This update shares ongoing Vault of Miny Things development, including testing a functional mockup of a content-complete Vault in actual-play environments. No action is required.

No action is required… other than reading a bunch of text, if you’re so inclined. Vaulter, so much has happened since the last update. We’re delighted to be able to announce that the Vault itself is finally content art-complete. What this means is that all of the printed pieces that come in the Vault of Mini Things have front and back art. Marshall Short has been burning the midnight oil to get to the end of this massive art journey and he’s earned a well-deserved rest… which he’ll get to take AFTER he completes the last few remaining pieces of art for the add-ons. 

He’s just completed some gorgeous art for the Graveyard set and is working on finishing up the ruins map tiles now. It’s worth repeating: while we are still working on the final few pieces for the Graveyard and Ruins terrain add-ons, all of the artwork for the contents of the Vault of Mini Things (and the other Add-ons) are in the hands of the manufacturer. Now that they’ve got all of our files we’re able to proceed to hashing out the particular details necessary for manufacturing, and examine factory proofs with final art. In other words: we’re getting very close to being able to hit “go” on the print run. 

It just so happens that one of the final pieces of art & engineering work coincides with the Halloween season. Let’s take a look at some of that work: the Graveyard Gate. Marshall’s art featured that classic Victorian ironwork we all associate with spooky cemeteries–probably due to Disney’s The Haunted Mansion attraction. We wanted the fine details of the ironwork to pop out–it seemed a shame to just print a black field in the void space between the bars, because it’d change something visually delicate and elegant into something clunky and plain. However, die-cutting such thin elements would be structurally unsound. So how to preserve the look without compromising quality? 

Our solution is to invent a new process that sandwiches a thin printed acrylic sheet between two half-as-thick-as-usual punchboard pieces. This process shows off the ironwork while still giving the durability and heft of the rest of the terrain pieces in the Vault product line. We think the result is fantastic. Take a look: 

The Graveyard add-on also got its own wall clip style that replaces the column artwork with a physical column wall clip. How cool is that!?

We expect these final bits of terrain to be complete in the next few days, and then we move on to packaging design. That work is greatly aided by the production and assembly of a:

Through the magic of 3d modeling and 3d printing we’ve been able to produce a functional prototype of the Vault’s external box and internal organizational components. This allowed us to load up the Vault with all of the components, thereby creating a dimensionally-accurate, content-complete, fully armed and operational Vault of Mini Things for live-fire testing a real game of Dungeons & Dragons. This step is crucial because we wanted to ensure that we can physically fit all of the content into the box, but also test that the content is easy and pleasurable to actually use in a real game.

We needed a working, usable prototype in order to be able to actively use the Vault in real D&D sessions. Doing so lets us test and ultimately improve the user experience. Are creatures and props easy to find, easy to deploy, and easy to put away? What about the terrain pieces? Map tiles? What are the pain points? How can we remove or mitigate them?

Note that this functional prototype is the most recent in a long line of, shall we say, less functional prototypes. Previous iterations showcased some flaws in our original plans, or highlighted opportunities to make things better. For example, we discovered that our concept of swappable trays for terrain was just not going to work the way we originally intended. They created failure points and expensive complexity that just weren't justified for the convenience we were trying to provide. Our solution was to instead create vacuum formed trays for terrain specific types, and nest them internally. This gives the functionality we wanted to provide (the ability to customize a Vault's "loadout" for travel) while eliminating points of cost and structural failure.

We’ve been playtesting the Vault, with Tinker Lane as Dungeon Master starting a run into the Dungeon of the Mad Mage. We figured this was the perfect adventure to test the Vault because it’s a classic dungeon environment with a myriad variety of monsters and dungeon features. It's about as perfect as an ideal test scenario for what an actual customer would experience at home with their own Vault, and we figured it'd be a good stress test for our purpose.

Boy, were we right. Tinker Lane had prepped the first three encounters, as outlined in the book, but of course the game immediately went off the rails when our party succeeded on an improbable search check to find a secret spyhole, and then used a combination of a tiny Bat familiar and Mage Hand to open a one-way secret door from the inside. Off the party went in a completely unexpected direction, and Tinker Lane had to scramble to find and deploy map tiles and creatures on the fly. The good news is, the Vault’s Creature Catalog organization system let him quickly find those unexpected creatures and deploy them to the dungeon. Honestly, it was as perfect of a “real world” use case as we could have hoped for and we were all gratified to see the Vault come to the DM’s rescue.

Here are some as-it-happened-at-the-table snapshots of the first combat encounter. Note this wasn't a photoshoot of a well-lit, well-staged engineering session; the purpose of the playtest was to do it "live" and use the Vault in real-time just as any Dungeon Master would in their home game.

