Hytale Update 6 Part 13 Pre-Release Patch Notes (August 20, 2026)

Hytale Update 6 Part 13 arrived on the pre-release branch on August 20, 2026, and it does not read like the parts before it. There is no headline feature. There are eight memory leak and crash fixes, a long-running large-world crash that got fixed and then got faster, the heaviest Mod Browser polish pass of the whole run, and a set of small server-side corrections that will matter more to anyone running a public server than any feature in the last month. This is a lock-down build. Everything below comes from the official pre-release patch notes page, whose "Pre-Release (Update 6 Part 13)" section is dated August 20, 2026. The timing is the story. Update 6 goes stable on Thursday August 27, 2026. Part 13 landed on Thursday August 20. If you run a server, the whole of this article is a list of things that change under you in seven days, and the operational sequence for the day itself is in our Update 6 August 27 server launch day checklist. Why You Cannot Find a Part 13 Post in the August Archive Worth clearing up first, because it catches people every single week. Search for "hytale part 13 patch notes", land on hytale.com/news/archive/2026/8, and you will be told "No posts found for this month". It is easy to read that as "nothing shipped". Something did ship. Parts 1 through 13 are all sections inside one post, dated May 28, 2026, at a single URL that is overwritten as each new part is added. The post never generates an August archive entry because the post is not from August. Its own intro says so plainly: "Hi everyone! Below are the pre-release patch notes for Update 6, which we will update weekly." And, for anyone who has not switched over yet: "To access Pre-Release version: Enable via Launcher → Settings → Pre-Release" Because that page is rolling, the Part 13 section you read today is not guaranteed to sit there in the same form next week — which is exactly why we write these up part by part, and why Part 12 from August 13, Part 11 from August 6 and Part 10 from July 30 are still readable here in full. Is Part 13 the Last Hytale Update 6 Pre-Release? Our read, clearly labelled as our read: probably, and Hypixel Studios has not said so. The reasoning is only arithmetic. The parts have been arriving on a Thursday cadence — Part 10 on July 30, Part 11 on August 6, Part 12 on August 13, Part 13 on August 20. Update 6 releases on Thursday August 27. The next Thursday slot is launch day, so if the cadence holds there is no room for a Part 14 before the stable build. That is an inference, not an announcement. No note anywhere calls Part 13 the final pre-release, and it would be entirely reasonable for a Part 14 to appear mid-week with last-minute fixes. But if you are a plugin author or a server operator planning your week, plan as though the API surface you are looking at now is the surface you ship against. You have roughly six days. The shape of the content supports the reading. Eight of the entries in Part 13 are memory leaks and crashes. The single biggest block of polish went into a feature that already exists. There is no new headline system. Teams write patch notes like this when they are closing a release, not opening one. Three Part 13 Fixes Every Hytale Server Owner Will Feel Lead with these, because they are the ones that turn into support tickets. 1. The /discovery link command finally tells you what went wrong If you have ever tried to get a server listed through Server Discovery and had /discovery link simply not work, this is the entry you have been waiting for: "The /discovery link command now tells you what actually went wrong. DiscoveryService.sendHeartbeat returns a HeartbeatResult, so a token that matches no listing, a server signed in as a different game profile, and an unreachable service each get their own message, and the token is only linked when the heartbeat really succeeds." The first improvement is diagnostics. Three named failure modes now get three distinct messages, and they are three genuinely different problems with three different fixes: A token that matches no listing. The token is wrong, stale, or belongs to a listing that no longer exists. Regenerate it from the listing and paste it again — and check you did not copy a token from a second listing you also own. A server signed in as a different game profile. The listing belongs to one account and the server process is authenticated as another. This is the one that used to be invisible, and it is the classic failure on a rented box or a server someone else set up for you. The token is fine; the identity is not. An unreachable service. Nothing is wrong with your configuration at all. Outbound network, DNS or the service itself. Wait, or check egress from the host, and stop rewriting your token. Before this, all three produced the same unhelpful outcome, so the standard debugging procedure was to regenerate the token repeatedly and hope. If you have been through that, the second failure mode is very likely what you were actually hitting. The second improvement is the last clause, and it is the bigger one: "the token is only linked when the heartbeat really succeeds." The implication is that the token could previously be recorded as linked on a heartbeat that had not succeeded — leaving you with a server that believes it is linked and a listing that never sees it. That