Hearth and Hamlet Research Guide: What to Buy First

The research book

Research is bought from the book, organised in tabs by area - production buildings, military, magic, civic. Patch 1.0.01 locked the tabs to one side to stop them shuffling, and adjusted the book’s hitboxes so a slight misclick no longer closes it, which tells you how much time players spend in here.

Two kinds of entry live in the book, and they are worth different amounts:

  • Building-specific upgrades - more output from one structure.
  • Global upgrades - a percentage across all production, or a mechanic change.

Global entries almost always win. A 5% global production upgrade applies to six resources at once and keeps applying as the settlement grows; a single-building upgrade is capped by that building’s share of your economy.

The early order

  1. Storage capacity. Nothing else matters if production is being discarded at the cap. This is the first research to take and the one experienced players restart runs over.
  2. Inspirational Leadership. Working a location personally gives its workers a 20% production boost. A later upgrade makes the effect linger for around ten seconds after you stop working, and Regal Aura strengthens it further. Manual harvesting also gains critical successes.
  3. Construction Adviser and Research Adviser. These flag affordable building upgrades and new research respectively. Early on that reads as a convenience; by mid-game it is the difference between a kingdom that is fully upgraded and one that is quietly running three tiers behind because you forgot a menu. Later upgrades add the same indicators for policies, shops and trade.
  4. Food and gathering research on whichever resource is actually the bottleneck - not evenly across all of them.

Reading a bottleneck correctly

The most useful habit in this game is refusing to treat the red number as the problem. Food dropping after a population threshold is a consumption change, not a farm failure. Every resource slowing at once is usually happiness, not worker assignment. Population stalling with food in surplus is housing.

Research the system that caused it. Researching the symptom is how runs stall with a full book of purchased upgrades.

Mid and late research

  • Building design tiers - Expert, Master and Legendary building design each unlock a further band of upgrades, and are gated behind the education line. See the blueprint guide.
  • Military research - faster training and better rewards from defeating raiders. Worth it only if you are actually fighting; see raids and military.
  • Magic research - magical upgrades, shop items and magic storage, from the Magic Academy. Powerful multipliers on an economy that already works.
  • Consecrated weapons - Cathedral research, and the intended answer to the Ancient Evil arc.

A note on patch history

Patch 1.0.01 also fixed Farm and Hunting research upgrades not appearing in the research book at all. If you are following a guide written on launch day and an entry it mentions is missing, check your version before assuming the guide is wrong - the patch notes page lists every change since 1.0.

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