Coming Soon

This page collects the features we’ve designed, sketched, or argued about that aren’t in the game yet. Treat each entry as a statement of direction, not a release note: the intent of these features is settled, but specific numbers, names, and edge cases will land when each one ships into a real wiki page. Order within each category doesn’t imply priority.

Progression

Leveling past 40

The level cap closes the door on character growth long before you’ve stopped finding interesting gear. We want a path past 40: continued progression with diminishing returns shaped so an extra level feels meaningful but never makes the gear chase obsolete. The cap stops being a wall and starts being a long, gentle slope.

Change death penalty to XP and gold

Hytale’s vanilla death penalty reduces the durability of your equipped gear and drops certain items at the death site. The durability hit punishes gear progression unevenly: the players most invested in their build pay the most to keep it intact, and a single bad fight can take a Legendary out of rotation until you can repair it. We want to swap both effects for an XP and gold cost. Dying still stings, but it stings the same for everyone, scales with your level, and doesn’t tax you for owning the affixes you worked to find.

Gear affixes that grant proficiencies

A subset of high-end affixes will hand you proficiencies you don’t otherwise have access to: skill bonuses, weapon proficiencies, saving-throw bumps. The point is to make a specific gear roll change how you play, not just how hard you hit. A staff that grants Stealth proficiency reads very differently from one that only adds Wisdom.

Proficiency unlocks from dramatic situations

We already gate proficiency unlocks behind quest progress; the next step is to gate them behind moments. Survive a fall that should have killed you and you might pick up Acrobatics. Talk your way out of an execution and Persuasion clicks.

Combat and Magic

D&D-style spell system

Magic in Natural 20 is going full tabletop. Spells will be picked from a known list, cost a per-day or per-rest resource to cast, scale with your spellcasting stat, and roll real saves on the targets they hit. The moment of casting should feel like a deliberate choice between resources you’ve allocated, not a button on cooldown. Schools, levels, components, concentration: the whole shape of it.

Enhanced Damage and Enhanced Defense

Two scaling stats baked directly into gear, separate from the affix budget: Enhanced Damage on weapons, Enhanced Defense on armor. They exist to keep gear progression meaningful as the system grows past the level 40 cap, giving high-tier gear a built-in power floor that low-tier gear can’t match no matter how lucky the affix roll. They don’t compete with affixes for slots: they’re the underlying scaling curve that affixes sit on top of.

Weapon stat scaling

Right now Strength is the only stat that scales weapon damage. We want every weapon class to scale off the stat that fits how you actually wield it. Bows and crossbows will draw damage from Dexterity. Staves will draw damage from Wisdom. Strength stays primary for melee. The point is to make a Dex-build ranger and a Wis-build caster feel like their main stat is doing real work in combat, not just gating proficiency checks.

Affixed consumable stacks

Affixes today only roll on durable equipment. A future pass extends them to consumable and projectile drops, where a single drop can be a stack of N: ten throwing spears that share an affix, twenty bombs that share an affix. The schema already reserves the stack-quantity hook on the gear-filter allowlist; what’s deferred is the pipeline plumbing and the call on whether the affix applies per stack or per item used.

Exploration and Discovery

Wisdom perception radius

Wisdom will quietly read the world around you. Within a perception radius that grows with the score, you’ll start noticing things ordinary players miss: hidden passages behind a suspicious wall, buried treasure under a patch of disturbed grass, a quest hook from an NPC you would otherwise have walked past. High Wisdom turns the map into a different game. Low Wisdom and the world keeps its secrets.

Handheld quest compass

A craftable, equippable compass that points toward your current quest objective. Direction first, distance only at a glance: we don’t want to remove the journey, just the “wait, which way” pause that breaks immersion in a procedurally generated world. The compass should feel like a tool you carry, not a GPS overlay you ignore.

One-use teleport-home portal

A consumable portal scroll that drops you at your home point and gives you a return trip back to where you cast it. One charge, two hops. The intent is to take the sting out of long resupply runs without trivialising the world’s distances: you can break for town, but you’ve spent something to do it, and the next time you need to leave you’re crafting another scroll.

