Haven and Hearth (kinda LP kinda over)

[DemoGraph]

I've been playing it solo for last two weeks or so.

Solo it's a meditative farming game (in the worst meaning of this word - the clicking is ungodly).

► Show Spoiler

Go forage for berries and squirrels to eat, combine proper foods to watch your stats go up (yes, you lvl up by eating healthy and diverse food; also you start the game completely naked, even women, and run tits bared until you craft some clothes - truly a conservative game).

Find some curiosities to consume (research), craft some, get xp to put into skills. This research can (and should) continue while you're offline. Your progression probably won't lag behind nolifers that much, even if you'll play for an hour or two daily, if you plan a bit.

Cut some trees to make logs to build a house behind a palisade to hide your trash in. Otherwise any passing player can steal your **** and, if he's advanced enough, permakill your char.

You can fish, mine, smelt, farm, plant trees, do pottery, winemaking, ranching and glasswork and I think alchemy is present. No automation, though. But you can craft ships and ahoy. You also can dig mines that get created on separate z-levels.

Every item has a quality rating that increases its stats, so high level play seems to be focused on quality farming.

The game for me was mostly peaceful (tm). I still haven't killed a single mob. (Squirrels, rats and chickens don't count.) I got beaten into unconsciousness several times by bats, badger and goddamn ants. I was burned by weeds, bitten by sand fleas, pierced by hedgehogs and got my first char killed by wolverine. His successor had managed to retrieve the body and bury it properly and got about half the stats back. RIP.

I haven't met a single player yet, though I saw their tracks sometimes and an occasional exchange in country chat.

Judging by the forum, proper PvP in HH is like EVE for village *******. There're several groups of griefers who try to wreck noobs and careless players for shits. Alts are permitted, so griefer spying is abundant, and there's much drama. All of that happens on the playerbase of 160-180 people (total), so w/e. I'm not interested in that.

I'm still a beginner. But if anyone would like to, we could run solo together. (I doubt that we would be able to MP properly, because I'm GMT+3 and most of you are GMT-5 or so).

► Show Spoiler

I can provide you with some protected housing to jump start your game, until you build your own.
If several people join, maybe we could even make the HQ village.

The caveats are:
- we probably don't want to attract other players' attention. With enough preparation settlement could be sieged and our **** destroyed. And older players seem to know how to powergame and should be able to oneshot noobs. Though the most prized possessions could be hidden by alts on log off. "Hermit" (solo) play seems to be very prevalent and could be successful. I've seen several hermit houses, they seem to be doing ok.
- I doubt that competitive PVP MP is realistic. I'm there for relaxed farming.
- The game is run on a single server that seems to be purged every November or so, as devs release a new version of the game. So our journey would last a few months tops.

Oh, and the game is free and very light - all you need is login and several kBs worth of Java executable. (yes, it's kilobytes)

So if you want to, you can create a char and start in random place. The map is seriously huge. We don't have to meet, ever.

Or ping me, and I'll build a beacon that would place your hearthfire (spawner) near my house.

If I know you, I can give you my first house completely free, no future mortgage in small print. The palisade is a bit dumb, but functional. And the house has starting gear, food and basic production facilities.


If more than one person wants to join, I can give you an access to one of the sheds. We'd need to furnish them a bit, but, again, they should have more than enough space for you to gather resources to start your own house.

Here's my place. The central area is mine. The small house up top, behind the gates, could be yours. I can make 3 more in the corners.


Having a house from the start is a real timesaver. You see, you need 10 leather and some other resources to create a palisade. For that you kill and skin animals. Then you put their skins to dry on the rack and wait for 8 real hours. Then you tan it in a tanning barrel for, IIRC, 12-24 real hours. Then you build your stuff. Then you wait for 8 hours for your palisade to dry and become impervious to manual damage. So it would take at least 2-4 days for a new player to make a claim and palisade. Again, I haven't seen thieves personally, but there's whining on the forum, so they're there somewhere. Lurking. Waiting for your sweet baby tears.

[rusty_shackleford]

Permanent Death & Open PvP
Master the Dark Arts of Trespassing, Theft, Rage, Vandalism and Murder to impose upon others who roam the Hearth.
Increase your Perception & Exploration to track down and bring to justice all breakers of peace and oaths, by tracking the vicious Stenches of Crime.
Construct mighty Siege Machines and engines of war to bring the flames of war to foreign lands.
Found Villages to claim large swathes of land and organize kith and kin into mighty bands.
Found Realms and lay claim to entire Provinces by capturing the ancient Thingwalls dotting the Hearth.
Bury the dead and fulfill the will of the ancestors to draw upon the strength of your previous lives.
Experience the thrill of a world where all interactions with your fellow Hearthling carries the potentiality for grave consequence.

