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

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.

Yet iamcxv7, whose social media profiles describe him as a 15-year-old music and programming enthusiast from Bangladesh, has shown off crossplay between Minecraft and Hytale working like the two games were always meant to work together. Clips posted to Twitter show a Minecraft player and Hytale player existing in the same world, watching each other jump around, and seeing blocks placed in one game appear in the other. Time of day is synched between the games. Cross-game text chat is even functional.

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.