Understanding Hytale Session Limits and Hosting Registration
What Hytale's concurrent session limits mean for hosting providers and how the hosting registration program worked.
Understanding Hytale Session Limits and Hosting Registration
Hytale's session system ties server capacity to Hytale accounts rather than hardware. Understanding this system is important for anyone running servers for others or operating a hosting business.
How Session Limits Work
A player session is created each time a player connects to a Hytale server running under a given account. Standard Hytale accounts are capped at 100 concurrent player sessions across all servers associated with that account.
This means if you are running three servers under one account and they collectively have 100 players connected, no additional players can join any of those servers until someone disconnects — even if individual server maxPlayers limits have not been reached.
Per-Server vs. Account-Wide
The maxPlayers setting in config.json controls the per-server connection limit. The account-level session cap is an additional ceiling that applies across all servers linked to the same account. The effective concurrent player count is the lower of the two.
The sessions.unlimited_servers Entitlement
To support hosting providers running many servers across many customers, Hytale created the sessions.unlimited_servers entitlement. Accounts holding this entitlement are not subject to the 100-session cap.
Current Status
The application program for sessions.unlimited_servers was suspended in April 2026. Providers who were approved before the suspension retain their entitlements. New applications are not currently being accepted.
Check the Hytale Developer Portal for the latest status on this program — Hytale may reopen applications in the future.
What This Means for Hosting Customers
If you are renting a Hytale server from a hosting provider:
- DustBowl.Games manages all account entitlements on the infrastructure side. You do not need to worry about session limits when hosting with us — server capacity is governed by your chosen plan's
maxPlayerssetting. - If you are self-hosting under a standard Hytale account, you are subject to the 100-session cap unless your account has the
sessions.unlimited_serversentitlement.
Checking Your Account's Session Usage
There is currently no in-server command to check real-time session usage against your account cap. Monitor it through the Hytale Developer Portal dashboard, which shows active sessions by server.
Session Expiry and OAuth2
The server's OAuth2 authentication session (used by the Downloader CLI and the running server process) is separate from player sessions. The OAuth2 session expires after 1 hour of inactivity but auto-refreshes while the server is running. If the server has been stopped and you need to restart or update, you may need to re-authenticate.
./hytale-downloader auth --refresh
See Downloading Hytale Server Files with the Hytale Downloader CLI for details.
Planning Around Session Limits
If you are running a self-hosted server close to the 100-session limit:
- Consider spreading load across accounts if you have multiple Hytale licenses.
- Set
maxPlayersinconfig.jsonconservatively to avoid hitting the cap unexpectedly. - Monitor the Developer Portal to see if the
sessions.unlimited_serversprogram reopens.