Background
On January 13th, 2026, Hytale was finally released after a long 7-year wait. Honestly, at that point, with all the problems and even an official cancellation, I had zero expectations that a launch would actually happen, but it did, and it was incredible.
After playing Hytale for a few hours, it was impossible not to compare it, in a good way, with our other beloved voxel game: Minecraft. And among the similarities, one thing that didn’t go unnoticed was my desire to create.
I’m not a gamedev by any means, and my work as a developer is far from having any correlation with games. But like almost every kid/teenager aspiring to be a developer back in my day, I went through a phase where creating something game-related was the holy grail. And Minecraft was an essential pillar of that phase, as it was one of the main games that fell victim to my many developer shenanigans.
First Impressions
Right on Hytale’s launch day, there was already a whole wave of excitement and a community forming around the modding universe, thanks to the Hypixel team’s stance on mods.
So from day one, it was easy to find resources and support for developing Hytale mods, a completely different scenario from what I experienced with my first Minecraft mods. Nowadays, creating a Minecraft mod is easy, but 14 years ago the situation was VERY different. Reference materials were scarce, the code was completely obfuscated, and we had no guarantee that the APIs we used to implement our methods wouldn’t break or change in future versions, a far cry from Hytale’s launch.
But not everything is sunshine and rainbows. Obviously, since it’s an Early Access game, it’s expected that we’ll run into several problems and difficulties, and the modding scene is no different. I had some issues with APIs that didn’t work, unimplemented interactions, methods that crashed the game, and so on, but nothing that was impossible to work around with a bit of creativity.
A great example of this was an annoying problem I had while implementing a crucial part of my first mod: HUD manipulation. I spent some time learning Hytale’s HUD management patterns, especially how to create a custom HUD. When I finally created my HUD and put it on screen, I got a pretty interesting surprise: I couldn’t remove the HUD from the screen 😑. My workaround was to create an “invisible” HUD with no content and use it to clear the screen.
My First Mod
After playing Hytale for a few hours, I started missing a very useful feature, especially for those who’ve used OptiFine extensively: Zoom. Determined to implement something similar, I began my journey.
My first cold shower was discovering that, in Hytale’s current state, it wasn’t possible to create a keybind for a specific keyboard key, since the client only exposed actions (walk forward, attack, jump) rather than keys (W, left click, space). In other words, if I made a keybind, I’d have to completely override an existing action, which wouldn’t be cool at all.
To solve this problem, I went with a more immersive alternative: creating an item that would enable zoom: the Spyglass. I spent a few hours modeling the spyglass and adding it as a custom item to the game, which turned out to be incredibly easy thanks to the Hypixel team’s efforts to democratize mod creation.
With the spyglass in hand (literally), I moved on to the mission of actually implementing the zoom, and that’s where I hit another wall: Hytale doesn’t allow FOV (Field of View) manipulation from the server 😱.
The most common way to implement zoom in games is by manipulating the camera’s FOV. Decreasing the FOV creates a zoom-in effect, while increasing it creates a zoom-out effect. Without that option, I had to resort to camera manipulation instead. In Hytale’s API, to project the camera in front of the player you have to use a negative distance, and this causes another problem: the camera with negative distances doesn’t respect block collisions, meaning I accidentally created an X-ray. To fix this, I had to manually build a mini raycast system to minimize block collisions and avoid the X-ray mode.
After a few hours of development and research, I had my first mod (Spyglass) ready to be presented to the world. And so it was, with the mod published on CurseForge and the source code available on GitHub.
Where Things Stand
Today, as I write this article, it’s been exactly 22 days since I released the first version of Spyglass, and what happened during this period was completely different from what I expected.
I received incredible support from the community, whether through ideas or bug reports (of course, they always exist, lol), which made everything more fun.
Currently, Spyglass has 12,573 downloads, a number I couldn’t even imagine while writing the first lines of code.
Writing my first Hytale mod was a really fun experience, and I hope that you, reading this article, will also take the leap and bring your creativity to life. Good luck :)