is a far worse state than a clean failure, because there is nothing on your end to fix. From Part 13 onward, linked means linked. If you are setting a listing up for the first time, our guide to listing your server on Hytale Server Discovery walks the whole flow. One more small correction lands in the same section: "/world remove and /chunk forcetick will now point to the correct commands." Minor, but if you have been getting nonsense from either, that is why. 2. The raw-text bug after a server restart is dead Three localisation entries, and together they kill one of the most-reported "is this server broken?" symptoms in the pre-release: "Server restarts will no longer cause item, block, or menu names to appear as raw text." "A single mistake in the translation files will no longer cause every name to become blank." "A malformed line in a .lang file no longer throws away the whole file. The parser names the file and the line number, skips the bad line, and keeps everything else." The first is the symptom players report: after a restart, every item, block and menu label renders as its underlying translation key rather than its name. Nothing is actually broken, but the server looks catastrophically broken, and a player who sees that is a player who leaves. The second and third are the cause, and they explain why this hit some servers relentlessly and others never. The old parser was all-or-nothing. One malformed line in a .lang file discarded the entire file, so a stray character in a single string took down every name that file supplied. That failure mode punishes exactly the servers doing the most work: localised servers, servers running community translations, and heavily modded servers where a dozen mods each ship their own language files and any one of them can poison the batch. Now the parser names the file and the line number, skips the offending line and keeps the rest, and an unterminated line continuation holds onto the text read so far rather than discarding it. Practical note for launch day: if your server has been showing raw keys after restarts, do not assume Update 6 fixes your content. It fixes the parser. Your bad line is still bad — the difference is that the log will now tell you where it is. Check the log after your first restart on the new build. 3. Long-running large worlds get a crash fix, and it is faster "Fixed a crash that could affect very large worlds that had been running for a long time when the server took time to reorganize where everything was. As a bonus, this process should now also be faster!" Read the qualifiers: very large worlds, running for a long time. That is not a test world. That is a busy public server — a world that has grown for months, in a process that does not get restarted more often than it has to. It is the hardest class of bug to reproduce and the one most likely to be sitting in your crash logs uninvestigated, because it only shows up under conditions nobody can recreate on a dev box. The bonus clause matters as much as the fix: the reorganisation pass is not just safer, it is faster, which means less of the periodic hitching that large long-lived worlds accumulate. If you have been logging unexplained crashes on a large world with high uptime, this is a strong candidate — and our Hytale server crash recovery and config guide covers capturing enough detail to confirm it rather than assume it. Eight Memory Leak and Crash Fixes: The Stability Pass The Stability Fixes section is the largest single block in Part 13, and it is the clearest evidence of what kind of build this is. Eight entries, all memory or crash. The large-world crash above is one; the other seven are leaks and one UI crash, and between them they cover almost every long-lived subsystem in the client: Main menu world previews. "Fixed a memory leak in the main menu: world preview images leaked memory every time a world's preview refreshed." A leak on a refresh loop in the one screen every session begins on. Character preview. "Fixed a memory and GPU resource leak when opening and closing menus with a character preview." GPU resources as well as memory, and it fires on every open and close. Entity status effects, world map markers and the customization-screen character preview. "Fixed graphics memory leaks from entity status effects, world map markers, and the character preview on the customization screen." Status effects are the one to note — those churn constantly in normal play. Sky loading on world exit. "Fixed a crash and memory leak related to leaving worlds while the sky was still loading." A crash and a leak, triggered by leaving early — which is exactly what a player does when a world is slow to load. Machinima scene loading. "Machinima: fixed memory leaks when loading a scene over an existing one or re-adding a scene with a duplicate name, and scene names with leading or trailing spaces now validate correctly." Asset editor. "Asset editor: fixed memory leaks when switching views and closing dialogs." Server-driven UI resets. "Fixed a UI crash that could occur when the server reset the interface while item or entity previews were on screen." The only one in the list that a server can trigger on a client, which makes it the one custom game modes should care about. A pattern runs through most of them: the leak is on a repeated open/close or load/reload cycle. Menus, previews, scenes, dialogs, views. Those