[Outdated] Sevenless' beginner guide to Haven and Hearth

by **Sevenless** » Mon Aug 31, 2015 7:45 pm

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Preface
Moderator note 3 October, 2016: As Haven and Hearth is a constantly changing game, and currently in an "eternal alpha" state, things can change dramatically at any time. Much of this guide will continue to be a useful start to new players, but other things can change. Recently the combat system has changed. A few things remain similar to the system described in this guide, but other things have changed radically. Please see the patch notes titled "Bumfights" and later for changes to the system. As soon as I find a good write-up on the system, I'll get it linked here.

Also to note is the missing information on Localized Resources. More can be read about them on the Ring of Brodgar wiki. These were added with the start of world 9.

--MagicManICT

Introduction

Hello fellow Hearthlings and welcome to my best attempt at guiding you through the early stages of Haven & Hearth in its newest reincarnation. As always, polite critiques and suggestions are more than welcome! Pretty pictures and other such niceness will come over time, but volunteers for making that kind of thing would be both awesome and credited as said volunteer wishes (art is not my specialty)

Please be aware that due to the scope of this guide, patches may outdate segments of it from time to time. I try my best to stay on top of it, but I will miss things. If you find anything like that, add a reply to the thread and I'll do my best to fix it. Furthermore, the particular formatting of guides does not lend itself overly well to raw data and bulk facts. As a result, I suggest the community wiki for any inquiries of that nature.

http://ringofbrodgar.com/wiki/

Can I edit/translate/repaste this guide elsewhere?

Feel free to link or paste this guide elsewhere, so long as a link to the original haven post is given with it. You're also free to make edits or translations so long as you note what edits were made and their author. Any hard work on your part should be credited after all.

Stuck in the starter zone?

After walking across the river to choose a gender, right click the wizard to name yourself, and then right click the fire to be sent into the game world.

Friendly warning about the nature of Haven

Haven is both charming, and brutal. You will die and lose everything your character has gained. You may even have everything you made destroyed. The strong define the rules of morality in game, and humans make capricious gods. There are no revivals under any circumstances, and this game bears the title of "Eternal Alpha" so this includes bug related deaths.

If you are not prepared for this, please don't play for your own sake. Haven is not meant for everyone, and there's no shame in that. Our help community and this guide will do the very best we can to help you survive early game, but after that you'll be on your own.

Meeting up with your friends

Wilderness beacons allow you to spawn near your friend provided your friend has gotten carpentry. This takes maybe 30 minutes for the average player, so if you want a group of friends to play together it's a good idea to have a trailblazer ready to make spawns for people.

Hotkeys and UI

You won't need these to get into game, but once you're playing they're a life saver. Come back and read this when you think it'll be useful. Do note that custom clients may change these, the client I use changes around several of them.

Clients

Haven's devs have an interesting philosophy about botting/client modifications. They're a small team, and they don't feel they have the resources to stop it, so instead it's given its own subforum and game design is aimed at making bots less effective without hindering players. Popular client creators get quite famous within the community even. Take a look for any of the client threads that have a particularly large number of replies, those tend to be the popular ones:

The Wizards' Tower

I am currently using Amber client, but please give all the popular clients a look. Pick the one that best suits your practical and/or aesthetic needs.

by **Sevenless** » Mon Aug 31, 2015 7:45 pm

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First steps

Welcome! I assume you've made it through the starting zone and were dumped naked into the world. Rest assured, that creepy old wizard has stolen everyone elses genitals as well so you're not alone in that department.

Your first aim in life is to discover the world around you. Each item like branches off a tree or a stone chipped from a rock will award a small amount of Learning Points (LP for short). These are effectively what you'll use to purchase ability points and skills to make/do new things. In haven you need to discover all the ingredients and own the skill to make an item so keep that in mind. Also, randomly for doing certain activities you'll be awarded with Experience Points (XP for short), which are spent in order to gain more LP through studying curiosities.

Once you've gathered every type of item you can see (Ctrl+Left click to drop an item from an inventory, most of what you picked is junk for now), it's time to buy your initial skills in this order if you run short on LP:

Foraging
Hunting
Lumberjacking
Carpentry

The road ahead

(Not particularly in order, depending what you find. After you've bought the above listed skills, raise Exploration with every bit of LP you can until it hits 5)

The starting area has been almost completely stripped bare of stone boulders. Start walking, if you find a quarry (gray, fairly small) or a mountain (red or grey, large) you can use the adventure>dig command to get a stone from them.

Badgers, Bats, Boars, Bears and Mammoths are aggressive and can/will attack if you move too close to them (I like to keep them at least half way towards the edge of my screen when fully zoomed out). If you're attacked, Ctrl+R will up your movespeed to the next notch, and aim for the closest cliff you can. Their aggressiveness is tied to movement. Walking slower might help you get away from a mob that got too close, but ultimately not moving and hearthing is the safest option. If one knocks you down hearthing immediately without moving when you wake up is your best chance of survival.

Swimming has traditionally been incredibly deadly in Haven for new players with low con values. This has been reduced somewhat in severity, but water should still be respected. Characters with the base 10 CON stat will be able to cross rivers 6-7 tiles wide with full stamina. Running out of stamina will quickly pile on Asphixiation damage which will heal slowly over time. Be cautious if you decide to test this out.

Remember to move at the second movespeed, not the third unless running to catch/escape from something. You don't want to grind your stamina / energy levels down, why will be explained later.

If you happen to get lucky and see a nettle grab it. Or a birch tree (white trunks) with bark, take the bark as you'll need at least six pieces.

Don't spam eat everything you see! Blackberries, Blueberries, Aphids out of raided ant hills are the only ones worth bothering with at this stage. If you're conservative with your stamina (as you should be) you shouldn't need to eat very much at this stage of the game. Aim to keep your energy just above 8000 so any ant wounds you take will start healing. This also means you can't do much heavy work like tree chopping, so try to plan your heavier activities for after you've found a decent bunch of food. But you shouldn't be settling down yet, so your heavy stamina needs are limited. The key here is to avoid taking wounds as much as possible, so you can get up to 8000% eating good foods. Catching rats to make rat on a stick, or eating grubs are both high energy density early foods so pick them up as you go.

Starvation is no joke! Under 2000 energy you take HHP damage for it. This penalty is scaling, it starts off serious but rapidly becomes very lethal. Be very careful here, the game doesn't make a big deal of informing you, so check for missing health and your energy levels as a habit.

Learn to raid an ant nest, preferably without dying (This requires the hunting skill, if you see one of the ants moving really fast avoid that hill). Walk up to the nest, and wait for the ants to not be directly beside you. Right click>Raid, and immediately start walking away. Preferably walk in a straight line down a relatively unobstructed path until the anthill dissapears from the minimap view, then stop. Wait for the ants to almost get to you, toggle on jog with Ctrl+R) and run around them/back to the nest. You should have enough time to raid the hill and start walking away. The ants will deaggro after you've been outside their targetting range for long enough, this can take some time.

Beware the super ant! Some ants move *much* faster, some impossible to outrun completely. If you're raiding ant hills, make sure you always have more HHP that 15 times the number of ants on the hill (4 would be safe for 60hhp and above). And make sure to lose the ants from the previous hill before the next raid. It's possible I'm speaking from experience on that one.

Catch a rabbit or chicken to butcher for the bone discovery. Chickens are very easy to catch, rabbits not so much. In order to catch a rabbit you'll need to move at least running (one above walking) speed. All critters in the game seem to have a normal movespeed, and the occasional outlier. Most rabbits move at a run, but some move at a walk and others move at a sprint. If you're in a biome that doesn't allow sprinting, give a run at each rabbit you pass in case you find a slow one. And if you can sprint, run at 3rd speed until you get close then toggle sprint as it massively drains your stamina (and stops at 50% stam bar even). Alternatively you might get lucky and find a rabbit killed by a fox, which as of current you can pickup without penalty.

Make a stone axe (requires chipped stone off a rock and a stick) and a bonesaw (needs bone and bough off a tree).

Make a birch bark cup with 2 birch bark. (You'll need water to regenerate stamina for cutting down a tree). A very viable alternative to this is finding a downed log (spawned or player cut), cutting a block and crafting the “wooden cup” in the symbel page which now holds 0.6L water and is relatively easy to find compared to bark for a beginner.

Chop a tree down, get blocks and planks. Wait until you get a saw and some type of cup, would be best to do beside water so refilling your cup is easy.

Make a birch bark backpack: 6 birch bark, 2 string, very useful since it increases inventory space. Ctrl+E to open equipment screen, Shift+Leftclick to move it into that inventory (and in this case equip it).

