Hytale Update 7 Patch Notes: Chapter 1's First Wave Lands in Pre-Release, and It Breaks a Lot of Plugins

Hytale published "PRE-RELEASE PATCH NOTES (UPDATE 7)" on Wednesday 3 September 2026, bylined "Posted by Hytale Team September 3, 2026". The section header inside reads "Pre-Release (Update 7 Part 1)". It is the first Update 7 pre-release, and it carries the first wave of Chapter 1 content. The hard confirmation is not in the notes at all. The version switcher on pre-release.docs.hytale.com now reads 0.7.0-pre.1, where the previous morning it read 0.6.0-pre.13. That whole minor-version step is the clearest evidence the Update 7 train has opened. Worth saying plainly: the notes contain no version number anywhere. That label comes from the docs switcher and nowhere else. The notes are a living document - "we will update weekly!" - and have already grown once, with a section headed "Additions (We forgot some stuff - sorry! )" appended after publication. Hytale opens with a credit worth repeating: "A huge thank you to Blovien, Nullicorn, and NoctuaAstrum for the fixes, features, and polish they've brought to this update." Two stories run through it: content that is Creative Mode only for now, and underneath it the largest migration bill for server owners and plugin authors since Hytale/3. The Short Version Pre-release only. The live branch still tops out at 0.6.3 from 31 August 2026, and there is no 0.6.4. Opt in via Launcher, Settings, Pre-Release. First wave of Chapter 1 content. The Rune Ability system with a Runebinder's Effigy and five runes, six reworked Goblins, five Goblin gadgets, a rebuilt glider. Mostly Creative Mode for now. The notes state "For this pre-release, the Chapter 1 content is mostly reached through Creative Mode." Nothing here is final. The content is "still being actively developed" and the Rune Ability system "will change a lot between now and Chapter 1's release." Your server may refuse to boot. A new install-directory check exits with code 11. Override: --allow-install-dir. The protocol version was bumped. Client and server must match, and hand-built ShowEventTitle packets break today. Plugins will stop compiling. Nine fields gone from ClientFeature, seventeen chunk-access members removed, BlockDataProvider reads private, TickProcedure.onTick resignatured. An entire objective type was deleted. Any asset naming the treasure map objective fails to load. One framing note, because it will be misreported all week: Update 7 is not Chapter 1. This pre-release carries the first of "several waves landing over the coming weeks", and Hytale has never publicly equated an update number with a chapter, as our write-up on how many chapters early access covers explains. No Update 7 release date and no Chapter 1 release date has been given. Back up before you switch: a pre-release world may not reopen cleanly on stable, and the patchline lives in its own folder tree, which is why people report their worlds and mods have vanished. They have not, and our guide to missing worlds and mods after switching patchlines covers where everything went. The Rune Ability System The headline feature: "Introducing the Rune Ability system! Collect Runes and then place them within a Runebinder's Effigy to augment your combat abilities." Five ship in this wave: Rune: Enrage - channel primal rage to increase damage both dealt and received. Rune: Fireball - launch a fireball that explodes on impact. Rune: Imbue Poison - imbue your weapon with poison, applying a stacking poison debuff. Rune: Ground Slam - sunder the earth, erupting a spike that launches foes upward. Rune: Wind Strike - imbue your weapon with elemental wind, so the next three attacks launch piercing arcs of wind. Two weapon imbues, one self-buff with a real drawback attached, one ranged nuke, one crowd-control launcher: a deliberate spread rather than five flavours of damage. Our breakdown of the Chapter 1 runes system is the background reading. Keep the hedge in view: the notes say the system "will change a lot between now and Chapter 1's release". If you are planning server content around runes, plan around the concept, not these five effects. Abilities that cannot be activated now play different sounds depending on why, distinguishing insufficient charges, cooldown and the wrong weapon type. The appended additions also moved ability keys onto a controller modifier system, so Ability 1 is RB and Y, Ability 2 RB and X, and so on. Six Goblins and Their Gadgets The Goblins arrive as a proper combat roster rather than one enemy with palette swaps: the Scrapper (light melee that swarms), the Miner (heavy melee with a leap attack), the Guardian (heavily armored, defends with a shield), the Lobber (ranged, explosive arsenal), the Burner (ranged, flamethrower) and the Feastmaster, "a physically imposing gargantuan