/v/illage Haven guide/faq

-What is Haven & Hearth?
From the Website:

 Haven & Hearth is a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) set in a fictional world loosely inspired by Slavic and Germanic myth and legend. The game sets itself apart from other games in the genre in its aim to provide players with an interactive, affectable and mutable game world, which can be permanently and fundamentally changed and affected through actions undertaken by the players. Our fundamental goal with Haven & Hearth is to create a game in which player choices have permanent and/or lasting effects and, thus, providing said players with a meaningful and fun gaming experience.

Players start the game surrounded by a vast and somewhat unforgiving wilderness, with only the most basic tools of survival at their disposal. The use of fire is a thematic focal point of the game's mythos, and an early and important task will be the simple lighting of one. As the first hearth fires disperse the darkness of the surrounding wilderness, more pressing questions will present themselves to the players: Who are they? Where are they? And, most importantly, where are they going? From this point on, players will have to blaze trails of their own into the unknown, the wilderness and the future, and explore and affect the world of Haven & Hearth using only their own best judgment and a chipped stone axe. Trust us, the stone axe is the shit.

As players progress, they will be able to acquire new skills and abilities, allowing them to perform a variety of tasks—such as the claiming of land, the construction of buildings and the cultivation of crops—each step forward making the basic task of survival somewhat easier. Having progressed far enough, players will, in time, be able to organize themselves into societies, from simple tribes and villages, progressing through republics, nation states and, ultimately, empires.

-How do I play Haven & Hearth?
Go to the game website (http://www.havenandhearth.com), create and log in into an account and press the Play button on the game logo. It's a Java game, so you both need to have Java installed and to give permissions the first time you play when prompted.

As there are several features the default client doesn't have, you might want to switch to a custom client after you start understanding the game. There are several custom clients and they all have their own functionalities and convenient tools. Currently the most popular clients are:

Amber Client - http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=40400&sid=3a110e40bd9536541021a8cf68644966
Ardennes Client - http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=62292&sid=0d5e283555f5a429314a04040461fba3

While I haven't used Ardennes as it was made way after my last time playing the game, it seems to be the most complete, having features from all other popular clients. One important thing about custom clients is to use them as your own risk, most are open source so they should be safe to use, but neither the game devs or myself endorse anything in case you get your account stolen (as unlikely as it is).

-I already downloaded the client and that stuff, how do I ACTUALLY play the game?
Before we start, you need to know that this is a point and click game, most actions are done with the mouse. Left click normally is used to move and right click to select and interact with stuff. You also got several possible actions in the toolbar at the bottom right of the screen, with time you'll find yourself putting your most used actions as shortcuts to use with the number keys (or other combinations while using a custom client).

When you make your character you start in an empty forest as a will-o-wisp kinda spirit ball. There you follow the path and have to choice your gender by crossing the river in the forked path, gender doesn't matter, so choose whatever. After this there is a small water mirror where you choose your features, this is pretty barebones and only includes hair style and beard.

Following this you have to choose your name by talking to the old man in front of the fire. Once you've done this you can either start your life as a hermit by yourself, or use a code word to start at the wilderness beacon someone might have made for you. These are your tow possible paths:

start alone: just walk into the fire lol
start with someone else: go to the post with an animal skull slightly ahead and, when prompted, use the secret code you got to start with someone else. If you plan to play with the /v/illage, just tell us and we'll make one for you as fast as we can. Once you have done this, walk into the fire to spawn in the game.

-I made my character and spawned in the world, now what?
Once you started, you need to start collecting everything you can from all around you. Search bushes, trees and pick up bugs and other stuff you find to start getting learning points for skills and stats. The first time you collect anything, you will earn a small amount of learning points, which adds up pretty quick in the beginning as there are several different species of trees, bushes and a variety of stones you can chip for more discoveries.

To drop useless stuff like random seeds and crap open up your inventory and drag and drop items to the ground, you might want to save food and curiosities (explained later on).

While you collect things you'll notice that you will unlock the Craft option in the toolbar, here you can start combining things to make tools, clothes, food, curiosities and other things. The two first things you must collect are a branch (from a tree) and a stone (by chipping a rock), this will unlock crafting a stone axe. Once you craft the stone axe open up your Equipment tab (Ctrl+E) and drag the axe from your inventory to this tab in order to equip it. The stone axe allows (once learned) to chop trees, mine rocks, build stuff and chip stone and dig faster.

If you are lucky, you might see some small whiteish trees, these are birches. Collect as much birch

To start learning skills go to your Character Sheet (ctrl+t), from this menu go to the Lore & Skills tab by pressing the button at the bottom of the menu window.

The first skills you want to learn are Foraging, Hunting, Lumberjacking, Pottery and Fishing. These skills will allow you to start working around and find more stuff for sutvival and learning points.

Skills have their own pre-requirements, so if there is something you know you want to make, but have no idea how check the wiki at http://ringofbrodgar.com , I'm posting some examples of skills to pursuit and reasons below, but you might need to ask around for other stuff as the game is too big to post everything on a pastebin.

