Hytale Update 7 Part 5 Patch Notes: /leave Is Replaced by /portal leave, the Chunk Accessor Purge Is Finished, and Cubic World Generators Need a New Method

Hytale appended a fifth section to its Update 7 pre-release patch notes on 1 October 2026, and nothing announced it. The heading "Pre-Release (Update 7 Part 5)", followed by "October 1, 2026", now sits at the top of the same living document that has carried Part 1 since 3 September. The byline on that page still reads "September 3, 2026". The card for it on the news index still shows 3 September, and the RSS feed still shows 3 September, because Hytale appends each new part inside the existing page instead of posting it separately. If you watch the index or the feed, you did not hear about Part 5. We re-fetched the page today with a cache-buster to be sure we were not reading a stale copy. The response came back as a cache miss with a last-modified timestamp of Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:23:36 GMT, and the anchor pre-release-u7p5 sits above pre-release-u7p4 in the document. The version pins corroborate it: pre-release.docs.hytale.com now reads 0.7.0-pre.5, while docs.hytale.com still reads 0.6.8, the same stable pin we wrote about when 0.6.8 appeared on the docs site with no patch notes attached. Before Anything Else: What This Build Is, and What We Have Not Done These are pre-release patch notes. They describe 0.7.0-pre.5, a test build on the pre-release branch, not the stable release that players are on. Nothing in this article has shipped to stable, and nobody at this site has tested any of it. Every number, identifier and behaviour below is what the studio wrote in its own notes, read back to you with the server-owner consequences spelled out. Where we tell you what to do about something, that is our reading, not an instruction from Hytale. One more piece of framing, and it is important to get the attribution right. The Part 5 section contains no statement that it is the final part of the cycle. The intro at the top of the living page still says the notes will be updated weekly. The reason this build matters more than the four before it comes from somewhere else: Slikey's 29 September post, which we reported at the time, said there will be no pre-release on 8 October because finalising Chapter 1 would give too much of it away. With Chapter 1 landing on 12 October, that makes this 1 October build the last one anybody outside the studio can test a mod or a plugin against before patch day. The patch notes do not say that. Slikey did. The Part 5 section is large. We counted 204 bullet lines in it, including sub-bullets, which makes it comfortably the biggest part of the cycle. Below we have pulled out what actually changes work for someone running a server or shipping code, then the player-facing rework, then a plain list of what the notes do not tell you. The section opens with the usual credit line: A huge thank you to PrestonR88 for the fixes, features, and polish they’ve brought to this update. Your community contributions make Hytale better for everyone! The Commands Section Is Two Lines Long, and One of Them Breaks Things The Commands section of Part 5 contains exactly two bullets. Here they are in full. /portal may now be used instead of /fragment. The /leave command has now been replaced with /portal leave. The first is additive and harmless: /portal is a new way to spell /fragment. The second is the one to act on. "Replaced" is not "aliased". If your server has /leave written on a sign, in a help menu, in a rules channel, in a web page, in a tutorial world, or registered as an alias in a plugin's command table, assume it stops resolving on this build and plan for /portal leave. Our reading, not the studio's: this is the cheapest thing on the entire list to get wrong and the cheapest to fix. Grep your plugin sources, your prefab sign text and your Discord pinned messages for /leave today, while you still have a pre-release branch to test the replacement on. There is no deprecation window written into the note. The Chunk Column Accessor Purge Is Now Finished Part 4 began this by marking nine legacy column accessors as restricted, so that a plugin calling them stopped compiling under Error Prone. We said at the time that the pattern was restriction first, removal later. Part 5 is the removal. The "For Plugin Developers" block carries 11 bullets, and this is the one that will break the most third-party code: The old column accessor surface is gone. IWorldChunks, IWorldChunksAsync, IChunkAccessorSync, ChunkAccessor, OverridableChunkAccessor and LocalCachedChunkAccessor are deleted, along with the block accessors on World, WorldChunk