Haven & Hearth

This is why we developed our village way up north. Only problems are the occasional Ruskies that steal an easily made boat.

 

In all honesty the stuff we had was pretty shitty compared to the best players. I mean the highest quality stuff we had was like 50q soil and that was from somewhere else. We'd only recently got a proper mating pair of each animal. The thing that pissed me off more was the fact they wouldn't fuck off even after they stole everything that would have been valuable to them, then I realised, I don't think I want to play knowing i'm gonna get that happen so many times.

 

Yeah, 1 I literally only figured was a good idea a few days ago. That's the problem, you don't start thinking seriously about defence until you actually get attacked. We were in our own happy little bubble with no-one bothering us, so I got complacent. It didn't help I wanted to make a stone mansion, which relates to 2. I think a mansion may as well be a big "Come and raid me" sign for all the raiders. Still, I feel like I wouldn't be in this position if everyone we invited had just listened about the no carrying keys rule. All they had to do was kill the guy carrying a set of keys doing stuff and bam, they got in. I never ever took them outside the palisade.

 

Well I never had keys, so I'm wondering who died and let then get keys.

 

Winya, he was Worm's friend >.>

 

Those raiders were polish guys who were pumping their e-penises by bullying weaker players. They took most precious stuff at start, but later they were just destroying and killing everything in our base for fun...

Maybe it was karma for scavenging at old, decayed settlements...

 

Or just a lesson not handing out keys.

 

Yes, I'm necroing the thread.
And yes, I'm back from a loong time inactivity. Many games and communities sucked me in and I had to do much stuff, mostly was busy and left kagforum

I've moved on to Salem, kinda good alternative at isn't THAT harsh as Haven and Hearth is, but not saying that H&H is garbage. It's glorious game.
I just want to show you in how game is beautiful - not beacuse of graphics (ha!), not beacuse of mechanics, but beacuse of the history it carves.

By pure boredom I stumbled across old files. And it's obvious what I've found. Nothing else but old, glorious Haven and Hearth.
I've checked last files and it seems like last time I launched that game it was something in Feb. 2014 when I came to see what happened after few weeks.

But a bit of backstory that I've said before my inactivity, I've made a hearthfire 5 minutes away from the decayed Village and made an alt which I used later to inspect stuff that was going on.
Village had pallisade built around it with another gate that raiders made it. I've carved the runestone saying they are douchebags (and I realised later how wrong I was).

So, being logged online, on my main character, Worm (obvious, isn't it?) I noticed serval runestones. One was in critical shape, which said:

Come down to the Coalition of Alrinyanites for a place to live.

I went south with my waterskin in equipment, sword and shield equipped, walking into unknown which was once home.

Many forests turned into grasslands, and there were almost no pallisades. One of our north bases had all buildings and palisades also stripped down.
All was left only runestone claiming it was a community garden - be a good kin, replant what you harvest. But in reality, it was all dead. Plants have waited for harvest that never came.
On my way south to the main village I saw various roads paved from stone. Thought it's all dead.

I came to base, just passing the huge square-ring paving which possibly could be the two-thick pallisade that was made to discourage us to come back into our home. I've entered the open gate and I just heard a sound.

Click

My thought was wrong.
There was a claim that some neutral people put on. Those weren't people that raided us, but someone else. They recycled the great home, but never gave them the good shine of past.

Early 2014 (I have only one that screenshot containing village and minimap)


Today, at the morning.



Haven't found the Coalition of Alrinyanites.
Beacuse it's burried. Dead, like our home.

 

jesus man. that is a perfect post to necro the thread. if i remember right, i had an alt that i used to village w/ your group for a small time, which means i might be able to spawn in that area.

