Version 1.6.0

The Ability Rework

The biggest update MMO Skill Tree has shipped. Every one of the roster's 63 active abilities and 34 triggered passives becomes editable content instead of hardcoded Java, every hit carries one of 9 damage schools, your gear can grant real stats and even ability upgrades, and a brand-new companion mod pulls you into hands-on work stations, starting with the Sawmill.

New abilities and combat

Fifteen new abilities, and your first deployables

Skyward Leap, Bull Rush, Tempest, Vortex Lunge, Javelin Toss, Explosive Shot, Hookshot Arrow and more join the trees, most built straight off native Hytale combat moves. Archery's Sentry Turret and Magic's Flame Totem plant a fighting structure that attacks on your behalf, and Summon Wolf calls a temporary ally to hunt hostile mobs. Kills from any of the three credit you, quests and achievements included.

Two channeled Staves abilities

Frost Stream pours a beam of ice that damages and slows for as long as you hold it on target; Void Slam leaps into a void-charged slam that launches enemies and leaves a lingering field behind.

Block and parry, made yours

Guard Stance and Parry Riposte build on the game's own block-and-parry hold: shrug off the stagger of your blocked hits, or open a tight parry window and strike back for free.

Eight abilities return, rebuilt

Blood Pact, Challenging Shout, Forest Warden, Iron Bulwark, Prospector's Focus, Smoke Bomb, Soul Drain and Wind Dancer come back on the new asset system with their own cast VFX and SFX.

Enemies can cast too

The same catalog players use can be cast by mobs, complete with real cast sound and visuals. It is the groundwork the MMO Mob Scaling companion uses to give elites their signature moves.

Damage schools

Every hit carries one of 9 schools

Fire, Ice, Lightning, Water, Arcane, Void, Poison, Life, Physical: each school has its own colour, its own bonus-damage and resistance channels for gear and mastery, and its own tooltip line. A pass across the whole roster puts frost spells on Ice, Tide Caller on Water, Riftblade on Void and the dagger shadow kit with it, and the draining pair on Life. Fire-immune monsters still shrug off fire spells exactly like before.

School resistance, everywhere it should be

A skill-tree node, a piece of gear, an enhancement roll or a mastery node can grant permanent resistance to any school, and everything granting the same school adds up on one stat.

Mastery reaches whole schools

A mastery node can say "+5% Fire damage" or "+4% Void resistance" instead of naming one weapon skill; the free Mastery Pack ships seven school tracks built on it.

How abilities feel

Every ability looks and sounds like what it does

The whole roster carries cast sounds, impact particles and, on the heaviest hits, camera shake. Empowered strikes play their own consume cue, bleeding and marked targets are visibly tinted, buff auras glow, and Vanish and Shadowstep get a void-purple makeover with real invulnerability for the instant of the blink.

Tooltips that never lie

A tooltip composes itself from the ability's real effect chain, so it never drifts from the actual numbers, and once unlocked it breaks your total down into base plus every bonus, naming where each comes from: gear, tree, mastery, or a granted upgrade.

Status icons for armed effects

While a next-hit buff or triggered passive is active, a named icon sits beside your other effects, and every ability in the roster carries its own unique icon.

The slam family lands with weight

Concussive Dive, Molten Slam, Rending Slam and Crippling Slam join Ground Slam, sharing its weapon-trail arc and impact burst, so every slam telegraphs and lands with a crack of dust and sound.

Clear refusals

Casting on cooldown, without resources, before unlock, or with the wrong weapon in hand tells you exactly why, in your own language, instead of one generic refusal.

Gear, stats and the damage math

Gear that scales your damage, and even your abilities

Defense, crit, lifesteal, combo damage, cooldown reduction, luck, bonus XP and more can now be granted straight from an item or a potion effect, with no plugin code. Seven ability-specific numbers (range, radius, splash, duration, cost, i-frames, pierce) are grantable gear stats too, each named on the item's own tooltip and each capped so stacking has a ceiling.

Gear can grant ability upgrades

A worn or held item can carry an ability improvement, and a dropped or crafted item can arrive already enhanced: mining a Zephyr gem carries a chance to drop a charm already boosting Vortex Pull's radius.

