Getting Started

So you wanna be a hearthling, you've read that other wiki, scoured the forums, memorized the /vg/ thread, and you think you're completely ready to go and know everything there is to know about the world of Haven & Hearth, right?

Wrong. Not everyone can be as naturally brilliant and gifted as ALWAYS. So read on, and let the knowledge of the hivemind sink into you.

Helpful Links
First of all, you might want to look into a couple of these links (in case you aren't that guy who's already read everything).
 * Quick How-To! A decent how to written by the creators on doing some basic actions in game.
 * Unofficial Manual The unofficial manual, written by some guy on the forums. It's for the previous world, and as such is slightly outdated, but still carries some valuable information.

Spawn In-game
When you appear, you'll be formless in a small room. Get yourself a body (male OR female, ooh la la!), a name, and the goodies in the treasure chest. Left click moves. Right click interacts. Afterward, speak to the person in the upper left of the room and give them our hearth secret "." Giving the HS to this person will allow you to teleport to our village and have our point of contact in your kin list already! If he's online at the moment, great, you can get some advice immediately. Otherwise, you'll have to get started on your own.

HALP! I'm all alone!
This will likely be the case for many of you... Let's get you started.

First off, you might meet someone who isn't your point of contact first. If you see anyone in the game who isn't on your kin list (only the point of contact from the hearth secret will be, everyone else will be a stranger), they will appear simply as ???, and you will appear as that to them. Don't freak out. Just introduce yourself and tell them that you're new. They'll probably already have guessed due to your linen clothing, newsboy hat, and fishing pole. They should help you to get started out, and will probably tell you everything this guide is about to tell you.

For those you of that have no one at all, carry on below.

Take in your surroundings
And by that I mean your HUD. On the upper left you have health, stamina, and hunger in the first row. The second row is happiness and your speed. You can hover over most of these bars to get a numerical value.

Health
Health has a heart beside it and is represented in three numbers. It should look something like 100/100/100. The first number is your SHP (soft health points), if this number reaches zero, you'll be knocked unconscious. The second number is your HHP (hard health points), and if this number reaches zero, you die. Damage to HHP is sometimes referred to as "grievous damage." The final number is your max HP.

SHP will recover over time by depleting your hunger as long as you're not very hungry. HHP does not recover normally and requires either gauze or leeches. Leeches will drain your SHP and recover only tiny bits of HHP. Be careful if you decide to use them.

Stamina
Stamina is represented by the blue bar with the water drop beside it. It goes from 0-100%. Almost every action in the game will deplete your stamina. Running, cutting trees, laying tiles, and building all use stamina for instance. Stamina will recover on its own normally by depleting hunger. 1% hunger will restore 5% stamina. You can speed up the process by sitting in a chair or drinking water. You can also drink tea to recover 45% stamina per mug without losing hunger.

Hunger
Hunger has two numbers when you mouse over it. The first one is the amount left in that stage of hunger, the second one is your total hunger. The second number is the one usually referred to if anyone talks about hunger.

Hunger has five levels: Starving (0-49%), Very Hungry (50-79%), Hungry (80-89%), Full (90-100%), Overstuffed (>100%).

If you are at the starving level, your character will slowly lose HHP. If you are at the overstuffed level, you will only be able to move at crawl speed.

Happiness
This is simply a placeholder for the developers. At the moment it does nothing.

Movement Speed
There are four speeds. Crawl, Walk, Run, and Sprint. Crawl is the slowest, represented by the crawling icon, and is the speed you will be at when carrying heavy items or when extraordinarily tired. Walk is your normal speed when unhindered and will never cause you to lose stamina. Run will make you lose stamina unless used on a Grassland. Running on a Moor, Road, or Hearthland will reduce the stamina drain of running. If you are pulling a cart, you can run on roads without taking any loss to stamina, and walk, rather than crawl, on a grassland with no loss to stamina. Keep that in mind since you can become tired suddenly if you run everywhere, and you will then need to eat quite a bit more than you would if you just walked. Sprint should almost never be used as it depletes stamina fast no matter what the terrain. Only use it when you're really in danger, or if you're a lazy piece of shit.

Getting some LP
We don't have experience, exp, or XP in this game. We have LP (learning points). Most every single action you do in the game will get you LP, from pulling a branch out of a tree to building an entire house. And every single skill beyond pulling those branches out of trees and lighting fires with them will have to be bought with LP.

But before I even tell you how to get your first point, there's something you can do to increase your learning rate! Click the face in the middle of your console. This will bring up your character sheet. On the bottom of that window will be four buttons, click the third one to go to your personal beliefs. You can change these once every eight hours. The only ones that matter for now though are peace and change. Slide peace over by one toward peace. Every time you change a belief, your change belief itself will also increase, so just worry about raising peace for now. Instant LP learning bonus!

