Hytale Just Turned On In-Game Server List Banners, Six Months After Saying It Would Not, and Only Featured Servers Get Them

On 28 April 2026, in a post titled Pre-Release - Official Server Lists, the Hytale Team set out what the official in-game server list would and would not do. One sentence drew the line: "Listings are name, description, and tags. No custom icons, banners, or rich media yet; those are things we want to build on after the basics are solid." Yesterday that stopped being true. Hotfix 0.7.3, dated Oct 21, 2026, carries this bullet under the sub-heading UI & Quality of Life Fixes: "Featured servers in the server list now show their custom banners. Server images also appear right after the game starts, without a new search or filter change." That is the whole of the announcement. There is no post on the /news index, which still lists only the three entries from 12 October, and the hotfix page byline still reads "Hytale Team" and "October 12, 2026" even though the 0.7.3 section carries its own Oct 21 date. The documentation at docs.hytale.com now reads Release 0.7.3, so the build is out. We are not claiming anyone hid anything; we are reporting what is observable, which is that a six-month-old limitation was lifted in one line of a hotfix. We have covered Hytale server discovery since March 2026 and we build banners, so this is the bullet we care about. For the rest of the hotfix, see our companion piece on Hytale hotfix 0.7.3. This article is about the server list only: what changed, what did not, and what it means if you run a server. What Changed in the Hytale In-Game Server List in 0.7.3 The bullet is two sentences doing two different jobs. Sentence one is the feature. Featured servers in the server list now show their custom banners. A listing that was text-only renders an image for one class of server. Sentence two is a fix. "Server images also appear right after the game starts, without a new search or filter change" describes a loading problem being corrected: before the hotfix, something had to prompt a refresh, a new search or a filter change, before images showed up. Our reading of that second sentence, offered as our reading and not as a claim by Hytale: you do not fix an image-loading bug for images that do not exist. Server images sound like they were already partly wired into the list client before 0.7.3, which would make this less a sudden new build and more a switch flipped on plumbing that was already there. One bullet cannot prove that, and Hytale does not say so. What Hytale Said About Hytale Server List Banners in April 2026 Back to the April post, which we covered at the time in our piece on the official server discovery applications. It stated two limits plainly. The first is the rich media sentence above. The second: "No live player count or ratings yet. These are things we want to explore next. We want to get the foundation right first so servers cannot spoof or manipulate these data points." Its FAQ bundled the two together as a single package of future work: "Live player count, and richer media are coming up next after the basics are solid. We are working on guard rails that will avoid player count tampering by servers and enable them to better advertise and showcase their brand identity to players." April named two things as next: live player count, and richer media. Six months on, one of them has started to arrive. Our guide to listing your server, written in August, still quotes the "no custom icons, banners, or rich media yet" limit as current, because until yesterday it was. Why Only Hytale Featured Servers Get Banners Scope is the part worth sitting with. The bullet says featured servers, not servers. Featured is a term the April post defined: "We will allow users to sort by featured (a curated highlight list moderated by the Hytale Team), overall likes and personal favorites." So featured is not earned against a published metric. It is a curated list, moderated by the Hytale Team. Stated without editorialising: the first operators who can put their own branding into the official in-game list are the operators Hytale had already selected. That is not a scandal. Shipping a visual feature to a small moderated set first is a sensible way to avoid turning your front page into an image-hosting problem on day one, and it fits April's stated caution about servers gaming listing data. But it does change who the feature is for today. If you are not featured, nothing in this bullet touches your listing. We will not tell you how to get featured, because the criteria are not public. The April definition is the only thing on record, and "a curated highlight list moderated by the Hytale Team" is not a checklist. Where Is the Hytale Live Player Count? Still absent, and for most owners that gap matters more than banners do. A banner makes a listing look good. A live player count makes a listing look alive. It is the one field that tells a browsing player whether anyone is in there right now, and it is the field every third-party listing site leads with, ours included. April said it was coming up next alongside richer media, and said why it had not shipped: guard rails, so servers cannot spoof or tamper with the number. That is credible, and it is also a much harder problem, which is probably why richer media landed first. Media is presentation. A trustworthy player count is an anti-fraud system. Nothing in 0.7.3 touches it, so the official list still cannot tell a player whether your server is busy. That is the main reason discovery outside the game still does work the official list does not, a point we worked through in Hytale server discovery versus server lists. What Size Should a Hytale In-Game Server List Banner Be? We do not know, and we will not guess. No specification for in-game server list banners is public anywhere we could reach: no dimensions, no aspect ratio, no file-size cap, no format list. The 0.7.3 bullet says banners show; it does not say what a banner is. Third-party sites are not a substitute source here. Different Hytale listing sites specify different banner sizes, including 500x75, 480x60 and 468x60, and none of them is the official in-game spec; each is that site's own requirement. Anyone quoting one of them as the Hytale in-game size is guessing. If you want a banner ready for server lists generally, we run a banner creator that works at the sizes common listing sites use. It cannot produce an officially-sized in-game banner, because nobody has published what that size is. When a spec appears, we will add it. What a Hytale Server Owner Should Do Now Honestly, not much, and we would rather say so than invent a workflow. There is no upload form, setting or config field we have seen or can verify, so anyone walking you through one is describing UI they have not used either. What is worth doing: Have a banner finished and on hand. Not resized to a guessed spec; just a good banner, with a readable server name, legible at small sizes, no fine text. Re-exporting a finished design takes minutes once a spec lands. Starting from nothing does not. Keep the listing healthy. Name, description and tags are still the whole of a standard listing, and still the only fields you control. Do not pay anyone for in-game banner placement. There is no published route for a non-featured server to show a banner, and no published criteria for becoming featured. Update to 0.7.3 anyway, for the rest of the hotfix rather than for this bullet. What We Do Not Know We have not seen the feature. Everything above is read from Hytale's hotfix page and its April post, not from a featured listing in the client. There is no official banner spec. We will not publish a number we cannot source. The featured criteria are not public. The April definition is the only description on record. We do not know whether banners are coming for non-featured servers. April named richer media as future work after the basics, and the 0.7.3 bullet is scoped to featured. Neither statement promises a wider rollout, and no timeline exists. We do not know how banners get uploaded or reviewed. No process has been described. The direction April described is real and moving. That post gave its long-term aim as "Richer listings, better browsing tools, deeper customization, and more ways for great communities to be found are all directions we want to build toward". The first piece of richer listings has shipped. It went to the curated list first, it arrived as one line in a hotfix, and the field most owners are waiting for is still queued behind an anti-spoofing problem.