Editorial Policy

Hawthorn Wiki is an independent fan project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or funded by NEARstudios or any publisher. We run no official accounts and speak for no one but ourselves.

We also do not republish game assets. Screenshots, art, logos and in-game text remain the property of their owners; where a fact needs evidence, we link to the official page rather than reproducing it.

Not all sources are equal. In descending order of authority:

1. NEARstudios official posts — playhawthorn.com, development updates and news.
2. The official Steam store page — developer-authored fields, feature lists and system requirements.
3. Official crowdfunding pages — Kickstarter, Ko-Fi and PayPal tier definitions.
4. Reproducible observations from a released build — logged with the build and date, and never upgraded to “confirmed”.
5. Press previews and community reports — used to generate questions, never to generate answers.

The full ledger is below. Every record on this site cites one or more of these IDs.

Four states appear across the site:

• Confirmed — stated directly by an official source.
• Playtest build — seen in a playtest build and reported by the studio, but not final.
• In development — announced as work in progress.
• NEEDS_VERIFY — no official statement exists. Shown as an open question.

A field is never promoted between states because it “seems likely”. Only an official statement or a reproducible observation moves it.

When sources disagree, the following order applies:

1. An official statement beats a community report, always.
2. A reproducible observation beats an unsourced claim.
3. Statements from different builds are stored separately rather than merged — the older one is labelled with the build it described.
4. Unconfirmed values never enter the “current” description. They stay in open questions.

Reddit threads, Discord discussion and hands-on previews are genuinely valuable — just not as evidence. We use them for two things:

• Question mining. If players keep asking whether Hawthorn is multiplayer, that becomes a page.
• Friction spotting. Reports of a thin tutorial or a confusing control tell us where a guide needs to work harder.

Anything learned this way is labelled as a community report or a playtest observation, never promoted to a confirmed fact.

Every content page carries a review date and, where relevant, the build it describes. Official updates are logged with the pages they invalidate, so a development post produces a work queue rather than quietly ageing a guide. See the development log.

Send corrections to corrections@hawthorn.wiki or use the contact page. Include the page, the claim you believe is wrong, and the official source that settles it.

Corrections backed by an official source are applied and the page’s review date is updated. Corrections backed by a stream, a forum post or a screenshot are logged as community reports. Either way you get a reply.

This site uses no game assets. The logo mark is original artwork created for this site, and all imagery is CSS and inline SVG. Where a fact comes from an official page, we link rather than copy.

If you are a rights holder and believe something here should be removed, contact us and it will be taken down while we review.