There were some useful takeaways at the end of the session from both the Tinker team and our volunteer testers. We’re changing up the card sleeve material so they’re less “slippery.” We’re taking another look at the divisions within creature types so they’re more useful. We’re creating a master index of every creature (name and Tab info) and deciding how to include that in the box as a second and complementary way to find the storage location of the exact creature you need. We’re examining the user experience of post-session cleanup, and experimenting with mechanisms for keeping track of where deployed creatures came from and “saving” the game state for instant and easy deployment of all entities at the start of the next session. The test game also revealed issues witherrors in our assumptions about quantities of bases, and how those will be stored inside the Vault. But we were very please with our casino chip-inspired storage system for bases and terrain pucks.

 

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We’ll wrap up this update with wishes for a wonderfully witchy Halloween, as welcomed by these wicked wretches:

Sincerely,

Mike, Lane, Chris, and Marshall

This update shows some of the significant challenges and progress with the Vault, and announces a further revision of the estimated delivery date: Spring 2025. It explains the reasons for the revision and shares production progress. No action is required.

Four months ago in Update 25 we announced that our initial estimate of Late Summer/ Early Fall 2024 was too aggressive, and revised delivery to Fall/Winter. Despite our best efforts there’s no realistic way we’ll be able to deliver this Fall. Therefore we’re announcing a new ETA of Spring 2025.

Before getting into the specifics of the reasons for this delay I’d like to acknowledge DessieD and Crabby, who correctly anticipated this second delay in the comments of Update 25. Y’all’s experience with crowdfunding shows! 

There are three primary factors contributing to the delay:

1. Art Production

By now every Vaulter is familiar with the amount and variety of minis included in the Vault of Mini Things and all the extras. It’s the most visceral, exciting, and noticeable amount of original art: 807 unique minis. And since the Vault’s minis feature front and back art, the art lift is actually double that. But the huge amount of art front and back creature art is not all that’s in the Vault.
 
What we did not correctly estimate is the amount of time required for production of object and terrain art. Torch stands. Bookcases. Pit traps. Sconces. Walls. Doors. Rubble. Terrain tiles, in particular, are taking much longer than anticipated. We could have simply repeated a basic texture in the myriad sizes of tiles we’re shipping with, but that’s not going to give the hand-drawn, bespoke look we’re going for. All that original art takes time–lots of time, and more than we thought. On the plus side, the terrain art is gorgeous:

2. Packaging & Manufacturing Complexity
Thinking of the Vault as a product, it’s a product with 1,855 individual pieces. All of those pieces have to go in a single box, and because a core value proposition of the vault is saving you time through thoughtful organization, each of those pieces has to have a specific spot in the box. We don’t want to ship a box of loose stuff for you to sort through. This engineering has taken considerable time due to back-and-forth with our manufacturer in China*. 

3. Wall Engineering
Update 25 spent a lot of words on our struggles with engineering for wall connections, and our proud presentation of finally settling on a solution. After months of prototype iteration and playtesting we were all pretty excited about what we came up with. Unfortunately, that solution failed when we received fabricated samples from the factory. We were testing on 3-d printed prototypes we printed here, in-house, and while the interaction between the material in those prototypes and the wall material works well, the interaction of the factory’s production material and the wall material does not work as well as we want. In short: the factory material is not as tacky/grippy as our printed prototypes. So it was back to the drawing board for wall connections. 

The good news is that we’ve got a tremendous amount of work done. We’ll show some of that work below, but the upshot is: each time we finalize an aspect of this project the total amount of unknowns decreases, and the more confident we can all be in the ETA. It’s like the reverse of entropy. The Vault of Mini Things: defying the second law of thermodynamics! 

1. Wall engineering

Didn’t we just see this in “What went wrong?” Yes, the factory sample interaction was a blow but we bounced back with a furious period of rapid prototyping. Tinker Lane applied his 3D modeling prowess and decades of wargaming experience, and Tinker Chris brought his design eye and materials engineering experience to bear. The final design is a wall-join piece that is good-looking, simple-to-use, and functional. Take a gander:

  

 Tinkers Mike, Lane, and Chris gathered to do a manual QA pass of freshly laser-cut prototype figures (lasered along the die-lines we’ve specified for the factory) and sort them into sleeves. The whole process of sorting the minis into categories, then sorting the categories into alphabetical order (made easier by the tab numbering system previewed in Update 26), and then sleeving the minis into our custom top-load landscape-orientation card sleeves took the three of us about 45 minutes–and that included pauses for Scotch.

In the above photo Tinker Chris is pointing out the pleasingly snug fit of the prototype terrain-sorting tray that Tinker Lane has designed. Notice the Grip Notches (tm) at one end, to facilitate swapping terrain trays in and out of your Vault according to your session's needs. The lasercut minis themselves have been temporarily sorted into Ziplocks--something Backers will never have to deal with, thanks to the Vault's organization system.

A convivial way to spend an evening with friends, to be sure, but more importantly we confirmed that the dielines were spot-on and that the tabs and categories make it easy to find and sort the vast array of creatures in the Vault. And, Tinker Chris even came up with a clever brand name for our card catalog-inspired organization system as a whole: he’s dubbed it the “Dungeon Decimal System.”

