Hytale update adds a new weapon for summoning undead hordes, but keep your early access expectations in check
I may have missed out on the original Minecraft era, but I'm not making that mistake a second time as Hytale accounted for most of my gameplay hours within the last two weeks. It's good stuff, albeit largely unfinished good stuff, but the updates are slowly trickling in, and I'm all about this new necromancy grimoire in the latest patch.
Progression is still a little stagnant for now as Hytale chips away at early access updates, though the Grimoire: Rekindle Embers is more of what I want to see, even if it feels a little underwhelming. With the fancy book, you can summon undead hordes to smack enemies about and take the pressure off yourself. Well, I say horde, but you've got a limited amount of pages to work with. At full capacity, it's more like a small skeletal squad.
You can find the Grimoire: Rekindle Embers in Zone 4 as a drop from the Burnt Skeleton Praetorians. They aren't a guaranteed drop, so maybe use those pages wisely. When I briefly tested it, the grimoire only seems to work with Piles of Bones—as in the actual furniture item—and not Bone Fragments.
The skeleton-summoning book builds upon the necromancy feature that sent the Hytale subreddit into a panic last week after some players assumed a few underwhelming skellies were representative of Hytale's full magic system. Turns out that's not the case, and Hypixel CEO Simon Collins-Laflamme set the record straight: "This is just a random drop fun item, it will evolve over time."
Thank god for that, because the few allies I conjured up burned themselves to death before the enemy even bothered to attack. Simon positioned this update as another avenue for modders to play around and experiment with the full potential of creating in Hytale's sandbox. It makes sense to me as we saw plenty of Hytale mods launch on day one, and the CurseForge library already has over 3,000 mods in less than two weeks.
More features added in Hytale Update 2
As for other changes in Hytale's second patch, there's a handful of new cosmetics and accessory variants available for everyone, regardless of which version you own. Since they listed vampire teeth as part of the customization drop, I had to hop on and see what all those new additions look like. Behold:
The cosmetics and skeleton minions are the most noteworthy additions, but you can check out the Hytale blog for more nitty-gritty changes. If you're a few extra, smaller details that caught my eye, I've got a little list:
- Armor slot visibility toggle
- Bison, Boar, Cows, Horses, and Warthogs now drop Medium Hide
- Lower tier pickaxes are now less effective for mining higher tier ore
- You can now use shift+click to equip armor if nothing is in that slot
- QERT shortcuts for managing your inventory (put all, pull all, quickstack, sort)
- Player markers display on the compass
- More decorative lights are available at the Furniture Bench
- Ophidiophobia mode for players with a fear of snakes