 

So you found the dead old home of myself and my buddies. The story behind our village is a simple one:

We had played the game before; although we weren't well versed in the combat system when knew all the other mechanics to survive. We had those who liked to farm and those who liked to hunt, those who liked to scavenge and those who liked to mine. Which was surprising because there was only three of us at first. We started the very first day that the new world (world seven) opened up. We had vaguely planned to group together and see how well we could survive - nothing in stone, just the idea really. The first day we spent looking for a cave. At the start that was the best we could hope for. We found a couple, but the one we decided to stay on was actually the first one we found after we started to settle into a different one. It was perfect, a somewhat large cave with a good number of twists and dips in it. It took fifteen minutes of sprinting to make it to the end, and we had the only entrance.

Our first triumph was the palisade. Me and my buddies coordinated the time to get on to the minute. We had set the palisade to dry and in the first thirty seconds that it was done (it takes a full day real time) we were all on building as fast as we could with supplies we left out hoping that nobody would destroy or take. It took us about forty minutes to finish everything and finally make and lock our gate. We had our home now, we were safe. It was only four days into the world or so, so we knew unless somebody got only pvp skills and had a grudge and a battering ram we were safe for at least a few weeks.

Our next was our growth. I love this game. I loved playing it because I could sink into it for hours and hours on end. I could just go explore. Every time I met somebody I had to be on edge because of the risk of permadeath. I even died a few times at the start which set me back a day or so, but after the sixth day I only died one more time. The last time. But I'll speak of this later. My friends liked the game too, but not nearly as much as I did, so even when I died I caught up to their skill levels faster than they could grow. This game rewarded you not just for how long you played, but also for how well you could play. I used the wiki to look for the best things I could find to help our group out. We found crops of every variety (except pumpkin which we traded for later), we started hunting and making rudimentary cheeses as we could. We built an inner palisade around the cave entrance which was within our walls.

We were the biggest village around for a supergrid I think. I was leading us forward through shear time played, and my friends we playing as much as they could too. I started to see people setting up around us. A few russians showed up so I used a translator program to come to terms with them in broken language. We agreed to live with each other. A group nearby found another cave, we agreed to help each other out if one of us was attacked. Finally, we met what would become our newest members. A mother and her daughter playing the game set up a settlement just north of us, within sight on the minimap from within our walls.
At first this posed a problem. We didn't like them standing on our territory, we didn't want them so close to us. When we first spoke to one of them she showed up with a crate on her head wanting to trade for some goods. I found her trust interesting, and her lack of concern about the distance between our palisades funny. As it turns out, this was the daughter of the mother who built the location. Her character name was Alrinya, and she was (if memory serves) seven or eight years old.

After speaking with the mother we agreed to trading terms and a mutual existence. We were surrounded by allies or neutrals, both of our locations we secure, and because there were now five of us working together we usually had at least one person online (apart from me). We decided to maintain the individual palisades we had as my friends were not very trusting of them and didn't want to let them into our significantly more developed area. We traded commonly; I gave them tools and items that would be difficult for them to obtain and they gave me things they could scavenge so I didn't need to go hunt for as many curiosity or food.

Our mine developed. I was the one going through the mine as I had the strength for it. We chose our cave well. At first we found tin and lost our collective shit. Seriously, we freaked out. We ate all our fancy food and threw frogs all over the place. We had never had a village do so well so quickly before. We were certainly the first to have metal for miles around. We hit this quick.
Then we found iron further in. Not just tin and copper, full on iron. We practically struck gold. This was the main ingredient we needed to put in place the biggest piece of our end-game village: brickwalls. I think I played for almost ten hours straight. I mined so much iron so quickly that I depleted our entire food supply doing so, but man was it worth it. We had swords, we had armor, we had metal tools and metal items everywhere! We played it smart and kept everything metal out of sight and in the centre of our village. It only took me a few days after that to get us what we wanted most - wall quality steel.

