Hytale Is Another Minecraft

by

Good Morning Folks! If you are floating around social media this week, you have most certainly seen chatter about a new building/survival Minecraft-like called Hytale. If you have no clue where this game came from, then I will attempt to explain. Essentially back in Minecraft proper, there was a group that ran a series of servers called Hypixel, largely known for the quantity and variety of mini-games that they offered. In 2020 Riot Games acquired Hypixel Studios with the purpose of publishing their game idea called Hytale, but that deal ultimately fell apart in June 2025 with the halting of development on the game. In November 2025, Hypixel Studios and with it Hytale was bought back by the original co-founders and since then we have had a rapid series of updates to the game to prepare it for its launch earlier this week. What you ahve not is a traditional early access model with the ability to buy into testing at various price points with the cheapest being around $20.

The real question however being that is Hytale good, and is it worth buying into? One of the challenges that I have with Minecraft is that I can almost never play the game in its original vanilla un-modified state. When I do play I use a tool called Modrinth to install and keep updated over twenty three mods that make the game feel better to play. Hytale out of the box… feels like a deeply modded Minecraft experience. It has slightly more modern combat, better graphics, and way more system depth in that the baseline feels like playing Minecraft with some sort of a technology pack addon. There are so many simple tweaks that just improve your quality of life, like the ablity to carry a torch in your offhand along with your tool or weapon in your mainhand. This makes exploring the dark depths of the world so much more palatable because really… you don’t NEED to torch off every inch of the world when you are down there only for the purpose of seeking resources.

Probably my single favorite thing that Hytale is doing is that it solves the “night one problem”. When you start a new Minecraft world you essentially have a very short period of time that you need to gather certain things. Firstly you need to craft some sort of a shelter, progress through the most basic tools, and locate either a large source of wood to turn into charcoal… or have some luck with surface coal so you can make torches, and spend some time lighting up an area of the world in order to prepare for the coming night. In Hytale you start off in an abandoned structure that quite honestly does an amazing job of serving as your first base. Once you clean it up a bit you have plenty of room to build all of the early progression, and have a safe hidey hole that you can duck into every night.

That is the other big takeaway that I have so far, is that the Night itself does not feel like as bit of an obstacle as it is in Minecraft. You can pretty much roam around freely at night, and so far almost every dangerous thing that I have come across… has some sort of significant glow effect going on. The Skeletons have glowing eyes and are often carrying a torch, and the weird void touched creatures all have some sort of green glow to them. So essentially if you have your head on a swivel, it is very unlikely you will ever be caught off guard by a random mob roaming up to you. There are these weird flying masses of tentacles that I have not tangled with, but look really ominous. You can barely see it in the above screenshot as it flys above the treeline. I have zero clue what these things are but they seem like they are bad mojo, but I was able to get relatively close to them without it aggroing.

One of the most interesting things about the game is that it has way more intentional creation than Minecraft does. This is a bit of a double edged sword. You are going to spend way more time roaming around the world looking for specific types of structures from the surface, than you are digging down and trying to find things. For example right outside of my first spawn point, is a cave system that goes all the way down to the lava layer, which is essentially what spawns in this game right above bedrock or the bottom of the world. You can in theory find all of the resources you need to get started, in one of these first holes. However as you roam around, different biomes have different resources, or at least certain resources might be more readily available. There was a badlands biome that I found that was loaded with surface iron deposts for example, and a swamp region that had these witches hut looking structures that had loot chests in them.

As a result you are going to be spending a lot more of your time roaming around the world looking for specific things. One of the benefits of exploring at night, is that a lot of the enemy camps have fires and lights, and can be seen easily at a distance. For example one of the first nights that I went roaming I stumbled across a troll village of sorts and thought I was doing really well… until I fell into a spiked pit and realized that there was a whole underground warren that I was not prepared to take on. I’ve found Mineshafts, forgotten villages filled with Skeletons, and entire cave systems full of all manner of poisonous creatures… that will ruin your day if you let them hit you. Essentially it feels like Hytale is delivering on the sort of promises that Cubeworld made, of having a really interesting world filled with meaningful drops. I’ve picked up several pieces of armor in my travels that are way better than anything I can currently craft, and dropped with decent stat bonuses on them. Loot feels like it actually matters in the game, and that alone will make the Minecraft experience so much more interesting.