and BlockChunk. Block reads now run through the section from ChunkStore.getChunkSectionReferenceAtBlock. Read "deleted" literally. These are not restricted, not deprecated and not allowlisted for first-party plugins. Six interfaces and classes are removed, and the block accessors on World, WorldChunk and BlockChunk go with them. A plugin that reads or writes blocks through any of those names does not compile against 0.7.0-pre.5, and no amount of ignoring compiler warnings will carry it forward. A second bullet removes the last of the type reads: Both getBlockType overloads are gone from IChunkAccessorSync because nothing called them. Read blocks through the chunk section reference from ChunkStore.getChunkSectionReferenceAtBlock instead. And a third removes the block entity path: WorldChunk.getBlockComponentEntity is gone, so block entities come from BlockModule.getBlockEntity, whose world overload now also rejects an invalid section ref. The BlockChunk block, count and ticking accessors went with it, and its (IntBytePalette, BlockSection[]) constructor is private. The replacement surface is named in every one of those entries, which is the one genuinely helpful thing about how this purge was written. Everything routes through ChunkStore.getChunkSectionReferenceAtBlock. Part 5 also adds the convenience layer that the section-based approach was missing: Reading blocks without touching a column got simpler. The new BlockReader interface carries getBlock and getFluidId, SectionReader implements it over chunk sections, and SectionAccessor extends it. Plus a way to hold a section open for the length of an asynchronous edit, which is the piece anyone writing a long-running world edit will need: A chunk section can now be pinned in memory for the length of an async edit, with addKeepLoaded, removeKeepLoaded and shouldKeepLoaded on ChunkSection. A held section does not keep its column resident on its own. That last sentence is a trap worth reading twice. Pinning a section does not pin its column. If your code assumed that holding a reference to anything inside a column kept the column loaded, that assumption is now explicitly wrong. If you are only now starting this migration, the background is in our Update 7 server and plugin breaking changes guide, which tracks the whole arc from 0.6.4 forward. Cubic World Generators Need a New Method Signature This is a mandatory signature change, and it is listed as a flat requirement rather than an option. Cubic world generators must now implement generateColumn(seed, index, x, z, stillNeeded, priority) on IWorldGen.Cubic. It returns a GeneratedColumn holding only the column level data such as the tint. Paired with it: In a cubic world, column and section generation is now split, no longer requiring the 0-9 range to be generated with the column. If you ship a custom cubic world generator, that is a compile-breaking interface change plus a change in what the engine expects you to produce in one pass. Column level data such as the tint comes back in a GeneratedColumn, and the section range no longer has to be generated alongside it. For what cubic worlds are and why the column and section split exists at all, see our explainer on cubic chunks and infinite world height. The Creative Tools section has a matching player-visible result: "Builder tools now work at any height in cubic worlds." The height limit has also been removed when copying a selection. UpdateBossBar Changes Its Wire Layout A protocol break, stated as one: The UpdateBossBar packet gained a HardMode field, which changes the wire layout. EncounterBossBarState.setTracked and the UpdateBossBar constructor both take a trailing hardMode argument. Anything that constructs, parses, proxies or logs that packet needs rebuilding against the new layout. A changed wire layout is not something you can defer with a compatibility shim on one side only. The reason the field exists is on the content side, in the NPCs and Entities part of the modder-facing list: Encounters can now mark their boss as hard mode on the boss bar. SetEncounterBossBar takes an optional HardMode boolean that defaults to false, and because each action replaces the whole bar state, leaving it out turns hard mode back off. That is the hard mode plumbing we wrote about when the Gobliterator hard mode boss did not appear in a pre-release build. The boss bar support for hard mode has now shipped to modders even though the encounter itself has not. Note the sting in the tail of that bullet: because each SetEncounterBossBar action replaces the entire bar state, omitting HardMode on a later call silently turns hard mode off again. If you build a multi-stage encounter, you