Hytale Update 6 Is Live: The Stable Patch Notes, Both Same-Day Hotfixes, and the Config Line That Stopped Servers Starting

Update 6 reached stable on Thursday 27 August 2026. The official patch notes went up the same day, and so did a separate hotfix post carrying two builds, 0.6.1 and 0.6.2, both dated 27 August as well. Two hotfixes on release day is the actual story, and one is a server-owner emergency most coverage skipped. Everyone wrote up the feature list. Almost nobody wrote up the part where a single line in your config.json stopped your server from starting. We have a second reason to write this. We covered Update 6 Part 1 through Part 13 plus Hotfix 1, week after week, then stopped one article short of the finish line. The notes describe thirteen weeks of pre-release feeding into this build, and this is the end of that run. One housekeeping note: the only version strings Hytale has published are the two hotfix numbers. A version number for the stable build itself circulates on third-party wikis and appears nowhere in the official notes, so we call it the stable release. The Launch-Day Emergency: A View Radius Above 32 Stopped Servers Starting Read this 0.6.2 entry backwards, because backwards is where the useful information is. The fix states that worlds and servers with a view radius above 32 in config.json start again, and that the radius is capped at 32 chunks. Start again. Which means that on the day the stable release landed, any world or server whose config.json carried a view radius above 32 did not start. Not slow, not degraded - it did not come up. And the setting that caused it was a value an operator had typed in at some point, quite possibly months earlier, for entirely sensible reasons. This is the worst shape a launch-day fault can take. Nothing is wrong with the server, the plugins or the world. A number that was legal yesterday is illegal today, and the failure gives you no pointer back to it. If you spent 27 August staring at a server that would not boot, this was probably it - and it is fixed, but only on 0.6.2. Confirm you are on the hotfix build, not the release as it first shipped, or you are exposed the next time the process restarts. Open config.json and read your view radius. The ceiling is 32 chunks and it is enforced. Our piece on what maxViewRadius actually does in the official server config docs covers the setting and its cost, and the cap changes the tuning conversation because the top of the range is now fixed. Our Update 6 launch-day checklist is the sequence we published for that morning, and it still applies to anyone updating late. What Else 0.6.2 Fixed Mod installs no longer fail because the file was already there. If you had placed the same file in the Mods folder by hand, installing through the browser now works. When a different file with that name genuinely blocks the install, the mod page names the file rather than blaming your connection for a disk problem. The heavily-modded join crash is gone. Worlds with enough mods to overflow the entity texture atlas crashed on join; affected NPCs now appear untextured instead. Note the trade: you keep the session, but something has silently not loaded. A clean join is no longer proof that everything loaded. Dropping the last item of a stack no longer crashes after placing items one at a time. Memories from the last session survive exiting the game or stopping the server. On a public world that is progression loss, which is what players quit over. Social avatars load reliably for large friends lists instead of falling back to the default portrait. What 0.6.1 Fixed The earlier hotfix is mostly networking, closing a loop on the story we ran on 25 August about ICE, STUN and TURN replacing the old hole-punch path. Multiplayer sessions now take a direct network path when one is available instead of routing through a VPN adapter or a relay, so latency should improve for anyone with Hamachi, Radmin or Teredo installed. Joining a host whose router hands out a new port for every destination works more often and at lower ping - one of the harder NAT shapes, and the residue left after the ICE work. The Online Play screen speaks English now. It states in plain words whether friends can join and what to do if they cannot, replacing the old NAT type label, and adds a Copy Network Report button producing a pasteable diagnostic. If you troubleshoot joins for people, ask for that report first. Our failed-to-connect troubleshooting guide covers the rest. Installing a world from the mod browser works. Press CREATE WORLD and the world appears. A world mod makes as many worlds as you like, each a separate copy, and removing the mod keeps every world already made from it. A launch crash on older NVIDIA cards is fixed, specifically the GeForce 400 to 700 series and their laptop variants. Before You Play, and Before You Restart the Server The notes open with two hard gates. Both stop you dead rather than degrading gracefully. OpenGL 4.1 or later is now required, and the game closes immediately without it. No error dialog, no fallback renderer. The notes add the practical follow-up: if Hytale stops launching after this update, updating your graphics drivers will almost always resolve it, because plenty of machines reporting an older OpenGL version are simply running a stale driver. Start with our system requirements piece on why Hytale will not launch. The protocol moved from hytale/2 to hytale/3, and servers and plugins need a rebuild before they will connect. The notes are blunt about the mechanism: "Plugins and custom servers must be rebuilt against the new protocol to connect, because the protocol CRC changed." Here is the clause