Sun Haven

I consider myself a patient player. When I dislike a game, I first try to understand the developers' intent: what they wanted me to feel and how they expected me to interact with the systems. I tried to understand Sun Haven. That is why this review is negative: my patience did not run out over one small thing, but because the game feels like it does not understand itself. I am not going to spend time on the translation issues or the stiff characters. My problem is different: Sun Haven has many mechanics, but many of them either have no purpose, get devalued by other mechanics, or feel unfinished. The easiest example is armor, jewelry and potions. On paper, these are important parts of progression: you craft gear, brew buffs, get stronger. In practice, almost all of these bonuses are replaced by permanent upgrades. The arena, food, community tokens, mine resources - all of that gives health, mana, armor, attack and spell damage forever. Even the best armor set does not feel like a meaningful step. It feels like being moved a couple of weeks ahead in a grind that would make the gear irrelevant anyway. By winter of year one, I had taken off almost all my armor and jewelry, keeping only farming rings and a hat. The difference against strong enemies was laughable: with gear I killed them a little faster; without gear the fight took a few seconds longer. Potions have the same problem. To make 10 of the strongest +12 attack potions, you gather resources and wait for crafting. In roughly the same time, you can get around +40 permanent attack by giving gifts, doing daily quests, and arena. Great system, if the goal was to teach the player that the system can be ignored. The second major pain point is resource management. The game has three large regions with their own farms, resources, stations, furniture, food and crafting chains. On paper, that sounds exciting. In practice, "unique" locations do not remove shared resources, so the player chooses between three kinds of pain: carry resources between farms, constantly return to the main farm for some missing item, or centralize everything in one place. I chose the third option. I ended up with around 80 large chests, 12 global item categories, every crafting station, and themed zones for different regions. Organizing it took about 20 real-life hours. Yes, now I press one button and items fly into the correct chests. Convenient. But having to build a warehouse terminal just so the game stops choking me says a lot about the design. The more locations the game opens, the less it feels like exciting content. After the elven farm, I was no longer excited for Withergate or the ocean floor. I was thinking: great, now they will dump dozens more items, stations, recipes and another layer of manual chaos on me. Exploration loses appeal when you know you will later have to organize and search through it. If you do not, you are sentencing yourself to constant pain while looking for that one item you can't remember where you put it. The skill trees leave a similar impression. At first, progression looks huge and useful: a bonus here, a bonus there, you want everything. Then you realize that outside of new spells and recipes, many perks give almost nothing. For example, the perk that gives a chance to get coal from rocks. Guides often recommend it because coal is useful early. In practice, 3 skill points can turn into a few extra pieces of coal per run. Three points for "well, maybe +4 coal per 10 mine floors." Wonderful. There are many perks like that. Selling bonuses give pocket change. Production speed bonuses only work while you are nearby; leave the farm or house, and the speed goes back to normal. Most fishing bonuses are made irrelevant by one bubble spell. Movement speed can become so high that you start fighting your own character. The most honest perk is the animal husbandry one: "your animals are very happy, no gameplay benefits." That note fits half the skill tree. Fertilizers and crops have the same issue. The crop variety is big, and it could have been a strength. But fertilizers again run into the question: why? Extra crop chance can be covered by totems and farming gear. Infinite watering is replaced by mana food and spamming rain. Growth speed fertilizer sounds great, but works worse than it sounds. When the game says "+50% growth speed", you expect an 8-day crop to grow roughly twice as fast. In reality, the mechanic calculates it differently, rounds it, and you get closer to 2 days saved instead of 4. It is easier to plant more seeds than gather resources, craft fertilizer and pretend you are optimizing anything. The economy is strange too. The game has a sharp transition from "I have no money at all" to "I have so much money I do not know why I need it." There is a short pleasant moment between those states, when you earn a lot and spend it on seeds, furniture, food and clothes. But it ends quickly. There are many professions, and technically you can do anything. In practice, many feel like checkbox activities because the balance between usefulness, time and income is uneven. Resource disposal is especially annoying. In some places, the game can be smart: regular stone can become decor, skill books, copper, gold, jewelry and money. Great chain: trash becomes useful. Then you go to other locations, mine thousands of themed stone, and the game says nothing. What do you do with it? Store it. Admire it. This is not only about stone: one resource is needed everywhere, while another drops from the same activity but is used in a couple of recipes and sells for pennies. Cooking has similar problems, and fish are funnier: need a specific fish? Too bad, fishing is random. Stardew's bait maker waves at this half-baked imitation. All of this would be easier to tolerate if the technical side were solid. It is not. I played through several major updates, roughly from version 2 to 3.1, and regularly ran into bugs of varying nastiness. The map sometimes does not show the player position. Large chests cannot be properly renamed, which is critical for storage. In the elven tree quest, my jump bugged so badly that I could not progress; that was when I dropped the game until the next update. Mount collisions still feel wrong: visually you are near one tile, but interacting with another. There are also smaller but exhausting problems. The rain spell sometimes refuses to water one random tile. If you miss it, your crop cycle desyncs. The final straw was an update after which regrowing crops stopped maturing. The game says: "ready tomorrow." You come back tomorrow: still "ready tomorrow." I wanted to feed myself with those crops the next day, but instead the game kept feeding me "tomorrow". Other players get the opposite bug: crops are endlessly ready to harvest. Farming is the core of the game, and it can randomly break years after release. Optimization is also questionable. For a pixel farming game, Sun Haven is too resource-hungry and unpredictable. My farm can run fine with piles of machines, crops, totems, scarecrows, fruit trees, pets and animations, and then the FPS drops in a mine or elven location where it is not clear what is trying to burn my computer. I have seen fewer weird drops in Terraria, Stardew Valley and Minecraft. Sun Haven is not just "a game with flaws" to me. It is a game where good potential drowns in unfinished systems. It gives you scale, then turns it into warehouse logistics. It gives you progression, then devalues it with permanent bonuses. It gives you crafting, then makes you think not about creativity, but about where the next resource is stored. It gives you farming, then breaks the crops. It gives you chill, but first asks for mental preparation, mods and the ability to laugh through clenched teeth. I really tried. More than 200 hours. Now I can finally relax by taking a break from this game. If that was the developers' meaning of cozyness, then I understood it perfectly.

