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''Killing, pillaging, sieging, and razing villages is what I enjoy doing most in haven. When I started playing all the way back in 2013, I was "fortunate" to know before hand that Haven is a pvp/permadeath (WAY less forgiving in world 7). And honestly, that's what attracted me to this game in the first place and it's the reason I still play. I've KO'd, killed, and sieged countless amounts of players over the years and based on the vast majority of reactions people have, they genuinely had no idea what was happening.
— Forum user's reply on discussion'' about the games Guide Dang It! and Misaimed Marketing issues.

Haven & Hearth is a Java-based MMORPG, with much of the in-game world (primarily) inspired by Germanic mythology. Its most notable features are its persistent world featuring little to no natural resource regeneration, its permanent death feature, and its focus on player interactions such as villages trading and negotiations. It also features a fairly unorthodox leveling system: Players earn Learning Points (LP) for discovering and producing new items or using particular "curiosities", which add LP over time, which are then spent to purchase or upgrade skills; also, eating most food will add points to their "Food Event" bar, which will raise one stat at random (based on the types of food eaten) when full.

Received major update on August 28, 2015. Graphics were upgraded into full 3D, handful of other features were added. Both developers started spending more time on the development of the game and to facilitate this, developers had to start asking for money, first with almost universally hated and then revised payment model. Players now enjoy unlimited game time, but can pay to verify their accounts and subscribe for bonuses to LP/FEP gain and speed of certain actions.

Although the game is technically (still) in an alpha state, it features a fairly sizable playerbase and many large in-game communities of players (known as hearthlings). It can be played here.

Latest world started Octubre 13th, 2023.


Haven & Hearth features examples of the following tropes:

  • Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Most things have a rather high degree of realism involved with them: animals don't drop leather, you need to skin them for bloody hide that has to hang on a drying frame for several RL hours, and then you have to place it on tanning tub for a full RL day. Many things, however, are much more merciful due to practical reasons.
    • Silkworm eggs have indefinite shelf-life and only hatch if placed on a herbalist's table.
    • Many things that would reasonably require metal, such as buckets and rowboats, do not.
  • Adaptational Villainy: Many small animals, that in real life would simply avoid humans, are aggressive to the point they can feel like Demonic Spiders for player lacking in combat skills or are otherwise unpreprared.
    • Caves are full of Goddamned Bats that, despite ostensibly being just regular batsnote  they can attack and maul players similar to much larger animals. At least there's an Encounter Repellant in the form of a cape that, when worn, prevents bat aggro.
    • Real adders flee if they detect a human and generally bite as an absolute last resort, it takes considerable time and energy to produce their venom. note 
  • Alliterative Name: The sausages' names. They include the Big Bear Banger, Chicken Chorizo, Delicious Deer Dog, Fox Fuet, Running Rabbit, Boar Baloney, and the Wonderful Wilderness Wurst.
    • Types of cheese include Cave and Cellar Cheddar, Generic Gouda and Sunlit Stilton.
  • Anachronism Stew: Despite taking place in what is mostly an Iron Age Germany, there's handful of items that wouldn't really fit if taken back in time:
    • Hussar's Wings.
    • One of the curiosities you can craft is a Slinky. It wasn't invented until 1940s!
    • Cash shop hats turn this up to eleven.
  • Annoying Arrows: Sort of. Slings and bows are generally the best way to deal with wildlife, but it takes a lot of work to take out even a fox without a high Marksmanship skill. Of course, actually getting the LP to raise the skill is a royal pain...
    • Current metagame has Archery see little use in PvP, but this hasn't always been the case.
    • Above entries should probably be rewritten, but to put it shortly: developers have been struggling to create a version of Ranged combat that is both A) useful in Pv P B) not completely broken OP.
  • All There in the Manual: Despite some serious effort from the devs, reading the Wiki is considered mandatory.
  • Anti Poop-Socking: Crops and trees grow in real time, letting you set everything up and come back later.
    • People managed to find Poop Socking aspect from farming, since harvesting them as soon as they grew into last stage means you raise their quality fastest. Devs addressed this by making harvested seeds gain increased growth rate from the time they spent in last stage.
  • Asteroids Monster: Cave slimes have a chance to create a clone if they take non-lethal damage. Clones seem reasonably weaker than originals. However combined with slimes spawning in groups to begin with, they can cause issues by their sheer numbers.
  • Bears Are Bad News: While no longer the toughest creature in the game, the combination of spawning regularly in all forest terrains, unprovoked aggression, speed, and ability to "Execute" note  means they likely have one of the highest kill counts out of all creatures.
  • Big Eater: Eating at a table with quality cutlery, getting the munchies from smoking hemp, and participating to a bonfire party greatly decrease how much food will fill you up, letting you get more stats from it.
  • Bicolor Cows, Solid Color Bulls: Averted. Both sexes of Cattle can be bi or solid color depending on their "dna." Before that, cows were solid red-ish brown and bulls were solid black. Players actually preferred the old system due to it's visual clarity compared having to measure horns and check for udders.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • Setting up industries of any type (wood farming, metal working, leather working) will require a lot of repetitive tasks, but unlocks plenty of useful quality resources.
      • Running said industries, especially if you want to generate and consume large amounts of food and curiosities, easily becomes a chore.
    • Bat Dungeon is one of the most dangerous note  PvE challenges in the game. While there are various item rewards that can be worth the hassle, the permanent character buff you gain from seeing Night Queen die is - normal bats no longer attacking you. However bats are such a nuisance you definitely want this on a character that regularly mines or spelunks for cave herbs and clay. note 
  • Confusion Fu: There are many combat styles, from basic fistcuffing to high-end swordmanship, passing by axe-grinding and dirty grappling tricks. And you can learn (and use) all of them at the same time.
  • Death is Cheap: Surprisingly for a game with permanent character death, this trope can apply.
    • The more experienced players are often able treat it as minor inconvenience and can even have enough perverse incentive to intentionally kill their characters (for example, to reset their FEP efficiency and get rid of wounds that could take weeks to heal even when treated.)
    • Can easily be subverted with inexperienced/new players, who are of course more likely to die unintentionally. Possibly in a way that results in losing their corpse and Inheritance from burying. Most crucially, they might not even realize there is Inheritance system to recover some of their dead character's stats and start at their old Hearth Fire location (thus recovering their base if they had one), instead starting all over again by spawning fresh character in random wilderness.
  • Death of a Thousand Cuts: it is possible to die from a collection of wounds that would individually be insignificant.
  • Defeat Means Friendship: You tame animals by, effectively, beating the crap out of them.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: Often invoked by the sandbox Pv P nature of the game.
  • Dual Wielding: You can equip up to two small tools, though some require two hands to handle. Equipping two weapons doesn't do much in combat, except expanding your repertoire of Confusion Fu.
  • Fisher King: Realms grant buffs to everyone within the Realm's area. These don't include any negative effects however but can be lost if the Realm is destroyed.
  • Foreign Queasine: Early-game foods include roast grasshoppers, snails, and "rat-on-a-stick."
  • Good Is Not Nice: Rangers will severely punish lawbreakers, if they don't simply knock you out and grab any stolen goods to teach you a lesson they will simply execute you.
  • Grey-and-Gray Morality : Potential griefers can buy a variety of skills to break and enter, steal and rough up others for no particular reason, but often target only players who leave obvious gaps in their defenses or indiscriminately drain their turf's natural resources. Rangers live to punish crimes and locate enemies, but can also track down people who did as much as step foot into a private property and kill them in cold blood. There is a lot of squabbling about politics from and to both sides.
  • Instant Leech: Just Fall in Water!: More specifically, swamp water. They can be used medicinally but since they can damage players and can be forcibly placed on them, they are of course weaponized as well.
  • Load-Bearing Boss: All Dungeons work like this. However it is more of an immersive way to explain the Dungeon despawning, as a new exit appears in the Boss Room.
  • Luck-Based Mission: Many things depend on biome or pre-generated nodes. Players are spawned into world randomly.
    • Certain quests to gain Credos (form of specialization) can ask you to experience certain event you get from seeing specific resource node. Problem is that whether or not you get the event when seeing one is completely based on RNG.
  • Magikarp Power: Freshly spawned character will lose to ants without excessive cheesing. With enough stats, it's possible to defeat a bear completely naked (might be much harder since animals were given armor, but the main limit would be having to rely on unarmed finishing moves to deal damage.)
  • Mundane Utility: Primary purposes of raising Strength attribute are: increase combat damage, mining power, and smithing cap. It also makes you slow down less when carrying objects overhead, something you can do with anything set "liftable" regardless of your Strength.
  • No Ontological Inertia: Dough that's 99% on the way to becoming bread can be taken out of the oven, resetting it to completely unbaked dough. Also applies to clay in kilns and ore in smelters.
  • Non-Standard Game Over: Many things are unexpectedly lethal, or more lethal than something that intuitively should be more dangerous.
    • Someone chasing you with a two-handed battle-axe can definitely kill you, but this comes with some serious limitations. See the One-Hit Kill example for details.
    • Deep water, on the other hand, is invariably lethal if you are KO'd when trying to escape by swimming or if you get KO'd while on a boat and then attacker simply breaks your boat. note 
    • Remember to check if attacker placed some leeches that are about to suck out your last hitpoints.
    • You can die from eating too much peppered food.note 
  • One-Hit Kill:
    • Invoked with the Pv P tactic designed to work around the three-tiered Hitpoints system and "KO Protection" by only using non-damaging moves, that still create openings, and then use "Cleave" to deal massive damage that, if sufficient, causes the target to simply die without entering the protected KO state.
    • As alluded above, the combat system doesn't allow you to kill even the weakest enemy with a single combat move, you need to create an opening first. If you count those as "hits" this is an Averted Trope.
  • Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: Every few years or so, when major update requires it, the world is destroyed and remade anew.
    • In the literal sense, if you're not careful when mining a section of the mine can collapse, potentially killing everyone unlucky enough to be caught beneath it.
  • Shout-Out:
  • Squick: Ways to heal wounds include leeches and "Toad Butter" that includes toads but not butter.
  • Suffer the Slings: Since bows were made the require leather and slings changed to requiring only a dried hide, slings are again the first ranged weapon the players have access to.
    • Sling has the potential to serve as Disc-One Nuke - even without risking medium prey like foxes or badgers, it is easy to one-shot all sorts of small animals that would otherwise be hard or impossible to catch like Rabbits, Mallards, various small birds.
    • Slings require Archery skill, since it unlocks the "Shoot" -action. Also Marksmanship needs to be raised 1->3. However both total 1500 LP, equal to unlocking the skill "Boat Building."
  • The Stoner: There are various drugs in the game, all mostly harmless: tobacco makes you relax, increasing the quality of certain fine crafts and alleviating fatigue, smoking hemp gives you the munchies, briefly turning you into a Big Eater, eating certain mushroom buffs your Psyche, and opium heals certain wounds while inflicting one of it's own.
  • Super Drowning Skills: By default, you can't swim. After unlocking the Swimming skill, you risk permanently killing your character every time you take a swim, although unlike in Legacy you start to take damage instead of instantly dying.
  • You Have Researched Breathing: Several of the higher-end skills include Rage (attacking other players), Trespassing (entering claimed territory), Theft, Vandalism (interacting with objects on claimed land) and Murder (killing other players). Justified with the perma-death system; the only players able to perform crimes are the ones who have everything to lose by being hunted down and revenge-killed by rangers.
    • You have to learn how to swing a sword or poke with a spear by killing animals.
  • You Killed My Father: If you create a new character to "inherit" a dead character, new character is considered their descendant. Therefore this trope can potentially be invoked.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Common reaction from playerbase, as the "Eternal Alpha" -development mantra mandates the devs to make sweeping changes, even in the middle of a world.
  • Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Utilized as Griefer tactic. Explained in detail here.

