Update - Alpha 4.0.0

Posted by Ponzel on 2025-11-18

It’s time for another HavenCraft Update!

If you are already signed up for the playtest, you can find the update link in the main menu of the game or in your signup email. You can just install over your old version; no need to uninstall it first.

Let us know if there are any issues and happy playing!

Changes

• Features
  • Added Skylings.
  • Added “Plot Levels”, a new system to upgrade buildings over time.
  • With that, added the ability to assign mutliple workers to a plot.
  • Can now replant trees. Both by yourself and also having the forester do it automatically.
  • Added support for custom keybindings. You can use as many keys in your combinations as you want and you can have 2 bindings per action (for example WASD and arrow keys both move the character).
  • While adding the custom keybindings, I also inverted the mouse scrolling direction of the inventory (@x0Z3ro0x, @Eccentric_Warmonger on Discord).
  • Big overhaul of the settings code, so we can add new settings easily. With that:
    • Added a setting to show/hide hotkey hints in the bottom right corner.
    • Added a setting to use items immediately on selection instead of on click.
    • Added a setting to turn on/off the grass shrinking in build mode.
    • Added a setting to hide plots when not plot painting.
    • Added a setting for developer mode. Need to enable this when using F3 in game.
    • Added a setting for the camera field of view.
    • Added a setting for the clock format (12 vs 24 hours).
    • The maximum frame rate setting is now only shown when vsync is off.
    • Added a grahpics setting for shadow distance.
    • Related: on lower shadow quality settings, the sun now moves in little “jumps” to reduce flickering with low resolution shadow maps.
    • Added graphics settings for grass density and grass distance.
  • Multiplayer
    • Clients can now open the map.
    • Clients can now see and assign villager homes.
    • Clients can now see and assign villager jobs.
    • Clients can now see and assign packling routes.
    • Clients can now manage villagers, including giving work orders and interacting with the villager’s inventory.
    • Clients can now eat food and get the benefits from it.
    • Other players in multiplayer now contribute to revealing the fog of war.
    • When players join or leave the game, a notification shows.
    • Villager food/tools/goods/home satisfaction is now replicated to the client.
    • Vastly improved bandwidth usage. Larger towns with many villagers should be handled better.
  • Plot signs now have a button to delete the whole plot instantly to avoid having to erase everything manually.
  • Can now sprint when you have eaten food. Sprinting consumes food more quickly than standing or running normally.
  • Because sprint is now bound to shift, plot painting and road painting erase mode is now bound to right mouse button. Exit with escape.
  • Berries already gave a walking speed bonus. Now, honey gives a +50% crafting speed bonus and bread gives a smaller walking speed bonus for a longer time. Every bonus stacks.
  • Because you can now sprint, the berry walking speed bonus was a reduced a little.
  • Big UI overhaul, which includes some new features as well:
    • Players can now trash items.
    • There is a new button you can click to keep your inventory sorted, if you want.
  • Workers now clean up their inventory every 2 minutes to make sure others can use the finished products. Before, they used to only drop off finished products once they were done crafting or they finished a full stack (link).
  • Packling stations are now directly connected to stockpiles, like skyling stations.
• Content
  • Added the new thatch and wood roof types, which unlock a lot earlier than the brick roof and take fewer resources to craft.
  • More natural color variety for clothes and hairs (@Charlotte on Discord).
  • We had 2 skin colors that were very similar to each other, so we adjusted one slightly to cover a broder range. If you keep playing an old save and you had that color selected, the skin color might change slightly.
  • Some objects to upgrade work plots, like the tool shed or the grindstone.
  • Introduced resource “wood joint”, for higher quality furniture.
  • Beekeeping is now available as tech to unlock.
• Balance
  • Adjusted crafting times so the only things that take long to craft are the ones you can delegate to villagers easily.
  • Of the recipes that villagers can craft for you, the ones for flour, bread, and metalworks research have shorter crafting times now, too.
  • Split chairs, tables, and beds into a ‘basic’ and a ‘quality’ version. This is not so much about the looks of these yet, this is mainly about playtesting the plot levels.
  • Town reputation: the villager cap gets raised way more quickly.
  • Increased the radius of sucking in items from 3 meters to 5 meters.
  • Slightly reduced island size for now (only on new maps, old ones still work).
  • Copper ore contains a little less copper per ore (we made sure there is more than enough copper on your island though).
  • Villagers no longer need “copper toolsets”, but instead “candles” as their first non-food item requirement.
  • The carpenter and stonemason jobs have been combined into “craftsman”. This means that you have to build one less building; therefore less work in the beginning of the game. The craftsman can also make candles and books.
  • Rebalanced research tree to fit with the order of when plot upgrade furniture is required.
  • Roads have to be researched first.
