Hytale Does Not Support SRV Records: Why Your Custom Domain Still Needs a Port, and the One Way to Hide It

Hytale does not support SRV records. If you came here to find out whether players can connect to play.example.com with no port on the end, that is the answer, and it comes straight from the official Hytale Server Manual rather than from anyone's testing. The rest of this guide is about what you do instead. A custom domain is still worth setting up, it just does less than people expect, and the difference between what it does and what an SRV record would do is worth understanding properly before you spend an evening editing DNS records. The Short Version SRV records are unsupported. The Hytale Server Manual gives the status as "Unsupported. Under evaluation." and lists SRV Record Support under Future Additions. A records still work, because they are not a Hytale feature. DNS resolves your hostname to an IP address before Hytale is involved at all. Players still type the port. play.example.com:5520, not play.example.com. The default port is 5520, and the default bind address is 0.0.0.0:5520. There is one way to lose the port suffix, and it is a consequence of that default rather than official advice: give the server its own IP address and leave it on 5520. The protocol is QUIC over UDP, not TCP, which decides how you forward and firewall the port. A domain never fixes a closed port. A hostname that resolves perfectly and a port that is not open is still a failed connection. The manual is dated June 15, 2026. The status could change, and nothing here is a promise that it will. What a Hytale SRV Record Would Do, If It Existed The manual describes the feature it does not yet have, which is a useful place to start because it is the clearest published statement of what people are actually asking for: SRV records allow players to connect using a domain name (e.g., play.example.com) without specifying a port, with DNS handling the lookup to resolve the actual server address and port. The important half is the second one. An SRV record does not just point a name at a machine, it carries a port as part of the record, and the client is expected to look that record up and use what it finds. The client has to know to ask. That is why the feature cannot be faked at the DNS level. You can publish a perfectly valid SRV record today and it will sit there being correct and being ignored, because nothing in the connection path queries it. Why Minecraft Players Expect It To Work Anybody who has run a Minecraft server has handed out a bare domain and watched it connect. That is the source of most of the confusion, and it is a reasonable expectation to arrive with: paying for a domain and then telling players to add :5520 feels like something has gone wrong in the setup. Nothing has gone wrong. The client decides whether SRV lookups happen, and Hytale's does not do them. Treat it as a habit to unlearn rather than a problem to debug, and you will save yourself an hour of re-reading your DNS zone looking for a mistake that is not there. The Official Hytale SRV Record Status, Quoted The Hytale Server Manual is explicit. On availability: Unsupported. Under evaluation. And on the reason, which is unusually specific for a "not yet" entry in a manual: There is no battle-tested C# library for SRV record resolution. Existing options either require pulling in a full DNS client implementation, which introduces unnecessary complexity and potential stability risks, or lack the production readiness we require for a core networking feature. We are evaluating alternatives and will revisit this when a suitable solution exists. Three things follow from that. This is a considered decision, not an oversight. The available libraries have been looked at and none of them clears the bar for something sitting in the connection path of every player. Filing it as a bug report will not move it. There is no timeline. "We are evaluating alternatives and will revisit this" is not a roadmap entry with a date, and SRV Record Support appears in the manual's Future Additions section alongside server discovery, parties, integrated payments and API endpoints. Anyone telling you which Hytale version will add SRV records is guessing. We are not going to guess either. The status is dated. The manual was created on January 11, 2026 and last updated on June 15, 2026. That is the freshest official word we have, and it is several months old. Check the manual yourself before treating this article as current. Hytale Custom Domain Setup: What an A Record Actually Does Here is the part that trips people up, and it is the crux of the whole subject. An A record is not a Hytale feature. It is not supported by Hytale, because there is nothing for Hytale to support. An A record is a DNS entry that maps a hostname to an IPv4 address, and the resolution happens in the operating system's resolver stack before a single byte of Hytale's networking code runs. By the time the client opens a connection, the hostname has already become an IP address. Hytale sees an address and a port. It never learns that a domain was involved. That is why A records work and SRV records do not, and it has nothing to do with one being better supported than the other. One is consumed by the generic resolver every program on the machine already uses. The other requires the application to go and ask a specific question, and Hytale's client does not ask it. So the practical setup is short: Create an A record pointing your chosen hostname at your server's public IPv4 address. Use an AAAA record instead, or as well, if you are serving over IPv6. Give players the hostname plus the port, for example play.example.com:5520, or your custom port if you changed it. That is the whole thing. There is no Hytale-side configuration that makes the domain work, because there is no Hytale-side involvement. Two honest caveats. Every registrar and DNS host has its own control panel, and we will not walk you through a specific one or tell you how long propagation takes, because those are generic DNS matters the Hytale Server Manual does not document. And nobody here has tested every registrar: the mechanism is standard DNS, so it should not vary, but "should not vary" is not "we checked". The upside of a domain is still real without SRV. You can move the server to a new host and change one DNS record rather than telling several hundred players a new IP address. That alone justifies it. If you are setting up a server for the first time, our Hytale server setup guide covers the rest of the groundwork. Hytale Server Domain Without Port: The One Way To Hide It This section is our reasoning, not guidance from the manual. The Hytale Server Manual documents a default port. It does not recommend the arrangement below. We are drawing a conclusion from a documented fact, and we are labelling it that way so you can judge it for yourself. The documented fact is that the default port is 5520, and the manual gives the bind argument as -b, --bind with a default of 0.0.0.0:5520. Its own example of overriding it looks like this: java -jar HytaleServer.jar --assets Assets.zip --bind 3500 Now the consequence. On a server left at the default, the port suffix is the part of the address carrying no information. Whether Hytale's client fills in 5520 when you omit it is something we have not verified and will not assert. What we can give you is the arrangement that removes the ambiguity: Give the server its own IP address. One public IPv4 address, one Hytale server, nothing else competing for the port. Leave it on 5520. Do not set --bind to a custom port just because you can. Every custom port is a port you will be explaining to players forever. Point your A record at that address and advertise the bare hostname, with the port available as a fallback for anyone whose client wants it. The cost is the dedicated IP. If you run several Hytale servers on one machine, only one can have 5520 and the rest need custom ports and visible suffixes. Weigh that before you buy a second server rather than a second address. Networks of linked servers raise other questions too, covered in our comparison of native transfers and proxies. Hytale Server Port 5520: QUIC, UDP and Why the Domain Cannot Save You A domain that resolves perfectly is still a failed connection if the port is shut. That is the most common reason a custom domain "does not work", and the fix has nothing to do with DNS. The manual is direct about the protocol: Hytale uses the QUIC protocol over UDP (not TCP). Configure your firewall and port forwarding accordingly. And about forwarding: If hosting behind a router, forward UDP port 5520 (or your custom port) to your server machine. TCP forwarding is not required. That second line saves real time. If you have been forwarding TCP out of habit, you have been forwarding the wrong thing. The manual also publishes the firewall rules directly: Windows Defender Firewall: New-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName "Hytale Server" -Direction Inbound -Protocol UDP -LocalPort 5520 -Action Allow Linux (iptables): sudo iptables -A INPUT -p udp --dport 5520 -j ACCEPT Linux (ufw): sudo ufw allow 5520/udp On NAT, the manual is reassuring with one exception. It says "QUIC handles NAT traversal well in most cases", and that "Players behind carrier-grade NAT (common on mobile networks) should connect fine as clients". The exception is the host side: "Symmetric NAT configurations may cause issues - consider a VPS or dedicated server". If you are hosting from home and hitting that, a domain will not help you, and our write-up on double NAT and players who cannot join friends goes through the symptoms. The 0.6.4 hotfix notes on port forwarding are worth a look as well. One more baseline from the manual, since people ask it in the same breath: "The Hytale server can run on any device with at least 4GB of memory and Java 25. Both x64 and arm64 architectures are supported." What a Custom Domain Does Not Do Three misconceptions, each of which sends people off editing the wrong thing. It is not domain verification. Listing sites, ours included, sometimes ask you to prove you control a domain before they will attach it to a listing. That is a separate mechanism with its own records and its own reasons, and having an A record pointing at your server does nothing for it. Our guide to listing your server covers the listing side on its own terms. Note also that the manual's Future Additions list includes server discovery as a whole, so the in-game side of that story is not settled either. It does not make connection problems go away. If players could not connect by IP, they will not connect by hostname, because the hostname becomes that IP. Start with the port, the protocol and the firewall, in that order. Our failed to connect troubleshooting guide is the place to go when the address is right and the connection still is not happening. It does not change the port. A domain and a port are independent. Pointing play.example.com at your server does not put it on port 80, does not put it on 25565 and does not move it off 5520. The only thing that decides the port is --bind. What We Do Not Know Whether SRV support is coming. The manual says the team is evaluating alternatives and will revisit it. That is all it says. No version, no date, no commitment. Whether the status has changed since June 15, 2026. That is the manual's last update date. Check the source before relying on this article. Whether the client silently assumes 5520 when a port is omitted. We have not tested it, so we are not claiming it either way. Plan on players typing the port. How every registrar behaves. Standard A records are standard, but nobody here has run the setup across every DNS host, and registrar control panels differ enough that we will not describe a specific one. What form a future solution would take. The manual's stated blocker is a library problem in C#, and a fix could arrive as a library adoption, an in-house resolver or something else entirely. Guessing is not useful. A Domain Checklist Before Chapter 1 Hytale Chapter 1 releases on October 12, 2026, which is the moment your address gets handed around more than it ever has. Get it settled before then rather than during. Our Chapter 1 server preparation checklist covers the wider job, and the release date announcement has the context. Pick the address you want to live with. Changing it after launch means re-teaching everybody. Create the A record, or AAAA if you are on IPv6, pointing at the server's public address. Decide on the port now. Default 5520 if you can, and accept a suffix if you cannot. Consider a dedicated IP if a bare hostname matters to you, and remember only one server per address can hold 5520. Forward UDP, not TCP, for 5520 or your custom port. Add the firewall rule for your platform, using the manual's own commands. Test from outside your network. A connection from inside the LAN proves nothing about the forwarding. Publish the address with the port included, even if you believe the port is optional, because an address with a redundant port still connects and an address missing a required one does not. Do not publish an SRV record and assume it is doing anything. It is not harmful, it is just inert. Write the address down in one place that your staff and your Discord both point at, so there is one thing to update. The Bottom Line Hytale custom domains are less interesting than people hope. There is no clever DNS configuration waiting to be discovered, because the feature that would make one possible is documented as unsupported and under evaluation, for a reason that has nothing to do with DNS and everything to do with the state of C# resolver libraries. So make the A record, keep the server on 5520 if you can, forward UDP, add the firewall rule, and hand players an address with the port on the end. If a bare hostname matters enough, buy the dedicated IP and take the default port, understanding that is our reading of a documented default and not something the manual recommends. And keep an eye on the manual. It is the only source that will tell you when the answer changes. Server ready for October 12? List it on HytaleCharts so players can find it, whatever your address looks like.