I'm good

[DemoGraph]

The horse I've been gifted and the first mammoth I've seen.


The horse turned out to be a kind of a white elephant. He has a very good breeding - runs fast, has a lot of stamina, etc. But to maintain that level of breeding he has to be fed quality feed. I've been feeding him the best I have (he actually ate better than I did) and it's still not enough by a wide margin. So I'll have to ask the original owner for proper foodstuffs soon or see the poor sod wither away on a noob diet.

[Demonic Fate]

Not seeing why I'd want to play this over Valheim tbh

[DemoGraph]

Not seeing why I'd want to play this over Valheim tbh

Valheim doesn't have this.


Seriously though, I've dropped Valheim some months ago and only a few times wanted to come back. Valheim is pretty atmospheric, but it's also quite shallow. When the novelty of viking sunsets wanes, there's not that much to do there other than combat.

HH is mostly economic. I haven't killed a single mob yet (squirrels and hedgehogs don't count). And after two weeks I have several avenues of development: I can spend time expanding my farm, improving one of several crafts, going on expeditions to see the world (or in PVP - raiding abandoned settlements, trying to find out what player groups are still active or visiting market).
There's also char development. You're incentivized to always have some items to consume for research, and those need to be recrafted. While you can do it in advance, I found out that this housekeeping still feels fresh and rewarding for me.

Also, saying "I play HH" is seriously ubermenschy.

[asf]

it is all fun until terminally online ****** come and wipe everything while you are working

[DemoGraph]

it is all fun until terminally online ****** come and wipe everything while you are working

There's a western griefer clan already. You can always hide from them because the world is endless. All you need is the boat to escape the central continents, and you can make the simplest one after a few hours.

Here's the player-compiled map of the current world. It's not the whole world but only the parts that were voluntarily sent to the compiler.
https://map.hearthworld.com
For reference, it took me 2-3 hours nonstop running to walk ~80 points of that map on foot. The largest base I've seen takes maybe 4-6 grid squares on that map on max zoom (that is, 2*2 or 2*3 coordinate units). My base takes maybe a quarter square (after the expansion that I haven't shown yet).

Edit. Also, there're 9 underground z-levels, each equal in size to the surface one. You can mine through them all (though I think you'll be able to access only the upper one without mining skills (via caves) and only 2-3 upper ones before upgrading your tools; I haven't mined yet, so these are approximate).

[Rumbles]

Permanent Death & Open PvP
Master the Dark Arts of Trespassing, Theft, Rage, Vandalism and Murder to impose upon others who roam the Hearth.
Increase your Perception & Exploration to track down and bring to justice all breakers of peace and oaths, by tracking the vicious Stenches of Crime.
Construct mighty Siege Machines and engines of war to bring the flames of war to foreign lands.
Found Villages to claim large swathes of land and organize kith and kin into mighty bands.
Found Realms and lay claim to entire Provinces by capturing the ancient Thingwalls dotting the Hearth.
Bury the dead and fulfill the will of the ancestors to draw upon the strength of your previous lives.
Experience the thrill of a world where all interactions with your fellow Hearthling carries the potentiality for grave consequence.

I'm good

Streets of Paris: The Game

But by the description it seems like some medieval rust, or wasnt one of the Conan games like that. Graphics look like a cross of Zomboid and RPGMO. Willing to try if there arent an insane level of griefers and egoists.
According to one steam review: "You won't beat these players, the "Player vs Player" part is a lie, it is so one-sided that there really is no versus or fighting involved, you will typically just die to someone who has been playing longer than you have. This should be the beginning of your journey of discovery of why these types of games do not work. If you allow players to grind skills and items for 50 hours before someone else shows up, the PvP aspect of the game becomes irrelevant, they will just kill you." But eh I used to play old Mortal online, im used to schizos treating a game world like a stress ball.

[asf]

last i played world was finite, but then that was probably 2010

i had even hacked through the java client and made a bot to spend all day selecting crops

i could join this if you think we can hide properly from *******

[DemoGraph]

After several more days playing I have to say that I definitely like devs approach to minutiae. This game has many little mechanics that seem to be included just for fun. But they definitely add to verisimilitude.