I cannot in good conscience recommend this game after all the behind the scenes stuff that this company has done. Ignoring the community, not crediting artists, underpaying employees, etc.

I want to love this game...Bug Haven is not worth your money. There is a reason the company has lawsuits against them. Multiplayer has a 50% chance of connecting and working. Most common bugs are characters permanently freezing (feinting does not fix), character saves disappearing, farms being deleted randomly, animals disappearing, selling portal not showing up, constant crashing and disconnect even if you're in the same room together. It has been like this for years and they refuse to fix it. Developers ignore multiplayer bug reports!! Single player is a little better but still has plenty of bugs unresolved. Bug reports can take years to fix, assuming they fix them. They also archive all reports even if they're not fixed making it very difficult to get the developers to do their job. Instead they'd rather put out $140 of DLC instead of fixing their game after 5 years of it being out. I understand Steam says it was released 3yrs ago, that is however when it came out of Early Access not when it first launched. As for the game itself, it is marketed as an RPG. This is a very loose description. Your characters racial abilities do not matter as all characters will be identical within the first 10-15hrs in the game. Making the races obsolete outside of RP focused players. The racial abilities rarely work like Angels heal. The RPG aspect is basically allowing you to choose if you want to use spells, a sword, or another type of weapon. There are no builds, like tank, archer, mage, etc. Ultimately what you choose will not matter as you can get all skills in the game with time. The customization of your character is all over the place with some races having limited options (Elemental) and others having strong favoritism (Elves). Even though in the game there is a wide diversity of characters you could have looked like. The romance in this game is very limited and all over the place. Which is very off putting when you have 25 options and achievements tied to them. Early Access Love interests will have their date scenes before you even date them. But later added RNPCS will require you to date them first before going on dates. Which means you have to max out there hearts and ask them to date you. Which can be easily achieved by simply talking to them every day. You do not need to gift them items or do anything special to make them immediately fall in love with you. You can date everyone in the game but marry one. If you're playing multiplayer only the host will have their spouse move in with them and only they can have kids. However you and your friends can all date and marry the same person in the game and it will have zero impact on the game nor acknowledge they're already married to someone else. To marry someone in the game you have to get through ALL of their dialogue which can take up to 3 in game years to complete for some characters. Again the mechanics are all over the place including the art styles. You can tell they have had many different developers working on them with how little cohesion their is. Speaking of Developers, they have promised to credit their workers but have never delivered. Credits are developers version of a resume, with work history. Without credit they're applying to jobs with no work history. Edit to add: the credits are not complete. Currently all whistle-blowers are missing, Kendra Smith who has a lawsuit against them is missing in the credits. Their community manager is missing from credits as well. And after they made an announcement about paying creators outside of the US a "fair competitive US Pay" those workers are not listed in the credits. Why is every person who asked for credits or have since been fired/removed from the company missing their credits? Being fired or leaving doesn't erase the work you have done. PixelSprout studios response to it was to say that these developers and artists "declined" to be added to the credits. Really? They all over night changed their minds after years of asking to be added to the credits? They also stole the work and took credit for player created translations and took the work of the modding community. Thankfully the lead translator who made all the spreadsheets (Potatoe) got wind of this they blocked the developers access to them. They are nolonger able to translate the game without using a bot. But they still have them up and even claim the work as their own. Workers are currently suing the company for unjustifiable firing, unfair treatment, not paying them properly ($7USD an hour when minimum wage is $15/hr). There is a lot more going on behind the scenes but this company is not good. It's a shame they chose greed over their players. If you'd like to hear from the developers that made this game. This is the whistle-blower interviews: https://youtu.be/bKcrEMAEUBc?si=PXGN555enepl1-R9

Disappointed by the lack of credits to the people who put so much work into this game, the lack of accountability from the devs about bugs and quality, the push of more content over polishing what's there, and overall how the game has been handled in the past years. I initially adored this game but as things stand I will not be recommending this to anyone and I won't be putting any more money into it.

狗屎制作团队，都他妈的几年了，机翻问题竟然还没解决，要么你就别标语言支持，要么你就全翻译了，又想赚人民币又不雇中文译者，啥人啊都是。

While the game isn't bad by any means, I would recommend against purchasing it due to how poorly the developers have been treated. It's up to you who you want to support, but it's good to be aware of where your money is going.

this is my favorite game and i will always love it but it's so ♥♥♥♥♥♥ to see everything that's been happening behind the scenes finally come to light. how do you ace a game and then treat the very staff that made it this enjoyable like garbage?? 10/10 game 10/10 devs that made this possible 0/10 company

It genuinely is a good game, but the studio is so shady and questionable i cant say you buy it to support them underpaying their devs and how poorly they've been treated throughout it