Improvements Rebalanced the strength of emotional effects on object quality Rebalanced the writing skill's book publishing payout The quality of a book is now displayed before publishing, so high-quality books can deliberately be chosen for publishers Made plants' harvest quality
Improvements
Rebalanced the strength of emotional effects on object quality
Rebalanced the writing skill's book publishing payout
The quality of a book is now displayed before publishing, so high-quality books can deliberately be chosen for publishers
Made plants' harvest quality be influenced by emotions and personalities
Fixes
Fixed the flower covering tile crashing old saves in 0.50.5
Additions Added some decorative gardening supplies, as well as two new small pot plants Added a new European-style roof greenery tile Added a gameplay option that allows configuring automatic babysitter hiring behavior Aded a total real-world play time counter to the save load me
Additions
Added some decorative gardening supplies, as well as two new small pot plants
Added a new European-style roof greenery tile
Added a gameplay option that allows configuring automatic babysitter hiring behavior
Aded a total real-world play time counter to the save load menu. Please note that, as this was previously not counted, the play time for existing saves starts at 0.
Added the ability for babies to ask to be carried home, and for adults to do so automatically when checking up on babies with low needs
Improvements
The fool around action is now not enqueued automatically anymore if the partner is an elder who is tired of a workout
The deadly emotion in-game hint is now also displayed when fooling around with an elder who isn't part of the active household
Improved the texture of some wallpapers to connect more smoothly between floors
Bathtubs can now be accessed from both tiles rather than just the center
Made gravel auto-tile
Massively speed up unsubscribed Steam workshop item removal checks on startup, especially when there are a lot of subscribed items
Water is now drawn with the borders in the tile tool ui to make it easier to recognize as water
Tinies now try multiple actions when discarding the held item, causing it to work more reliably
Made it more likely for trash cans to contain actual trash when rummaging through them
Increased startup performance when having a lot of disabled mods installed
Unloaded mods that aren't from Steam workshop can now be deleted from within the game
Fixes
Fixed the child stove not properly deducting the price
Fixed various incorrect behaviors related to walls on lot borders
Fixed fences not being affected by indoor lighting
Fixed tiles not immediately updating the roofed state of rooms below them
Fixed an exception when the work action is still enqueued after quitting the job
Fixed being unable to place hanging objects above water
Fixed some actions, like throwing away and cleaning dishes, not properly recognizing available destination objects
Fixed being able to clean dishes on broken sinks, causing them to disappear without an animation
Fixed an oversight that caused people to get stuck when cleaning dishes or doing food-related tasks
Fixed cheats not working on people with spaces in their first or last names
Fixed playing in the sandbox having a high likelihood of failing since not all possible positions were tried
Fixed various instances of objects being put down on the wrong floor when fast-forwarding, causing them to get stuck in the air forever
Removals
Removed the gray tile that is displayed on the "down" version of roofs, which players can replace with real tiles if they want a ceiling on the room below
Additions Added the No Visitors lot type, which Tinies will not autonomously visit, and avoid doing activities on Improvements Tinies now prefer putting down seed bags and harvest baskets on the ground rather than a surface Tinies gardening autonomously will now use seed bags and
Additions
Added the No Visitors lot type, which Tinies will not autonomously visit, and avoid doing activities on
Improvements
Tinies now prefer putting down seed bags and harvest baskets on the ground rather than a surface
Tinies gardening autonomously will now use seed bags and harvest baskets from household storage and return them there
Made some of the sillier clothes be less likely to be picked for randomly generated outfits
Fixes
Fixed clothes hiding hair even when they're not currently visible
Improvements Overhauled in-game hints: new hints now always display a notification, and players can select whether they also open their popup in the hints tab of the options menu (or when the first hint is displayed in a new save) Display a link to the custom content installation
Improvements
Overhauled in-game hints: new hints now always display a notification, and players can select whether they also open their popup in the hints tab of the options menu (or when the first hint is displayed in a new save)
Display a link to the custom content installation tutorial in import menus
Made people much likelier to take appropriate food from the fridge when being asked to by a baby
Fixes
Fixed opening the hint menu from a notification not pausing the game
Fixed being unable to upload lots with fences to the Steam workshop
API
Fixed mods being unable to load custom songs through the content manager
Fixed a crash when opening the non-buyable objects tab after disabling the cheat
Hi everyone! This is a medium-sized update that includes a new lot type, various gardening improvements and fixes, and a few new decorative and clutter items. Additions Added two decorative medicine cabinets, a rounded in-counter sink, a towel rack and a toilet paper roll decorat
Hi everyone! This is a medium-sized update that includes a new lot type, various gardening improvements and fixes, and a few new decorative and clutter items.
