9 Hytale Systems That Might Surprise Players Expecting a ‘Minecraft Clone’

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Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he's not working or watching anime, he's either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.

Given the prevalence of half-baked Minecraft clones out there, I wouldn’t blame anyone for immediately writing Hytale off as such at a glance. If all you see is one random screenshot, it just looks like Minecraft with an upscaled texture pack. As the old saying goes, though, you really shouldn’t judge books by their covers. Hytale does share a lot of DNA with Minecraft, this is true, but its devs have also taken the effort to establish it as its own unique game.

Hytale Enters Early Access After A Decade In Development

Hypixel Studios has rallied around the support of the community and brought Hytale back to life.

Hytale has a Minecraft-like emphasis on building, crafting, and exploring, but the devil is in the details. The precise means by which you explore and interact with Hytale’s world, the world itself, the ways you gain strength and resources, and other systems and details are different from Minecraft in ways both subtle and overt. If you’re having trouble shaking your preconceptions about Hytale, here’s a breakdown of some of the game’s differentiating elements from the big daddy of voxel survival games.

9 More Elaborate Combat

Including Special Abilities

You’ll notice one of the most distinct differences between Hytale and Minecraft just about as soon as you pick up a sword. While Minecraft’s combat system is certainly more elaborate now than it was in the game’s early days, it’s still not much more complicated than “swing sword really fast until thing dies.” Hytale, on the other hand, takes a page out of the MOBA playbook by integrating special moves, unique to each weapon type.

When you’re in a scrape, you gradually accumulate energy with your weapon, and when you press Q, you unleash your weapon’s special attack. You can hold onto your special attack and use it when you need it, but if you switch weapons or tools, your energy will gradually bleed off until you switch back. Shields are also available in Hytale, which you can use for both the obvious purpose and for bashing enemies to knock them back.

8 Magical Weapons and Mana

Put on Your Robe and Wizard Hat

In the current early access build of Hytale, only melee weapons, shields, and some simple ranged weapons like bows are available. However, at least based on the game’s dev notes, that’s not all that will be available in later builds. Magical weapons like staves and spellbooks are also slated to be added later down the line, adding an extra dimension to the game’s combat.

Minecraft does technically have a magic system, but it’s more like alchemy than traditional magic, requiring you to craft potions to lob at people with simple effects like poison or instant damage. Hytale’s magic, at least from what we know of it, is more in line with traditional RPG tenets. You’ll have a mana meter, as well as elemental staves that can draw on it to launch projectiles like ice spikes and energy blasts. Spellbooks are slated to work much the same, requiring a brief charge-up before launching powerful concussive bolts.

7 You Can Climb Up Cliffs

Rock Climbing, Everyone

In Minecraft, assuming you don’t have an Elytra and some fireworks, the only way to surmount large mountains is to climb up them, one block at a time. If a wall is higher than you can jump, your only option is to dig into it, burning a pickaxe or two in the process. In Hytale, your player character can perform a miraculous feat that Steve could never conceive: they can use their arms to lift themselves.

Hytale has mantling as one of its base gameplay mechanics, a small, yet stark difference from Minecraft’s means of overworld traversal. If you jump up to a block in front of you, even one that’s one or two notches higher than you, your player character will automatically grab the ledge and lift themselves up and over. No more having to take the long way around mildly high ledges or breaking tools to dig your way through the middle; if there’s a mountain in front of you, just climb it like a sensible person.

6 There’s a Full World Map

With Unique Locations

In Minecraft, if you want to know where you are in your randomly-generated world, you need to craft both a map and a compass and have both in your inventory. Of course, you have to read the map from your hand, which isn’t exactly clear even with a compass. Hytale’s worlds are also procedurally-generated, but unlike in Minecraft, the game is a little less cagey with your locational data, which is good, because there’s plenty to find.

At any time in Hytale, you can consult a full world map, complete with tiles denoting points of interest like your current heading, your current spawn point, points of interest, and dungeons. There is fog of war covering spots you haven’t been to yet, but once you have, you can always find them again. Additionally, in a similar vein to Minecraft’s biomes, Hytale’s world has distinct zones, each with an elemental affinity, from the starting forest to sandy dunes and snow-covered mountains. These zones have unique biomes in themselves, like a swampland in the forest or an oasis in the desert. There are also unique, static locations in each zone, such as the Forgotten Temple, which you’ll need to re-visit regularly.

