Hytale New Worlds Modding Contest: Voting Now Open Through May 12, $100K and 65 Winners on the Line

Public voting in the Hytale New Worlds Modding Contest is open. CurseForge revealed the finalist slate on Tuesday, May 5, 2026, and the community vote runs through Tuesday, May 12, with winners announced the same day. The contest spans three categories — WorldGen V2, NPCs, and Experiences — and the prize pool sits at $100,000 split across 65 winners. The voting hub is live at hytale.curseforge.com/newworldscontest. For the HytaleCharts audience — server owners, modders, and players trying to keep up with a release cycle that has accelerated meaningfully since March — this is the most concentrated week of community-creator activity Hytale has had in 2026. Update 5 is now six weeks deep into pre-release and a stable cut is plausibly imminent. The contest finalists are demoing on Update 5 Part 6's new tooling. And the next seven days will tell us which projects the community wants to see become flagship mods on the platform. How the Voting Works The voting window opened on May 5 and closes on May 12, 2026, with winners announced the same day voting closes. Each of the three categories has its own CurseForge community-picks page where finalists are listed and voted on individually: Experiences, WorldGen V2, and NPCs. The vote is open to any CurseForge account holder. The prize ladder is the same in each of the three categories. First place wins $10,000, second wins $7,500, third wins $2,500, and fourth through tenth each take home $1,000. That puts $27,000 into each category and 30 paid placements across the three combined. Five additional community-favorite winners receive $2,000 each, drawn across the contest as a whole. And 30 mid-contest awards of $300 each were distributed through the submission window before finalists were named. Add it all up and the pot lands at $100,000 across 65 paid winners. The Experiences Finalists The Experiences category is where the contest's range is widest, and the finalist list reflects that. One of the most-circulated finalists is a Star Wars universe pack that adds custom planets, lightsabers, and a tier of ore mining tied to the franchise's lore. Another finalist takes the magic-and-progression route with an evolutive spellbooks system layered onto magic-infused weapons, where spells and gear scale together as the player advances. A third finalist drops a Legend-of-Zelda-style dungeon-and-items pack, recreating that genre's tight loop of dungeon, key, item, capability around a Hytale-native moveset. The finalist that has generated the most pre-vote conversation is a full RPG leveling system the creator describes as inspired by Solo Leveling and League of Legends. It ships dungeons, classes, races, pets, and an ability tree, and is almost certainly built on AzureDoomC's LevelingCore framework, which has now passed 41,800 downloads on CurseForge and is becoming the default base layer for class-and-progression mods coming out of the contest pipeline. Rounding out the named Experiences finalists is a precision combat mod centered on parry timing and stamina management, a noticeable departure from Hytale's stock combat feel. The WorldGen V2 Finalists WorldGen V2 is the category where the contest will most directly shape what end-game Hytale exploration looks like, because the winners' worldgen packs are the ones server owners are most likely to layer into their own seeds. The named finalists span an unusually broad range of dimension and biome design. One finalist adds a magical flying-islands dimension built around custom worldgen, hand-authored structures, and a roster of new mobs tuned to the dimension's verticality. Another, called The Rose Mire, introduces a new dimension with two themed biomes that share a setting but contrast tonally. A third — the most ambitious of the slate — is a horror mod that takes the player through a seven-dimension descent, with each layer ruled by its own deadly creature. There is also a Kweebec ravines biome that reframes one of Orbis's existing-fauna zones as a deep-cut terrain feature, a Silent Construct ruins worldgen pack that adds explorable hand-built structure sets, and a set of new ocean-based biomes that fill in one of Hytale's traditionally thinner content zones. The NPCs Finalists The NPCs category is the smallest in named-finalist visibility but arguably the most impressive on a craft basis, because every entry is built on Hytale's asset-driven NPC system rather than scripted from scratch. The slate ranges from soulslike dragons — multi-phase boss creatures with telegraphed move sets and stagger systems — to wandering merchants designed to bring Orbis's roads and biomes to life with traversal-aware vendors. It is a clean demonstration of what the asset-driven NPC pipeline can produce in the hands of skilled modders, and the eventual winners here are the ones server owners running