that will catch experienced operators. Packet layouts changed again later in the pre-release cycle. A server or plugin rebuilt early in the run is not necessarily current: being on hytale/3 is not the same as being on the shipping shape of hytale/3. Rebuild against the release. Our hytale/3 protocol breaking changes guide walks it through. What Actually Changed for Server Owners Several of these change behaviour on a running server without you asking. Crash recovery is now configurable Dedicated servers, per the notes, now "recover on their own" when the main world crashes. Previously a crash could leave the server unjoinable and kick everyone until an operator reloaded the world or restarted the process - which at 3am meant it stayed broken until somebody woke up. You can also set a policy: add a CrashRecovery block to the server config or a world's own config. Mode takes None, Reload or Shutdown, and Reload additionally takes MaxAttempts, RetryDelaySeconds and a Fallback - that last field being the one to think about, because it defines what happens after automatic recovery has failed. Our crash recovery config guide covers the shape of it. The whitelist was rebuilt, and it migrates your file A genuine migration, not a rename. HytaleWhitelistProvider is removed. Whitelisting now runs on the hytale.server.join permission, and the whitelist commands grant and revoke that permission rather than editing a list. Your existing whitelist.json migrates to whitelist.json.migrated. So any tooling that read or wrote whitelist.json directly is now operating on a file nothing reads, and whitelist access composes with your role setup instead of sitting beside it. Worth verifying on a server where access control is the point - our whitelist and access control guide covers the concepts. Bans are pluggable, and staff quietly lost permissions Implement BanProvider to replace ban handling entirely, or BanStorageProvider to store bans wherever you want - a shared database across a network being the obvious case. AbstractBan, InfiniteBan and TimedBan collapse into a single codec-stored Ban. File the next part under commands that will silently stop working for your staff. Seven new permission nodes - hytale.command.give.armor.other, recipe.learn.other, recipe.forget.other, recipe.list.other, model.other, model.set.other and model.reset.other - are granted to no built-in role by default, so a moderator who could do these things last week cannot now until you grant the node. Separately, /warp list previously let a player warp without holding warp.go. Hardcore is a server-level choice now, and existing worlds migrate Defaults.HardcoreMode takes None, PerPlayer or Global, and existing hardcore worlds migrate to PerPlayer. If your world was running a shared-fate configuration, check it, because PerPlayer is not that. A PlayerLives component is readable and writable by any game mode or plugin, and reviving someone else needs player.respawn.other. The silent data-loss fix Chunk sections 0 to 9 were not written to disk when SaveNewChunks: false was set in the world config. On first save they were silently dropped, and on reload they regenerated empty. No config change is needed to get the fix - but if you ran with that setting and have unexplained holes in your world, this is a plausible explanation. Other operational changes The server now stops when a core plugin fails to load, set up or start, rather than running on in a broken state. Close to home for us as a server list, /discovery link now reports what actually went wrong, and DiscoveryService.sendHeartbeat returns a HeartbeatResult, so a token matching no listing, a server signed in as a different game profile and an unreachable service each get their own message instead of one generic failure. Spectator arrives as an opt-in server feature with a /spectate command (toggle, watch, target, free, exit, plus an admin set), each behind its own permissions. Spectators are hidden from other players, ignored by NPCs, skipped for item pickup and spawn beacons, and no longer hold dungeon instances open. Underneath sits a data-driven GameModeType asset layer applied on enter and reversed on exit - if you have ever wanted to build a minigame server, that is the foundation you were missing. On performance, the headline is that packet decoding is 2 to 4 times faster on both client and server. World generation is considerably faster and the chunk priority system delivers nearby chunks sooner while spending less CPU on distant ones. Servers no longer unload and reload chunks aggressively when memory is plentiful, and network reliability improved when a server streams large amounts of data. Worldgen V2 also gained twelve VectorProvider nodes and other node types, with SimplexNoise2D and 3D up to around 20% faster - see worldgen V1 versus V2 and existing worlds if you are still weighing the migration. What Players Get The four features the team said in July were about three weeks away - Spectator, Hardcore, Mod Browser and player entity collision - all shipped. Mod Browser, in-game from the main menu: featured, popular and recently updated listings, category filters, search, per-mod pages with screenshots, download counts and supported game versions, and a My Library screen for updating and removing what you have. There are no paid mods, and the team describes a future path where players support mods directly and receive cosmetics made by the official Hytale team in return. Hardcore Mode, five settings chosen at world creation only via the Customize button: Off, Permadeath, Three Strikes, Nine Lives and Soulbound. We explained all five when they arrived in Part 11; our hardcore mode guide