have to set the flag on every action, not just the first. Two New Server Settings for BuilderTools BuilderTools gained two limits on how much world a single edit loads up front, PrefetchColumnLimit (default 1024) and PrefetchSectionLimit (default 10240). An edit over either limit reads what is already in memory and reports the rest as skipped. Both defaults are given, so you know what you are starting from: PrefetchColumnLimit at 1024 and PrefetchSectionLimit at 10240. The behaviour past the limit is the part to communicate to your build team. An oversized edit does not fail and does not stall the server waiting on disk. It reads whatever is already resident and reports the remainder as skipped, which means a large selection can come back partially applied with a report rather than an error. The Creative Tools section lines up with that: an edit too large for a creative tool to perform in one action will no longer attempt the edit and will now notify the editor what size would fit, and attempting to save a prefab wider than the creative tools can hold will now fail instead of saving only part of the prefab. Undo and redo now report how many steps were undone or redone. The Stability Fix That Matters on Patch Day Fixed an issue where a freshly started server could freeze when several players joined at the same moment. Of every line in Part 5, this is the one most likely to affect you personally on 12 October. A freshly started server freezing under a simultaneous join rush is exactly the shape of a Chapter 1 launch: you restart onto the new build, you announce it, and everybody connects within the same few seconds. That it is fixed in the last pre-release before launch is worth knowing. Whether the fix holds under real launch load is not something we can tell you, and the note does not quantify how many players triggered it. Two more performance entries are relevant to a loaded server. "Blocks, fluids, and creatures far above or below players will now pause until a player approaches", which matters most in cubic worlds with a lot of vertical extent, and the Performance Fixes section says "Fixed a long stall that could occur when joining a world." If you are working through launch preparation, our Chapter 1 server preparation checklist is the companion piece to this section. World Events Can Now Be Toggled for Exploration Worlds World Events may now be enabled or disabled in the World Settings screen for Exploration Worlds. When world events first became configurable, the World Settings toggle covered Creative Worlds only, with new Creative worlds defaulting to events off. Part 5 extends the screen toggle to Exploration Worlds. The note does not state a default for Exploration Worlds, so if the setting matters on your server, check it rather than assuming it inherits the Creative default. The Rest of the Modder-Facing List Eleven bullets sit under "For Plugin Developers" and we have covered six of them above. The remainder, plus the other modder-facing sections, in short: Server-side Noesis UI has landed, and you are told not to use it. The note is unusually blunt: "The tentative API for server-side Noesis UI has made its way into the server, however it is currently not usable yet as we are still finalizing parts of the system before it is ready to be used. All new APIs are prefixed with dev_ and should not be used yet." If you see a dev_ prefix in the server API, that is the marker. Our reading: treat anything dev_ prefixed as having no stability guarantee at all, including between pre-release builds. A new block carry event. Plugins can now react when a player starts to carry a block, through a new BlockCarriedEvent that fires on the block entity holder with the carrier reference, so an entity holder event system can adjust your own components at that moment. Cooldown overlays are reskinnable. "The cooldown overlay drawn on item slots can be reskinned. ItemGridStyle takes a new CooldownOverlay patch property that you can set in a .ui style block." That pairs with the player-facing change where items on cooldown dim and display a draining overlay. World-Gen V2 context sizing is now dynamic. "World-Gen V2 now manages the Context Size dynamically isolating the performance impact of adding new Biomes and POIs from the rest of the world. This feature can be configured in the Runtime node’s new ContextPrecision setting." Two example biomes also ship, Example_Vector_Offset_Gradient and Example_Sin_XValue. NPC roles can read universe-wide flags. "NPC roles can now react to universe-wide game flags. A new GameFlag sensor takes a Flag, a Level and a Comparator." Target leading is now opt-in, which is a silent behaviour