Additions
Added two decorative medicine cabinets, a rounded in-counter sink, a towel rack and a toilet paper roll decoration, as well as two tech decor items
Added the cemetery lot type and associated burial plot marker objects
Added the ability to move gravestones to a cemetery if there are empty plots available
Added the "special lot types" furniture tab
Improvements
Made it much less likely for people to visit other lots while they have visitors over
Display an X when an action is currently in the canceled state, but the game is paused
Allow planting seeds from seed bags you don't own
Increased the length of the adult life stage from 28 to 35 days
Enqueue Go to Work action more aggressively
Fixes
Fixed custom content not being refreshed when a whole directory is added or removed
Fixed deleting custom maps from within the game not deleting all relevant files
Fixed various food types having wrong dietary categorizations
Fixed an exception when people with no home lots try to sell harvestables
Fixed household storage being deleted when moving someone out
Fixed erroneously being able to sell a harvest basket or seed bag from storage
Fixed lot border walls ignoring the wall display mode
Fixed dropdown content staying selected when closing a dropdown using a controller
Fixed the food-related achievement requiring unobtainable items to complete
Fixed counters automatically connecting to other counters on different floors
Fixed being unable to place plants in planters that are on non-natural ground
API
Added AllowNonMovable and AllowNonSellable cheats which allow moving and selling objects which normally cannot be moved or sold
Added the ability to specify custom placement rules for furniture in FurniturePlacer
Fixes Fixed a crash in the demo when opening build mode Fixed the second stage of the gardener life goal not saving to disk correctly Fixed existing notifications being displayed after a loading screen playing the notification sound again
Fixes
Fixed a crash in the demo when opening build mode
Fixed the second stage of the gardener life goal not saving to disk correctly
Fixed existing notifications being displayed after a loading screen playing the notification sound again
Hi Tiny Life enjoyers! It's yet again been a little while since the last devlog, and thus, since the last major update to the game. I'd like to apologize for the repeated delays in update releases, but I think this time around, it's really going to have been worth the wait for yo
Hi Tiny Life enjoyers! It's yet again been a little while since the last devlog, and thus, since the last major update to the game. I'd like to apologize for the repeated delays in update releases, but I think this time around, it's really going to have been worth the wait for you.
For Tiny Life 0.50.0, which is releasing alongside this devlog, we have a lot of cool new features to cover, including the major addition of gardening and the introduction of a foraging system to the game! Let's get right into it.
Gardening
Tinies can now acquire and build the Gardening skill by planting seeds, watering their plants, harvesting them, and even selling their produce for money. To get a good overview of the gardening system and how it works, you should check out this teaser video we made for it a while ago if you haven't already:
The first step in your gardening journey is to gather some seeds in a seed bag. To do this, head out into the world and find some wild plants! Each of the three non-demo worlds featured in the game will now have wild plants strewn about in various locations. They generate (or grow) over time, so the ones you'd like to plant may not be available straight away, but be sure to check around every few days and see if you find them!
When harvesting wild plants to gather seeds, your Tinies will automatically equip a seed bag that the seeds will then go into. Seed bags, as well as the harvest baskets we'll talk about a bit later, are handheld objects that store your seeds and harvestables. They can be picked up and put down like any other small items, but they can also be put into and taken out of your household storage, which allows them to be tucked away neatly and shared easily with other household members and across different locations.
In the future, the wild plants system will be expanded into a full foraging system with an accompanying skill and different, unique items to forage for. For now, plants are the only thing you can find dotted around the world, though.
Planting, Watering and Harvesting
The seeds your Tinies have collected can be planted in plant pots found in build mode. Two plant pots are available in this update: a 1x1 one and a 2x2 one, which can fit 1 and 4 plants, respectively. After planting, plants can optionally be moved around in build mode, including moving them out of their plant pots and onto natural ground.
To thrive, plants need to be watered regularly, with the frequently depending on the plant. Plants can be hovered over to see their watering state as well as their growth stage. Once fully grown, plants can be harvested, causing their havest to be put into a harvest basket that works similarly to the seed bag. The quality of harvested plants depends on the total amount of time that they went unwatered while growing, as well as your Tiny's gardening skill level.
When harvesting plants, especially with low gardening skill, there is a chance that your Tiny harvests the plant incorrectly, causing for it to die. When a plant dies, the spot in the planter box becomes available for a new plant. If you don't like having to replant your dead plants, you can head into the gameplay options menu to enable the "Dead Plants Turn into Seeds" option, which will cause dying plants to turn into fresh seeds of the same type instead.
After harvesting, produce can then be sold through the mailbox for profit, and some items can be snacked on for some hunger need regeneration.
Community Garden
This update also adds the community, or public, garden lot type, where Tinies will autonomously come and garden. The public garden lot also employs a community gardener who will occasionally tend plants and, upon request, plant some new ones for you.
While this update doesn't include a prebuilt community garden lot, you can always build your own or find one on the Steam workshop!
Other Gardening Activities
In addition to the ability to sell harvestables through the mailbox, a Tiny can also put their gardening skill to use through the Gardener job.
Alongside the new job type, we also added the Garden Guardian life goal. Completing this life goal gives your Tiny the ability to nourish their plants, which causes them to stop requiring water for a full week. During the week, they are also not susceptible to over-harvesting and will grow twice as fast!
The gardening system is pretty in-depth already, and we're pretty proud of how it works right now, but we have a lot of additional plans for the future, so stay tuned for future game updates!