- There're forest ticks. They jump on you while you're interacting with trees or bushes and some time later begin sucking your blood. When they do, they get quality depending on your constitution stat. You can take them off you, but if you wait them to become bloodfilled, they could be used as a fish bait. I think they also digest your blood, and slowly turn back to empty state.
- Also, each type of damage deals a specific wound. Ticks do tick bites that are mostly irritation. There're some wounds that give debuffs and/or can combine into nastier versions ("it's just a cut at first, but then gangrene strikes"). Both my chars managed to get so many cuts that their muscles tore into shreds and are bleeding for days. That's an especially nasty wound because it heals very slowly and sometimes DOTs you.
There's also permanent neural damage that could be healed only by special roots that could be gathered in a few POIs every 5 RL days or so.
- Your inventory can hold only 3-4 wooden planks. So building houses and some other things is a pain. You can stockpile planks in a pile, but you can't carry it. Later you learn how to create wheelbarrow that can move any stockpile comparatively fast.
- The type of fish you can catch depends on the bait, type of pond and probably time of day.
- There're two global stocks of lost items - one for sea and one for land. When you fish, you can randomly catch an item either from the predefined list or from the list of lost items. Same is true for digging and items lost on land. I've recently found a metal arrow and some oddities while digging. While you dig you also can find a worm that could be used as bait or for crafting.
- Many materials (wood, stones, clay, cloth, etc.) have unique colors. When you create buildings or items out of them, they get colored accordingly. I've been hunting specific woods and thatching materials for my buildings just for the sake of visuals.
- When you damage the ground (via digging), the grass grows back tile by tile.
- It takes several RL days for a tree to grow or for your seeds to mature.
- Chopped logs and tree stumps slowly decay into rotten wood that has its own uses.
- There're many types of foods. Many. I routinely use maybe 30-40 types to advance my char. All of them are unique in stats and could be combined for a meaningful mechanic result. You don't have to, you can still advance even if you use one type of food for one stat (so 8). I just like to.
- There're also separate mechanics for raiding anthills, beehives, hunting squirrels, hunting game, etc. In WoW or the like you'd have "RMB to interact" and that's it. Here everything has some quirk.
- Forest birds rise into the air when somebody approaches. You can sometimes see that an animal or a player approaches before seeing them by noticing the flock flying from some point.
- The horse is a fucken tamagochi. Best thing I had this game. I tend to forget that you can dig and cut trees from the horseback, saddle down, go afk while my meeple does dumb labor and then run around panicking looking for him, because he wandered off. There are cliffs and walls of thorns on the map he can't get through, but there're also water shallows he can traverse on full throttle, so travelling with him and without him are two completely different endeavors. And the speed boost makes him indispensable.

And all that was made by two people.

[rusty_shackleford]

After several more days playing I have to say that I definitely like devs approach to minutiae. This game has many little mechanics that seem to be included just for fun. But they definitely add to verisimilitude.

- There're forest ticks. They jump on you while you're interacting with trees or bushes and some time later begin sucking your blood. When they do, they get quality depending on your constitution stat. You can take them off you, but if you wait them to become bloodfilled, they could be used as a fish bait. I think they also digest your blood, and slowly turn back to empty state.
- Also, each type of damage deals a specific wound. Ticks do tick bites that are mostly irritation. There're some wounds that give debuffs and/or can combine into nastier versions ("it's just a cut at first, but then gangrene strikes"). Both my chars managed to get so many cuts that their muscles tore into shreds and are bleeding for days. That's an especially nasty wound because it heals very slowly and sometimes DOTs you.
There's also permanent neural damage that could be healed only by special roots that could be gathered in a few POIs every 5 RL days or so.
- Your inventory can hold only 3-4 wooden planks. So building houses and some other things is a pain. You can stockpile planks in a pile, but you can't carry it. Later you learn how to create wheelbarrow that can move any stockpile comparatively fast.
- The type of fish you can catch depends on the bait, type of pond and probably time of day.
- There're two global stocks of lost items - one for sea and one for land. When you fish, you can randomly catch an item either from the predefined list or from the list of lost items. Same is true for digging and items lost on land. I've recently found a metal arrow and some oddities while digging. While you dig you also can find a worm that could be used as bait or for crafting.
- Many materials (wood, stones, clay, cloth, etc.) have unique colors. When you create buildings or items out of them, they get colored accordingly. I've been hunting specific woods and thatching materials for my buildings just for the sake of visuals.
- When you damage the ground (via digging), the grass grows back tile by tile.
- It takes several RL days for a tree to grow or for your seeds to mature.
- Chopped logs and tree stumps slowly decay into rotten wood that has its own uses.
- There're many types of foods. Many. I routinely use maybe 30-40 types to advance my char. All of them are unique in stats and could be combined for a meaningful mechanic result. You don't have to, you can still advance even if you use one type of food for one stat (so 8). I just like to.
- There're also separate mechanics for raiding anthills, beehives, hunting squirrels, hunting game, etc. In WoW or the like you'd have "RMB to interact" and that's it. Here everything has some quirk.
- Forest birds rise into the air when somebody approaches. You can sometimes see that an animal or a player approaches before seeing them by noticing the flock flying from some point.
- The horse is a fucken tamagochi. Best thing I had this game. I tend to forget that you can dig and cut trees from the horseback, saddle down, go afk while my meeple does dumb labor and then run around panicking looking for him, because he wandered off. There are cliffs and walls of thorns on the map he can't get through, but there're also water shallows he can traverse on full throttle, so travelling with him and without him are two completely different endeavors. And the speed boost makes him indispensable.