One predictable damage calculation

Every damage bonus feeds one shared calculation in one fixed order, the tooltip reads from the same numbers the hit uses, and stacked percent bonuses are capped, so runaway stacking has a tunable ceiling.

Crowd control works on everyone

Slows, roots, stuns and hastes now move players and mobs alike, at the same strength, and repeated stuns on one target build toward a short stun immunity.

Fields and beams behave

Lingering fields and channeled beams still deal their listed damage with your bonuses, but no longer roll crits, eat armed buffs or trigger on-hit passives on every tick.

Interactive work stations

Press use, and get to work

Press use on a station block to pull into a third-person work view (or sit down, hands-free) and convert materials one cycle at a time for small, steady experience. The engine is the new standalone RPG Stations companion mod; install it plus the MMO Skill Stations Pack and the first station, the Sawmill, pays Woodcutting and Crafting XP. Servers that skip both never see anything station-related at all.

Cosmetic flair unlocks

A quest, an achievement or a mastery node can unlock a named sound-and-particle flourish for a station, purely cosmetic and kept forever.

Packs can add a whole new skill

A content pack can add a brand-new skill to the tree, with its own name, icon and category, the same way a pack already adds masteries or quests.

The world, its people and its quests

The Guide is waiting in the Forgotten Temple

Placed NPCs are one system now: one file per character covering where it stands, which worlds it appears in, and what pressing use opens - which is how the Adventurer's Guide can also be waiting inside the Forgotten Temple, with a greeting you only hear on your first visit and a quest arc only they hand out: clear the rubble, thin the Trork off the stair, and earn the keeper's vestments, with a daily offering at the stones that pays a different way each time.

Rewards worth coming back for

A quest can pay a real item, a roll on a shared loot table, or gear that arrives already enhanced, and a finished quest parks its reward in your log until you collect it.

Bonus drops, one table

The lucky find in a broken block and the extra a killed mob is worth are one system now, pattern-matched per family, and a drop's odds can even weigh what a companion mod knows about the mob.

Conversations that remember

A first-visit greeting is a one-line switch, optionally once per world, and anything else a conversation remembers is declared with its own lifetime, so a quest reset can never strand a dialogue.

A Quest Book in your pocket

A second tutorial item joins the Skills Menu Scroll: use it to open your quest log directly.

For content authors

Abilities are content-pack material

Every active ability and triggered passive ships as its own asset file, so a pack can author a brand-new ability, override an existing one, or build a variant that inherits everything it does not change. Quests and achievements move onto one shared format with native inheritance and generators, every quest and achievement notice is a small file you can reword, and a server owner can retune one ability in ability-overrides.json and push it live with /mmoability reload, no restart.

One shared quest format

One file per quest or achievement, inheritable by Parent, stamped out in families by generators, and every built-in ships that way, so any of them reads as an example.

Content can depend on another mod

A quest, dialogue option, drop or NPC can require (or exclude) a named mod, and simply hides when it is not there; the Quest Pack uses it for a Kweebec Nightmare chapter.

Admin and tools

A sharper admin surface, and an upgrade helper

/mmoadmin becomes a hub of focused pages with two brand-new editors (World Rules and Power Level), every admin page speaks all nine languages, and a page-by-page audit fixed the actions that could crash or disconnect an admin. /mmoability unlockall lets you try the whole roster, /mmonpc tells you what should be standing where, and /mmomigrate reads your server, reports every older-format file in plain language, and converts what it safely can with automatic backups.

Also in 1.6.0

A release this size has corners

Beyond the headlines, a long tail of smaller changes lands across the whole mod:

