Tons of content is locked behind hard metal/cave layer 2 now

[Rebs]

I hear you, but I actually have the opposite perspective—I feel that reaching the Hard Metal age could even be delayed further.
In my opinion, the game would benefit from stretching out the "Stone Age" and "Bronze Age" before we jump into Iron. It feels more rewarding to build a civilization out of clay, bone, and stone first. Ideally, I’d love to see the primitive era last at least a week, or perhaps longer for a solo player.

Since Haven is an open-world PvP game, I think it’s natural for the difficulty to be balanced around teamwork and cooperation. If the progression were designed primarily around hermits, the game would likely become too easy for organized groups.

yesssss +1
Move tin to lvl 2 and shift everything.


I would even argue make pyres take 2 weeks, I feel like the majority of players are not ready for the next level of mines before its unlocked. Honestly the catch up mechanics is kinda stupid and poorly implemented but it does at least timegate "ages" which is fun imo. having stuff locked behind mining is fine, I do agree as mentioned before there is too many things on hard metal which could be moved to iron for a bit of a wider discovery and need for iron.

[Mr_Bober]

Wax is not hard to get. Just build beeskeps as you get larvas from beehives(corn grass drops straw already).
Anything that slows down the game is great IMO. The pyre, the metal distribution, the steel, the crops domestication, etc.

As with many other suggestions, it all boils down to the usual thing: the game can't be tailored to large villages AND hermits at the same time.
Haven is clearly meant to be a co-op game. Everything in the game suggests that, from abilities and attributes, to credos and village/realm systems.
If you decide to play solo, or with a very tiny group, it's your choice and you suffer the consequences.
Best tip I can give to hermits or small groups is to make an alt, go meet the larger villages, and trade with them.

I trade stuff to lots of hermits in my area.
Bronze (gear or bars+parchments) is often among those trades.
To hermits:
Villages often look for two things: items of value (cave clay, local resources, etc) or items that require time to get in bulk (eggs, lots of strings, bunch of decent curios, etc).
A crate of drangonflies, barnacles and similar is a great thing to trade. A bunch of low-q strings from cattails as building materials. Chicken eggs. Meats. A couple of weeks into the world, silk; super easy to make, very boring, villages need a ton of it and it's valuable even at low quality (for belts and the new backpacks).

[VDZ]

You guys stick too much to VDZ's statement about wax, it's not about it at all.
Yes, you can farm it much easier now, but the whole idea is that 70 to 80 percent of the game is locked behind lvl2 mine construction.

The whole point of the change was to timegate content.

I am not at all opposed to timegating content. Palisades are timegated behind leather, which are timegated behind hides. Normal crops are timegated behind primitive crop evolution. Metal used to be timegated behind coal. For hermits, snekkjas (before that knarrs) used to be timegated behind mass cloth production. Skills and forageables are timegated behind getting enough LP. And so on, and so forth. I have zero issues with mine pyres, and I had no issue with them back when it took everyone a week even if someone else already finished theirs.

The problem is that after a while of good progression in various different areas (which you can lag behind on or be right on top of while affecting the other elements, but only weakly so), suddenly everything grinds to a sudden halt due to a massive bottleneck, after which suddenly everything unlocks at the same time without progression in-between.

Take alchemy for example. Since day 1 it's been possible to make Herbal Swills and Herbal Grinds, with the only upgrades being gradually finding more different forageables by raising your PER*EXP over time. After that is a long, long time of no progression whatsoever. Then you get hard metal, which instantly also gets you glassmaking (because you have the spare LP to unlock the skill way, WAY before you get to use it, and sand and lye are trivial to get) and by that time you'll also have plenty of cloth, so you instantly unlock Mushroom Decoction, Lye Ablution, Fiery combustion and Mineral Calcination, with the only upgrade left being getting precious metal to unlock the rest. Give me something in-between so I can do more than combine stuff at random until I suddenly have tons of options! The same thing with meat, which goes from roasted meat, followed by a long period of no upgrades, to suddenly all sausages at once. There is no excitement in getting new kinds of meat to get new sausages because I can already get all relevant kinds of meat by the time I can make any sausages.

Spreading it out to beyond hard metal is part of the solution, but some of it could also be pulled forward a bit to fill the gap that currently exists.

[springyb]

Hermits are choosing to play the game on Challenge Mode on purpose of their own free will, and then never shut up about the consequences of their decision and I'm tired of it. Playing the game wrong makes it harder??? Waow

Sirest of sirs, please. This is not a hermit issue. This is a user issue.

I also forgot to tell you guys. VDZ will not take any of your advice on how to improve at the game, he will only respond with pages of theorycraft about how he already plans to lose.

