Stonehearth
The most promising game that never had a chance to be.
Stonehearth
Help a small group of settlers build a home for themselves in a forgotten land. Establish a food supply, build shelter, defend your people, monitor their moods, and find a way to grow and expand, facing challenges at every step.
Introduction
A review for Stonehearth has been long overdue. I have been playing this game on and off since 2018, for a total of over 400 hours. It’s safe to say that I love this game, I keep going back to this game and it is one of my favourite games.
That’s why it pained me so much to see it discarded as it has been.
Long story short:
The game showed a lot of potential initially, promising an advanced engine and flexible building mechanics. But early alpha builds were unstable, and updates were minor, failing to address core problems, which wasn’t good.
RIOT Games acquired the studio mainly for the developers' expertise in fighting games, not for Stonehearth, but it got acquired nonetheless. Post-acquisition, the original developers shifted focus away from this game onto their other projects, leaving the remaining team without clear direction. Despite promises, meaningful updates were rare, and key features were never implemented.
Eventually, RIOT pushed, the devs caved and the game was declared finished in a disappointing state, far from its potential.
An amazing group of modders volunteered to keep the game alive through the Authorized Community Expansion Project, ACE for short. What started as a mod to expand the game vastly, ended up being its sole saviour.
All of this to say, yes, the game was abandoned rather unceremoniously and that sucks, because it really was promising, but it is still a good game regardless, especially if you add all the wonderful mods that are still being maintained and expanded upon.
Storyline
The main idea is: you control a bunch of settlers who come here to build a town from scratch, and gather resources, craft items, construct buihldings and defend against invasions to do so.
There are a few storylines in the form of quests that enrich the entire feeling of the game, but I genuinely don’t want to spoil them because they are so cute to discover on your own.
There is no real “end goal” other than survive and expand your village to its limits, after which you can select a handful of hearthlings and re-embark on a new journey, this time taking some resources and gained knowledge with you.
Gameplay
Gameplay-wise, Stonehearth is a blend between city-building, colony management, sandbox building, with survival elements.
You get dropped on a map of your choosing and decide where to start your village. That spawns a hearthfire, which is the centerpiece of your village. This is what will evolve as you progress through quests and unlock more hearthlings and jobs.
You gather resources by sending your hearthlings out to do so, stockpiling them to craft with later. You assign jobs to hearthlings using job tools, allowing you to switch jobs rather easily. Depending on which faction you chose, your job tree will look different.
The building mechanics are fantastic. I’m honestly bummed that the devs didn’t quite bring this to its fruition because it could have been revolutionary. Through an intuitive interface, you can design buildings using the different blocks and items you have unlocked (but maybe not yet crafted, so get your crafters on top of that!) There are quite a few premade blueprints in the game, and through the Steam Workshop, you can find many, many more and share your own.
Once ready to build, the hearthlings will take care of getting the resourfces and adding them to the blueprint. They’ll use adorable little scaffolding ladders to so. After construction is finished, you can still add things to existing buildings. Say you find a nice rug and think, wow, this would really tie my carpenter’s room together”, you can easily dispatch it there, making your carpenter a very happy dude. With mods, you’ll add even more furniture to decorate with.
Atmosphere
When it comes to visuals, Stonehearth is probably the nicest game I have ever played.
It is just so pretty! The voxel art style, when done well, is one of my favourites.
The entire game gives off a cosy vibe, even the monsters / enemies you have to vibe are absolutely adorable, making it quite hard to just outright MURDER them, but oh well.
Tutorial
The tutorial doesn’t feel separate - it’s more: the game explains things when they come to you, and it’s built pretty straight-forwardly that your intuition already gets you most of the way there.
Modding
And then there are the mods. Oh. My. God.
So many creative expansions have been made by the community; It doesn’t even feel like modding anymore, those have just become part of the game.
I could write a whole segment here about the mods I recommend, but it’s genuinely: all of them.
Just hop into the Steam Workshop and sort by “most popular of all time”.
Everything by ACE is a must. Some quality of life things like Autoharvest, or a better crafting queue. A brickload of blueprints, adding tons of buildings to your game. But also, heaps of new content. New jobs like Glassblower or an expansion on the Trapper, decorative items, new armours and weapons, there is so much. Honestly, just check out my subscribed items and get started.
TL;DR
I would still recommend Stonehearth wholeheartedly, despite it being abandoned / never really finished, with the caveat of it requiring mods.
Stonehearth is a wonderful game in a cosy, voxel setting with the right amount of gathering, crafting, building and fighting to keep brain occupied for hours, even more so with mods. I have yet to find another game with those same parameters that pulls it off this well.
But seriously, if you find a voxel game like this that pushes the same buttons, please let me know!
Questions or comments? Let me know on Steam or on Twitter!