Hawthorn is still in development with no announced release date. Pages state which build they describe · Fact base last reviewed September 13, 2026.
Database
Hawthorn’s story layer was rebuilt from scratch after the Proof-of-Concept demo. The systems are confirmed; the individual quests are not.
Last reviewed September 13, 2026
Short answer
Does Hawthorn have quests?
Yes — the systems exist. The Winter 2025/2026 build added a new quest system, a new dialogue system, a storyteller system for procedural content, and new story and dialogue authoring tools. The game now begins with its proper story introduction, and each villager has their own introductory story.
No individual quest has been named by NEARstudios, so there is no quest list yet.
The Winter 2025/2026 development update describes a full replacement of the narrative layer, and the reasoning is worth understanding because it explains why the demo has almost none of this.
The team branched off from the Proof-of-Concept build and “needed to start expanding into the player start experience and the long-term progression experience for the full game.” To do that they built new and improved dialogue, quest and storyteller systems, plus other procedural tools that are scalable and suited to sandbox play.
Three consequences are already visible:
A new quest system was built for the full game as part of the Winter 2025/2026 work, alongside new story and dialogue tools.
A new and improved dialogue system shipped in the Winter 2025/2026 build, built to scale for sandbox play.
A storyteller system drives procedural events and was part of the scalable tooling built in Winter 2025/2026.
The studio was unusually candid about the trade-off. The Proof-of-Concept demo was built to excite people and pitch publishers faster than the full systems could be built — “those systems are complicated and take time to build and we needed to share the vision for the game with the community and publishers faster than we could build those systems in full, hence the reason for the Proof-of-Concept demo.”
For players, that means the current build and the public demo are not two versions of the same thing. They are a prototype and the foundations of the real game.
It also means quest content is likely to arrive late and change often, which is why this page documents systems rather than walkthroughs.
Quest walkthroughs will be added the moment quests are confirmable — tracked on the wiki index.