Stonehearth is a game about exploration and survival in an epic fantasy setting. Your job is to help a small group of settlers survive and carve out a place for themselves in a hostile land. You’ll need to establish a food supply, build shelter, defend your people, and find a way to grow and expand, facing challenges at every step.
Starting from procedurally generated terrain with dynamic AI encounters, Stonehearth combines city sim and good old combat with infinite building possibilities. It’s built to be moddable at every level, from your city, to the people and creatures inhabiting the world, and will ship with the tools and documentation for you to add your own customizations to the game, and share them with friends.
The game is equal parts Sandbox, Real Time Strategy, and RPG.
It will initially ship on PC, but we have a stretch goal for Mac and Linux releases.
This kickstarter is to fund the single player version of the game. We would love to add cooperative multiplayer and PvP modes as well, and these will appear as future stretch goals.

The heart of the game is city building and management. When you're just starting out, you'll need to juggle tasks like obtaining a sustainable food supply, building shelter, and defending your fledgling settlement from raiders.
Once you've achieved a foothold in the world, it will be up to you to write the destiny for your people. You’re going to have the flexibility to choose your own path in this game. Do you want to build a great conquering empire? A vibrant trade city? A spiritual monastery? We really want you to feel like this is your settlement, and give you the tools that make it look and operate exactly as you wish.

Level Up Your Settlers
All the settlers in your towns have jobs. A job is like a class in a role playing game. Each job has a specific role like hauling materials, building, crafting, and fighting. As your little guys work at a job they will gain experience and levels. Some jobs, when they meet certain pre-requisites, can upgrade into entirely new jobs with new capabilities
Usually to assign someone a new job you'll also need to craft a tool for them. The Mason can craft blocks, statues, and tools from stone, but to do it he'll need a mallet and chisel crafted by the carpenter. Our goal is to have a tech tree that's both very wide and very deep, so there will be plenty of different kinds of things to do in the game, but also a lot of depth to explore if you want to concentrate on any one area.

As your town becomes more wealthy and prosperous, you risk attracting the attention of one of the world's Titans, epic boss monsters looking to protect their turf, or just to plunder your riches.

Each boss will have a unique lore and set of abilities used to lay waste to your city.

We LOVE mods and want to make it as easy as possible to author and share mods.

Want to see a new kind of sword in the game? You can model it, define it’s stats, and then craft it in game. You can also share the design with other players so they can enjoy it too, or bring their authored content into your game.

As a modder you’ll be able to do basically anything that we as developers can do: introduce new items and monsters, write new scripted adventures, influence the AI, you name it. It goes back to that original pen and paper RPG experience, where “the game” is a collaboration between the core ruleset and the stories crafted by the gamemaster.

Spoiler:

 Squigsquasher wrote:
Oh look, yet another Minecraft clone.

Mammoth Bonanza: All backers at the $15 level and higher will receive a cuddly baby Mammoth pet!

Friendly Faction: Rabbit Clan: An ancient race of honorable, subterranean lagomorphs. Your potential allies.

Glacier Biome: Snowy, icy lands with unique building mechanics for igloos and frost forts!

Mac and Linux Port: Retail release of the game for both Mac & Linux.

Pirates, Ninjas and Politicians: Your wealthy, thriving communities will draw the attention of the dread Order of Applied Equivocation. Unlike the straightforward aggression of goblins and trolls, these new enemies will cheat, kidnap, and blackmail their way into your citizen’s homes... and coffers.

A secret panel in the dead merchant’s desk reveals a cheerful crest chased with the following motto: The OAE: Backstabbing You for Our Better Tomorrow.

New Class: Animal Trainer : Tame wild animals and train up their young to work and fight by your side. Optimize food, building, and resource production through careful breeding and rigorous conditioning.

“Extra fine, I get. Extra fluffy? Sure, keeps the kids warm in the winter. Even the natural saffron yellow, I managed, though it took three generations and the weavers complained it came out more chartreuse than goldenrod. But steel wool? Who’s ever heard of a sheep growing metal outta’ its skin?” Devin Baaspeak stared dolefully at his herd. They stared dolefully back. “Crafters,” he sighed. “Time to get to work, guys.”

New Class: Magma Smith: Harness the earth’s most destructive material to incinerate invaders and raise towering walls of black glass.

“Lad, I once saw a man bend fire and earth into a new continent for his people. The least you can do is dig your ma her new flowerbed.”