And all that was made by two people.

I'd probably try this if it didn't have pvp

[asf]

wheres ur base

[DemoGraph]

I'd probably try this if it didn't have pvp

Well, I can say the following.
I was wrong previously, the map isn't endless. Still, it's very large. Very. I went on several expeditions for fun. For scale, it took me several hours running (with stops to drink and forage) to get diagonally from one corner of the orange rectangle to the opposite one (rectangle might or might not be placed where I live).

► Show Spoiler

You're significantly faster on horseback or teleporting. But you won't be able to quickly scout the whole world still. Again, for scale, the red rectangles are approximate territories of four main pvp groups. Even then there's a lot of empty space there. Think D&D style untapped wilderness between villages few and far between.
Everything outside is probably mostly empty. You can make a simplest boat (dugout) in about half an hour and set sail for fail wherever. Choose one of the empty continents or islands and see for yourself. Swim somewhere up river to get away from the shore and then run a bit more. If there's nobody around, you can be pretty confident that nobody would find you, ever.
I think that south is pretty much untapped wilds.
There are only 130-150 people playing routinely. I've seen ~200 tops. And if you don't go adventuring on purpose, you can pretty much spend all your time in your base, tending to crops and/or digging 10 z-levels deep.
I have even seen some bases that moved completely underground. I don't know how successfull are they, but it's a thing.
It's a late world, so most people seem to be focused on their pet projects and don't run around being dumb.
So I'd say that if you play safe, the biggest threat is inevitable wipe and new world in about November-December. The first few months of the new world should be the most hectic and butthurt inducing, as older players would rush to spam combat alts in a week or two and then run around griefing.

Oh, also, I've already lost my first char without any player interaction whatsoever. He was kicked to low HP by animals, then I ran out again and was beaten to death by wolverine. I made an inheritor char, buried him half an hour later, and got back half XP he had.
Now, it wouldn't be the same with players, because they would behead your corpse, and research it to get his XP (if he was advanced enough to make it worthwhile). Or they might blackmail you to return the corpse to you. But there're still mechanics to retrieve up to 45% XP when your char dies. So if you're prepared, it's never a full wipe.

Alts are legal, so you should play a bunch of them, "a dynasty". It seems to be very enduring.
Even if you'll get found, people would probably be too lazy to lay a proper siege to your bumfuck corner, if you're not a large faction - siege takes 24h for siege engines to "dry" and become operable, plus some time to prepare siege settlement, etc. So it's not worth it to siege a small player, unless emotions are involved. Even if you get sieged, you should be able to spam yourself a bunch of alts to move your best gear offline in the meantime.
Or maybe do it in advance. Place their hearthfires (respawn points) in some cave somewhere, move them to your village and log off. If siege comes, log them in, load them up and TP to hearthfires. Each char would be able to carry cartloads of stuff with him, so you'll be able to start rebuilding immediately. The only thing you'd lose is already grown trees and time invested in infrastructure.
Actually, it's a good advice to myself. I probably should do this in a few days, even if just for practice.
Also should go on a maritime expedition. Never did this, might be fun.

wheres ur base

I'm not posting the place here.
Let's say that I live on the central continent and, obviously, not right beside Balls Bay (HQ of the angriest pvp faction "Femboi Supremaci") and Koreans (****** mafia). Maybe I live in the orange rectangle.

I've upped my paranoia a bit, got invested in the game some more, and I don't know you, so...
My proposal for free house still stands if:
- Rusty, Kal, Val, Whiteshark or Irenaeus tell me you're not some bum,
- you don't run around posting maps on the web or being ******* to other players you might meet.
I've been playing very peacefully so far, but I also didn't aggro other players in chat or wherever.

Edit again FFS.
And yes, I was able to survive as a noob on the central continent, supposedly (and actually) most pvp-infested. Not that I've tried that hard, just played slightly cautiously.

[asf]

forget it

[DemoGraph]

Remember the pet boulder questgiver?
We're seriously increasing levels of cuteness here!

[DemoGraph]

Witness the humble beginning of the mighty agricultural empire!

(that would probably amount to pretty much nothing)

We are in bees knees!

Also witness the tree farm I began that utterly failed, because I've planted the trees on the future field and had to cut a bunch of them to free space for the field. The field is circular, because beehive coverage is circular. No idea how useful honey is, but wax is needed for better leather and I saw people do cricles, so we'll find out.