Destination Doors
In addition to gardening and foraging, this update also features a new semi-major feature that map makers can use when creating custom worlds: destination doors, or out of town doors!
These doors can be bought with the ShowNonBuyable cheat enabled. As the name suggests, these doors act as "out of town destinations," which are places Tinies will go to do out-of-town activities like going to work. Previously, Tinies were only able to do these activities by exiting a world at a road or pathway connected to the border, but now, placing an out of town door of the relevant type will cause Tinies to head there for out of town activities instead.
This feature allows players to build custom buildings for set dressing, like a hospital, office or science lab, and have Tinies actually travel to them when heading to work or school.
In the future, new base game maps will also be making use of this feature.
Small Stuff
Finally, this update also includes a bunch of small features, some of which we feel important enough to mention in this devlog!
The default wallpaper texture (which used to be a sort of drywall look) has gotten an overhaul: it now has the look of bare bricks instead! In addition to this, we've added a new and improved drywall texture to the game, which can be applied for the same price as the bare bricks texture if desired. The reason for this change is that Tiny Life was always meant to be set in Central Europe, but many of the design choices we adapted from games like The Sims contradicted that: The American-style free-standing mailboxes with flags, the thin walls that look like they're made of cardboard, the car-centric layout of suburban places like Maple Plains City, and so on. In recent history, we've been trying to rectify this by adapting some of these features to feel less overly American!
Check out the new bare bricks texture that walls will now have by default (right), as well as the new and improved drywall texture (left).
Now that we have two distinct "ugly wall" textures, we thought we'd increase the number of ugly things in the game further in case any of you want to build some old, grimy houses for any reason. This updates adds five new free decorative trash items that you can get in build mode. Be careful though: Tinies really don't like the look of these!
Finally, there are a bunch of additional small features in this update, including the ability to nap on sofas and benches, as well as the ability to disable autonomous outfit changes in the gmaeplay options. Feel free to explore the full changelog below if you're interested!
About the Roadmap
As I said at the top, I know that this update has been a really long time coming. Over the last few years, we've gradually strayed away from the "one major update a month" schedule that I so rigidly try to stick to during and shortly after the pandemic. People who read these devlogs regularly know that I've already talked this topic to death, and so I don't want to go into details again about why updates have slowed down, but rest assured, I am still passionate about, and committed to, development on Tiny Life.
As you can probably tell, the gardening update is not one that was explicitly mentioned on the public roadmap upfront, but it is one that players have been asking about for quite a long time. In a survey that we did a few months before we started work on the gardening feature, we asked what players would like, and gardening won by quite a large margin. That's why we started working on it!
After this update, however, we plan on continuing with the public roadmap in our attempt to get the game ready for leaving Early Access sooner rather than later. First up, we'd really love to get started on social events, which will pave the way for the addition of weddings and marriage in the future.
I hope you're excited for future updates and where they'll take Tiny Life, and I hope you enjoy playing with this update as well, of course!
❤️ Ell
The Full Changelog
Finally, here's the full changelog as always:
Additions
Added the gardening skill with 7* plants to take care of
Added wild plant spawners to all worlds except Demoville (since gardening is unavailable in the demo)
Added the community garden lot type, where visitors will autonomously garden
Added a gardening life goal and the gardener job
Added the ability to nap on benches and sofas
Added sounds for changing game speed as well as a notification popping up
Added keybinds for focusing the camera on the home lot and the active Tiny
Added a decorative hydrangea plant
Added the ability to disable autonomous outfit changes in the gameplay options
Added various small, "decorative" trash items
Improvements
Made actions like sleeping and sitting try multiple locations on the goal object, not just the closest one
When closing an in-game hint, a notification now displays that allows re-opening it
Stopped using "AI" wording in favor of "autonomy" in the game to avoid confusion with generative AI software (which Tiny Life does not use)
Tinies now don't autonomously get a job in unplayed households if they already have enough money
Custom content items that were manually installed or exported can now be deleted from the import menu
When opening the Steam workshop from within the game, it will now go to the correct filter immediately
The mods whose items are used for an exported lot or household are now listed in the Steam description when uploading
Walls on lot borders are now handled more consistently, including the ability to place walls right on the border
Made radio buttons have a visually distinct style from checkboxes
Increased the chance of items randomly appearing in the trash
Changed the default wallpaper style to a more European-style bare brick, and improved the texture of drywall
Fixes
Fixed controls hints being visible for one frame if disabled
Fixed the menu jumping around when typing into the search field for in-game hints
Fixed children not using the running animation when running
Fixed children being able to have dirty diapers if the Use Diaper action was enqueued before they grew up
Fixed the relationship tab not updating correctly while open when relationship data changed
Fixed job task changes not being reflected in the job tab while open
Fixed completed life goals sticking around sometimes, causing crashes
API
Added doors that act as certain destinations, which allow map makers to place faux-destination buildings that Tinies will actually visit when traveling out of town
