Hytale Update 2 lets you summon gangs of skeletons and provides more modding tools to the Minecraft-inspired RPG - and yes, magic is coming: "We will have a proper mana and spell system in the future"

It seems almost surreal to be writing this, but Hytale's second post-launch update is on the way. The embattled Minecraft-inspired RPG is finally in early access, and developer Hypixel is hitting the ground running with fixes, tweaks, and additions, this time giving you the power to summon a gang of skeletons as well as making life easier for modders.

Simon Collins-Laflamme, director of Hytale and Hypixel founder, shared the patch notes on Twitter. "New magic! Necromancy grimoire! Drops from Skeleton Praetorian, lets you raise up to five skeletal minions from bone piles," reads the foremost bullet-point in the gameplay section. Definitely the most vital information.

Your skeletal soldiers last for five minutes, or until you're taken out. Those bigger enemies have a few frights coming their way. For mods, there's public documentation on WorldGen V2 coming, and a heavy increase to the amount of ore about the place, but particularly in the underground parts of the Devastated Lands.

In an effort to assuage players going "full panic mode," Collins-Laflamme clarifies that the grimoire is really a "random drop fun item," and not the full magic loadout. "We will have a proper mana and spell system in the future," he says in a follow-up tweet. "The staves, totems and grimoires are all ass by design, we will regroup them all into a proper system later on, but for now you get to play around with it, mod it, etc."

Cosmetics, farming, UI, and practically every other facet of the blocky adventure are given a little fine-tuning. It's a robust changelist, making it clear Hypixel is committed to making sure Hytale lives up to the decade-plus of anticipation it took to get here. The plan is for this update to arrive this weekend, and the third to follow sometime after.

Hytale mithril doesn't exist yet, but thanks to "suggestions in DMs" endgame mining is going to get "a bit more interesting"