are precisely the leaks that never appear in a short test and always appear in a long session, which is why a batch of them tends to get found and fixed together late in a release cycle. If you have players reporting that Hytale gets progressively worse over a few hours and a restart fixes it, this block is the answer. Note what this list is and is not: these are overwhelmingly client-side leaks. They improve your players' sessions rather than your server's memory profile. The server-side stability items in Part 13 are the large-world reorganisation crash and the one performance entry below. The one performance entry, and it is a server-side win "Improved the memory use at high view distances. Worlds with a lot of open sky above them now keep far less lighting data around." Short, and more consequential than its length suggests. High view distance is the setting that most reliably turns a comfortable server into an expensive one, and lighting data over open sky is pure overhead — a column of air above a surface world holds nothing worth remembering. Surface-heavy worlds benefit most: open landscapes, oceans, plains, anything with sky above it, which is most survival worlds. Cave-heavy or heavily built-over worlds will see less. And if you previously reduced your view radius purely to control memory, Part 13 is a reason to re-measure rather than assume. Our guide to maxViewRadius and the official server config docs covers what that setting actually costs; change it after you are on the stable build and watch, rather than raising it speculatively on launch day. Worth remembering too that Update 6 worlds are much taller than they used to be — our explainer on cubic chunks and infinite world height covers why "open sky above them" is a bigger volume than it sounds. The Mod Browser Gets Its Heaviest Polish Pass Yet The in-game Mod Browser shipped in Part 12 as an explicit first version, and it is one of the three features named in the official launch announcement. Part 13 spends eight bullets on it, six of them controller-related. Quoted in full: "The Mod Browser install button is now easier to reach on a controller. The controller buttons should now be more in line with those on the Server Discovery page." "The Mod Browser has been updated so that using a thumbstick should now be able to reach all of the carousels, checkboxes, buttons, and tiles." "Installing a mod will no longer cancel the download of other mods. Mods are now instead placed into a queue." "The 'Browse All' section will no longer refer to the total number of Worlds, Mods, and Prefabs as just Mods." "The Mod Browser can now correctly be navigated to and from using controller trigger buttons." "Filters are now applied by selecting them with a button press." "Navigating between Mod Browser tabs with a thumbstick will no longer cause the focus to switch to the search icon." "The update marker on an installed mod now provides a tooltip to explain what it means." The download queue is the one functional fix in the list, and it is a real one: installing a second mod used to cancel the first one's download. Anyone setting up a fresh client would have hit that within their first five minutes, with no way of knowing why the first mod never appeared. The rest is controller navigation, and the volume is the interesting part. Six bullets on thumbstick reachability, trigger navigation, focus handling and button parity is not incidental polish — that is somebody working through a gamepad pass systematically, one week before release, on a feature that shipped one week earlier. The stated goal of aligning the controller buttons with the Server Discovery page suggests Server Discovery is being treated as the reference implementation for controller input in the menus. The tooltip on the update marker is smaller but genuinely good design: an icon meaning "an update exists for this" is useless if nobody knows that is what it means. One caution for launch week that has nothing to do with the browser's quality. Reading CurseForge's Hytale section on August 21, 2026, its game-version filter offered exactly two options, Early Access and 0.5. That is a dated observation rather than a standing fact, and it is nobody's fault — no sensible author tags a stable release against a moving pre-release branch — but it sets expectations. Check the supported game versions on a mod page before you press install, and expect the ecosystem to catch up in the weeks after the 27th rather than on the day. Player-Facing Fixes: Portals, Dupes, Arrows and Glass The bug-fix body of Part 13 is long and unusually varied. The ones with consequences beyond the immediate symptom are worth calling out. Portal destinations stop closing behind you "Portal destinations will no longer close down prematurely when you move away from the portal device. The worlds will stay open and the portals will reconnect to them when you get within range." This is a world-lifetime fix dressed as a portal fix. Walking away from the device was closing down the destination world, so returning meant reopening it. Now the destination stays open and the portal reconnects when you are back in range. On a multiplayer server this is much more visible than it sounds: a portal network where destinations survive people wandering off behaves completely differently from one where they do not. The plugin-side companion, in the modder