Hytale Pre-Release Patch Notes: Animal Taming System, Sickle Farming Tool, Climbing Overhaul, and Curse Breaker Story Chapters Revealed

Taming Has Arrived in Hytale — And It's Already Excellent

The latest Hytale pre-release delivers what may be the single most requested feature since early access launched: a complete animal taming system. Players can now tame, ride, pet, feed, and lead dozens of creatures across Orbis using their favorite foods. Combined with a new sickle tool for efficient farming, overhauled climbing mechanics, and confirmation that Hytale's major content will unfold through story-driven chapters, this is one of the most feature-rich pre-releases yet.

This appears to be the final pre-release in the current batch before everything gets bundled into a full update. Here's the complete breakdown of every change, plus the team's exciting announcements about Hytale's future direction.

How Taming Works: Every Animal and Their Favorite Food

The taming system is straightforward and intuitive. Walk up to any tameable creature, interact with it, and a thought bubble appears above its head showing exactly which food item it wants. Once you have the correct food, feed it to the animal and it becomes yours.

Confirmed Taming Foods

Here is every animal-to-food pairing confirmed so far:

• Horses — Carrots
• Cows — Cabbages
• Sheep — Cabbages
• Chickens — Corn
• Pigs — Turnips
• Moss Horns — Potatoes
• Bison — Cauliflower
• Bo — Pumpkins
• Goats — Apples
• Camels — Tomatoes
• Rabbits — Carrots

The food preference for each species appears to be consistent — a horse will always want carrots, regardless of the individual animal. There are likely more tameable creatures yet to be discovered, and the development team will almost certainly expand the roster in future updates.

What Tamed Animals Can Do

Taming unlocks a range of interactions beyond simple companionship:

• Riding — Many tamed animals can be mounted and ridden as transportation
• Following — Hold their favorite food and tamed animals will trail behind you, making them easy to lead to pens and enclosures
• Petting — Interact with a tamed animal using an empty hand to pet them, triggering a unique greeting animation
• Feeding — Tamed animals can be fed periodically to keep them happy
• Milking — Certain animals like cows and moss horns can be milked
• Shearing — Wool-bearing animals can be sheared for resources
• Baby variants — The taming system works on baby animals as well

Crucially, tamed animals no longer flee from players unless they are directly attacked. Before this update, corralling animals required capture crates and significant effort. Now, building a farm with loyal livestock is far more accessible and rewarding.

Each tamed animal greets its owner with a small animation when you approach — a charming detail that adds personality to the creatures Hytale is known for. For players building farms on survival servers, this update transforms the animal husbandry experience entirely.

Sickles: The Farming Tool Players Have Been Asking For

A brand-new tool category has been added to Hytale: sickles. Craftable at the farmer's workbench, sickles let you harvest multiple crops simultaneously instead of picking them one by one.

This is a direct response to community feedback. Large-scale farming was previously tedious due to the one-at-a-time harvesting limitation. Sickles make maintaining big farms practical, especially when combined with the existing farming progression.

For survival and PvE servers with farming-oriented communities, sickles are an essential quality of life addition.

Climbing Overhaul: Ropes and Ladders Finally Feel Right

Climbing mechanics have received a significant rework in this pre-release. Players can now:

• Side-step on ropes — Move laterally while hanging, opening up new traversal options
• Drop down from ropes — Controlled descent without falling to your death
• Rotate around ropes — Reposition yourself on hanging ropes more fluidly

These improvements address longstanding frustrations with ladders and climbing ropes, particularly in parkour courses and vertical exploration scenarios. Players running parkour content on servers should notice a substantial improvement in responsiveness and control.

Prefab and Progression Changes

The team has adjusted world generation prefabs in a meaningful way: some structures will no longer spawn with workbenches or chicken coops pre-placed inside them. This makes finding these items through exploration harder, increasing the incentive to craft them yourself.

This is a notable balance shift. Previously, it was common to stumble upon an alchemy or arctinist workbench inside a prefab structure, bypassing the normal crafting progression. Now players will need to invest more in their own base infrastructure.

Farming Bench Tier Rebalancing

The farming bench progression has been adjusted:

• Tier 3 now requires Drywood Logs instead of Redwood
• Tier 6 now requires Redwood Logs instead of Drywood

This swap better aligns the resource requirements with natural progression — drywood is more accessible earlier in the game, while redwood represents a later-game material.

Combat and Gameplay Quality of Life

Backpack Arrow Shooting

Short bows and crossbows can now fire arrows directly from your backpack. Previously, arrows had to be manually moved to an accessible inventory slot before they could be used. This removes a constant friction point in ranged combat and makes bows far more practical in fast-paced encounters.

Instant Early-Game Crafting

Crafting times for crude ammo, crude weapons, and crude tools have been reduced to instant. The builder's bench and chicken coop also have slightly faster craft times. This smooths out the early game significantly — no more waiting around for basic equipment when you're just trying to get started.

Grass Spreading

Random block ticking for grass spread has been added to the game. Dirt patches and excavated areas around your base will gradually regrow with grass over time, keeping your surroundings looking natural without manual intervention.

Green Rhino Toad Variant

A new green variant of the rhino toad has been introduced to the world. As if the existing rhino toads weren't enough of a challenge for early explorers, there's now another color variant prowling the landscape.

