Update - Alpha 6.0.1

Posted by Ponzel on 2026-09-24

It’s time for the Alpha 6 release!

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
  • Roof corners: You can now just drag a roof into an existing roof and it will automatically generate the correct roof corners.
  • Also made roof dragging smarter in general: dragging one roof onto another roof closes the top automatically.
  • Work orders now belong to the work plot, instead of being separate for each villager. Easier to configure and nothing gets lost when villagers get (un)assigned.
  • Added a small little intro scene.
  • You can now claim a bed for yourself
  • Weather: it can now snow in winter
  • Streets give everyone a 40% speed boost (players, villagers, packlings).
  • Villagers are now shown on the map.
  • Town happiness reacts to your supplies immediately, not only at the end of day. (Add food to a supply stand -> happiness goes up instantly.)
  • Villagers no longer go to bed at exactly the same time.
  • The game is now 100% translated into German, Italian, French, Spanish, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Japanese.
  • On the first launch the game picks the language of your operating system.
  • Long German and Russian item names now hyphenate and wrap properly instead of being shrunk to unreadable sizes.
  • Tools like the axe are no longer equipped automatically, but require one click. That way it’s easier to “get your hands free”.
  • Clicking on a packling station automatically opens the map, so you can easily hook it up.
  • Packling stations can now also be built on supply stands, not just on stockpiles.
• Content
  • New public service plot: The Temple.
    • Needs temple keeper staff.
    • Visited by villagers in their free time, like the tavern.
    • Lots of new furniture to level up the temple: candle stands, candle walls, wall-mounted braziers, temple benches, bells, incense burners, colored windows, etc.
    • Lots of new animations for the temple keepers as well as the temple visitors.
  • Lots of new dialogue lines for villagers, some to help you out and others to make the village more lively. Some dialogue lines depend on what they were just doing before you interrupted them.
  • Lots of new walls and floors: 5 more stone wall variations, stone and terracotta floors, and 12 new wooden floor patterns (cross, diamond and wave, each in oak, walnut, cherry and chestnut).
  • Wooden beams now come in a light and a dark wood color, across all the beam shapes.
  • Added clay bricks.
• Balance
  • Days and nights are longer
  • Seasons are now 5 days long instead of 4.
  • Rebalanced stack sizes. Wood planks, stone bricks, clay bricks, roofs, wooden beams, plaster walls and fiber now stack to 200. Cloth, cotton, copper ore, copper ingots, gears, books, candles, torches and stairs stack to 100. Berries, bread, flour, honey, soap, wax, sewing kits, log stools, braziers, streetlamps and tavern counters stack to 50. Fireplaces only stack to 5 now, and plant vases to 50.
  • Sawing wood now yields 5 planks per wood instead of 4, and cutting stone yields 6 stone bricks per stone instead of 5. Should make early building a bit less grindy.
  • Each tavern counter now serves 3 villagers instead of 1. Your town also wants its first tavern a bit earlier: at 8 villagers instead of 10.
  • Reorganized the tech tree. Some highlights: wheat farming now comes earlier, the tavern no longer needs metalworks research, reforestation comes earlier, directly after baking.
  • New work orders now default to keeping a full stack in storage instead of 0, so a fresh order is automatically active.
  • Improved villager crafting cycles: They pick up multiple input items and stay focused on their tasks better, less walking between stockpiles.
  • Tavern and temple staff now stay at their building during their free time too.
• Tutorials & Tips
  • Added two example towns in the main menu so demo players can easily check out what HavenCraft has to offer.
  • Replaced the old step-by-step tutorial with a new system that gives you tips more dynamically
  • The biggest tutorial is the “confused house builder”. They need help finishing a house, teaching you the basics as you help them.
  • Many items now get a description in the crafting panel.
  • Added a new tip system that shows small arrows and hints all over the place, when needed:
    • Setting up a work plot
    • Upgrading a plot
    • Keeping track of your villagers’ needs
    • Assigning villager jobs + beds
    • Configuring skyling orders and using the items delivered by skylings
    • How to manage a villager
    • Wrong button presses
  • Also added a couple of tutorial videos that pop up if the game notices that you haven’t noticed some quality of life features yet.
  • Research is soft-hidden at the start (you can still check it out), just so players can focus on learning the basics first.
