Haven & Hearth – Starter Guide

Guide for New Players (How to Start)

General Overview of Progression

As a brand new player, you need to learn to navigate the user interface, and must gain a basic understanding of crafting and character progression. Before you read the more detailed sections of the new player experience chapter, try to keep the following in mind:

Crafting will be familiar to those of you who are experienced in the “Survival Crafting” genre. There are a variety of crafting recipes which will begin to populate your crafting menu, once you meet two conditions: You’ve “discovered” the prerequisite crafting components AND you’ve unlocked the “skill” which governs the craft.

You’ll discover items by gathering or crafting them. For example, all characters by default begin with the “primitive tools” skill, which allows you to craft a stone axe. However, in order to craft a stone axe you need to first right click a tree and select “Take Branch.” You must then right click a boulder and select “Chip Stone.” Once you do so, you’ll “discover” the materials “Branch” and generic “Stone.”

Your crafting menu will then instantly update to show the new recipe for stone axe. More advanced recipes will require advanced crafted ingredients you will discover by crafting components, and advanced skills you will purchase as your character progresses. For example, to make a Hirdsman’s Sword, you will need to have discovered a block of wood, bar of steel, and you’ll need to have made (and interact with) an anvil, while you’ve equipped a Smithy’s Hammer. Finally, you’ll need to have the “Metal Working” skill.

Character Progression is very different than a standard MMO or Survival Game.

There are four main methods of progression:

1. Eating consumable foods to gain core attributes (Strength, Constitution, Agility, Dexterity, Will, Etc). Note, you must be above 8000% energy or eating at a table to get food event points.
2. Studying crafted, foraged, or hunted “curiosity” items which are consumed to gain learning points which level your Combat and Non-Combat Abilities (Melee Combat, Carpentry, Farming, Survival, Masonry, etc.) “Credo” questing, which are progressively more difficult procedurally generated quest-lines to unlock specialized bonuses (Farmers have better crop yield, Miners can locate minerals easier, Cooks make food more efficiently, Herders can give bonuses to their domesticated animals, Cave Hermits can commune with trolls, etc).
3. Base Building/Technology progression. Although this doesn’t directly correlate to character stats, it does so indirectly by allowing you to craft more complex food and better equipment, which will greatly increase your character’s capabilities and rate of progression. If you spawn into the world late, you can effectively “skip” a lot of technological progression by finding abandoned bases and taking or being gifted goods (or even claiming an entire abandoned base, or joining an existing village.)
4. Eating food you’ve produced or traded for should be a large focus of your play sessions. When you’re brand new, “discoveries” will also additionally give you “learning points” for your skills, but you’ll eventually need to craft, forage, or purchase curiosities in large quantities to passively gain learning points over hours or days. This continues while you’re offline, and you can automatically load in new curiosities even while offline using a study desk.

Don’t stress too much about specializing as a first time player. You can complete all the content in the game solo (referred to as “Hermits” in the community). However, having a group with at least one person who is willing to focus on the general responsibilities of

• Crafting/farming/cooking;
• Hunting/scouting/foraging; and
• Mining + industrial dwarf-like stuff, will make the game significantly easier.

User Interface

For the purposes of this guide, we will be using the “Ender’s Client” which I recommend players use when playing Haven and Hearth. However, Ender’s Client is very similar to the default “Play” client’s appearance, and almost identical to Kami, so what we cover should mostly be universally applicable:

This is a basic overview of the top level User Interface. Some of the UI in the above image is slightly customized, as I’ve selected many of the optional checkboxes in the “Settings” menu.

The first two things you should familiarize yourself with are the:

• “Crafting and Action Menu” in the bottom right hand corner, grid spaces.
• “Character Sheet” (looks like a Papyrus Scroll above the crafting menu).

The crafting and action menu houses some of the actions you can take (others are performed by inventory function or by right clicking an object in the game world to interact with it), and everything your character currently knows how to BUILD or CRAFT.

The first action you should learn how to perform is how to teleport back to your home location – By default, this is either the “Thingwall” at the center of the province you spawned in, or a hearth fire if you’ve built one or been summoned by a wilderness beacon. You can do that by selecting the following chain of commands in the action/craft menu:

Every time you select one of these options, you go into a new sub-menu which houses other options. You can return to the previous, higher, menu by pressing “Back” in the crafting menu, or pressing Backspace by default on your keyboard. Any of these menus, submenus, or actions can be clicked and dragged into your hotbars for easy navigation and keybinding.

You can also memorize the associated hotkeys, shown by the orange letter (Starcraft Style.) For example, from the top menu, pressing “A, H, H❞ will activate the “Adventure” “Haven and Hearth” and Travel to Hearthfire” options sequentially (I suggest typing A->T->T to enable automatic item stacking now.).

As you start, this menu will begin with very few options. As you discover things and unlock new abilities, it will begin to populate and fill extensively.