Household money is now stored as a double rather than a float to increase precision at high money amounts
Additions Added an "until action is completed" variation of the very fast and extremely fast speed options, similar to The Sims 3 Added the Pyramid of Prediction Added a keybind (bound to M by default, for "map") that zooms all the way out and, if pressed again, zooms back in Imp
Additions
Added an "until action is completed" variation of the very fast and extremely fast speed options, similar to The Sims 3
Added the Pyramid of Prediction
Added a keybind (bound to M by default, for "map") that zooms all the way out and, if pressed again, zooms back in
Improvements
Display the current week number in the top-right panel
Made the silly goggles much less likely to be worn randomly by generated Tinies
Fixes
Fixed the lot description button being part of the wrong UI category, causing gamepad-based controls in build mode to break
Fixed typing a space in the cheat text box unpausing the game
Fixed replacing clothes that force other layers to have items added causing incorrect amounts of money to be deducted
Fixed being unable to clean, pick up or throw away items that are broken
Fixed being unable to interact with objects that have broken items on them
Fixed a crash when previewing a lot with missing tiles
Fixed tooltips sticking around for an additional frame when their text is cleared
Fixed the color tool crashing when quick-removing the object that it has selected
Additions Added the ability to give lots and exported lots descriptions, and added accompanying descriptions to lots on default maps Added the pronoun removal joke feature from the April Fools post as a commandline switch. For more info, see the launch arguments article . Added a
Additions
Added the ability to give lots and exported lots descriptions, and added accompanying descriptions to lots on default maps
Added a gravel tile, which objects that require dirt, grass or sandy ground can be placed on
Added a variety of invisible colorable lights as non-buyable objects, which can be used to spruce up lighting in various places
Improvements
Overhauled culling, increasing rendering performance especially on lower-end devices. Please let us know if you notice objects popping in and out near the borders of the screen after the update.
The green dots for new objects can new be disabled in the hints settings
Tinies can now walk over lawn edging
Default Tinies now also have random default age days, causing them not to all age up and die at the same time
Slightly improved lot import menu loading performance
Fixes
Fixed a crash when loading a save with missing tiles
Fixed Tinies being able to age up twice when blowing out a candle close to midnight
Fixed being able to place openings in fences
Fixed lot previews of taller lots being cut off at the top
API
Rooms that are off-lot are now always treated as "set dressing," meaning their contents will never show, their walls will never go down, and their doors will be inaccessible
The month of April has finally arrived, and with the month, the developers' realization: the developers have been going about inclusivity in Tiny Life all wrong. The developers' goal to create and foster a community intended for everyone, especially queer folk, has surely alienat
The month of April has finally arrived, and with the month, the developers' realization: the developers have been going about inclusivity in Tiny Life all wrong. The developers' goal to create and foster a community intended for everyone, especially queer folk, has surely alienated many potential players.
Indeed, over the years, the developers have had many requests from gamers entirely unable to play the game because the amount of queer-positive features is just too overwhelming, resulting in potential players have had no choice but to refund the game.
Well, the developers have got these potential players now, friends.
Pronouns in Tiny Life
For quite a while now, Tiny Life has featured the ability for players to select and later view the pronouns players would like to use for Tinies. The feature was intended to help players talk about Tinies, as Tinies were previously only addressed by the game using gender-neutral language. The feature was also intended to allow players to enhance storytelling by, for example, modifying a Tiny's pronouns during play to signify a change in the Tiny's gender identity.
However, recently, the developers have read Some Article on Some Website Somewhere and the article said the things mentioned in the previous paragraph are wrong, and gender is actually binary, pronouns somehow don't exist, and women should stay in the kitchen!
The Update
For the first update, releasing a bit later the current week, the developers are addressing the pronoun situation first, as the situation is arguably the most egregious issue in Tiny Life at the moment. Getting the issue fixed, to the developers, has become far more important than fixing bugs or adding new gameplay features, so all of the bugs will remain in the game for now.
The pronoun issue in Tiny Life was remarkably easy to fix, as all the developers had to do was overhaul the game's language file and remove any pronouns from the file. Here are some screenshots showing the results!
As the reader may be able to see, players are greeted with the updated language right as players start a new game!
Of course, even the most important and serious of text boxes have been adjusted.
Aaah, a sight for sore eyes. The developers hope the reader is as excited about the update as the developers are! Please keep in mind: there may still be some phrases or sentences in the game erroneously including pronouns, as many more English words than the reader may think are actually pronouns.
Future Updates
In the next update, the developers will be tackling the "women should stay in the kitchen" bit previously discussed. Further information the developers read on X also lead the developers to believe there may be a variety of other issues related to gender in the game, including the ability for Men to Wear Pink Little Skirts, as well as the ability for Women to Wear Anything At All.
The developers hope the reader looks forward to the update as well as all future ones!
❤️ Manly Man Ell Who Never Wears a Skirt Ever
On a serious note, please remember: transphobia is antifeminist, and absolutely not welcome here. You can look forward to the "pronoun removal" joke feature in the next Tiny Life update in the form of a secret commandline switch. Happy April Fools, everyone!