A journey begun

Now that you've got the basics going, it's time to explain curiosities. These items go into the study window and after a set amount of time are consumed at a cost of XP to generate LP for you to spend. Early game discovery LP forms the bulk, but within a day or two curiosities will become the main source. More intelligence points gives you more Attention, which is basically the other limiter on what you can study other than the physical size of the Study inventory. Each curio comes with an attention cost required to study it, and a time required to complete study. Here's a list of ones you should have running as much as possible as a beginner:

Dandelion
Cone cow (pick coniferous cone to discover)
Ant curios (soldier, queen, empress)
Dragon fly (if you're lucky enough to find a swamp where you can catch them, right clicking them on the minimap is the easiest way to catch them)

Now it's time to pick up your next skill and start spending some points on abilities

Fishing

If you happen to find a fishing node (jumping fish in the water) on a lake, maybe it's a good time to hunt some ants and gather the larva/pupae to go fishing. This will also require a rod, a hook, and a piece of taproot for stringing the rod. Once you have Right clicked all of these items into the rod along with a piece of bait (ants, entrails, silkmoth, ladybug, worm), you're ready to fish. This is a pretty slow process, so don't get impatient. The more fish you see jumping, the faster you'll be catching things. But if you're having really bad luck, try switching from fishing in shallow water to deep or vice versa. Since this is permadeath, it's unfortunately advisable that you watch the screen in case a boar/bear/player wanders by.

Each fish caught/butchered/cooked will net 150LP. To light a fire, make it with 5 branches through the adventure menu first, then make a firebrand through the same menu. As soon as the firebrand is done crafting (you'll want 60+% stam to craft it) right click it onto the fire to light it. Right click the fire first to start using it, then choose the “cook meat” recipe butchering should have unlocked by now.

If you can't find fish just yet, keep moving forward with the guide and come back to this step when you can. Do remember, since it autodraws bait from your inventory don't keep any insect studyables in there while doing this!

Note: Advanced fishing with lures (this comes *much* later in the game) uses a minigame to catch fish. The basic story is that you will hook a fish species depending on lures, fishing location, and moon phase. You get four options on how to respond to this fish, most are neutral, some increase your catch meter and some decrease it. How far back your character is leaning indicates how close you are to catching the fish. There have been rumours that the pattern of answers you get depends on your previous ones, but I haven't done enough testing to be certain. If you decide to play with philosofishing as Jorb calls it, it's better to do so for entertainment than fish output.

Exploration to 5

The game world might seem empty of things to interact with at first, but it's not that there's nothing there. There just isn't anything your character can find yet. The exploration ability, along with your perception attribute, determines your foraging find rate. All forageables in the game have a minimum PER*EXP score required to see any, and the amount you can see of what's spawned rises until a cap. Some of the highest score forageables in legacy required 1600 PER*EXP just to see at all. Either way, due to early game relying so heavily on forageables, you'll be raising this stat a fair bit at first.

Survival to 3

Now your next task is to hunt nettles. You can make and wear two sets of nettle clothing simultaneously for +survival, which increases the quality of all your forageables (LP and FEP). The neat thing is, when you get your nettles to an average quality of 6, they start giving +2 survival. With only 2 points in survival, you can get all the way to 10 survival with no further LP invested by using your +1 nettle clothes to help you make +2 nettle clothes. Continue to work on this while grinding the LP for the next step:

Time for a quick mention of in game terms. Survival is a hard cap on things you harvest. No matter what the quality of something you forage, you will get not a point higher than the amount of survival you have. Later on, mostly with crafting and buildings used to make things, you'll run into soft caps. Soft caps give you a product that is the average of your relevant crafting score and the item's quality. So if I'm making nettle pants with Q20 nettles, but my sewing score sqrt(sew*dex) = 10, the nettle pants will come out at (20+10)/2 = 15. What stats/abilities are used per item are noted in the items crafting tooltip.

Exploration to 10

Food! By now you're probably wondering how exactly we get attributes in haven. Heck, you might even have seen a bit of the Food Event Point system. Time for an explanation:

In haven, your highest attribute sets the bar on how many FEPs you need to consume in order to get an attribute point increase. Everything you eat adds to this bar in some way, although how varies widely base on the food. When you complete the bar (including any overfill) the attribute point types within it give a % chance to get a level up. So if I get 9 int FEP and 1 str, I'll have a 10% chance of gaining strength and 90% chance it's int instead. If I massively overfilled my initial bar and ate 5 points of int then a whopping 15 points of str, it'd be 25% for int and 75% for strength. Overkilling is by and large considered a waste of resources because of that relatively weak benefit.

Now, it's time to talk briefly about quality. There are three types, Essence, Substance and Vitality. Each quality type influences an item in a different way. For food Vitality increases the FEP's gained, Substance decreases the Hunger penalty and Essence decreases the satiation penalty. How these attributes influence an item will depend what type an item is, but for now understanding how food works is sufficient.

And right about now you're probably wondering “Hunger? Satiation?”. Yes, it gets a bit more complicated but it shouldn't be too hard.

The FEP you gain from a food is as follows:

Base FEP for food item * quality bonus from vitality * hunger modifier * satiation penalty

When an item is eaten, it adds points to the hunger modifier, higher is bad. These points drain away very slowly with the passing of time in real life (you can be offline as well). The modifier goes from 300% to 25%, so not spam eating everything in sight is probably a good idea.

Furthermore, when an item of a particular type is eaten (blueberries count as a forageable), the particular satiation penalty is applied. Eating tonnes and tonnes of forageables loses effectiveness over time. You can see in the food mouseover text that satiation penalty is chance based while hunger is not. Overall you can essentially ignore satiation for any attribute values under 30, but keep this concept in mind for later.

Remember what I said about your highest attribute determining the FEP amount you need to fill? In the early days you'll want to raise your PER and INT in lockstep as much as possible to reduce the FEP burden. Aiming to get both to 20 is a good goal to work on while you wait for LP to invest in abilities/skills. One other neat little thing is that each type of food item eaten reduces the total FEPs you need to earn in a quickly diminishing formula. It's not important until you hit 20+ stats, but eat a couple different items and pay attention to the FEPs the bar says it requires. This is the Variety bonus you may see mentioned elsewhere on the forums.

by **Sevenless** » Mon Aug 31, 2015 7:45 pm

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Setting up camp

During your long trek, here's the skills you should be looking into. This next phase can take anywhere from 2-6 hours easily so I'll just give the skill/ability order at the start in a block:

Hearth Magic

In order to make a hearth fire, you'll need to discover a dream (make a dream catcher, wait for a while and harvest) and then the option pops up in the adventure menu.

Farming
Will to Power

Assuming you've butchered something and chopped up a hollow log on the ground, the Mirkwood Offering should unlock. This curio is very fast, gives good LP, and devours XP. However in the early/mid game days you should have a healthy surplus of XP and there really isn't anything else to use it on. I'd suggest keeping a reserve of 1k XP, but any XP you get above use this curio on. The LP gain is massively useful at this stage of the game.

Yeomanry
Exploration to 15
Survival to 15 (including nettle bonus)
Swimming (prerequisite for boatbuilding)
Boatbuilding (for the nice curio and added mobility)
Tanning
Sewing
Stone Working

Now that we've covered that, you may have noticed a distinct lack of mention with regards to settling down until now. And this is for a good reason, you need yeomanry first. House damage soak (or damage reduction as it's called in other games) now starts at zero. A newbie character can bash a house with enough water. This is to prevent “gatehouse” griefing where players would construct buildings to block gates.

As such, without a claim anyone can destroy a house with zero effort or investment. Perhaps it's worth stopping to discuss the crime system and why exactly a claim helps protect you:

There are varying types of actions in game that leave “scents” on the ground after they have been committed. These scents allow your current location to be tracked, but the severity of the crime can also impose a secondary set of penalties. For serious crimes an initial debuff called "Red Handed" will prevent the criminal from hearthing home or allowing their character to log off (now that you're setting up camp it's neat to know through the adventure menu you can teleport to your hearth fire). This eventually lessens in severity into an "Outlaw" debuff, which only prevents character logout. The exact length of the buff changes based on the relative severity of the crime. Trespassing (entering buildings, peaking inside containers) and Assault (attacking a hearthling but not knocking them unconcious) are considered minor crimes and do not cause the red handed/outlaw debuff, only allowing someone to track you or your hearthfire (hearthfire is always trackable even if you're offline). Other offenses include Battery (knocking out a hearthling), Theft, Vandalism (damage to claimed structures), and Murder.

Note: All characters can turn on criminal actions toggle and enter/exit claims without the trespassing skill. The naming often confuses people a little. You will still get the health penalty for leaving scents though.

So, we can see that at the very least destroying your house with a claim over it requires some accountability due to the crime system. Because of this crime system, there's a saying among hearthlings "If it's not on a claim, it's fair game". Some choose to be annoyed if someone takes a boat they are using, or something out of a crate that was just placed there, but the game's morality system sees neither of these constituting "crimes". Thankfully, there's plenty of ingame methods to protect your items from casual sticky fingers.

