Hytale New Worlds Modding Contest Winners: Necromancer's Spire, Civic Core, Byte Crashers Take $100K

The Hytale New Worlds Modding Contest closed on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, and CurseForge published the official winners list the same day. The $100,000 prize pool has now been distributed across 65 paid placements: three category podiums of ten each, five Community Favorites at $2,000 apiece, and the 30 mid-contest awards handed out earlier in the submission window. The full results live on the contest hub at hytale.curseforge.com/newworldscontest, with category breakouts on the WorldGen V2, NPCs, and Experiences community-picks pages. We covered the finalist slate and the voting mechanics in last week's article. With the votes counted and the placements locked, this is what server owners and modded-Hytale players should actually know — who won, what they built, and where the next wave of community content is heading. WorldGen V2 Winners WorldGen V2 produced the contest's most-circulated winner. Necromancer's Spire by legendary_workshop took first place with its Necroland Dimension — a self-contained dimension with hand-authored dungeons and a roster of new creatures tuned to its theme. It is the kind of pack server owners can drop in as an end-game zone without rebuilding their seed, and the win nets legendary_workshop $10,000 plus, as we'll get to below, a Community Favorites bonus. Second place went to Below Every Heaven by StonefallStudio, the horror descent that walks the player through seven distinct dimensions with a deadly creature ruling each layer. It was one of the most-discussed finalist concepts in the pre-vote window, and the second-place placement comes with a $7,500 payout. Dragon's Fantasy Scenes by DragonstoneMC took third for $2,500, rounding out the podium with a more conventional fantasy-biome reframing. The remaining seven placements — fourth through tenth — each received $1,000, putting $27,000 into the category. The Rose Mire dimension, the Kweebec ravines biome, the Silent Construct ruins worldgen, and the magical flying-islands dimension from the finalist round all landed in that tier and are now published mods on CurseForge. NPCs Winners The NPCs category produced the contest's most technically interesting winner. Project Civic Core by PacificByte took first place for $10,000 with a system of autonomous villager settlements — NPCs that actually run a town rather than standing in one. It is the cleanest demonstration so far of what Hytale's asset-driven NPC pipeline can produce when a modder commits to AI behavior rather than just appearance, and it is exactly the kind of foundation other modders will build on top of. Second place went to Ancient Constructs by DanBagh for $7,500, a roster of constructed-being NPCs that lean into Hytale's mythic-Orbis tone. Third went to Clay Factoria by Lordimass for $2,500, taking the category in a different direction with a more whimsical, production-focused NPC system. The combined NPCs category paid out $27,000 across ten placements, same as the other two. Every winning NPC mod is built on Hytale's asset-driven mob design rather than from-scratch scripting, which matters because asset-driven NPCs slot into other mods cleanly — the constructs from Ancient Constructs and the villagers from Project Civic Core can coexist on the same server without the conflict surface you'd hit with hand-coded entity systems. Experiences Winners Byte Crashers: Jungle Jam by GINCo took first in the Experiences category for $10,000. It is a 4-player minigame, and the placement is notable because Experiences was the broadest category in the finalist round — anything from full RPG systems to combat overhauls qualified — and a tight, well-scoped minigame ended up on top. The lesson there is the same one the Hypixel Network surfaced for years: a small experience that ships is worth more than a sprawling system that does not. [Zen's] Arcanum by zenkuro placed second for $7,500, taking the magical-progression slot with a layered spellbook-and-weapon system. Arcane Relay by Pseudo_Elephant rounded out the podium at third for $2,500. One placement worth a separate note: Endless Leveling V9 by Airijko landed in the fourth-through-tenth tier (and, as we'll see, picked up a Community Favorites award). It is built on AzureDoomC's LevelingCore framework, which has now passed 50,000 downloads on CurseForge after sitting at 41,800 a week ago — and is becoming the de facto base layer for class-and-progression mods. The Community Favorites Five Community Favorites awards of $2,000 each were drawn