Hello everyone!
Today, we want to shine a spotlight on our amazing community. While the team has been busy with Chapter 1, the community is having fun with WorldGen V2. What they’ve been creating speaks for itself!
WorldGen V2 is one of the biggest and most foundational systems we're working on, and one of the most iterative. It's the building block for everything ahead of us and makes the world the main character of Hytale.
What we didn't expect was how much the community around it grew, and how quickly WorldGen turned into its own creative scene. People are teaching each other, running jams, writing the documentation we haven't written yet, and pushing the Node Editor into shapes we didn't plan for!
Here's what our community has been making in the past few months!
Community Worlds
Kirschdieb
DeepCanionStudio
TristanM
SAMPL3R
lazywombat
Meyos
Breadley
A huge thank you to everyone who's been experimenting, sharing their work, and helping others learn along the way. Seeing the community explore these tools is a big part of what makes developing Hytale fun for us.
V1 vs. V2
Everything above was built with WorldGen V2, so it's worth a quick reminder of how the two generators fit together.
V1 is the older generator and was built as a prototype in 2017. It's what Exploration mode shipped on for Early Access because the biomes and content were already there.
V2 is what we are working on for 1.0, and it's the one we plan to support going forward. It will replace V1 once Orbis is ready!
That handover is not a single switch we flip. V2 will arrive in pieces (and you’ve already been playing with some of them!)
What this means for your current worlds
Your world is forever. The V1 world you're in right now is not getting deleted, reset, or left behind. V1 will eventually stop generating new chunks, but the world will remain playable.
A relic of the past. Once Hytale leaves Early Access, V1 worlds will no longer be something you can create. Anyone who shows up afterwards will lose the access to generate V1 worldgen. If a friend wants to see and experience the Echo, they'll have to come visit your V1 world.
Not all items can travel. Some blocks and items won't be able to move between V1 and V2 worlds. We'll make sure to clearly communicate about what does and doesn't transfer.
A story about The Echo. We don’t want to spoil anything yet, but something is brewing that will impact The Echo. Anything you have built will stay intact, but the world surrounding it may have significant changes.
Learning World Generation
One of the goals behind Hytale's world generation system is accessibility. The entire system is built around a visual Node Editor. You can create terrain, biomes, structures, and generation logic just by connecting nodes together. Watch the world change as you go, and adjust until it looks the way you want. The best part is you don't need any prior programming experience to start experimenting. Every world in this post was made by artists and builders, rather than programmers. The barrier to trying it yourself is a lot lower than it looks, and our goal is to keep improving the tools and making them accessible to everyone!
Where to start learning
It's been great to see the modding scene spinning up its own spaces where people learn and mentor each other on things like WorldGen, and it keeps growing!
HytaleModding Community
If you want to actually learn WorldGen, this is where the community goes to help each other grow and learn. HytaleModding is completely community led and operated, built to help people learn Hytale modding from the ground up with comprehensive guides and documentation to get you started. They run monthly town halls to keep everyone in the loop, and host community events like ModJams that bring modders together to build and compete.
It's a great place to learn, collaborate, and become part of the wider modding community!
- Website and documentation: https://hytalemodding.dev/
- Discord: https://discord.gg/hytalemodding
Official Hytale Discord
Stay close to the team and up-to-date with Hytale news. Connect with artists, modders, and other players: https://discord.gg/hytale
And keep an eye out for modding contests! We've been running a few, and we'll be running a lot more in the future.
We Are Hiring
When we announced WorldGen V2, we mentioned World Designer would become a real role that we would fill primarily from the community. We meant it. We've already doubled the size of the Level Design team, and we're still growing it.
Job applications are open, and everything you need to learn about WorldGen is linked in the above section.
Please bear in mind that we hire in waves. It moves slowly, but it will keep going over the next few months and years. If you do not receive a reply from us, it does not always indicate an immediate rejection. We appreciate your patience!
A large part of our team came from the modding scene, and several of them came from communities exactly like these. Ultimately, we would rather work with someone who is already using the tools in Hytale than convince someone to be passionate about it.
You can apply for the role here
Create Your Own Worlds!
Every creator featured in this post got their start the same way. They opened the Node Editor for the first time, connected a few nodes, and kept going from there.
That’s the part we love the most. In a way, we’re building WorldGen V2 so the world can become “the main character” of Hytale, but the players get to decide “who” that character is. We will continue to make that journey as accessible as possible.
So, open the Node Editor. Break something. Fix it. Make something crazy. Share your experiences with the community. We’ll be watching, and we can’t wait to see what you make!