Now that we've covered crime, back to business! For your first camp, if you've not managed to buy Yeomanry (which also requires farming and will to power skills) you can use leantos instead. Once you deposit a liftable object into a leanto, you'll have a little piece of paper show up on it and it will be claimed. Each player can only claim one leanto at a time, and it requires theft to take items out or vandalism to destroy the leanto. If using crates, this gives a nice 30 slots of inventory space to work with until you can drop a proper claim. Empty leantos are not claimed by anyone, so always keep a container in there if you don't want someone snagging it from you.

Note: You've probably been doing some hard work terraforming and noticed your energy dropping. Some foods in game are much better at regenerating energy levels without trashing your hunger bonus than others. One of the beginner ones is Rat on a Stick, 450% energy for 2% hunger. Explore the different foods available and pay attention to those numbers!

At this point, it's time to be honest with yourself. You're probably going to want to stay at the first spot you plonk down a leanto, perhaps an hour or two walk from the starter zone. You will find a million and one reasons why it's an acceptable place, and many rationalizations for why the downfalls are tolerable. Don't do it, don't give in. Your first camp, even your first claim, is temporary. If every player gives into that desire, and many do, they will be living in the areas just outside the starter zone which become cramped with high competition for forageables and easy pickings for raiders.

So, after you've set up your first temporary camp (with everyone's hearth fires there) here's how to go about hunting for a new spot: Each player should head in a slightly different direction from the starting zone. With hearth fires all centralized, anyone who doesn't find a location of interest can port home to the same starting point as the rest of the party. As for biomes that are particularly useful:

Forest

Spawns nettles, taproot, anthills, huntable wildlife. The anthills will be quite important for both LP and fishing in the early days. There's no longer a distinct difference between leafy forests and pine forests, so there's some variety in what animals/forageables spawn but they're all variants on this basic concept.

Since trees are central to quality gain in the game, if given the choice settling ontop of a forest for faster tree growing isn't a bad idea. It can be "created" slowly, details in the farming section below.

Grasslands

Better chance at seeing tamable animals, lots of chicken flocks, some useful forageables not found in forests. Sparse on trees, but horses that can have clovers used on them to let you ride them are amazing for many tasks right now.

Swamps

Dragonflies make a good relatively active curio to run for early right through mid game. The rare ruby dragonfly you get is a very solid curio even in the highest developed towns. Several plant forageables are also found here that are of use. Leeches will also attach on any open equipment slots, useful for bait (once they've fed on your 3 times to bloat) and healing some wound types as discussed later.

Mountain

As of current, mountains even at high PER*EXP are somewhat lackluster. The one major benefit is a large supply of caves (benefits discussed below), and the occasional frogs crown.

Caves & Water

Ok, ok, so they're not exactly biomes but both are important. Shallow water is one of the best areas to hunt for quality clay nodes. Drinking water is also a bit annoying to haul over large distances. Furthermore boat transportation is quite speedy, allowing you to cover large distances. But then again, this works for raiders as well.

Caves are not "required", but miles easier than punching mineholes down from the surface for beginners and also give access to lots of walls to test for ore. Metal isn't "necessary" if you're hermitting solo (unless you intend to someday work on a brick wall, which requires iron products), but it's incredibly helpful if you intend to be self sufficient. It's a huge quality of life boost, and it's been made easier than it was in legacy for a solo player to get the metal basics even if quality metal is a far off dream.

