Hytale Double NAT: Why You Still Cannot Join Your Friend After Update 6, and When the Fix Is Meant To Land

If you still cannot join your friend's Hytale world after Update 6, and everyone around you says the problem went away for them, there is a good chance you are behind Double NAT. Two things follow, and both are worth knowing before you spend another evening in your router settings. It is not your fault and not a misconfiguration: Hytale knows, has said so twice in public, and named it specifically rather than burying it in a known-issues list. And there is no date for the fix. The official wording is that the team hopes to have a solution for the Update 7 pre-releases. That hedge is theirs, and we will not upgrade it into a promise. The Short Version, 2 September 2026 Update 6 genuinely fixed friend-joining for most people. It added STUN and TURN, which for many players removed the need for Tailscale or Hamachi. Double NAT was explicitly excluded. The engine developer who built it and the official patch notes say so in near-identical words. The fix is aimed at the Update 7 pre-releases, and those have not started. We show that below rather than assert it. You are not without options today. One properly solves it, one might, and one is worth asking your ISP about. What Update 6 Actually Changed Before the acknowledgement makes sense, it helps to know how much did change, because it was not a token effort. On 20 August 2026, a week before stable, engine developer Alex (@MelodicAlbuild, bio: "Engine Developer @Hytale") described what was coming: "In Update 6 we will be releasing network improvements that allow even more people to connect with their friends without needing external apps. This means that players that haven't been able to connect with friends because of NAT issues, will now be able to connect without needing to use other software, commonly Tailscale. We implemented a well-known set of protocols, called STUN and TURN to help connect players no matter where you are in the world, what your NAT type is, and who you're playing with." That is a big claim and it largely held. We covered the rework when it first hit the pre-release channel, in our piece on the ICE networking changes in Part 13 Hotfix 1, and the full stable patch notes cover what shipped alongside it. Four changes matter enormously for diagnosis. Verbatim from the notes and the 0.6.1 hotfix: "Multiplayer sessions now take a direct network path when one is available, instead of running through a VPN adapter or a relay. Latency should improve if you have Hamachi, Radmin, or Teredo installed." "Joining a host whose router hands out a new port for every destination now works more often, and at a lower ping." "The Online Play screen now says in plain words whether friends can join, and what to do if they cannot. This replaces the old NAT type label." "Added a Copy Network Report button to the Online Play screen. It copies a diagnostic report you can paste when you ask for help." Hold on to those last two. They change how you should approach this entirely. The Acknowledgement, in Both Places It Appears Alex continued in the same post: "There are, however, still a couple instances where you may not be able to play with a friend. Specifically "Double NAT" does not work yet. This is something I, and the rest of the team, are actively exploring, and we hope to have a solution for it out in the Update 7 Pre-Releases." Seven days later the official Update 6 patch notes, bylined 27 August 2026, repeated the STUN and TURN line and then said the same thing in the studio's own voice: "NOTE: There are still instances where you may still have troubles connecting with your friends. Specifically, "Double NAT" does not work yet. The team is actively seeking a way to fix this and hope to have a solution for our Update 7 Pre-Releases." Read the verb. Both times it is "hope to have a solution". Not "will ship", not "is scheduled for". A team still exploring a problem does not know how long it will take, and saying so plainly beats a date that slips. Everything else you read about a Hytale Double NAT fix date has been invented by somebody. What Double NAT Actually Is This part is general networking, not Hytale-specific, so treat it as background rather than anything the studio has said about its implementation. Network Address Translation is what lets a household share one public IP address: your router holds the public address, hands out private ones inside your home, and rewrites addresses on packets as they cross the boundary. Double NAT is when that happens twice on the way out. Two usual causes: Two routers in your own home. The classic case is an ISP-supplied modem/router combo you have plugged your own router into. Your device sits behind your router, which sits behind theirs. Carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT). Your ISP does not have enough public IPv4 addresses for every customer, so it shares one among many households and translates at its own equipment. What looks like a public address on your router is not one. Common on mobile broadband, fixed wireless, and budget or newer fibre providers. Now the reason it breaks peer-to-peer play. STUN asks an outside server "what address and port do my packets appear to come from?", then hands that answer to the other player to aim at. Both sides send outward at roughly the same moment, each punches a hole through its own NAT, and the streams meet. It falls apart when the reported address is not one the other player can reach, or when a layer you do not control will not keep the hole open predictably. With two stacked, the outer one is somebody else's equipment: you cannot configure it, port-forward on it, or ask it to behave. The standard fallback is TURN: stop connecting directly and relay everything through a server both sides can definitely reach. It always works, and it costs the operator real bandwidth per session, which is why nobody uses it first. Update 6 implemented both protocols and Double NAT still does not work, so the remaining gap is not solved by simply having a relay in the codebase. That is as far as we can go without speculating about unpublished internals. How To Check Whether This Is You Do this in the game first. Not in your router. 