So far at least, much of the early gameplay seems to be around building out your tech tree and trying to acquire specific resources. Copper Ore for example seen above, dominates the early things that you can build and allowing you to kit out your character in a full set of armor and items. Right now I am in a phase where I desperately need Iron Ore, which is pushing me to go out further and explore more dangerous places… which often leads to my untimely demise. One of the cool things about this game is that unlike Minecraft you don’t teleport back to your spawn point empty handed. You will lose a lot of the resources that you have found… but will at least keep a small percentage of stuff so that you never end up in a situation where a single death makes the game suddenly unplayable. So while I have lost countless chunks of iron down in the depths, I still managed to limp back home with enough of it to upgrade my workbench, and now am working towards upgrading my backpack size and storage limits.

If there was anything that was lacking in Hytale… I would say that it wouild be some sort of overarching quest structure to guide the player through progression. At least based on the original design for the game, it felt like this was going to be more of a feature than it actually is. Right now we have a really solid Minecraft clone, that feels like playing a really good modded server. However I feel like there could be so much more more, and there are lots of things that could be expanded upon. The look and feel of exploring the depths, and all of the cute and interesing critters that you stumble upon in your journey is pretty great. For example I found this amazing underground lake while exploring yet another cave system, and I was almost afraid to hop into the water for fear that it was acid or something. Turns out that no it was just lighting effects and normal water.

One of the few quests that exists in the game revolves around finding a portal to a forgotten temple, which then teleports you to what is likely going to be a social hub at some point in the game’s lifespan. Inside here are all sorts of cute NPCs that really do not do much of anything at the moment. There are a ton of WIP signs, but there are at least a couple of NPCs that allow you to barter life essence for general useful materials. Sadly they did not have any Iron Ore for me, but if I wanted to skip some steps in progression and buy spices for cooking I could do that easy enough. I would like to see more of this sort of content in the game. Let me stumble across traders out in the wilds that what me to collect region specific resources that I can then trade for interesting stuff. Given that so much of the game is about exploration, I am really hoping that there is some sort of waypoint system that allows me to fast travel between areas so I can build a bunch of forward bases as I explore.

I guess I should talk a bit about crafting. Essentially the earliest progression resolves around setting up basic crafting benches that do different things. For example you want to create a Campfire that will consume wood or charcoal and then produce cooked food. You can dump disparate resources into the input slots so that you can cook up multiple items at the same time. Most of the crafting benches will work like this, and they are capable of drawing resources automatically from chests that are stored within the vicinity of the crafting machine. I believe I read somewhere that this is an eight block radius, which means that you are going to want to optimize the placement of your crafting machines around maybe central column of chests. So far the starter building seems to be a good place for dumping these crafting machines and I’ve yet to encounter not being able to draw resources from the banks of chests that I have created there.

All in all I am pretty happy with what I have seen so far of the game. It is way more baked than I was expecting it to be for this point in its development cycle. Combat feels solid, and there is a ton of stuff to explore and find. Thinking back and comparing this to other Minecraft-likes that I played in early access… I would say that this is way more feature complete than Trove, Vintage Story, Boundless, Creativerse, or Nightingale was when I first played each of those. It is clear that this is standing on the backs of the progression systems built into the Minecraft modding scene, but I think that is okay. Setting up a fully modded Minecraft is only now a simple process, and there are many folks who have never gotten to experience what that came can be with enough effort. Hytale is a pretty great start on that experience. I am swapping it up to try third person mode to see if that makes exploration feel a bit less claustophobic.

Like I hinted at in one of the above paragraphs, I tried to pay the game like Minecraft and dig one of my shafts to bedrock and did not quite get there. In all of my way digging down I did not encounter anything terribly useful apart from some ore spawns. I am hoping at some point this is a viable means of playing the game, but right now it feels like you are supposed to be looking for features above ground, rather than spending all of your time digging around underneath it. There are some cave systems near my base that I really want to spend some time properly exploring and torching them off so that I can know where I have been before. I am not really sure if torches prevent spawns in the same way as they do in Minecraft, but that is half the fun of a brand new game like this. There are new rules about the world to learn and understand. For example in Minecraft I can drop into that game and have diamond weapons within the hour. At some point… I hope to reach that level of progression in Hytale.

Have you spent any time playing Hytale? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.

The Thousand Theory

by

Good Morning Folks. This has been a really weird week for Destiny Rising. Yesterday was “sibling time” and Ace and I did our normal Grandmasters and Hang thing… but it was far less chill than normal. We started the evening with another attempt at Calamity Ops, but still could not get out of the relegation zone. We had what felt like a perfect run, or as close to perfect as we were likely going to be getting… and still came up short of progressing. So in theory on Thursday we will drop down a rank, but so long as we both drop at the same time life should be fine. Hopefully we can have a really good double progression during the next two week period and move back up again. We struggled a bit with our Grandmaster Strike after that but it was nowhere near as bad as our worst week ever so we were doing pretty good. Mostly we both just came off as exhausted and spent the next hour or so chatting while doing random stuff in game.

