Tinkertown News

Dear Tinkerers - it's time for our next building contest!

With the warm weather comes our itch for adventure! To go out and explore the wilds and find breathtaking views and hidden paths.

Maybe you stumble on a dark cave, full of fairies and flowers? Or find a peaceful oasis in the desert, where a grove of cacti are framing a cooling lake.

The theme for this building contest is Exploring the Wilds! We want to see your most daring expeditions captured in screenshots or a short video clip.

Submit your entries in the comments, on our Discord server or on Twitter. The winners are picked by a voting jury consisting of five of the Headup team members. The contest ends Tuesday 23rd of May, at 15:00 CET. Make sure you submit your entry before then!

One entry per contestant, and the glorious prizes are:

• 1st place: Your name on a craftable in game item! Also the Discord role as “Building Contest Champion” and 3 Steam keys for Tinkertown.
  
  
• 2nd place: 2 Steam keys for Tinkertown
  
  
• 3rd place: 1 Steam key for Tinkertown
  

Now - go out there with bold steps and return with tales of wonder!

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!