Hearth and Hamlet v1.1 update and Steam Autumn Sale!

Hello everyone!

We wanted to once again thank each and every one of you for playing and enjoying Hearth and Hamlet so far. The reception to our little game has been beyond our wildest expectations, and we’re so happy to hear that so many of you have enjoyed your time with it.

And it’s on that note that we have two pieces of exciting news to share with you.

First up, we are delighted to announce that we are releasing the game’s first patch today! Patch 1.1 brings a wide range of gameplay changes and bug fixes requested by the community. The full details are below - but here’s just a few of the highlights. 

As a quality of life improvement, we have introduced research pinning, to help you better keep track of your progress as you build up your kingdom. Additionally, any pinned research and buildings are now saved, and will be restored when you reload the game at a later date.

We’ve also made some changes to adapt to both bigger and smaller screens. For those of you playing on Steam Deck or similar devices, we have redesigned the UI in the bottom-left corner to better accommodate small screens. For high resolution screens, the mouse cursor now scales with UI scaling for better ease of use. 

The full details are below - But before we get to that, there’s one more piece of news we want to share. Hearth and Hamlet is taking part in the Steam Autumn Sale! From October 1st through to the 8th, Hearth and Hamlet will be on sale for a 20% discount. So for those of you who have been waiting on the sidelines to join our community, there has never been a better opportunity to jump in.

And now - on to the patch notes. As ever, we look forward to hearing your feedback!

Patch 1.1.0

Gameplay Changes

• Added research pinning.
• Pinned research and buildings are now saved and restored when a game is loaded.
• Redesigned the UI in the bottom-left corner to better accommodate small screens such as the Steam Deck.
• The mouse cursor now scales with UI scaling, making it easier to use on high-resolution screens.
• Arrow keys can now be used to move the camera (in addition to WASD).
• Added new icons for the One-way Magic Portal and Stable Magic Portal.
• Removed Spacebar and Enter as harvest shortcuts. Use the 'Hover to Click' option in the menu instead. This prevents accidentally harvesting a location while viewing elsewhere on the map.
• Renamed Lord's Manor to Noble's Manor.
• Updated several item descriptions.
• Added an arrow indicator pointing to the education building when the next level of blueprints is unlocked.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed Item and Policy status effects overlapping the UI when many are active at once.
• Fixed several graphical errors in the farm.
• Fixed bugged ocean tiles.
• Fixed Town Guards becoming trapped.
• Fixed graphical glitches around the town.
• Fixed the sliding menus so the grabber is easier to grab at maximum and minimum sizes.
• Fixed the One-way Portal and Stable Portal not activating correctly at the Wizard Academy.
• Fixed a bug that allowed harvesting to continue after fast travelling away from a location.
• Fixed a bug that caused the game's UI to display incorrectly when launching on Linux.
• Fixed tooltip text shrinking too small on lower UI scaling.
• Fixed some translation errors.
• Fixed a bug that caused some resources to exceed their maximum when gathering.
• Fixed unpurchased research upgrades causing the research book tab to flash when the required resources have not yet been unlocked.
• Reduced the occurrence of overlapping UI elements. UI scaling can still cause overlap in some cases.

Additional Changes

• Memory usage has been greatly optimised, further reducing RAM requirements beyond the improvements in previous patches.
• Significantly improved load times.
• Lowering the game difficulty now warns the player if the change will affect completion achievements.
• Adjusted the Options menu size and layout to better fit lower-resolution screens.
• Removed 720p as a preset window option. The game remains playable at this resolution, but some UI elements are not optimised for sizes below 800p.
• Added a tooltip in the Options menu warning that increasing UI scaling too high for the current resolution may cause UI to overlap or exceed screen boundaries.

Thank you all for playing, and we look forward to speaking to you again soon!