Hytale Minecraft mod is the ultimate sandbox mash-up

Hytale has become a playground for modders since its release earlier this month. Players have managed to achieve a lot with the new game, including the development of a mod that allows Minecraft to be played in the Hytale world map, and another that enables cross-play between the two sandbox builders.

Released in a state that developer-publisher Hypixel Studios called “very early access,” one of the first features prioritized for Hytale was a robust, supportive framework for modding. Though features like an adventure mode are still yet to come, players have been very busy nonetheless, especially when it comes to mods. Following its release on Jan. 13, the game has already accrued 5.6 million mod downloads on CurseForge, with over 2,000 of them currently available.

Both of these Minecraft-related mods come from the same creator, 15-year-old modder Sadat Sahib, who goes by the usernames iamcxv7 and SSquadTeam online. Placing Minecraft within Hytale isn’t his first time making a crazy crossover; he’s also made Doom and Windows 95 run within the Hytale map. He explained on Reddit the intricate process behind running Minecraft on the map screen: “I’m running Minecraft Classic 0.30 entirely on the server with a custom software renderer I wrote from scratch. No GPU, no OpenGL calls – just pure CPU-based 3D rendering. Every frame, I compute the pixels myself and stream them to players through Hytale’s world map system.”

The cross-play mod is even more complicated, though Sahib says its foundation essentially boils down to “packet trickery” that allows Minecraft and Hytale players to enjoy their games at the same time. He’s slowly been adding other features to the mod, like combat and cross-play chat, though it all still has a ways to go in terms of development. Currently, neither of these mods is available to the public, and Sahib said that the cross-play mod specifically is still “really unstable,” but it’s a work in progress.

Considering how much the modding community has accomplished with Hytale in so short a time, it will be incredibly interesting to see the ways creators continue to one-up themselves. Since its release, many players have found fun in pushing the limits of what they can create for Hytale, not just in terms of designing the world around them, but completely reinventing it.