gobbler of grub". Swarm, leaper, shield, grenadier, flamethrower, big one: a fight designed to punish standing still, and a real step up from the first look at Chapter 1's Goblins and worldgen. The orphan Goblin Hermit and Scavenger assets were removed, so a mod referencing them is now pointing at nothing, while deprecated goblin spawn markers were restored under _Deprecated so worlds using them keep loading. The Goblins brought five gadgets: the Scrap Drill (breaks multiple blocks at once), the Spyglass, the Scrap Glider, Rocket Boots (double jumps) and the Hookshot, with Hook Anchors. Gliding was reworked: you can dive and ascend by pressing and releasing Sprint, and the glider keeps your velocity when you deploy it, which turns a glider into the end of a movement chain rather than a reset. For modders it has a cost - the old FallSpeedMultiplier, HorizontalSpeedMultiplier, TerminalVelocity and Speed values on the item are gone, replaced by a wider set of fields on Template_Glider covering the dive and the climb, so any custom glider needs retuning from scratch. Official Hytale concept art. The Goblin roster is the kind of encounter these spaces are built around, and the new encounter weather actions let a template change the sky mid-fight. World, Blocks and Trigger Volumes New blocksets: Enkindled Copper, Enkindled Iron, Goblin Iron and a set of Goblin decorations, plus new models and a texture polish on Gold. The change with the widest reach for server owners: server rule changes now affect players immediately. Health bars, combat text, armor hiding and the rules for placing or breaking blocks all update without leaving and rejoining, which deletes a whole class of reconnect workaround for anyone toggling rules between rounds. It is the player-facing half of the architectural change covered below, where those rules moved out of ClientFeature into the GameplayConfig asset. A new WorldConfig.BlockBreakingBypassTag also names a tag whose blocks stay breakable while AllowBlockBreaking is off. Trigger volumes got a real pass. Three new effects handle respawning - SetRespawnPoint, SetWorldSpawn and ClearRespawnPoints - and respawn points can set facing through a Yaw. A Tag Condition can compare one tag against another via CompareAgainst and CompareTagKey, and a new Activate Trigger Volumes toggle lets you walk through your own volumes without setting them off. Two new world event conditions arrived too, TimeCondition and GameFlagLevelCondition. Performance and the Crash List Entity-collision block lookups were deduplicated, which matters because they run for every moving player and creature on the server, and server-side block breaking no longer stops to load chunks mid-operation. The world map was reworked to load in small pieces instead of one huge image, so it uses a fraction of the memory and no longer stutters while open. The stability list is long and unusually good. The one that will fix the most machines outright: a crash on older NVIDIA graphics cards has been fixed, covering the GeForce 400 to 700 series and their laptop versions. If a player has never once managed to get in, ask what card they are on. Also fixed: crashes when leaving a world, when malicious network data nested structures too deep, and when joining a world running several large custom skins, plus several memory and graphics leaks. Servers close connections cleanly on shutdown now, and a fault where one player's connection could break networking for everyone else was fixed. NPCs cast shadows correctly again, a re-fix of ground covered by hotfix 0.6.3. Mods can now contain whole worlds, which appear in your world list once installed, and a world you create from one survives the mod being removed. A mod becomes a distributable place, not just a folder of assets. What Did Not Land in Part 1 Double NAT is not fixed yet, and that is not a broken promise On 20 August 2026, Alex (@MelodicAlbuild, Engine Developer at Hytale) wrote: "Specifically 'Double NAT' does not work yet. This is something I, and the rest of the team, are actively exploring, and we hope to have a solution for it out in the Update 7 Pre-Releases." We grepped the full Part 1 notes. There are zero standalone occurrences of "NAT", "STUN", "TURN", "ICE", "relay", "UPnP" or "port forward". The only networking-adjacent entries are the direct-route preference ("Multiplayer sessions now prefer a direct route where one exists, instead of alternatives that would increase ping"), the new Copy Network Report button, and the fix for one player's connection breaking networking for everyone else. Read that precisely, because it is not a miss. Alex said "Update 7 Pre-Releases", plural, and these notes are explicitly the first of several weekly waves, so Part 1 not containing it is consistent with what was said. The fix is still pending, and the place