• Quality of Life
  • You can now press space to toggle auto-crafting. You no longer need to hold down the mouse button.
  • Hotkey hints are now also shown in the inventory/crafting, research, stockpile, and villager management views.
  • The map now centers on the player position when opened.
  • Your position marker on the map is now an arrow and shows the direction you are facing.
  • Other players in multiplayer now also show up on the map.
  • Stockpiles now show their filtered icon on the sign.
  • Plot signs now show the icon of the plot on the sign.
  • Packlings now show an icon of the resource they’re carrying on the box.
  • You can now shift-click villagers to skip the dialogue and go into the management screen directly.
  • The effects of food (like faster walking or faster crafting) are now explained in bottom left of the screen.
  • You can now press Ctrl-Q to enter “free snapping mode”, in case the default snapping doesn’t get you what you want.
  • When constructing an object: Any part that is hidden behind another object is shown with transparent blue stripes so you can more easily see what you are building exactly.
• Graphics
  • Improved clock panel. Time text starts blinking when the day is getting close to sleep time.
  • Improved various other UI panels slightly, like the tech panel, the speech bubbles, or the hotkey hints panel.
  • Consolidated the notifcation, tutorial, and research HUDs on the right side. This means the game can now also show multiple notifications at once.
  • Crafting panel: sorted crafting recipes by category and similar recipes.
  • Also changed the farm plant info panel to only show when looking at the plant (less cluttered). Also, reusing the same info panel now for the furniture stats in some plots.
  • Implemented the ability for workplaces to play a little animation when a villager is working on them. Used this already for the new baking oven.
  • New research station, backing oven, packling station, tavern counter.
  • Improved berries appearence.
  • Improved windows look from far away by changing the LODS and made glass more transparent
  • Improved icons.
  • Changed the reflection probe to be more neutral, without the strong blue tint on some materials.
  • Added new “point light shadow caching” feature on high graphics settings, leading to much better lighting in the night.
  • The outline + graphical effect when selecting worldObjects for construction / interaction / deletion is less strong now.
  • New logo!
• Audio
  • Added a new main theme for main menu.
  • Playing different tracks during the day and at night. Still keeping some of the old placeholer tracks for the day until we have enough custom music.
  • Added some environment sounds, like birds chirps in the forest during the day or crickets in the evening.
• Tutorials & Tips
  • Made it so that the tutorial auto-advances properly even if you do the tasks out-of-order.
  • Stockpiles and supply stands now have a little explanation text.
  • Research panel shows tip like “You have currently 0 inventors in your town. You have to do the research yourself!”.
• Performance
  • Improved game start time by 30% by rendering some less important icons after the game has already started, not during the loading screen.
  • Improved shadow performance at dusk and dawn (shadows are expensive at these times because many objects throw really long shadows: expensive to render shadow maps).
• Bugfixes
  • Fixed End of Day overview being buggy in multiplayer.
  • Fixed an issue where villagers and packling would walk below the terrain or in the air, especially in a hilly environment.
  • Spawn physical items when you destroy a world object while a player’s inventory is full.
  • Fixed an issue where the “indoors” state of a piece of furniture could be incorrect when the player was far away.
  • In multiplayer, fixed notifications on the client to only trigger when triggered on the host (for example, clients would get unnecessary “tech unlocked!” notifications when they first joined a game that already has some unlocked techs).
  • The “Press T to select research”-panel no longer gets shown when you have finished all research.
  • Fixed wrong icons shown in tutorial.
  • Fixed an issue where carpets and small wooden pillars could block a villager’s way (link).
  • Fixed an issue where you couldn’t place carpets below other furniture (@erulisse on Discord).
  • Fixed an issue where villagers would interact with stockpiles through walls (link).
  • Fixed an issue where alt-tabbing out of the game while crafting would make crafting block until you re-opened the crafting panel (link, @Eccentric_Warmonger on Discord).
  • Fixed an issue where the “saving food” town policy would not actually save food (link).
  • Fixed an issue where the game would not allow ctrl-clicking on a inventory panel you can not interact with (e.g. recipe inputs in the crafting overview).
  • Fixed an issue where food and tool/goods consumption of the village was not properly saved and loaded.
  • Fixed an issue where the mouse position would not be recognized correctly on linux when constructing something.
  • Fixed an issue where your character’s speech bubble would jitter while running.
  • Fixed an issue where it was possible to have a weird camera angle during dialogue, which lead to speech bubbles being positioned outside the visible screen area. Now, dialogue speech bubbles are always visible.
  • Fixed an issue where the error screen would not show properly when a bug was detected.

Big thanks to everyone that reported bugs and gave feedback!