Hi everyone! Currently I'm very busy with university exams, but here's a small update to tide you over. Development on major features should be able to continue in April! Additions Added the ability for babies and children to play in puddles Improvements Drastically improved path
Hi everyone! Currently I'm very busy with university exams, but here's a small update to tide you over. Development on major features should be able to continue in April!
Additions
Added the ability for babies and children to play in puddles
Improvements
Drastically improved pathfinding pre-generation speed when loading a save
Slightly improved performance when drawing static map objects, especially after rotating the camera while zoomed out
The prices of all doors and windows are now halved
Fixes
Various fixes to issues with the household split panel, which resulted in incorrect amounts of money when moving
Fixed being unable to import lots when the lot would fit if rotated 90 degrees
Fixed being unable to import a lot when the current lot's conditions are unmet
Fixes Fixed a stack overflow crash when holding an item while other discardable items are around Fixed Discord rich presence integration crashing if the game is closed early
Fixes
Fixed a stack overflow crash when holding an item while other discardable items are around
Fixed Discord rich presence integration crashing if the game is closed early
Additions Added two new outdoor-style wall-attached lights Added two types of outdoor stepping stone objects Improvements Tinies now avoid placing non-food items on counters when discarding them to avoid being unable to cook food on them Tinies can now execute cooking steps while
Additions
Added two new outdoor-style wall-attached lights
Added two types of outdoor stepping stone objects
Improvements
Tinies now avoid placing non-food items on counters when discarding them to avoid being unable to cook food on them
Tinies can now execute cooking steps while still holding an item, which they will autonomously put down
Tinies now automatically grab a serving of a food platter they just made if hungry enough
Tinies can now adopt a child as parent even when not in the same household, as long as their relationship is good enough
Fixes
Fixed the graphics for the pride hoodie and tshirt being swapped for children
Fixed various issues with section position clamping, causing resetting locations for people who live on smaller maps to cause exceptions
Fixed a rare exception when selecting from a small set of available AI tasks
Improvements Users are now warned more heavily when there are incomplete lots on the map, as they can cause issues for gameplay Generalized the maps options tab and added stats about tinies in the save Death messages are now only displayed for Tinies that are known to the current
Improvements
Users are now warned more heavily when there are incomplete lots on the map, as they can cause issues for gameplay
Generalized the maps options tab and added stats about tinies in the save
Death messages are now only displayed for Tinies that are known to the current household
Passive map update frequency is now increased for smoother performance with multiple maps
Allow changing game speed while the interaction menu is open
The clothes changing animation is now displayed when fooling around, as well as when cleaning or bathing a baby
Improved the required amenities system for residential lots to avoid people starving when no counters are avaiable
Fixes
Fixed object rotation hint not displaying in the stairs tool
Fixed Steam Cloud downloading saves with different casing on Linux
Fixed the Clean Everything action not including the Clean action if important AI actions are disabled in the gameplay options
API
The Find cheat can now also find gravestones of dead people by typing their names
The debug menu now doesn't show people and updating object stats by default, requiring a cheat to enable them
Added events for SetNewId
Added a linked child action system for social actions, as well as a related wait action
Hi everyone! It's 2026 now, and doesn't that feel a little weird? Funny thing is, this isn't even the first Tiny Life blog post of the year, since that title goes to the recent Community Showcase about the mod Tiny Louvre. Definitely give it a read if you haven't gotten a chance
Hi everyone! It's 2026 now, and doesn't that feel a little weird? Funny thing is, this isn't even the first Tiny Life blog post of the year, since that title goes to the recent Community Showcase about the mod Tiny Louvre. Definitely give it a read if you haven't gotten a chance yet!
It's been a few weeks since the last update, but we've been hard at work adding a few new personalities in response to the Post-0.48 Feature Survey which explored what new features you all would be interested in. It turns out that, while a Gardening system won by a landslide, you also pointed out an interest in the addition of new personalities. And while we haven't gotten a chance to get started on Gardening yet (though we've been collecting some more concrete ideas for it), we did take the time to add three new personalities for this update.
This time, there are also a lot of other cool new things to show off, both small and large, so let's get started with my personal favorite!
The History (and Future) of Maple Plains City
As most of you know very well by now, Maple Plains City is both the largest and oldest map in the game. I sometimes tell the anecdote that Maple Plains City resident Benny Banana was the first Tiny ever created for the game, and while that's not necessarily correct (since there were a lot of unnamed test Tinies before him that didn't get saved and/or named since those things didn't exist yet), Benny Banana is indeed the first Tiny to be created and stick around. He's lived in Rose Origin with his partner Carmen Cashew since his creation as well, which just goes to show how old Maple Plains City really is.
It's gotten a lot of improvements and revisions over the last few years, with Tiny Life now being over five years old. Maybe this incredibly ancient screenshot will give you a feeling of just how barebones Maple Plains City was back in the game's public alpha days in 2020.
