Survival ARPG Overhaul Mod

A comprehensive overhaul that transforms Hytale into a full-scale Survival Action RPG — new core systems, reworked mechanics, and deep progression across combat, loot, base-building, and world exploration.

⚠️ Before You Start: This mod overrides many core systems and vanilla assets, making it highly incompatible with other mods. Start a fresh world — do not install this on a world you care about. Both Hytale and this mod are under active development, so expect some instability.

At a Glance

Get a taste of what this mod adds.

System	What It Does
🍖 Survival	Hunger & thirst bars, water purification, and configurable drain rates
⚔️ Player Progression	Levels, XP, HP scaling on level-up, and class-based skill trees with active abilities and cooldowns
🏆 Gear Score	Your equipped items' average score directly scales all damage dealt and received
🪨 Ore Progression	Rarer ores unlock the further you explore from your starting point
✨ Item Rarities & Affixes	Common → Legendary rarity tiers; gear rolls 1–4 random affixes plus implicit modifiers
🔩 Component Crafting	Build gear from tiered components crafted at benches and assembled via the Horradrix Cube
🔨 Salvaging	Break down unwanted gear into components and materials via the Horradrix Cube
🛡️ Combat	Block, parry, stamina-based damage mitigation, look-to-target, and a full ARPG damage pipeline
👾 Enemy Scaling	Enemies scale infinitely by distance from spawn, with randomized affixes, named rarities, and damage-type prefixes
🏠 Base Building & Light Wells	Claim territory with Light Wells; place benches and set your spawn point inside your base and use Homestones to warp home at any time.
⚔️ Raids	Player bases (and players) can be raided by one of 15 raid events; co-ownership supported
🏛️ Room System	Discover room recipes by experimenting with room sizes, decorations, and contents
🗺️ Prefab Spawning	Drop custom prefabs into the world — surface and underground variants with mob spawning
🧭 Compass	A craftable compass that points you toward Wayward Shrines, prefabs, bosses, and something darker…
💀 Gravestones	Fallen players leave a gravestone that stores their items — allies can resurrect them, or you can use a Dead Man's Chest to recall it
💼 Jobs	Earn job XP through gameplay activities and unlock perks in dedicated job skill trees
⚙️ Configuration	Extensive config file covering combat, enemies, XP, survival, loot, world, building, and more

Core Features

Survival

Hunger & Thirst — Both bars drain over time and are visible on your HUD, with min/max drain rates for natural variance
Food restores hunger; fruits restore both hunger and thirst
Craft a Water Bottle to carry 10 charges of water — purify dirty water at the campfire
Both systems can be toggled on or off via command

Player Progression

Levels & XP

Your HUD shows your World Tier, Average Enemy Level, Gear Score, Player Level, and XP progress toward your next level. Earn XP by defeating enemies, and spend +2 skill points per level in any class skill tree. You also gain a permanent HP increase on each level-up, making progression feel impactful beyond skill points alone.

Skill Trees & Abilities

Specialize your character by investing skill points into one or more class trees. Each tree unlocks passive bonuses and active abilities you can slot into dedicated ability slots. Abilities support cooldowns and resource costs — some require specific weapon types. You'll get a chat notification if a weapon requirement isn't met, and the skill tree UI shows all requirements and costs upfront.

Available Now

Class	Playstyle	Abilities
Knight	Durability, defense, group support — uses 1H weapons & shields	Taunt, Rallying Cry (Ultimate)
Juggernaut	Aggressive high-impact melee — uses 2H weapons	Cyclone, Leap Slam, Chain Pull
Ranger	Ranged combat & mobility — uses bows & crossbows	Aerial Maneuver, Rain of Arrows (pins enemies, Ultimate)
Assassin	Mark targets and execute with precision strikes — uses daggers & kunai	Assassin's Mark, Shadow Strike, Reaper Death Seal (Ultimate)
Mage	Homing and area-effect arcane spellcasting — uses staves & wands	Arcane Missiles, Simulacrum, Arcane Meteor (Ultimate)

Coming Next: Elementalist, Priest and Monk. With many more planned for the future!