section, matters if you build with instances: "The links will not survive a server restart." That is the caveat on PortalInstanceLinks and PortalInstanceRelinker, the new machinery that lets portal devices inside an instance copy remember the world they opened, so a fresh copy of that instance reconnects instead of losing the link. It keeps the destination and device config keyed by instance and block position, and restores them when a copy starts. Useful — but in memory only. If you are building a dungeon or arena system on instance portals, design for links being gone after a restart rather than discovering it during one. Water and glass are the surfaces Part 13's rendering fix targets: see-through surfaces were losing their sharpness, and glowing particles had stopped glowing. A general official Hytale screenshot, not a Part 13 screenshot. The duplication bug "Fixed an issue that could result in items being duplicated under specific circumstances." One line, no detail, and that is normal and correct — nobody publishes a reproduction for a live dupe. It is still one of the most valuable entries in Part 13 for an owner, because a duplication bug does not stay a bug for long on a public server. It becomes an economy. If you have been running an economy server on the pre-release branch and your numbers have looked wrong, this is one more argument for a fresh start at launch. Combat, blocks and the rest "Multi-block objects such as doors or statues will now be correctly struck at the point where you aimed." Anyone who has swung at a door and hit nothing knows this one. "Area of effect attacks will now affect the correct areas in parts of the world with negative coordinates." The classic negative-coordinate sign bug, in AoE. If your spawn sits near the origin, part of your world had subtly wrong AoE behaviour. "Arrows that are fired through cells containing blocks with smaller hitboxes will now correctly perform interactions on the block they impact." "Larger soft blocks, such as the Spider Cocoon, can now be shot down." "Interaction prompts now show all available options for blocks with more than one interaction." Multi-interaction blocks were only advertising one option. "The Large Kweebec Chest will now be treated as a wooden block when breaking it, meaning hatchets should be the most effective way to break it." "Invulnerable creatures are standing their ground and will no longer be affected by knockback from projectiles." Invulnerable meant unkillable but still shovable — relevant if you use invulnerable NPCs as fixtures. "Performing actions such as opening chests or interacting with objects can once again cause nearby creatures to notice your presence." A regression: "once again" is doing the work in that sentence. "Fixed an issue where picking up unrelated items could merge the item pickup notifications together." Graphics and audio "Fixed an issue causing see-through surfaces such as glass or water to lose their sharpness." Builders working with glass will notice this immediately. "Glowing particles have been permitted to glow once again." Another regression, phrased with the patch notes' usual dry humour. "Vanquished the unending darkness that would occur if a weather effect was applied within a world that forces its own weather effects." If you run a custom world with forced weather plus anything else that applies weather, that combination was the trigger for permanent darkness. "Music and ambience will no longer become quite so quiet while on low Health. You may still be in danger, but at least you can now more easily appreciate the sounds of the world around you." The low-health audio duck was too aggressive. Creative and building Two creative fixes, and the second one is genuinely important if you copy large builds: "When copying and saving selections of blocks, Trigger Volumes will only also be copied or saved if they exist within that selection. Previously, Trigger Volumes that connect to the border of the selection would also be included." Volumes touching the border of a selection were being dragged along with it. On a server where trigger volumes carry live logic, that meant a copy could silently duplicate behaviour you did not intend to duplicate — and duplicated volumes are a genuinely unpleasant thing to debug, because everything looks correct. Paired with it, from the world fixes: "Trigger Volumes that are pasted into the world will no longer lose their conditions, rejection effects, or group settings." So pasting was stripping conditions, rejection effects and group settings. Both halves of the copy-paste cycle were wrong in opposite directions: the copy took too much, the paste kept too little. If you build with volumes, re-verify any logic you copy-pasted while on the pre-release branch — it may have been silently wrong since you built it. Our guide to trigger volumes and no-code logic covers what those settings do and what a stripped volume looks like in practice. The third creative entry is smaller: "Held builder brushes now use the correct model." WorldGen V2: Two Fixes and Twelve New Density Nodes Two player-facing generation fixes first: "Fixed a defect in WorldGen V2 that was deleting some entities in rotated prefab." Rotation was deleting entities out of prefabs. If you have placed rotated prefabs and found NPCs or props missing, that is the cause. "Fixed a defect in WorldGen V2 generating different