest-relevant to play, while also giving the entry's creator a real audience during the vote. For server owners who entered the contest themselves, the seven-day quiet period before May 5 is the moment to make sure the install path for your entry is frictionless. Anyone who clicks through from a finalist announcement should be able to install your mod and find a server running it within a few minutes. That is the difference between a contest entry that converts community attention into long-term players and one that does not. HytaleCharts currently lists more than 432 active Hytale servers, and the official Hytale Discord has more than 567,000 members. The overlap between those two audiences is going to spike during the voting week. Server owners who position themselves as the place to actually play the finalist mods are going to capture meaningful traffic from that spike. Looking Ahead to May 5 and May 12 The next two weeks are the most consequential stretch the Hytale modding community has had this year. May 5 brings the finalist reveal and the start of community voting, and is the date that will determine which entries get the spotlight. May 12 brings the winners and the formal close of the contest's first-ever cycle. Beyond the contest itself, the wider calendar still has Update 5 Part 6 likely landing imminently, an eventual Update 5 stable cut, and Simon's promised Chapter 1 blog all in flight. The early-May window is going to be busy on multiple fronts at once. For now, the news is simple. Submissions are closed. The community has eight weeks of work in the hopper. In one week, we find out which entries advance, and a week after that, we find out who takes home a share of the $100,000 prize pool. We will be here covering all of it.