I’m a Kickstarter back on this, but I thought it was one of those projects that was going to fail. I thought that because, as a backer, I’ve heard almost nothing from them. Other Kickstarter projects I get pretty frequent updates, around every week or two.
So I’m glad to hear that this game is alive and kicking, and looking at their website it definitely seems like development is trucking along!
They post everything on their development blog, lots of content and updates.
Alpha 4 is out. This adds Footman, Weaver, and revised Trapper classes. Some basic combat and improved building design features and a fair number of crafting recipes.
I spent a fair amount of time messing around with it last night. Here are some screenshots from my game.
Long bunkhouse in the background still missing roof with scaffolding in place. Crops of silkweed (for weaving) on left and turnips in the middle. Berries are no longer very productive, forcing you to find an alternative food source (farming and trapping both work, although trapping has only moderate yields, using both is best, since a varied diet keeps your people happy). Some of my citizens are warming up by the fire.
Bunkhouse completed, new corn crop going up on far-right. Corn is a very slow growing crop, but is much more nutritious than turnips. In game time, I’d say a turnip crop probably comes up every two days (if the farmer has the time to plant seeds and harvest), whereas a corn crop takes somewhere between five and seven days.
Everyone sleeping in the bunkhouse:
Corn crop has come out and is being harvested. Second building added on the right.
Our new building is much “nicer” than the old long house and includes dressers, writing desks, padded and unpadded chairs, a tapestry, and a rug.
Overall I would say the game is definitely coming along. But it’s still buggy. While the houses were under construction I had some workers step in the wrong direction while working on the roof and fall into the house. They were then trapped until the house had completed and the scaffolding removed – I was a bit worried they were going to starve to death. I’ve run in to random geometry problems – at one point a bed that was supposed to be on the ground floor got stuck hanging off the roof. And there are a fair number of assertion error messages that show up (although they never seem to be fatal, the program keeps running, although sometimes the UI ends up in a weird modal state and you have to save and reload the game).
The other issue for me is there’s no real driving challenge. Goblins do show up, and in fact, I just had my very first fatality. My Footman got killed by a goblin, which was a bit of a surprise since he had leather armor and was a soldier, in the past even my regular citizens have been able to kill goblins – I guess it all comes down to one’s luck with the random number generator. But I’ve only ever had two goblins show up at once, and usually they go down pretty quickly when you hit the town defense button. I have heard of hordes of 10-12 goblins showing up and wiping out the village, and one guy claims he got wiped out by trolls.
Radiant (the developers) say they will be working on combat quite a bit in the next few Alphas.
Alpha 9 is released, someone with time go play it and report in!
http://stonehearth.net/2015/03/24/stonehearth-alpha-9-released/
I haven’t dabbled with the game since… ALpha 1 or 2 maybe, where you couldn’t do much. I must say the game has improved a lot… There’s actually a game there now; and the attention to detail/art style is as great as ever.
64-bit build seemed to run quite fast and haven’t run into any crashes yet. My biggest problem at the moment is when I’m digging down, my followers seem to fail at building ladders and they end up stuck.
I don’t think I’ve played it since around then either - will definitely check it out soon and see how it’s improved.
30 bucks for an alpha?
AIUI you need to explicitly stick in a ladder using the ladder tool. No idea on the thinking behind that decision, it does seem like Hearthlings should be smart enough not to dig themselves in to a hole without giving themselves a way to get out.
I’m planning to wait another 1-2 Alphas and then giving it another shot. They seem to be releasing an Alpha every 4-6 weeks. Alpha 10 is currently planned to include 1) initial release of Water and 2) multi-story buildings. Alpha 11 is supposed to expand on water – possibly adding some water related professions like Fishermen, there’s also been some discussion of boats, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s much further out. I also know they’re working on Skeletons to provide a second combat campaign. At some point the Goblin campaign added in the current Alpha should be much further expanded.