Resetting Skills

Use a Sphere of Regret to fully refund all of your invested skill points, letting you rebuild your character without starting over.

Gear Score

Your Gear Score is the average score of your equipped items and directly affects how much damage you deal and receive. Crafted gear matches your player level; dropped gear scales to the enemy's level.

Use Runes of Powering to bring an existing piece of gear's score up to your current level. Runes of Powering can only increase an item's Gear Score — they cannot lower it.

Ore Progression

Ore spawns in a distance-based progression system — the further you explore from your starting point, the more advanced the materials you'll find. Copper starts at 2k blocks out, giving early exploration a true T0 phase before metals begin appearing.

Tier	Ore	Spawn Range	Peak Spawn
T0	Crude	0–2k blocks	N/A
T1	Copper	2k–22k blocks	~12k blocks
T2	Iron	12k–32k blocks	~22k blocks
T3	Thorium	22k–42k blocks	~32k blocks
T4	Cobalt	32k–52k blocks	~42k blocks
T5	Adamantite	42k–62k blocks	~52k blocks
T6	Mithril	52k–72k blocks	~62k blocks

Spawn distances are fully configurable.

Jobs

Jobs are a parallel progression system that runs alongside your combat class. Rather than earning XP from combat, job XP is earned through gameplay activities — mining, crafting, exploring, and more. Each job has its own level and perk tree, letting you specialize in the activities you enjoy most.

View your job progress and unlocked perks in the dedicated UI page by typing the new command /jobs.

Available Now

Job	How to Level	Perks
Logging	Chop trees and harvest wood	Passive bonuses to yield more wood, sticks and fiber when chopping trees
Mining	Mine ore nodes	Passive bonuses to yield more ore and provide opportunities to collect more rarity shards
Alchemy ⏳	Picking up and refining alchemy ingredients, crafting alchemy recipes	Coming soon
Bartering ⏳	Buying and selling from NPCs and the Player Market	Coming soon
Beastmastery ⏳	Taming, ranching, breeding, fighting beside combat pets	Coming soon
Building ⏳	Crafting and placing build pieces, discovering room recipes	Coming soon
Cooking ⏳	Picking up and refining cooking ingredients, cooking recipes	Coming soon
Crafting ⏳	Processing, crafting, salvaging, combining	Coming soon
Exploring ⏳	Discovering Wayward Shrines and prefab locations	Coming soon
Farming ⏳	Planting, watering, and harvesting crops	Coming soon
Fishing ⏳	Catching fish, crafting bait	Coming soon
Performing ⏳	Emoting, singing, or playing an instrument	Coming soon
Thievery ⏳	Crafting lockpicks, picking locks, pickpocketing, detecting traps and hidden objects	Coming soon

Admins can add and reset player job levels via command.

Loot & Items

Item Rarities

Items come in a tiered rarity system, with a new Set rarity tier now in the game (no Set items yet — groundwork is laid for future content):

Common → Uncommon → Rare → Epic → Legendary → Set

Component Crafting

Gear is now crafted from components via the Horradrix Cube. The Arcane, Weapon, and Armor benches have been refactored to craft mod components directly. You will still need to discover ingredients to unlock the recipes for components. You can view locked component recipes at their respective workbenches. All weapon and armor components have custom icons, and their implicit modifiers have been hand-tuned to be tighter and more impactful.

Two-handed weapons roll with double implicit and affix values (this includes base weapon damage implicit values) to compensate for the lack of an offhand item/stat-stick.

The Horradrix Cube serves as a combined crafting and salvage station for mod gear, and also supports cube combining — feed similar items into the cube to combine them into upgraded or different items, or combine gear and runes to modify the gear permanently.

Implicit Modifiers

Implicit Modifiers are tied to components. You will be able to see the crafting result of items based on the selected components before crafting.

