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

Amazing that just about one year ago, thanks to you this project was kicked into gear. Huzzah for the anniversary! Huzzah for the Vaulter community! Huzzah for the Vault of Mini Things!

This update features an in-depth look at standee tabs as well as a community poll for its name. The update also shows off new Marshall art, and answers some excellent questions from the Vaulter community.

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Absolutely Tabulous

The Vault is not just a big box of loose stuff. It’s designed to save time and effort via what we consider to be a clever and intuitive organization system. The most fundamental element of that system is the tab at the bottom of each standee. 

More than just a piece that lets the base grip the standee and hold it upright, the Vault’s tabs convey crucial information. Each standee’s color-coded tab tells you which category that standee belongs to, where it goes within that category alphabetically, and a unique number. All combined, each standee has a unique identifier that lets future adventure authors specify particular Vault standees. We’re also planning on hosting a living online reference doc that’s searchable, so that you and your players can look up creatures and quickly discover where they are in your Vault. This reference will be updated over time as we release new expansions.

We agonized over just what information to include, factoring in space limitations, localization, ease-of-use, and expandability. To clarify our various ideas, we put the focus on the customer and identified these priorities:  

To accomplish those priorities, we identified these functional requirements:

In the end we determined that the best solution is to follow this format: 

Where CA is an abbreviation of one of the Vault’s categories, such as, “Heroes”, “Animals, “Foes”, etc. These categories provide the initial organizational “buckets” the standees are sorted into.

Next we have L, this is the first letter of the creature’s name and allows for more specific alphabetical sorting within the categories. All the As, all the Bs, the Cs, etc.

Let’s pretend we’re trying to find a Black Bear Standee for a wildness encounter we have planned. Bears are animals so we’d first goto the Animal category, Bear starts with B so let’s head for the B section of the Animal category, ahh there it is, right next to the Bats and Beetles, a Black Bear with "AN B 2" on the tab, AN for Animal and B for Bear. Nice.

But wait, what’s the 2 all about?

This brings us to the last element of our sorting system and that’s unique reference ### numbers for every standee. There maybe many "AN Bs" but there’s only one "AN B 2" and that’s the Black Bear!

So, why have unique reference ### numbers, and why not just print the full name for each creature? Primary reason is space limitation. These tabs are not very large and some names are lengthy. But also, it’s just faster and easier to sort by a system rather than by a name. After all, the inspiration for the Creature Catalog system, of which the tabs are a crucial part, is the library Card Catalog or Dewey Decimal System. Remember those? You’d first find the section (fiction, nonfiction, etc) then the authors, and once you found the Cs you’d just look through to find your authors name–whether it be Crichton or Card. 

We’d love your feedback on this, though we’re pretty committed. And! We’ve got a poll at the bottom of this update for you to choose the cheeky three-letter-acronym for the tab itself.

But first, some new hotness from the digital pen of Marshall Short. The usual caveats that these are print prototypes, not necessarily indicative of the Vault’s form-factor and materials, etc. 

 

Vaulter Community Q&A

Update 25 prompted some great questions, and rather than have folks search through comments we thought we’d answer them here:

Q: Jeff asked,

A: We’re actually super proud of the engineering that went into our custom bases. Job one was to overcome your worry: to have a base that gripped the standee such that you can confidently move them as you intuitively want to, by grabbing the standee. But! Just as important was for that snug fit to not come at the cost of long-term damage to the standee from multiple insertions. That’s why our standees have carefully angled contours that safely guide the standee tab into an ever-tightening gap. The benefit is that standees insert easily, bases grip snugly, and damage-over-time is vastly minimized.

Full video of the base here: https://youtu.be/4AwbbRO-8Hk

Q: Jeff also asked,

A: Good eye, and that’s right! Tinker Lane wrote custom software that examines each and every work of Marshall art, and then draws a dieline at uniform distance. It even identifies interior dielines, so that the Vault standees will have actual airgaps. Then Tinker Chris goes over each and every individual standee and manually adjusts when necessary to ensure the minis look the best they can be while also being sturdy and stable. 

Q: Jblu asked,

Thick and thin can be subjective, so let’s get technical. For terrain pieces like walls and trees, we use 2mm chipboard. For creature standees and small props / dungeon dressing like torch stands and chests we use 310gsm weight cardstock–similar in feel to Magic cards. We use these two different materials because chipboard gives a confidence-inspiring heft to elements that should be stable, like dungeon walls. While cardstock allows us to include hundreds of minis at an affordable price, without taking up too much space.

Q: Borie Florent asked,

Subject to change, but: right now the box is 295mm by 295mm by 170mm.

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That’s all for this update! Thank you for the understanding for the shipping delay–your ongoing support is an inspiration and morale boost. Even with the adjustment we’re in the home stretch now. The 20% of final details that take 80% of the time are getting locked down one by one. And with each to-do crossed off, the whole team here gets more and more excited about finally getting it in your hands. 

Sincerely,

Mike, Lane, Chris, and Marshall