1. Read the Online Play screen Update 6 rewrote it for precisely this. In the studio's words it "now says in plain words whether friends can join, and what to do if they cannot", replacing the old NAT type label. If it says friends cannot join, believe it and read the suggestion. Hunting for a NAT type letter is obsolete; that label was removed deliberately, because it told people little and sent them off changing settings that were not the problem. 2. Press Copy Network Report The other new button copies a diagnostic report to your clipboard, stated purpose being that you "can paste when you ask for help". Use it. Paste it into your bug report or your server's support channel. It beats describing the symptom in prose, because whoever helps you is then looking at what your machine sees rather than guessing from "it says failed to connect". 3. Only then look at your own equipment Two questions confirm the shape of your network. Is there a second router in the path? If your own router is plugged into an ISP box, two devices are translating, and that is the version you can actually fix. Are you on CGNAT? Compare the WAN address in your router's status page against the public address the internet sees for you. If they differ, something upstream is translating, and that is your ISP. If your problem turns out not to be Double NAT, our broader failed to connect fix guide covers the ordinary causes, and our guide to playing Hytale with friends walks the normal joining flow from the start. What You Can Do Today Three real options, and one that is not one. Each has a trade-off, and pretending otherwise would be doing you a disservice. Put the second router in bridge mode This applies to the in-home version only. Putting the ISP box into bridge or modem-only mode collapses two translation layers into one, and you are back to ordinary single NAT that STUN handles well. Trade-off: you lose whatever the ISP box was providing, which on some setups includes phone service or the household Wi-Fi, and some providers hide the option or will not support the result. Do it when nobody else needs the connection. Ask your ISP about a public IPv4 address If you are on CGNAT, the second translation layer is inside your provider's network and there is nothing on your side of the wall to change. Some providers will move you off it or sell you a public address, sometimes for a small monthly fee. Trade-off: availability varies enormously, and on some networks the answer is simply no. Stop hosting peer-to-peer and use a dedicated server This is the one that actually solves the problem rather than working around it. Double NAT breaks peer-to-peer because neither player can be reached from outside. A hosted server has a public address and is listening, so both of you connect outward to it, and outbound connections are exactly what NAT is designed to allow however many layers either player sits behind. Being honest about the cost: it is money you were not spending, and a different way to play. A hosted server is a persistent world that exists whether or not you are logged in, rather than a private world you open when a friend is around. For some groups that is an upgrade; for others it is not what they wanted. Our self-hosted versus managed hosting guide lays out what each route costs. Self-hosting from the same connection reproduces the original problem, so the address has to be genuinely reachable, and our hytale/3 protocol guide covers what Update 6 changed for server owners. What is not an option Port forwarding will not save you, and it is worth saying because it is the first advice everyone gives. On Double NAT you can only forward ports on the router you control, and the traffic never reaches it: it is stopped a layer out, on equipment you cannot log into. On CGNAT there is no port to forward. Where Update 7 Actually Is, and How You Will Know When It Moves The fix is aimed at the Update 7 pre-releases, so the useful question is not "when is Update 7" but "have the pre-releases started?" As of 2 September 2026, no. The evidence rather than the assertion: The pre-release documentation is still on the Update 6 train. The version switcher on pre-release.docs.hytale.com reads 0.6.0-pre.13. That is the strongest signal available, because it is the channel that moves first. Had Update 7 pre-releases begun it would read 0.7.0-pre.x. The newest game build is 0.6.3. In-body dated 31 August 2026, appended to the living Update 6 hotfix page, which holds exactly three version headings: 0.6.3, 0.6.2, 0.6.1. There is no 0.6.4. See our 0.6.3 NPC shadows write-up. The labels lag, which is why trackers get this wrong. That page's byline still says 27 August even though 0.6.3 was appended on the 31st, and docs.hytale.com reads 0.6.2, one behind the shipping client. There is no Part 14. The Update 6 pre-release page tops out at "Pre-Release (Update 6, Part 13, Hotfix 1)". The string "Part 14" does not appear. Nothing new has been published. No post on the news index since 27 August 2026, and no September archive; that URL namespace returns a 404. Now the important part: this is not a delay and not bad news. It is six days after