No way I would've been able to get that many seeds in three weeks on my on. I've looted several thousands worth of 50-100 quality seeds and boosted the second character (that my wife appropriates from time to time) to be a farmer. She has 50 farming skill boosted to over 90 by clothing. If skill would've been less than seed quality, the seed would've degraded, so we put quite a lot of effort to make her skillful enough to not waste seeds.

It takes 3-5 IRL days for plants to grow. Each grown plant changes its quality by (-2;+5). You can realistically get seeds of about q40 from the wild.
It depends on survival skill that determines the quality of **** you forage, with some ceilings. Upping survival over 40 is, I think, almost useless, because most natural goods are effectively capped at 10-30. I very rarely saw low 30s reeds despite running around with 40+ survival.
So, back to farming. Upping seeds from 40 to 50-80 I have would've taken me maybe about 20-30 growing cycles, or, you guessed it, 2-3 months worth of growing **** (that is, unless there's some trick that would allow them to grow faster that I don't know.)

Looting abandoned settlements kinda paid off.

When I'll get stable 40-60 quality crop flow, it should become worthwhile to breed chickens and rabbits and get stable source of those same 40-60 feathers and leather and intestines. And those would be burned in the research engine.

[DemoGraph]

I think this is the only game that properly shows construction process of dugout boat.
It's quite comfy.


Met neighbors. This is the largest crowd I've seen in the game so far.
I think I'm the only one without a weapon. My trade is my blade!


Remember me mentioning permanent damage? Guess what, wifey's char got it. Luckily, I've managed to get some of those super special roots that heal any damage. I got only two of those, though. And when the first one managed to heal only an ordinary wound a bit, that was I sweater. But the second root cleared almost them all, most importantly that brain drain.

(actually, that -1 int is marginal, but still uncomfortable; I think it can also stack many times over)

Speeking of wifey. We've been specifically boosting her lately, to turn her into basement dweller village crafter and farmer. And lo, she's the first to get dat 100 stat. Half of it are gear boosters, but so long as you don't forget to switch your crafting kits, it works.
It still feels that her char lags, because the char spent a lot of XP on village expansion. It will be fixed in time.
Meanwhile, we got first harvest. Those 100 points would be enough to gradually improve crops for some time. I've looted seeds from abandoned bases, so we're starting not from crop levels 10-30, but rather from 60-80. When we'll get sustainable income, we could think about breeding animals.


Also, autumn began in the game. Wolves are roaming the wilds in packs and aggro on sight. It would've been very ugly if not for the horse.
Rain goes very often, trees change their coloration and leaf piles appeared on the ground. When you go over them, they disappear with satisfying whoosh and sometimes a lizard or worm spawn from the pile.

[Decline]

I played this many years ago, it's quite good. I am surprised it still exists.

[DemoGraph]

MY **** JUST GOT SMALLER It was 18cm and now only 17!

► Show Spoiler

That son of ***** and dinosaur was q44 when I looted him from a ruin. I'm feeding him q55 seeds, but I have access to only q24 water (and even then I have to go on an expedition to yet another ruin to get it, default water is q10). On average water+seeds gives q40, so the gay ****** degrades in these horrible conditions (I'm eating mostly q10-25 food). One of the chicks also was q41.

OTOH, my stallion stopped dropping in quality. He was q129 at birth, I got him as q101 and he doesn't degrade any more, despite me feeding him q10-40 trash. It seems there's a degradation limit in each generation (as could be testified by any witness of US politics). I'm completely satisfied by him as he exists right now, so it's one problem less.
I hope that I've reached the quality bottom with chicks and from now numbers would only go up as I produce better and better seeds.

Water seems to be a real bottleneck. Making wells is a real pain. I dug one, and it turned out to be q10. There's a spell to improve any well, but I don't have access to it yet. And besides, it doubles in cost after improvement by 3-9 points, so it quickly becomes cost prohibitive.
I still have no answer for water quality problem. People say, there once was a q100 natural water source this world whose owner put it in common access. But its claim was raided and destroyed by the griefer clan few IRL months ago. Then they put bots to monitor incoming people who tried to rebuild it (or even fill another barrel), then jumped in and killed them.

On the plus side, I've managed to find q37-39 clay - much better than my current q17 kiln and q6-8 crafts. I would need to get q40 fuel to heat it with, but I'm already growing the trees, and failing that I know where to get some abandoned ones.

[DemoGraph]

Got my first proper harvest. By intuition I went for hemp and flax (and an assortment of barley, poppy and other stuff, including pumpkins and whatnot)... Well, it wasn't specifically an intuition, but rather a selection of seeds I've looted. Though I've realized it only just now. It seems my predecessors knew what they were doing. But at first I thought that "well, now I can make clothing only out of some roots, there's probably a lot of stuff locked behind proper clothing".
Hemp and flax gave me a lot of strings to make cloth from. I've made a test loom, trying to build it as well as I could (again, on the assumption of tech locking) and managed a little over q50. It was actually a pretty big leap in quality, all thanks to high q seeds I had. All my production facilities before that were about q8-15. Then I dug through the new stuff that opened as I made a first batch of test clothing... And some feverish crafting later I made this.