Salvaging & Shards

You can use the Horradrix Cube to salvage gear back into components and components back into ingredients. Right now it's 1 component/ingredient chosen at random, but future updates will offer ways to improve that through skill lines and room recipes.

Shard Dust is a new material that drops from enemies, chests, and containers such as barrels, coffins, and crates. Smelt it at the furnace to convert it into usable shards, or feed similar dusts into the Horradrix Cube to combine them into higher-quality variants.

Runes of Powering

Runes of Powering are a new item that drop from enemies and loot containers. They come in tiers — 3 lower-tier runes can be combined in the Horradrix Cube to produce 1 rune of the next tier. Higher-tier runes can then be used in cube combine recipes to upgrade the Gear Score of your items. Runes of Powering can only increase an item's Gear Score — they will never lower it.

Armors

Full T6 Leather and Cloth armor sets added
Crude "Wood Armor" set added for T0 — craftable from the start before metals are available
Metal armor tiers updated: Cobalt is now T4, Adamantite T5, Mithril T6
Cloth bolt recipes updated — cloth can now be refined at the reworked Loom bench, which now properly works as a processing station
Flat life bonuses on components have been converted to increased life percent bonuses

New & Reworked Weapons

Available Now

Axe, Battleaxe, Club, Daggers, Longsword, Mace, Shield, Sword
Crossbow, Kunai, Shortbow, Staff, Wand
All weapons scale across 7 tiers: Crude, Copper, Iron, Thorium, Cobalt, Adamantite, Mithril
New custom crossbow models, icons and textures
New custom kunai models, icons and textures; kunai can now be held to fire
New custom wand models, icons and textures; wand can now be held to fire

Note:

Arrows have been removed — bows and crossbows use the ammo recharge system instead.

Teleporters are Legendary / level 60, non-breakable, and can no longer be crafted. They will spawn within Wayward Shrines scattered throughout the world at even paces.

Coming Soon: Spellbooks, Spears, Scythes, Sickles, Bombs, Concoctions, Longbows and more!

Loot Tables

Both enemies and chests drop tiered loot based purely on distance from spawn — no more mixed or inconsistent rewards. Metal, leather, and cloth drop pools are all properly tiered. Drop rates have been tuned down from previous versions.

Affix System

Gear and enemies can spawn with affixes — bonus modifiers that make each item or enemy feel unique. The number of affixes scales with rarity (1–4). Affixes range from T0 to T5: T0 is an extremely rare chase modifier; almost all drops land in the T1–T5 range. Stat types include mana leech, damage taken from, main hand / off hand flat damage, health/mana/stamina leeching, and Assassin Marks. A custom inventory page lets you view all active affixes and your full player stats.

Enemy Damage Type Prefixes

Enemies have a 25% chance (configurable) to roll with a damage type prefix, granting them flat bonus damage of that type. Enemies with a prefix award 50% bonus XP on kill, making them worth hunting down. The roll chance and bonus damage values are both adjustable in the config.

Combat

Look-to-Target

Abilities now use a look-to-target system — looking at an enemy highlights and marks them as your active target, and applicable abilities aim at that target. All applicable abilities have been reworked to use this system.

Blocking

Stability affixes increase how efficiently you block incoming hits
Unblocked damage drains Stamina before cutting into Health
Barrier on Block is a new stat that grants temporary protection on a successful block — Barrier also applies to fall and environmental damage

Parrying

Stability and Parry Window affixes improve timing and effectiveness
A successful parry evaluates total incoming damage against your stamina
Failed parries are treated as blocked hits

Damage Types

Enemies now have catalogued damage types, combat types, and damage values tuned per enemy group, giving each faction a more distinct and sensible feel in combat. Weapons deal specific damage types that feed into a custom ARPG-style damage pipeline — old unused damage types have been removed and new weapon/forced type scaling damage types added:

Weapon damage type — ability damage scales directly off your equipped weapon
Fall and environmental damage runs through the damage pipeline, and dedicated stats (including Barrier) can reduce it

All existing class abilities have been updated to scale off main hand with appropriate modifiers — ultimates in particular now feel appropriately powerful.

