Hearth and Hamlet Best Building Upgrade Order Guide
Upgrade food and Church toward Cathedral before vanity Keeps in Hearth and Hamlet. Town Square and roads cut sanitation. Exact level costs remain unmarked for
Last verified: August 20, 2026 — Hearth and Hamlet full release on Steam (app 4315040, launched August 19, 2026). Demo numbers are not treated as live data.
A full-release upgrade order is Camp → food huts → hunting → Town Square / roads → Guard House → gold / Market, with Church → Cathedral when the undead quest appears. Official screenshots show Keep, Tavern, Harbor, Shipwright, Alchemist, and Dwellings — those are real, but they are not first.
A few first-hour costs showed up on more than one 1.0 video: Camp 50 wood; next camp 60 wood (fishing); then 80 wood + 80 food (Woodcutter + Fisherman huts); Fisherman’s Hut 160/160; lumber camp 240/240. Later levels are still not a published table.
Decision order
| Order | Upgrade | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Food huts / Dwellings that actually raise food or workers | People leave when food fails |
| 2 | Church → Cathedral when the quest appears | Consecrated weapons; expensive on purpose |
| 3 | Roads and Town Square | Only verified sanitation fix so far |
| 4 | Market to level 3 | Unlocks extra caravan research |
| 5 | Keep / walls / Harbor / Shipwright / Alchemist | After the survival spends |
One Cathedral-thread player takes sidequests and other upgrades first because the Church upgrade is expensive. That is allowed. Skipping Cathedral entirely during the zombie window is not — the developer said the upgrade is what makes zombies manageable.
Do not import a demo building spreadsheet. Competing pages still watermark August 10 and “complete building list to be verified.”
From Community Gameplay
- Camp line: 50 wood tent → 60 wood fishing → 80/80 huts → camp level that unlocks stone / tavern / wood cabin. After that the Camp is replaced by a Town Square. (Campfire Kingdom, 00:22–04:41; K full start, 01:13–10:24)
- Food order that kept repeating: Fisherman’s Hut first for the +1 base productivity, then Hunting Lodge (better per worker), then Farm once +50% farm research is in. (Campfire Kingdom, 03:34 / 11:18 / 40:26)
- Roads: first road +1 to all gathering. That beat almost every vanity building. (Campfire Kingdom, 24:16)
- Work Teams on Town Square: +20% worker production and +10% happiness (sanitation). See Sanitation Guide.
- Blacksmith before fancy walls. Iron tools (50–100% on a job) were the mid-game spike. (Kingdom Part 2, 29:28)
- Layout is fixed. You unlock plots; you do not drag houses. (4-min guide, 02:07)
Buildings you can see on official screenshots
Harbor District, Shipwright, Alchemist, Keep, Tavern, Dwellings, Town Square, fishing boat, stone walls. Those labels are 1.0. They are useful for knowing the spend sinks exist. They are not a requirement to max them for 100%. See Hardest Difficulty and 100%.
Layout is predetermined. You do not place houses on a grid. Upgrades happen on the fixed village. That came from the developer on a pre-release questions thread and matches the screenshot language of districts, not a sandbox.
Competing spends
Research nodes (scouting, extra caravans) often beat a vanity Keep level. Policies (tax, drafts) can substitute for a building if gold is the wall. See Best Research Order and Best Policies and Tax Rate. If the next raid is Extreme, read the label before you click another Tavern level.
Sources
- Official Steam store: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4315040/
- Steam Community hub: https://steamcommunity.com/app/4315040/discussions/
- Cathedral thread: https://steamcommunity.com/app/4315040/discussions/0/588435430711590809/
- Sanitation thread: https://steamcommunity.com/app/4315040/discussions/0/588435430711618045/
- Early building order footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQqbBSyw6-w
- Full-release start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKVkhtM3SuI
Fan-made guide. This site is not affiliated with Phorust Studios, Runic Forge, Gamersky Games, Steam, or Valve; all game content and media belong to their respective owners.