Hello everyone! It's finally time for some news! We're going to release Alpha 6 in 2 weeks, on Thursday, September 24th.
This one will also land on Steam as a free Demo. We want to prepare for a good launch into Early Access later this year, so Alpha 6 contains A LOT of small changes that make the experience overall smoother, clearer, and just straight up better.
In HavenCraft, you're supposed to build a whole town, so building needs to work really well.
That's why we worked on some roof upgrades: For example, when you drag two roofs onto each other, they merge automatically, closing the top nicely. But! That's not the big news.
One of the coolest HavenCraft features that pretty much anyone enjoys is the auto-triangles for walls under the roofs. So the big news is that roof building does the same thing now, auto-corners: This way, you can now build all kinds of roofs: By the way, thanks to the content creators who already played Alpha 5 and requested this feature, for example Hirnsturz and GigaDon. This feature is a bit experimental; for now it's only on the 45° roof pieces. We wanted to first see some player reactions and make sure this works well, before doing all the math for the other angles' algorithms.
It used to be that each villager had their own work orders. That meant that whenever you hired a new person, or assigned/unassigned jobs, you had to reconfigure all work orders. That's no longer the case: work orders are now per-plot. This means that, for example, the carpenter plot has orders to make 800 wood joints, and you can freely assign 4 more carpenters who will all get to work immediately. Work orders are now also active by default. That should help newer players get started, hopefully.
Walking on a road now makes you 40% faster. This goes for everyone: you, your villagers, and even your packlings. Now roads are not just decoration anymore; they actually help with logistics, too. You should build roads anyways, it helps keep the town organized! (town credit: GOSH on Discord)
Hoppers now check whether the target storage still has space before they start moving an item, instead of picking something up and getting stuck with it.
Villagers grab enough material for a whole crafting session instead of stopping and re-fetching after every single item.
New intro: you wake up on the beach, and the lore screen is back.
When you sleep in a bed, it now gets assigned to you.
More will be listed in the full changelog on release.
Big thanks to everyone who played the last Alpha!
We realized that there were a lot of things unexplained, so with Alpha 6 we're adding lots of small hints and tips, as well as some bigger tutorials all throughout the game.
One good thing about our new tutorials is that they all work in multiplayer, so people can get started directly without having to play any intro levels first.
The new tips are often just an arrow, sometimes with a little text label, just letting you know "hey, there is something you can set up here". We were careful not to make them too intrusive, and they also stop showing up as much once you've played for a bit.
The very first steps in the game require some more guidance than a tip here and there, so that's what "The Confused House Builder" is for. The house builder has escaped from the alchemy catastrophe and, just like you, they want to build themselves a new home. However... they're not good at it. So the house builder will ask you to help them build the first house, giving a little bit of a soft intro to the game.
The villagers themselves also have some new things to say! When they need a place to sleep, a job to do, or some food, they'll let you know and give you some tips on how to remedy the situation. More on this next week.
Villagers now have voices! We're taking a Sims-like approach here, with a voice-acted simple invented language and a bunch of "terms" in that language that the villagers use throughout their conversations. I think that's a great compromise for indie games: as a small studio, you can't voice act every dialogue line for every language, but this way you get nice-sounding characters that make sense in-game and don't have to use something like AI voices either.
I'll let you experience the voices in-game for yourself when it releases in two weeks. September 24th, mark the date!
Let us know what you think, and happy playing!