3. PAX West

 PAX started in the Seattle area (ask me how I know!), so it’s very little effort to stand up a booth in the tabletop area. Boxes of the Vault aren’t available for sale, of course, but we bring a collection of minis and terrain for display in order to generate interest. And wow, was the response ever positive! 

As we’d just done a pass of our finalized mini sheets, for this show we brought a much larger contingent of minis than we’d ever brought before. It was a genuine delight to spread them across the table and then see folks’ necks turn as they walked by and clocked the sheer number of gorgeous creatures spread across our table. It really proved our selling point that Marshall’s art not only looks great on a screen, but looks great at table-play distance.

Many PAX-goers stopped by to chat about the Vault over the course of the show, and it was a huge morale boost to hear things like: 

“I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time.”

“Oh wow, look! They’re front-and-back!”

“So, since they pack flat, I can have, like, a dozen skeletons?” 

“It comes with terrain too? Take my money!”

“This is gonna be way easier to take to my friend’s house.”

At one point a group walked up to check out the minis. I asked them if they played D&D. One person in the group said “Oh yeah. Lifelong DM.” Another person in the same group said they were just starting out. I said “Then the Vault is for you. Both of you. It’s for someone just starting out who doesn’t have a lot of stuff, because it has everything you need in one box. And it’s for a long-time player who has accumulated a lot of mis-matched stuff over the years, because you can leave all that stuff behind and just take this one box.”

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While things are continuing to move in the right direction and the number of open project tasks continues to whittle down, we folks here at TinkerHouse understand that it’s disappointing to hear of delays in ETA. If Spring 2025 doesn’t work for you, we invite you to get in touch and we’ll issue a full refund of your pledge. And if you can wait just that bit longer for your Vault: thank you very much for your ongoing support!

Sincerely,

Mike, Lane, Chris, and Marshall 

* We wish we could work with a USA-based manufacturer, because that would vastly speed up production back-and-forth and shipping. We’ve looked at every manufacturer in the space. No one yet can handle the precision of die-cut tool making that we require.

Hello everyone, this is Tinker Chris here to talk a bit about printing and manufacturing. There is no action needed in this update.

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I've been busy getting everything finalized for handoff to the manufacturer, and if there is one thing that I've taken away from this process in the past it's that physically proofing art before sending it to manufacturing is WAY faster than making any potential changes during the manufacturing process. A couple of days on our end can save us weeks on the other end.

To ensure quality and create a quicker turnaround we’ve built in a local print proof process. This gives us the chance to look at our layout in printed form to make sure things are aligning correctly that we may not have caught on screen. While we don't get an accurate idea of the final colors—as every printer will be slightly different due to a variety of environmental factors, and these are digital prints—we were quite impressed with what we were seeing. We were also very excited by seeing the sheer breadth of items in this stack of prints. Take a look at some of the photos I took of this:

We hope that you are excited by this first look as we are!! 

The plan was to start the lock process last Friday, but that did not happen. We figure everyone received a little extra time for any last minute changes. That said we plan to push the button tomorrow and start that process. You will have an additional 48 hours before orders are locked and then we will start charging cards for those that are late-pledge, have added items to their initial pledge, or are pre-order.

Again we will be charging shipping at as soon as we have that information. Anyone that is concerned about not knowing shipping now, we want to insure you that we plan to pass the shipping cost on to you without any markup. We've typically shipped from three different countries to get better rates and in the past that has worked out great for all of us. If for some reason you feel that your shipping cost is too high, we will  work with you to refund your pledge.

In this update we plan to explain what this means, what actions are required of you, and when this will happen?

Let’s first cover locking orders. When we lock orders you will no longer be able to adjust or modify your order on your own via the pledge manager. If you need to make any changes or adjustments you will need to reach out to us and we would manage those changes on a case by case basis. We plan to start the  lock order process on Friday, July 12th. On that day you should receive a final notice that your order will be locked in 48 hours. This process goes for Pre-orders as well. After orders are locked we will begin charging your credit cards for any add-ons or extras that you added in the pledge manager and/or Pre-orders or Late Pledge orders. If for any reason your credit card is declined, BackerKit will contact you to update it. Nobody from our team or BackerKit will ask you for your credit card number directly. You will be forwarded to login to your BackerKit account to make those changes. If you need to review your order you should be able to find that information once logged into BackerKit. As always please let us know if you run into issues and we will do our best to facilitate.

At this time we still do not have accurate weights and measures for each product. This means that we cannot currently accurately charge for shipping. Shipping will be collected closer to when we are fulfilling your orders, and that process will be outlined much like this.

Moving forward we plan to keep the pre-order store open so hopefully folks won’t feel like they will miss out on this first shipment. We will have limited supply on some of these products, but you will be able to add to your order later if absolutely necessary. Also, if you were an original backer of the project and want to add to your pledge please reach out to us so that we can add those to your original pledge at those prices.

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That’s all for this update! Thank you in advance for your timely response to any notices you receive from us through BackerKit. 

Sincerely,

Mike, Lane, Chris, and Marshall