change. "Target leading is now opt-in. Deflection defaults to false, so any NPC role that wants its ranged attacks to lead a moving target has to set it to true." If you ship custom ranged NPCs, they stop leading their targets unless you set the flag. Nothing fails to compile, so this one changes behaviour quietly. Item quality is now inherited unless set. "Item stacks now store a quality only when one is explicitly set. A stack without its own quality follows the quality on its item asset, so an item that gets updated picks the new value up." Alongside it, "The /give command gained an optional quality argument that overrides the quality the item asset would otherwise use." A confirmation page for custom UI. "Content can now ask the player to confirm something before it acts, with a new Confirmation page for OpenCustomUI. It takes TitleKey and MessageKey for the text, optional ConfirmKey and CancelKey for the buttons, a required Success root that runs on confirm, and an optional Fail root for every other way the page closes." Note that the Fail root covers every other way the page closes, not just the cancel button. Document writes get their own thread pool. "Document writes no longer run on the common pool. BsonUtil.writeDocument now uses its own fixed pool of four Document Writer threads, which covers world config, world resources and player saves, so a world tick can no longer starve waiting on a save." That is a direct answer to a class of tick-time spike on busy servers. Lighting and chunk commands now work at any height. "Fixed lighting invalidate --one and lighting info --detail always reading section 0, because both passed a section index where a block Y was expected. lighting get, chunk lighting, chunk forcetick, chunk fixheight and chunk resend --clearcache now work on loaded sections at any height, and an absent section answers with the new commands.errors.sectionNotLoaded message." If you have been debugging lighting in a cubic world and getting nonsense, that is why. Portal world cleanup and edit-mode protection. "Portal worlds reached through TeleportInstanceInteraction are now removed from disk once the portal world’s timer reaches 0", and separately, "Fixed a portal world config overriding the settings of an instance you opened for editing. Instance edit worlds now carry an isEditMode flag on InstanceWorldConfig, and PortalWorldUtils leaves those worlds alone." A crash fix for builder strokes below Y 0. All four TargetUtil.getTargetBlockAvoidLocations overloads now take a collection of integer triple sets for blocksToIgnore rather than a collection of packed-long sets. The note says the old packed-long form crashed the world thread on a stroke below Y 0. That is both a signature change and the reason for it. Kill feed markup and asset pack refresh fixes. Killer and decedent names in the kill feed now render their markup instead of showing raw tags, and an asset pack refresh no longer errors because the pack's ZIP file system was closed before unregister listeners had finished reading it. Trigger volume timers respect world time. "Trigger volume timers will now be affected by the speed of time within the world. This means commands such as /time pause or /time dilation will be respected by trigger volume timers." Timed trigger volume events also no longer count down in paused singleplayer worlds and then fire all at once on unpause. The Player-Facing Rework: Mana Becomes an Economy The combat section of Part 5 is the largest single rework of the cycle, and it changes how abilities feel rather than just their numbers. Three lines carry most of it. Mana will now passively regenerate from empty to full over the course of 30 seconds. Signature abilities now restore Mana whenever they hit an enemy. Hitting several at once restores more, with diminishing returns. All abilities now slow the caster to 60% of their movement speed when casting. Put together: mana is no longer a long resource you spend down over a fight, it is a 30 second cycle, and signature abilities are the way you accelerate it. The cost is mobility on every single cast. The individual ability numbers follow the same shape, with mana costs up sharply and cooldowns cut hard. Ground Slam goes to 40 mana from 30 with a 5 second cooldown from 18. Fireball goes to 30 mana from 25 with a 2 second cooldown from 12, deals 28 Fire damage from 24, and travels about 25 blocks. Wind Strike goes to 30 mana from 20 with a 2 second cooldown from 10, dealing 10 Wind damage from 8. Enrage goes to 45 mana from 20 with a 4 second cooldown from 16 and an 8 second duration from 10. Imbue Poison goes to 40 mana from 10 with a 4 second cooldown from 18 and a 6 