Well, as I'm also sure you know, Maple Plains City has looked much different and a lot more lived-in recently, but it was still never my favorite. For one, the pine-forested area was always a little empty in my opinion, and there were parts of the map, especially around the lake and the Coffees and Trees Café, that always felt a little lifeless to me. That's why, in this update, we've gone around the map to place a bunch more objects, paths, and even two new lots!
We won't show all of the improvements in this post, since those are for you to discover, but here are some of the highlights!
There's a bigger forested area in the corner now.
Maple Plains Park has received a cute little pedestrian bridge.
The forested area has received a dirt road inspired by the one in Lunar Grove, along with a few new paths to connect existing paths to it, and two new (currently unoccupied) residential lots!
For future updates, we're still planning on doing some more minor improvements to these new areas, such as adding more pre-built houses, especially now that there are two additional empty lots.
When loading an existing save for the first time after downloading the update, you should notice that loading the game will take a little longer than usual. That's because, as always with map updates, existing saves will be updated to receive decorative off-lot features from map updates without overriding anything that makes your save file unique (such as your lots or modified households). We hope you enjoy the improvements to Maple Plains City!
New Personalities
As we said at the top, this update also includes two new personalities, both of which are fully featured major personalities that include new behaviors, social actions and a bit of additional gameplay.
The first two new personalities are Charismatic and Romantic, which are essentially friendship- and romance-related versions of the same idea: Tinies with one or both of these personalities will have improved relationship gain in their respective categories, faster skill gain in the Charisma skill, and a few unique interactions and emotions available.
The Neat personality, which is the third new one added in this update, is not socialization-related at all, and instead improves Tinies' ability and interest in cleaning and keeping the house nice and tidy. Maybe there's a negative to being that neat here and there, though...
With the addition of this personality, we've also updated the Cleaning skill icon to make it a bit more representative of the overall cleaning process. It now doesn't just include a sponge, but also a little mop-slash-duster.
We hope you're excited to try out these new personalities and end up enjoying the new features they have to offer. We hope that these will certainly make your Tinies that little bit more diverse in behavior. Of course, we still have a lot of additional personalities and updates to existing ones planned for future updates though, so stay tuned and always feel free to let us know what other personalities you'd love to see in the game!
High-Speed Speed
We recently held a small survey about the speed of the game's time, specifically how much time speeds up when using the fast or very fast speed buttons. As it turns out, a lot of people were feeling that the very fast speed didn't feel all that fast at all, and they commonly found themselves wishing that there was a higher speed to select.
Enter the Higher Game Speed Increase option that you can now find in the General options tab, which allows you to permanently increase the speed of the fast and very fast speed buttons. Instead of doubling and tripling the game's speed, which they normally do, enabling the option will cause them to triple and quintuple the speed instead, respectively. That's five times the speed instead of three times the speed for the very fast button!
Feel free to try out this option and let us know what you think!
In all of this speed discussion, please keep in mind that the extremely fast speed setting, which is denoted with a small + icon in the top-right corner of the very fast speed button, is still available when all Tinies in the active household are asleep or out of town. This speed option has always been 20x the regular speed, and this is unchanged both in this update and with the Higher Game Speed Increase option selected.
The Full Changelog
That's pretty much it in terms of major features for this update! As always, there are some smaller additions and various improvements that we didn't feel it necessary to cover as part of this devlog, but you can read about them in the full changelog below.
I hope you've had a lovely end of the last, and start of the new, year, and I hope you enjoy this update a lot!
❤️ Ell
Additions
Added the charismatic, romantic and neat personalities
Added three new important event stings by Jamal Green
Added mismatched socks for adults
Added an accessibility option to pause the game automatically when zoomed out into map view
Added the ability to increase the game's speed increase factors from 2x/3x to 3x/5x, respectively
Improvements
Completely overhauled Maple Plains City's plains areas and added two new lots to it
Slightly increase the default AI activation cooldown
Allow pressing on the current emotion to open the emotions tab
Camera movement speed using the keyboard is now increased when holding shift
Better organization for general and accessibility options tabs
Undo and redo in build mode can now also be invoked using new UI buttons
Made the AI only ever enqueue one need-solving action at a time
Fixes
Fixed lot employees being able to carry babies into restricted areas
Fixed grabbing a serving and getting water succeeding even when there's no valid path
Fixed an exception when an action involving player interaction is enqueued before switching to a different household
Fixed Tinies grabbing a serving automatically on food with a candle on it
Fixed genealogies automatically being able to change for people who are in a romantic relationship
Fixed baby names not being updated correctly in play mode when having a baby
Fixed an exception when trying to change a baby's outfit
Fixed people still thinking other adults are in primary school if they knew them as kids
Fixed a rare exception when trying to prepare invalid food items
Fixed a rare crash when trying to render a Tiny whose animations have not been initialized yet
API
Fixed mods being instructed to registr custom json type safe generic data holders
ell: Hi everyone! It's been a hot minute since the last Tiny Life Community Showcase post, but I've been wanting to revive the category for years now. The opportunity presented itself to me when long-time friend of mine and modder of Tiny Life blur created the Tiny Louvre mod and
ell:
Hi everyone! It's been a hot minute since the last Tiny Life Community Showcase post, but I've been wanting to revive the category for years now. The opportunity presented itself to me when long-time friend of mine and modder of Tiny Life blur created the Tiny Louvre mod and an accompanying video and blog post on their website.
