10 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting Survival Sim Hytale

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Anyone who has ever played Minecraft at any point in its 17 years of existence already has a head start when it comes to playing Hytale. The two games are so similar that familiarity with one mostly sets you up for the other. However, this also means it can be easier to get tripped up by the smaller details that are different, those aspects of the cuboid survival game that aren’t quite where you might expect them to be. So to prepare you for the transition, here are 10 things I wish I’d known before I started.

Don’t look for Hytale on Steam

In a bold move, developer Hypixel has chosen not to release Hytale on Steam, nor indeed Epic or GOG. The early access game is only available to buy via the game’s own site, and then only loads through the game’s own installed loader. Why? Because of the fall of man? Or perhaps to avoid paying the 30-percent tithes? I dunno, but it’s annoying to have yet another bespoke loader to clutter up your desktop. The game’s also not yet on console, although that’s planned for the future.

Before anything else, head for the Forgotten Temple Gateway

The smartest thing to do at the start of a new game of Hytale is make your way to the Forgotten Temple Gateway. This is a magic portal under a ruined temple that will teleport you to the Forgotten Temple hub, a peaceful location in which you can register all the mobs you’ve encountered so far with a central statue. (As the game develops, it’ll also be the hub for a lot of new content.) Its location is marked on your compass at the top of the screen, and it should be pretty nearby. Every creature you meet for the first time, whether hostile or ambivalent, will send a blue spark called a Memory your way. The more of these you gather, the more unlocks you’ll get via the statue, gaining access to new craftable items on your workstations.

You get sticks from trees and bushes

I realize, out of context, that sounds like the stupidest piece of advice ever. “What next, John? You get bear shit from woods?” But the point here is in Minecraft sticks are crafted from wood blocks, and that’s not the case in Hytale. The ingredient, vital for crafting rudimentary tools, arrows and torches, instead falls when chopping down trees and whacking bushes. And they fall plentifully! However, given the speed with which crossbows go through arrows, you’re going to want stack after stack after stack of them, so get used to punching down every bush you walk past. And talking of which…

Trees are affected by gravity

“And Popes are affected by Catholicism?” Yes, cleverclogs, but if you’ve played Minecraft you’ll be familiar with the oddity that has blocks magically float in place if you remove those between them and the ground. Not so in Hytale, meaning chopping down trees for trunks, which are then crafted into wooden blocks, and then in turn into vast amounts of other items in the game, is a much faster affair. Chop down the very lowest bit of the trunk, and then rest of the tree will come cascading down around you in its various bits and blocks, complete with trunks, sticks, and the all-important sap which is used for crafting torches, candles and other lighting.

You’re going to need a BIG house for crafting tables

When I built my first modest log cabin, it was with the expectation that I’d have a nice little crafting table, perhaps an anvil, and with enough room for some chests and eventually whatever Hytale‘s equivalent of an enchanting table might be. Oh, poor sweet summer child that I am. I have since added two entire new wings to my home to fit in the ridiculous array of different workbenches you need to play the game. There are a total of eight workbenches that you’ll absolutely need, and then a further four more you can add, and most have a footprint three blocks wide and two blocks high. Why it’s like this is anyone’s guess, but plan ahead when building your starter home.

Put chests directly next to workbenches

One of the neatest elements of Hytale (and it’s somewhat damning that it’s a detail this granular) is that if you store items in a chest near to a workbench, the bench will source materials from the chests while you’re crafting. In Minecraft you need to have everything in your on-body inventory, which requires juggling items between chests before crafting. Here, you can keep the crafting materials you need the most often in nearby storage and do far less organizational drudgery. Those chests do need to be close, though. If they’re on the other side of the room the bench won’t recognize them.

Repair Kits let you fix tools and weapons on the fly

Hytale doesn’t offer Minecraft‘s means of fixing a weakened weapon or tool via anvils, but instead through a bespoke Repair Kit. This is a craftable item that you can keep in your inventory, and then use to restore most of a tool’s durability while you’re out and about. This is especially helpful if your pickaxe breaks when you’re 40 blocks below ground and have lost the route you took to get down there. They don’t come cheap, however. While all you need to craft a Repair Kit is two Linen Scraps, one Light Leather, and one Iron Ingot, these are all items that you’ll only get from hard work. Leather comes from slain mobs, which must then be processed on your (very slow) Tanning Rack. Linen Scraps come from fallen enemies’ clothing. And Iron Ingots are iron you’ve put through your Furnace, and at this point are a bizarrely difficult resource to find. See the next tip for more on that.

Iron is hard to come by

You might think, given Hytale‘s hierarchy of metals going Copper > Iron > Thorium > Cobalt > Adamantite > Mithril, that iron would be reasonable simple to find. In Minecraft, it’s pretty much the second ore you’ll ever find after coal, and sits pretty near the surface. Not so in Hytale, where iron doesn’t start showing up until you’ve gone a long way underground, and then almost always in caverns packed with very tough enemies for such an early point in the game. I imagine this is something that will be balanced out in the near future, but for now know that you want to dig until you’re seeing lava, and then spot the silver glints in the ceiling and walls in areas that aren’t packed with foes. Grab as much as you can and get out fast.

You don’t drop everything when you die

In another tweak to the Minecraft formula, Hytale doesn’t strip your entire inventory when you die and respawn. Instead you keep about two-thirds of what you had when you conked it, which is pretty generous in comparison. (Only cowards play Minecraft with “Keep Inventory” toggled on.) The rest will drop where you died, and the game will put a death marker on the compass to direct you back there to scoop it all back up.

You can build teleporters to speed up travel

I wish this were possible a lot earlier, given the ordeal it is to craft. Hytale‘s world of Orbis is enormous, and while movement is pretty swift, if you’ve been out exploring other biomes it’ll still take you a fair amount of time to return to your current home without taking the death route. But there’s a way to make Teleporters, and leave as many as six of them in the world. (That number can reach 12 if you unlock enough Memories in the Forgotten Temple.)

The first thing you need to do is upgrade your main workbench to level 2. That requires 20 Iron, which as mentioned above is the biggest obstacle, alongside 30 Copper (easily found everywhere) and 20 Linen Scrap (kill a bunch of humanoid enemies). That done, you can then craft the Arcanist’s Workbench, but this in turn is a hefty challenge. For this you’ll need 20 Essence of the Void (kill monsters at night for these), 30 Linen Scraps, and toughest of all, 10 Thorium Ingots. This requires you to travel to the Howling Sands biome (in what’s called Zone 2), so it’s not something you’ll be doing straight away.

With that done, you then need the Teleporter ingredients too! For this you need Azure Logs, Azure Kelp and some regular stone. For that you need to find the blue Azure Forest biome and chop down some of those blue, blue trees.

So yeah, quite the fuss. But once done, you’ve got a way to leap around Orbis like a mad wizard.

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