Haven and Hearth is a multiplayer online survival RPG. It’s hard to classify, the experience totally depends on the players you encounter. You might have a great 6 months building a village, roleplaying, feasting with friends, sailing the world, and then be brutally murdered while out on a routine trip to market.

Another game that’s been in development for 12 years, there are deep systems for character development and continuous improvement of item quality. It’s a single server with a map resetting about once every 2 years. Player-count will be about 1000 people very heavily playing the first month, and tails off to about 200 regulars after a year.

It’s a huge map for the number of players. Sailing across the world could be an 8 hour trek, but fast-travel locations can be used once discovered. Local fast-travel routes can also be constructed by players to make repeat trips easy. Things like map data and market surveys are all collected by players and published on third-party websites.

Playing as a hermit or joining a group are both common. A normal first-time experience would be getting killed by bears a few times before finding a place you’d like to settle; constructing a wooden palisade and waiting a day, to be safe from any would-be murderers, and then making progress on farms and mines. Eventually you’ll brave out to meet your neighbors, find a route to the inevitable player-built market-city, and go sailing in a Snekkja.

It is free to play, with a 1-time $7 fee for “normal” increase of inventory space and chopping/mining speed, and optional subscription for cosmetic hats and more inventory space. I played free for a year, and did the 1-time fee when the new world came out, haven’t felt the need for the subscription. There is a token system inspired by Eve-online, where you can buy subscription tokens from the developers, and securely trade those with other players. Anything besides cosmetic hats and the tokens can be stolen, if you die outside of your base.

I’ll have to edit this post in a bit, lots I could say about this game and my time playing.