The following post is a version of the original post modified by them to appear on the Tiny Life blog and accompanying platforms. It goes into detail about what Tiny Louvre is, how it was created, and gets technical about some implementation details here and there. In that way, it's also sort of a light version of a Tiny Technicalities post.
I hope you enjoy reading blur's post, and please keep in mind to check out the mod afterwards!
Editor's note: The formatting of this post is a bit of a mess on Steam, as there are few automated ways to convert from Markdown to BBCode (which is the formatting that Steam expects posts to be in) and this post uses a lot of special formatting in various places. I've tried to amend it as best I can, but for the best experience, I recommend reading the post on the website instead.
blur:
So, recently I made a mod for Tiny Life called Tiny Louvre. This mod adds paintings you can create in-game that both show up on furniture in-game and can be shared with and downloaded from other players. To this end, the mod adds a variety of bits, like an easel with a painting interface, a museum where people can view art collated from online, and, well, the paintings themselves!
I made a video about the mod and how it works if you're interested:
Anyway, when I was making it, I bumped into some design challenges, and for the sake of my future self and anyone else looking to make a Tiny Life mod with these features, I figured I'd enumerate the challenges and the solutions I landed on.
Adding Default Maps
So, Tiny Louvre adds a new default map, the Tiny Louvre. This is a museum lot that lets players view a variety of both classical paintings I added to the game and paintings downloaded from online.
And this was simple enough, right? I just used the Creating Custom Maps tutorial in the Tiny Life docs to create the custom map, exported it, and copied the .json file into Content/TinyLouvre/Maps.
But wait, it wasn't appearing in the map list. I guess that's to be expected, there's probably a method or event for telling the game what maps my mod adds. And yep, there's Map.OnGetStaticMaps, which I can hook into without much fuss.
Hey, there it is!
I should make sure this works before I celebrate too much. Check the map off, create the world, aaaaaand crash.
So, reading in modern day you might see something noteworthy in the OnGetStaticMaps docs:
If this event is subscribed to and one or more custom maps are added to the list, the OnLoadStaticMap event should also be subscribed to to handle actually loading these maps.
That's because ell added that to the docs while we were talking about this issue. At the time, I had no idea I had to do something else to load the map, but it turns out I also had to subscribe to OnLoadStaticMap. Okay, so add a new bit to AddGameContent,
and we're golden, everything loads and we can see the map in-game.
Well that was simple enough, let's move on to another issue I spent time on,
Enabling Online Mode
So, adding the online mode features, while a technological challenge on their own, wasn't actually that involved since I knew before I started writing code how I was going to design the paintings and codec to optimize for sharing on social media.
What I did have some issues with, however, was getting a pop-up to appear the first time the mod was loaded asking the user if they wanted Online Mode enabled. On principal, I didn't want to have online functionality in an offline-by-default game without disclosing that it was user-generated and confirming with the player.
For determining whether it was actually enabled, Tiny Life actually has a pretty good Options system, letting you put all your controls in the mod's options section using the PopulateOptions hook, and providing methods like ModInfo.LoadOptions to load your mod options into a convenient little object. Handy!
My first approach, and a bit of a naïve one, was just to do exactly what I usually do to open a menu, but right when the mod loads up. Which sounds fine on paper, but, uh. The Root UI element gets replaced once the main menu loads up, so the pop up doesn't actually stay on screen.
I ended up looking around, searching for a hook into the main menu spawning or something, until eventually just asking Ellpeck what he does for the mod version popup, which pretty much has exactly the behavior I was looking for.
And he pointed me to OnSwitchGameMode. Well that's easy enough, just add GameImpl.Instance.UiSystem.Add( "TinyLouvreOnlineConfirmWindows", new ConfirmWindow() ); to that hook, and hey!
Then I just added a bit to the options that just checked whether it had been shown yet, and skip showing it if it had been. Simple enough, what else is there to talk about?
Furniture Textures
Sure, why not?
So, for Tiny Louvre, my original plan was to add a renderer to just draw the paintings askew and realign to the top pixels, either by drawing in blocks or using a shader.
But wait, Tiny Life is built with MLEM, which is based on MonoGame. I can just construct textures in memory to save on render time!
_furnitureTextures[0] ??= new Texture2D(device, SIZE_X, (SIZE_Y + ho)); _furnitureTextures[1] ??= new Texture2D(device, SIZE_X, (SIZE_Y + ho));
Tiny Louvre keeps its furniture textures small, only constructing two for the downward-facing variants of Paintings.
When generating these, I just take the canvas (which I also convert to a Texture2D for rendering), then march from left to right placing pixels slightly askew, by either starting at the top and shifting down every other column or vice versa.
Then, when it comes time to render in the world, it's as easy as drawing into the level, right?