Dragon Whelp Bonanza: All backers at the $15 level and higher will receive a hyperactive baby dragon. Warning: may take centuries to mature.

“What, the egg? The kid found it in the stream bed yesterday. It’s small enough. What’s the harm?”

Player vs. Player City Raids: Select a party of adventurers to storm a copy of another player’s city and bring home their treasures. Leaderboards will rank and track the deadliest fighters and most impenetrable fortresses.

“Stormloft47 has demolished 208 raiding parties.”


New Class - Geomancer: Manipulate rock and stone to bolster your city's builders, flattening or raising earth as the cause demands. Craft tireless golem workers so everyone else can take a much needed break.

She put green lights in their empty eyesockets--a fanciful touch, but she felt it gave them character. Now, she checked each rune for dust, noted every crack for the touchups she'd handle tomorrow. Powered them off, one by one. Slowly, lights dimmed to black. "Good job, guys! Finished the whole square in just two days!" She dusted her hands, patted each fondly on the head, and shut the warehouse door.

In the dark, one pair of eyes swirled back to life.

Enemy Faction - Elementals: When conditions are just right, unstoppable giants of fire, rock, ice, and air rampage across the land, destroying everything in their path. Appease them or prepare your defenses...

Verne Earthwalk fought to control his voice. "My Lords," he managed, "when I said that your incessant digging made the earth angry, I meant it. Literally."


New Class - Engineer: Fiendishly complex traps. Steam pumps. Black powder. In his moments of genius, this Master Craftsman boosts your town's productivity with miraculously advanced tools and weaponry. In his other moments....

"With steam, human ingenuity, and enough pipes, anything is possible!"

Seasons!: Horde food for the winter and farm up a storm in the summer as the four seasons cycle over your town. Building, farming and fighting all gain new depth as rising temperatures parch the land and falling snows drive your settlers indoors.

"SNOW DAY!!!!"

Co-op Multiplayer: Share a living world with your friends and family! Build sprawling empires of towns, cities and castles, and unite in mutual defense against the towering threat of ancient titans.

“When the shadow fell over the valley the ground trembled, but our hearts did not. For no matter what happened between this breath and the next, we knew we stood with our brothers and sisters, together in this world... and the next, and next, and next.”

Festivals: Join your townsfolk as they celebrate popular holidays like Solstice, Harvest, and The Monday of The Twelve Golden Fruit. Properly provisioned festivals produce happy, energetic workers. Forgotten events invite the wrath of greater powers...

“Though color variations make it clear at which point in its cycle the banana ought to be eaten, the proper way to hold the fruit is still debated. Though all scholars agree that the curved, nearly hexagonal shape fits the human fist, accounts vary as to whether the golden peel should be pulled back from the stem (as is traditional) or up from the black nub at the bottom. Either way, so please the gods.”

--Celebrant Jordan, Treatises on the Rituals of The Monday of the Twelve Golden Fruit


Alternate Planes: Many dimensions lurk beneath the fabric of reality. Lured by the promise of untold riches and arcane secrets, your bravest townsfolk open portals to previously unknown realms. What could possibly go wrong?

Through the door I saw... the sky. The sky at night, when the stars fill one end of the horizon to the other. Except... the stars were ordered in perfect rows, like corn in the field. And little round plates studded with rubies dashed around between them, jabbing lances of light at each other. One of the plates... flew apart as I watched. In a ball of fire!

...No more mushrooms for me.

-- From the diary of Archmage Twellot

Upgraded Musical Score: The Japanese RPGs from which Stonehearth draws its artistic inspiration were as much defined by their soundtrack as their visual style. Help us draw on the talent of a variety of professional musicians to create an enticing score that will stand up to a decade’s worth of play.


Three Playable Kingdoms: Hardy explorers and canny traders join our hardworking settlers in their quest to build, farm, and fight their way across the land. At the start of each game, choose one of the three kingdoms, each with its own unique perks.

Healing Crosswinds Caravan, Transcript, Early Summer, Immediately before The Incident

New Playable Race: Dwarves: While the Three Kingdoms of humans spread across the world's surface, the dwarves build their own empire deep in the mountains and bedrock below.

This dwarven race will come complete with new art, entirely new play mechanics more suited to a dwarven disposition, and new classes and crafting recipes.

Help! All driven underground by fire and trapped by rocks. The ground shakes; Dwarven drums in the deep. We cannot get out... they are coming!

--Jiruk Firestarter, Goblin Shaman

 Squigsquasher wrote:
Oh look, yet another Minecraft clone.