The first Hytale update adds dinosaurs and improves melee combat, but I'm most excited about the torches

The first Hytale update has arrived, and it’s got me all excited about torches. That’s a feeling I haven’t had since I was deep in a Terraria hole many years ago, and it feels good to see such a swell of positivity around the Minecraft-style sandbox game’s launch after its dramatic death and rebirth. I still can’t quite believe it’s actually out, just half a year after former owner Riot Games pulled the plug on the project. Yet here we are, and as we come to the end of week one, a new patch brings its first round of changes.

Hytale Update 1 is available to test today, January 16, although the development team warns that it might not make it to the live version in full before the weekend. “It’s a larger patch than I was expecting, so it will be tricky to roll out today to the release build, given the number of new players we have coming in,” founder Simon Collins-Laflamme explains. He says the team is working on the final version, but adds, “I will try to cherry-pick the most-wanted features if we can’t make the full update today.”

Are you afraid of the dark? If so, this patch is good news, because you’ll now be able to go to bed earlier. About an hour and a half earlier, in fact. That means fewer instances of being forced to wait around or continue building after the light has virtually disappeared. Even better, you’re now able to place torches while dual-wielding. That might not immediately sound all that exciting, but if you’ve done any exploration or underground building then you’ll probably appreciate why this has me breathing a sigh of relief.

Among the world changes, Hypixel has most notably improved zone four, which now has dinosaurs along with improved atmosphere and spawning. Work has also been done to repair villages, outposts, and dungeons, and environmental damage has been adjusted. On the combat side, melee attacks should now land more consistently. Lava and burn damage has been tuned, and you’re able to clear burns with water. Fire creatures, on the other hand, have been made immune to fire damage.

Backpacks are now easier and cheaper to craft, making inventory expansions quicker to get your hands on without massacring the entire animal population. Alongside this, benches will now be able to pull materials from chests twice as far out as before, so you should find crafting to be much more streamlined. Processing hide into leather has been sped up (that’ll also make grabbing a backpack faster), and some early balance changes have been made to food and farming to address outliers.

The Hytale team has also introduced new and updated sound effects for mining and polished particle effects for a range of activities, such as breaking ore and drinking potions. Performance improvements should speed up chunk loading for players with a high view distance, and some safeguards and fixes for high-FOV setups have been implemented.

New face and hair customization options are also on the change list, although the developer notes that these won’t be available until the full-release build goes live. Finally, it promises improvements to server commands including teleport, give, whitelist, and ban, and even a “cute secret new NPC added for creatives and modders.”

Hytale Update 1 is available now in pre-release. If you want to help test it out, simply go to the launcher and select ‘pre-release’ from the Patchline drop-down menu. You can share your feedback and any bugs or issues you encounter via the game’s Discord, where there’s a channel dedicated to pre-release testing. That’s also where you can check the preliminary patch notes, with a full set due alongside the update’s final release.