Global Resources***

This section will be written once the global resources have been tweaked around, settled out by the devs, and I'm playing enough to fully understand their implication. Sufficed to say, settling near these may be useful or it may bring too much attention. Your gameplay isn't going to be crippled for lacking your own source, although you might need to trade for some. Take a look around the forums/wiki to figure it out if you feel it's important.

~~~

Now, there's many variations of these biomes in the game of current. Each one may have slightly different forageables and vastly different plant life but generally speaking they still fall into those categories. Due to ants being so useful in early and mid game, I feel living within 5 minute walking range of a sizeable anthill spawning forest to be absolutely crucial. At least 15 “minimaps” (the default view range of the minimap in game is “1 minimap” in size) worth of forest, and even that's cutting it kind of short.

Grasslands, due to the temporary tame-able and ride-able horse, are nice to have nearby other good biomes you want to forage. In particular, for now at least, horses not getting a move speed debuff when riding over swamps makes for an excellent dragon fly catching machine. Living in the middle of a grassland isn't advised though as you'll have difficulty with curio deprivation. Variety is key!

Leafy forests are a mild positive to have nearbye but not particularly required. It entirely depends on what type of curios that particular leafy forest spawns, they seem to have the most variety of any biome type in that sense.

Swamps and Mountains both fall into the realm of “not required at first”, but they grow in utility very quickly as time passes. I would say you'll want to be within a ten minute walk of at least one of these biomes, both obviously preferable.

Caves are great if you can find them (They are much more common in this version than they were in legacy, shouldn't be an issue finding one), but please don't make the mistake so many haveners (myself included) have made in forgetting that people can use it to walk into a base if it's not walled off properly. The cave mouth * must * be treated like it's outside your walls when it comes to placing gates around it. I've walked into a village and killed them all when they felt an ungated cave mouth was safe. I lost a 1500 hour character and half my village to raiders because I decided a palisade was enough instead of a brick wall to separate it from the rest of the village in mid game. And that's just my experiences, those stories have happened hundreds or thousands of times by now.

Water is also as much a danger as it is a blessing. For all its usefulness, raiders can use rowboats to scan areas much more quickly for targets. The old maxim of haven 1.0 was to live 3 minimaps away from any connected body of water. Living on the shore of a small unconnected (this also means at least 3 minimap away from all water sources on all sides) lake is acceptable if you manage to find one.

As a final note, don't forget your need for surface stone at first. It's a real pain to end up a 30 minute walk from any stone sources. By the start of midgame mining will be producing all the stone you need. If it happens, remember you can hearthfire home with a crate over your head. Just make one when you find stone and port with an inventory+crate full.

Walls and Safety

This is a great time to mention the fact that there are many mean people in the world. Do not trust strangers, and do NOT let them walk up to you. It is essentially impossible to escape an attacker on foot, if they decide to hurt you and you get within 20 tiles of there is nothing you can do to stop them. Several of the custom clients have "autohearth" features, which automatically engage the hearth teleport if an unknown character enters your viewscreen. I advise you have this turned on, and if you find you're being teleported home a lot maybe it's time to find a less populated area. Neighbours can be helpful and friendly, or deadly. Hearthsecrets left on runestones can let you start talking to them, but ultimately anyone may disguise their intentions as they see fit.

Take this as a word of caution, but decide for yourself how to play the game.

Now, from personal protection to protection of property: Claims only provide a small amount of protection, and effectively zero protection against anyone with any serious intent of harming you. Here are the various protection combinations available within the game:

Claim (village or personal): No skills required to enter
Claim + roundpole fence with gate: Trespassing to enter
Claim + roundpole fence with no gate: Vandalism to enter
Claim + Locked Palisade: Requires a very large amount of strength + Vandalism to destroy by hand, otherwise must dry a ram for 24 IRL hours to enter
Claim + Locked Brickwall: Requires decent amount of strength and multiple characters using a ram + vandalism to enter

As you can see, the first two options are pretty cheap to get the skills to bypass. You should skip straight to option 3 for your first setup (destroy a hole in the wall and rebuild it when you leave). This should be used for the sole purpose of acquiring enough leather to build yourself a palisade. Everyone should longterm aim to have a brickwall because "Palibashers" start to exist 2-3 months after world start, and with a character like that attacking a palisaded hermitage becomes very cheap to engage in.

Gate direction and keys

The ramp opens towards the outside. Slave keys can open the door from inside only. Master keys can open it from both directions, but also allow the locks to be changed. You should always have your hearth fire inside your walled encampment and the master key should never leave. Preferably an alt walked to your base will be holding said master key, and left logged off at all times unless you need to make new slave keys.

Remember, a Master key gives a raider full control of your doors, including replacing the locks and tombing you inside your own walls.

by **Sevenless** » Mon Aug 31, 2015 7:45 pm

Moderator note: Much, if not all, of this section is out of date. There was a recent (September, 2016) change to how combat is done. This section is being left here for now to keep the guide as a whole intact. Some of the information here is still relevant for world 9, but please be advised that one should search out new combat infromation elsewhere on the forum on how to get started first.

Links to the update: viewtopic.php?f=39&t=50921 and others after with balance changes and additions

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Blood in the water

Please remember, this tutorial will not protect you from even a mediocrely capable pvper. If you see strangers, your best chance of survival is hearthing away instantly and only talking to them over a wall.

Combat in the new haven has taken inspiration (at least it seems to me) from a combination of the old haven system and dueling card games. The fusion has, as far as I've seen, proven to be quite popular. It's worth noting though, that any Martial school you design should take steps to insulate itself from being too RNG dependent. Losing a fight in pve has serious consequences and losing in pvp will often prove fatal. All attribute/ability level suggestions given here are a touch generous to ensure beginners learning the ropes have room to make some mistakes.

But enough with that, in order to participate in this class remember the Will to Power ability is required. Furthermore you'll want at least 10 points of Unarmed Combat ability (this can include nettle gear bonus) so that ants don't wreck you too much if you make mistakes

Getting Started

Go to the fourth page of your Character Sheet (Ctrl+T) menu. This brings up the “Martial Arts & Combat Schools” page, where you can see the moves you've unlocked. You will start with some points already allocated, but for now change your page around so that you have my “Beginner Fu” setup. Click the save button and you're ready to go.

Each point is like a card in a deck. When a move is used, it's returned to the school and another move is drawn. Because you get five active moves, and this style only has five moves in total, you always get one of each move at all times. This makes it very reliable for learning combat, but pretty inflexible for fancier fighting such as against strong animals or players.

When you initiate combat by clicking on a mob with the attack cursor active (default key is T, you may have to hit ESC first to exit out of any crafting menu choices you had open), you will randomly drawn 5 moves from your school. In our case, it's always the same five but the order will be mixed up.

Red backgrounds are attacks, blue backgrounds are defenses. If you're hit with no defense up, all the attack damage will go straight to your soft hitpoints. These moves override your 1-5 hotkeys, with 1 triggering the move on the furthest left and so on until 5 triggers the furthest move to the right. Hopefully the UI shows this in the future, but for now it's not too hard to figure out.

Here's a picture after I initiated a fight with an ant swarm and took its first attack:

When the ants attacked me, their attack applies to my furthest right blocks first. However, you'll see that my Jump block wasn't harmed. This has to do with those coloured triangles you may have noticed on the moves. There are four styles of moves, Striking, Sweeping, Backhanded, Oppressive.

Ants have a single basic attack that is a combo Striking/Backhanded move. Any block with either Striking or Backhanded is able to intercept it. Because Jump is a Sweeping block, the ants attack passed right through it.

Now it's important to note that defenses work whether or not you're standing still, as such putting up defenses, running in to hit the ants, and then backing off is a perfectly sound tactic against slower foes. And the bar on the right shows the current block the ants are using, but since we only have Striking and Backhanded attacks in this school we'll have to beat through them in order to deal damage. As a side note, it's a good time to mention that if you queue an attack against an opponent, or are in pursuit mode (top right corner has a button to activate this), you can use defensive/ranged moves without having to stop moving. If you're not actively engaging a target though, you will need to pause briefly to complete the move.

All moves have something called “Combat Weight”, which is how well the attack is able to penetrate enemy blocks. This stat for our Beginner Fu school is always just your UA ability compared to the enemies defense ability score (for animals this will always be their UA stat naturally, but players could use blocks with their melee combat ability). In my previous example we see that the ant wasn't able to break my Quick Dodge defense because I had significantly higher UA during the fight (30 to be precise). Quick attacks like the Striking Punch are good at chewing through blocks the ants put up, allowing openings for the more damaging Backhanded Left Hook to hit. And of course, if a style isn't being blocked all damage goes straight to their HP

Note: Other important stats for combat are Agility, Strength, and Constitution. Agility is another relative stat, where your agility compared to your opponent changes how fast your moves execute. Due to the quick paced nature of this combat system, Agility is paramount to winning a fight since it both speeds up your attacks and slows your enemies. Strength acts as a damage multiplier, and while not nearly as crucial as Agi it does make you hit quite a bit harder if you get an attack through their blocks. And naturally constitution giving extra HP is useful for soaking up damage if your blocks get countered or broken through.

Combat Discovery

In your first attempt or two, you may notice a strange new move popping up on your hotbar:

This is a combat discovery move. It has every attack style, and is weighted with both your UA and MC (melee combat) stats. Since you're unlikely to invest anything in MC at first, this basically means you need to strip away all the enemy's blocks before using this move you successfully land the hit. If you do, you will be awarded with the new move card that is visible on the discovery token. It can be an additional card for a move you already have, or it could be a new move entirely. Farm as many of these as you can when you see them pop up, they will be useful when you get more experienced with the system.