Next, let’s talk about the “Character Sheet,” which you can reach from the papyrus scroll shown in an earlier image. This menu may, by default, also be bound to Ctrl+T or Ctrl+X, or even simply X, depending on your client.

When you activate the “Character Sheet,” a new window will appear on your screen. The window has SIX separate tabs at the bottom, which will change the function of the window to a separate page. The following shows what your character sheet looks like when you’ve selected the Skills and Credos tab:

Once you select the “Quest Log” tab to complete your first tutorial quest the window will change like so:

Be sure to navigate to this window (the Quest Log) and press the “I’m Here” button in this beginner quest! Once you do so, you’ll notice that the quest log will populate with some starter quests.

Feel free to do them at your leisure, the game often rewards you with some learning points for completion of certain starter quests (although the rewards aren’t necessary to progress, and you’ll complete the quests after “I’m here” through natural play). Be aware that some of the quests ask you to do things without explaining properly how to do them, like lift an object or fill your cup of water.

If you’re looking to start with a friend, or struggling with the controls, I recommend completing the next section before doing the starter quests, as I explain in detail how to do many of the basic tasks which will make significant progress for your starter quest.

There are certainly more things we could cover about the user interface. However, at this point, you’ve learned enough that you can get started learning through trial, error, and reference to the wiki or this guide. Many of the menus have submenus, and many of the options have tooltips if you hover your mouse over options. Best of Luck!

The Basics of Crafting and (If You Want) Starting with Friends

Now that we’ve covered the basic UI elements, you should be prepared to make your first basic item (a stone axe). As you wander through the forest or plains you spawn at, you’ll want to begin removing seeds from trees and interacting with various rocks and objects to gain your first discoveries, and discovery learning points to purchase skills (you gain 50 learning points by default for each unique class of item you discover, which should be enough to purchase all the basic skills).

As you do this, we’re going to set a goal of getting you basic equipment and the ability to craft a Wilderness Beacon if you wish to summon a friend or friends. You’re going to want something to drink from to recover your stamina, a stone axe, a bone saw, and the following skills: foraging, hunting, lumberjacking, carpentry. You’ll need to unlock all of those skills before you can craft and use a bone saw.

You should be able to craft the stone axe easily by taking a branch from a tree, and chipping stone from a boulder.

To craft your first drinking vessel, wander around and look for a white barked birch tree. You can right click it to remove the bark, and use two bark to craft a “Kuksa” in your craft menu. Once you’ve crafted a Kuksa, it should appear in your inventory. Travel to fresh water (not-ocean), and then left click the Kuksa in your inventory so it is under your mouse, and right click the water. This is the inventory action to make the Kuksa interact with the water – It should now be full of water! You can drink this to restore stamina at any time by right clicking the Kuksa and selecting drink, or alternatively by using the “Adventure” and “Drink” action.

To make a bone saw, you’re going to need to have unlocked the foraging, hunting, lumberjacking, and carpentry skills. Make sure you’ve got at least a 2×1 slot free in your inventory. Go to a forest. Drink to fill your stamina. Find a squirrel. Set your move speed to run, and right click the squirrel. Once it appears in your inventory, right click it sequentially to

1. Wring its neck.
2. Flay it with your stone axe.
3. Clean the squirrel carcass, and finally…
4. Butcher the clean squirrel carcass.

Once you’ve completed that task, you’ll have been awarded with a bone in your inventory. Find an appropriate species of tree that has a tree bough:

Harvest, the bough. Now, with the bone and the bough, you should be able to make a bone saw. Cut down a tree by right clicking it and selecting “Chop”. It will become between 1->4 logs, depending on the tree species. Cut the logs into blocks of wood and boards. Go to shallow water. Use “Adventure” -> “Dig” in the shallow water to harvest clay. You should now have all the discoveries necessary to have unlocked the “Wilderness Beacon” craft:

If you gather 10 clay, 10 stone, 10 boards, and 20 blocks of wood, you can build the beacon. Once you’ve built it, right click it – and it’ll ask you to enter a code:

Enter a code, and then press “enter” on your keyboard. Give the code to your friend, and then they can use this code to spawn in to that location by providing the code to the Deer Skull prior to spawning into the world (their deer skull will have red flaming eyes after they enter the code, to show that it worked and they’ve locked on to a wilderness beacon.) Keep in mind, wilderness beacons will expire after 1 real life hour of being lit, if they are unused!

Hopefully, you now understand enough of the basics of gathering, crafting, user interface, and inventory functions in Haven and Hearth that you can use the wiki to educate yourself on how to advance to more complex crafting and building operations that use more advanced skills.

As an aside, there are a number of shortcuts to doing mass inventory or item interaction actions. If you find yourself repetitively doing something with dropped items, stockpiles, or item transferring from containers, try using shift and/or alt and/or ctrl modifiers held down when doing a left or right click action.