How to play

Your first day

Press Play, pick a username and password, and you own a farm: 96 by 96 tiles of grass, trees, rocks, a pond, a farmhouse, a forge, a kitchen, a mailbox, and a Match Portal you should ignore for ten minutes. You start with 500 gold, full energy, and five tools already on your quickbar: hoe, watering can, axe, pickaxe, sickle.

An eight-step tutorial walks you through the essentials and ends with a solo practice raid in Tutorial Grove, where PvP is off and the slimes are polite. Your progress saves server-side at every step, so you can close the tab mid-tutorial and resume on another machine.

Check the mailbox over the first few mornings. Pierre sends turnip seeds on day two, Marnie sends hay, Robin sends fifty wood and twenty-five stone. The town wants you to make it.

The clock

Havenfall runs one world for everyone, and its clock does not wait for you.

• The visual day, sunrise to sunrise, lasts 24 real minutes.
• The world day, the one crops and animals care about, advances every 6 real hours, or the moment you sleep.
• Seasons are 28 world days. Spring, summer, fall, winter, all shared globally.
• Sleeping (walk to your bed, press F) advances one day, refills energy, grows crops, delivers mail, and finishes forge and construction jobs. Once per world day.

The morning report after each sleep is your farm ledger: what grew, what sold at auction overnight, what finished building.

The farm

Energy

You have 100 energy a day (125 once you’ve earned a Stardrop). Tilling costs 2, watering 1, harvesting 2, chopping and mining 5. Food gives it back: even a Fried Egg restores 50. Cook before big clearing days.

Crops

Till, plant, water, wait, harvest. Watering multiplies growth speed several times over, so a watered Turnip beats a neglected one by days. Rain waters everything free. Plant inside the season or the server refuses the seed, and pull your harvest before the season flips: the frost takes whatever is still in the ground, unless you own the greenhouse. The full crop sheet with prices lives in the Almanac.

Animals

Coop and barn animals produce daily. Feed them hay by hand to build affection, and at 750 affection the product upgrades: large eggs, large milk. A silo automates feeding but wins no hearts. Hunger is lethal in three to four days. The Almanac lists every species and price.

Fishing

Cast at the pond for 2 energy. When the bobber dips, strike with Space. Harder fish give you a shorter strike window, down to about seven-tenths of a second for the Legendary. Rarity is rolled per bite: 70/20/8/2 from Common to Legendary.

The forge and the kitchen

The forge smelts bars, forges weapons and armor, and upgrades tools while you sleep: copper, steel, gold, iridium. The kitchen turns produce into energy and buffs, and Cooking levels unlock better dishes. Fifty-seven recipes are cataloged in the Almanac.

Raids

Before you go

Raid gear stages through a separate 30-slot extraction backpack: move weapons, armor, potions, and food into it from farm storage, and your match loadout draws from there. What you bring is what you risk. In the match everyone carries the same 16-slot inventory; the first slots of it are your safe pocket, two by default and four once an Explorer’s Rucksack sits in your farm storage. No need to equip it; owning it is enough.

Finding a match

Walk onto the Match Portal and hit Find Match. You’ll land in a shared map with up to 8 players for a 30-minute timer. Nobody new joins in the final 10 minutes. If your connection drops you have 60 seconds to come back to your own body, inventory intact.

Out there

Gather nodes with the right tool: herbs and berries by sickle, deadfall by axe, stone and iron seams by pickaxe at the cliffs. Kill what hunts you, or don’t, and watch for the match objectives in the corner: time trials, turn-ins, kill quotas, and the boss bounty, each paying gold on extraction. Mid-match the map stirs: surges speed the monsters up or fatten their drops, supply caches fall at announced spots, and once a match the bloodmoon does both at once.

Getting out

Extraction pads glow green when active, and late pads wake for the final 8 minutes. Stand on a pad for 5 seconds to leave. Any monster or rival player within 4 tiles pauses the countdown, held, not reset, and the screen shouts Contested. Friends extracting beside you never contest, so pairs can leave together. There is a second door: elite Stone Brutes sometimes drop a Raider Key, and a key-holder standing on a raider hatch leaves instantly, no channel, no contest.

What you keep

• Extract: everything you carry, plus objective gold, plus all XP.
• Die: regular slots drop at your body as a lootable bag. Safe pocket and XP still come home. Objective gold is forfeit.
• Timer runs out or you stay disconnected: safe pocket and XP only, and there is no bag for anyone.

Loadouts are locked in the database when you join, so a server crash returns your gear rather than eating it.

Combat

You have 100 HP in a match and walk at 4 tiles per second. Damage is deterministic, no crits: weapon damage times tier multiplier minus the target’s armor. Tiers run Rusty 0.8x, Iron 1.0x, Steel 1.3x, Gold 1.6x.

• Melee (left click): a 90-degree swing with brief recovery. Mouse position aims it.
• Bows: mouse-aimed projectiles, four tiers up to Mythril.
• Dodge roll (Space): 0.35 seconds of invincibility, 25 stamina, savior against Venom Slimes and Charger dashes.
• Block (right click): absorbs 80% of frontal damage while draining stamina.
• Sprint (Shift): 1.5x speed against monsters that walk 1.6 to 3.8; only the Dusk Harrier matches your pace. Watch the stamina bar: empty means no sprint until it refills to 30.

Nearly every monster telegraphs its dangerous move; the Venom Slime’s touch is the exception, so keep your distance. The Bestiary lists the tell and the counter for all thirteen.

Skills

Six skills level from 0 to 10: Farming, Foraging, Fishing, Mining, Combat, Cooking. XP comes from doing the thing, and levels never drop, not even in death. Combat adds +1 damage per 2 levels to every hit. Cooking gates recipes. Milestones bring letters with gifts, and a few quests ask for levels outright.

Economy

Gold in, gold out. Pierre buys crops at about 85% of value, the Fence buys raid loot at about two-thirds, and both restock daily. The auction house is player-to-player: flat 10g listing fee, 48-hour listings, 5% tax on sale. Big purchases to aim at: the Big Barn (12,000g, unlocks most animals), the Explorer’s Rucksack (boss drop or crafted), and the 30,000g greenhouse. A starter coop and barn are already standing on every new farm.

Controls

Keyboard bindings are rebindable in Settings. On phones and tablets the game switches to full touch controls automatically. Gamepads currently navigate menus only.

First-raid tips

• Go in broke. Bring a cheap sword, a few potions, and empty slots. Your first haul of iron ore outvalues any gear you could have lost.
• Everyone gets two safe-pocket slots from day one. The upgrade worth chasing is the Explorer’s Rucksack: four safe slots, dropped by the Forest Spirit or crafted at the end of the pack line.
• Put the best thing you find in the safe pocket immediately, not when trouble starts.
• Grove Tenders first, always. Nothing dies while the healer stands.
• Extract at 60% greed. The players you loot on the way out waited for 100%.
• The Boss Bounty pays 250g, but only if you extract. Kill the boss with time to walk out.