Hadavi is a world of sand, ruin, and hard-won wonder.

For thousands of years the Days of Judgment scoured the continents, collapsing empires and burying wholethe agesworld beneath shifting dunes. What survived did so by becoming tougher, stranger, and more ruthless. In Hadavi, the horizon is never empty for long, dust storms roll in like walls, distant lights burn where they shouldn’t, and the desert quietly gives up pieces of history to anyone bold enough to go looking.

Hytale Reimagined is my long-term project to transform Hytale into Embergrave: a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting I’ve been building for two decades through D&D campaigns, stories, maps, art, and relentless worldbuilding. The goal is a grand-scale, total-conversion survival MMORPG, built in public with the community, where exploration, faction conflict, and progression all serve one thing: making Hadavi feel real.

The Project

Embergrave is the Seventh Age of Hadavi: a brutal era that still carries the echo of the old world’s grand ambitions and catastrophic magic. The tone is equal parts savagery and myth, something with the grit and speed of a wasteland story, but also the scale and awe of classic sword-and-sorcery.

This isn’t a setting you “finish.” It’s a setting you live in. Cities endure as rare islands of safety and politics. The wilds are expansive and unforgiving. Power is often found in what the sand has hidden, and the cost of claiming it.

What “Hytale Reimagined” means

This is not about adding a few custom blocks and calling it a day. The goal is to build a coherent, authored world experience, Hytale transformed into Hadavi, with systems that feel like they belong there.

Hadavi, world overview

Hadavi is an ocean of dunes covering broken continents. Ruins surface, vanish, and surface again as the sand shifts. Relic hunters and drifters treat the desert like a map that rewrites itself, because it does.

Magic follows different rules here. In its raw state it manifests as Shimmer, beautiful, volatile, and dangerous to the unprepared. Much of what people call “magic” survives in relics: objects that hold spellwork like a sealed storm. They’re coveted, traded, worshiped, and fought over.

Travel is a defining part of the setting. Hadavi is meant to be crossed, not just walked through. Drift-ships exist because of float stones, rare materials that can temporarily change how sand behaves, letting dunes move like water beneath a hull. In the far distance, visible across vast stretches of desert, stands Megathra, one of the Towers of Za, lit by the Heart of Ga’lee, a beacon that reminds you how large the world truly is.

Three quick anchors for the setting:

• A living desert: storms, shifting terrain, hidden vaults, and ruins that reappear as the dunes move.
• Dangerous magic: Shimmer is real, unstable, and often lethal; relics are power you can carry, if you survive earning them.
• Drifter culture: travel is identity; ships and caravans are lifelines, targets, and legends.

The MMORPG Vision

Embergrave is a survival-first sandbox MMORPG with authored content. Think a world where you can live off the land, build a base, and trade your way into power, while still having structured progression, roles in combat, and PvE experiences that feel like real destinations.

I want this to land in the space between games like New World and Ashes of Creation, but with more emphasis on travel and exploration as core gameplay, not a commute between objectives. It should support roleplay naturally because the world is built to be inhabited, not speedrun.

Here’s the experience we’re aiming for:

• Sandbox agency: land ownership, building, crafting economies, factions, reputation, and meaningful risk.
• Authored adventure: questlines, hubs, dungeons, raids, and points of interest that tell stories and unlock access.
• Long-term progression: skills, crafting, and magic designed to grow over time and support different playstyles.
• Social gravity: crews, guilds, rivalries, trade networks, and hub cities that matter.

Core gameplay loop

We’re still designing the final loop, but the shape is already clear: you prepare, you push into danger, you return stronger, and then you go farther.

That shows up in play as gathering and crafting, traveling into risky regions, discovering POIs and relic sites, taking contracts and quests, delving dungeons and raids, and returning to hub cities to trade, upgrade, recruit, and plan.

Features

This project isn’t about adding one “cool system.” It’s about building a coherent world experience with depth across exploration, progression, PvE, and PvP.

The headline features we’re building toward:

• A massive custom world: distinct biomes, handcrafted points of interest, and major cities built as true player hubs.
• Environmental storytelling: lore delivered through quests, NPCs, relics, ruins, and the world itself.
• Deep progression: custom leveling, crafting, and magic systems designed to feel like a real MMORPG.

Systems we want to build

Under the headlines are the systems that make the world function:

• Skills and stats overhaul: a progression model with meaningful choices and long-term goals.
• Crafting with economy pressure: materials, recipes, and production loops designed to create trade and specialization.
• Faction and reputation systems: access, benefits, contracts, and consequences tied to who you work with (and who you cross).
• PvE content built for the world: dungeons and raids as destinations with story, factions, and reasons to return.
• PvP with stakes: territory conflict, open-world encounters, piracy, and social consequences.
• Player hubs that function: cities as markets, meeting points, job boards, faction centers, and staging grounds.

Drifting and ships

If there’s one feature that defines Embergrave, it’s drifting, ships that cross the desert.

If we execute it the way I want, your ship won’t be a cosmetic novelty. It will be your home and your logistics. You’ll build it, expand it, maintain it, and take it into danger. You’ll bring other players aboard, run expeditions, trade across the dunes, and, if you choose, raid rivals or NPC factions. It becomes a mobile base of operations that ties exploration, economy, and conflict together.

What “ships as gameplay” means in practice:

• Build and upgrade: start small, expand rooms and stations, improve storage, survivability, and functionality.
• Upkeep matters: supplies, repairs, and planning are part of the fantasy, drifting should feel earned.
• Crew play: invite players aboard for roles, expeditions, escorts, and shared risk.
• Piracy and conflict: ships create opportunity for ambushes, raids, defense, and reputation.

It’s ambitious. It’s difficult. It’s also the most Embergrave thing we could possibly build.

Development

This isn’t meant to feel like a messy side project. If it’s in the game, it should feel authored, smooth, and worth interacting with.

Everything we build will be measured against a few simple standards: it must be faithful to Embergrave’s Seventh Age; it must show attention to detail; it must be high-quality and coherent; it must protect immersion; and it must support player agency in a world that still feels handcrafted.

Why Hytale

Hytale makes this kind of project believable.

It’s accessible enough for a community to build together, but powerful enough to support a total conversion. Voxel building lets us author cities, ruins, landmarks, and dungeons at scale. The asset pipeline (Blockbench-friendly) makes it possible to create a large library of creatures, gear, and world props without needing a full studio. World generation tools open the door to biomes that can cover a massive world consistently, instead of a series of disconnected scenes. And the server-first approach means players can jump in and experience the project as it evolves.

Current status

Embergrave is not in early access yet.

Right now we’re in planning and discovery, building the foundation and assembling the team and community to make something ambitious together. What we do have is the most important ingredient: the setting itself, two decades of lore, factions, creatures, locations, and a clear vision of Hadavi.

To start building momentum (and to give everyone a place to gather), we’re running a vanilla Hytale server with basic mods. It’s a space for the community to play, hang out, and for us to begin testing incremental additions, new creatures, blocks, items, early magic concepts, and eventually the first versions of core systems.

A major dependency is large-scale world creation tooling. Hadavi is mapped, but we need a way to bring that map into Hytale at the right size. While we wait for tools to mature, we’re focusing on what we can build immediately: biome experiments, an asset pipeline, and modular systems that will later plug into the full world.

How to get involved

If this is the kind of project you want to be part of from the beginning, you can help right now.

Join the server, join the Discord, and follow along as we develop in public. If you’re a builder, artist, developer, or writer and you want to contribute, reach out. There’s room here for people who want to help turn a setting into a world.

We’re turning Hytale into Hadavi, slowly, deliberately, and with the community watching it take shape.