Introducing Farhaven: Not an MMO, a FriendMO
Today we are announcing Farhaven, the first game from Dragon Snacks Games: a cooperative sandbox RPG where up to sixteen friends create, protect, and grow a shared magical town in their own private, persistent world.
We have spent the last eighteen months building it, and for most of that time we have talked about it only as “the game.” It feels very good to finally be able to say the name.
The question we started with
We founded Dragon Snacks Games almost two years ago around a belief that games can be powerful places for connection, creativity, and belonging, and Farhaven began with a specific version of that idea: what if you could have the feeling of living inside a large, persistent online world, and that world belonged only to you and the people you chose?
Persistent online worlds have always asked players to accept a trade. You get a place that keeps existing when you log off, that accumulates history and other people’s projects, that rewards you for coming back to it; in exchange, you share that place with thousands of strangers, most of whom you will never speak to. The scale is what makes those worlds feel alive, and the scale is also what makes them feel like public space.
Farhaven keeps the first half of that trade and drops the second. We started describing it as not an MMO, but a FriendMO: a persistent world sized for the friends and family you actually want to spend time with, up to sixteen players, in a town that belongs to your group and to nobody else.
What you do in Farhaven
You build a life. You build and decorate a home in a town you are shaping together. You farm, fish, cook, and craft, and you take on jobs that give you a role in how the town runs. You push out past the Mist into procedurally generated adventures, fight what lives there, and bring back what you find. You befriend the townsfolk, and if you are so inclined, you romance them, with your friends watching and teasing you the entire way.
Farhaven’s world is fantasy through a slightly greasy lens: clanking machinery and ancient magic in the same landscape, strange and warm characters, and a Mist that gives back new adventures, neighbors, professions, and storylines as you push your town’s boundaries further out.
Whatever you enjoy most, there is a way to play in Farhaven. Explorers, crafters, fighters, and lore keepers are all welcomed and contribute to the world.
Progress you make for one another
In Farhaven, progress is not something you make alongside one another. It is something you make for one another.
If a friend logs in on a Tuesday afternoon while you are at work and clears an adventure, finishes a building, opens up a new environment, or reaches a milestone with one of the townsfolk, their accomplishment opens possibilities for everyone in the town. Nobody HAS to be online at the same time, and nobody HAS to coordinate schedules to feel like they are playing together. You come back to a place that changed while you were gone, in ways the people you care about made, and your next session builds on theirs. And, at the same time, when you are on together, you can adventure, craft, or redesign the whole town layout if you’d like.
Everything in the game serves the idea of building together: one story you are all inside of, rather than a game you each progress through alone and compare notes on later.
Why we are building it
We think games can be third places, the spaces outside of home, work, and school where we spend unstructured time with people who matter to us. Those places have gotten harder to find and harder to keep, and the online versions of them tend to be enormous, public, and exhausting.
A world that belongs to your group is different. It keeps growing when everyone cannot be online at once, it fills up with the specific history of things you have done together, and it is small enough that everyone in it is someone you chose. That third place is what we set out to build, and it is why Farhaven exists.
Farhaven is playable right now
We wanted to announce a game, not an idea.
Farhaven is in alpha and systems complete, which means the systems that make the game work are built and talking to each other, and the road ahead of us is largely content: more jobs, more weapons, more stories, more art, and more of the world. More than 300 people have signed up for our playtest, and average play sessions are running about fifty minutes, which means that people are staying for the game itself rather than for the novelty.
We have been building alongside those players from the beginning, and their sessions, bug reports, and arguments about what a town should be have shaped the game in ways that would not have happened in a closed studio. Our development with our community continues throughout the game’s lifecycle. We welcome you to join the community playtest and our Discord at https://farhaven.firstlook.gg/invite/farhavenalpha.
What comes next
Our Steam page is live today, and so is our Kickstarter campaign page. Farhaven launches next year, and between now and then we will be adding content, deepening the systems, polishing what is already there, and building the partnerships that help us bring the game to players everywhere.
If Farhaven sounds like a world you would want to share with your favorite people, there are a few things you can do today that make a real difference for a studio our size:
Wishlist Farhaven on Steam. Early wishlists are one of the strongest signals Steam uses to decide who else gets to discover us.
Follow our Kickstarter. Follows before a campaign launches shape how the campaign performs when it does.
Join the playtest and our Discord, and come tell us what you think.
Watch the announcement trailer, and send it to someone you would want in your town.
Farhaven is a game about the people you play it with, so the person you share this with today may well be the person you are building a town with next year.
Welcome to Farhaven.
The Dragon Snacks Games Team