Yep, that's another q100 skill!
But I couldn't actually find what to do with it. Welp.
So I've decided to do some mining.

And it also fumbled. There were no metal-yielding ores nearby, my pops got several concussions in cave-ins and some q15-20 stone - better than q10 I had by default but nothing exiting.
On the plus side I've asked around and found a public q50 well, went on expedition, got a cart full of water barrels and began planting trees with this good water (and q40 soil I dug previously). You see, when I did found abandoned bases, there were high q trees there. I never cut them. But instead got tree seeds, berries and whatnot, to get my own tree farm later.
Turns out, I'm stuck with low q24 water in chicken coops for a while, because there's no way to clean them from water or feed already placed inside. But I managed to stabilize chickens on q40 and already got few birdlings hatched.

But then a disaster stroke!
You see, I've been trying to get better clay to get pots for trees and garden bushes. Went on an expedition, looked around for really long time for not-q20-clay I have near my house. Finally, got q38-39. Brought home a whole cart full of it. Made a kiln, upgraded pottery circle somewhat, went on another expedition for high q brushwood for fuel, cooked q40 pots... And then I got so excited that I'm going to start planting bushes now, that I clicked through the pots very fast. Some irrelevant details later, garden pots dropped under my feet and their collision boxes got stuck in each other. So now I got three max quality pots sitting there looking as one and being completely impossible to interact with. Also, turned out, there's no AOE damage in the game that can hit them. I spent a few hours trying to destroy or move them to break their hitboxes apart, but to no avail. Filed a bugreport.
But now I have an immovable garden pots of indestructability pinning the whole world to the stellar tapestry right through my garden.


I got so bummed with this, that I spent two evenings being butthurt and doing **** all.
That's depression for you. Being butthurt over some irrelevant **** like a teenager.

Still, while I've poked around uselessly, I've realized that I can make better cutlery right now.

This thing takes up harvest from 25 squares (a whole microfield!), but is very cool. Now my pops can eat pretty much indefinitely, and that opens up fast leveling (as long as I have food).

I also realized that those 100 sewing and better kiln allow me to efficiently create new research items, that not only would allow me to stop running around like an idiot in constant search of new ingredients to burn in research race, but are also almost as efficient as the best things I could craft previously. And, quite some time of confusion, that finally felt like a real progress.

I'm a proper farmer now! I think that I can finally state that I've completed the first, forager stage of the game, and shifted to quality race vertical development. At least I guess so (haven't read any noob teching guides or anything).

I still need to prepare for winter properly, because wild nuts, berries and whatnot would obviously disappear under the snow. I won't starve (there's plenty of food between fishing, prey animals and stock I've been hoarding), but getting blocked from eating just when I got a forbidden scarlet art of giganiga consumption would've been sad.

[DemoGraph]

This game lies constantly.

[rusty_shackleford]

did they remove PvP yet?

[DemoGraph]

did they remove PvP yet?

Didn't have any PVP attempts during an "almost month" I'm playing. The only char I lost was to animals and my carelessness (don't run into wolverine at 5 hp).

One of the neighbors was killed recently, though. He's Canadian, so no loss here. I'll ask him about it, but I think he went too far into nonoland. He made a new char, and pretty much already recovered, I think. Also, he and his pal had managed to spawn near
a) abandoned undecayed advanced farm, that had one of its gates unlocked for some reason. They're looting it for their hearts' content.
b) a friendly advanced group, like half a dozen Spaniards, who're feeding them high q mats and whatnot. They got metal smelting a couple of days ago.
Generally speaking, they're advancing faster than I do. Though the killed guy was more of a grinder, like I am, so he loots carefully.

In other news, the girl who gave me the horse had recently thrown away a couple more, I picked them up, and now have a whole stable in the unused corner of the farm. One of them had also given birth to a foal and another is on route. q60-80 horses are trash for her, but a great boost for me. I'm thinking about trying to breed them for fun before inevitable wipe. I can reliably male q80+ hay, so the food shouldn't be a problem when/if I scale it up.

[DemoGraph]

Bots next.