prefabs on separate platforms." The same seed was producing different prefabs on different platforms — a determinism bug, and the worst kind for a multiplayer game. The second one deserves emphasis. Cross-platform determinism is the property that makes a shared world coherent, and a generator that disagrees with itself by platform is a class of problem you cannot patch around from a server. Fixed a week before launch is the right time to find it. On top of the fixes, the generator gains real expressive power. Twelve new logical Density nodes: Comparator, Equal, GreaterOrEqual, GreaterThan, LessOrEqual, LessThan, And, Or, Not, Nor, Xor and Selector. That is a complete boolean and comparison vocabulary arriving in one go. Before this, conditional logic in a density graph had to be expressed arithmetically — the usual tricks with clamps and multiplications standing in for an if. Now the graph can say what it means, and Selector is the most useful of the twelve for biome logic, because branching on a condition is the operation everything else was working around. Our WorldGen V2 graph system and nodes guide covers how density graphs are assembled, and these twelve slot straight into that model. Alongside them: "Improved the performance of SimplexNoise2D and SimplexNoise3D Density nodes by up to ~20%." Simplex noise is the base layer of nearly every graph, so a fifth off the two most-used nodes is a broad generation-time win rather than a narrow one. There is also additional validation on Density assets, and a new Example_Vector_Offset_Avoid biome demonstrating how to offset positions away from a density region so props steer clear of an area. Several smaller generation fixes round it out: a WorldStructure asset with a broken default Biome reference no longer builds silently; deleting a WorldGen V2 instance or stopping the server no longer floods the log with "Failed to load chunk!"; the PositionsHorizontalPinch Density feature no longer throws exceptions at the world origin; the Offset Pattern node stops offering a decimal vector pin for its offset in the node editor; and a defect in the Spawner NodeAction that made Graph nodes disappear in negative coordinates is fixed. If you are still deciding what to do with an existing world, our write-up on WorldGen V1 versus V2 and what happens to existing worlds is the piece to read before the 27th, not after. Breaking Changes: What Part 13 Removes Part 13 is a stabilisation build, but it is not a feature freeze. Public API is still being removed six days before launch. If you maintain a plugin, this section is the whole reason to read Part 13. BlockChunk loses its per-block light accessors "BlockChunk no longer exposes the per block light accessors, getSectionCount, blockCounts, or setNeighbourBlocksTicking. Resolve the chunk section for the block Y and read light through BlockSection.getGlobalLight() instead." This is the same direction of travel Part 12 set when it deleted BlockAccessor outright: block access is moving from chunk level to section level. The migration is mechanical — resolve the section for the block Y, then read through BlockSection.getGlobalLight() — but it is not a rename, so it will not compile until you do it. Four members gone in one entry. WorldChunk.toHolder is gone "Removed WorldChunk.toHolder. Chunk saving always goes through saver.saveChunkColumn now…" The note adds that the new path copies the chunk entity's components instead of aliasing them, and that GeneratedChunk.toChunkHolder assembles its holder inline. Copy rather than alias is the safety fix hiding in there: an aliased component is shared state, and shared state during a save is how a chunk gets written in a torn state. Anything that saved chunks by hand needs to move onto saver.saveChunkColumn. Camera and selector overloads removed "CameraSequenceBuilder no longer carries the keyframe(..., Float fov) and keyframeLookingAt(..., Float fov) overloads." "…the entity-anchored Selector.selectNearbyBlocks overloads are gone." FOV moves onto the new CameraKeyframeBuilder, which takes duration and easing in its constructor and leaves every other channel optional — a cleaner shape, but a compile break for any cinematic code passing FOV the old way. The selector removal comes with a replacement: selectors now resolve the filler base block themselves and report it through the new Selector.BlockConsumer, which takes the hit cell and the base cell together, so SelectInteraction reads both straight from the callback rather than calling the deprecated IChunkAccessorSync.getBaseBlock. Renames and deprecations Three straightforward renames, which are the easy half of the day: CarryInteractionHints on Item becomes CarryHudInputBindings CarryInteractionHint on RootInteraction becomes HudInputBindingEntry The EncounterAudio collector becomes EncounterMembers Note that the first two are asset-facing as well as code-facing — the old names appear in item and interaction definitions, not only in Java. Search your content, not just your source. For the wider Update 6 migration picture, our Update 6 protocol and breaking changes guide for server operators tracks the removals across the whole pre-release run rather than one part at a time. Behaviour Changes That Do Not Break the Build, but Change Your Server These are the dangerous ones, because nothing fails to compile. Your server starts, and then behaves