Immediately the populus began plodding around, doing what I asked, proud of the new names I had bestowed on them. I thought the terrain I chose would be easily defensible. I decided to stick with what I knew and founded Ballyscum between two lakes and a forested mountainside (you can pick the location of your settlement from randomly generated map). Resourceful desert-dwellers or stout forest peoples. At the beginning of a new game you get to pick your race. My village of Ballyscum, for instance, should stand as a lesson for the ages. These kinds of games tend to produce silly stories and the same is true for Stonehearth. That's not to say it's unworthy of its genre.

But it's the same cycle that leaves you feeling a little tired by the end of the first in-game month. It's this cycle of 'build, defend, grow' that's at the heart of things. Then you get back to work, building a new shack for your blacksmith. This lets you murder the baddies using some (very simplistic) attack commands and loot the corpses.

To this end, you can assign some settlers to be guards and others to form a militia. While growth is the objective, you also have to fight off nasty creatures and chase away goblin thieves who sneak into town and try to pinch all your precious veg. Do well (increase your food, morale and 'net worth') and another little cuboid settler will potter into your village. At the end of each day you get a little report card. You start off with a small group of settlers and some baskets full of turnips. It's a village management sim with some RPG bits and bobs - a hyper-simplified Dwarf Fortress with a Minecraft face. But it hasn't really seen much light since. Stonehearth was first spotted by us back in the golden age of 2013 (in a post in which Alec wondered aloud what 2016 would be like (answer: it's dreadful)).

But with the hamlet I created, it was not so much a case of 'village idiot' than 'idiot village'. It would be easy for me to blame everything that went wrong with my settlement on one foolish worker who always messed things up. This week, he founds his own village in Stonehearth. Every week, Brendan forages on the frontiers of Early Access, looking for nourishing games and safety from dark creatures.

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