[rusty_shackleford]

also read they regularly reset server progress, sounds lame

[DemoGraph]

also read they regularly reset server progress, sounds lame

Regularly = about once a year. I decided that I'm going to have fun with the process while it lasts. And it's unlikely that I wont get bored with the game after a whole year. A year! The last games I was hooked by were Factorio (maybe two years of playing, with long breaks), EOFS (a few months) and Valheim (a few weeks). So far I got about a month of fun out of HH, and it's much more than I expected when I launched an obscure title on a hunch.
I saw many abandoned settlements that seems to be dropped after several months of playing. I think I'm not on that stage yet, but I'm getting closer. And some of the players I talked to were sad that their buddies got bored by the game 3-6 months after world restart. Who knows, maybe I'll get bored similarly.
So the session will expire, one way or another, but in the end everything does*.
Also, the devs generate a new world every time. It means a new map to explore. And they seem to add new mechanics (or rebalance old ones) every time.

In other news, I've spent a major part of Saturday and some part of Monday playing. I don't even remember when I had such going binges last.
The winter begins tomorrow, so I was hamstering shrooms, nuts and whatnot. The winter should last till about October, I'm still unsure how abundant the food would be. So I made a special hay pile that should keep my field free of snow and operational through the winter (it's magic!).
That Factorio-style furnace row I've shown was used to make about 60 "garden pots" to grow berries, mushrooms and flowers in - again, they should be operational in winter. I thought about placing them in the mine, but without metal I have no ability to make mine support columns. And caveins were really tiresome. So I dumped them in the base proper.
I also made a bunch of granaries and assorted small upgrades, will show them later.
Also, remember the cool q50 loom I made? I got a first batch of q85 flax, and that loom began to worsen the quality of the goods. I'll have to replace it soon.

* Except my permission for Kal's ratings.

[DemoGraph]

I had a quiet evening yesterday making some research toys (literally, toy chariots) and ceramic plates.
I made a small monument area to my butthurt post (and pot).


A few days ago I went to the Canadian neighbor (whos original char was killed). He asked who had the highest carpentry among the neighbors - I did (60). So he asked me to come and make him some production tables for gardening. I came and it turned out that he thought I would bring my materials as well. Goddamn Canadians, I thought, but said nothing and asked what high q mats he had. Turned out, he had almost nothing. I asked him whether he had a good saw (because it allows to make okayish planks even from the ****** wood), turned out, he still had a noobster one.
So he actually could've made the desks himself, because with ****** mats your skill is much less relevant.
I said nothing again and... well, he needed help. And high q desks are pretty important, because with good pots and whatnot they allow you to make high q seeds and saplings. So I cashed my small stash of two q50 logs I've looted somewhere, got other assorted mats, brought them to him, upped my carpentry to 80, spending XP I've hoarded for several days, and built him q70 tables. Then I tped back instantly, because it was one of the last days of autumn and I wanted to forage.
He told me in area chat that he didn't manage to thank me. I told him he can do it some other time.
Felt like Batman.

Then I looked at two of my own desks (that I looted from somewhere), and they were a bit worse than the ones I made him.
Felt like dumb Batman. Real Batman at least got catgirl blowjobs for his efforts.
But still Batman. I decided that I can live with my desks, because high q wood is still too precious to spend it on a few quality points.

While I wrote this, my toy chariots got baked. With q39 kiln I've made separately (max q I can reach now) and some shenanigans I've managed to turn q1 clay into several q32 chariots that give 30k LP total - best I made as of yet and enough to upgrade a skill from 0 to 24 or from 60 to 65.

Also, made some calculations about the new loom. I prepared wood for a new one, and then noticed that I have a choice which strings to use. I can make it out of q88 strings I have in abundance. Or I can wait for 3 RL days for a new harvest of q150 flax (again, looted and carefully multiplied). The difference in quality is like q83 vs q93. So I'm waiting to upgrade wardrobe and boost stats again.

The winter began today, but I'll write about it later.

[rusty_shackleford]

I like reading your updates

[Xenich]

Permanent Death & Open PvP
Master the Dark Arts of Trespassing, Theft, Rage, Vandalism and Murder to impose upon others who roam the Hearth.
Increase your Perception & Exploration to track down and bring to justice all breakers of peace and oaths, by tracking the vicious Stenches of Crime.
Construct mighty Siege Machines and engines of war to bring the flames of war to foreign lands.
Found Villages to claim large swathes of land and organize kith and kin into mighty bands.
Found Realms and lay claim to entire Provinces by capturing the ancient Thingwalls dotting the Hearth.
Bury the dead and fulfill the will of the ancestors to draw upon the strength of your previous lives.
Experience the thrill of a world where all interactions with your fellow Hearthling carries the potentiality for grave consequence.

I'm good

Umm...

Yeah, that is a hard pass for me as well.

Used to love doing PvP in MUDs in my early days, but the loss in a MUD was something that could always be recovered very quickly due to the leveling/gear acquisition loop being designed around PvP.

Though after UO and some cheating resulting in massive time loss with some gear... that killed my enjoyment for PvP in all but the more "controlled" systems (ie arena game stuff) and even then the cheating, or the "lifers" who developed teams to steam roll the games made it seem less enjoyable.