Well, when I used the base Draw method, for some reason stuff just... wasn't working? The layering was off, it was drawing paintings on every floor.
Wait, wait, wait. I think I see what's going on here.
And ell agreed, noting that I was offsetting the depthOffset by too much to compensate for the fact that I wasn't using the right one for the floor the painting was on. Oops.
Well, thankfully, there's a method on MapObjects that does all this for me, DrawColumns. Just switch over to using that to draw my paintings et voilá!
Now you can't see paintings through the floor!
Conclusion?
So, what's the takeaway here?
Well, first off, ell is very cool and helpful, thank you a ton. Through his effort, during the dev process here and elsewhere, Tiny Life's modding and API documentation are quite good, which makes it very comfortable to learn how to mod this game and fun to continue to do so.
Also, don't be afraid to reach out for help in the #tiny-life-modding channel on the Ellpeck Games Discord. Plenty of folks (myself included on occasion) are willing to help you get your mod working by pointing you to the right spots in documentation, helping you figure out tough problems, or rubber ducking for you as you walk through your process.
Honestly, I just like modding in Tiny Life. I've mostly been working on games like Minecraft recently, which is fun, but having first-class modding support and a line to the game's primary developer is such a breath of fresh air.
I'd say if you are even a little interested in modding Tiny Life, give it a go! It's cross-platform (I mod on Linux but it's trivially easy to do on Windows or Mac), it's fun, and there's a community waiting to help you get your mod made.
And remember:
Tiny Louvre is a cool mod
ell:
Lastly, you can download Tiny Louvre both on Steam workshop and the mod's GitHub repository. Be sure to have any paintings you create published through the mod's in-game editor so that they're available for other players to view!
Also, please keep in mind that, due to Tiny Louvre being a mod created by a community member and the game's modding API still being early, not all future versions of Tiny Life may be compatible with Tiny Louvre. If that's the case, you can always contact blur through the Steam workshop post or the GitHub issue tracker, as linked above!
Fixes Fixed incorrect locations of the new wall tool visuals in some camera rotations Fixed a race condition that caused the game to freeze when locking doors for non-household members
Fixes
Fixed incorrect locations of the new wall tool visuals in some camera rotations
Fixed a race condition that caused the game to freeze when locking doors for non-household members
Additions Added the ability to increase the AI activation cooldown for selected Tinies in the accessibility settings Added the ability to change a baby's outfit for them Improvements Improved visual feedback of the wall and fence tools during placement Display a tooltip informing
Additions
Added the ability to increase the AI activation cooldown for selected Tinies in the accessibility settings
Added the ability to change a baby's outfit for them
Improvements
Improved visual feedback of the wall and fence tools during placement
Display a tooltip informing the player while the Done button on the New Game menu is grayed out
Reintroduce the feature where Tinies leave the room when seeing someone inappropriately (which was inadvertently removed in an earlier update)
Tinies who aren't part of the active household will now fill their needs elsewhere automatically when repeatedly failing to do so on their home lot (which hopefully reduces reported cases of starvation!)
Actions like cleaning up dishes and putting down items will now attempt to find a different suitable location when the last selected one caused the action to fail
The modern color scheme now includes some nice shades of brown
Fixes
Fixed various UI exceptions and crashes, and notably a common one in the emotions tab
Fixed Tinies going home immediately after manually enqueueing the Visit World action
Fixed an exception when a trash collector tries to collect a trash item that has since been deleted
Fixed bathing babies not restoring nearly enough hygiene
Fixed money being deducted incorrectly when changing clothing items as a result of changing a Tiny's age in the character creator
Improvements Tinies in the active household will not visit other lots autonomously anymore, unless the new corresponding gameplay option is enabled for the save Made it much less likely to get electrocuted while repairing when focused Made house guests always get food when called
Improvements
Tinies in the active household will not visit other lots autonomously anymore, unless the new corresponding gameplay option is enabled for the save
Made it much less likely to get electrocuted while repairing when focused
Made house guests always get food when called to meal, regardless of their hunger need
Avocado toast can now be bought at the café
Fixes
Fixed erroring mods not displaying their error info correctly on startup
Fixed the creative child life goal only requiring 3 meals to be made instead of 5
Fixed grandparents giving babies food they can't eat when sneaking them a treat
Fixed putting an item down on the standing desk giving you standing desk-related emotions
Fixed the character creator showing a frame of black in the menu when switching clothes
Additions Added an (unbound by default) keybind to toggle build mode Improvements Shorten some keyboard key names to make the controls hint less wide Made homebodies much less likely to visit other lots Made it much less likely for visitors to check on babies Fixes Fixed very hig
Additions
Added an (unbound by default) keybind to toggle build mode
Improvements
Shorten some keyboard key names to make the controls hint less wide
Made homebodies much less likely to visit other lots
Made it much less likely for visitors to check on babies
Fixes
Fixed very high likelihood of items breaking or getting dirty
Fixed having to cook a ham and cheese sandwich
Fixed counters getting dirty while puzzling or using a coloring book on them
Fixed objects being able to break while cleaning them
