Hytale Update 6 Part 1 Patch Notes: Pre-Release Lands May 28 — Block Palette Presets, hytale/3 Protocol Bump, and Server Discovery Refinements

Two days. That is the gap between the Update 5 stable launch on Tuesday, May 26, 2026 and the first pre-release of the next cycle. On Thursday, May 28, the Hytale Team posted the Pre-Release Patch Notes for Update 6 (Part 1) — the first dev-facing build after Update 5 left the pre-release branch and shipped stable. That tight turnaround is not an accident. Simon Collins-Laflamme has framed the studio's cadence as weekly pre-releases with stable cuts landing roughly every two to six weeks — pre-release Thursdays stack up, and when a batch is ready it graduates to stable. An Update 6 pre-release arriving 48 hours after Update 5 stable is exactly what that rhythm produces: the foundation cycle is closed, and the content-and-tooling cycle is already moving. Update 6 Part 1 is a builder-and-modder build, and it carries one breaking change every server owner needs to act on this week. Block Palette Presets — Save and Reuse Your Palettes The headline feature is Block Palette Presets. The patch notes put it plainly: "Save and reuse Block Palettes with the new Block Palette Presets!" A new side tab has been added to the Quick Settings menu specifically to manage block palettes, and from there you can save a palette as a preset and load it back at any time. Backing the tab is a new Palette Editor. It lets you create, save, delete, and restore block palettes, with a color picker and a block eyedropper for selecting palette colors directly. For anyone who builds at scale — a hub team standardizing on a stone-and-glass theme, a roleplay server keeping every district visually consistent, a creative builder hopping between projects — this turns palette setup from a repeat chore into a one-click load. Save the palette once, name it, and pull it back the next time you start a build. It is the kind of quality-of-life primitive that quietly changes how builders work day to day. One small but satisfying world change ships alongside it: "Grass will no longer spread under water. Grass that has already been placed underwater will now slowly revert back to dirt." Underwater grass has been a long-standing visual oddity, and the engine now self-corrects it over time. The May 27 Update 5 Hotfix Wave Before Update 6 opened, the studio spent the day after stable cleaning up. On Tuesday, May 27, Hytale shipped a hotfix run for Update 5 spanning versions 0.5.1, 0.5.2, and 0.5.3 — the standard "first 24 hours of a stable launch" stabilization pass. The 0.5.2 hotfix carried two changes server owners and players will notice immediately. The social bar will no longer get stuck in a jittering, flickering state, and — importantly for privacy — "Server addresses are now hidden by default." The client and server also now use the protocol version for server discovery, and an ambience volume slider bug was fixed. The 0.5.3 hotfix focused on movement and stability, the layer most affected by the Update 5 Hierarchical Finite State Machine rework. Sprinting is now preserved when crouch-sliding instead of dropping back to a walk, rolling on landing correctly reduces fall damage again, and a sprint-input reset bug was fixed. On the stability side it resolved a deadlock on invite, a memory leak after leaving a world, and a race condition in block lighting, plus Friends-list and long-server-description scroll fixes. Those same fixes were carried into Update 6 Part 1's own Hotfix 1 on May 29, so whichever branch you run, the movement layer is solid this weekend. The Modding and Server-API Breaking Changes — Read This First This is the section that matters most for anyone running a live server, and it is not optional reading. Update 6 Part 1 carries a hard breaking change to the network layer. The network protocol version has been bumped from hytale/2 to hytale/3. The patch notes are explicit: "Clients and servers on the previous protocol version will be unable to connect." A new Crash = 7 QuicApplicationErrorCode was added to surface the mismatch. In practice this means a server still running the old protocol will reject updated clients, and an updated client cannot join a server that has not moved to hytale/3. If you operate a server, plan your update window now so your players are not locked out — protocol bumps are the one category of change that breaks connectivity rather than just behavior. For modders and plugin authors, several API changes land in the same build: Plugin accessor rename. BedsPlugin#getInstance() has been renamed to #get() to match the accessor convention already used by Universe, NPCPlugin, FarmingPlugin, and ObjectivePlugin. Any plugin calling the old method needs updating. New cross-world transfer API. A shared Universe#transferPlayerAsync() API has been added, centralising the "remove from world → await target world → addPlayer" pattern. For networks running multiple instances or moving players between worlds, this is the sanctioned path forward and worth migrating onto. Chunk-access deprecations. World#getChunkIfInMemory, getChunkIfLoaded, getChunkIfNonTicking, getChunkAsync, and getNonTickingChunkAsync have been deprecated. Chunk data should now be accessed as components from the chunk ref directly. The WorldGen SingleInstance field has also been marked experimental. And as of the May 29 Hotfix 1, Transport#bind(InetSocketAddress) now returns a CompletableFuture<ServerListener> and no longer declares throws InterruptedException. If you maintain server-side mods, the practical takeaway is simple: do not push the Update 6 build to production