Hytale New Worlds Modding Contest: Deadline Day, $100K on the Line, and the April Mod Wave

Today is the day. As of 11:59 PM Pacific Time on Tuesday, April 28, 2026, submissions for the Hytale New Worlds Modding Contest close — taking with them the chance to win a slice of a $100,000 prize pool spread across 65 winners. After months of teasers, mid-contest drops, and a steady drip of mod uploads to CurseForge, the Hytale modding community is heading into its first real, large-scale judged showcase. And it is happening in the same week that the team also shipped Update 5 Part 5 — meaning many of the entries about to be reviewed will be running on the freshest possible build of the game. If you have been watching the modding scene from a distance, here is the deadline-day briefing: what closes tonight, what we know is moving on CurseForge right now, what we still do not know, and what to put on your calendar for May. What closes tonight The contest, hosted on CurseForge in partnership with the Hytale team, has a clear shape. The headline number is $100,000 in total prizes, but it is not a single grand prize — it is split deliberately to reward different kinds of work and different sizes of team. Here is the breakdown: $81,000 across three main categories — $27,000 each for WorldGen V2 packs, NPC-driven experiences, and full Experiences. $10,000 across five Community Favourite winners — decided by a public community vote rather than the panel. $9,000 already paid out across 30 Mid-Contest Drop winners at $300 each, awarded throughout the contest window. That brings the total winners to 65 individual creators or teams. The official rules and the submission portal both live on the contest landing page, and Hytale's original announcement post is over at hytale.com/news. If you are reading this in the morning Pacific time, you still have hours; if you are reading this from Europe or Asia, the deadline likely lands in the early hours of Wednesday morning your time. The three main categories, explained Each of the three main brackets pays the same — $27,000 — but they are looking for very different things. Understanding the split is the easiest way to read what kinds of mods the judges will end up promoting. WorldGen V2 packs. These are biome and terrain generation mods built on the rebuilt WorldGen V2 system. Think custom biomes, new ore distributions, generated structures, alternative climate systems — the kind of pack that, dropped into a server, completely changes the feel of an exploration session. NPC-driven experiences. This category is about behaviour, dialogue, encounters, and AI. With Hytale's NPC and event systems exposed to modders, judges are looking for entries that lean on storytelling and interaction — quest givers, faction systems, scripted encounters, dynamic schedules. Less terrain, more characters. Full Experiences. The biggest, broadest bracket. A "full Experience" can combine custom worldgen, custom NPCs, custom UI, custom items, and custom progression into a single playable package — something close to a small standalone game running on the Hytale platform. This is the category most likely to produce mods that end up running long-term on community servers, and it is also the most demanding to build. The April mod wave on CurseForge You cannot point to a public list of contest entries — the Hytale team has not published one — but you can look at what has shipped on the public CurseForge Hytale hub during the contest window. The past week alone has been one of the busiest stretches the platform has had: April 22 — Hylamity 0.1.0 launched, a Calamity-themed mod for Hytale from Yharim_Hylamity and the Hylamity-Team. The opening release ships Wulfrum content and a Scrapshop Depot prefab, with permissions secured from both the Calamity and Fargo Souls teams. It cleared 1.3K+ downloads in its first week. April 23 — AzureDoomC shipped LevelingCore 1.0.4 and a Classes Sub Mod alongside the Update 5 Part 5 pre-release. April 25 — AzureDoomC updated the Unified Tagging API, a cross-mod compatibility layer for items, blocks, and entities. April 25 — Gueridon uploaded a vanilla-style Furniture mod with craftable décor pieces. April 25 — An RPG Leveling mod received an update covering XP, zones, scaling difficulty, and stat progression (author unconfirmed at time of writing). April 26 — EineNT released a quality-of-life vein-miner mod: hold LEFT ALT to mine connected ore veins. April 20 — Lewaii's Endgame and QoL hit v5.0, with cumulative downloads now sitting around 341.7K, putting it among the most-downloaded community mods on the platform. One important caveat: none of these mods are confirmed contest submissions. They are simply the mods active during the contest window. Some of them may well be entries — the timing is suggestive, especially for the cluster of releases on April 23 and 25 — but until the finalists are announced, treat any specific mod as a candidate, not a confirmed entry. What we still do not know For all the noise around the contest, several big questions remain unanswered as the deadline lands: No public submission count. Hytale has not announced how many entries have been submitted, and there is no live counter on the contest page. No entry showcase. Unlike some game jams where every submission is browsable on day one, contest entries are being held back for the judging round. No finalist list yet. Finalists across all three main categories are not announced until May 5, 2026. No community vote yet. The five Community Favourite winners are decided after finalists are known and announced on May 12, 2026. In other words: today is the loud day for creators, but the loud day for players is still about a week away. The build the entries will be tested on Worth a brief note: the Update 5 Part 5 pre-release dropped on April 23, just five days before the deadline. That build introduces the reworked Extrude Tool (merging Extrude and Flood with Same Material and Same Shape filters and a Fill mode), sound diffraction that pairs with Part 4's audio occlusion, the new /locate command, music layer support, and a polished Social Sidebar v2. Most importantly for modders, Part 5 also introduced an initial falling-block tech API. Many late entries — and certainly the judging round itself — will be played and reviewed against this build, so any contest mod that leans on those new systems is going to feel more current than one frozen weeks ago on Part 4. The Chapter 1 blog that has not landed One thing that did not happen this week, despite community expectations: the long-awaited Chapter 1 blog from Hytale Studio Director Simon Collins-Laflamme. Back on April 9, alongside the Part 3 patch notes, Simon publicly committed to a dedicated Chapter 1 blog post. As of today — April 28, almost three weeks later — that blog has still not been published. With Part 5 already out and the contest closing, the next obvious window for it would be alongside Part 6's pre-release (the next Thursday cadence falls on April 30) or alongside the May 5 finalist reveal. Worth keeping hytale.com/news bookmarked. The timeline ahead Here is what to put on your calendar for the next two weeks: April 28 (today), 11:59 PM PT — submissions close. April 30 — the next regular Thursday in the Update 5 patch cadence; if Part 6 follows the established rhythm, this is the most likely day for the next pre-release. Not confirmed. May 5 — finalists announced across the three main categories. May 12 — Community Favourite winners announced after the public vote. Later in May / June — the longer tail: any stable Update 5 release, a possible Chapter 1 blog, and the gradual migration of winning mods onto live community servers. What this means for HytaleCharts server owners If you run or play on a Hytale server — and there are now 431+ active servers listed on HytaleCharts — the contest matters to you even if you never submit a single line of code. The mods that win this contest will be the mods that define the next six months of community-server identity. WorldGen V2 packs will reshape what "vanilla survival" feels like. NPC-driven experiences will make populated towns and questing servers viable. Full Experiences will give server owners ready-made themed packages they can adopt instead of building from scratch. So today, follow the deadline. On May 5, watch the finalist list. On May 12, vote in the Community Favourite round. And once the winners stabilise their releases on CurseForge, expect the best of them to start showing up on the community servers you are already browsing on HytaleCharts. The contest is the upstream event; the server scene is the downstream one. We will be tracking both.