Your first LP will likely come from branches and fires. There are plenty of fir trees around our village, each holding seven branches each. Right click one, select take branch, and you'll collect until the tree runs out or you have no space in your inventory. If the option to take a branch doesn't appear, someone's already picked that tree clean. We have a huge forest, find another tree. Now go into the adventure menu in the bottom right and select light fire (The red fire, not the green one. There's a difference.) Wherever you place the fire will cause a sign to appear. This is a build site. In your inventory (the brown bag in the middle of the console), shift+click the branches to add them to the build site (ctrl+click will drop them onto the ground from your inventory), then click build. You will now construct the fire. When it's finished, right click the fire and select "Light my fire!" You've gained a bit more LP. You can continue doing this until you've gained 1000 LP on this character, at which point branches will no longer give LP. By that time, however, you will have found alternate sources.

A word on the forest: BOARS AND BEARS
As a side note, forest terrain does have wild animals living in it. Bunnies and foxes won't bother you, so don't worry about them. Boars and Bears, though, are another story entirely. They hate you and they WILL chase you across the continent to gore you. STAY AWAY FROM BOARS AND BEARS! If one does manage to get you, it will likely knock you out in one hit. When you're out it will probably lose interest. As soon as you stop seeing stars, get up and run the fuck away. Hopefully he won't smell your fear and follow.

Good ways to earn LP in the beginning

 * Chipping a fuck load of stone.
 * Taking branches from trees and making fires.
 * Taking branches and chipping stones to fashion into stone axes.
 * Digging for clay in the river.
 * Crafting tea pots from clay (requires the pottery skill).

Bad ways to earn LP
Doing these sorts of things will make people hate you, and someone with the rage skill may come along and beat you down for it. We don't like our resources being depleted for very inefficient LP gain and we don't like piles of shit being left on our door steps.
 * Clear cutting forests.
 * Taking branches and making wicker baskets EVERYWHERE.
 * Converting every boulder you see into a runestone or quern.
 * Getting all jihad on the entire forest. They take quite a while to regrow.
 * Building things halfway and then leaving your shit laying all over the place. Unfinished does not mean LP.

Spend some LP
So you're feeling a little more comfortable in the mechanics of the game and have built up some LP after starting some forest fires. Great. You're on your way to becoming a productive member of the community, and we'll love you more and more each day. <3 (unless you are Tye, in which case, you will never get anyone's love, rather, you will sleep with random people in the hopes of attaining closeness with another human, only to realize that you have yet again sabotauged your own life, leading you down a horrible spiral of partying, finding new men, sleeping with them, loss, then partying to forget, ad infinatum. This usually ends with you being found in the woods surrounded by 3000 wooden cups and nothing but tears to show for it.)

Open your character sheet and choose the second button on the bottom to go to your skills. Some good ones in the beginning include hunting, foraging, and plant lore. These skills will enable you to begin to gather your own food and tools. Also you could get fishing, since you started with a fishing pole. But you'll still need to find string (forage for spindly taproot), bait (dig for earthworms or gather leeches from the swamp), and make a hook (bones from rabbits or chickens from hunting). Fishing is very slow and quite boring, and in the long run the fish won't provide you with very good FEP.

Speaking of FEP!
Other than the skill values you've probably already noticed in your character sheet, (farming, marksmanship, smithing, etc.) that can be raised by spending LP, you also have your own personal stats. Gaining levels is a little different than you may be used to around here. You raise those through FEP (food event points). You really are what you eat in this game.

You gain different sorts of FEP from different foods. For instance, chicken will raise your dexterity FEP, and rabbits will raise your agility FEP. The amount of FEP required to raise a stat point is equal to the highest stat you already have. So if you have 20 intelligence, for instance, it requires 20 FEP to go up a level.

But hold on, it's not quite that easy.

Let's say you need 20 FEP to go up a level. You've eaten 10 agility FEP, 5 intelligence FEP, and 5 psyche FEP... At level up, you have a 50% chance to get an agility point (because half your FEPs to level up are agility), and 25% to get either intelligence or psyche. If you want to increase a certain stat, be sure to eat only foods that increase that stat's likelihood to increase and very little of anything else.

There is an upside to a wide and balanced diet however. For every different type of FEP you eat, the total amount required to go up a level is decreased. So keep that in mind as well if you don't have a specific stat you need to raise.

The best thing to remember is don't just eat a LOT of one type of food and screw yourself over with like 100 intelligence. It will be difficult to increase other stats and you'll have one high stat that does nothing or little for you. It won't be too much to worry about in the beginning when you get low FEP anyway, but keep it in mind for later!

Reminder about boars
Stay the hell away from them.

Make yourself useful!
By now you have some skills, a good amount of LP, and know how food works. Great. You're on your way to becoming a functional and prospering member of society. Talk to someone in charge about where you can claim a plot, and start building yourself a house and whatever else you like. You'll get great LP for that house, by the way.

Welcome to Haven & Hearth.

(Xu's Note: Check my Guide To Not Being Retarded for more information on being a successful part of our troupe.)