One modder has already got Doom running inside the voxel-sandbox Hytale, and it’s not even out yet: It plays ‘a bit like a broken keyboard’

Hytale is first and foremost a sandbox adventure RPG inspired by Minecraft, but having been made by a team of top Minecraft modders and community members, it’s also built with modding in mind. And when mods are involved, things are bound to get very weird, very fast.

One Hytale modder by the name of “tr7zw”, who’s behind the time-saving Landmark fast-travel mod for the game, has done the inevitable: they’ve made Doom run inside Hytale, and it’s as chunky and charming as you’d imagine.

“I’ll be honest, I didn’t plan for this…two to three nights with not enough sleep later and here we go: Doom running 100% inside a Hytale mod, before Hytale is even released,” said the modder. “To quote @Simon_Hypixel [the co-founder of Hytale’s development studio]: ‘what’.” That being, befuddlement at this cursed creation.

And yes, you read that right, they’ve done all this before the official Hytale launch time has even rolled around, since the developers let modders get cooking early. Nevertheless, that means we’ve got Doom running in Hytale before the general playerbase has had hands on Hytale itself.

As for how this works exactly, it clearly took a bit of tinkering. As I understand it, the modder uses a full Java port of Doom and downsamples each image to Hytale to display at 20fps. The 80×60 block grid changes to the nearest colour to match the images sent over by Doom, so I’d have to imagine there’s a fair bit of input delay. Speaking of inputs, it’s fully controlled in-game and feels “a bit like a broken keyboard,” according to the modder.

Getting Doom to run on things it was never meant to run on is one of gaming’s greatest tests, seeing it playable on everything from your motherboard’s BIOS, old potatoes, a Lego brick, a home pregnancy test, and even Doom running inside Doom. Hytale, clearly, has passed the test, though I’m not sure I want to try it for myself.

About