  • Similarly, some recipes only unlock when you’ve hired villagers or made a plot, so the player only unlocks certain things when needed.
  • Lots of new hints where your character gives a comment speech bubble when you’re trying to do something that’s currently not possible.
• Graphics
  • Reworked bee nests and beehives. Nests now sit properly on their tree, and can no longer spawn twice in the same spot.
  • Bushes now visibly empty out when they’re harvested, and there’s a new berry bush model.
  • New models for the workbench, sawbench, research table, log stool, bench and beds, and updated cotton and wheat plants.
  • Restyled stone, brick, plaster and terracotta materials, new plaster colors, a fancy wooden floor, and a reworked wooden roof.
  • Many new animations: sweeping with a broom, working the grindstone, playing the harmonica, working at the workbench, the baking oven, the research table and the tavern counter, warming up at the fire, eating, cheering, holding a blueprint while building, and the temple animations (praying, lighting candles, ringing the bell, swinging incense).
  • Higher-quality clothing for male and female characters, in six variations.
  • Three new male hairstyles, and hats now deform hair properly on more hairstyles. Temple Keepers and tavern keepers get their own hats.
  • New smoke effects for the furnace, baking oven and forge, and new particles when hitting rocks.
  • New graphics setting “World Ambient Occlusion”: soft shading that gets baked at runtime and doesn’t fry your GPU.
  • Characters now move their upper and lower body separately, so swinging a tool while walking no longer makes them slide around.
  • Workstations now animate in sync with the villager working at them.
  • Directional light shadows now fade out at very low sun angles, leading to better performance at dawn and dusk.
  • Fixed noisy speckles on distant trees on Nvidia GPUs.
  • Improved the plaster wall shader, and cotton plants now use billboards in the distance.
  • New impostors and LODs for bushes, pillars, walls, roofs, beds, candles, the sawbench, beehives and characters, etc.
• Audio
  • Villagers now have voices, talking in their own language, similar to the Sims.
  • Footsteps now sound like what you walk on: wood, stone, streets, grass, and snow in winter. Also new sounds for swimming.
  • Lots of new work sounds: sweeping, hammering at the forge and the workbench, sowing, harvesting, sanding, grinding, eating, and more.
  • Villagers occasionally play actual tunes on the harmonica, and the background music fades out while you’re close enough to listen.
  • Six new music tracks: new night music for every season, and two more tracks for fall days.
  • The temple bell rings when the keepers ring it.
  • New volume sliders for voices and footsteps.
  • Turned off the doppler effect, so sounds no longer bend in pitch while you move.
  • Crickets are now quiet in winter.
• Quality of Life
  • Notifications stay on screen twice as long, and now also show up while the map or the crafting menu is open.
  • Lowered the default mouse sensitivity of the camera, after player feedback.
  • You now get a notification when a plot levels up, when a plot has reached its maximum size, when you lose your bed, and when the game has been saved.
  • The crafting and research panels now show the names of the ingredients, and which workstation a recipe needs.
  • Recipes that can only be made in a machine are now shown in the crafting panel, for your information.
  • Eating now plays an animation while you hold the use button, and if you keep holding it you keep eating until you’re full.
  • Chests now show which plot they are on, and warn you when they’re not on any plot so no worker will use them.
  • Deconstructing now shows a progress bar with a timer, and plots highlight when you hover them on the map.
  • While painting a plot, a side panel tells you what you’re doing: creating a new plot, extending an existing one (with its icon and type), or erasing.
  • Plot painting now extends the most dominant plot in the brush area instead of picking somewhat randomly.
  • Erasing plots now works with a single click, not just by dragging.
  • Objects you place now face you instead of always facing the same world direction, and the “can’t place here” preview rotates with R just like the real one.
  • Drag arrows now show you how far a drag-build or drag-deconstruct will reach.
  • The workshop map overlay now tells you which items a work plot still needs when it has no work slots yet.
  • World names have to be unique now, and you get a proper error for empty names, names that are too long, and names that already exist.
  • Radial menu polish: a pointer arrow and icons that scale with the selection.
• Multiplayer
  • Dialogue is now driven by the host, which makes it more stable and easier to program.
  • Villager greetings are also host-driven now.
  • World tags are now replicated, so world-wide progress is consistent for everyone.
  • Joining a world is faster.
  • The host now gets a notification when opening the game to multiplayer fails, or when multiplayer stops working.