    Legacy version exclusive tropes 
  • Agony of the Feet: In Legacy version, players walking around bare-footed in the wilderness will constantly get the health- and stamina-draining "Thorn in the foot" debuff. Yeowch.
  • Booze-Based Buff: Drink a sip of wine or a mug of ale, and your stats and study capacity will increase for a while. Drink too much in a short time, though, and your stats will go down instead.
  • Common Place Rare: Metal is extremely valuable, and can be found underground. The only way to get underground is via a cave entrance (rare and often claimed) or a mine hole (extremely expensive to construct). Not only that, but mining is dangerous, and takes a high Strength and Mining level to get anything good from it.
    • Sausages are extremely valuable food, but can only be made by sausage machines, which require costly skills and...metal. This also applies to everything else that needs metal, such as brick walls.
      • You can make Ceramic Meat Grinder combining various types of not-so-easily accessible clay, but it can not make all types of sausages.
  • Luck-Based Mission: Most basic commodities (such as food) are very hard to find if you start in certain environments, forcing you to rely on passing rabbits and rats or foraging for randomly-spawning roots and berries to survive.
  • No "Arc" in "Archery": All projectiles not only fly straight at the target (regardless whether they'll hit or miss), but will even fly up hills and through trees, rocks and walls.
  • Shout-Out: The description of the Ranger skill references Walker, Texas Ranger.
  • Squick: There are only two ways to recover your maximum HP in the game. The easier one is to attach leeches to your body until they bloat up. The other is bandaging your head (and the bandage becomes soaked with blood soon after).
  • Suffer the Slings: Slings are ranged weapon of choice for most players, due to the extremely high LP investments needed to properly use a bow.
  • Super Drowning Skills: By default, you can't swim. This is for your own safety; rivers are the only things in this game worse than bears.
    • To elaborate: to be killed by a creature (including bears) they have to breach your defenses, then damage your HP enough to knock you out, then finish you off when you're down, and even then, you can reincarnate to recover your equipment and your skull to get some of your abilities back. But running out of Stamina in the water (which drains incredibly fast) is an instant kill that makes everything your character has on him/her lost forever.
  • The Stoner: Certain opium-based "medicine" gives you a huge strength buff for a handful of seconds.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The change in how LP is earned from world 4 to 5 has been...controversial to say the least.


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