We’ve also had a really weird week when it comes to the Pack Hunt map. Thankfully we have another guild member that has been helping us out. However until last night, every single three node that could be a stronghold has not turned into one. A few weeks back Ace came up with this theory on how to move around the map and we have been continuing to test that theory, and for the most part I think it works. I can’t say for certain we understand every aspect of it, but there does seem to be a method to the madness when it comes to moving around the map and avoiding large obstacles like mountain ranges and lakes. This is in large part why you see such weird patterns of movement that we have made on the map, because there are a limited number of total moves that we get during a week, so want to try and make as much progress as we can with those.

So essentially the theory is this… the nodes that reward 1000 Energy are always going to lead you in the right direction. This could be just towards a potential stronghold objective, or towards a break in an obstacle wall. if you see 1000 Energy available as a node reward, far as we can tell you ALWAYS want to take it. Next up is if you see three resoruces being rewarded at the same time… this seems to signify one of two things. Either you are going to get a combat node, which often times serve as breaks in obstacles like mountain ranges or lakes… or you are going to for certain uncover a stronghold when you get to a three node block. What you want to avoid however is 500 Energy nodes and single resource nodes, because these often are indicators of a mountain range or another obstacle, or that you are heading towards one. Essentially there seems to be this minesweeper type logic that you can follow to figure out how to route around the map. Sometimes you are going to have to just yolo it and try a node, hoping you find one of the breadcrumb nodes later however because there is not always a good node up to follow.

I have multiple accounts set up for Destiny Rising, in part to help us unlock nodes on the Pack Hunt map, and also gain energy to keep funding the “bitcoin miner” in our guild hall. I spent a good chunk of last night while hanging out and talking with “Erasure” trying to get my second account set up to the point where I have three Iron Commander missions every day, so that I can get an easy 60 pinnacle rewards done for daily progress. At some point I really need to get my third account through the main story so that I unlock more options there as well. I wish we could recruit more people to the cause, so that neither Ace or I felt the need to run alt accounts…. but alas this seems to mostly be a sibling endevour. So long as we can technically keep making things happen with just us forcing it, I am okay with that.

In other news I am probably going to be trying to ease back into Final Fantasy XIV soon. “Erasure” never got through A Realm Reborn, and I have been drafted to the cause of helping her get through some of the content, specifically the content that does not have trust support yet. Some of this is probably going to be doing a bit of nerves bolstering as we queue together for Crystal Tower, so that I can hang out on voice and explain some of the mechanics to make it a bit less fraught. My hope is that this gets me back into the swing of playing my Warrior main, and can start chipping away at the post patch content for Dawntrail. I’ve picked up some gear so that I can move forward in the MSQ, but just need to get back to the point where my muscle memory will take over again.

Anyways. I hope yall are having a most excellent week. I am starting to get worried for next week because I am out due to a colonoscopy, and it is my first one…. so yeah a bit worried about how that will go. I am not sure how much blogging will happen, because it will ultimately depend on where I am both nerves wise and health wise throughout the week.

Goodbye Anthem

by

Yesterday was the day that the Anthem Servers went offline officially. This poor game lived such an ignominious fate, and in truth I had not really thought about it in years. However my friend Carthuun reminded me of its passing yesterday, as did a bunch of YouTube channels. It was a really important game for me… until it wasn’t. I wanted this thing to be so much more than it was, and I tried the hell out of making it my next Destiny. It has so many problems, so little content, and so many hamfisted decisions. There was a fun core there, but in an effort to slow players down and keep them from grinding through all of the content… they made the game feel deeply unrewarding and lost me in the process. If you want a proper eulogy for the game then I would suggest that you check out the video Paul Tassi posted yesterday.

I think for me personally I am going to prefer to remember the good bits. There was a really fun gameplay loop when it worked, and roaming around the big open world in an Iron Man suit was a fucking blast. Once they dialed it in, the controls felt amazing and all that it really needed… was more content. However that is unfortunately the most expensive thing to create… and it felt like EA was trying to foist this game out on us and not really fund it. I am not sure what came after those first six months, but supposedly the game improved over time. I don’t think it actually got much in the way of more content, but there was a weirdly devoted Reddit to the game. The thing I am probably going to remember the most is the soundtrack and how much I really loved it. I would love it if someone figured out a way to make this game work with emulator servers, since we should be able t still get the client via steam. However I doubt it had a large enough player base to support that sort of nonsense. You were a cool idea Anthem, but sadly Electronic Arts is a shitbag that did not allow you time or funding to turn into something cool.