to check each week is the pre-release notes page itself. Our Double NAT explainer keeps the original hedges intact and lists what you can do meanwhile. None of the six mod browser items Eli listed on 31 August appear in Part 1 either, but that absence is not evidence they have not shipped: the mod browser is a server-side service, and patch notes are the wrong place to look for one. Server Owners: Your Server May Refuse To Boot "The server now refuses to boot when the content it writes would land inside the launcher's install folder, which every update patches or wipes. The check covers the working directory plus --universe, --prefab-cache and --backup-dir, and it prints the steps to move them somewhere safe before exiting with code 11." This will generate the most confused support tickets this week, and it is a data-loss guard rather than a regression: people have been losing universes for months by parking a server inside a folder the launcher rewrites on every patch. The new behaviour is a hard stop with instructions printed to console and exit code 11. Move your content, do not silence the check. Put the working directory, universe, prefab cache and backup directory somewhere the launcher never touches. It is the only fix that survives the next patch. If you must run there anyway, use --allow-install-dir, mirrored by the hytale.allow_install_dir system property. The notes are explicit that this means accepting the data loss risk. Know what already skips the check. Singleplayer runs, --help, --version, and a --bare start without --bootstrap are exempt. If your host restarts the process automatically, exit code 11 looks like a crash loop rather than a refusal, and you will never see the printed instructions. Check the first lines of console output, not the restart count. Our server crash recovery and config guide covers capturing that output when a supervisor is eating it. The related good news: servers and worlds no longer refuse to start when the saved view distance is higher than Hytale allows. The value is capped at 32 chunks, a MaxViewRadius outside 1 to 32 in config.json is clamped in memory with a warning while your file keeps whatever you wrote, and the command now rejects anything above 32 instead of 512. Our maxViewRadius breakdown covers what the value buys and costs. The Protocol Break The protocol version was bumped, which is the operational headline: client and server must match. Our Hytale/3 protocol breaking changes guide is the same shape of problem, and the same triage applies. UpdateLanguage.Language is a required protocol field now instead of an optional one, and the protocol version was bumped for it. It and Connect.Language also widened from a 16-character cap to 100 characters, which fits any .NET CultureInfo.Name. The ShowEventTitle packet dropped IsMajor in favour of an EventTitleStyle Style field, "which breaks any plugin that builds the packet by hand". Styles include Default and Major. A new WorldGameplayConfig packet replicates the world's gameplay config to the client, carrying WorldConfig, CombatConfig and PlayerConfig structs. It goes out on join and whenever the GameplayConfig asset reloads - the plumbing behind rule changes taking effect immediately. Beams are on the wire, through BeamConfig, UpdateBeamConfigs and BeamInstance, so beams need a matching client. A peer also rejects any structure nesting inside itself more than 32 levels deep. The IsMajor trap, which most coverage will get wrong IsMajor is handled in two different places with two different outcomes, and conflating them sends people chasing the wrong fix. In asset JSON, you are fine for now. The notes say ShowEventTitleInteraction, ShowEventTitleEffect and InstanceDiscoveryConfig all take a Style value, "and the old IsMajor and Major keys still decode so existing assets keep working, however the old IsMajor and Major properties are marked as deprecated and will be removed in a future version." Your existing assets load. They are on borrowed time, not broken. On the network protocol, you break today. The packet dropped IsMajor outright and no compatibility shim is described. If your plugin constructs that packet directly rather than going through the helper, it is broken now. And there is an ambiguity you should know about. Renames and Deprecations states flatly that "IsMajor is gone from ShowEventTitleEffect. The Style field covers it, so pick the look you want there instead of flipping a boolean." That sits in tension with the asset-compatibility line above, which names ShowEventTitleEffect among the types where the old keys still decode. We are not resolving that by guessing: test your event title assets on the pre-release build, and if the old key fails to decode, migrate immediately. Migrating is cheap either way: EventTitleUtil has overloads taking an EventTitleStyle, and /eventtitle now takes --style. Plugin Developers: What Stops Compiling This is the most breaking release for plugin authors since Hytale/3, and the breakage is concentrated in the chunk and block access surface. Budget an afternoon. Our server plugin development guide covers the API these changes are moving. Hard compile breaks ClientFeature lost nine fields. DisplayHealthBars, DisplayCombatText, CanHideHelmet, CanHideCuirass, CanHideGauntlets, CanHidePants, AllowBlockPlacement, AllowBlockBreaking and AllowBlockGathering are gone, and "a plugin naming one of them stops compiling". Those rules live in the GameplayConfig asset now; ClientFeature keeps the movement capabilities plugins register themselves. BlockDataProvider read methods are private. readBlockId, readRotation, readFiller, readFluidId and readFluidLevel "are private now, so a plugin that called them directly will not compile". Seventeen unused chunk-access members were removed, "so a plugin still calling them will not compile": IChunkAccessorSync.getBlockComponentHolder, IWorldChunksAsync.getNonTickingChunkAsync(int, int), BlockChunk.getSectionRefAtIndex, BlockComponentSection.getBlockReferences, BlockSection.setChunkSection and getMaximumHitboxExtent, PaletteTypeEnum.getPaletteId, and ten accessors on LocalCachedChunkAccessor. Read and write through the section ref instead. IChunkAccessorSync.getBaseBlock is gone. Filler blocks resolve through BlockOperations.resolveBaseBlockPosition, which takes a ChunkStore and never triggers a chunk load. ChunkAccessor.performBlockUpdate and WorldChunk.setTicking are gone. Use BlockOperations.updateBlockArea for a whole hitbox or BlockSection.setTicking with ChunkSection.markNeedsSaving for one cell. WorldChunk.setBlockPhysics and BlockTypeModule.SET_BLOCK_SETTINGS are removed too. The public ItemMergeSystem#RADIUS constant is gone. Merge distance comes from item config through ItemComponent#getMergeRadius(ComponentAccessor), with a matching MergeRadius key on ItemEntityConfig. Signature changes TickProcedure.onTick now takes a CommandBuffer<ChunkStore> and the chunk section Ref<ChunkStore> in place of the World and WorldChunk parameters, "so any subclass override needs updating". The world is available from commandBuffer.getExternalData().getWorld(). TargetUtil.getTargetBlock and getTargetLocation take a ChunkStore where they used to take a World, so calling code has to pass world.getChunkStore(). LightCalculation.init takes a ChunkStore and a section Ref rather than a WorldChunk, and ChunkLightingManager exposes invalidateLightInChunkSections. Deprecations to act on now Every chunk lookup returning a WorldChunk is marked for removal, across IChunkAccessorSync, IWorldChunksAsync, IWorldChunks, World and LocalCachedChunkAccessor. Behaviour is unchanged, but you compile with deprecation warnings and should move to ChunkStore.getChunkReference and the section store. WorldChunk.setBlock and breakBlock are deprecated for removal too. Read the direction of travel: chunks are becoming sections and references everywhere, and a plugin that still thinks in whole WorldChunk objects will keep breaking every release until it stops. One behavioural change to plan for while you are in there: block tick procedures now run in chunk sections at any height, where scheduled ticking used to stop outside Y 0 to 319, so a procedure written for that range has to cope with negative and high coordinates. Renames: The Find-and-Replace Table These are mechanical, and doing them in one pass hurts much less than discovering them one load error at a time. If you ship assets other people patch on top of, coordinate the rename. OldNewWhere it applies DurabilityOperatorComparisonOperatorPlugin code only. Asset JSON and the wire format are unchanged. ChargeAccelerationChargeAccelerationDistance and ChargeDecelerationDistanceBodyMotionCharge. Sizes each ramp in blocks instead of setting a rate. The old key only warns at load and loses the behaviour. RemovedBlockSetIgnoredBlockSetNPC charge config. The probe treats those blocks as non-colliding and breathable. SmallerThan, SmallerOrEquals, Select, Equals, GreaterOrEqualsLessThan, LessOrEqual, Selector, Equal, GreaterOrEqualDensity asset types. The node editor entries carry the new names too. Spectre_VoidVoid_SpectreModel, drop list, icon and particles. Old ids no longer resolve. Spiwer_Web_Full.pngSpider_Web_Full.pngAsset file rename. Fig_Blue_.pngFig_Blue.pngAsset file rename. The Treasure Map Objective Is Gone Read this carefully if you ship quests or adventure maps. It is a deletion, not a deprecation. "The treasure map objective is gone, along with everything it used. The TreasureMap objective task, the OpenTreasureContainer and DestroyTreasureCondition interactions, the LookBlocksBelow and TagBlockHeight world location conditions and the