Now, I can't stand PvP in most cases, especially with horrible winners who are also some of the worst losers.

Though... PvP with friends I know and trust is fun in closed environments (ie private servers), but I don't play with many people much anymore to go to the lengths of setting that stuff up.

Hmm.. I have been mulling over the UO server thing, but... well... lack of will to put the effort in always seems to win the day unfortunately.

[DemoGraph]

Winter came and brought her white blanket.

► Show Spoiler

Also featured:
- overengineered "airlock" entrance. The gates with flags are "visitor gates" - they give you "visitor" debuff a) when you pass them, b) you're on a claim. That debuff forbids you to interact with stuff on the claim, according to permissions the owner sets. So visitor gate is a way to prevent guests from stealing your ****.
The downside is that you can't pass the visitor gates while you're in combat. So I thought that if I would be chased by a boar or a bear, I won't be able to hide on my base. But you can enter the ordinary gates while in combat. So that walled-off little yard is supposed to be a quarantine zone in case I'm being followed. It also should have had a small shack to hide in, because if animal can see you, it won't drop the aggro.
The airlock turned out to be useless, because horse can save you from any ordinary animal.
The shack(s) also should've served as a guest house for HQers, but that turned out unnecessary.
- parts of storage houses that are filled with wardrobes. To store ****.
- my "lumber palette". As you can see from the small chicken coops bottom right, all materials have specific colors. So I've been storing interesting lumber to use in the future. Turns out, it was unnecessary, because there's a player-made viewer here: https://carrygun.gitlab.io/hmdt/

Water freezes. Shallow water is already frozen, I think deep water in rivers and lakes will also freeze soon.
Most of the trees had lost their leaves. Their fruits lie on the ground in a half-frozen form ("yesteryear apple", etc.). They're considered different from their basic form, so could be used for variety eating (nb: each new type of food you eat improves efficiency of other eaten foods for stat gain, so you want to have a very varied diet).


Winter brought with it snowflake curiosities (that could be consumed for XP gain), winter mushrooms and some rarer stuff.
She also brought rabbits.

I got a first litter. They're growing now. I should kill low quality males to improve breeding quality. Sorry, beta bros, you had your roast and are heading for another kind of roast now.

This is the heart of the farm.

That goathead pillar is a claim post. That igloo is just for fun (dig snow, even by hand, build a quick house that would melt in spring; noob housing). Those lines or the ground is a stone paved sun cross, because that's what my farm is called. Those pines and willows are there because I like them.
We've also planted pairs of oaks on the side of every outer gate. I'll show them when they grow up.
As a sidenote, settling on that red ground was a mistake. It's considered a highland wasteland, so only some coniferous trees grow fast there. We've tried planting berry bushes, apple trees and whatnot, and they grow very slowly. When they do grow, they slowly produce forest tiles around them, but it's maddeningly slow and limited in range. After the wipe I'm settling in the forest or on some green plain.

I finally got a spell that allows to fix "symbel" (cutlery and tablecloth). Cutlery loses its durability when you use it, 0 and it's broken. This spell fixes it momentarily, while degrading max durability by 1 each time. Very useful. Otherwise maintaining a good table would've been a pain.


Also, we've crafted this mask for waifu char.


It's the largest lore boost we can make right now. Everything else is a pain.
(also, meeples sleep with their eyes open)

Bees are almost sleeping, but we've lucked out on this. IIRC we need three larvae for new hive, our current hive is about q55, so this would boost the next one.


I also made a tar pit. Burn wood inside, get charcoal and tar. Tar is used for long-burning torches and whatnot, but it's also used to thatch roofs. Check the viewer above, tar roofs are black.
Experimental tar pit had shown that the production is slow like hell. It's 3 days per full load. At 25% it brought about 1.6 liters of tar (depends on a type of wood, coniferous should bring more). I need 2.5 liters for one crafting of tarsticks (5, I hope, wiki isn't specific enough). And 30 sticks for a roof. Full pine load is 20 liters of tar, but pines are comparatively rare. So I'll have to use other types conifers and can't predict how much tar they would bring. Still, with 2-3 pits I should have enough tar for a single dark and edgy roof some time next week. I hope.
Oh, yeah, the main powergaming reason for that pit is to make coal for metal smelting, but I didn't find any ore yet and don't want to get underground for a time being. Tar is also used for better boats, but I'm also not going to go on expeditions yet. Especially because the rivers are getting locked in ice. It's all about prettiness now.


Oh, also a naked "chick" spawned nearby and asked for a boat and directions to a nearest thingwall. I gave "her" a dugout that I made few posts above.
Batman or ****? Let's say that in Russia we don't leave a naked girl in the snowdrift, even if she says "bro".