[STEAM] Hytale and Minecraft Get Crossplay Capability Thanks to Intrepid Modder

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Newly-released sandbox adventure game Hytale originated as a Minecraft mod, Hypixel, only to eventually be spun off and transformed into the early access, standalone game we now know. But even so, I don't think anyone had "Minecraft x Hytale crossplay" on their Bingo card.



Bedrock / Pocket

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Java

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— iamcxv7 (@iamcxv711)

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This wizardry comes from modder u/ssquadteam, also known as

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, a 15-year-old modder who has also managed to get things like

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and,

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, Doom. iamcxv7 has managed to figure out how to get Hytale and Minecraft to talk to one another so that players in one can play alongside players in the other, seeing one another's characters rendered in their own game's style, interact, build, chat, and even fight one another.

What. On. Earth. How? I'm not savvy enough to parse the technicalities behind this, but

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: "It's all just Packet Trickery. You could say I am running a Minecraft Server in the Hytale JVM which uses the Coordinate System of the Hytale World (As its the same) As well as takes a Snapshot of the Hytale World and reconstructs it and then send it to to the Client via Packets"

But a bit more simply, what's cool here is that Hytale and Minecraft are so similar in how their worlds are constructed and what kinds of things they invite players to do that gameplay in one can easily map to the other. There's still some work to do: the mod isn't public yet, as iamcxv7 says it's still "really unstable" and there are some features, such as world generation and how to render certain blocks that exist in Hytale but not Minecraft, still missing. Given that Hytale is only a week old, this feels extremely reasonable! The fact that this is going to be possible at all is brain-breaking enough.

Hypixel Studios co-founder Simon Collins-Laflamme shared an update today, saying that saving the game after it was dropped by Riot Games last year was “

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Previously, Collins-LaFlamme had

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after years of development, scope increase, and delays. Prior to the launch, Collins-Laflamme said that Hytale had

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. And those next two years stand to be busy ones, with Hypixel already working on Update 2 for the game later this week.

If you're heading into Hytale, check out IGN's comprehensive

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for a step-by-step walkthrough on

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,

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,

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, and more. To get around

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fast, you'll need to know

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- and if you'd like to experiment with what the sandbox game can do, use

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to bend reality to your will, or

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to add new creations to your game.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].

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