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It has been in the works for a long time but we’re excited to announce that Here Be Mon­sters is now offi­cial open for beta!

The best way I can think of to describe Here Be Mon­ster (HBM) is a genre-bending soft-core MMORPG. It com­bines ele­ments from many pop­u­lar gen­res of social games and gives you a world, based on our own, where you can explore, talk to oth­ers, for­age for food and build traps to catch bad-ass monsters!

Story

Set in medieval time, in a par­al­lel uni­verse where local folk­lores and mon­sters are real (oh yeah, big­foot and were­wolves are real alright!) and live peace­fully with the native inhab­i­tants of the land, that is, until the star­i­ums started falling from the sky..

These warm, pul­sat­ing mete­orites have caused plants to mutate, and mon­sters to become cor­rupted, turn­ing them against those they once lived with peacefully..

Nobody knows the ori­gin of these star­i­ums and why they started falling, sev­eral rumours are cir­cu­lat­ing amongst the con­spir­acy the­o­rists that the ‘star­ium fall’ sym­bol­ises the rise of a dark power..

For the time being though, the Min­istry of Mon­sters are not tak­ing these rumours too seri­ously and instead, focus­ing on the cap­tur­ing and cur­ing of cor­rupted mon­sters to return them back to their for­mer state of mind.

Badly out­num­bered and under-resourced, the Min­istry is look­ing for new recruits to join their ranks to help trap way­ward monsters.

This is where you come in, as a fresh recruit, you’ll undergo stren­u­ous (don’t worry, it’s not that not bad ) trap­per train­ings to quickly get you up to speed and equipped with all the knowl­edge and tools you need to start trapping!

Explor­ing

If you room into the world map, you’ll see that it’s full of places (spots and towns) rom the real world where you can travel to.

Some of these are sim­ple spots where you can go and for­age fruit trees, catch but­ter­flies, do a bit of fish­ing or place down your trap to catch what­ever mon­sters that are around the area.

Whilst for­ag­ing fruit trees, occa­sion­ally you might also find seeds which you can take back home and grow in your home­stead so that you can start pro­duc­ing fruits from the com­fort of your own backyard!

All the items that you find in your travel can be used in other ways, e.g. man­gos for­aged from a mango tree can be squeezed into Mango Juice or com­bined with 2 x Chicken Egg and 1 x Sugar into a Mango Bucket which, whilst tastes dis­gust­ing.. is a pow­er­ful bait for Ahool, a giant bat-monkey from the islands of Java.

There are also a num­ber of towns dot­ted around the world (e.g. Lon­don, Nan­Jing, Musumba, etc.) which are hubs where you can find lots of NPCs (non-playable char­ac­ters) who will give you quests and errands to per­form and occa­sion­ally they will also tell you inter­est­ing back­sto­ries about them­selves and how the star­i­ums have affected their local area.

For now though, only Lon­don is open for visit dur­ing the early Beta, but we’ll open up the other cities and their respec­tive quest lines in the very near future, so stay tuned on our offi­cial fan page for updates!

Farm­ing

Unlike other games which focuses on the farm­ing and resource man­age­ment aspect, the pur­pose of farm­ing in HBM goes far beyond the sim­ple loop of plant –> sell pro­duce –> buy new seeds –> plant. In HBM, the goods that your crops pro­duce is part of a big­ger ecosys­tem where they can be com­bined with other items in the game to make baits for mon­sters, a nice cake for you to eat, or sim­ply sold for some coins.

For any­one who’s famil­iar with games such as Far­mVille or Har­vest Moon, the farm­ing aspect of HBM will look imme­di­ately familiar:

• there are farm plots for you to plant seeds and grow crops for har­vest­ing after some time
• you can have ani­mals who pro­duce resources (wool, milk, etc.) periodically
• there are trees and fruit trees you can chop or har­vest respectively
• there are rocks which you can mine for stones and rare gems
• you can build spe­cial resource-producing build­ings (well, bee-hive, etc.) which you can har­vest periodically

Cook­ing

Cook­ing is closely tied to farm­ing and other activ­i­ties in the game, the pro­duce from your crops often act as ingre­di­ents for cook­ing recipes. E.g. to make a BBQ Beef, you first need to grow and har­vest Olives in order to make Olive Oil, but you also need a por­tion of Raw Beef which (unfor­tu­nately..) you only get by grind­ing a Cow in your workshop:

As another exam­ple, here’s a short video that shows how you can make a Roast Mut­ton in the game:

All and all, the cook­ing mini-game is fun and engag­ing, and depend­ing on the recipe can be chal­leng­ing and require plenty of plan­ning to acquire all the nec­es­sary ingredients!

Trap­ping

Trap­ping is a key part of the game and is closely aligned with the rich sto­ry­line that runs through­out the game.

There are essen­tially three aspects to trapping:

1. Mon­sters, there are 95 mon­sters in the game right now and as we expand the game there will be many more to come! All the mon­sters are based on local legions and folklores.
2. Traps
3. Baits, in order to catch a mon­ster you first need to lure it to your trap, and dif­fer­ent mon­sters have dif­fer­ent pref­er­ences (e.g. gnomes like potato) so whilst you can use just about any­thing as bait you’ll have the most suc­cess attract­ing the mon­ster you’re after when using one of its pre­ferred baits.

Each mon­ster has a set of stats which tells you how pow­er­ful this mon­ster is, each trap also has a set of stats and is usu­ally strong against one or more types of mon­sters (air, land or water).

Take my hunt for Veg­etable Lamb for instance, one of the most hor­ri­fy­ing mon­sters in exis­tence, I decided to use Fox­gloved Mut­ton as bait in my Tar Pit trap which is very strong against the Veg­etable Lamb.

So first, I cooked some Fox­gloved Mut­ton using Mut­ton Chops (from my poor lit­tle lamb..) and some Fox­glove which I had painstak­ingly col­lected from all over Europe. Once I had some bait handy, I tele­ported to where I had placed my trap, set my bait and hoped lady luck is smil­ing at me today!

As you can see from the video, I failed at my first attempt, a Shishi had shown up at my trap, which is ill-equipped to deal with it, and took a bite of the bait I had placed for the Veg­etable Lamb…

Such is the life of a trap­per, you do every­thing right and then the wrong mon­ster shows up at your trap! But worry not my friends, it took a cou­ple of attempts but even­tu­ally I was able to lure my tar­get into my trap and cap­ture it!

I won’t go into too much details in this post but there is much more that goes on behind the scene for trap­ping in terms of the dif­fer­ent types of mon­sters and the rel­a­tive strengths and weak­nesses of each trap, not to men­tion the whole craft­ing aspect of the game which is nec­es­sary to acquire stronger, more pow­er­ful traps that are capa­ble of cap­tur­ing the strongest of monsters.

With that, I hope you’ve enjoyed my intro­duc­tion to Here Be Mon­sters, and I look for­ward to see­ing you in the game!