I’ve been back in Path of Exile a bit working on challenges and this morning I checked my mappers and finished up Legendary Leagues. Essentially I would really like to hit 34 challenges, and I am sitting at 32, which of course means that I need to squeeze out two more. There are some that I could just pay for carries to complete, but I always hate doing that because it feels like failure. There is one for having run a bunch of map modifiers and fragments, and that one just takes immense time mapping in order to knock out. In theory it is relatively easy to do so, I just have to play a lot, and if I put on an audiobook I can burn through that. However I have not been on my audiobook game lately because I have wanted to spend every moment I can with “Erasure”. However last night we just hung out on voice chat while we both did our own things and that was extremely nice.

This morning I rolled a bunch of originator maps in an attempt to get several that did not have truly onerous affixes on them. That is my core problem with Tier 16.5 is that they have the same pure butts modifiers that T17s have. In theory I should be able to burn through these without much issue, and since I am already level 100 on my Righteous Fire Chieftain, I don’t much care about taking deaths. I know yesterday at one point I took a death, momentarily cringed, and then remembered I was max level and it was no big deal. I think leveling in Path of Exile II made me once again conscious of the damage loss penalty, and I am having to remember that I already beat that boss in Path of Exile 1. I am off today so I am probably going to throw on a book and grind maps at some point.

I also played a bit of Minecraft last night, working on my world that I created named after “Erasure”. It continues to pay off significantly and I found some pretty early diamonds at -5 Z height, or just shortly after ending the deep slate layers. This allowed me to craft my first diamond pick, and sped up my progress descending to bedrock. I’ve harvested so many resources while hollowing out my 8×8 chambers on the way down. I’ve got worlds of iron, gold, copper, redstone, and lapis and an overabundance of raw rock resources. In theory I am probably going to start using the deep slate in combination with cobblestone to build up my tower a bit more so that I can see it even further from base. I also made some shears and got some wool. When I deforested the top of the hill I was building on, it made it so more farm animals spawned giving me much better access to resources.

In theory I need to find some wheat so that I can start breeding cattle. I have tons of cows roaming around near my base and in theory should probably go with the good ole tried and true “meat hole” approach for infinite food production. In order to do that however… I need grain, and in order to find grain…. I am going to need to roam around a bit. The tower is going to make sighting where I am in the world much easier so that is probably the next major expansion project. I should also start to create an above ground fenced in area for crop production and the eventual creation of said “meat hole”. I did hit bedrock and at some point I am going to start setting up branch mining, because once I have access to diamond… I want more of it because diamond picks speed everything in this game up so much.

Tonight is going to be sibling time. We need to make another attempt to get out of relegation territory in Calamity Ops. In theory it really does not matter to much other than it being a point of pride, but we just need to stay together in rank so we can keep doing it together. We also have a new set of Grandmaster keys so we will be doing that tonight, and during the day I might try and unlock the full tower defense mode so we can do some of that. I am not sure when Morgran’s Hunt begins, but I know it is soon as well. Thursday is reset so we may get together really quickly that night and try and get in some early Calamity Ops then as well. I love sibling time, but I am also trying to coax “Erasure” into joining us if for no reason to hang out and listen to the nonsense that Ace and I get up to.

Anyways! I hope you are having a great week. I am pretty freaking happy at the moment, or at least happier than I have been in awhile. I kind of want that for everyone.

Dig a Hole, Find some Coal

by

Good Morning Folks! I am sort of all over the place when it comes to gaming right now. The primary game that I am playing… is spending time obsessively chatting with “Erasure” and pretty much everything else is falling by the wayside. I have been remembering to log into FFXIV however to collect my weekly cactpot so that is at least something. At some point I want to return to the game and catch up, but nothing has really prompted me to do so. I would also like to play my secondary set of characters over on Dynamis, but I doubt I actually do that until Ace is also in the mood to play the game… which may be never. They were a matched set and we pretty much only played them as sibling time, which was a heck of a lot of fun for awhile until we both wandered off like bored toddlers. I figure my mains on Cactuar I might actually play whenever the next expansion is announced because I tend to have a bump in my desire to play whenever that happens.

I am still playing some Path of Exile II, but I also sort of feel like I have “beaten” that league. I had a lot of fun being a demon bear hopping all around the place blowing things up, but I’ve been kind of getting the itch to finish things up in Path of Exile 1. As a result I spent a chunk of yesterday working on some of the achievements that I left dangling. I respecced away from Incursion and just picked up more Heist stuff on the atlas tree to speed up the total time it takes to run each map. I was working on the meta achievement for running a bunch of super serious mode league content, and have almost finished the step where you have to run 20 Rituals with blood filled containers. I think I have one more of those left, and then I need to figure out one more thing to do in order to finish up that challenge. I set a bunch of mappers running last night, but I have a feeling that I will not be lucky enough to have gotten enough 100% completions in order to knock that meta out. I did just pop in to check and I got 9 completed at 100% so… honestly 15/30 is not too shabby.

