Getting Started

If you are new to Haven & Hearth, it is recommended that you read the Sevenless's Guide for Beginning Players Checking forums frequently. Especially Announcements section might be very helpful, as developers may add something possibly deadly into the game.

Creating your character

You will start out in an instanced "character creation room." Getting out of there isn't too complicated, but you may want to check out Character Creation for explanations of some easy-to-miss mechanics like inheritance. You can also start getting discoveries (explained below) while still in the room. Upon entering to the game world proper, your inventory will reset to empty, so don't waste too much time trying to craft something.

Improving your character

In Haven and Hearth, you don't so much 'level up' via XP so much as you earn Learning Points (LPs) and spend them on skills, which in turn make your character better.

Earning LP

As of the start of World 5 in 2011, you only get LPs for discovering new items or by studying Curiosities. As of World 8, Curiosities have an Experience cost to study.

As you discover new items and find things to craft, you'll eventually find some curios from foraging parts of the world, and some curio crafts you can make. Studying curios requires Experience, which is gained by random lores that appear when you do stuff. The amount of Experience needed varies from one curiosity to the next, and is spent every time a curiosity is completed. You'll need to have required amount of Experience before you can study a particular curio.

Some of the easiest things to "discover" when first starting out:

• Tree products
  • Branches
  • Fruit and Seeds
  • Boughs
  • Bark
• Clay (You can dig from the side of a river or from a clay node in a Mudflat)
• Foraged items such as Spindly Taproot or Blueberries (see Foraging for how to acquire)
• Digging for soil and worms

Note that you must discover resources before you will be able to craft with them. So for example, Leather Boots not only requires that you have the skill Tanning but also requires that you have taken a piece of Leather from a Tanning Tub. Just having a friend give you leather is not enough.

Personally I thoroughly recommend picking up the fishing skill as your first skill and catching as many fish as you can. You'll get LP and you can eat the fish for good early FEP's.

Some of the first Curiosities you might get:

• Dandelion
• Cone Cow
• Dice
• Ladybug

Scavenging

Before you acquire the hunting skill you cannot hunt. You will see rabbits and other animals but you can't attack them or catch them. These animals don't know that. They will run from you if they sense you. You may not want to purchase the hunting skill in the first few minutes or hours of play, but you may want the resources you would get from these animals, such as their bones to make fishhooks or saws or their entrails as fish bait.

As well as rabbits and squirrels and chickens, you will see foxes. The foxes hunt rabbits and squirrels and chickens, but when they make a kill they leave the dead animal intact and you can pick it up. So if you see a fox in hot pursuit of a prey animal it can be well worth following. You can also circle around behind a rabbit and come at it from the right angle to send it bolting towards the fox, if you see both animals symbols on your minimap.

However you will not be able to scavenge a kill that the fox makes in water. If the prey is killed in the water you will see blood staining the water but there will be no dead animal to pick up. Presumably it sank or floated away.

Using LP

There are two ways to use LP. The second tab on your character sheet is where you spend LP to increase your Abilities. The third tab on your character sheet is where you can spend LP to purchase Skills. For example the skill Foraging is required before you can see forageables. Increasing your Exploration and Survival means that you will see more foragables and that they will be better quality. You will want to spend your LP on a combination of Skills and the Abilities that support them.

Increasing Stats

Your Attributes (STR, AGI, INT, etc.) are increased by eating various foods. Each food provides a number of Food Event Points (FEPs) towards various stats, detailed in the FEP Table. To increase a stat, you must accumulate a number of FEPs equal to your highest stat (ignoring modifiers). By placing the cursor over the bar below the statistics on the character sheet, you can see a tooltip showing how many FEPs you currently have and how many you need. The stat that is increased is probabilistically determined by how many FEPs you have towards each stat. For example, if you only eat bear salami, then upon accumulating enough FEPs to increase a stat, you will have a 57.14% chance of strength increasing by one, and a 42.86% chance of charisma increasing by one. After a stat is increased, your current FEPs are reset to zero, so any overflow is lost (though it still affects the determination of which stat increases before the current FEPs are reset).

Equipment

See Equipment.

How To ...

If you wish to know how to create a specific object, please look it up in the Objects category.

Keyboard Shortcuts

See Keyboard Shortcuts.

Console Commands

See Console Commands.