differently. Spawning now checks whether the section is ticking "Spawning now looks at the chunk section at the spawn Y through the new SpawningContext.isTickingSection, so a loaded column with a non ticking section at that height no longer accepts spawns." This can change mob spawning on a live server, and it will not announce itself. The old test was effectively "is the column loaded". The new test is "is the section at this specific height ticking". A loaded column with a non-ticking section at the spawn height used to accept spawns and now refuses them. Who feels it: anyone with a mob farm, a spawner-driven event, or a custom spawning plugin that depends on mobs appearing at a height nobody is standing near. Tall worlds make this more likely, not less, because a column now spans far more sections than it used to. If mob rates matter to your server's economy or its events, test spawning specifically after you update. It is the single most likely thing in Part 13 to change your server without producing a single error line. Proxy-entity interactions are distance checked "Block interactions that run for a proxy entity are now distance checked like players are. A projectile must be within 8 blocks of the cell it acts on, measured against the contact cell so a tall block is not rejected by its own height." A projectile is a proxy entity, and proxy entities were not distance checked. Now they are, with an 8 block limit. The refinement is thoughtful — measuring against the contact cell rather than the block origin stops a tall block from failing its own check because its origin is far from where the arrow actually hit — but the ceiling is real. Any content that used a projectile to act on a block from further than 8 blocks away will stop working, and it will stop working quietly. Related, and in the same area: projectile physics now records the cell the projectile actually touched on both client and server, so an impact chain acts on that cell rather than one derived from the final position, with base cell resolution moved to SimpleBlockInteraction.resolveBaseBlockPosition. And the held item now resolves from the interaction context when the acting entity has no inventory, so a projectile weighs a break against the shooter's item. Blocks also gain a break-time interaction chain: OnBreak fires on a normal break and OnBreakImpact fires when a falling block lands and breaks. A removal that should not trigger the block's own reaction passes SetBlockSettings.NO_FIRE_ON_BREAK to suppress the OnBreak chain, and BreakFallingBlockImpact now inherits DropItems so a child block type keeps its parent's value. Projectile breaks can also be narrowed: a new SoftOnly flag on BreakBlockInteraction ignores whatever the breaking entity holds, and the new Block_Break_Projectile interaction "sets it for the 38 projectile configs that used to share Block_Break_Adventure". Thirty-eight configs changing behaviour in one line is worth a look if you have customised projectile breaking. New Protocol: Block Animation Speeds and a Native Boss Bar Two protocol additions, and one of them opens a door. "The wire protocol gained the SetBlockAnimationSpeeds packet and a ModelAnimationSpeed field on BlockType. Each packet carries the complete state of one section together with a monotonic revision, so an out of order packet cannot undo a newer one." The design note is the interesting half. Full section state plus a monotonic revision is the boring, correct way to do this: no deltas to lose, no ordering assumptions, and an old packet arriving late is simply discarded. That is a protocol you can trust under packet loss. "HudComponent gained a BossBar entry, and the new UpdateBossBar packet carries the entity network id, the name as a FormattedMessage, and a Hide flag. A game mode can use it to show or hide the bar." This is genuinely new surface. A native boss bar over the wire means a game mode can drive a real boss health bar rather than hand-building an approximation out of a custom HUD document. It carries the entity network id, so the bar is bound to an actual entity rather than to a number a plugin has to keep in sync; the name is a FormattedMessage, so it localises and styles like any other message; and a Hide flag makes showing and hiding a one-packet operation. If you have written a fake boss bar, you can delete it. Two new commands "Added a /blockanimspeed command that sets the model animation speed of the block you are targeting, with an optional animation phase in frames." "Added /worldmap markers override with add, remove, and clear subcommands for trying marker overrides in game. The subcommands inherit the GROUP_WORLD_EDITOR permission from /worldmap." Both are authoring tools rather than player commands, and the permission inheritance is the part operators should note: the marker override subcommands inherit GROUP_WORLD_EDITOR from /worldmap, so anyone who can already use /worldmap can use them. If your permission groups are broad, that is worth a look before launch — our whitelist, access control and permissions guide covers auditing groups so an inherited node does not become an accident. The rest of the modder-facing surface Part 13 adds a substantial amount that breaks nothing: Block animation from gameplay state. A new CustomModelAnimationSpeed on a BlockType or one of its states is "a multiplier from 0 up to 100 and it inherits like the other model