You may notice that ants occasionally have a Sweeping/Oppressive defense stance up. Your beginner school cannot do anything about this for enabling discoveries, so either kill the ant or run around until that block expires. Eventually you should loot a Haymaker Sweeping attack. Swapping out Left Hook for Haymaker should allow you to break these blocks while discovery farming. Once I'd exhausted the discoveries from Beginner Fu, I switched back to left hook since it can be used for UA hunting boars and has a much shorter cooldown.

Final note: You can only get one discovery move per battle, per enemy. You are not guaranteed to get one either because it's RNG when it appears. That being said, I noticed that ants stopped giving discovery moves after a while and it took bats or boars to continue seeing more. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about that mechanic to explain why or what the conditions behind it are.

More complex combat discoveries have a couple requirements to trigger. Specifically, you need to be able to use a combat discovery to have it appear. That means discovering the shield defensive maneuver requires having a shield equipped, and discovering any IP using move will require the correct amount or more IP stockpiled. Furthermore, there is a correlation related to what types of enemies you're fighting and which moves you use. Both of these factors seem to play into your ability to find the most complex moves. Hopefully once the community figures out what each of the requirements are, the wiki will contain all of the required information.

The next challenger - (If you don't have the stats but want to hunt with bow and arrow, skip to the next section and come back to this later)

You might be curious why Beginner Fu includes the Jump block despite it being useless against ants. And that answer lies with your next opponent: Bats.

Now bats are a fair bit tougher than ants, you'll want 30 UA and 20 Agi to fight them. Also, try to attack only a solo bat, when low hp they will flee and if you give chase other bats nearby may wake up and attack you. Bats may be passive you if crawl or walk past them, but are reliably aggressive if you're running or sprinting. Just remember that when you spook them (not through intentional aggro), the entire swarm attacks and that can be incredibly lethal to an unprepared character.

When fighting, you may occasionally hear a coin clinking, and their Initiative Point counter going up. Initiative Points, or IP, are used to do more powerful moves/blocks. In particular, the bats have a Sweeping attack that they will use when they get 3 IP. Make sure you have Jump set up after a couple moves into the fight. Bat meat, especially spitroasted bat, is a great food (int/per for meat + agi on spitroast), and the curios/hides are nice for any village with caves nearby.

And that concludes our lesson on Beginner Fu, hopefully it will serve you as well as it has served me. Note: I managed to take down a fox without too much trouble at this same combat level of 30ua/20agi, but it's a much closer fight than with bats. Spamming quickdodge and punch seems to be best since they will still be attacking quickly, and most of their blocks are Sweeping/Oppressive from what I saw.

Note: In more advanced decks, sometimes you can get undesirable card combos. In order to handle this, hitting Ctrl+(1, 2, 3, 4, 5) discards the current move and draws a new one from the school.

by **Sevenless** » Mon Aug 31, 2015 7:45 pm

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The beginning marksman

Mod note: As of the start of world 10 (Jan 2017), arrows and sling stones will softcap the hide of the animal hit each time it is hit. Eventually the hide will be effectively the same quality as the arrows or stones used. There are current exploits on using hand to hand style combat, but these may be nerfed in the future. You can find a few of these guides floating around the "How Do I?" section of the forums.

--MagicManICT, 8 March, 2017

I've been told that segments of this hunting guide are out dated. Proceed cautiously considering, I'll see when I can get the energy to rewrite it.

Now that you've a bit of experience in melee combat, it's time to try out hunting with bow and arrow. You'll want 10 marksmanship and 10 carpentry to get rolling. First task is to craft at least a quality 10/10/10 bow, but since you're soft capping the quality a fair bit don't worry about using higher quality than 10 really. At least 5 arrows (bone arrows made from rabbit/chicken bones work fine), and 2L or more worth of drinking water in your inventory.

First off, this isn't the only way to hunt but it's something everyone should have access to. There are also techniques involving hunting across water instead of cliffs, but smart hearthlings like yourself should be able to figure out how that works from this cliff hunting tutorial. In order to trap a mob, you'll need a cliff that extends roughly 25 tiles in either direction of where you want to trap it. The cliff I used happens to be a U shape, but that's not required. Mobs that can be safely hunted like this are Boar and Deer. Quick note: Cave entrances count as a hitbox and will block any shots if the mob is wedged up against one.

It seems the devs have upped the range which animals will run around to get to you. I'd suggest playing it safe with cliffs that extend out of your vision range in both directions unless you're able to handle the damage of being beaten down by whatever you're trying to shoot. By all means experiment a bit, but do so within your capability to heal and don't rush things. Being so hurt it's too dangerous to forage is not a fun situation to be in.

Now the trick here is to use the melee aggro to draw the mob to the cliff. I'm assuming Ctrl+T stands for taunt. Deer are very quick, so you'll need to find one close to a cliff to work this with. Boar however can be outrun on third move setting (remember, watch for super boar. If it's moving at a slow saunter you're good, but avoid the quick trotting ones), so you're safe to aggro them at a range and climb the cliff when you're far enough ahead so they don't catch up. I ran this boar in from a minimap away.

In order to aim the bow press H by default with none of the crafting sub menus (or you can hotbar it to 6-0, since 1-5 are remapped for combat). When you click on the bar I like to have the camera swung more horizontal, this allows me to click the boar's tile without confusing the game into thinking I want to shoot the cliff at my feet. If you're within 1-2 tiles the boar can hit you with melee, so you'll want to stand ~3 tiles away from the cliff. When aiming anywhere past the red line I drew is going to have pretty reliable accuracy at this range/ability level/bow quality.

And now the chase begins! Boar will have to be run down on foot, but hopefully you manage to instakill deer which have ~175hp. For deer, try to fill up as much as possible of your aim bar. Running them down involves de-aggroing and trying to figure out where they ran off to for a second shot. Aggroing a fleeing animal will cause it to flee again, you'll have to run up to it and pointblank the deer as fast as you can if this happens.

This is a good time to remember that defenses can be raised while pursuing something. This is particularly important in case you make a mistake with the boar's move "Tusk Romp". This defensive move causes a counter attack if you hit the boar while it's active whether or not it's in flee mode, and that's likely going to knock your hearthling on its butt.

A couple solid left hooks or haymakers (tusk romp defends against neither of these), and the boar is down. I'd guesstimate this boar had roughly 300hp since it took a 202 bowshot, and 3x47 worth of haymakers before going down.

Fresh boar meat for all! Boar gives lots of str FEP, while cooked deer gives a very useful amount of per. It's worth noting that foxes can be shot point blank to instakill them. Well so can deer. But in both these cases if you miss your timing on the shot and it moves, you'll get aggroed and drubbed soundly for your mistake. I personally prefer to stick to cliffs since the healing time is kind of long.

Also note: This technique is very dangerous when used with bears. When they run you'll need to de-aggro them (since they've peaced you, just click on the olive branch beside their name to complete the peacing), and then follow and try to shoot them without a cliff. If you miss, they run again and it's no big deal. However, if you cause the bear to enter rage mode when it's at low HP, it will chase you at sprint speed and maul you quite badly.

I have hunted bear this way (Q10 bow/bone arrows seems to kill it right through the rage), but I was well aware my character was at risk of serious injury and/or death. Proceed only if you're willing to take that risk.

Alternative bear hunting method that takes advantage of current mechanics hidden below. This requires a friend or an alt, and since mechanics may be changed I can't guarentee this'll work forever. I'll do my best to update this if something gets put through

by **Sevenless** » Mon Aug 31, 2015 7:45 pm

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A healing touch

If you're anything like me, you've probably got some scrapes from learning how to hunt. Amusingly, while mucking with a boar to get a picture of tusk romp I got nailed myself. Perfect time to learn about the healing system!

Now you see my health bar has three different colours. Red stands for Soft Hit Points (SHP), if these reach zero I will pass out. Yellow stands for Hard Hit Points (HHP), these act as a maximum number of shp I can have and if they hit zero my character will die. Oh and the black zone represents how much total HHP I'm missing from the maximum I could have. Whenever an attack hits my character, he receives the full damage to SHP, and a percentage is also applied to his HHP. In the case of the boar, he was hit for 76 damage, and ~20% of that was also applied as that Fell Slash HHP wound you see. If you want to see your wounds they are listed on the 5th tab of the Character sheet.

SHP will heal on its own at the cost of roughly 2 energy per 1shp so long as you're above 4000 energy. Some HHP wounds will heal themselves, others will stay until medical treatment is applied.

Here's a quick guide to the various common injuries. Do note, the healing system is being re-worked a lot and this part might get out-dated. I'll do my best to keep ontop of it.

Self healing
Nick Knack - heals quickly
Leech Burns - heals quickly
Punch Sore - heals quickly
Bruise - heals slowly or use Leeches to convert to Leech Burns.
Starvation - heals slowly
Asphyxiation - heals slowly

Requires intervention
Unfaced - Leech
Blunt Trauma - Leech or Gauze
Swollen Bump - Leech or Stinging Poultice
Deep Cut - Stinging Poultice or Gauze
Fell Slash - Gauze
Cruel Incision - Gauze or Stitch Patch
Wretched Gore - Stitch Patch (Despite the text, this does not increase in severity or kill you... yet)

Known rare medicine
Rootfil: Requires strange root (rare curio from destroying stumps) and laurel leaves

Leeches are found simply by wading in swamps with any equipment slots open. They damage your SHP and have a small chance to convert 1 point of the wounds they "heal" into quick healing leech burns. If they bloat (damage you three times to bloat) they can be used as fishing bait so that's a small benefit. Left alone, they will eventually unbloat so don't let them sit too long if you want to use them for fish.

Stinging poultice will require access to a Nettle spawning biome and some hides (well and a clay cauldron at least). It's a of a nuisance at first, but remember you can split hides into hide patches with a right click if they are bigger than 1x1. Right click this onto the wound you want to heal and choose treat. You can have as many poultices running as you want, but they come with a str/agi penalty.

