Hytale Pre-Release Patch Notes Update 5, Part 5: Reworked Extrude Tool, Sound Diffraction, and the /locate Command

Hypixel Studios pushed the fifth pre-release drop for Update 5 on April 23, 2026, exactly one week after Part 4 and three weeks into the most sustained patch cadence the studio has ever held. Simon Collins-Laflamme and the Hytale team have now shipped five consecutive weekly pre-release drops in April, and Part 5 is one of the most builder-facing of the cycle. The headline change is a full rework of the Extrude Tool, which has been merged with the Flood Tool into a single building primitive with new filters, configurable strategies, and a Fill mode that respects block boundaries. Part 5 also lands sound diffraction so audio bends around corners instead of dead-stopping at them, music layer support, a long-requested /locate command, more Social Sidebar polish, and the first falling-block tech for modders. Here is everything that changed and what it means for Hytale server operators. The Extrude Tool, Reworked from the Ground Up The single biggest creator-facing change in Part 5 is the Extrude Tool rework. Previously, Extrude and Flood were two separate primitives, each useful but each with its own quirks. Part 5 collapses them into one reworked Extrude Tool that takes the best of both and adds a stack of new options on top. The reworked tool now respects the source block when extruding, so pulling a face out of a stone wall produces stone rather than a generic placeholder. Two new filters give builders fine-grained control: "Same Material" restricts the extrude to blocks that match the seed block's material, and "Same Shape" restricts it to blocks of the same shape. You can combine those filters with a configurable extrusion strategy to get exactly the kind of selection you want without the constant select-deselect-reselect dance the old workflow demanded. The new Fill mode is the part most builders will reach for first. Fill mode replaces air while respecting block boundaries, which means you can pour material into a hollow region without it escaping into adjacent open spaces. For anyone who has tried to fill the inside of a complex multi-room structure with the old Flood Tool and watched material leak through a missed wall, this is a quality-of-life lift. For modders building large prefabs and worldgen authors stamping repeating structures into terrain, the merged Extrude Tool is the kind of foundational change that pays off every single day after the patch lands. Sound Diffraction Arrives Part 4 shipped audio occlusion, with sound muffled when it travelled through walls. Part 5 takes the next step on the audio roadmap and adds sound diffraction. Sound now bends realistically around corners and through doorways instead of being silently muffled at the geometry that blocks the direct path. The practical effect is that an open doorway behaves like an open doorway. A footstep in the next room will reach you down the corridor it actually has to travel, attenuated based on path length and intervening materials, instead of being treated as if the wall between you and the source were the only thing the sound has to cross. Combined with the audio occlusion that landed in Part 4, Hytale's audio engine now has the two foundational pieces it needs to feel spatially correct in interior spaces. This is the kind of change you do not consciously notice until you walk back to a Part 3 build for comparison. Caves, dungeons, multi-room buildings, and any space with non-trivial geometry now feel sonically grounded in a way they did not a week ago. Music Layer Support Audio gets a second meaningful upgrade in Part 5: music layer support. The new system lets composers and modders layer multiple music tracks that mix dynamically based on context — combat versus exploration, for example, or different intensity layers as a player goes deeper into a dungeon. This is foundational tech rather than a player-visible feature on its own. The payoff arrives when modders and the official content team start building music systems on top of it. Expect the first wave of community packs to ship layered exploration music for biomes within a few weeks of Part 5 going stable. The /locate Command Part 5 ships a new /locate command that finds and optionally teleports you to biomes, zones, regions, and prefabs. This has been one of the most-requested commands in the Update 5 cycle, and the implementation in Part 5 is broader than most players expected. You can locate a biome by its identifier, jump to the nearest zone of a given type, or find a prefab by name and inspect its coordinates without leaving the world. For server admins running test environments, builders verifying that a worldgen pack is producing the structures it should, and content creators trying to find a specific biome for video b-roll, /locate collapses minutes of manual searching into a single line. It also pairs well with WorldGen V2's /worldgen2 create starter scaffolding from Part 4: scaffold a pack, generate a test world, and use /locate to verify your prefabs and biomes are being placed where the manifest says they should be. Social Sidebar v2: Toasts, Blocking, and Discord Integration The Social Sidebar that landed in Part 4 gets a second pass of polish in Part 5. Toast notifications now surface friend requests and world invites without forcing the player back into the Main Menu, so an in-world session can react to a friend popping online without breaking flow. Player blocking has been split into text and voice, so you can mute a disruptive player's chat without also blocking their voice channel — useful for servers running proximity voice chat where the social and gameplay layers benefit from separate moderation knobs. A new "Allow Friend Requests" toggle lets players opt out of unsolicited invites entirely. The Discord integration shipped in Part 4 grows up in Part 5. Discord friends who are also playing Hytale now bridge into the in-game friends list automatically, with avatars and presence updating in close to real time. Favorite friends are visible across both the Local and Online tabs, so the people you actually play with stay pinned regardless of which view you are in. The patch notes also describe the Social Sidebar as ready to ship to the live game soon after this pre-release week, which is one of the strongest hints yet that an Update 5 stable cut is close. Capture Crates, Build Blocks, and Fish Bait A handful of smaller item and block changes round out the player-facing side of Part 5. Capture Crates now display the model of the NPC actually inside them in the inventory icon, instead of showing a generic crate. This is a small change that meaningfully improves inventory legibility once you have multiple