The second open beta
Five weeks of harvests, rare crafts and guild competition, while Farming, Cooking and the everyday shape of Hearthroot changed around its players.
Open Beta #2 ran from 31 August to 5 October. Thank you to everyone who played, reported bugs, shared feedback and helped Hearthroot grow.
353 accounts created 348 characters. Together, you gathered resources, built up your Homesteads, traded with other players and pushed further into the world.
The beta in numbers
353 accounts joined, creating 348 characters.
265.4 million skill XP earned.
1.81 million enemies defeated.
140,230 plots harvested.
6,218 main quest rewards claimed.
5 guilds formed and 411 Guild Orders completed.
Field Rats had a particularly rough beta: players defeated 713,381 of them. At the other end of the world, a single character accounted for all 45 Frostmere Colossi defeated.
Congratulations, Heartlings
Heartlings [TOP1] won the guild season during Open Beta #2, finishing at the top of the whole-beta standings with 138,396 points and 178 completed Guild Orders.
| Guild | Points | Guild Orders |
|---|---|---|
| Heartlings [TOP1] | 138,396 | 178 |
| triangles [TRNG] | 114,252 | 151 |
| L Empire Du Mal [LEDM] | 48,524 | 67 |
The winning team deserves a mention by name. Congratulations to all ten Heartlings members:
| Player | Guild role |
|---|---|
| xZeraz | Guild Master |
| Alfyfricosul | Officer |
| Child Worker | Officer |
| ReziXy | Officer |
| Cho | Recruit |
| Christa | Recruit |
| GIGASMELTER | Recruit |
| Melons | Recruit |
| Sonrisa | Recruit |
| Vorisek | Recruit |
Thank you to every guild that took part, and to the 71 accounts that contributed to Hearthfires along the way.
Where the XP went
Mining and Farming led the total XP earned, followed by Fishing. These five skills accounted for most of the beta's skill XP:
| Skill | XP earned |
|---|---|
 Mining | 47,339,365 |
 Farming | 46,467,495 |
 Fishing | 38,071,909 |
 Woodcutting | 29,889,832 |
 Cooking | 25,442,443 |
Dsunk reached the highest Total Level at 1,025, while Christa held the highest combined skill XP at 18,555,770.
Rare crafts and very common earthworms
30 Masterpiece items were crafted by 21 characters. That included five Copper Swords, four Copper Rings, three Iron Shields and three Iron Rings.
The resource piles were rather larger:
5.39 million Copper Ore collected.
4.53 million Willow Logs produced.
4.24 million Coal collected.
And somehow, 6.29 million Earthworms produced.
Seven characters also completed all 64 main quests present at the end of the beta.
A player economy
The Market traded almost 1.48 million item units, with a base trade value of 41.54 million Silver.
145 accounts completed a trade. Buy orders moved 82.7% of the traded item units, giving players a way to sell their resources into existing demand.
Behind the large totals were ordinary decisions: which tool to craft, what to keep for the next recipe, what to sell and what another player needed.
A beta that kept changing
The second open beta was also five weeks of work on the game itself. The numbers above describe what players achieved, but the world they were playing changed throughout that time.
Some updates added another reason to return. Others changed how much attention an existing activity asked for. A large part of the work was making the connections between systems easier to understand: crops becoming meals, resources becoming guild contributions, and repeated work becoming a specialisation.
Farming found a different rhythm
Farming had the largest change in daily routine.
The first rework moved regular crops away from the old five-minute planting loop. One-hour and eight-hour cycles gave players a choice between checking during a session and leaving the garden while they worked or slept. Fourteen regular crops spread across seven tiers, with Chilli Pepper, Sweet Potato and Eggplant joining the garden and Cabbage returning at the top.
That first release was not the final answer. Fifteen-minute and four-hour cycles followed, bringing each regular crop to four schedules. The choice became less about finding the one crop with a convenient timer and more about growing the ingredient you needed on a schedule that suited your day.
Later in the beta, Farming level, shovels and compost moved towards increasing the harvest rather than shortening the chosen grow time. A four-hour planting could remain a predictable four-hour commitment while your progress made the collection more rewarding.
