Hello everyone!
First off, if you’re short on time: Check out our new Soundtrack Video on Youtube!
HavenCraft Alpha 5 will release next Tuesday! With that said, it’s time for the last news post before the release.
Last week we covered seasons and the trailer. Today we’re talking about everything to do with the villagers in your town.
One of the things that makes a town feel like an actual place is seeing the people in it just live their lives. Doing ordinary things when they have a moment.
In Alpha 5, villagers and travelers have a bunch of new idle behaviours:
Villagers gathering outside and relaxing in the tavern after work.
Eating dinner and reading on a bench on a sunny spring day.
A small but nice addition: there is now an end-of-workday notification that lets you know when your villagers are wrapping up for the day. We called it “Feierabend” - a German word that means the moment you’re done with work for the day and can finally relax. We thought it fits.
This one came directly from a lot of your feedback. With the old mechanic you’d lose items and wake up somewhere random if you didn’t make it to bed. The community didn’t like it so much, so we removed it.
From Alpha 5 on, you still fall asleep if you stay up too late, and you still get the end-of-day overview. But no more item loss, and no more waking up somewhere unexpected.
The end-of-day overview is a good opportunity to show some city stats and do some technical work behind the scenes, like season changes, but if you want to, you can hit enter and skip it quickly.
We also took this release as an opportunity to update the player and villager character models. The new models look a lot better and still work with old saves. There is even a new barber chair so you can change your appearance in the middle of the game now.
On top of that, hair now properly deforms when wearing a hat instead of clipping through it, and we added some simple hair physics, too.
There are all kinds of small details we added to the animations as well:
Buildings now also kick up a small dust cloud when they’re constructed, and trees and rocks now show impact particles when you hit them with a tool.
There is also a bunch of new furniture and decorations to place in your town. We have new indoor and outdoor pieces to flesh out your builds.
New indoor and outdoor furniture and decorations.
This includes the new animated forge, brick and colored walls, a sofa, a fireplace, and plants you can place in pots.
Last but not least, we made a big change to how pathfinding works under the hood. Pathfinding is now asynchronous and time-sliced, which means long-distance paths no longer cause a lag spike while the game figures them out. We also fixed a number of bugs where villagers would occasionally walk underground or in the air.
Logistics queries (like “where should I bring this item?” or “where can I get some stone?”) are also now faster and calculated in the background, so your villagers won’t lag the game when planning to walk across the island.
Maybe not a big deal for the game, but I love the soundtrack and wanted to share it with you!
Put on some headphones and check it out. There are different tracks for each season and time of day:
That’s it for this week! Alpha 5 release is on May 27th.
Let us know what you think, and happy playing!