Gauze is often tough to acquire for starters. You'll need the Basic Mechanics skill and will have to make a loom. Next you'll need to find a grassland, forage clover, and right click the clover when standing near a sheep to make it docile. Then you right click it with a sharp tool equipped to sheer wool, and use that wool to craft gauze on your loom. Gauze is applied the same way as poultice, but you can only have one running at a time because it takes up your neck equipment slot (top right on the equipment screen which can be accessed by Ctrl+E).

Stitch patch requires metal and cloth. Honestly, if you're in the early days of the game and manage to acquire a wretched gore, it may be worthwhile to consider suiciding your character after some preparation. Stitch patch heals a meager 1hhp per day, and due to wretched being at least 50+ damage, that means you're in for 2 months of healing. If you do decide it's worth it, and lack the farming for cloth consider making wool cloth from clover harvested wool.

Easy right?

Yeah I don't really think so either. Be careful about taking damage out there in the hearthlands, healing those wounds can be pretty tough in the early days.

by **Sevenless** » Mon Aug 31, 2015 7:45 pm

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Striking the earth

Now that we've covered how to get meat for both strength and energy regeneration, it's about time to move underground. Unlike in the old haven, mining does not require special preparation. Any character with a Q10 stone axe and 10 str can mine some of the segments of underground caves (bring a bucket of water though, it burns stamina very quickly). The iconic bear cape is still ingame and will give a hefty str if you manage to kill one. A second bear kill can be used to make bear tooth necklaces which also carry a minor str bonus. These are nice, but not required to get started. Requirements that you do need however are:

Mining (Stone Working to unlock)
Metalworking
Brick discovery (clay cooked in a kiln, unlocked via pottery skill)

There are several skills that come after mining/metalworking, and they will greatly increase the bar yield of any ore you mine. But they don't impact your ability to find a vein, which can quite frankly be a long endeavor. If you're serious about mining (beyond wanting the metal basics) I'd say start picking those skills up while you vein hunt. Also, since it takes a while to burn, it's a good idea to make yourself a tar kiln first before setting foot in a cave. These take around a real life day to finish cooking and their quality acts as a soft cap to the quality of coal produced. Make it, load it up with blocks of wood and set it burning as soon as you feel you're ready to start mining and smelting ore. Black coal can be mined underground, but it's a lot more effort and not reliably found.

When you first enter a cave, the walls (assuming you're the first in there) will look something like this:

Sometimes you'll be able to mine the wall, sometimes you won't. The message it gives will hint at how much more mining power you need to mine the wall. Ranging from "Just slightly too hard" to "You don't even scratch this rock" in severity. Mining power is based off your tool quality and your character's strength score. Improving either of those will help you mine more of the underground world. Wall hardness depends on the type of rock/ore present, and also has some hardness variation which appears as regions of harder than normal rock.

Each hourglass you see is a single mining check. Once it's complete, you have a chance to get ore/stone, a chance to get a mining curiosity (which are pretty terrible right now), and a chance to break the wall tile/cause a cave in if it's unsupported. Cave walls don't give ore/stone so you just get the other two possibilities per mining check. It can vary pretty wildly in how many checks it takes to destroy a single tile, from one all the way up to fifty on the rare occasion.

When your cave wall is finally mined out, you get to see what rock type is behind it. Here's an example where I was mining out spots along the wall to attempt to figure out how wide my heavy earth ore vein was.

As you can see, the heavy earth vein was running between segments of limestone and sandstone, the vein itself is a good 25 tiles wide, and runs at least 100 tiles in length. Veins can vary from large ones like this, to smaller veins like the 50 tiles of Iron Ochre I found in my other cave. Ore type will also impact the size/shape.

When looking for your first metal, you have two options. One is simple, but somewhat dangerous/frustrating. The other is more complicated, but significantly safer.

Dangerous method: Poking the stone bear

Move along the walls mining out a hole every ten tiles or so. Check the rock type (mine until something shows up in your inventory) to familiarize yourself, and also see if you get better quality stone for making a better stone axe. If you right click the rock/ore on the ground a stockpile will appear. Stone stockpiles are gray, while ore stockpiles are reddish brown in colouration if you're not certain what it is. Metal veins are not exactly common, you will likely need to spend an hour or two looking before you find one. Possibly more if you happen to have caves that don't cross metal veins.

On the note of making prospecting holes, you're going to get rocks dumped on your poor little hearthling's head more likely than not. Cave ins on the first level don't appear to be lethal to full health miners, but be aware the possiblity exists. However, the HHP loss from a single cave in will likely put your metal finding adventure on hold for the rest of the day as you heal up.

Safe method: Prospecting

Prospecting is a touch more straightforward than it was in legacy. You'll still need rustroot extract (~900 PER*EXP score to see this regularly) before you get started. When prospecting, it will tell you the stone type directly beneath you. If you are within a certain number of tiles of an ore vein that is below, you'll get an arrow like this:

After a couple tests, using Vitality 10 extract I found out the range on the arrow to be roughly 5 tiles away. Vitality 30 extract however had a detection range of 50 tiles. Both Essence and Substance appeared to have no effect on it. My best suggestion for getting decent extract is to find some vitality water with 30+ which will make even Q10 rustroot useful.

It's been noted that Perception at the very least has some influence on the "accuracy" of the arrow. I don't consider this particularly problematic since RR extract is cheap to make and low PER does not cause false positives. I've seen no evidence that PER influences range of the scan, but it's possible. Either way, even a low PER character seems able to make decent use of rustroot extract.

Cavesweeper

Cave ins work in a similar fashion to minesweeper. Unstable tiles are randomly seeded throughout the caves, and mining into one will always cause a cave in. The game warns you if an unstable tile is nearby by displaying dust particles floating from the ceiling when you knock out an adjacent tile.

It's a little hard to convey in a static picture, but you get the idea. Now, this dust means one of the 8 tiles surrounding it is marked as unstable. When you're wall prospecting you don't get any warning and can mine straight into these unstable tiles causing a collapse. But when you're mining and/or making tunnels you can start to figure things out. Here's an example of an area I was clearing with coal. Any place you see a coal pile, there was dust from the ceiling. I screwed up and caused a collapse, that's marked by the bat hide.

And unfortunately, science demands sacrifice. I mined out the furthest right unstable tile that I'd marked, and got the painful but expected result.

And there you have it. If you'd prefer to dig support free, assuming there's not too many unstable tiles and you're careful you're more than able to do so if you choose. The technique I use (that will work with any client too) is to pave anywhere I see dust when mining out a vein supportless. Be careful not to pave with your fresh mined ore, drop that off in a stockpile first. Any square that doesn't have dust drop you are safe to mine all eight tiles that touch it (including diagonally). It's more time consuming than dropping supports, but for a small operation it's sufficient.

Do remember however, that the most dangerous part of caves at the moment is still the bats. Crawling by them will, 95% of the time, allow you to continue on your path even if you pass within a couple tiles of them. Risking it with 1-2 bats is perfectly fine if you're not able to fight them yet (and you shouldn't really be fighting groups of bats). However if there's 3 or more, getting the swarm aggroed could very well fatally cripple your character or kill it outright. As such, if larger swarms block your way it's probably best to pick a different cave or branch of the cave for more prospecting. Leaving a cave alone for thirty minutes will allow the bat spawns to reset.

Once you've manage to get both coal and ore, it's time to smelt! It will take 12 pieces of coal in a smelter to fully smelt one load of ore. Different ores have different chances to produce a bar of metal when smelted, and some ores can produce different bar types. That Heavy Earth node I mentioned is effectively the worst ore in the game. It's pretty normal to see a smelter full of stones after a burn, with the average bars per load being somewhere around one with some loads having none and some loads giving you two. If you manage to find Iron Ochre, it's slightly better averaging somewhere between one an two bars a load. Tin and Copper ores of various types may also be discovered. It's unlikely you'll find better iron ores though due to them being harder rock types and therefore well out of the reach of beginners.

Better luck next time hopefully.

Metal expenditures of particular interest, roughly in order I decided to get them
Village idol 1 bar (village chat, 101x101 claim area)
Anvil set = 5 + 2 bars (needed to do pretty much anything else with metal)
Pickaxe = 4 bars (much faster mining speed)
Meat Grinder = 3 bars (new FEPs from hunted meat, AGI off deer sausage is particularly nice)
2 Wooden Chests = 4/10th of a bar each (carrying capacity to make ore hauling easier. Pair this with a road for teleportation to triple your effectiveness)
2 Spectacles = 1/10th of a bar each (bonus PER)
Metal Shovel = 1 bar (faster digging)
Metal Saw = 1 bar (more boards/log)
Metal Axe = 2 bar (more blocks/log)
Metal Cauldron = 6 bars (instant boil instead of waiting 10 minutes for a clay cauldron)

Wrought and Steel

Wrought iron is made in a Finery Forge. Unlike the smelter, the finery forge will only soft cap the quality of bloom or slag produced. Once bars of metal are burned with 2 charcoal (~10 minutes, set a timer), some of the bars will be turned into slag (low grade ore for reburning) and some will become bloom. Bloom eventually turns into slag if left to sit, so try to get it processed asap. Hammer the bloom on an anvil for a chance to get a bar of cast iron again, or a chance of getting Wrought iron. Mining skills are heavily suggested for this endeaver, and even Deep Artifice gives quite a noticeable boost to it. DA is by no means required, but I personally regretted not getting it sooner.

Once your wrought iron is made, it's time to fire up steel crucibles. These act like the finery forge again, soft cap only, and need to be lit for 56 consecutive hours. Luckily blocks of wood can be used to fuel them, with 4 blocks overfilling the fuel gauge. The fuel inside a crucible will last 12 hours, meaning they will need to be fueled 3 times per day in order to not risk them going out. Unlike smelting, steel progress gets completely reverted if the crucible runs out of fuel.

I bring this up because even though it is a rather monumental task as a hermit, lacking a brick wall by mid world is asking for trouble when raiders are able to field characters that can bash palisades by hand. If current reports are to be believed, this becomes an issue after the world is 3 months old or so.

by **Sevenless** » Mon Aug 31, 2015 7:45 pm

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Taming

Taming is fairly simple, if requiring some LP invested into combat abilities. Animals that can be fed a clover and leashed with a rope can be tamed (mouflon, auroch, boar). You right click a rope onto them to leash after feeding the clover, and then lead them home to your hitching post where you hitch them by right clicking that rope on the post.