second duration from 8. Chain Hook goes to 50 mana from 15. Charged Shot moves to a flat 35 mana, its chill now applies for 2 seconds from 3, and it travels about 25 blocks. Ground Slam no longer roots the caster, Charged Shot now slows the caster more for each stage they’ve channelled and fires automatically when fully charged, abilities can no longer harm the caster, and Poison has become a subtype of elemental damage. Health potions now share a 15 second cooldown and stamina potions a 30 second cooldown. The secondary boost action on the Glider is removed, described in the notes as a test function. For anyone running PvP or arena content, that is a different game from the Part 4 build. Cooldowns measured in two to five seconds instead of ten to eighteen, mana as the real limiter, and a 40% movement penalty on every cast. Four New Modifier Runestones Part 5 adds four Modifier Runestones. If the Ability and Modifier split is new to you, our explainer on the Chapter 1 runes system covers how the two halves combine. Added a new Wither Modifier Runestone. This rune augments an Ability Runestone causing it to apply the Wither debuff. This debuff slows the afflicted enemy and causes them to deal less damage. Added a new Rend Modifier Runestone. This rune augments an Ability Runestone causing it to apply the Rend debuff. This debuff causes the afflicted enemy to bleed for a duration, taking damage over time and receiving increased physical damage. Added a new Quickening Modifier Runestone. This rune augments an Ability Runestone by reducing its cooldown, mana cost, duration and damage. It also increased the speed of its projectiles. Added a new Thrift Modifier Runestone. This rune augments an Ability Runestone to cause it to deal less damage, but cost less mana. The wrong tense in the Quickening line is the studio's, not a transcription slip on our part, and we have left it as written. Same for "Antidotes now removes poison caused by the Imbue Poison Runestone, and grants brief immunity to it." in the same section. Four Runestones Renamed and Rebalanced Four of the runestones added in Part 4 are renamed in Part 5, and every one of them gets new numbers at the same time. If you have written guides, wiki pages or shop listings against the Part 4 names, all four need updating. Part 4 namePart 5 nameWhat changed ExpansionColossalArea of effect increase cut to 60% from 100%, and it now also increases projectile size by 150%, damage by 40%, mana cost by 60%, and decreases projectile speed by 50%. Extended DurationEnduringDuration increase is now 50%, previously a flat +2 seconds, with mana cost up 30% and cooldown up 60%. ForkSplinterSplit projectiles now deal 30% less damage, their area of effect and scaling drop 30%, cooldown up 20%, mana cost up 25%. RicochetReboundSplit projectiles now deal 20% less damage, projectile speed up 40%, cooldown up 30%, mana cost up 25%. The pattern across all four is the same: the raw multiplier comes down, and a real cost in mana or cooldown goes on. Part 4 shipped modifiers that were close to free. Part 5 prices them. Durability Goes Up Across the Board, and Crossbows Get Some Damage Back Part 4 contained the largest damage cuts of the cycle, including the Ancient Steel Crossbow combo shot dropping from 42 to 13.125. Part 5 partially walks that back: Iron Crossbow combo shot damage has been increased from 12.5 to 13. Ancient Steel Crossbow combo shot damage has been increased from 13.125 to 14. Small absolute moves, but they are moves back up after the Part 4 cuts, which is a useful signal about where the studio thinks crossbows should land. Durability is the bigger story, and the increases are large enough to change economy balance on a survival server. TierWeapon durabilityPickaxe and hatchet durability Crude, Bronze, Steel, Frost80 to 120Crude: 150 to 200 Copper100 to 200200 to 300 Iron120 to 250250 to 500 Cobalt, Thorium150 to 350325 to 700 Adamantite, Ancient Steel180 to 500Adamantite: 400 to 1000 Adamantite tools go from 400 to 1000 and Adamantite and Ancient Steel weapons from 180 to 500. The Scrap Drill goes from 150 to 200 and now breaks blocks in a 2x2 area rather than a 1x2 column. If your server economy prices repair materials, ore or tool sales, the demand side of that just changed by a factor of two or three at the top end. The crafting costs for several items introduced in Chapter 1 have also been adjusted, without the notes saying which or how. Other Player-Facing Changes Worth Knowing About Goblin breaches are much rarer: "The minimum time between Goblin breaches potentially appearing has been increased to 30 minutes (from 10 minutes)." They also launch players away as they