The earlier Farming devlog records the first stage of that change. The follow-up matters because the original rework also reduced the supply of ingredients for frequent harvesters. Changing Farming meant looking again at what the rest of the game expected a garden to provide.
Food became a fuller progression path
Fishing expanded into a seven-tier progression across the world, from Hearthroot Village through to Moltenfall. Woodcutting also gained rare mushroom by-products across its seven tiers.
Cooking then grew around those ingredients: fish meals, pies and mushroom stews, with recipes across the same progression bands. The starter dishes remained a way into the skill, while later meals gave higher-tier fish, crops and mushrooms a place in the food supply.
Windmill Oil accepted a wider range of seeds. Cooking gained Fish, Pie and Stew filters, and meals received their own artwork, including burnt results. Finding a recipe and recognising its output became easier.
This is one of the connections I want Hearthroot to keep strengthening. A crop is more interesting when it can become a meal for Combat, a product to sell, or something another player is looking for. The beta helped expose where those connections worked and where ingredient supply still needed attention.
Guilds had more to build together
Guild Storage arrived during the beta, giving members a shared place to deposit and withdraw items after funding the building together.
The important part was the shared objective. Gathering a resource could now mean stocking a guild's supplies rather than only filling your own inventory. Deposits and withdrawals were recorded in the activity log, so members could see how those supplies were being used.
Guild profiles gained shareable links, progress and member lists. Avatars, contribution details and completed-order leaderboards made the people behind the totals more visible. Members also received notifications when a guild building was completed.
Heartlings' result belongs in that story. The winning score is a useful number, but listing the ten players recognises the group that earned it. The beta gave guild progression a real set of teams to test it, with different levels of activity and different ways of contributing.
Repeated work gained its own progress
Specialisations arrived on Skills and Progress, with tracks for particular activities alongside the broader skill levels.
Mining level describes your progress in Mining as a whole. A specialisation gives repeated work on a particular activity another form of progress. It adds a reason to care about what you spend your time doing, beyond choosing whichever action is currently available at your level.
Profiles gained a Specialisations tab too, making that progress visible when looking at another character. The interface was updated to show Specialisation XP when collecting and to explain what each track covered.
This is still something to learn from. The beta showed that players can reach very different stages of progression, and another progress bar is only useful if its choices and rewards are clear.
Leaving the game became easier
Optional browser alerts were added for crops, skill batches, Combat, travel and the offline progression cap, with daily reward alerts following later.
Players could choose the alerts they wanted on a particular device and send a test notification from Settings. The in-game inbox also became clearer about outstanding actions and recent activity.
An idle game needs to work when you are away from it. Longer Farming cycles helped with the schedule; notifications helped with knowing when there was something worth returning for. They gave players another way to fit the game around their day.
The smaller changes added up
Inventory locks helped protect items from sales and Guild Orders. Quality and Recently added sorting made growing collections easier to browse, and remembered tabs reduced some of the repeated navigation.
Smelting and Smithing received separate Hammer ladders. Crafting filters gained clearer categories and material checks. Combat Details began explaining XP per kill and incoming damage, while crop details showed how harvest bonuses were contributing.
The chest ladder was updated to Copper through Adamant. Opening a chest gained a hold animation and an immediate reward display, with another opening available from the same modal.
The Wiki gained gameplay rules and more detailed guides for XP, guilds and specialisations. These changes did not produce one headline number, but they helped explain the decisions players were already making.
What the beta taught me
The strongest lesson is that these systems need to be reviewed together. A change to crop output affects Cooking. A useful meal affects Combat preparation. Guild deliveries and the Market give the same resources other destinations.
The next questions are more specific than simply adding more content. I am looking at the first quests and the move into Brackenford, how ingredients reach the food supply, and where Silver enters and leaves the economy. The beta totals help identify those questions; your feedback helps explain what they felt like to play.
That is why this beta matters beyond its records. It gave the game a group of players who could try these connections while they were being changed, find the awkward parts and show which goals were worth pursuing.
Your bug reports, suggestions and time in the game will help shape the next stage of Hearthroot.
Thank you for being part of Open Beta #2.