a stable release, and the published cadence accounts for it. Simon (@Simon_Hypixel) set out the rules on 28 January 2026: "• Pre-release updates go out weekly / • Pre-release to get features earlier for feedback & bug reports / • Releases ship when pre-release is in a good state (every ~2-6 weeks) / • Hotfixes can still ship at any time to both pre and release" And, crucially: "FYI, we might skip a week from time to time for holidays, PTO, or other reasons." Plus, for server owners: "If we are aiming for a release week, we will make the call publicly and tell people to prepare their mods/servers a few days beforehand." A quiet week after shipping a major update is what that cadence looks like from outside. The picture at the top of this article — two builders in hard hats at a workbench, beside a hazard-striped work-in-progress sign — describes where the fix sits. Being built, not shipped, no sign on the door saying when. The three things to watch The pre-release docs version switcher. The instant it reads 0.7.0-pre.1, the Update 7 pre-release train has left, and that is the window the fix is aimed at. The pre-release patch notes page. An Update 7 section there is the readable version of the same event. A public "release week" call. Per Simon's rules, the studio announces it and warns modders and server owners days beforehand. One thing to be precise about: Chapter 1 is not Update 7 Plenty of coverage blurs these together. The "First Look: Chapter 1 and More" post of 16 July 2026 gave a release timeline saying "Chapter 1: within the next 2-3 months", and does not mention Update 7 at all. Update 6's notes refer to "our upcoming Chapter 1 update". Hytale has never publicly said Chapter 1 is Update 7. If someone tells you the Double NAT fix comes with Chapter 1, ask where that was stated. A Short Note on Who Is Fixing This A nice detail from the Community Contributions section of the Update 6 patch notes: "The Update 6 lifecycle was the first time we accepted contributions from our community", followed by "As a side note: We'd like to welcome MelodicAlbuild to our team (who offered many contributions)!" That is the same Alex whose post opens this article, now an Engine Developer at Hytale. The person who owns the Double NAT problem came in through the community contribution route during the very update that shipped the networking rework. Frequently Asked Questions Why can't I join my friend's Hytale world? There are far fewer causes than there used to be, because Update 6's STUN and TURN work removed the most common NAT failures. The remaining acknowledged one is Double NAT, unfixed as of 2 September 2026. Check the Online Play screen first: it now states in plain words whether friends can join. What is Double NAT in Hytale? It is not a Hytale feature but a property of your connection: your traffic passes through two layers of address translation instead of one, usually because your router sits behind an ISP-supplied one, or because your ISP uses carrier-grade NAT. It breaks hole punching because the address the outside world sees cannot be reached back through to you. Is Hytale Double NAT fixed? No. As of 2 September 2026 it is unfixed and officially acknowledged. Engine developer Alex on 20 August 2026 and the Update 6 patch notes on 27 August both state that Double NAT "does not work yet" and that the team hopes to have a solution for the Update 7 pre-releases. When is Hytale Update 7? There is no announced date as of 2 September 2026, and no Update 7 pre-releases have started. The pre-release docs version switcher still reads 0.6.0-pre.13, the pre-release patch notes page tops out at Update 6 Part 13 Hotfix 1, and nothing has been posted since 27 August. Under the published cadence, pre-releases go out weekly with skipped weeks expected, and releases ship every two to six weeks. Will the Double NAT fix definitely be in Update 7? No. The official wording is that the team "hope to have a solution for our Update 7 Pre-Releases" — a stated aim from a team still actively seeking a fix, not a commitment. Anyone quoting you a firm version or date has made it up. Does a dedicated server fix Double NAT? Yes, in the practical sense: it sidesteps the problem. A hosted server has a public address and is listening, so both players connect outward to it, and outbound connections are what NAT is designed to allow however many layers you sit behind. It costs money and it is a different way to play, so weigh that rather than treating it as a free fix. Do I still need Tailscale or Hamachi for Hytale? Most people no longer do. Update 6 set out to remove the need for external apps for NAT-related failures, and sessions now take a direct network path when one is available instead of running through a VPN adapter or relay. Behind Double NAT, an overlay may still be the only thing that works for peer-to-peer play. What To Actually Do Not checked yet: open the Online Play screen. It was rewritten in Update 6 to answer exactly this question in plain language. Double NAT with two routers: bridging the ISP box is the fix genuinely within your reach. CGNAT: ask your provider about a public IPv4 address, and if that goes nowhere, a hosted server is the option that actually works rather than the one that might. Waiting for the official fix: watch the pre-release docs version switcher for 0.7.0-pre.1. That, not a news post, is the first thing that will change. And do not let anyone convince you a date exists, because as of today one does not. Whichever route you take, the point is getting into a world with other people. Browse the Hytale server list to find one worth joining, or list your own so the players sorting out their connection this week can find you.