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.”

—

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.