Objective Tracker

A Zygor-style step-by-step survival guide for Hytale. A panel on the right side of the screen tells you exactly what to do next, from picking up your first sticks and pebbles to crafting an Adamantite Pickaxe, and ticks objectives off live as items land in your inventory.

CHAPTER 1 - FIRST STEPS
Gather sticks and plant fiber
Pick up loose sticks lying on the ground...
[X]  Sticks   6/6
[  ]  Plant Fiber   2/6
  ↖  Plant Fiber
     14m
Tip: Forest edges near spawn have plenty of both.
Step 2 / 40   -   /guide help

What it does

• 8 chapters, 40 steps: Fieldcraft tools → Workbench → Furnace → Copper → Tanning/Linen → Iron → Tier 2 Workbench → Zone 2 Thorium → Zone 3 Cobalt → Tier 3 Workbench → Zone 4 Adamantite. Every recipe, item ID and ore location in it was taken from the game's own asset files (v0.7.4).
• Auto-completion: steps check your whole inventory once a second. Objectives can be
  • item: hold N of an item (or any of a list of items),
  • resource: hold N of anything tagged with a resource type (Rubble, Wood_Trunk, Rock, …),
  • zone: enter a zone (Zone2, Zone3, …),
  • below: go below a Y level,
  • manual: confirm it yourself with /guide done (e.g. "upgrade your workbench").
• Waypoints: where the game world allows it, the guide points you at the nearest thing you need: loose sticks, bushes, rubble, trees, stone, each ore, or the bench you should craft at. You get a marker on the world map and compass, plus an arrow on the panel that follows your camera (updated every world tick, 30 times a second, 64 directions) and shades from green when you're facing the target to red when it's behind you, with the distance and how far up or down it is. The search only looks at chunks that are already loaded (up to ~80 blocks around you) and is refreshed every 2 seconds. Steps whose target can't be found by looking at blocks (hunting, zone travel) don't show one.
• Smart skipping: each step can have skipIf conditions, so a player who already has an iron pickaxe isn't told to go and collect sticks.
• Progress is saved per player (by UUID) and survives restarts.
• Small asset pack: the panel itself is inline UI markup (like the game's spectator HUD); the jar also carries the 64 arrow images and GuideArrow.ui under Common/UI/Custom/ObjectiveTracker (IncludesAssetPack in the manifest). If those aren't available the panel falls back to text directions. Regenerate the images and GuideArrow.ui with python3 tools/make_arrows.py (needs Pillow).

Commands

All players can use these (/og is an alias):

Command	What it does
/guide show / /guide hide	Toggle the panel
/guide waypoint	Turn waypoints on or off
/guide done	Finish the current step (for "manual" steps)
/guide skip / /guide back	Move one step forward / back
/guide list	List every step with your progress
/guide step <n>	Jump to step n
/guide reset	Start over
/guide help	Show this list in game

Building

Requirements: JDK 25 or newer, Gradle, and Hytale installed through the launcher.

gradle build          # -> build/libs/ObjectiveTracker-<version>.jar
gradle installMod     # builds and copies the jar into Hytale's UserData/Mods folder
gradle runServer      # starts a local dedicated server in ./run with the plugin loaded

The Hytale install and Mods folder default to the Flatpak launcher's locations on Linux (~/.var/app/com.hypixel.HytaleLauncher/...). If yours are elsewhere, create a local.properties file (it isn't committed) next to build.gradle.kts:

hytaleDir=/path/to/Hytale/install/release/package/game/latest
hytaleModsDir=/path/to/Hytale/UserData/Mods

Testing in game

1. gradle installMod
2. Launch Hytale, create or open a world, and enable ObjectiveTracker in the world's mod settings if it isn't enabled automatically.
3. The guide panel should appear on the right after you spawn. Try /guide list.

Or connect to the dev server from gradle runServer (localhost). On first start you'll have to authenticate it: type /auth login device in the server console.

Customising the guide

On every start the plugin writes its bundled guide to <server>/mods/ObjectiveTracker_ObjectiveTracker/guides/survival.default.json for reference. To customise, copy it to survival.json in the same folder, edit, and restart the server. If survival.json exists it replaces the bundled guide. Otherwise the bundled one is used, so plugin updates bring guide fixes automatically. Unknown item IDs are listed as a warning in the server log at startup.

Step format:

{
  "id": "mine_copper",
  "title": "Find and mine Copper Ore",
  "text": "Shown under the title.",
  "hint": "Optional tip line.",
  "objectives": [
    { "type": "item", "ids": ["Ore_Copper", "Ingredient_Bar_Copper"], "count": 9, "label": "Copper Ore",
      "find": ["Ore_Copper*"] }
  ],
  "skipIf": [
    { "type": "item", "ids": ["Tool_Pickaxe_Copper", "Tool_Pickaxe_Iron"], "count": 1 }
  ]
}

find lists block ids to point the waypoint at while that objective is unfinished (* is a wildcard; block states like a lit furnace are included automatically). A step can also have its own "find" and "findLabel", used when no unfinished objective has one, e.g. the Workbench for a crafting step. Patterns that match no block are listed as a warning at startup.

Step ids are what's saved in player progress, so keep them stable when editing.

Project layout

src/main/java/dev/objectivetracker/
  ObjectiveTrackerPlugin.java   plugin entry: registers command, events, 1s ticker
  GuideService.java             evaluates objectives, advances steps, drives the HUD
  hud/GuideHud.java             the on-screen panel (CustomUIHud + inline markup)
  waypoint/                     nearest-block search + world map/compass marker
  command/GuideCommand.java     /guide subcommands
  guide/                        guide data model + JSON loader
  progress/                     per-player progress (JSON files)
src/main/resources/
  manifest.json                 Hytale plugin manifest
  guides/survival.json          the survival guide

License

MIT © 2026 djsaintg