Update - Alpha 5.0.2

Posted by Ponzel on 2026-05-27

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 seasons. Each season changes the atmosphere: terrain, foliage, vegetation, decorations, fog, lighting, and music. Snow covers roofs in winter.
  • Lots of new idle behaviours for villagers and travelers
    • talking to each other
    • playing cards at the table
    • reading a book
    • eating soup
    • warming up at the fire
    • relaxing in public buildings in the evening
    • going to bed at night
    • hanging around their assigned area
  • Trees that have a bee nest on them are now linked to the nest. Cutting the tree destroys the nest, and villagers no longer try to chop trees that hold nests.
  • Added an incinerator to automatically dispose of items. It burns everything into ash, and burns ash into nothing.
  • You can now make soap from ash and make your townspeople clean and happy.
  • Both wood and wood planks can be burned in furnaces and incinerators now.
  • Added a “barber’s chair” to edit your character later in the game.
  • Support for different languages. First up: German.
• Content
  • Lots of new furniture and decorations: animated forge, incinerator, brick walls, colored walls, sofa, fireplace, and plants you can put into plant pots.
• Balance
  • After lots of community feedback: Falling asleep is now not punishing anymore. You still fall asleep and get the end-of-day overview, but no more item loss, no more waking up in another place.
• Multiplayer
  • Added a chat panel.
  • Town reputation and the active town policies are now properly replicated to clients.
  • Seasons are saved/loaded and replicated to all players.
  • Equipment, hats, hairstyles, dialogue data, and the items packlings are carrying are now replicated to clients.
  • The host now interpolates remote players’ movement, making client player movement look much smoother.
  • Faster joining process.
  • Fixed NPCs being jittery for clients.
  • Fixed the client not hearing the pickup sound when picking up a physical item.
  • Fixed two clients being able to start upgrading the same plot at the same time.
  • Fixed research data not getting properly replicated to clients while the world is loading.
  • Fixed a crash when the client moves very far from the island.
  • Fixed a crash when version mismatch was detected when joining a game.
  • Fixed building onto existing objects not working when playing as a client (skyling station on stockpile).
  • Fixed a lag spike that happened on clients around 5 seconds after joining the game (painting the streets on the terrain was inefficient).
  • Fixed an error that could happen when a client painted streets if the client’s and host’s inventory data got out of sync.
  • Fixed animation and NPC walking position to be better in sync.
  • Reduced bandwidth usage by optimizing villager data transmission.
• Audio
  • New music tracks for all the seasons, day and night versions.
  • New sound for picking up items.
• Quality of Life
  • Added an end-of-workday notification (“Feierabend”) so you know when villagers are wrapping up.
  • The third-person camera code now ignores other NPCs, so there is less jerking back and forth.
  • Some new hidden features in the F3 debug menu. Unstable, mostly made for devs for now.
• Graphics
  • Brand new male and female character models. Old saves still work.
  • Hair now properly deforms when wearing a hat, instead of clipping through.
  • New seasonal materials and snow shaders, snow on roofs, fall colors on the terrain, butterflies, and improvements to fog, HDR, lighting, and light scattering.
  • Super-simple hair physics.
  • Reflection probes now work better with the environment instead of giving a strong colored tint.
  • Improved the look of glass, water, melted metal, and roof materials.
  • Constructing an object now plays a little animation and kicks up a small dust cloud.
  • Hitting a tree or rock with an axe/pickaxe now spawns hit particles and a small hitstop on impact.
  • Many new character animations: chopping, mining, eating soup out of a bowl, sitting, playing cards, talking with each other, falling asleep.
  • A forge hat for blacksmiths.
  • Sleeping animation has a little “zzz” effect,
• Performance
  • Big rendering optimization: world objects now render through a single batched rendering pipeline with hierarchical frustm culling and jobified LoD calculation. This means many more objects on screen with much less CPU cost.
  • Pathfinding is now asynchronous and time-sliced. Long-distance paths no longer lag the game while they’re calculated.
  • Logistics queries are faster and are calculated in the background (“Where should I put this item?”, “Where can I get stone?”, etc.)
  • Hopper performance bug fixed.
• Bugfixes
  • Inputs now reset properly when the game window loses focus, so keys can’t get “stuck”.
  • Reworked the loading screen so it only goes away once the game world is actually fully loaded; no screen flashing a half-loaded world for a split second.
  • Fixed NPCs sometimes walking underground or in the air.
  • Fixed villagers ignoring object locks and working on the same objects simultaneously.
  • Fixed an issue where travelers would set up their camp inside bushes or rocks. Also made them choose a flat location, not the side of a mountain.
  • Fixed a small paintbrush offset when painting streets.
  • Fixed a crash when deconstructing windows.
  • Fixed window placement snapping when dragging windows on floors and ceilings.
  • Fixed glass not being refunded when destroying a wall that still had a window in it.
  • Fixed weird head rotation when opening UI panels while the camera was looking at the character from the front.
  • Fixed deconstruct-drag not working properly on fields and other objects glued to the terrain.
  • Fixed traveler dialogue softlocking in some situations.
  • Fixed an issue where villager would switch to idle animation mid-walk if their job changed mid-walk.
  • Because of an engine update, we had to re-implement the object outline system: looks better now and more performant as a bonus.

Big thanks to everyone that reported bugs and gave feedback!