Duelist's Instinct and Tremor Aftershock, two granted upgrades that change how an ability behaves, not just its numbers.
A finished quest parks its reward in your log until you collect it, and a repeatable quest states its own comeback rules: a rolling wait, a calendar allowance, a lifetime cap, or any mix.
Achievements land the instant you earn them, with the unlock, its toast and its rewards arriving in the same moment as the action.
Every quest and achievement notice (the toasts, jingles and banners) is a small file you can reword, recolour or silence, from a pack or per server.
A shop or bounty board shows every wallet it deals in, side by side with your balances, and shop categories can be ordered your way with CategoryOrder.
A quest step can watch any number the game tracks, including one another mod owns; your total level and highest skill level become readable everywhere too.
Dialogue options and NPCs can check your stats, held item, or tool quality with no plugin code, and the same names work at a work station.
XP notifications collapse into one updating banner while you work a station, instead of a stack of popups.
New: CozyTales Fishing integration. Every catch trains Fishing and counts for quests and achievements, rarer fish pay more, and the adapter was contributed by that mod's own author.
ability-clamps.json: per-stat safety rails that folded gear and mastery bonuses can never push past, retunable live with /mmoconfig reload.
A locked mastery node or class advancement lists everything you still need, one line each, instead of only the first unmet requirement.
One action, one credit: a break, kill, craft, pickup or placement is counted exactly once across XP, statistics, quests, achievements and bonus drops.
Bug fixes

A long list of things that now just work

The rework came with a correctness pass across combat, mastery and quests, plus a sweep of fixes for issues reported on the community Discord.

Skill mastery damage no longer counts twice on ability casts (a correctness fix, not a rebalance: builds leaning on the doubled bonus will read lower).
Meteor's mastery damage nodes actually raise its damage: mastery and skill-wide bonuses reach zone and damage-over-time damage now.
Burning pools and bleeds train the ability's own skill, not Magic, so Hemorrhage's bleed trains Daggers.
Piercing Shot's pierce mastery node grants its extra targets instead of doing nothing.
Passive ability cards read PASSIVE in all nine languages instead of printing a raw text code.
Shield Bash's impact lands on the enemy you hit, not on you, and stays quiet on a whiff.
Drinking a Shadowstep potion reliably teleports you, and Flame Stream renders correctly when cast bare-handed.
Skipping a quest through dialogue credits everything that was watching: achievement chains, complete-this-quest steps, and the bounty tail.
An authored /give count is delivered in full, however it was written.
A reward that would not fit no longer vanishes: every claim checks the payout fits before anything is charged, and refuses cleanly.

From the community Discord

Turning the quest tracker HUD off sticks across restarts.
The "Claim Items!" badge only shows when something is actually claimable.
Daily bounties reset properly at rollover, even when the rotation repeats a contract.
A quest with a custom name shows it, instead of its first objective's text.
Turn-in dialogue options check your bag before offering to hand items in.
The tutorial gathering quest completes: the stone you mine counts, and baby boars count for boar hunts.
The Adventurer's Guide stays put after instance trips, re-places itself if missing, and can no longer be killed.
Batch crafting counts every item it produced toward quests, achievements and statistics.
Switching off a single built-in quest sticks; the rest of the quest system stays on.
Running a second dialogue mod no longer blanks every conversation or disconnects you mid-talk.
Custom skills made in-game keep their names after a restart, no language file needed.
Editing a custom skill no longer disconnects you, and the editor reads properly in all nine languages.
The Boosts, Quests, Achievements and Abilities screens get their breathing room back.
Mastery appears on the achievements screens' side list, where it was missing.
Damage achievements count the damage your hits actually land, not the number of swings.
Renaming yourself keeps your leaderboard spot; a newcomer never inherits a stranger's row.
Offline XP commands refuse a name nobody owns instead of queueing XP for a future stranger.
Shop categories always show a readable label, and console-opened menus work from any world.
Permission nodes match the documented commands, and the full node list is documented.
A stale companion-library jar fails up front naming the required version, not with a cryptic class error.

The companions, in step

1.6.0 ships alongside its family: the new RPG Stations companion mod and the new MMO Skill Stations Pack, the first release of the free MMO Skill Quest Pack, and updates to the Bounty, Taming and Mastery packs. MMO Mob Scaling uses the new enemy ability casting for signature moves, and everything rides on Ziggfreed's CommonLib. See each pack's own page for what it adds.

Coming from 1.5.x? A Hytale Update 6 (0.6.x) server is required, a handful of owner files changed shape, and the server converts what it safely can at first boot; Upgrading to 1.6.0 walks the whole thing, including /mmomigrate and the browser-based Migration Converter for content packs.

This page is the highlights, distilled from the full 1.6.0 notes; they join the patch notes page at release.