properties". The runtime side is BlockAnimationModule, offering setBlockAnimationSpeed, setBlockAnimationPhase, clearBlockAnimationSpeed and getBlockAnimationSpeedOverride, "all on the world thread, and they return false when the target section is not loaded". Note both halves of that: world thread only, and a false return you must actually check, because an unloaded section is a normal condition rather than an error. Map marker overrides in code and in events. WorldMapManager.addMarkerOverride takes a marker ID and a MapMarkerOverride carrying an optional icon and an optional global flag, applying to every player in the world from the next tick. World events get MapMarkerOverrideAddAction and MapMarkerOverrideRemoveAction, and the override is dropped on its own when the event ends — self-cleaning, which is the right default. NPC head rotation and richer spawning. A new Rotate head motion takes a RotationSpeed in signed degrees per second, with ClearPitch flattening head pitch while it turns. Separately, SpawnNPCInteraction now takes a weighted entity pool with per-entry count ranges, a spawn count range, distance scatter, an optional spawn state, a spawn velocity, midair spawning, centered hitbox spawning and relaxed full-cube clearance — and spawn validation can ignore decorative non-full blocks where you configure it to. Event titles and message targeting. A new ShowEventTitle interaction puts an event title on screen, and a new Target field on SendMessageInteraction sends to the instigating entity, to every player in the world the interaction runs in, or to all players across every world. Depth of field from the server. A DepthOfFieldSettings focus band sits on ServerCameraSettings and on each keyframe via CameraKeyframeBuilder.depthOfField, blending across a sequence with the segment easing — enough, per the notes, for a tilt-shift miniature look from an aerial shot. Cursor cameras become usable. Gamepad support via the right stick with deadzone and sensitivity applied; PlayerMouseButtonEvent fires again on clicks, carrying the target block or entity and the screen point; movement runs at forward speed in every direction instead of W outrunning A, S and D; and cursor cameras now ignore mouse input while a menu, chat or page is open, so the pause menu stops spinning your character. The camera offset that extends interaction reach is now capped, "since it arrives from server-sent values" — a quiet security fix worth noticing. Per-player weather sticks. An override set through WeatherTracker.setOverrideWeatherIndex now stays up in a world with forced weather instead of reverting within a second, SetWeatherEffect with PlayerOnly sticks for the same reason, and /weather set leaves that player's sky alone until the override clears. Smaller items: notification tags now apply to item notifications, so items can be split into separate toasts by tag; WaveDelay on a particle spawner inherits from its parent again; and particle assets now carry field descriptions in the editor. What Part 13 Does Not Do: No Rebuild Required This is the best news in the release for anyone running a server, and it is defined by absence, so it is easy to miss. Part 13 contains no protocol CRC change and no rebuild requirement. An earlier Update 6 pre-release note reported that the protocol CRC had changed, which is the kind of entry that forces every plugin and every proxy to be rebuilt in lockstep or connections stop working. There is nothing of that kind in Part 13. What that means concretely: Part 13 by itself does not re-break your connections. If you were already running Part 12 successfully, moving to Part 13 does not force a rebuild cycle on your plugin set. The API removals above will break plugins at compile time, which is a different and much more manageable problem than a wire-format change that breaks them at runtime. Do not over-read it. This says nothing about what the stable Update 6 build on August 27 will require — only that Part 13, in isolation, does not add a protocol break on top of everything else in the final week. The Launch Date Context The anchor for all of this was set four days before Part 13. On August 17, 2026, the official @Hytale account posted: "Update 6 releases August 27 — Mod Browser, Hardcore Mode, new Creative Tools, and so much more! Note to Modders/Server Operators: please check the warnings and bug fixes to ensure you are prepared." Two things are true at once here and both are worth stating. The date is officially confirmed. It came from the verified official account, not an aggregator, not a leak. And as of August 21 it still appears nowhere on hytale.com. The game updates channel still tops out at "HOTFIXES: UPDATE 5", the front page carries no countdown, the download page carries no date, and the support site has no Update 6 article. That is not a contradiction, just an unfinished rollout — but if you have been checking the website and finding nothing, that is why. We are also not going to state a launch time of day, because only the date has been published. The closing line of that post is effectively the commission for this article. "Please check the warnings and bug fixes to ensure you are prepared" — Part 13 is the warnings and bug fixes. Of the three features named, two are directly touched by Part 13: the Mod Browser gets eight fixes, and if you are planning to run Hardcore, our Hardcore Mode