We've been releasing Alpha builds for playtesting before Early Access on our website.
Join the playtests and see additional info about HavenCraft here.
Now, we're getting close to the pre-Early Access Alpha 5 release! Our target date is in 2 weeks, on Wednesday, May 27th. We're going to do a small weekly series of posts leading up to the release so you know what's new. There is a lot to cover!
We finally have a Trailer. Check it out!
We hope you like it, but feel free to give us your feedback! It's important that we get the trailer to be as good as possible before the Early Access release.
For Alpha 5, we spent a lot of time improving HavenCraft under the hood, but as you've seen in the trailer, the big visual change is the new seasons!
Each season changes the entire atmosphere of your town: the terrain, the foliage, the vegetation, the decorations, the fog, the lighting, and even the music all change. There are also some smaller details, like butterflies in some seasons or leaves falling from the trees when you hit them in the fall.
In spring, you’ll find flowers and butterflies, while on summer nights, the fireflies come out. In fall, the leaves turn red and yellow in fall. Winter is my personal favorite season.
Having seasons means that you have to be prepared. Farm plants don’t grow in winter, so be sure to stock up on food.
We added a new type of furnace, the “incinerator”. Instead of smelting ores into ingots, it can burn anything into ash.That’s useful for 2 purposes.
Getting rid of unwanted items or overproduction in an automatable way (you can fill it via hoppers).
You can use the ash to make soap for the villagers and achieve a little bit of extra town happiness.
If you try to burn the ash itself again, it’ll burn into nothing, so you can truly get rid of items if you want.
Don’t put your valuables inside.
Some of our playtesters have pushed quite far in Alpha 4, playing anywhere up to 10 - 160 hours already. What they have also pushed to the limits is HavenCraft’s graphics rendering :DSo we’re happy that we can already include some large performance improvements for Alpha 5. World objects now render through a “batched rendering pipeline”, which makes most buildings render a lot faster. The effect is especially optimising walls, floors, foundations, pillars, etc.
If you make a large town in Alpha 5 and manage to make the game lag, send it to us! It’s always good to have real test saves, so we know what to optimize first.
Multiplayer keeps getting better with every update. Besides integrating every part of the game more and more, the main feature this time is the new chat panel.
A few more multiplayer improvements:
Seasons are saved/loaded and replicated to all players, as is town reputation data.
Equipment, hats, hairstyles, dialogue data, and packling cargo are now properly replicated to clients.
The host interpolates remote players’ movement, so other players look much smoother.
Joining a game is faster.
And a whole bunch of multiplayer bugfixes - villagers’ movement no longer looks jittery, two clients can’t upgrade the same plot at the same time anymore, etc.
The full changelog will be in the Alpha 5 release post.
That’s it for this week. Let us know what you think, and don’t forget to wishlist the game!Happy playing!