In addition to their Road Map they’ve got a more finely grained description of stuff they’re currently working on or have at least on their planning board up on Trello. Green is currently being worked on, blue is next up, yellow and orange are much further out.
Stuff that’s added since my Alpha 4 writeup above written 6 months ago include:
[ul]
[li] Shepherd and Sheep,
[/li][li] Blacksmith,
[/li][li] Stone Mason,
[/li][li] Mining,
[/li][li] Roads,
[/li][li] Ability to create blueprints and then create buildings based on the blueprints,
[/li][li] Level Up System (as Hearthlings do their jobs they will unlock additional abilities – e.g., the Carpenter will unlock more recipes, the Swordsman will get tougher and learn new attack moves).
[/li][li] First cut at a Goblin campaign, including a Goblin camp and multiple types of Goblins including thieves, fighters, armored fighters, and a chieftain,
[/li][li] Traveling merchants.
[/li][/ul]
I bought a bed from a travelling merchant. Seemed the most sound investment plan.
Still hard to find this thread trying to remember the spelling of the thread…
Anyway, they have sent another update…is anyone playing this? I am susprised they won an award:
The Stonehearth release rhythm continues pounding ahead! This time, we’re turning things all the way up to 11… Alpha 11.
With Alpha 11 out the door, last weekend we headed to Seattle for the gamingpalooza that is PAX Prime. Thanks to all of you who came by and introduced yourself – it was great to meet so many of our Kickstarter backers there. Plus, we walked away with a very cool award for Stonehearth: The Curse Award for Best Strategy Game.
We’ve had a really successful several weeks since our launch on Steam Early Access. Thousands of new Stonehearth players are setting their hearthlings to work – building and playing and battling those nasty goblins. Perhaps not surprisingly, our new influx of players has exposed a slew of new bugs that need fixing.
Fixing those bugs was a big priority for us in Alpha 11, which in turn means we’ve pushed a couple of things to the next release (stairs are coming!).
Even so, we were able to push a lot of new features into Alpha 11.
Here’s more info on 11
http://stonehearth.net/alpha-11-is-live-on-steam-and-humble-bundle/
I backed it but I’m not playing it yet. I don’t like getting involved in games too early, except for very rare exceptions.
I generally put in a couple hours with every stable release. Its fun as-is, for me, being a builder at heart, and it gets noticeably better every push.
Yes Discourse, I know this is old but you know what, they’re still adding to the game. It’s gotten to the point where i feel it’s mostly fun to play. I am not a huge fan of the mining system. It feels like they should be able to mine down and just build those dang ladders themselves to get-up, but the variety of enemies is nice now, the kind of random events are popping in there… the job system has expanded, requires some thought, and the little peeps interacting is nice… plus pets. I still see no end in sight here but they’re chugging along here.
Nice, thanks Nesrie! I kickstarted this a million years ago so it’s nice to hear a status update.
Been a while since I played this now, wonde how it is compared to my last attempt at the game.
Really dig the art style.
My biggest worry is that the studio will be finished before the game is. They hopefully are financially stable enough with their other projects like skullgirls that they will be able to see it through to the end. I’ve been waiting for them to finish it before diving in.
Radiant Entertainment (the original company developing it) got bought out by Riot Games (of League of Legends fame) back in 2016. Most of the original developers are still working on Stonehearth, but given their new ownership, I don’t think you need to worry too much about their financial stability.
If you’re interested in seeing what they’re working on, they generally post one short (~5 minute) “Stonehearth Developer Diary” per week and two long (1 hour+) developer streams per week on their Youtube channel:
I haven’t played in a year or two, but I’m always pleased to see that development still seems to be making steady progress
I look at the roadmap every once in a while. Glad to learn that Riot bought them.
It was a very interesting concept/ideas when introduced and I was an original backer…but I suspect the focus was never there to really push it out. It will be interesting to see where it goes from here.
