Devlog | September 2026

Ahoy, Tinkerlanders!

We are back with a new devlog and so many things to share. Grab a cup of coffee and make yourself comfortable because this is going to be a long post.

First of all, I wanted to thank you all for taking some time to review the feedback form we shared. We've gathered so much valuable info that it's going to take some time to handle, but we are very happy to share that we have addressed most of the most common issues in some way or another in the next update.

We have also received 100+ questions for the Q&A so I won't be able to answer each one of them, but I'll try my best to group similar questions and to answer as much of them as possible. And if you want to be part of the next testing round, keep an eye on our Discord ! We’re preparing a Community Playtest for the upcoming update, and we’ll share the exact dates a bit later.

The overall sentiment is that Tinkerlands is fun and it's mostly in a good place with a lot of potential for upgrades and changes. Though we understand that this chart is biased, since if you don't like Tinkerlands then it's very unlikely you'll fill the feedback form, but still this helps us know that we are going in the right direction.

Let's start addressing your feedback, we have grouped it in different sections with priorities set based on how many times it was repeated:

Feedback

Priority #0 - Updates are taking too long

We know, and we are sorry about that. First of all, we are a team of 3 developers. We have Karv which is our artist doing everything by himself; Tashirotsu which is the guy behind design, implementation and tooling; and me, CodeManu, who is in charge of programming, directing, production, community management, support, writting this post and a bazillion other things. Some things just take a long time and we can't just get everything done as fast as we'd like.

On the other hand, 'Seas Of Fortune' is the biggest update we've done so far. This update alone adds close to 1000 new items, lots of new bosses, 5 new islands, new systems, new NPCs, lots of GUI reworks , etc.

And it's not only that this update is the biggest one, but it's also the most complex; The save system has been completely reworked (more info about that later in Priority #3) which was a huge task that also required a lot of testing to make sure it doesn't break anything. We've commited to players not needing to start a new game with each update, and it means that players who started playing on Early Access launch, can use their world on this update , and just supporting that alone adds a lot of extra work.

Then there's the new travel system, which made us completely scrap the old ship system to introduce a new one that is far more complex, with random encounters, seamless navigation (and saving/loading during traversal), ship building and making that support multiplayer. It was a huge task that took longer than anticipated.

We have also spend a lot of time testing and improving multiplayer, it's always a difficult task to replicate bugs in multiplayer since each machine has its own specs and It's hard to reproduce reported issues sometimes.

But the good news is that with this update, we are done reworking major systems, and the systems left to be implemented for 1.0 aren't as complex as the ones we did in this update. Next updates will be more focused on content rather than new systems, so we can assure that future updates will come faster than this one.

Priority #1 - Replayability, depth, reasons to explore

This has been the most common feedback we've received. While the sentiment is that the Main Island is fun to explore, other islands feel more linear and their tools and equipment become obsolete quickly. There are also a few comments sharing that there are no reasons to go back to an island after you visit it for the first time.

We agree.

And that's why we have been working on improving this in the next update. There's a new system called 'Contracts' that will make players go back to previous islands to complete the contract, and will reward the player with some tokens to be spent on unique rewards. This system is entirely optional for players that don't want to backtrack at all.

Contracts will get you moving through the whole world.

And while this will be mostly addressed in the 1.0 update as we had planned, we have also been working on improving the islands, adding more secrets to discover and making them more meaningful. We have also revisited equipment so upgrades have more weight and to give you more time to get attached to a certain piece of equipment before swapping it out.

Random NPCs that won't join the community will now populate islands.

The new update will make this point more bearable, though the big changes will come in the 1.0 update with the Cursed Islands and Endless Tower endgame systems.

Priority 2 - Progression clarity, guidance and wiki dependency

We have received feedback that the game's progression is not always clear, and that the wiki is needed to understand where to go next, where do items drop or how to find bosses.