5 You Don’t Drop Everything on Death

Though You Do Lose Some Things

Just about anyone who has ever played Minecraft is familiar with the sense of existential loss that comes from getting killed in a bad spot and watching your entire inventory tumble into a poorly-placed magma spout. If you’ve been carrying the weight of that feeling in your heart all these years, you might feel comforted to know that dying in Hytale doesn’t incur such a stiff penalty. That’s not to say there are no penalties for eating it, of course, just fewer.

Hytale: Where to Get Azure Kelp

For all your teleporting needs.

When you drop dead in Hytale, rather than losing your entire inventory, you only lose a portion of it, and only specific items. Things like armor and weapons will stay with you, but you will lose half of any consumable items like food or crafting resources. Additionally, while you won’t lose gear, any gear on your person will suffer a 10% penalty to its current durability. In theory, if your weapons or armor are already on the brink, dying could push them over the edge. On the bright side, any consumables you lose can be recovered if you return to the spot you bit it, and as an added perk, the world map will have a little gravestone marker denoting that spot.

4 The Memory System

Meet Creatures to Level Up

Minecraft has an experience system in which defeating mobs, hostile or otherwise, rewards you with little XP things that can be used for enchanting equipment. Despite the name, though, experience has little bearing on your actual character progression. Hytale doesn’t have a traditional experience system either, but the system it does have is a little bit closer to one: memories.

Whenever you encounter an NPC in Hytale, either a passive one or a hostile one, a symbol appears above them and you start receiving memories from standing near them. It’s a nifty little way to encourage you to explore the world, as you’ll get some more memories every time you encounter a mob you haven’t seen before, at least before you skin their hides. These memories can then be taken to the Forgotten Temple and turned in at the Heart of Orbis, which in turn provides you with a sequential series of rewards like seeds, chests, potions, and teleporters. It’s kind of like an in-game battle pass, except it doesn’t have a time limit to claim the rewards.

New and Improved

While memories aren’t used for weapon and gear enhancement in Hytale like XP is used in Minecraft, that doesn’t mean there’s no way to soup up your stuff. Instead of temporary enchantments, better gear can be crafted with higher-grade materials, though you’ll need to upgrade your respective tools first. It’s less about getting lucky and finding random deposits of diamond, and more about gradually working your way up to more advanced gear.

Rather than Minecraft, Hytale’s upgrade system is similar to another survival-crafting game, Valheim. Like in that game, using and upgrading your crafting equipment improves their overall rates of progression, which in turn opens the path to better craftables. Different types of gear require different crafting tools; weapons need an anvil, armor needs an armorer’s workbench, and so on. While this does mean you can’t just craft a mithril pickaxe right off the bat, it also means that you don’t need to worry as much about losing a high-quality tool, because you can always make another of comparable quality. Tools can be repaired as well, so it doesn't come to that.

2 It’s Got an Actual Story

…Or at Least it Will Eventually

I don’t think I would ever describe Minecraft as having a lucid plot. The only real “story” element about it is the cryptic message that plays when you beat the Ender Dragon, but that’s less of a “story” and more of an… inexplicable thing that happens. By contrast, Hytale actually has a story, complete with an overarching narrative, progression paths, and an end goal. Or, at least, it’s slated to have all of that. As of writing, the game has only just launched in Early Access, and the Adventure mode isn’t available yet, but it will be eventually.

From what has been divulged by the developers, Hytale’s Adventure mode is slated to be a multi-phase journey through multiple Alterversus, distinct planets with their own unique residents and topography. The world we know now, Orbis, is the first of these planets, but you’ll be traversing several more in the full story, from the lush Numdrassl to the mountainous Nexus. The Adventure mode is also slated to have support for both solo and co-op play, same as the exploration and creative modes, so you can take a lengthy journey with your buddies.

1 There will be Trackable Objectives

From Treasure to Bounties

In addition to the larger scope of its Adventure mode, Hytale is also slated to have small-scale progression tracking as well. Unlike in Minecraft where all you can really do is pick a direction and start walking in hopes of finding stuff, Hytale will have quests with trackable objectives.

Fittingly for its hybrid RPG design, Hytale will allow you to track a handful of different quests and objectives, with the ultimate goal of progressing the story or obtaining some manner of side quest reward. According to the devs, quests can crop up in a few different ways; sometimes, you’ll get a tracked objective just from entering a particular locale like a town or dungeon, or you’ll get objectives from picking up certain items like treasure maps or bounty notices. These quests could involve navigating dungeons or killing a certain number of enemies, among other things, and can yield various rewards like cash or valuable junk.