Signature Energy

Signature Energy is earned by both dealing and taking damage — one point per hit in each direction. Future affixes will interact with this mechanic to create deeper combat loops.

Resources

Health, Mana, Stamina, and Ammo all regenerate at configurable base rates. Affixes and skill tree nodes can add flat or percentage bonuses on top. Ammo is a recharging resource (no longer a consumed item) and appears on your HUD when using a compatible weapon.

Enemies

Enemies scale infinitely based on how far you've traveled from the start
Each enemy group has a hand-crafted catalogue defining their damage type, combat type, and damage values — giving enemy factions a balanced but distinct feel appropriate to their identity
Enemy level and rarity persist correctly through logout/login
Enemies can spawn with 1–4 affixes based on their rarity tier
Enemies have a 25% chance to roll with a damage type prefix, adding flat bonus damage and granting 50% extra XP on kill
Enemy name and level are displayed above the health bar (configurable)
Loot and damage notifications only appear for the players directly involved in the kill or hit

Prefab Spawning

The mod includes a fully configurable prefab spawning system that places custom structures throughout the world as you explore. Two spawn categories are currently active, each with its own folder in the mod directory:

Folder	Where It Spawns	Mobs
`surface`	Overworld, above ground	No
`underground`	Below ground	No

Drop your own *.prefab.json files into the appropriate folder and they'll be picked up automatically. Surface prefabs no longer paste air blocks, so terrain can grow over and around them naturally. Prefab placements are registered to world data, enabling the compass and future explorer tracking features.

The mod also ships with a Wayward Shrine prefab — a discoverable landmark that provides utility to explorers. Wayward Shrines have their own spawn flow and config settings separate from general prefabs.

⚠️ Surface & Underground Dungeons Temporarily Disabled — The surface_dungeon and underground_dungeon categories have been disabled due to spawners crashing the game. I am looking into other ways to approach this.

Wayward Compass

The Wayward Compass is a craftable navigation tool that can help you track down nearby points of interest:

Wayward Shrines — fast travel and utility landmarks scattered across the world at even paces
Prefabs (Surface & Underground) — custom structures placed throughout the world
Dungeon Prefabs (Surface & Underground) — custom structures placed throughout the world
World Bosses — powerful enemies worth hunting down (coming soon)
Something Dark — a dark presence lingers… (coming soon)

Base Building & Light Wells

Light Wells are the foundation of your base — place one to claim territory and set your spawn point. The Light Well features a new block model and animations.

Placing a Light Well automatically sets it as your spawn location
Breaking your active Light Well resets your spawn to world spawn
Co-ownership supported — share territories with other players via the Light Well UI. Just interact with your or another player's Light Well to get started
Territory can be cleared via admin command if one gets stuck
A craftable Homestone item lets you teleport back to your owned or co-owned Light Well from anywhere in the world — you'll warp in close to your Light Well

Raids

Player bases (and players, if enabled via config) can be raided. Once a Light Well is placed, your territory becomes a target. The raid system supports co-ownership — all owning players will see and be able to participate in base raids.

15 current raid events can trigger against a base or player
Raid enemies spawn at a level appropriate for online owners and co-owners
The raid HUD now shows enemies remaining, and the raid ends automatically when all enemies are defeated
Admins can force a raid on any base or player via command
Default raid cooldown is now 90 minutes (still configurable)

Room System

Discover new room recipes by experimenting — build rooms of different sizes, fill them with decorations, benches, and contents, and see what recipes you unlock.

Discovered room recipes appear in the recipe book, use the /discovered command to view them
Admin commands are available for clearing room recipes

Gravestones - Death doesn't have to mean sitting out!

When a player dies, they leave behind a gravestone at their location that stores their dropped items. Allies can spend 10 seconds interacting with it to resurrect the fallen player. While interacting with a gravestone you will be unable to move, and taking damage cancels the resurrection forcing you to start over.

