5 Best Practices for Building a Multi-Server Hytale Network

Growing beyond a single Hytale server is exciting, but it comes with real challenges.
How do you move players between a lobby and minigames seamlessly? How do you protect
your backend IPs? How do you keep things simple enough to actually maintain?

After building EtProxy, a proxy layer purpose-built for Hytale networks, here are the
5 best practices we see network owners get right (or wrong).

1. Always hide your backend server IPs

If players can connect directly to your backend game servers, you're exposed. DDoS
attacks, ban evasion, and exploits all get easier when your real IPs are visible.

A proxy layer like EtProxy sits between your players and your backend servers, so
the outside world only ever sees one address: your proxy. Your game servers stay
completely hidden.

2. Design your server topology before you write a line of config

The most common mistake: adding servers reactively. You end up with spaghetti routing
and no clear player flow.

Before you configure anything, sketch your network:
- One or more lobby servers as entry points
- Game servers grouped by mode (survival, minigames, etc.)
- Clear rules for when and how players move between them

EtProxy's config is intentionally minimal, which means it forces you to think in
clean terms: which servers exist, and what are the rules for moving between them.

3. Make player transfers instant and invisible

Nothing breaks immersion like a 5-second black screen when switching game modes.
Players should move between servers without feeling a seam.

This requires your proxy to handle the transfer at the network level, not inside
each game server. EtProxy moves players between backend servers instantly, without
them needing to reconnect.

4. Give your backend developers a real API

Too many proxy setups treat the proxy as dumb infrastructure. But your game servers
need to talk to the proxy to trigger transfers, check player locations, or
coordinate cross-server events.

EtProxy ships with a developer API on the backend server side, so your devs can
build features that span the whole network, not just a single server instance.

5. Keep your proxy config dead simple

Complexity is the enemy of uptime. The more configuration your proxy requires, the
more surfaces there are for things to go wrong, and the harder it is to onboard
new team members.

EtProxy is built around zero unnecessary bloat. One config file. Clear options.
No plugins to manage, no dependency hell.

Ready to connect your Hytale servers?

EtProxy is a fast, minimal proxy built specifically for Hytale networks. It handles
everything above out of the box: IP hiding, instant player transfers, a clean
developer API, and a config you can actually read.

Get EtProxy