Hearth and Hamlet Beginner Guide - From Campfire to First Kingdom

Hearth and Hamlet is a medieval citybuilder clicker from Phorust Studios, published by Runic Forge and Gamersky Games and released on Steam on Aug 19, 2026 at $6.39 in the US. It starts with a campfire and ends, per the store text, with a kingdom.

What the store listing says the game is

The store text describes a cozy incremental citybuilder set in a magic-filled medieval pixel art world. The short description puts the loop in three sentences: gather resources, assign workers, construct buildings, and slowly turn a quiet frontier camp into a thriving kingdom.

It is tagged Casual, Simulation and Strategy, and the developer line names Phorust Studios with two publishers attached. Nothing in the listing suggests a hostile map or a losing state.

The loop, step by step

The published feature list reads as a sequence, and it is short enough to lay out in order.

• Start with a campfire on the frontier.
• Gather resources such as food, wood, stone and gold.
• Assign your population to the gathering jobs.
• Construct buildings, from simple tents upward.
• Set policies and laws that shape how the kingdom grows.
• Research technologies that permanently unlock buildings, magic and upgrades.
• Trade with neighbouring kingdoms and recruit soldiers as the realm expands.

That is the whole published loop. The listing promises a loop that rewards patience and planning rather than reaction.

Running the kingdom: laws and policies

Management is described as the second half of the game. The store text says that as a settlement grows, managing it becomes as important as expanding it, and it names four areas that policies touch.

Policy area	What the listing says it affects
Taxation rules	Income for the kingdom
Worker rules	Morale of your population
City guard drafts	Protection of your population
Civic decisions	The character of your kingdom

Those four lines are all the store page gives. There is no policy tree diagram, no list of individual laws and no numbers attached to any of them.

Research, magic and trade routes

Every upgrade feeds into a research tree, and the listing says the unlocks are permanent: advanced buildings, new policies and stronger magic.

Magic is the later-game layer. The store text names alchemical labs and magical academies as examples, and says magic adds a new dimension to how the kingdom operates. Trade is the other expansion route: the listing describes establishing trade routes with neighbouring kingdoms to grow the economy beyond what local terrain provides.

What the listing does not publish

Four things a new player would want are missing: how long a run takes, what the full building list contains, how combat works if it exists at all, and how the research tree is structured.

The store text mentions recruiting soldiers as the realm expands to protect what you have built, but it publishes no unit list and no combat system. Where the listing is silent, this page stays silent. The platform and spec details are on Availability, and the launch facts are on Launch & Demo.