Just a quick note, boar will always have the chance to aggro you, even while in the middle of the clovering process. You might need to go through a couple to get one that actually becomes leashable.

Beginner Fu and a set of leather armor (badger vest + bat cloak also suggested) should be sufficient. With the leather armor, you only need enough deflection value to bounce what damage they get through your block. Since we're on the subject, lets cover how armor works:

Wear is essentially the number of hitpoints the armor has before disintegrating. Armor class is given as Deflection/Absorption and is given as the most points from an attack that the armor can handle before the rest goes to your SHP. Your armor values from all your worn armor is added up, and attack damage is first applied to the deflection. Any damage hitting deflection is ignored entirely. If there's still damage left, it's now put against the absorption which accumulates wear on your armor. If any damage is left after this, it gets applied against your SHP as mentioned earlier. Some attacks also have a part of their damage ignore armor entirely, but most animals do not possess this. Ants are the only current* example, but updates can change this so always be careful.

So the key here is, since damage that leaks through a block is proportional to the amount of the attack that was absorbed we don't need to be perfect. Agility remains as quite important though due to needing to continue refreshing blocks at least as quickly as the animal is taking them down, we don't want to receive a full damage hit.

My current best guesses as to the minimal values (these are after penalty/bonuses) for taming without taking damage in leather armor are:

Mouflon (sheep): 20ua, 20-25 agi
Auroch (cow): 40ua, 30 agi
Boar: 50ua, 30agi

Now, once we've gotten the animal hitched and waited 24 hours you should see the animal "ready for combat". Left of this picture is the passive cow, while right is the ready signal.

Animals will exit the combat stage if left in fight mode after 3-6 hours. Initiate a fight with them, and immediately click the crossed swords button in the top right of the screen. This puts up your "yield" such that when the animal is beaten combat will end immediately and there's no chance of you accidentally hitting it again after. Now: keep up one of each block, and start hitting them with punch (because of boar's tusk romp, you'll want to use Left Hook instead for them). It's currently possible to kill an animal accidentally while taming so you want the damage to be low.

When the fight is over you will be granted some taming points and the animal can now be leashed and re-attached to the hitching post without needing a clover (this must be done for the animal to stay after the area unloads). An Auroch took 3 taming rounds (4 IRL days) to complete taming. It's a pretty good idea to try and do multiple animals at once since you'll want one of each gender and you can't tell which is which when they're wild. You will need a hitching post for each animal you try to tame simultaneously.

And there we have it! After much practice and dedication I managed to tame a cow.

Breeding

Now that you have tamed at least one male and one female, it's time to talk about what happens next. Left together in the same pen, the female will get pregnant within two real life days. When this happens, the amount of fodder she consumes increases. There's no inbreeding mechanics, so a single male is all you'll need at a time. Bulls can be used to pull wagons, and since there's a chance they'll get hungry and take a loss of "wellfedness", make sure to keep your breeding bull seperate from your wagon pullers.

When the baby is born, all of the stats will have random modifiers put on them. The base value of the stats will be the average of the male and female's qualities. In legacy the breeding stat of the male served as a soft cap on the attributes of the produced young. After significant testing, it's utterly impossible to raise everything at the same time, you need to specialize your breeding lines if you want to get forward motion.

Meat (sub, vit, meat quantity, meat %, breeding)

Sheep meat isn't overly useful. The sausages produce per and a dex multi food. Sheep however seem to eat less than cows and have shorter breeding cycles. This makes them an ideal source of quality suckling maws.

Cow meat produces good constitution, but isn't really worth the effort in my opinion. Calves do produce suckling maws though.

Pig meat is str/con and usable for boar recipes. They also get special modifiers on their meat quality, making endgame pigs meat fountains. Piglets do not produce suckling maws.

Milk (sub, vit, milk quantity, milk %, breeding)

Sheep do produce milk, but at a far slower rate than cows. A sheep with 10 milk quantity seems to produce half the milk of a cow with 10 milk quantity. Likely they also have a less beneficial random applied to milk quantity. In theory milking sheep endgame could be quite good, but they would be far outpaced by cows for the first 2-3 months of breeding.

Cows are the obvious choice for milk, and seem to do their job well. Most people will be raising milking cows.

Pigs do not produce milk.

Hide/Wool (ess, sub, vit, hide % or wool %, breeding)

Naturally sheep are the only wool giver. Beyond that I'd guess if you can gain additional hide it comes from meat quantity, but for hide I feel vit has enough utility that trading quantity for vit is a decent trade off. Any of the animal types will work for this, but I'd guess that sheep are probably the best for it if my hunch about them having faster generations is true.

Instead of raising both a hide and a wool line of sheep, you could sacrifice vitality and raise both hide % and wool % on the same line. Your vapentreyiu will have significantly less wear, but enough to survive a pvp encounter and cheap to replace in general.

Breeding Summary

Personally, I would suggest: Milk cow, Wool/Hide combo sheep, Meat sheep for maws, Meat pig.

This list is roughly in the order of importance. If you're extremely limited on space or time for farming, just a line of milk cows would be my suggestion. Expand down the line if you feel you have the labour/space required. In the long run, and with haven's tri quality we might be talking 2 years, domesticated animals will produce better hide and meat than can be found in the wild. As such, breeding a line for hide will eventually produce far superior leather than can be found in the wild.

Note: It may be difficult to gain on all 5 suggested stats. It's a very difficult game of deciding what's most important to you when you're deciding if one negative stat is worth taking to gain in the other four. How you balance those decisions is up to you.

Chickens

Chickens are the other type of domesticated animal, but with significantly less hassle involved. All you need to do is scoop them up, and put them in a coop with water and feed. Hens lay eggs in any of the spaces in the 2x2 below them. A single rooster will fertilize any of the eggs laid, causing them to eventually hatch into a chick if left under a hen. The eggs will progress one more maturation tick if taken out from a hen, occasionally causing eggs to hatch in cupboards. This should also allow you to move them around of you so wish, because the egg only dies if the tick happens and no hen is found.

Personally this is how I have my chicken coops set up because it lets me squeeze in one extra hen while still leaving room for each hen to have 2 slots to lay eggs in. You can go further and shift the central lower hen up one tile to fit 10 hens in total, but 3 hens only get one egg laying space as a result.

I check my coops once a day and pull any eggs with a minimum quality less than 2 higher than my current lowest hen (custom client quality views are massively helpful here). This ensures a good mix between quality advancing and eggs for cooking. Once the eggs hatch, I move the babies to a second coop to mature. Keep note that food quality and water quality get averaged to determine if a chicken loses quality when eating. Food quality can be checked in troughs or chicken coops with a bucket. For sanity's sake, just assume any water put in is 10/10/10. In general crops advance fast enough that with a bit of headstart they should easily keep ahead of chickens if farmed regularly with enough farming skill to prevent capping.

By end game, chicken bones will be the highest quality possible to find. The feathers also make the very solid feather trinket and winged helm.

by **Sevenless** » Mon Aug 31, 2015 7:45 pm

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Crops

If you haven't read the hotkeys section by now, you really should go back to the first post of this guide and check them out. Shift+Right click on harvestable crops or seeds to get the bulk harvest and bulk plant options respectively

Skills and Abilities have quite a notable effect on farming. Your farming ability will act as a soft cap on the quality of planted seeds, and the harvesting character can have several skills will boost the amount of seeds/vegetables received. Getting ready to invest in these is a good idea if you intend to farm actively

The farming system has been changed in a notable way from legacy. Primarily, most crops take significantly longer to grow than they used to. Without beehives, carrots take roughly a day, while pumpkins and grapes take up to two weeks to finish growing. Furthermore, the beehive influence on crop growth has been lowered dramatically. They will still speed up most crops (barley being a wind pollinated instead of insect pollinated crop ignores beehives), but only to the tune of 20-30%. What this means is that effectively carrots will still take a full day per generation, although a particularly enthusiastic individual might be able to shorten that a little. Crops like pumpkins and grapes though the effect will be noticeable due to the very long generation times. One of the side effects of longer growing times is that you don't really want to start farming until you find your final living place. Any seeds you put down in temporary camps will either be wasted or encourage you to stay in a place you already decided was temporary.

Now, your first task for getting started into farming is to collect as many Wild Windsown Weeds as possible. These should start showing up very regularly by the time you hit 15*15 EXP*PER score.

Frankly, if you've taken the time to find a proper living space far enough out from spawn you should easily have these stats by now. Which seed a WWW gives when dried on a drying rack is determined by the seed spawning region it came from. These are invisible, but you don't want to just stick to the area around your base as you'll get a limited variety of seeds. I suggest "straight line foraging" where you walk in a given direction picking up nothing but WWW's until your inventory is full. Port home, start them drying, and repeat 3-4 times. Try to note which direction you go each time, and remember which drying racks you put the seeds on.

This is important because you're going to want more than 1-2 seeds of each type due to the length of a growing cycle. A single flax seed would take over a week to make enough fibers for an herb table. Herb tables allow you to dry seeds faster, and they also serve as crucial ingredients in both Sericulture (silk making) and tree planting. The seeds of particular interest are as follows:

Flax: 8 fibers for an herbalist table (also requires plant lore skill)
Barley: 10 straw for beehive, 10 straw for chicken coop (note straw can be used as thatch, don't accidentally waste it that way)
Beets: Fast growing reliable animal fodder
Pumpkins: Very slow to grow, you'll want a head start. Reliable CON food when baked into pie, CON can be quite difficult to get
Grapes: Very slow to grow, you'll also want this in the ground asap. Vinegar will be used to make cheese, good idea to get this started.