crates with different captures stored. Build blocks — Black Build, Gray Build, White Build, and the Build Lightsource variant — no longer break in a single hit. Multiple hits are now required, with pickaxes accelerating the break. This nerfs accidental griefing on builds that use these blocks and pulls them in line with the durability model the rest of the block system already uses. Pickaxes still mine them at a meaningful pace, so intentional teardown of a build remains a reasonable workflow. The Fish Bait (Wild) item received a model update, which is the kind of art-pass detail that quietly raises the polish floor on the fishing system as Update 5 prepares to go stable. Falling Blocks: First Modder Tech The most interesting modding-API addition in Part 5 is initial support for falling blocks. Modders can now register blocks that fall under gravity when the block beneath them is removed. This is the foundation that sand-style behaviour, structural collapse mechanics, and physics-driven puzzles need to exist as mods. The implementation in Part 5 is described as initial, which means the API surface is likely to grow in subsequent drops. But even the first iteration unlocks a category of mods that simply was not possible on the previous Hytale modding API. Bug Fixes Worth Calling Out Part 5 ships a meaningful bug-fix list alongside the headline features. The crash that occurred when joining a world via Discord invite is fixed, which removes one of the friction points in the Social Sidebar's Discord-bridge flow. The Adamantite Hatchet and torch interaction has been corrected. Grass rendering bugs that were producing visible seams on certain terrain configurations are addressed. The asset editor and command autocomplete UI both received fixes, and a Social Sidebar layering issue that caused the panel to render behind certain modal dialogs is resolved. None of these are headline items on their own, but the cumulative effect is a noticeably more stable build than Part 4 was at the equivalent point in its lifecycle. What Did Not Ship: No Stable Cut, No Chapter 1 Blog Two things players were watching for did not appear in this drop. The first is the Update 5 stable release. Earlier in April, with weekly pre-release drops landing on schedule and Part 2 going stable about a week after its pre-release, a stable cut for Update 5 within the April 21–27 window was a reasonable expectation. Part 5 is still pre-release. The fifth pre-release part instead suggests Hypixel Studios is widening Update 5's scope rather than racing to ship it, and the Social Sidebar v2 polish work in Part 5 reads like the team finishing pieces that the stable build needs in production form. The second is the Chapter 1 blog Simon Collins-Laflamme teased on April 9 alongside the Part 3 patch notes. He wrote at the time that "Chapter 1 groundwork and some major overhauls to the game are coming, and I'll put together a blog" to walk through what was in flight. As of the Part 5 drop on April 23, that blog has not been published. Given the cadence of pre-release drops since, the most likely landing spot is alongside a stable Update 5 ship, where the Chapter 1 framing can do double duty as a "what just shipped and what is coming next" post. The New Worlds Modding Contest Closes April 28 Part 5 lands four days before the New Worlds Modding Contest deadline. Submissions for the $100,000 CurseForge-partnered contest close on April 28, 2026, with finalists announced May 5 and winners voted in by the community by May 12. The contest covers three categories — WorldGen V2 packs, NPC-driven experiences, and full Experiences — with $27,000 in prizes per category. If you have been sitting on a worldgen pack or an NPC-driven concept, the timing of Part 5 is genuinely useful. The reworked Extrude Tool, the /locate command, and the falling-block API all unlock build patterns that did not exist in earlier Update 5 pre-releases, and contest entries built on Part 5 will look meaningfully more polished than entries built on the older toolset. Community momentum around the contest is real. Hylamity, a Calamity-inspired mod for Hytale, launched on CurseForge on April 22 and crossed 1.3K downloads inside its first week. AzureDoomC's LevelingCore class sub-mod shipped on April 23 alongside the Part 5 drop, and a Unified Tagging API followed on April 25. The modding ecosystem is putting serious tools and content into players' hands week-over-week, and a non-trivial share of those releases are positioning for the contest. What This Means for Hytale Server Owners Part 5 is a quieter drop for server operators than Part 4 was, but the items that matter, matter directly. The reworked Extrude Tool is a builder win across the board. If your server runs custom maps, hub builds, or persistent player worlds, the people building those spaces can now move faster and produce cleaner geometry. Servers that schedule community build events, themed contests, or seasonal map rotations should see a quality lift on entries built after April 23 versus entries built before. Sound diffraction matters most for immersive servers — roleplay, survival with custom interior spaces, dungeon-crawl servers, and any build that depends on enclosed geometry feeling enclosed. A week from now, players walking your server's interiors will perceive them as more grounded without anyone being able to point at a specific change. That is the best kind of polish. The /locate command is a moderation and operations win. Server admins can verify worldgen output, check that custom prefabs are spawning, and find specific biomes for events without having to leave the world or open external tools. Build it into your staff command training. The Social Sidebar v2 work is a reminder that the friend-driven distribution channel which arrived in Part 4 is about to get more powerful. Toast notifications mean a friend who is already playing on your server can invite friends without breaking either party's flow, and the Discord-bridge polish means more of those invites will actually land. If you run a server listed on HytaleCharts, anything you do that gives players a reason to invite a friend right now — scheduled events, group content, server-side achievements — is going to convert better in May than it did in March. The HytaleCharts server list currently has more than 431 active Hytale servers. Most of them will feel at least one of Part 5's changes inside the first week of running it. The pre-release build is available through the Launcher under Settings → Pre-Release. With the New Worlds Contest deadline four days out and a stable Update 5 cut likely within the next two to four weeks, the early May window is shaping up to be one of the most active stretches of the Hytale calendar so far.