Kickstarter Ending! Housing & Morale!

Wow! We’ve shot past our $400,000 USD Kickstarter stretch goal well before the end of the campaign today! The Kickstarter is more than 200% funded! This means Hawthorn will have housing. Thank you so much, dear backers, for inviting your friends and contacts and making this possible! Now, you and your villagers will be able to claim those little animal cottages, nestled among the roots of the great oak. Assign a home to each villager, including yourself, then customize each one to suit its owner’s tastes. Decorate, rearrange, and make every nook cozy. Either help the NPCs decorating their homes, or, if that’s a bit much for you, you can let them decorate on their own. At day’s end, NPCs will retire to their cottages to rest, and so can you! You’re not just building a village. Now you can actually live the cottage life!

Another Kickstarter Mystery Goal Revealed! As always, meeting a Kickstarter stretch goal means that there is a new mystery goal coming up, this time at the $450,000 USD mark. Since the campaign ends today, we’re announcing right now that this mystery goal is “Village Morale”. Rebuilding a village and homesteading isn’t a walk in the park! Each villager, NPCs and players, will have things that they want, preferences in food, home, décor, and eventually much more. With Village Morale, supplying what each villager needs will make them happier and thereby improve the morale of the whole village, and this will affect not just the way the villagers behave but also how fast the village can progress, looking to the future. If we don’t reach this “Village Morale” goal by the end of the campaign today, we do have late pledges enabled. We could actually make many more stretch goals through late pledges if we keep spreading the word!

A Discord Party! Join the Hawthorn Discord for a party today at 3:30PM EDT (US) where NEARstudios will be celebrating with our community as the Kickstarter comes to its official close. We might even livestream some of the Hawthorn proof-of-concept demo... Also please wishlist Hawthorn on Steam! Steam wishlists will be very important to proving our traction with Hawthorn.

Finishing Strong This Kickstarter campaign officially ends June 5th at 4PM EDT (though, as mentioned, late pledges are enabled). It has been a whirlwind! We met our funding goal just over a week in. Then we voted in Hummingbirds as a new pet. We enabled the foundation for Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter in Hawthorn. We unlocked one of the first main story beats, the Hawthorn House, followed by the Storyteller System and travelling NPCs that players can name and customize with a Kickstarter add-on. And now Housing!

We’ve been blown away by the love and support of our community, by the sharing, the donations. Thank you so, so much!