Each player can have up to 1 active gravestone at a time. If you die again while a gravestone already exists, creating the new one will cause the previous gravestone to drop its stored items on the ground wherever it was located.

The new craftable Dead Man's Chest item lets you recall your gravestone and its stored items directly to you — useful when allies aren't available to resurrect you and there's no shot you are getting back to your body.

Configuration

A config file is generated automatically on first run, and any missing entries are regenerated on startup. Current options include:

Combat — player/enemy damage, parry window, base enemy damage
Enemies — level scaling, nameplates, origin point for level scaling, enemy prefix roll chance and bonus damage values
XP — XP gain rates, XP required per level
Survival — hunger/thirst toggle, drain rates (min/max), death on empty toggle
World — ore spawn distances and distribution
Player — base regen rates for Health, Mana, Stamina, and Ammo
Building & Raids — Light Well territory, raid settings (including cooldown), room system
Prefab Spawning — spawn range, spawner density, spawn frequency per category; separate config for Wayward Shrines
Logging — enable/disable loot and combat logs at the server level and per player

Note: Loot drop chance and recipe drop chance are no longer configurable — loot is now determined by static distance-based drop pools.

What's New — v3.6.0

UI & QoL

Custom tooltips added for all mod gear — hover over items to see their full stats inline
Stat pages rebuilt using ItemGridSlot component — enables tooltips on equipped items and drag-and-drop directly from the stat page
Targeted enemy info now displayed on the HUD when you have an enemy targeted
Cube crafting/salvaging page streamlined — placing items into slots is now faster and more intuitive
New config option to disable the rarity highlight effect on items
New config option to disable the targeted enemy highlight effect

Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug causing item stats and enemy stats to compound incorrectly
Updated to Hytale version 5.2

Previous Patch Highlights (v3.5.0)

Jobs system implemented — Logging and Mining jobs available with perks; Jobs UI page added
Rune of Powering recipe fixed — can no longer lower an item's Gear Score
Homestone drop rate halved; warp positioning improved
Updated code to align with Hytale patch 5; general code cleanup

Previous Patch Highlights (v3.4.0)

Look-to-target system implemented — looking at an enemy marks them as your active target; all applicable abilities reworked to use it
Default enemy damage increased slightly
HyUI HUD fully replaced with a native vanilla custom HUD — HyUI removed from the project entirely

Previous Patch Highlights (v3.3.0)

Mage class implemented — Arcane Missiles, Simulacrum, Arcane Meteor (Ultimate)
HP buff on level-up added; Sphere of Regret added to refund skill points
Staves and Wands fully implemented with components and crafting
Two-handed weapons now roll with double implicit and affix values
Runes of Powering added — tiered upgrade items for Gear Score
Enemy damage catalogues added per faction; damage pipeline reworked
Damage type prefixes for enemies — 25% chance, 50% bonus XP on kill
Raid HUD shows enemies remaining; raids end automatically on completion
Gravestones now persist and store dropped items; Dead Man's Chest added
Homestone item added, replacing the /home command
World Tier and Average Enemy Level added to HUD
Skill page replaced with VanillaUI

Roadmap

These features are planned but not yet in a specific order:

Outdoor rooms & areas (in progress — assets pending)
Set items with unique set bonuses
More custom prefabs shipped with the mod (dungeons, landmarks, points of interest)
Underground dungeon prefabs re-enabled once spawner crash is resolved
Custom language file support
More crafting runes for cube combining
Additional metal tiers beyond Mithril
More combat skill trees
More jobs
Job system (XP, levels, job skill trees)
More affixes, unique weapons, and unique armors
World Bosses and Pinnacle Bosses
Dynamic overworld events
Procedural dungeons
Expanded base system (room buffs, more rooms and decorations for unique recipes)

Known Issues

The UI appears semi-transparent on the map screen
Ore nodes can float in open caves or in the ocean (mostly cosmetic)
Copper showing in snow biomes outside it's world tier ranges

HyARPG