On this regard, we have made two major changes that should improve the game's guidance a lot:

1. The Main Island icon on the navigation menu is now dynamic, and changes depending on what's currently going on. This should catch the players' attention whenever they need to go back to the Main Island for one of the events. Although this is a small change, we believe that it will help a lot guiding players to the next objective since these were the events where players would get lost the most.

Baba Yaga is having fun with the poison cloud in the Main Island.

2. In the 'Seas of Fortune' update you'll have an "Island Items Checklist" in the navigation menu that you can check at any point to get a hint about what items you are missing from that island. Completing the item checklist will give you an unique reward for each island, which might be something small like a few reforge tokens, or even cooler things.

You can get a hint on items that you are missing, and info about the items you already have.

This change tries to address the need to check the wiki on each island to see what items you've missed. While it's hard for a game like Tinkerlands not to rely on the wiki, we are doing our best to hopefully avoid the player's need to use the wiki all the time.

Priority 3 - Loading, multiplayer stability and performance

There's not much to explain here, saving and loading takes time. Multiplayer sometimes freezes or lags, and takes a really long time when travelling to load the new island for all players. And we've also received performance complaints in general.

Well, we are happy to announce that we have been working on this issue since we started working on the update, and that things have improved vastly. We have reworked the save/load system entirely and it doesn't freeze the game anymore. But it's not the only improvement. We have also improved saving and loading times by a huge margin. Our new benchmarks look like this:

Name

v0.3 (Current Build)

v0.4 (New update)

Loading Time

27.4s

2.45s

Auto Save

15.7s

1.75s

Synced Save (Save & Exit)

3.10s

0.90s

Not much to comment here, the comparison speaks for itself.

Apart from that, we have also been working on the multiplayer side of the game and have made lots of improvements on performance. The size of a standard savegame is now down from ~7mb to ~1.5mb, which will translate in much faster transfer and loading times when travelling or joining a game. Connections should be more stable now and we've fixed a few bugs related to unused data being sent over the net which would have been increasing latency.

We don't have the resources to test this a a bigger scale (we are 3 devs at the team) so we'll need your feedback on the community playtest to check that it has improved as much as we believe. If you want to help us with this, please join our Discord and stay tuned for the Community Playtest announcement. We’ll share the exact dates once we’re ready.

Priority 4 - Combat, builds, weapons and class identity

This is a mixed bag. We've received feedback that Melee class is too strong, but also that Melee class is too weak. Bosses are too easy, but also too hard. Tinkerlands has so many items and so many things to improve your character that the feeling player gets while playing might differ enormously from another player.

That being said, we are looking into it. We have plans to make the hard difficulty harder, and we are also working on each class having a clearer identity. Apart from that, we are also working on weapon upgrades for the community favorites like the Spider Staff or Hammerfrog. These are weapons that players love but that eventually get obsolete, but now you'll be able to upgrade them with new materials so they remain relevant throughout the game.

The upgraded 'Spider Staff' (pending balance)

The good ol' Hammerfrog with a new face and increased power.

The rainbow bow is now iridescent.

We will continue monitoring the game's balance and will always try to achieve a challenging but fair combat in Tinkerlands.

Priority 5 - Inventory, storage, drops and item management

We've heard the feedback, Tinkerlands have too many items and chests aren't big enough.

So that's why we have been working on bigger chests for the next update, along with a new chest interface that should make working with them easier. We have also finally fixed the old container sorting bug, so now you can safely sort any container without issues.

Apart from that, there's a new "Portable Storage" item that you can get as many as you want by completing Contracts for the pirates. These act as a little portable chest that can store up to 9 items but only take one slot in your inventory.

Nine whole slots for the price of one!

We will keep working on this section, as you've shared with us some ideas that we liked, but need to investigate and test before commiting into them.