emerge, no longer drop themselves as an item if broken, have a slightly larger protected area, and vanish after 5 minutes if not approached, down from 10. Hunts on the other side of Goblin breaches now require a Voidheart, and Voidhearts are dropped less frequently by void enemies. The number of hunts per breach is reduced. Most void enemies drop more void essence. Except Larvae, which the notes confirm drop nothing. Crosshairs change for swords, daggers, battleaxes, spears, maces, shields, shortbows, crossbows and the hookshot: a small dot instead of a ring, with a red X flash on a killing blow. Items on cooldown now dim and display an overlay that drains as the cooldown runs out. A reminder that Hytale is still in early access has been added to the home screen. Windows in Lost Civilization, Kweebec, Tavern and Wind Temple builds now use transparent glass, Village windows now have tinted glass instead of empty frames, and bottles and flasks on the Alchemy Bench use transparent glass. If you build with those sets, your existing prefabs will look different. Shields can no longer be raised to interrupt an attack animation after damage could have been dealt, and hotbar swapping no longer lets attacks fire sooner than intended. Both are PvP exploit closures. Dagger attacks now check line of sight like other weapons, so they can no longer damage entities through walls. Four decorative block sets are renamed to Cybercity Bronze, Cybercity Copper, Cybercity Iron and Cybercity Zinc, and Crude, Sandswept, Goblin and Iron Chests are renamed to indicate small or large. Every cause of death now comes with its own complete message instead of one stitched together from separate pieces, backed on the asset side by a new DeathMessageKey on each damage asset. What the Notes Do Not Say This section exists because the gaps matter as much as the contents, and nobody else is going to list them for you. No stable release date for Update 7 or 0.7.0 appears anywhere in Part 5. The 12 October date for Chapter 1 comes from the studio's separate announcement, not from these notes. Part 5 never says it is the final part. The intro at the top of the living page still says the notes will be updated weekly. The "last pre-release before Chapter 1" framing is Slikey's, from his 29 September post. The notes do not say which mods or plugins break. They list removed and changed APIs. Working out which of your dependencies touch them is your job, and there is no compatibility list. There is no migration guide for the deleted accessor APIs. Each bullet names a replacement call, which is more than nothing, but there is no document walking you from the old column-oriented code to the new section-oriented code, no before and after example, and no deprecation period, because the classes are already gone. No default is stated for World Events on Exploration Worlds. The Creative default was written down when that setting shipped. This one is not. The crafting cost adjustments for Chapter 1 items are unquantified. The notes say several items were adjusted and stop there. Nothing is said about what a plugin should do while the server-side Noesis UI is unusable. The instruction is simply not to use the dev_ APIs yet. Our Reading: What to Do With the Week You Have Left This is our advice, not the studio's. Hytale has not told anybody to do any of this. Find every /leave in your world. Signs, help menus, tutorial prefabs, plugin command aliases, Discord pins, your website. Replace with /portal leave and test on pre-release. Compile every plugin you own against 0.7.0-pre.5 this week. The deleted accessor classes mean the failures are compile-time and loud, which is the good case. You find them now or on 12 October. Chase the plugins you do not own. Open an issue, post in the author's channel, ask whether they have built against pre.5. A dependency that silently stops loading on patch day is worse than one you knew about. If you ship a cubic world generator, treat generateColumn as the top of your list. It is a mandatory interface method on IWorldGen.Cubic, not an optional override. Audit custom ranged NPCs for the Deflection default. This one compiles fine and changes behaviour, which makes it the easiest to miss in the whole list. Re-check your economy numbers against the new durability values. Top-tier tools lasting two and a half times longer changes repair and ore demand. Plan for a join rush. The simultaneous-join freeze fix is good news, but a launch-day restart with everybody connecting at once is still the hardest thing your server will do this month. Frequently Asked Questions What is Hytale Update 7 Part 5? It is the fifth section of the living Update 