Hytale Update 7 Pre-Release: Chapter 1 First Wave (September 2026)

Hytale Update 7 Pre-Release: The First Wave of Chapter 1

Update 7, Part 1 opened in the pre-release branch on September 3, 2026, a week after Update 6 shipped on August 27. It is the first of several waves of Chapter 1 content that Hypixel Studios plans to land over the coming weeks, and it is explicitly unfinished: the Rune Ability system in particular is expected to change a lot before Chapter 1 releases. This page summarises what is in the wave, what reaches every server regardless of branch, and the operator-facing changes that are easy to miss in a long changelog. The source is the official pre-release patch notes, which the studio updates weekly.

What the first wave of Chapter 1 adds

Feature	Details
Rune Ability system	Collect Runes and place them in a Runebinder's Effigy to augment combat. Five initial runes: Enrage (more damage dealt and received), Fireball (explodes on impact), Imbue Poison (stacking poison on weapon hits), Ground Slam (an earthen spike that launches foes), Wind Strike (the next three attacks fire piercing arcs of wind).
Glider rework	Dive and ascend by pressing and releasing the Sprint key; the glider keeps your velocity when deployed.
Six Goblin NPCs	Scrapper (light melee, swarms), Miner (heavy melee with a leap), Guardian (shielded), Lobber (bombs), Burner (flamethrower), Feastmaster (a gargantuan eater). Charging NPCs got finer acceleration and deceleration tuning.
New blocks	Enkindled Copper and Enkindled Iron blocksets, a Goblin Iron blockset, Goblin decorations, and an updated Gold blockset with new models and textures.
Goblin gadgets	Scrap Drill (breaks several blocks at once), Spyglass, Scrap Glider, Rocket Boots (double jump), Hookshot with Hook Anchors. The Watering Can lost its offensive use.
Hedera's Lair	The void event now escalates after fixed amounts of time instead of the previous build-up.
Controller	Abilities moved to a modifier layout: RB plus a face button (RB+Y signature move, RB+X and RB+B skills, RB+A ability 4).

Changes that reach every server

• Server rule changes apply live. Health bars, combat text, armour hiding and the block placing, breaking and gathering rules now update for connected players without a rejoin.
• Explosions respect the rules. In worlds with block breaking turned off, explosions no longer break blocks. A new WorldConfig.BlockBreakingBypassTag lets chosen blocks stay breakable anyway.
• Instance editing lets you break, gather and place blocks even when the instance normally forbids it, via a new InstanceEdit gameplay config.
• Trigger volumes can set a player's respawn point, move a world's spawn, or clear respawn points; a Tag Condition can compare one tag against another; the event title effect takes a Style option in place of the old "Is Major" toggle; and creative mode gains an Activate Trigger Volumes toggle so builders can walk through their own volumes.
• Mods can contain whole worlds, which appear in the world list once installed; a world created from one survives the mod's removal, and creating it asks permission first.
• Online Play tells players in plain words whether friends can join and what to do if not, and a Copy Network Report button produces a short diagnostic with no addresses in it, useful when someone asks for help joining. The bug report screen gained a copy button for the report ID.
• Portal panels in portal worlds were redesigned, and one-time full-screen announcements can appear after the splash screen.

Performance and stability, the server side

• Block lookups behind entity collision, which run for every moving player and creature on the server, are deduplicated.
• Block breaking on the server no longer stops to load chunks while working out what was broken.
• The world map loads in small pieces instead of one image, using a fraction of the memory and no longer stuttering while open.
• Multiplayer sessions prefer a direct route where one exists, instead of alternatives that add ping.
• A fault where a single player's connection could break networking for everyone else on the server is fixed, as is a shared world staying reachable for a few seconds after being switched back to private.
• Servers now close connections cleanly on shutdown, so clients no longer wait for a timeout.
• View distance is capped at 32 chunks. Servers and worlds no longer refuse to start over a saved value above the cap, and a MaxViewRadius outside 1 to 32 in config.json is clamped in memory with a warning while the file is left as written.
• Crash fixes cover leaving a world or moving between servers, malformed network data nested too deep, joining a world with several large custom skins, a server refreshing the interface, and older NVIDIA GeForce 400 to 700 series cards, plus several memory leaks over long sessions.

Server operator changes

• /auth login browser and /auth login device now work while already signed in; the existing session stays active until the new sign-in completes, so a cancelled login leaves the server as it was.
• /eventtitle takes --style in place of --major, and its secondary line defaults to empty.
• A new /wilderness debug [enabled] [player] command tints wilderness and home chunks on one player's map; wilderness tracking stays off by default.
• The max view radius command rejects values above 32 instead of 512.
• The protocol version was bumped: UpdateLanguage.Language is now required and language fields accept up to 100 characters. Clients and servers on different builds cannot connect.

For plugin and mod developers

This wave breaks more plugin code than most. The items most likely to stop a plugin compiling or loading:

• ClientFeature no longer carries the health bar, combat text, armour hiding or block placement, breaking and gathering flags; those rules live in the GameplayConfig asset, replicated to clients by a new WorldGameplayConfig packet.
• The ShowEventTitle packet dropped IsMajor for an EventTitleStyle field, which breaks any plugin building the packet by hand.
• TargetUtil.getTargetBlock and getTargetLocation take a ChunkStore; WorldChunk.setBlock and breakBlock are deprecated in favour of BlockOperations; ChunkAccessor.performBlockUpdate and WorldChunk.setTicking are gone; every chunk lookup returning a WorldChunk is marked for removal; seventeen unused chunk-access members were deleted.
• TickProcedure.onTick now takes a CommandBuffer<ChunkStore> and a section reference, and block tick procedures run at any height, so code written for Y 0 to 319 must cope with the full range.
• DurabilityOperator is now ComparisonOperator; the treasure map objective and its interactions no longer decode; Spectre_Void is Void_Spectre; density nodes were renamed (SmallerThan to LessThan, SmallerOrEquals to LessOrEqual, Select to Selector, Equals to Equal, GreaterOrEquals to GreaterOrEqual).
• Glider tuning moved from item fields to a wider set on Template_Glider; charge NPCs use ChargeAccelerationDistance and ChargeDecelerationDistance in blocks instead of a rate.
• New: encounters can force weather for participants, a Rewards module with EntitlementReward, a Beam asset and component, music transitions and stingers as asset types, world events that wait on the clock or on campaign progress, and updated public HytaleGenerator documentation under "pre-release".

Running the pre-release on a server

1. Use a second server. The notes change weekly and the Rune system is expected to change substantially; a populated server does not want that churn.
2. Check your data directories against the new boot rule before the first start, or expect exit code 11.
3. Expect release-build players to be unable to join; the protocol bump makes the branches mutually exclusive.
4. Plugins written against Update 6 will need the changes above before they load.
5. Watch the official notes page; it is a living document, and the "Additions" section at its foot already carries items added after the first publication.

For the previous update cycle see the Update 4 server guide, and for public servers the Server Discovery guide, since the in-client browser from Update 5 is still how most players find a server.

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