Hytale gets crossplay with Minecraft thanks to 15-year-old modder presumably channeling some form of black magic

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This is what you can do when you have "all the time and energy"

Hytale
(Image credit: Hypixel)

Hytale launched into early access just last week, and modders are already starting to do some wild stuff. Well, one modder in particular is worth highlighting – the same person who got Windows 95, Doom, and Hytale itself running in Hytale has now done something that's arguably even more impressive. He's gotten crossplay working between Minecraft and Hytale.

While developer Hypixel's origins lie in running modded Minecraft servers, Hytale is an original game that simply shares Minecraft's block-building sandbox genre. The idea of crossplay between the two games is as absurd as the thought of crossplay between, say, Call of Duty and Battlefield. World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14. Fortnite and PUBG.

How is this apparent magic possible? "It's all just Packet Trickery," iamcxv7 explains on Twitter. "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."

Put the emphasis on "trickery" there, since the project in its current state is fairly limited, and iamcxv7 adds in a Reddit post that it's currently "more of a proof of concept" with "no end goal for now." But hey, he also adds that he has "all the time and energy," so who knows what form the mod may eventually take.

Still trying to figure out how to play with friends in Hytale and join their worlds? We've got you covered.

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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