7 pre-release patch notes, headed "Pre-Release (Update 7 Part 5)" and dated October 1, 2026, appended to the same page that carries Parts 1 to 4. No separate post was published for it, the page byline still reads September 3, 2026, and the news index and RSS feed do not list it. Is Hytale Update 7 Part 5 version 0.7.0-pre.5? The patch notes themselves carry no version number. The pre-release documentation site pins 0.7.0-pre.5, verified live on 2 October 2026, while the stable documentation site still pins 0.6.8. That is a corroborating build identifier, not a statement from the notes. Is Update 7 Part 5 the last Hytale pre-release before Chapter 1? The Part 5 section does not say so, and the intro to the living page still says the notes will be updated weekly. The framing comes from Slikey's 29 September post, which said there would be no pre-release on 8 October because finalising Chapter 1 would give too much of it away. With Chapter 1 due on 12 October, that makes the 1 October build the last one anybody outside the studio can test against. Has the Hytale /leave command been removed? The notes say "The /leave command has now been replaced with /portal leave." Separately, "/portal may now be used instead of /fragment." Treat /leave as gone on this build and update any sign text, help menu, documentation or plugin alias that refers to it. Which Hytale plugin APIs were removed in Update 7 Part 5? The old column accessor surface is deleted: IWorldChunks, IWorldChunksAsync, IChunkAccessorSync, ChunkAccessor, OverridableChunkAccessor and LocalCachedChunkAccessor, along with the block accessors on World, WorldChunk and BlockChunk. Both getBlockType overloads are gone from IChunkAccessorSync, and WorldChunk.getBlockComponentEntity is gone. Block reads now run through the section from ChunkStore.getChunkSectionReferenceAtBlock, with a new BlockReader interface, SectionReader and SectionAccessor, and block entities come from BlockModule.getBlockEntity. What changed for cubic world generators in Update 7 Part 5? Cubic world generators must now implement generateColumn(seed, index, x, z, stillNeeded, priority) on IWorldGen.Cubic, returning a GeneratedColumn holding only column level data such as the tint. Column and section generation in a cubic world is now split, and the 0-9 range no longer has to be generated with the column. Does Update 7 Part 5 break the Hytale network protocol? One packet changes. The UpdateBossBar packet gained a HardMode field, which the notes say changes the wire layout, and EncounterBossBarState.setTracked and the UpdateBossBar constructor both take a trailing hardMode argument. What are PrefetchColumnLimit and PrefetchSectionLimit? Two new BuilderTools limits on how much world a single edit loads up front, with defaults of 1024 columns and 10240 sections. An edit over either limit reads what is already in memory and reports the rest as skipped, rather than failing or blocking. Does Update 7 Part 5 give a Hytale 0.7.0 release date? No. No stable release date for Update 7 or 0.7.0 appears in the Part 5 notes. The 12 October Chapter 1 date comes from the studio's separate announcement. Has anyone tested these Update 7 Part 5 changes? Not at this site. This is a read of the published pre-release patch notes for 0.7.0-pre.5, plus verification that the page and the documentation version pins say what we report they say. We have not run the build. The Bottom Line Part 5 is the part of the Update 7 cycle that actually breaks code. Part 4 warned you by making the old chunk column accessors refuse to compile under Error Prone. Part 5 deletes them, takes the block accessors on World, WorldChunk and BlockChunk with them, adds a mandatory method to IWorldGen.Cubic, changes the UpdateBossBar wire layout, and replaces /leave with /portal leave in a two-line Commands section that is easy to scroll straight past. For players, it is the most interesting part of the cycle: mana turns into a 30 second economy that signature abilities feed, cooldowns collapse to a few seconds, every cast costs 40% of your movement speed, four new Modifier Runestones arrive while four existing ones get renamed and priced properly, and tools and weapons last two to three times longer at the top end. None of it is on 0.6.8 yet. Our reporting on Slikey's 29 September post is where the deadline comes from: with no pre-release on 8 October and Chapter 1 due on 12 October, this is the build you get to test against. If you ship anything that touches blocks, chunks, boss bars or commands, this week is the week. Catching up on the cycle? Start with our Part 4 breakdown, then read the Chapter 1 server preparation checklist before patch day.