Coming soon

About This Game

A farm nobody wanted anymore

Two, three or four of you come from the city and buy an old farm in Upper Carinthia, in the Austrian Alps. The roof holds, the barn stands, the soil is good. What's missing is everything people used to know. Down the road lives Hias. He's old, he has time, and he finds you funny.

What kind of game this is

Homestead – Old Ways is a narrative game. You read a lot: scenes, conversations, the diary, the chronicle. Underneath, the farm keeps count day by day of what you plant, harvest, store and eat, and what of it spoils. You don't walk around the farm and you don't build anything brick by brick. You plan the week, make decisions and see what comes of them.

Learning before it counts

For now the Lagerhaus co-op store is full and the bank account is fine. If you like, you can buy the hay you didn't make. But every month there's a new notice on the board at the Lagerhaus, and in the village people talk more quietly than they used to. What you learn, what you build and who you get on with will count later.

The year on the farm

• Plan the week — who goes to the fields, who to the forest, who to the animals. Or "How Hias would do it", and only step in when something happens. His plan will do, but it isn't the best one.
  
• Read the weather — real daily weather data from the Klagenfurt weather station. On haymaking days you decide by the signs in the sky whether to mow. If it rains on the cut grass, part of the hay is ruined.
  
• Build what lasts — henhouse, bee house, earth cellar, bread oven, smokehouse: more than twenty projects you can see on the farm once they're finished.
  
• Cellar and winter — preserve, dry, pickle or sell. In the fall you work out whether the hay will last until Candlemas. What stays in the cellar too long spoils.

A village with a life of its own

Mass on Sunday and then a beer at the inn, where the regulars' table settles who helps whom with the mowing. Raising the maypole, the church fair, the singers' masked ball, the drive down from the alp. The neighbors grow older, marry, have children and die. Whoever belongs gets help. Whoever only buys stays "the ones from up the hill".

One path closes

From the second year on, every year has a crossroads: the neighborhood or the farmers' market, bees or cheese, the stranger at the Graben or the wall with the old farmer, the orchard or the timber. There's time for one path, and the other is closed for good. You don't decide with a button but with the hours you put in.

Why did that happen?

Every loss tells you its cause: how many wet days, how many frosty nights, how much hay was missing. There is chance, as on any farm: weather, illness, a fox. But nothing happens without a reason you can look up. What the neighbors teach you ends up in your notebook and opens up a better choice later.

Early Access: the first five years

Years 1 to 5 are finished, every week planned by you, with an ending of their own. The full version spans twenty-five years. Ten of them you play week by week yourself. The others pass as jump years, month by month in a chronicle, with one or two decisions, and from the sixteenth year on as story years, where the story moves on in bigger steps.

Good to know

• Lots of text, little rush. You plan the work on a week sheet, a table of people and tasks. There's no walking around, no building with the mouse and no quick reactions.
  
• English and German. Names, places and festivals stay Carinthian and are explained when they first appear.
  
• Three difficulty levels. On "Easy" there's time for the village and the story. From "Realistic" on you can starve, most easily with two of you.
  
• A calm path for anyone who finds the calendar too much: Hias plans the weeks until something happens.
  
• Watercolor-style pictures for every season, old Ländler recordings from 1908 to 1917 and the sounds of the farm.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

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

The images (places, characters, objects) were created with the image model FLUX.1 Krea and the short transition films with Wan 2.2, then selected, edited and integrated by hand. The texts, dialogue, rules and the English translation were written with the help of AI language models and specified, checked and revised by the developer; the village, characters and names come from the developer. Nothing is generated by AI while the game is running.