Hytale gets its long-awaited early access launch next week, and the devs are revealing more about their plans for the game in the days leading up to release. One big change coming after the early access launch is a new approach to world generation, which founder Simon Collins-Laflamme believes will mark a "fundamental shift" in how sandbox games in the Minecraft mold will build their playspaces in the future.
At the launch of early access, Hytale's exploration mode will still be stuck with the "V1" world generation system that the devs built from 2016 through 2020, as explained in a new blog post. Eventually, the V2 system that's been in development since 2021 will come in to replace the world-gen system, and this is where the big changes over the status quo begin.
V2 is still a procedural generation system, as you'd expect from a Minecraft-like, but it allows for more meaningful patterns set for designers. You might bias the generator to create dark-leaved trees over caves, giving players the kind of guidance while exploring you'd expect from a more traditional, crafted game world. The blog post also runs down a handful of more experimental worlds that could be created, like the alien world shown in the video below.
The devs aim to give modders the tools to quickly and easily create their own world-generation parameters, all with no programming knowledge required. A node-based editor will let you tweak all the variables of world-gen, and you'll be able to see those changes reflected in-game immediately.
"This new approach to world generation will redefine the block-game genre," Collins-Laflamme adds. "For the first time, artists and game designers can take full ownership of world generation, with complete control over the final result. This is a fundamental shift away from a world shaped almost solely by programmers."
To that end, the Hytale devs are hiring over 15 world designers, which Collins-Laflamme notes is an unusual position for a procedurally generated sandbox game. "Hytale's vision is to feel carefully handcrafted while remaining infinitely procedural," he adds, "with design always serving gameplay first!"