I am still playing Destiny Rising, but mostly as a daily maintenance mode game. Essentially I have been focused on trying to uncover a lot of stuff for the guild so that we can keep paying upkeep. I am not playing all three accounts, but I am at very least playing one quite a bit each week. I got my Jaren up to 70k which should be useful so long as we have Fire Damage on the meta for this season. I sort of miss my girl Helhest a bit, and really enjoy when her exotic bow procs and blows a ton of shit up. I also miss Estella being the god empress of all content, but I get that they are wanting to convince people to build new characters. I still absolutely consider this to have been my Game of the Year for 2025 not counting the Fractal Incursion event in Guild Wars 2. It is so damned much fun, I just wish I could convince more of my friends to play it so we could keep upgrading the base without going broke every week.

Something that I have honestly played a lot of this past weekend is Minecraft. I have this dumb habit of making seeds based off my friends and then seeing what they offer. I made a seed based on “Erasure” and it was pretty wild. There was a shipwreck beside where I spawned into the world, tons of sea turtles everywhere, some surface lava, and forests as far as the eyes can see. While I once did a Hardcore Minecraft series, I mostly just play casually. In fact I tend to go tweak a bunch of the world settings so that I don’t have to care about getting sleep every night to prevent phantoms from spawning, and also make it so that creepers cannot blow up my hard work. So in truth these days I plan on pretty fucking softcore mode, and I am fine with that. I like milling around in the world and building dumb things.

Of course the biggest challenge of a new spawn is finding that initial coal. The last world that I created was so forested and so devoid of coal, that I had to start burning logs to get my initial start. This world however, within a few blocks of the side of that initial hill I struck the motherlode of coal deposits and was able to make two full stacks of torches. This was more than enough to fuel most of my further explorations. I am a weirdo in that I mostly stay inside cave systems in Minecraft, and go full on Dwarf mode as I hollow out the earth looking for riches. So the first thing I did was start to hollow out a base in the side of the hill, while being very careful not to break back out into the world. I put a piece of dirt in the entrance to wall off my little safe chamber and then began structuring something reasonable to work in, slowly adding pieces of equipment as needed.

This of course led me to do what I always do… and start a shaft down to bedrock. I am not entirely certain how deep I am at this point but I have broken into the layers of deep stone. Essentially the central shaft has a winding staircase around the outside of what is effectively a series of eight by eight rooms, with three block tall ceilings. The amount of Iron, Copper, and Coal that I have come across in my “spelunk” has fueled my further expansion. The only real challenge with this world so far is that I have yet to find a single sheep. I should probably go off on a mission to find a breeding pair of those so that I can farm them for wool. I do have enough steel to make shears, so I should probably do that rather than killing them. Essentially more than anything right now I need some wool so that I can make a bed and then reset my spawn point inside; my catacombs.

The next big project however is deforesting the hill that I dug into. My intent is to start building up and make a bit of a tower, so that I can see it clearly from above ground. Right now it is just a hovel in the side of a hill with a bunch of torches, and that is hard to see when I am off exploring the world. Sure I have my mini-map mod, and sure I could set waypoints…. but I would far rather give myself a nice big visual landmark to see from the surrounding area. So effectively I am going to harvest all of the birch trees up on top of my hill and then begin to build similar eight by eight chambers upwards into the sky. I will have to figure out what I want for the design for these to be as I build up. I most certainly have MORE than enough materials from my downwards expansion to fuel some above ground mega structures.

I guess as far as things go with “Erasure” I should probably give an update. It was a dramatic couple of days for various reasons. We had the first thing that really checked our relationship, and a lot of it was me being in my head about things. However I think we exited on better ground than we started, so that is pretty good. The harsh reality is that I do not know how to go slow. The relationship that I had with my wife of thirty years… was one that pretty much transitioned from being “just friends” to being a “couple” that was inseparable in over the course of a single weekend. I am really not good at casually seeing someone, and I am working on that. It probably seems like the most counter-intuitive thing to anyone who has dated around at length… but it is just the way my brain and heart works. I am having to learn how to pump the brakes a bit, but will ultimately be better for it. Luckily she did not run away, and luckily is willing to work with me through it.

Anyways. That is my weekend. A bunch of random games, that took a backseat to my continued getting to know someone that I’ve cared about for twenty years… but am starting to care about in new ways.