Hytale vs Minecraft Server Hosting: What's Different and What to Expect

If you've ever run a Minecraft server, you are more than halfway prepared for Hytale – there's enough DNA shared between the two games that the muscle memory carries over. Hytale is built by the team behind the Hypixel Minecraft network (now operating as an independent studio again, after buying the IP back from Riot in late 2025), so a lot of the design decisions reflect "things we wished we could fix in Minecraft but couldn't."

This post is a practical comparison for admins – what's genuinely different between hosting Hytale and hosting Minecraft, what transfers, and what you'll need to unlearn.

The modding story is the biggest difference

I'm putting this at the top because it's by far the thing that will change how you feel about Hytale hosting compared to Minecraft.

On a Minecraft server, mods are a constant administrative burden. You pick a loader (Forge, Fabric, NeoForge, Paper plugins, Spigot) and from that moment on you are locked into that loader's ecosystem and its version-compatibility landscape. Players have to install the same loader and the same exact mod versions before they can connect. Every major Minecraft update is a compatibility earthquake – mods break, loaders catch up on their own timelines, and half your players are stuck on the old version while the other half have already updated the game.

On Hytale, mods live on the server. You drop .zip or .jar files into the mods/ folder, restart the server, and every player who joins after that receives the mods automatically from the server itself. There is no client-side installation. There is no loader choice. There is no "install Fabric, then install Fabric API, then install Sodium, then install Lithium..." dance that has become familiar to anyone running a modern Minecraft server.

This one change alone makes Hytale hosting significantly less effort than equivalent Minecraft hosting. If you've ever had to walk a non-technical friend through installing a mod loader, you know exactly how much time this saves.

CurseForge is the primary mod distribution platform for Hytale (as with Minecraft). On LOW.MS the Mod Manager panel has one-click installs for a curated set of popular Hytale mods; anything outside that you can drop into mods/ through File Manager or SFTP. The mods and plugins guide covers the process end to end.

Configuration: JSON, not properties

This is a smaller thing but it'll catch you out if you don't expect it. Minecraft Java Edition uses server.properties – a flat key-value file that accepts lines like max-players=20 and pvp=true. Hytale uses config.json, a JSON file.

The practical implications:

• You can't just paste Minecraft-style key=value lines into a Hytale config.
• JSON is stricter about syntax – missing commas, unmatched braces, and unquoted strings will all crash the parser.
• Each world also has its own config.json under universe/worlds/<world>/, separate from the server-wide file. Minecraft has nothing exactly equivalent to that split.

On LOW.MS you edit all of these through Configuration Files in the panel, with syntax highlighting that catches typos before you save. That's a quality-of-life win over editing the Minecraft config through whatever text editor your host happens to expose.

Everything I'd actually change on a fresh config.json is covered in the server settings guide.

Permissions: built in, rather than bolted on

Minecraft Java Edition's built-in permission system is extremely basic – you are either an operator (full admin, can do anything) or a regular player. Any meaningful permission management requires a plugin like LuckPerms, which in turn requires running a plugin-capable server like Paper or Spigot, which in turn means you've made choices about your modding stack you might not have wanted to make.

Hytale ships with a permissions file (permissions.json) and a built-in ranks system. It's not as flexible as LuckPerms on a mature Paper server, but it's good enough for the vast majority of servers without installing anything extra. The permissions and ranks guide covers how it works.

Networking: QUIC vs TCP

Minecraft Java Edition uses TCP (port 25565 by default). Hytale uses QUIC over UDP (port 5520 by default). QUIC is a newer protocol, originally from Google, designed for lower latency and better behaviour on unreliable networks.

From an admin's perspective, the main practical implications are:

• Port forwarding is different. Forward UDP 5520 for Hytale, not TCP. I've already seen a handful of "how to port forward Hytale" posts tell people to forward both – that's wrong. Hytale doesn't use TCP at all.
• Firewall rules are different. Your Linux ufw/iptables rules need to target UDP, not TCP. If you paste in Minecraft-style TCP rules, nothing will work.
• Some symmetric NATs that cause Minecraft connection issues can also cause Hytale connection issues – in both cases the fix is usually to host somewhere with a proper public IP rather than fight with your router.

Beyond that, the day-to-day of managing a Hytale server network is not really any different from Minecraft.

RAM and CPU: rough shapes

Hytale and Minecraft have comparable RAM profiles for similar player counts. If you're already comfortable sizing a Minecraft server, the same intuitions work for Hytale – maybe slightly more generous on the RAM side because Hytale's world generation is visually richer. A 4 GB plan will comfortably hold a small friend group on either game; 8 GB handles a midsize community; 16 GB and up starts to make sense for bigger servers or heavier mod loads.

The one architectural wrinkle people bring up a lot: Minecraft's main world tick is famously single-threaded, so CPU single-thread performance matters disproportionately for large Minecraft servers. How much of that applies to Hytale isn't something I'd want to claim definitively in the first few months of Early Access – I'd rather wait for real benchmark data than parrot a "multi-threaded by design" line I can't back up. What I can say is that for servers below ~20 concurrent players, CPU is rarely the bottleneck in either game, and your time is better spent on RAM and mod audits.

What transfers from Minecraft

A lot, in practice:

• Server management concepts. Worlds, backups, scheduled restarts, permission management, player bans – all the same ideas.
• Modding vocabulary. The idea of a mod, a mod pack, a config directory – these map cleanly across.
• Community management skills. Moderating a Discord, handling disputes between players, running events – none of that changes.
• Performance intuition. If you know how to think about a server that's lagging, that intuition still works.

What doesn't transfer

• Worlds and builds. There is no world import from Minecraft to Hytale – the games use different formats, different block palettes, different everything. Your Minecraft builds stay in Minecraft.
• Mods and plugins. You will need to find Hytale equivalents rather than port your Minecraft mod list over. Some categories of mod exist in both ecosystems (quality-of-life, cosmetic, new mobs); others are still being built out for Hytale.
• Redstone, command blocks, function packs, data packs. None of the Minecraft-specific systems exist in Hytale. The systems Hytale has are different enough that whatever Minecraft-specific expertise you built up over the years mostly stops applying.
• Aikar's flags, Paper tuning, Purpur configs. All Minecraft-specific. Do not paste them into a Hytale server – they're not validated and they're tuned for a different workload. The performance guide has more on this.

Pricing

Both games are priced comparably on LOW.MS – it's a RAM-based model for both, and the per-GB pricing is broadly similar. I'm not going to list numbers here because the current tiers are on the Hytale hosting page and the Minecraft hosting page and those are the actual source of truth.

If you're already running a Minecraft server on LOW.MS, you can open a ticket from the panel and we can help you set up a Hytale server alongside it – no reason you can't run both.

Which should you pick?

Honestly, neither game replaces the other. Minecraft has fifteen years of content, mods, and communities behind it; that isn't going anywhere. Hytale is new, smaller, and still in Early Access – but its hosting experience is in some ways nicer than Minecraft's, the modding story is genuinely better, and it's worth setting up a server to see for yourself.

If you're starting a brand new community and you want the modern option with the nicer modding story, Hytale is a very reasonable pick in 2026. If you have an existing Minecraft community that's thriving, running both in parallel is probably the right answer – let people try Hytale without abandoning what already works.

Either way, the Hytale getting started guide will take you from "I bought a plan" to "my friends are on the server" in about fifteen minutes.