Hytale Hits Early Access, Gets 2.8 Million Players, Adds Dinosaurs, Runs Windows 95
- Hytale hit Early Access Jan. 13, 2026, drawing ~2.8M players in its first day.
- Dinosaurs added in Update 1, with mods already running Hytale – and Windows 95 – inside the game.
- Shut down in 2025, Hytale was reclaimed by its creator and has relaunched with funding secured for the foreseeable future.
Hytale, the once-and-future “Minecraft Killer,” entered Early Access on Jan. 13, 2026, and registered almost 3 million players within its first day of release. Developers Hypixel Games then revealed the first update on Jan. 17, adding dinosaurs alongside various fixes. Modders have also recently managed to get Windows 95 running in it.
Hytale, a voxel-based sandbox RPG, has had a long and unusual road to release. It started as a Minecraft mod, became a full game, got shut down (along with Hypixel), and then resurrected. The original founder of Hypixel Games, Simon Collins-Laflamme, has been clear in his appreciation for loyal gamers by making regular posts on X.
“Waking up to thousands of videos and screenshots of Hytale is surreal,” he posted on the Early Access release day. “We got a long way to go to achieve our goals with the game but I’m happy to see the positive reaction, I was not expecting such support and understanding!”
“This is a four year old version of the game that we rebuilt in a few months, exploration mode did not exist!” he added. “Thanks again for the support; I have no regrets at all saving Hytale two months ago.”
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Mine-What?
Hytale was, and to many gamers still is, considered a “Minecraft killer” due to giving players not just a sandbox playground like its main competitor, but also factoring in true RPG elements. While Minecraft has since added these kinds of features and mechanics, not to mention RPG-related spin-offs, Hytale came out of the gate in 2018 with a lot of these things already in place.
Like Minecraft, Hytale also has a strong focus on mods, but the way it implements them is one of the key factors that’s exciting many gamers. For starters, mods work on a per-world basis, so they can be installed for a specific world and then checked/unchecked accordingly. This means a new world can be created with as many mods as a player likes, rather than a new world for each mod.
Plus, if someone wants to run a multiplayer Hytale server session with specific mods, only the host needs to have these enabled, rather than every player in the session. Hypixel Games has been clear from the beginning that it sees Hytale’s survival and development as being directly linked to the modding community.
“Hytale has extensive modding capabilities, asset pack management, assets editor, worldgen editors, and other tools that will help support big projects and long-term content creation. This goes along with our partnerships from Blockbench and CurseForge that helped us allow support for modding on Day 1!”
CurseForge followed Hytale’s release with a related milestone on Jan. 15: “WE HIT 1,000,000 HYTALE MOD DOWNLOADS IN ONLY 48 HOURS. The Hytale community has broken records yet again, creating over 500 new mods and generating a million mod downloads only two days after launch!”
Comeback King
Hytale was initially revealed in 2018, before it (and development studio Hypixel Games) were sold to Riot Games in 2020. However, a combination of feature creep, missed deadlines, and general mismanagement caused Riot to shutter both Hypixel and Hytale in June, 2025.
In a comeback story for the ages, Collins-Laflamme responded to a huge amount of community support and managed to reacquire both Hypixel Games and Hytale in November. Referencing preorder sales of Hytale before Jan. 13, and his initial personal investment to get Hytale and Hypixel back, he said on X: “Pleased to announce that we have officially secured the next two years of development costs through pre-purchases. Combined with my personal commitment of 10 years, we are looking very strong for the future.”
He’s also been very transparent about what players can and should expect from Hytale, given that the version that’s now in Early Access is based on the build before Riot Games took over. “In just eight weeks, we worked on a 4+ year-old build of the game, merged hundreds of branches, fixed core systems such as camera, movement, combat, crafting, building, audio, and rendering, squashed thousands of bugs, and added numerous new features. Now, we are finally able to share with you a playable version of Hytale.”
“The game is currently in Early Access in its truest form: unpolished and incomplete, but within those rough edges lies the foundation for something extraordinary.”
Hytale in Hytale
Update 1 added a wealth of fixes, patches, and general Quality of Life tweaks, alongside new NPCs and dinosaurs. As per Collins-Laflamme’s previous comments on Hytale’s rough edges, these new additions use placeholder behavior and are a work in progress.
However, plenty of new additions are being reported as working well already, including Hytale World Gen V2, that allows for different biomes other than the default woodland region (such as deserts). Hytale mods have also received a real workout as two separate devs have recently managed to get Hytale working inside Hytale, as well as Windows 95, as powerful examples of what can already be achieved with the existing community/game tools.
Hytale Early Access is available on PC, Linux, and MacOS via the official Hytale site. There are three tiers available: Standard, Supporter, and Cursebreaker, with the latter two options coming with a ton of extra cosmetics. Despite not being on Steam, dissatisfied players can still get their money back, with the Hytale refund policy being a bit more generous than Steam’s: players have 14 days after purchase to get their money back, provided they have less than four hours play time (and their payment provider allows refunds).
