Devlog #11 - Replanting Trees, Multiplayer, And More

Posted by Ponzel on 2025-11-07

Hello everyone!

This week I want to take some time and talk about all the small little things we’re doing to improve the game here and there.

A lot of these improvements come directly from your playtest feedback and the survey that many have filled out. Thanks for that!

Replanting Trees

Since you have to build a lot in HavenCraft, wood quickly runs out. In Alpha 3, this meant that you’d have to keep expanding your forester zone all the time. The forest around your town would slowly disappear. Some players even made their forester zone far away and decided to deliver the wood by packling instead.

No longer!

From Alpha 4 on, you’ll be able to unlock and craft these tree-stakes. Not only can you manually plant trees wherever you’d like them now, but placing them in the forester zone also gives your forester the ability to re-plant trees. The stakes stay around after the tree is cut, so that the forester will keep replanting -> cutting -> replanting -> cutting, … without your intervention!

Tree stakes without and with a young tree growing.

Quality of Life Improvements

There is a lot of small stuff here, so let me just go bit-by-bit:

Lots of people didn’t see that berries increase your walking speed. Well, now there are a whole host of changes:

• We show the effects of food in the bottom left corner
• Berries still increase the walking speed, but bread does too - for a longer time.
• Honey now increases crafting speed by 50%. The effects stack…
• And the final big news: When you have eaten, you can now sprint! Together with the foods that boost walking speed, you can get around quite fast.

Speaking about crafting times, we also rebalanced a lot of those. Now, the only things that take a long time to craft are the ones you can delegate to villagers. The final assembly of furniture and similar pieces is very quick.

Different effects for different food types.

If you set a filter on a stockpile, the icon is now shown on the side of the stockpile. I also took the opportunity to show the cargo of the packling on its box.

Showing stockpile filters and packling cargo as icons.

It used to be annoying to delete a whole plot - you’d have to erase it manually, by hand. Now there is a convenient button in the plot overview:

Instantly delete a whole plot.

Some people asked for a way to sort their inventory. So here you go, you can turn auto-sorting on and off in the corner:

Inventory auto-sorting for those who want it.

Other changes:

• We had complaints about items flying everywhere when gathering. Now, while we haven’t changed the core system in a deep way yet, we increased the radius of sucking in items automatically from 3 to 5 meters, so hopefully that’ll help already.
• You can now shift-click villagers to skip the dialogue and go into the management screen directly.
• We implemented the ability for workplaces to play a little animation when a villager is working on them. This is already being used for the new baking oven; it shows a burning fire and some smoke when bread is being baked.

Multiplayer Progress

Because we’re still in the early playtesting phase, multiplayer features lag a little behind singleplayer features - it takes some time to implement them correctly!

But with Alpha 4, we have caught up on many of the important things, most importantly:

• 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 villagers’ inventory.
• Other players in multiplayer now contribute to revealing the fog of war.
• When players join or leave the game, a notification shows
• Other players in multiplayer now also show up on the map.

The last one is the best one: First of all, we made each player an arrow on the map, so you can see which direction you’re headed. And finally, you can find your friends on the map, too.

See yourself and your friends on the map.

Better Shadows

A small extra thing we’re including with Alpha 4 is the new shadowing system for stuff like torches, streetlamps, chandeliers, etc.

It does take some performance to run - all shadows do - but we’ve taken care to minimize the impact as much as possible. We only update the shadows in the background when a player builds or destroys something.

New shadows. We tried to optimize them well, but let us know how they run on your system!

That’s quite a lot of changes and we’re looking forward to you seeing them in the game. Happy playing!