survival or roleplay setups will want to integrate first. Why the Modding Scene Just Got So Big As of late April 2026, CurseForge's Hytale platform hosted more than 5,700 mods with over 25 million combined downloads. The top mods by download count include Spellbook at 181,000-plus, Miners Helmet at 116,000-plus, Wayback Charm at 73,000-plus, Endgame and QoL at 296,000, and Better Modlist at 241,000. That spread — utility, gameplay, and content all clearing six figures — is a healthy sign for the platform. The contest is one obvious driver. The Update 5 pre-release cadence is the other. Part 6, which shipped April 30, added the Trigger Volume Tool, a built-in 3D-volume primitive that lets builders fire scripted effects on player enter, exit, and remain without touching glue code — a meaningful drop in the floor for what a non-programmer can author. Part 6 also opened up new modder API surfaces that finalists have been adapting to in the final week: DisplayNameComponent is now runtime-only and replaced by PersistentDisplayName for serialized display names, CollisionResult#getCollisionEntities now returns entity references rather than full Entity objects, Player#notifyPickupItem is now a static method, new world-gen-v1 mod event hooks were added, new asset types for biome modification landed, and ProjectileComponent#getCreatorUuid shipped for projectile attribution. Several of those changes are breaking, and the rolling pre-release rhythm has finalists shipping fixes day-of as the API moves under them. Why There Was No Part 7 Today Today, Thursday, May 7, 2026, was the expected slot for Update 5 Part 7 under the six-week Thursday pre-release cadence Hypixel Studios has been holding since March 26. Part 7 did not ship. Simon Collins-Laflamme flagged the slowdown a week early in an April 30 post, writing: "Small note on Update 5: we're giving this one a bit more time on purpose! There's a lot of backend/social/creator tech in this batch, including friends list work, server [discovery]..." (via X). Simon's stated rule for stable releases is that pre-release updates ship weekly and stable releases ship "every ~2–6 weeks" once the pre-release branch is in a good state. As of today, Update 5 has been in pre-release for six full weeks, which puts it at the ceiling of his stated window. That means the most likely explanation for skipping Part 7 today is not that the cadence has broken indefinitely, but that the studio is consolidating into a stable Update 5 cut. Massively OP picked up the server-discovery thread on May 5 in a piece on Hytale's in-game server browser, which Simon has confirmed is part of this batch. The other piece still outstanding is the Chapter 1 groundwork blog Simon teased on April 9: "Chapter 1 groundwork and some major overhauls to the game are coming, and I'll put together a blog [post]" (via X). It has not been published as of this writing, and the most natural landing spot for it is alongside an eventual stable Update 5 ship. What This Means for Server Owners For HytaleCharts-listed server owners, this week is one of the few moments in 2026 where a piece of player attention is concentrated specifically on community-built content. Featuring a finalist's pack as a server event during the voting window — a themed weekend, a temporary game mode, a community playthrough — is a distribution moment, both for the finalist and for the server. The contest voting page links back to CurseForge, which is where the finalist mods are hosted, which means the finalists' download numbers are going to spike this week regardless of how the placements shake out. The other thing worth doing this week is preparing for Update 5 stable. Once stable ships, the in-game server browser arrives with it, which means verifying domain ownership and locking down server-discovery metadata on HytaleCharts is going to matter in a way it has not before. We currently list more than 432 active Hytale servers. The official Hytale Discord has more than 567,000 members. The traffic is real, and it is about to gain a second front. Vote Before May 12 The voting window closes Tuesday, May 12, 2026. The full voting hub is at hytale.curseforge.com/newworldscontest, with separate ballots for the Experiences, WorldGen V2, and NPCs categories. The strongest argument for voting is the same one that makes the contest interesting in the first place: the finalists you are voting for are mods you can actually install and play this week, and several of them — the Solo-Leveling RPG system, the seven-dimension horror descent, the asset-driven soulslike dragons — would be flagship picks on any modded Hytale server worth running. If you want HytaleCharts coverage of Update 5 Part 7 if and when it ships, the eventual stable Update 5 cut, the in-game server browser launch, and the long-promised Chapter 1 groundwork blog, subscribe to the HytaleCharts blog. The next two weeks are going to move fast.