Priority 6 - Movement, traversal, portals, map and clutter

We are a bit surprised about this one. Since we've changed the collision system on the player, players shouldn't be getting stuck into objects too often and it should be much more playable right now. We understand that there's a big amount of objects on each island and that it slows down traversal, but that's actually intended. If we wouldn't introduce clutter in each island, it would allow players to instantly traverse the island breaking all the sense of exploring and slowly advancing through an unknown place. Reducing the amount of objects that an island has also has implications on game's balance and progression, which might make gathering enough items for the next objective harder than we anticipated, or plainly impossible.

However, we've introduced different ways to deal with islands' clutter, like explosives (including the Endless Bomb), mounts or the new statue that stops clutter from re-appearing. We will continue monitoring feedback and trying to understand what's behind these comments and how we can improve and fix this issue. We have also made some improvements on traversal unrelated to clutter, like portals now being faster to use and other ways to improve player's speed.

The 'Bomb Spell' helps getting rid of clutter quickly.

Priority 7 - Building, decorating, NPCs and world life

More furniture and decoration, more (and better) roofs, more floors and walls... Yeah, we agree!

We are constantly working on more vanity and decoration objects while working on the updates, we also want to expand the possibilities of decoration with systems like rotating objects (which might sound trivial, but it's a ton of work!).

In the next update, we've added lots of things regarding customization and decoration. Things like the stylist mirror to change player's appearance, dyes to change player's hair color, color torches and more. And we will continue expanding the decoration possibilities of Tinkerlands as much as we can.

The new color torches help creating new moods on your base (or ship).

The stylist mirror allows the player changing appearance ingame.

Q&A

Feedback addressed, let's now answer some questions from the community:

Update timing and Early Access

1. When is the next major update coming out?

Let's get the big one done right off the bat. We are planning to release the v0.4 'Seas Of Fortune' update in November . We will give the specific date in the next devlog.

2. Why are you running closed/community playtests instead of releasing updates directly to everyone in Early Access?

Because the first playtests might be unstable, cause savegame corruptions and other major stuff that we want to avoid. We want to make sure that anyone that wants to test the new update before It's stable knows that issues might (and most likely will) happen during these playtests.

3. When will Tinkerlands leave Early Access?

Our current plan is to release version 1.0 in Q1-Q2 2027 .

4. Will there be more major updates after version 1.0?

This is me, CodeManu, answering on my behalf and thoughts: I really hope I can keep working on Tinkerlands for years. But in the end, it all depends on player's reception and how well the game does. I know the team loves working on Tinkerlands, and we would love to do so for a long-long time, it all depends on if we can afford to do so.

5. Are paid DLCs or supporter content planned after release?

No plans to do that.

Seas of Fortune and ships

6. Will there be boss fights or events involving ships?

Wouldn't like to spoil anything. But I guess this answer is a spoiler by itself.

7. How will ship building affect existing items placed on ships, such as chests or workbenches?

When the old savegame is loaded, we will take all your chests contents in your ship, and also all your interactables and put them in an infinite chest in the new ship. The infinite chest only allows to grab items and doesn't allow placing items inside, so don't get any ideas!

8. Will ships become part of long-term exploration, or mostly a way to reach new islands?

That's a good one. Right now ships are meant to be used to travel to other islands. But things happen while you travel that could be also considered part of exploration.

9. Can NPCs join players on ships or during sea adventures in the future?

NPCs can appear on your ship, but housing them in the ship is not possible at this moment. We are considering this and might have more information to share about it in the future.

Performance and multiplayer

10. What are you doing to improve loading times between islands?

We got you covered above in the Priority #3 section. As a TL;DR though, we have vastly improved saving and loading times, as well as reduced the savegame file size. All of this make loading times when travelling between islands much much shorter. With the addition that all happens in the background now while navigating in your ship without interrupting the gameplay, you should barely notice it.