Repeatable dungeon instance portals

Some dungeons are built to be run more than once. Those will get instance portals: an entry point that spawns a fresh, unlooted copy of the dungeon for you and your party. Loot tables, boss tables, and difficulty roll fresh on every entry. Static dungeons stay static; instance dungeons are the recurring grind targets, where the build you’ve been working on actually has somewhere to be tested.

Retrofit content into existing worlds

Installing Natural 20 onto a save you’ve already played leaves your explored territory empty of settlements and cave dungeons, because worldgen content currently only seeds into chunks the world hasn’t generated yet. We want a retrofit pass: a one-time backfill that walks your existing world, picks valid sites in already-generated chunks, and places settlements, cave voids, and the POI quests that hang off them. The stat, dialogue, and quest-NPC systems already work on existing worlds: this closes the loop on the worldgen side, so adding the mod to a long-running save isn’t a quiet punishment for having played there.

Humanoid boss with minions

A new boss archetype: a humanoid commander backed by a squad of humanoid minions, all sharing a faction theme (bandits, cultists, rogue knights, and so on). The boss carries dialogue, not just a name. The minions have their own roles in the fight: some support, some skirmish, some hold the line. Designed to feel like an encounter you’d write into a tabletop session, not a scaled-up champion pack.

Active, lively taverns

Settlement taverns will stop being empty rooms with a barkeep. We want patrons who drink, talk, gossip, occasionally brawl, and occasionally hand out the kind of quest a stranger only offers after the third round. Taverns are where the game’s social systems should be at their thickest: rumours, recruitment, disposition, the lot.

Recruitable NPCs

Some NPCs you meet will be willing to travel with you. Recruitment is gated behind reputation and dialogue, not gold. A recruited NPC follows, fights, holds an inventory, can be outfitted with gear from your stash, and has opinions about where you’re going and what you’re doing. Lose them in a hard fight and they don’t respawn.

Gold currency and traders

Gold becomes a real economy: a single in-world currency that mobs drop, quests reward, and traders accept. Traders carry persistent stocks, restock on a timer, and pay differently for items based on what they specialise in. The blacksmith pays more for weapons; the fence pays for the gear you’d rather not explain. Barter pages out, price tags in.

Oblivion-style disposition minigame

An optional layer on top of normal dialogue. When you’re talking to an NPC, you can choose to launch a charm minigame to push their disposition higher before you ask for the favour: pick conversational tactics, watch the reaction, nudge the meter into friendlier territory. Charisma and Wisdom both feed into it, so a low-Charisma character can still negotiate by reading their target instead of charming them. Skipping the minigame and just talking is always fine: it’s a tool, not a gate.

Pickpocketing

A Dexterity-based skill check against an NPC’s perception. Sneak up, attempt the lift, and either walk away with a coin purse, a quest item, or a key you weren’t meant to have, or get caught and watch the NPC turn hostile (and watch the rest of the settlement remember it). The reward is shaped by who you’re stealing from: a drunk farmer is low risk and low value; a tax collector is high risk and high value. Stealth and disposition both feed into the consequences.

Smalltalk that references active and completed quests

NPCs already have smalltalk; the missing piece is awareness. Future smalltalk pools will pull lines that reference your active quests (“you’re the one looking for the missing caravan, aren’t you?”) and your completed ones (“heard you cleared out the cultists at the old chapel: nicely done”). The world should remember what you’ve been doing, especially if it happened nearby.

Authoring and Content

Building-block quests, and new objective types

The current quest system is built from a fixed set of objective types: kill, collect, talk, escort. We want to keep adding to that set as the game gives us new verbs. Every new objective type is a new shape of quest the system can generate. On the shortlist:

Build a structure: place a defined arrangement of blocks, validated against a template.
Deliver an item: courier work, with or without a time limit.
Defend a position: hold a point against waves long enough for the quest-giver’s interest to clear.
Scout without being seen: reach a marked location without breaking line of sight from the wrong NPCs.
Hitman: murder a specific named NPC, ideally without witnesses.
Persuade a hostile NPC: talk an enemy down through a disposition or skill check. Fail the check and you fight them on the spot.
Investigation: piece together a multi-step mystery from clues scattered across NPCs, notes, and locations, and arrive at the right conclusion before turning the quest in.