[MightySheep]

U want softmetal anvil? U have to feed exact solution if u wanna get will considerd u can't expect devs to spend time thinking about haven

[yym331]

I am not at all opposed to timegating content. Palisades are timegated behind leather, which are timegated behind hides. Normal crops are timegated behind primitive crop evolution. Metal used to be timegated behind coal. For hermits, snekkjas (before that knarrs) used to be timegated behind mass cloth production. Skills and forageables are timegated behind getting enough LP. And so on, and so forth. I have zero issues with mine pyres, and I had no issue with them back when it took everyone a week even if someone else already finished theirs.

The problem is that after a while of good progression in various different areas (which you can lag behind on or be right on top of while affecting the other elements, but only weakly so), suddenly everything grinds to a sudden halt due to a massive bottleneck, after which suddenly everything unlocks at the same time without progression in-between.

Take alchemy for example. Since day 1 it's been possible to make Herbal Swills and Herbal Grinds, with the only upgrades being gradually finding more different forageables by raising your PER*EXP over time. After that is a long, long time of no progression whatsoever. Then you get hard metal, which instantly also gets you glassmaking (because you have the spare LP to unlock the skill way, WAY before you get to use it, and sand and lye are trivial to get) and by that time you'll also have plenty of cloth, so you instantly unlock Mushroom Decoction, Lye Ablution, Fiery combustion and Mineral Calcination, with the only upgrade left being getting precious metal to unlock the rest. Give me something in-between so I can do more than combine stuff at random until I suddenly have tons of options! The same thing with meat, which goes from roasted meat, followed by a long period of no upgrades, to suddenly all sausages at once. There is no excitement in getting new kinds of meat to get new sausages because I can already get all relevant kinds of meat by the time I can make any sausages.

Spreading it out to beyond hard metal is part of the solution, but some of it could also be pulled forward a bit to fill the gap that currently exists.

I think you hit the nail on the head regarding the "progression gap." However, in my view, the core issue isn't the accessibility of Hard Metal itself, but rather the lack of meaningful content during that long "no-progression" period you described.
I believe we should actually extend the primitive era, but make it more dense. The reason everything feels like it grinds to a halt at Soft Metal is that we reach that stage too quickly and then get stuck behind the wax/minehole wall.

For example, Boards are currently too easy to produce. If Boards were moved further down the tech tree, it would naturally slow the game down. Of course, this would normally break progression (no Rope Walk, no Palisade, no Tanning Tub, etc.), but that’s where "Primitive" versions of these structures come in.

Primitive Palisades (made without boards/rope walks)
Primitive Furnaces (made purely from clay)
Primitive Tanning Tubs (large ceramic pots)

By adding these "Primitive ○○" alternatives, we create a smoother gradation of what players can and cannot do. As for your point about sausages, re-introducing the Ceramic Meat Grinder (as seen in Legacy) would be a perfect bridge. It could allow for early sausage making but with a significant Quality penalty or debuff, making the Hard Metal version still feel like a true upgrade.

[Halbertz]

Primitive Tanning Tubs (large ceramic pots)

Locked behind 1 bone.

What imo game is really missing is some mid game things between bronze and steel. Armor is a good example, as no one realy uses any iron armor or weapons.

[MightySheep]

The time between bronze and steel doesn't feel very long tho

[Dawidio123]

The time between bronze and steel doesn't feel very long tho

Eh it's 3 weeks in a normal rate world which is like 70% of the time when a world is alive and i'm being optimistic. It could really use a bunch of new qol you get from iron/wrought other than butchering cleaver ig. They keep adding random shit for week 1 which is nice but we could really use some random bullshit around week 2-3 to round it out tbh.

[Sevenless]

Fresh spawned alts on a free account are capable of smoking bees afk within 5 minutes of spawning. Find beehive, smoke, alt tab to main. Honeycombs are a joke, you grab the larva and make hives out of them from wild cereal straw. Collect up to 1 wax per day per hive by bulk planting a stupid amount of wild string grass for easy cloth access.

I never enjoy alt spam, but wax is pretty trivial if you do this right. I run 1-3 bee alts while playing on my main. Zero care in the world if they get koed by animals, usually brings back 2-3 hives of larva per hour (while you can run multiple of them). Traditional haven non-intuitive but actually very easy problem to solve.


As to the content gating... that's the point of minehole timing. I'm less concerned about the "social difficulty" of making the minehole though. It's the bit where if your neighbours get down first you are 100% helpless to make your own minehole if they're being anal enough about it. There's always a window to bash your minehole. I think that's the real issue personally.