Finally, we then got our next big achievement. With the help of our neighbours, and all of us contributing, we got together all the ingredients and enough LP to finally make our village. We had talked about it and decided to permanently keep our palisades separate, but that they would be villagers with us and that we would build them a wall after we finished ours. We had been talking about names for our village for a while, but finally my friend suggested a name. "Coalition of Alryinanites" after the daughter of the woman across form us. She had been the one to make first contact with us, she was friendly and simple, young and trusting. Honestly, without a couple of her trades (even though they favoured her) it would have taken us another week of gathering food and curiosity, not to mention bricks everywhere, to get enough supplies to start building that wall. I thought it was dorky, but in a sweet way, so we all agreed to it, and our coalition was formed. We had been living together for almost three weeks now, so there was a growing trust between us - although the daughter was starting to play less frequently.

However, this was not to last.

Gathering the bricks for the brickwall took much longer than any of us thought. We wanted the first brick wall to be built *within* our palisade - so nothing could stop it. After that we decided that we would let pretty much anybody live inside our palisade, but only the trusted five would have access to our inner brick wall. We coordinated to make the brick wall. We set the first cornerposts, and then in a measely 24 hours we would have our guarantee - our first ever brick wall. But we made a single, fatal mistake. We had grown accustomed to leaving the cave palisade door open for the ease of it. I was always going in and out mining, and we had a lot of food and curiosity stored in there. So although our main palisade gate was always shut securely, our cave door being open left us exposed.

I wanted to go out in a fight. I knew we wouldn't last for the whole game, but I wanted us to leave a mark on the land, on the people around us at least. I wanted more than anything to just survive for as long as I could, until eventually I would get sloppy outside our walls, or we would get seiged. We had been trying to learn to fight with each other. I always favoured a bow, so I was learning to incorporate it in our fights when we sparred. I had thought with our levels and equipment we were ready for a fight. For our fight. The fight. I never got to even test out what I knew.

I woke up dead. They had tunneled into our cave system by accident or on purpose, but far enough away so that I never saw it coming. They came in through our cave, through the doors I had left open, and into my house in my sleep. They didn't even have the strength to break my armor, but they could put leaches on me with theft. They bled me to death. They stole everything and destroyed what they didn't want to take. I had almost four weeks on the character and with new responsibilities coming around I didn't have the time to catch up this death. This was it, this was the end. I logged onto my friends account to see what had happened. Everything burned to the ground. The key to our cave palisade stolen (our main gate key was on an alt, but the cave one was in a basket inside our palisade) so security was gone forever unless they left us alone long enough for us to rebuild - which was doubtful enough as it was. My friends had been untouched - logged off in place of sleeping in a bed like me, but as they had played much less they couldn't carry on without me. I spoke with the mother next door and she expressed her sorrow. This was the last time I saw them log on, and I stopped playing soon after. No tools, no materials, only two survivors.

The Coalition was gone overnight, and the only thing that would stand to show we had been here was a single thing. A funny, little ironic mark on the land. Our brickwall corner post waiting for the rest of the wall - sealed so nothing could grow from it touching the corner near our cave entrance. The only thing that would last was a reminder of how I had failed to complete the last crucial step to security.

But we are not dead forever. We are not gone so softly into the night. We may not find the same players as before - but this time we're starting with more. And we want more people to join in too.

The new world has been announced to start on August 21st coming with the first MAJOR update to the game. Haven and Hearth is no more - that time is behind us now. H&H 2 is being released, and the same old original group is coming back plus a couple more. We're going to hit the ground running, and we're going to kick this games ASS.

If anybody wants to join this call to arms - I know this game is harsh. I know it takes a lot of time, patience and luck to get anywhere, but together we can succeed. We can survive. my email is brettkeeping@hotmail.com and I want you to join us. We could always use an extra hand this time around. Help us become great once more.


P.S. The thread detailing our demise on the H&H forums is here if you want the read, titled "Raid at the Coalition of Alrinyanites:
http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum...oalition&sid=6e556796fea5bff51a9b533c00d8a6dd

Can't wait to start the new game, I hope some of you join us.