11. Are multiplayer freezes, desyncs, and long co-op loading screens being worked on?

Yes, we have improved a lot on that regard and we keep working on it. Loading screens in co-op should be a thing of the past now with the new save system upgrade and the new travelling system. Freezes and desyncs should have improved now that we've fixed some bugs related to that, but they are always hard to reproduce and we rely on community reports to find them.

12. Will Steam Deck and controller support be improved?

Yes. We have a lot of gamepad improvements implemented and queued to be implemented in the next update. I have personally commited to complete the game using a gamepad on my Steam Machine, and I hate gamepads, so expects lots of improvements to make it more bearable (for me).

13. Will players get more graphics/performance options for lower-end devices?

Yes. We have added a new option to disable smooth shadows which should already improve the GPU usage on low-end devices, and we will keep improving performance as well as adding new options that sadly lower the game's graphical fidelity but that will improve performance on low-end devices.

Progression, guidance and information

14. Are you planning to make progression clearer without forcing players to use a wiki?

Addressed above in Priority #2 section, but as a TL;DR, yes. We have implemented subtle visual changes to lead the player to the next objective, as well as added a new "Item shopping list" for each island so players know what they are missing and where they are missing it.

15. Will the Codex/Guide/Bestiary show where items, accessories, charms, recipes, or boss summons can be found?

No. Although I understand where this is coming from, we believe that the Codex isn't the place to do this. Just imagine an items page, with 3,000 items!

We are addressing this issue as mentioned in Priority #2 section, but we believe that we can solve this issue without implementing all of the clues in the Codex.

16. Will there be clearer story, lore, or a proper ending by release?

There will be an ending, and improved lore. We've had the story in our minds since the inception of Tinkerlands, but Tinkerlands' isn't a story-based game so we don't want to focus too much on that. But yes, expect more about it in the 1.0 release.

17. Will there be more questlines or NPC guidance for bosses and biomes?

Yes, we have recently improved the questing interface to show rewards or abandon quests if you are not interested. Next point in our plan is to make better quests.

Combat, builds and classes

18. Will Summoner get more weapons, summon options, or a higher summon limit?

Yes. To everything.

19. Will existing summons conflict with the new Summoner class?

No, the summoner class is basically the same as in the current update. What changes is that summon damage and buffs is now properly transfered to summons, and that we have expanded the amount of summons, and equipments for summoners.

20. Are you planning to make melee, ranged, magic and other weapons types feel more distinct?

Yes, but it's not an easy thing to do. There's a lot of weapons and usable items in general, and it's getting harder and harder to make items unique and distinct to their classes. But yeah, we are working on it!

21. Will there be more class-specific armor, weapons, passive abilities, or accessory combinations?

You bet!

22. Are you considering stronger endgame builds, mastery systems, skill trees, or equipment upgrades?

We are considering skill trees and other similar systems for Tinkerlands endgame which will come in the 1.0 release. If we end up including them, they won't be available until you complete the game for the first time. However, in the v0.4 'Seas Of Fortune' update there's a lot of new permanent upgrade items that as their name say, permanently increases player's capabilities.

23. Will boss difficulty and co-op scaling be adjusted?

We haven't heard complains about co-op scaling being unbalanced. But we will look into it and we are absolutely open to get it checked out.

Replayability and endgame

24. What are your plans for long-term endgame content?

The Endless Tower. That's coming in the 1.0 release, so we cannot talk much about it yet, but it'll be our endgame content that happens after you beat the game.

25. Are you considering endless dungeons, challenge towers, superbosses, NG+, raids or other replayable systems?

Endless dungeons (The Endless Tower) and superbosses are on the menu. We still need to think about more systems, but we don't want to over-scope the next update.

26. Will older islands get more reasons to revisit them?

We have just covered that in the Priority #1 section, but yes. The new 'Contracts' system will make you visit previous islands, but we also have other ideas to implement to make back-tracking meaningful.

27. Will future islands have more unique events, secrets, or biome-specific mechanics?

Yes. Not only the…