Carpentry (http://ringofbrodgar.com/wiki/Carpentry): For both building and helping other people spawn with you, this is a required skill. It allows you to build your first buildings and most wood containers and useful stuff. If you want to build a Wilderness Beacon you'll need this, other discoveries you need for that are Clay (check Pottery skill), bone (to build a bonesaw and make boards out of trees you cut down).
Yeomanry (http://ringofbrodgar.com/wiki/Yeomanry): This expensive skill is required to actually protect your stuff as it allows you to create personal claims, which in turn protect your stuff until people spend way more learning points for thievery. Even if people can eventually steal your stuff, this skill alows creating both palisades and brick walls, once you got all your stuff behind one of these walls, it's almost impossible for an enemy to take your shit or attack you inside, unless they invest heavily into siege and take your walls down, but that's unlikely to happen if you didn't piss off some big shot earlier.
Mining (http://ringofbrodgar.com/wiki/Mining): This skill is a top priority after Yeomanry when living as a hermit and a smaller one when living with other people, unless you are tasked with mining and smithing. It allows you, first of all, mine in the underground levels, build mine holes to go into said underground levels (you can get into the first level by finding a cave and save on materials), and create rustroot extract to prospect in order to find minerals.

Another useful, although dangerous skill is Swimming (http://ringofbrodgar.com/wiki/Swimming). It both opens up the path to Boat Building and allows you to swim in the water by activating a toggle. If you don't know about this, better don't activate that toggle as it's the #1 cause of noob deaths. At initial stats, you might be able to swim 3-4 tiles, but with low Constitution it drains your stamina really fast, and once it gets to 0 you start getting lots of Asphixiation damage, which will cripple you hard if you manage to survive. Once you accumulate enough damage you will die PERMANENTLY.

-I already found everything I could and can't find more stuff to get learning points, what now?
You need to start making or finding curiosities to learn. If you are curious enough you might have already found the Abilities tab in your Character Sheet. There you got a small Study Report inventory, here you can drop curiosities to start learning, depending the item to learn from, it might take minutes, hours or days to learn. Your limits here are both your attention and the space on that inventory. your attention span is exactly the intelligence your character has (increased initially by eating blueberries and other stuff), so the more Intelligence you have the faster you'll earn learning points.

As we are already on the Abilities tab, it's important to know what to invest first for Abilities. To keep on finding stuff and start increasing qualities of the things you find (base for everything is q10, and your low survival has probably made you find all in q1) you need to increase these abilities. Both Survival and Exploration are good places to start, give them some points and then click the Buy button. They cost Learning Points but will help making your life easier. Survival roughly allows you to find things in higher qualities while foraging or doing low level crafting. Exploration allows you to see more of the forageable stuff that spawns on the ground, to find more stuff you need to increase your Perception * Exploration product, bieng Exploration the first bottleneck there.

-You haven't told me shit about the base attributes, what's the deal here?
To increase them you need to eat stuff, most stuff tells you what it will increase. There is a Food Event Points (FEP) bar that increases while you eat, once it's full the rng will decide what attribute you earn, what you earn depends on what you eat, but you might get unlucky and get the attribute of that 0.1 berry that you ate out of despair and is completely useless.

Anyways, it's good to spread out your attributes a little, as the FEP bar required base points depends on your highest attribute. So if you have 20 Strength and everything else in 10, 20 will be the base value to fill the bar. It's good to have some food variety too, right now there are two reasons for this:

-Eating variety of food makes the FEP bar require less points to fill. Each non repeated food you eat will make the FEP bar require less points, so try to eat a variety that has similar FEP gains or gamble on eating that 0.1 berry for an unrelated stat and pray that stat doesn't win.
-Each food you eat will reduce (increase?) your satiations, a food with a low percentage satiation will give less FEP points than a similar food from a higher percentage satiation. So watch out for this when eating food, you don't want your meat to give you only 10% of what it should. Food tells you which satiations it will fill, so with time it gets easier to manage.

This said, satiations and other food mechanics might change in the new world, so this might now apply or only partially.

-I want to kill stuff, what do?
Don't do.

First increase your UA to at least 10 in order to start punching shit. Then create a deck in the Martial Arts & Combat Schools tab in your Character Sheet. On this deck add all your defense (Restorations) and offense (Attacks) moves. Which restorations you need to use depend on what you are fighting, so check what is your enemy attacking you with while fighting and use those restorations when your defenses start getting lowered. As for attacks, for starters, Left Hook is stronger than Punch, but Punch is faster, which one to use also defends on the Restorations your enemy uses, but you mainly want to  use one single Attack type to penetrate their defenses.

I know the combat part is incomplete, but there might be changes to early game animal punching. Right now the best methods to kill animals without needing other people or a brain are:

	-Punch from a boat into shallow water and run away when damaged (don't use versus walrii), go back to punches after recovering defenses
	-Punch from a tamed or clover fed horse and run away when damaged, go back to punches after recovering defenses..

UPDATE: animal quality is hardcapped by the minimum Survival stat of everyone who fought with it now. This means that a horde of naked punching players will most likely get shit quality stuff from animals. No other significant changes reported by the devs yet.

-What's the /v/illage plan?
Current idea is to start everyone separated and look for important resources. Localized resources like Jotun Mussels and Salt (overworld) are some examples, Bat Guano from caves is another good resource. Locations are also important, nearby marsh and mountains are good to have too.

We'll share our discoveries on the /v/illage discord (or thread) and from there we'll decide where to actually start. The player who finds the best starting place will be in charge of summoning the first couple anons with the wilderness Beacon and from there we'll start collecting resources and LP to start the /v/illage.

We estimate that on Day 2-3 we must have our first palisade, for this we'll need leather (from animal skins), bone glue (from bones), rope (from string) and tons of wood. Once we get the palisade up, we'll be able to slow down as our stuff will be protected from outsiders.

After this everyone can either specialize on a trade (farmer, miner, hunter, forager, ...) or be a jack of all trades and start contributing with our village.