Hearth Fable — Ink-wash Chinese city-building sim. Start from a blank scroll: build trades, raise mythical beasts, defend your town, and paint your own mountain-sea utopia.

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About This Demo

Hearth Fable is a 2D side-scrolling management and building game whose entire world is painted on an ancient hand-drawn scroll of mountains and seas. You start with two people and a single warehouse, turning a patch of wasteland into a bustling town, then carrying your town into every corner of the scroll. Your ultimate goal is to plant the Jianmu, a world-tree that grows until it pierces the sky.

Paint Your Own Scroll

  • On a scroll that slowly unfurls before you, assign your mountain-sea wanderers to their tasks and write your own story across this living painting.

  • Raise houses, set out beds and stoves, build roads and ladders, and arrange every corner of your own scroll.

  • Wherever your town takes root, the mountains and waters around it regain their colors.

A Hundred Trades in Bloom

  • Farming, logging, weaving, cooking, brewing, mining—open one workshop after another.

  • Study the Register of a Hundred Trades to learn new professions and unlock new houses and workshops.

  • Grind pigments at the color-study bench and the ink kiln, then use those pigments to drive mechanisms such as the water mill and the cloud-soaring platform.

Tending the Mountain-Sea Folk

  • The residents work, eat, and sleep on their own, and each has their own joys and sorrows.

  • Pay wages, collect taxes, and set the rules—you must keep both the purse and the people's hearts in balance.

  • Repair the waystation gate and newcomers will arrive seeking shelter; choose the right ones to stay.

Spring Sowing, Autumn Harvest

  • Spring, summer, autumn, and winter turn in turn; rush the harvest in autumn and pull through winter on stored grain and firewood.

  • Go hungry, lack shelter, or fall ill, and the residents will voice their grievances.

Giants Fallen from the Sky

Things from beyond the painting can fall into it: a calligraphy brush taller than a house plunges into the earth, a colossal hamburger crashes outside the town walls—enough to feed the whole city for days. No one in town knows what they are, but every one of them has its use, and its price. What to do with them is up to you.

Invaders at the Gates

  • The bigger your town grows, the more it draws covetous eyes, and enemies will come in waves to storm it.

  • Train soldiers and build defenses to hold the town gates and the granaries.

  • Bosses hold sway in deep nests and dungeons—conquer them and claim rich rewards.

Strange Lands of Mountains and Seas

  • Dig down into the earth and strike out into the distance; jungles, deserts, mineral veins, volcanoes, and lakes—each land is home to different plants, trees, birds, and beasts.

  • Out in the wild you may encounter creatures from the Classic of Mountains and Seas, such as the Wenyao flying fish, the Qingniao messenger bird, and the Qinyuan.

  • At the edge of every strange land stands a wonder: the Zhuyu Shrine of Fertile Fields, the White Tiger Martial Shrine, the Fusang Shrine of the Great Thoroughfare, the Yinglong Shrine, and the Jianmu itself. The special materials needed to build these wonders can only be taken from the rare beasts and odd creatures scattered across the map.

The Jianmu Reaches the Heavens

  • The Jianmu is the greatest undertaking in all the scroll. Set its roots, raise its trunk, grow its branches, and spread its leaves—it climbs one section at a time along with your town, all the way to the top of the scroll, and then breaks through it. The day the tree reaches the heavens is the day your scroll is complete.

Here, paint your own Hearth Fable and begin a strange and wondrous journey.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

This game leverages generative AI technology to generate cat appearances, decorative props and scene content, enriching your desktop cat-raising experience. All AI-generated assets are processed and adjusted manually to fit the game’s visual style. No real personal data will be used for AI creation.

System Requirements

    Minimum:
    • OS *: Windows 7 64 bit
    • Processor: AMD A10 7850K, Intel i3-2000
    • Memory: 4 MB RAM
    • Graphics: Radeon R9 280, Geforce GTX 740
    • Storage: 500 MB available space
    Recommended:
    • OS *: Windows 7 64 bit
    • Processor: AMD A10 7850K, Intel i3-2000
    • Memory: 4 MB RAM
    • Graphics: Radeon R9 280, Geforce GTX 740
    • Storage: 500 MB available space
* Starting January 1st, 2024, the Steam Client will only support Windows 10 and later versions.
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