Hearth

The time is there! Your township has grown large enough to get a personalized Hearth, to accompony your beautiful banner. Now choose one and go for it!

Basics
The basic premise of the Hearth is the next level of Township, giving acces to tier 2 building templates, and providing a nice way of generating extra wealth for your town. It is a resting place for heartlings and when idle at dusk and night, will often sit around it. It has one of the highest appeal scores by far, and makes everybody happy.

The choices
Now that you have the option to choose a hearth, you'd do well to slow down a bit and think. A hearth essentaily determines your way and speed of gaining new Hearthlings, and will add a extra number to the daily screen. You have three choices as a township for a hearth, and all shall be explained.

Hearth of Cheer
The most happy of happy Hearths, only a town that can keep its citizens fed and entertained can achieve its full potential! The Cheer hearth provides a different daily bonus, that can be ranging from a novelty to a impressive save. These boosts are listed as followed: Thus, keep those hearthlings happy and those boosts coming!

Hearth of the Makers
For those who want to exploit Heartstone's trading mechanics to grow, this is a fine option. The hearth of the makers acually has nothing to do with crafting directly, but it has a special property: it turns into a bank! The Hearth provedes intrest on gold in storage, up to 300 extra gold a day, and boosts your net value by your money. this can go out of control fairly quickly, if your township is set up with the neccesary crafters to keep coin coming in. But beware of pesky goblin raids, who will now directly affect your net value.

Hearth of Glory
When you have confidince in janky heartstone combat mechanics or just like the combat music, the Hearth of Glory is a good option. It provides net value by way of defeating waves of undead. These waves can be summonend at any time, one level after the next and dont affect story progression. Each level of the Hearth, stated on it, will raise your Net value by 100 permanently. When your township has 20+ members and rescources to spare, you could challenge the waves repeatedly in an area where there are turrets and traps set up, and gain massive amount of undead loot in a short time, like bars and ores. A good late game alternative to mining, if you're up for it. Enemies in the waves:

Made a Choice?
Now that you've chosen your hearth and future, you will need to earn it. Unlike the Banner, which is just to start up, the Hearth has some requirements to be able to be activated.

Hearth of Cheer
The Hearth of Cheer's requirements require the least amount of time and effort. It requires to have all citizens be content with their lives, while having 5 Merry citizens and 20 pieces of prepared food. The food can be anything, as long as it's made by a cook. The only Job requirement for this Hearth is a cook, if you can keep your citizens happy.

Hearth of the Makers
The Makers Hearth is trading. Thats it. You need to have at least 500 gold in the stockpile at any given time, and you need to have at least 10 Excellent quality items in your town/stockpile. The other two requirements require you to have at least spent 1000 gold on trade and earned 2000. This is quite intensive at this stage, as you are not fully ready yet with all your heartlings and trade strategies. Usually, this one is finished at around 13 to 14 heartlings.

Hearth of Glory
This thing. THIS THING. Why does it have to be so hard? Buckle up, because this is the late game hearth, and it will task you. There are five, yes, five, requirements to activate this Hearth, from which the most simple one is keeping a stock of 20 small healing tonics. Easy enough to do while leveling a herbalist, but the second one is having 5 Heavy bandages. A heavy bandage is a lvl 5 herablist item, so thats a lot of work, and requires a weaver and a farmer to gain its raw materials. Then there is the combat group requirement, and Rayya's are going to have it bad here. It requires one footman, one Knight and one Archer, all at level three. This isn't so bad, until you realize that Rayya's need to go trough their entire job tree for this, as bow's are made by a lvl 4 carpenter, and Rayya's children need a mason and a blacksmith first, both competantly leveled. The class levels themself aren't that hard, as you naturally gain them, but its the process of obtaining those specific items that is hard. Expect to finish this one on avarage by 16+ heartlings.

Preparing for the Future
Now that you have your hearth all done and dandy, it is time to exploit its benifits and reap those juicy rewards, you've earned them. Now to get the mini goal of 20+ heartlings for the next tier upgrade.

Trivia

 * At dusk, a worker hearthling will light the hearth, consuming 1 wood resource in the process.
 * For the combat hearth, you can exploit spawn mechanics to make waves last less than 1 second. Place traps with 1 block differences around the heart, and when everything's ready, summon it. The spawned undead will spawn on the traps and instantly die.