until you have rebuilt your plugins against the new API and confirmed your server is on hytale/3. Our modding API and server plugin development guide walks through the plugin lifecycle if you are setting up a build pipeline for the first time. Server Discovery Refinements — Tag Overflow and the Europe Rename Update 5 brought the in-game Community Server Discovery browser live, and Update 6 Part 1 is already iterating on it. Two changes land that matter directly to anyone running a listed server. First, tag display got smarter. Servers with more than four tags now show the first three tags plus an overflow indicator, and hovering over that indicator reveals the remaining tags in a tooltip. If you have been stuffing your in-game profile with every applicable tag, the first three now carry the most weight in the at-a-glance view — order them so your most distinctive, highest-intent tags come first. Second, the 'EU' region name has been updated to 'Europe' — a small clarity fix, but one worth knowing if your players reference regions when choosing where to connect. These refinements underline the same point we have made since the in-game browser previewed: the V1 discovery surface is intentionally narrow, and the visual and social signals players actually use to evaluate an unknown server — banners, live player counts, written reviews, ratings — live on third-party listings. Keep your HytaleCharts listing tight and your in-game Server Profile filled out, and you are reachable on every path a new player takes. If you have not listed yet, you can browse the server list and add your server in a few minutes. Anti-Cheat Hardening: Authoritative Projectiles and Distance-Validated Interactions Two server-relevant security changes ship in Update 6 Part 1, both aimed at modified clients. They are quiet patch-note lines, but they tighten the kind of exploits that plague competitive and PvP servers. The first hardens projectiles: "Projectile spawn positions are now derived from the server's authoritative entity transform, with the client-reported position only accepted when it falls within a velocity-based desync allowance." In plain terms, the server now decides where an arrow or thrown object originates rather than trusting whatever the client reports, accepting the client value only when it is within a tolerance the server's own velocity math allows. That closes a class of teleport-shot and origin-spoofing exploits. The second validates interaction range: "NPC and mount interactions now validate the player's distance to the target entity, preventing modified clients from interacting with NPCs or mounting entities from arbitrary distances." Reach-hack-style interactions against NPCs and mounts are now distance-checked server-side. For any server running shops, quest-givers, or mountable entities, this removes a long-distance exploit vector for free. Audio, Creative Tools, and Importer Accuracy Update 6 Part 1 also rounds out a set of smaller-but-welcome changes. On audio, there are new break sounds for Trash Piles and Braziers with per-material soundsets, new sounds for breaking and walking on Leaves, new sounds for breaking Brambles, and new landing sounds for Cloth blocks. In Creative, the item library now always deletes items dropped into it — including into empty slots — and you can drop items one at a time from a stack by right-clicking. A new world setting, 'Resolve Block Spawners', controls whether block spawner blocks resolve into their target blocks — for example, whether chests actually spawn in. For modders importing images and OBJ models, the importing tools now use a new TextureComputedColor field — a dominant weighted color average of an item's textures — instead of particle colors, producing far more accurate block-color matching, and the importers now filter out special-quality items. A new Asset Editor button regenerates the TextureComputedColor field from an item's textures. The Selection Tool also handles longer localized text better, alongside a batch of localization and UI sizing fixes. What Server Owners Should Do This Week The cleanup-and-cutover checklist for Update 6 Part 1 is short but time-sensitive: Plan your protocol cutover. The jump to hytale/3 means old and new cannot mix. Decide your update window, announce it to your community, and move your server and your players together — an out-of-date server will simply reject updated clients with the new Crash = 7 code. Rebuild your plugins before you ship. If you run server-side mods, update for the BedsPlugin#get() rename, migrate cross-world transfers onto Universe#transferPlayerAsync(), and move off the deprecated chunk-access methods toward component-based chunk refs. Test on the pre-release branch before touching production. Re-order your tags. With Server Discovery now showing only the first three tags before the overflow tooltip, put your most distinctive, highest-intent tags first on both your in-game Server Profile and your HytaleCharts listing. Polish your listing. The in-game browser still does not show banners, live player counts, or community ratings — your HytaleCharts listing is where players decide whether to join. Confirm your banner is current, the heartbeat plugin is reporting live player counts, votifier is wired up, and your description is sharp. Update 6 Part 1 is the build to be testing this weekend if you run anything that touches the network layer or server-side mods. The protocol bump is the one change you cannot defer — everything else is upside. Get on hytale/3, rebuild your plugins, tidy your tags, and you are ready for whatever lands on next Thursday's pre-release.