TreasureChest block entity component no longer decode, so any asset that names one fails to load." No migration path is offered and no replacement named. If your mod builds a treasure hunt on those pieces it does not load, and rebuilding means designing a different objective out of trigger volumes, the new conditions and the encounter system. The one relief: a world with a placed treasure chest still loads, "since the server keeps the component as unknown data". Your players' worlds survive. Your assets do not. The Good News for Plugin Authors Cubic worlds work properly. Explosions, block harvesting, raycast selectors and the spectator camera all work in cubic worlds now that TargetUtil no longer assumes a single vertical column. Encounters can force weather through SetEncounterWeather and ClearEncounterWeather. Caveat straight from the notes: NPC weather sensors still read world weather only, so Sensor: Weather does not match a forced sky. Drive that from encounter state or beacons instead. Universe resources flush at shutdown, in a new ShutdownEvent.FLUSH_UNIVERSE_RESOURCES stage that runs after SHUTDOWN_WORLDS while every plugin is still enabled. If you were losing plugin state on restart, that is your fix. Cursor server cameras are playable again, and there is a new Rewards builtin plugins can extend with their own reward types. Frequently Asked Questions Is Update 7 out on the live version of Hytale? No. Update 7 is pre-release only. The live release branch is unchanged and still tops out at 0.6.3 from 31 August 2026. There is no 0.6.4. You opt in through Launcher, Settings, Pre-Release. What version is the Hytale Update 7 pre-release? The pre-release docs version switcher reads 0.7.0-pre.1, up from 0.6.0-pre.13 the previous morning. The patch notes themselves contain no version number at all, so that label comes from the docs switcher rather than from the notes. Does Update 7 mean Chapter 1 has released? No. This pre-release carries the first wave of content for the upcoming Chapter 1, the first of several waves landing over the coming weeks. The notes say the content is still being actively developed and that the Rune Ability system in particular will change a lot before Chapter 1's release. No Chapter 1 release date and no Update 7 release date has been given. Did Update 7 fix Double NAT? Not in Part 1. There is no mention of NAT, STUN, TURN, relays, UPnP or port forwarding anywhere in these notes. The commitment made on 20 August was to have a solution "out in the Update 7 Pre-Releases", plural, and Part 1 is the first of several weekly waves, so its absence here is consistent with what was said rather than a missed deadline. Why does my Hytale server refuse to start after updating? Most likely the new install-directory check. The server refuses to boot when the content it writes would land inside the launcher's install folder, covering the working directory plus --universe, --prefab-cache and --backup-dir, and exits with code 11. The correct fix is moving that content somewhere safe; the --allow-install-dir flag, mirrored by the hytale.allow_install_dir system property, overrides the check and accepts the data loss risk. Will my plugin break in Update 7? Very likely, if it touches chunks, blocks or the wire format. ClientFeature lost nine fields, BlockDataProvider's five read methods are private, seventeen chunk-access members were removed, and TickProcedure.onTick and TargetUtil.getTargetBlock changed signature. A plugin building the ShowEventTitle packet by hand breaks too, and client and server must match since the protocol version was bumped. Do my existing event title assets still work? The asset schema section says the old IsMajor and Major keys still decode so existing assets keep working, and are deprecated for removal later. Renames and Deprecations separately says IsMajor is gone from ShowEventTitleEffect. Those statements sit in tension, so test on the pre-release build and migrate to Style either way. What To Do This Week If you play: opt in, back up first, and go break the Goblins. The Rune Ability system is what Hytale most wants feedback on, through the in-game reporter and the Feedback Request page. If you run a server: do not switch production yet. Stand up a second instance on the pre-release branch, check your directories against the install-folder rule before starting it, and find out which plugins compile. The last pre-release train ran to thirteen numbered parts before stable, so there is time to do this properly rather than at 2am on release day. If you write plugins: compile errors first, deprecation warnings second, assets third. Every release that ships while your plugin still holds a WorldChunk costs another afternoon. And when you have a build that works, browse the Hytale server list and find one running on the branch you are on.