covers surviving them. Spectator Mode: when your run ends you stay in the world and keep watching, swapping between living players or flying free. Spectators are invisible and intangible, and NPCs ignore them - the notes describe it as preparation for future minigames. Color Tool in Creative, under Specialized Tools: Coloring replaces blocks you aim at and can preserve shape variants, Gradient makes smooth transitions across an area, and Shading derives lighter and darker tones from a light source, surface angle or custom palette. Also new: Block Palette Presets and a Point Tool placing named, persistent points you can teleport to. Our Color Tool guide goes mode by mode. Player collision with rotated entities: players can stand on and be pushed by entities with hard collision, and the Entity Tool can give an entity a rotated collision box players slide down. Players only at this stage - other entities and NPCs are not covered. Builder tools: selections up to 16 million blocks, a new compact save format, and faster copy, cut, paste and save. Gyro Controls for gyroscope-capable controllers, with the DualSense and Switch Pro named. Bastion Cape, an unlockable cosmetic wearable only by avatars with two-factor authentication enabled on their Hytale account - cosmetics as a security incentive, and the cheapest possible reason to finally turn 2FA on. One more thing worth recording: Update 6 was the first lifecycle in which Hytale accepted community contributions, and the notes welcome MelodicAlbuild to the team after many of them. We have cited that account as an engine developer before; this is the release where the contribution became a job. The Mod Browser Does Not Install Your Server's Plugins If you take one thing from this article and you run a server, take this. The Mod Browser is a client feature. It lives in the main menu of the game on your own machine. It downloads mods for your client, tracks them in a My Library screen on your machine, and updates and removes them there. It is a store front for your local installation. It does not install plugins on your server. There is no path in it that reaches a machine you rent, drops a file into a folder and restarts a process. Server-side plugins are still installed the way they always have been: put the file in the mods/ directory on the server and restart it. Nothing in this release changed that. This needs saying out loud because the vocabulary collided. Players now have an in-game mod browser, hosting panels have web interfaces that also install mods, and desktop launcher apps do something similar again. Three tools, one word. The predictable failure is a server owner who installs a mod through the in-game browser, joins their own server, finds the content missing and concludes something is broken. Nothing is broken. The mod is on their PC. The server never heard about it. The corollary matters as much: your players installing a mod through the browser does not put that mod on your server either. If a mod needs server-side support, they get whatever a client-only install produces - often nothing, occasionally a mismatch. Anything that must match between client and server still has to be coordinated, announced and installed by you. The one place the two meet is worlds, and it is still local: per 0.6.1, a world mod installed through the browser creates worlds on your own machine, and the confirmation prompt exists because a world can carry mods that run code on your computer. For the server side, our server mods guide describes the workflow that is still the workflow. For Plugin Developers: The Breaking Changes Assume nothing compiles until you have checked. These have teeth. Chunk access has been reorganised. The BlockAccessor interface is removed and every member now lives on WorldChunk. IChunkAccessorSync, ChunkAccessor and OverridableChunkAccessor are no longer generic, so drop the <WorldChunk> argument. WorldChunk.getChunkAccessor() is gone - go through World. getCurrentInteractionState moved onto BlockType, WorldChunk.toHolder is removed, and chunk saving goes through saver.saveChunkColumn. Several chunk lookups on World are deprecated. The silent trap in that list is setBlock. A new BlockOperations.setBlock is the future replacement for WorldChunk.setBlock. Existing WorldChunk.setBlock calls still compile and still run - but they may not work correctly in cubic worlds. That is the worst category of change, because it does not fail loudly; it fails only in a specific world type, only for the users unlucky enough to be running one. Migrate deliberately rather than waiting for a bug report you cannot reproduce. The packet API lost its ByteBuf surface. Removed: Packet.serialize(ByteBuf), the generated validateStructure(ByteBuf, int), the ByteBuf helpers on PacketIO, and ValidationResult. Use Packet.serialize(MemorySegment, int) and toObject(MemorySegment, int, ReadCursor). Validation now runs during the read and throws ProtocolException, and it got stricter: non-canonical VarInts, malformed UTF-8 strings and mismatched offset tables are rejected, so data that used to slip through will now raise. ClientTeleport changed shape. It gains IgnoredTransformFields and RelativeTransformFields bitmasks, both defaulting to 0 for backwards compatibility - but the old NaN sentinel for partial teleports is no longer supported. If you ever wrote NaN into a transform field to mean "leave this one alone", that code needs rewriting against the bitmasks. Also sweep for renames and new packets. New surface includes UpdateBossBar, UpdateLivesRemaining with a nullable LivesRemaining player-list field, a Spectating boolean on player-list entries and FovOverride. Renamed: CustomConcurrency to LowPriorityConcurrency, CarryInteractionHints to CarryHudInputBindings, BuilderToolsPlugin.Action.ROTATE to Action.TRANSFORM. The IsUsable block flag is gone. Several previously-nullable fields are now required, and leaving them null fails codec validation outright - among them DamageEntityInteraction.TargetedDamage, ChainingInteraction.ChainingNext, RootInteraction.Interactions and ApplyForceInteraction.Forces, plus ViewBobbing and CameraShakeConfig. This bites asset authors as hard as code authors: a JSON asset that omitted an optional field now refuses to validate. The documentation also moved: release docs to docs.hytale.com and pre-release docs to pre-release.docs.hytale.com, with a version switcher in the sidebar - check which version a page is pinned to before trusting a signature on it. Our modding API and server plugin development guide is the broader orientation. Still Broken: Double NAT The release implements STUN and TURN so players can connect regardless of NAT type without external software such as Tailscale or a VPN. That is genuinely good. The caveat survives into stable unchanged: Double NAT still does not work. If your traffic passes through two layers of address translation before reaching the open internet - an ISP router with your own router behind it, or carrier-grade NAT - you still cannot connect, and the team hopes to have a solution in the Update 7 pre-releases. A hope with a target window is not a date. If you used an overlay because of Double NAT, keep it. FAQ Why will my Hytale server not start after Update 6? Check the view radius in your config.json first. Worlds and servers with a view radius above 32 failed to start on the initial stable build; hotfix 0.6.2 fixed that and capped the radius at 32 chunks. If you are on 0.6.2 or later and it still will not start, check whether a core plugin is failing, because the server now stops outright when a core plugin fails to load, set up or start. The log will name it. Do I need to rebuild my Hytale plugins and server for Update 6? Yes. The protocol moved from hytale/2 to hytale/3, and the notes state that plugins and custom servers must be rebuilt against the new protocol to connect because the protocol CRC changed. Packet layouts also changed again later in the pre-release cycle, so a build made early in the run is not necessarily current. Does the Hytale Mod Browser install mods on my server? No. The Mod Browser is a client feature reached from the game's main menu, and it installs mods to your own machine. Server-side plugins are still installed by placing the file in the server's mods/ directory and restarting. Your players installing a mod through the browser does not put it on your server either, so anything that must match between client and server still has to be coordinated by you. What is in Hytale hotfixes 0.6.1 and 0.6.2? Both are dated 27 August 2026. 0.6.2 restores startup for servers with a view radius above 32 and caps the radius at 32 chunks, fixes mod installs blocked by a hand-placed file, fixes a join crash in worlds that overflow the entity texture atlas, fixes a crash when dropping the last item of a stack, and stops memories being lost on exit. 0.6.1 is mostly networking: direct paths preferred over VPN adapters and relays, better joins to hosts whose router changes port per destination, a rewritten Online Play screen with a Copy Network Report button, working world installs from the mod browser, and a launch crash fix for older NVIDIA cards. Why does Hytale close immediately when I launch it? OpenGL 4.1 or later is now required, and the game closes immediately without it. The notes point at graphics drivers as the near-universal fix, because many machines reporting an older OpenGL version are running a stale driver rather than genuinely unsupported hardware. Update the driver first, then check the hardware. What happened to my whitelist.json after Update 6? It migrated to whitelist.json.migrated. HytaleWhitelistProvider is removed and the whitelist now runs on the hytale.server.join permission, granted and revoked by the whitelist commands. Is there a Hytale 0.6.3, an Update 6 Part 14, or Update 7 pre-release notes? Not as of 31 August 2026. The newest published builds are the two hotfixes dated 27 August, and the pre-release page's newest section is still Part 13 Hotfix 1 from 22 August. Anything presented to you as a Part 14 today did not come from Hytale. What To Do This Week Get onto the hotfix build and check your view radius. If you are running the release as it first shipped, you are one restart away from a server that does not come up. Verify the things that migrated. Your whitelist moved onto a permission node and left a .migrated file behind. Your hardcore worlds moved to PerPlayer. Your staff lost seven permission nodes. None of those produce an error message; they produce a confused moderator on a Saturday. Rebuild against the release, not against your last pre-release build. The packet layouts moved twice. And if you touch blocks in code, plan the move to BlockOperations.setBlock before somebody reports corruption in a cubic world you cannot reproduce in a normal one. Then tell your players what changed. The Mod Browser is the most visible new thing in this release and the one most likely to generate support questions aimed at you for something happening entirely on their own machine. One pinned message is cheaper than answering thirty. Once your server is current, the point of all of it is people showing up. Browse the Hytale server list to find worlds already running the new build, or add yours so players hunting for an updated server this week can actually find it.