across the contest as a whole, layered on top of the category placements. The list rewards both breakout new work and finalists that already won their categories: MAJOR DUNGEONS by MAJOR76 picked up a Community Favorites slot — a dungeon pack that did not place in the WorldGen V2 top three but generated enough community traction during the vote to clear the bar. Endless Leveling V9 by Airijko took a second Community Favorites award on top of its Experiences placement, which is consistent with the LevelingCore-built mods having outsized download-share on the platform. Better Mob Expansion by CiccioFrah rounded out the new-work Community Favorites with a creature-roster mod. The other two Community Favorites went to mods that already won their categories outright: Necromancer's Spire (legendary_workshop, WorldGen V2 1st) and Byte Crashers: Jungle Jam (GINCo, Experiences 1st). Both creators take home an additional $2,000 on top of the $10,000 category prize, putting them at $12,000 each on the contest. That is the contest's loudest signal — when a mod wins both the category vote and the all-contest favorites vote, it is the one to install first. What the Numbers Tell Us The full prize-pool math: $27,000 per category across 10 placements times three categories equals $81,000. Five Community Favorites at $2,000 equals $10,000. Thirty mid-contest awards at $300 equals $9,000. Total: $100,000 across 65 winners, distributed exactly as CurseForge laid out at the contest's open in March. The submission window pulled roughly 400 approved entries, which means the paid placements represent under one percent of submitted work. CurseForge's Hytale platform now hosts more than 5,700 mods with over 25 million combined downloads, and the contest winners are about to take a noticeable share of that second number over the next quarter. The official Hypixel Studios retrospective is up at hytale.com and is worth reading for the studio's own framing — including their stated interest in hiring contest talent. What This Means for Server Owners For HytaleCharts-listed server owners, the winners list is now a practical install checklist. The combination most worth running on a survival or roleplay server: Project Civic Core for living settlements, Ancient Constructs for high-tier enemies, Necromancer's Spire as a destination dimension, and Below Every Heaven as a late-game horror push. For a minigame-focused server, Byte Crashers: Jungle Jam is the obvious anchor, with Endless Leveling V9 (and the LevelingCore base layer it sits on) as a progression spine. The themed-weekend opportunity is also still open. The contest just minted a slate of new flagship mods, and the community attention on those mods is at its peak right now. Running a "Necromancer's Spire weekend" or a "Byte Crashers tournament night" in the next two weeks is the cleanest distribution moment a server is going to get this quarter. We currently list 432+ active Hytale servers, and the ones that ride this wave first will get disproportionate traffic from it. The other piece to prepare for is the in-game server browser. Update 5 stable is still pending, and the server browser is part of that batch. When it ships, verified domain ownership and clean discovery metadata on HytaleCharts are going to matter in a way they did not before. Now is a reasonable moment to audit your listing. What's Next for Hytale Modding Two things to watch over the next month. First: how many contest winners get hired or contracted by Hypixel Studios. The retrospective explicitly flags this as something the studio is interested in, and several of the named winners — Project Civic Core, Below Every Heaven, Necromancer's Spire — are at a scope and craft level where a studio offer is plausible. Second: the long-promised Chapter 1 groundwork blog Simon Collins-Laflamme teased on April 9 (via X) is still unpublished. The most natural landing slot for it remains alongside the eventual Update 5 stable cut. Update 5 itself remains in pre-release, and Hypixel Studios has not given a public stable date. The modding scene has not been waiting — the contest finalists shipped against a moving API target through the pre-release cadence, and the winning mods are live on CurseForge today. HytaleCharts will be covering the Update 5 stable release, the in-game server browser launch, the Chapter 1 groundwork blog, and the contest winners' download trajectories over the next quarter. Subscribe to the HytaleCharts blog to get that coverage as it lands — and if you're running a server, list it on HytaleCharts so the players hunting these winning mods can find you.