  • Fixed the night never ending when a client got knocked out instead of going to bed.
  • Fixed notifications not reaching clients at all in busy worlds.
  • Clients now also get the notification when a villager loses their job.
  • Fixed clients only seeing the beds near them on the homes map overlay, so they could only assign those.
  • Fixed clients getting no bed data at all in big towns, which made them see villagers as homeless and a much lower town happiness than the host.
  • Fixed errors on clients while one of their plot upgrades was on its way to the host.
  • Fixed an error when a client erased plot area right after joining.
  • Fixed errors on clients when an NPC disappeared.
  • Fixed a failed Steam or GOG invite dropping you into a new world of your own instead of telling you that joining failed.
  • Fixed farm plants showing a different growth stage on clients than on the host.
  • Fixed travelers being offered different convince prices on the host and on the client.
  • Fixed a crash when trying to hire a traveler that somebody else had just hired.
  • Fixed a crash when a client was in character customization while the host went to sleep.
  • Fixed a client’s character not being cleaned up when they disconnected before it had been replicated, which could leave a broken name tag behind.
  • Fixed a conversation staying open when the player in it disconnected.
  • The “plot reached maximum size” notification now also shows for clients.
• Performance
  • Rewrote how villagers decide what to work on. The work order planner now runs in Burst jobs off the main thread instead of on it.
  • Added a “reachability cache”, so navigation checks are a lot faster.
  • Interaction spots are only re-analyzed where necessary.
  • Item piles, furniture, fields, roofs, beds, hoppers, etc. no longer create Unity game objects (slow) and render through the batched pipeline directly.
  • Certain colliders no longer create game objects either, but use our own collision code instead
  • Point light shadow baking speed improved.
  • Checking whether objects are indoors now happens off the main thread.
  • Better LOD configurations.
  • Enabled incremental garbage collection, which spreads GC work over several frames instead of causing a spike.
  • Removed garbage allocations from a lot of hot paths.
  • Fixed minor memory leaks.
  • Multiplayer prioritization (deciding what to send to which client first) moved into an optimized Burst job off the main thread.
  • The replication scope walk now only visits objects that actually changed scope.
  • Town reputation is now sent every 5 seconds and ticked forward locally on clients in between.
  • Destroying world objects on clients is much cheaper.
  • Fixed a lag spike caused by re-fetching Steam friends’ avatars every time, and a similar one on GOG.
• Bugfixes
  • Centralized cursor handling, so the mouse cursor no longer gets stuck hidden or captured in odd situations.
  • Fixed plots that showed “will be downgraded tomorrow” not actually getting downgraded sometimes.
  • Fixed packlings ignoring the stockpile filters.
  • Fixed slides starting a move to a container that had no space for the item.
  • Fixed not being able to shift-click wood into the incinerator’s fuel slot.
  • Fixed villagers reaching through walls to interact with objects.
  • Major pathfinding improvement: fixed villagers flip-flopping between two paths, teleporting when floors or roofs changed, walking through the air, and getting stuck.
  • Fixed a villager who was about to leave the town forgetting about it after saving and loading.
  • Fixed two villagers ending a conversation where one of them kept talking to nobody.
  • Fixed NPCs sometimes holding two props at the same time.
  • Fixed the crafting panel forgetting which recipe you last picked at a workstation.
  • Fixed window rendering randomly breaking, and windows sometimes getting a wrong rotation, especially on floors.
  • Fixed some crafting recipes not being properly locked behind their tech.
  • Fixed the 12-hour clock showing “00:30 PM” at noon instead of “12:30 PM”.
  • Fixed a second process of the game failing to start while another one was running on the same computer.
• Typos & Text
  • Renamed several things for clarity: “Barley” is now “Wheat”, “Sleeping Spot” is now “Rough Bed”, “Simple Hopper” is now “Simple Slide”, “Brick Roof” is now “Tile Roof”, “Wooden Pillar” is now “Wooden Beam”, “Window” is now “Glass Window”, the “Forester” is now the “Woodcutter”, “Tree Replanting” is now “Reforestation”, the “Entertainment” village need is now “Leisure”, the “Home” tech is now “Home Furniture”, “Wall Coloring” is now “Clay and Plaster”, and the “Village Plot” is now the “Town Plot”.

Big thanks to everyone that reported bugs and gave feedback!