Tinkertown News

Hey dear Tinkerers!

Tinker Tuesday is back, making our favorite game even more enjoyable! This week we have updated the area for the hookshot tutorial (in the Ice Dungeon), to make the use of the item a bit clearer. We've also continued doing small tweaks to the UI and other neat details!

The full list is conveniently placed below:

Early Access 0.17.1

• Updated hookshot Tutorial Area in Ice Dungeon for a better introduction
  
• Smaller changes and bug fixes for the UI rework
  
• Updated Chinese font for better readability
  
• Made placeable walls destructible with bare hands to prevent players from being locked in
  
• Increased item pickup range slighty
  
• Minor changes
  

This sets us up nicely for major things to come! We have both the database rework and the journal update in the pipeline and we're working hard to get everything together.

Do you have something that you hope for in the coming updates?

A huge thank you for your continued support and love for Tinkertown!

Your Tinkertown team

We love your feedback! Talk to us on our social media:
Twitter Discord

Dear Tinkerers!

Today we want to share some juicy details about what we are currently tinkering on for our save game functionality! It will improve a whole lot of things for the future (and possibly create a small amount of temporary hassle).

Behind the scenes we are reworking the way save games for characters and worlds work. "Why?" You might ask - It's mainly for these reasons:

Cloud Saves - Formerly our save game consisted of more than 10.000 individual files. That stopped us from implementing cloud saves, something we now can introduce in future updates!

Performance - To have that many individual files is bad for performance, especially on slow hard drives.

Upgradeablility - The new save game is a SQLITE file. That makes it possible for us to introduce more complex changes in the future that would otherwise have threatened existing player saves.

Modability - Because SQLITE is a standardized portable format, it is very easy to modify save games! We want to stress that this is NOT mod support, but it takes us a lot closer to it (even if it's not a primary goal for us) and very invested players can take steps to modify save games to match their vision!

Why do we talk about this?

There is a risk that some parts of your old save games may not be ported to the new way of saving. But don't panic! Your characters and worlds will still be there. However, your questing progress will likely be lost, because we also made big changes to the quest system to make it more enjoyable in multiplayer.

We are currently doing our best to keep everything you achieved, but we wanted to be as transparent as possible and give you a heads up that some parts of your saves may be gone.

What changes have we made to the quest system?

The quest progress will now be bound to the world instead of individuals. Currently, every character and every player has their own quest progression. That forced us to make many of them repeatable and therefore perhaps less impactful. We also found it clunky that every player had to finish the quest for themselves.

We think that these changes will set the game up real nicely for future updates and we are eager to share even more soon.

Take care and thanks for being an awesome community!

Your Tinkertown team

Dear Tinkerers,

Today, we have some exciting news to share: We’ve updated our UI to make the game even more accessible to all players! This big quality-of-life improvement also comes with several smaller fixes and squashed bugs, which you can find in the full patch notes down below.

We have been able to improve readability by shifting from our previous pixel-font style to a more readable version, that still matches our Tinkertown aesthetic, but ensures that the in-game text is a bit clearer. Additionally, we have adjusted the positions of several UI elements and included keyboard and mouse icons for all of our non-controller-wielding Tinkerers!

We are looking forward to hearing your feedback about the big and small changes for this patch. Here is a full list of the complete patch notes:

• New UI theme
  
• New fonts for improved readability
  
• New icons in-game to support navigation
  
• Improved positions of several UI elements for better user experience
  
• Added icons for keyboard and mouse
  
• Added display on the bottom of the screen showing usable buttons for active interfaces
  
• Fixed issue in the settings menu, when moving through tabs, sometimes not displaying
  
• Updated missing localizations for certain UI elements
  
• Improved visibility for the shovel cursor
  
• Added a new track in the Forest Biome at night
  
• Fixed bugs and inconsistencies
  

Thanks for staying with us and keeping up to date on our progress, as we keep improving our game to be the best it can possibly be – for you!

Your Tinkertown Team!

Dear Tinkerers!

Today we are doing something new for Tinker Tuesday. Since we're currently working on some big stuff behind the scenes we don't have a new patch today. Instead, we want to highlight our brilliant Discord community!

The Tinkertown server truly is one of the nicest places you'll find - if you're not on it you should join the cozy community there! But don't just take it from us! We asked one of our veteran moderators, Shane "Welf" van Tuinen, what it is that makes the server special.

Discord moderator Shane van Tuinen has been an active Tinkertown player since the beta

What's the best thing about the Tinkertown Discord?
"Honestly, the communication between developers, moderators and players."

What do you think being part of the community on the Discord adds to the game?
"The Tinkertown Discord community as a whole is one of the friendliest I've seen and I feel that it adds a lot to the game. You can meet new people to play multi-player with, share your screenshots with others and get new ideas for your own worlds. There is even a channel for suggesting new ideas that the developers have been actively paying attention to."

Do you have any cool ideas for what the Discord community could do in the future?
"I can see some more community events such as building contests, AMA with mods and staff, multi-player sessions with staff, and maybe a vote for a item or monster the community wants implemented next. A fan art contest would be fun too, I feel. This community has grown so much since I joined it, nearly at the very beginning of the Discord server going live, and it has never stopped being a great place to come make friends. The development team is one of the most open ones I've ever talked to and I look forward to continued growth and community developments in the future!"

You heard Shane - join one of the friendliest gaming Discords out there!
https://discord.gg/2FyMTtDqFY

Next week we will be back with some in game updates, take care until then.

Your Tinkertown team