There are a number of other crops in game, but these five are the ones that are essential to have. Try to find 3-4 seeds of each type, repeating directions that gave you the seeds you wanted on your WWW trips. It's worth mentioning that three of the crops ingame (peas, hops, grapes) require a trellis to grow. You don't need to plow, just build the trellis and Right click the seed onto the trellis to plant. It's also worth noting that carrots have multiple stages of harvestability:

Here are the three harvestable stages of carrots. The first gives a single carrot (good for quality grinding), the second gives seeds (good for expanding your fields) and the final stage gives multiple carrots. The first and third stage are easiest to tell apart by the colour of the leaves, since the early stage has yellow leaves and the final stage has green ones. The other crops that have multiple stages that I'm aware of are: Hemp (orange buds = harvest for no seeds but you get curable hemp bud), and beetroots (harvesting early gives beets, but no leaves).

Beehives:

Personal testing of beehives is not supporting the math as it was initially explained by the devs. Currently, beehives support far more crops than you'd expect. One possible explanation is that "hour" referred to ingame hour, which would make ticks regenerate x3 faster than the stated rate. Either way, I'm running 1 beehive per 100-200 tiles of crop land without any ill effects, and it's effectively required to run more tiles per hive to get decent amounts of wax production. Wax seems to be produced roughly every 400 stage changes around a beehive.

Each time a crop grows to the next stage, it checks if there's a beehive within range. If it finds beehive, the time before the next stage change is reduced, and the beehive receives a usage tick. Beehives can store up to 50 uses (and noting how jorb worded it, it's likely they start will a full 50 when first created), and will regenerate 6 uses per hour. Crops using a beehive will cause honey and wax production (exact mechanics unknown), but jorb has stated there is a low level of base production of honey/wax by a hive even if it has no crops nearby.

The crucial note here is the usage cap of 50 (and a daily regeneration of no more than 144 uses). The number of hives you need varies pretty heavily based on what type of crop you're growing. Carrots will go through 5 stages per day (1 hive per 28 tiles), beets will do about 4 stages per day (1 hive per 36 tiles) and flax will do roughly 1-2 stages per day (1 hive per 72 tiles? The 50 use cap might mean you have to reduce this).

My advice would be 1 hive per 25 tiles of fast growing crops (beets/carrots/onions) and 1 per 50 tiles of anything else. Remember that barley doesn't need a beehive. This might be a bit of overkill, but beehives have no intrinsic quality (quality of products depends on quality of the crops growing nearby) so you don't need to spend good resources making them.

Farming and Quality

Okay so farming quality is... "interesting" right now.

When you plant a crop you can tell what quality you're going to harvest it at via the inspect tool (A S for hotkey). You will get RNG of -2 to +5 on each of the three stats. This will hold for the entire batch of seeds that you plant if they have the same initial quality. In order to increase quality faster than RNG would normally, test planting becomes important. A small area seperated from your main fields should be set up for test planting so any harvests from that don't accidentally round qualities down in what you harvest.

Test plant, is the quality bad? Wait. Within 5 hours the stats will be fully randomized from what you initially got, if you plant sooner than that you'll get similar ish results. The worse the test plant, the longer you should wait, but toy with it and figure out what works for your schedule. If you're a more casual player I honestly think you should just check back the next day on a really bad test. Testing should be done in a side area from the main batch crop, any seeds harvested out of this will have pretty trashy rounding effects.

Now, due to how it's coded, there can be very tiny variations in the quality of a planted field. usually this is 1 point quality difference on one of the three qualities. Some people drop seeds after every harvest, or use clients that do so to prevent auto-stacking. I personally think that's too much hassle and just eat the quality loss, but it's good to be aware of the mechanic.

Your farming quality will go up overall if you simply ignore this test planting mechanic, and that's an option if you want a more hands off approach to farming. The most important thing is to make sure you get a single seed quality going when planting larger fields. The rounding effect gets harsh enough to really destroy the quality of a field if you plant multiple strains.

Treeplanting

Trees grow fastest when living on a forest biome. If planted on grassland, they may take 2 or more weeks to grow. However if planted on a forest tile they will grow within 7 days assuming they don't get stunted.

In order to plant trees, you'll need a character with most or all of the treefarming related skills (those currently include Druidic Rite, so it's quite costly). Dirt+water+seed go into the treeplanter pot, and then are left on a table to sprout (this takes a little over an hour). Without full skills, some trees will die on the table which can be a real nuisance when planting trees that give relatively few seeds.

Once your sprouts are ready, they can be planted and do not have spacing requirements like legacy haven did. The stunting chance is instead completely random and determined when the sprout is planted. Even full treeplanting skills will not eliminate this stunting chance. Trees at any stage of growth can have items picked off them without harming the tree and they will come out at full quality. If the tree is cut down before full maturity though, the wood quality and amount will be harmed significantly.

When picking which species to grow, it's worth noting that all species (at the time of this writing) grow at the exact same speed, and equally well on any of the forest types. This means the species of preference becomes based off the trees attributes and products. Some species produce more wood per log, and more logs in total when full grown (maple and king's oak). Some species produce boughs, which are critical for mining pick quality and bow quality and therefore completely essential for any self sustaining village (alder, elm, fire, spruce, yew). Species with edible fruits can harvest seeds before full maturity, allowing their over time quality grind to outpace any of the other species through seed quality RNG. And finally some berry bushes (elder berry, blackthorn/sloan berry) produce a sizeable number of blocks when cut and both let seeds be harvested quickly and grow faster than full grown trees. In the end, what you grow is entirely up to you. Some trees produce important products, like the mulberry tree, and as such will be a must for any group. Other trees produce rarely used products, or edible fruits. The laurel tree and apple tree would be examples.

All said though, the minimum self sufficient setup requires one bough bearing tree, and the mulberry tree to cover all your needs. Minmaxers who wish to go further have all the clues they need to investigate and catalog the various species.

Growing your own forest Biome:

Sericulture - The art of making silk

Silk works almost the exact same in previous worlds, with the small change that mulberry trees no longer produce infinite leaves. There are several skills attached to getting more silk from cocoons, and it's probably not worth bothering until you have everything farming related except Druidic Rite as a minimum. You can still stockpile wild moths/eggs in preparation though.

The basic process is quite simple:

-Capture silk moths of opposite genders, and let them breed in a cupboard (this may take up to 24 hours).

-Hatch the eggs on a herbalist table (8 hours)

-Place silk worms into a cabinet filled with mulberry leaves. Each worm will eat one leaf every four hours after hatching. If a worm fails to find a leaf to eat 2 times, it will die. (16 hours)

-After four leaves each, the worms will cocoon. At this stage you'll need to process some cocoons if you want silk from that batch. I'd suggest culling roughly half your stock, picking for the lowest qualities (some clients have a "lowest quality" view setting that is very helpful here).

-Adult moths will emerge from the cocoons after 16 hours. Within the next 8 hours following, you can re-arrange them so genders are matched up (up to 10 mating pairs can fit in a cupboard). After 8 hours of being born, they will mate to produce the next generation (48 hours for a complete generation).

A couple notes on general efficiency need to be taken with that though. 3 Herbalist tables can hatch enough worms to fill 4 cabinets. Each mulberry tree grown to maturity will stock 5 cabinets with leaves. This is an example of a stone stead with the first floor set up for silking:

This setup uses ~1.6 grown trees worth of leaves per generation, and produces up to 96 filaments with full skills if you take exactly half the cocoons. 2 extra cocoons taken will give exactly 1 cloth per generation if you have Druidic rite. The extra cabinet is for general storage.

Since the average person will manage to complete 2-3 generations a week, I'd suggest planting 1 mulberry tree per cabinet that's expected to have worms in it for the next week. This is a bit overkill for characters with Druidic Rite, but it lets you be pickier about the leaf quality and gives room for trees being stunted. This is assuming you're planting on Wald biome, off wald mulberry trees will grow much slower. If you're not planting on wald, I'd plant as many mulberries as you can and just plan your silking around the amount of leaves you manage to collect.

by **Sevenless** » Mon Aug 31, 2015 7:45 pm

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Smelting station setup

Example ore processing station that should serve the needs of 1-3 person villages. Pull coal from one kiln as needed, when it empties refill/light and begin using the other kiln until you need to repeat.

Don't forget the quick travel option of roads. Linking your mines to your main base does make your base more visible if they're multiple minimaps apart, but the increased hauling speed of ores/materials is very crucial to keeping yourself efficient when mining. Roads can also be built inside the caves themselves.

Symbel and other food bonuses

Despite confusing naming, Symbel items that give "satiation reduction" actually give hunger reduction which is frankly far far more useful. Substitution and vitality are the two most important qualities since they influence hunger reduction and wear respectively. Vit is important because as wear increases, the bonuses given from the items decrease. It's worth noting that each item added to the table does not cause a flat decrease in the hunger reduction, as such keeping your table at 100% new status isn't required to get the majority of the benefit. As always, play around with it and see what meets your needs.

My personal suggestion for a table that is both effective and affordable would have the following items on it are below. These items are organized cheapest to most expensive.

This applies to beginners specifically, and so it assumes ~q10 on everything. If you have obscenely high quality stuff, the optimal list will change quite a bit

Wooden Plate, Wine Glass, Soft Metal Cutlery, Pepper Shaker, Pepper Mill, Metal Plate, Tankard (Drinking Horn if tin-less), Metal Saucier, Cast Iron Trivet.

Both smoking hemp for the buff and using pepper on food have buffs attached to them. I haven't done enough testing to know how powerful/useful these are, but feel free to experiment with them if it interests you.

[Outdated] Sevenless' beginner guide to Haven and Hearth

[Outdated] Sevenless' beginner guide to Haven and Hearth

Sevenless' beginner guide to Haven and Hearth

Sevenless' beginner guide to Haven and Hearth

Sevenless' beginner guide to Haven and Hearth

Sevenless' beginner guide to Haven and Hearth

Sevenless' beginner guide to Haven and Hearth

Sevenless' beginner guide to Haven and Hearth

The nurturing hand: Taming and Livestock

Elven Pastimes: Crops, Trees, and Silk

Making a Home: Tidbits about life in haven going forward

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