guide covers enabling it and what changes. FAQ What is new in Hytale Update 6 Part 13? Part 13, dated August 20, 2026, is a stabilisation build. It carries eight memory leak and crash fixes — covering main-menu world previews, character previews, entity status effects, world map markers, Machinima scene loading, the asset editor, sky loading on world exit, and a crash affecting very large long-running worlds that is now also faster. It reduces memory use at high view distances, spends eight bullets polishing the Mod Browser, fixes an item duplication bug, ends the raw-text bug after server restarts, makes /discovery link report which failure it hit, adds twelve logical WorldGen V2 Density nodes and a native boss bar to the protocol, and removes several public APIs including the BlockChunk per-block light accessors and WorldChunk.toHolder. Is Part 13 the final Hytale Update 6 pre-release? Hypixel Studios has not said so. Our reading is that it probably is: the parts have arrived on a Thursday cadence — Part 10 on July 30, Part 11 on August 6, Part 12 on August 13, Part 13 on August 20 — and Update 6 releases on Thursday August 27, so if the cadence holds there is no room for a Part 14 before the stable build. Treat that as our inference, not an announcement, and plan as though the current API surface is what you ship against. Why can I not find the Part 13 patch notes in Hytale's August news archive? Because Parts 1 through 13 are all sections inside a single post dated May 28, 2026, which is updated weekly rather than replaced. The post never creates an August archive entry, so hytale.com/news/archive/2026/8 reports "No posts found for this month" even though Part 13 was published on August 20. What does the /discovery link fix change? DiscoveryService.sendHeartbeat now returns a HeartbeatResult, so three failure modes each get their own message: a token that matches no listing, a server signed in as a different game profile, and an unreachable service. Just as importantly, the token is only linked when the heartbeat really succeeds, so a server can no longer end up believing it is linked when it is not. Does Part 13 break my Hytale plugins? Some, at compile time. Part 13 removes the BlockChunk per-block light accessors along with getSectionCount, blockCounts and setNeighbourBlocksTicking; removes WorldChunk.toHolder; removes the CameraSequenceBuilder FOV keyframe overloads; and removes the entity-anchored Selector.selectNearbyBlocks overloads. It also renames CarryInteractionHints to CarryHudInputBindings, CarryInteractionHint to HudInputBindingEntry and the EncounterAudio collector to EncounterMembers. What it does not contain is a protocol CRC change or a rebuild requirement, so Part 13 does not re-break connections on its own. Will Part 13 change mob spawning on my server? It can. Spawning now checks the chunk section at the spawn Y through the new SpawningContext.isTickingSection, so a loaded column with a non-ticking section at that height no longer accepts spawns. Nothing fails to compile and nothing logs an error — rates simply change. Test spawning explicitly after you update, especially if you run farms, spawner-driven events or a custom spawning plugin. When does Hytale Update 6 release? August 27, 2026, confirmed by the official @Hytale account on August 17, 2026. No time of day has been published, and as of August 21 the date still does not appear anywhere on hytale.com. What Part 13 Means If You Run a Server Five things, in the order they will bite. Test mob spawning after you update. The SpawningContext.isTickingSection change is the only item in Part 13 that can quietly rewrite your server's behaviour with no error, no crash and no compile failure. If spawn rates matter to your economy or your events, verify them rather than assume them. Re-verify any trigger volume logic you copy-pasted on the pre-release branch. Copies were pulling in border-touching volumes and pastes were dropping conditions, rejection effects and group settings. Both are fixed now, but anything built while they were broken is still broken. Check your plugins against the removals: the BlockChunk light accessors, getSectionCount, blockCounts, setNeighbourBlocksTicking, WorldChunk.toHolder, the CameraSequenceBuilder FOV overloads and the entity-anchored Selector.selectNearbyBlocks overloads. Then search your content — not just your source — for the three renames, because two of them appear in item and interaction definitions. Watch your log after the first restart on the new build. The .lang parser now names the file and the line number of a bad translation line instead of discarding the whole file. If you have been seeing raw text after restarts, that message is your fix. Do not schedule a rebuild you do not need. Part 13 carries no protocol CRC change and no rebuild requirement, so moving from Part 12 to Part 13 does not force a lockstep rebuild of your plugin set. Spend that time on the launch-day sequence instead — our August 27 server launch day checklist is the companion piece to this one, and it is the last thing worth reading before Thursday. For players, Part 13 is simply a better client than Part 12: fewer leaks, sharper glass, particles that glow, audio that does not vanish when your health drops, a Mod Browser that works on a controller, and portals that stay open when you walk away. That is a good way to arrive at a launch.