NPC and Weapon Improvements

• Improved NPC target switching — Enemies are smarter about choosing which player to attack in group encounters
• Flamethrower tweaks — Updated visual effects and slightly faster firing speed

Modding, Creative, and UI Updates

Several improvements target the modding and creative communities:

• Missing mod warnings — The game now warns players when loading into a world that uses mods they don't have installed
• The Crossroads — The Creative World hub has been renamed to "The Crossroads," potentially hinting at upcoming lore connections
• Improved server list navigation — Better navigation and a new scrollbar for managing large mod lists
• Return to Crossroads button — Added to the World Map for Creative Worlds
• Machinima tool improvements — Playback speed controls and improved validation
• New debug flags — VisLeashPosition for NPC leashing visualization and VisFlock for flock structure visualization
• Builder tools update — Packet handlers now use the World packet handler for world-specific packets
• Draft brush shape — Changed from Cube to Sphere by default
• Selection tool upgrade — Entities now rotate and render in rotate/translate mode

UI/UX Polish

• Reworked item tooltips for better localization support
• Confirmation message when swapping Avatar Presets with unsaved changes
• Avatar Presets counter added to the Add Preset button
• Noto Sans added as secondary fallback font for Cyrillic glyphs
• Increased dimensions of UI elements for localization

Major Bug Fixes

This pre-release addresses a substantial list of bugs that have been affecting the player experience:

World Generation and Stability

• World map and chunk updates now use their own streams, improving world loading performance
• Floating trees in world generation have been fixed
• Spawn suppression crash when regenerating chunks has been resolved
• Creative tool preview crash when undoing and reapplying large changes has been fixed
• Skin save crash and Linux folder crash (without Nautilus) resolved

Gameplay Fixes

• Portal respawn zombification — Players no longer get stuck in a zombified state when respawning inside a portal world
• Durability on death — Dying no longer causes carried items to incorrectly become unusable
• Fish in lava — Fixed an issue where fish could spawn in lava (rest in peace to those who didn't make it)
• Village furniture — Several items that incorrectly required a pickaxe now correctly require an axe
• Player hitbox — Adjusted when sitting and sleeping for more accurate collision
• Full brightness toggle — Fixed an issue preventing full brightness when entering creative mode

Environment and Performance

• Cloud weather transitions — Fixed multiple issues with clouds during weather changes
• Fire spread above 256 blocks — Resolved an edge case likely discovered through community testing
• Multiple memory leaks patched for improved long-session stability
• Grammar corrections and typo fixes throughout the UI

Curse Breaker Chapters: Hytale's Story Will Unfold Through Early Access

Perhaps the most significant announcement alongside this update is the confirmation of how Hytale's larger content will be delivered. The development team has revealed that major updates will arrive as story-driven chapters following the Curse Breaker narrative arc.

The team shared the following details about this approach:

• Weekly updates continue — Regular pre-releases with features and fixes will keep rolling throughout early access
• Larger updates arrive as chapters — These will progressively unfold the Curse Breaker story
• Choices with consequences — When the first chapter begins, players will face difficult decisions that carry lasting consequences for both the world and their character
• The curse is currently quiet — Players in Exploration Mode have noticed this, but it won't stay that way
• Orby is the endgame — When the final chapter concludes, Orby will be within reach and the game reaches full release
• Shared community journey — The chapter progression is designed as a shared experience with the community, creating lasting memories for those who participate during early access

The team emphasized that they're not going deep on narrative during early access — the curse arc is primarily a progression framework for how the game evolves chapter by chapter. But the promise of meaningful choices and world-altering consequences suggests something far more ambitious than typical early access content drops.

For server communities, chapter releases could become major events that bring players together to experience new content as it launches.

NPC Framework Deep Dive: Bosses and Advanced Combat AI on the Horizon

Alongside the update, the team published a detailed blog post on hightail.com covering the current state of Hytale's NPC framework — what works, what's still rough, and where it's heading.

What the Blog Reveals

• Sheep animation showcase — The blog includes videos of sheep with various animations, including one where a sheep attacks a player, demonstrating what's possible through the NPC system
• Combat Action Evaluator — An updated skeleton Ptorian enemy is shown making smarter, more dynamic combat decisions using this system
• Weapon-wielding NPCs — Demonstrations include sheep equipped with guns and swords — not for vanilla gameplay, but showcasing the flexibility of the framework for modders
• Boss encounter potential — The team states all of this work leads toward "proper bosses, encounters that will push our PVE systems to their absolute limits"

The Reality Check

The team is candid about limitations. NPC behavior is "very sophisticated and requires a lot of time by skilled designers to perfect." The system is acknowledged as incomplete and rough around the edges, with known bugs that need resolution before advanced NPC behaviors can ship in the main game.

However, expect improvements to bleed through progressively into the game over time — likely starting with boss encounters and faction behavior updates. The foundations are being laid for something substantial, even if the full vision is still months away.

What This Means for Hytale Server Owners

Immediate Opportunities

• Taming-focused gameplay — Servers can build events and communities around animal collection and breeding
• Farming overhaul — With sickles and taming, farm-oriented servers become much more viable
• Parkour and movement courses — Updated climbing mechanics mean existing courses may play differently — time to test and update
• Chapter launch events — Plan community events around major chapter releases when they begin

Prepare for What's Coming

• Boss encounters — PvE servers should prepare for boss content as the NPC framework matures
• Story integration — Consider how chapter-based story progression might affect your server's world state
• Modding potential — The NPC framework documentation gives modders new tools to create custom encounters

The Development Pace Continues

This pre-release reinforces the pattern established since Hytale's early access launch: weekly updates that consistently deliver meaningful features. The team isn't just shipping headline items like taming — they're simultaneously fixing memory leaks, patching world generation bugs, adjusting crafting balance, and polishing UI elements.

The announcement of chapter-based story progression adds a new dimension to the roadmap. Rather than just a feature checklist, players now have a narrative framework to follow as the game evolves toward full release.

With the team describing themselves as fully independent with no funding concerns, the focus is entirely on making the best game possible — and the pace of updates reflects that commitment.

Find a server to experience taming, sickles, and the climbing overhaul on HytaleTop100.com, or list your own server to grow your community as Hytale's story chapters begin to unfold.