Hello Tavern Keepers,

We are nearing the end of the first quarter of 2026 and thus our first Major Update “A New Hue” is almost here: It’s high time for an update!

Major Update 1 adds the color picker tool, more stories and a couple of other smaller surprise features as visible on our roadmap:

The good news is that all of this is nearly ready and the even better news is that we have been inspired by your enthusiasm for the game and have added significantly more features to this update.

Player Requested Extras 💚

Here are the Player Requested Extra features coming with Update 1:

As you can see we have a big new block of “Player Requested Extras” and these are all features that wouldn’t exist without your input.

Extra Feature 1: Steam Deck & Controller Support

Many of you asked for Controller Support and a better Steam Deck experience. We had initially not planned to do this during Early Access but you convinced us otherwise. Update 1 will ship with Controller Support (in Beta), 16:10 screen support (no more black bars on Steam Deck) as well as scalable tooltips (no more tiny tooltips on small screens). This Update drastically improves the experience of playing on Steam Deck or on PC with a controller.

Extra Feature 2: Tavern Keeper Workshop

We have soft-launched https://tavernkeeper.com/workshop: A bespoke website allowing you to discover and share custom Designs for Tavern Keeper. Build your library by adding Designs or Collections and manage your own creations.

The Tavern Keeper Workshop already features hundreds of player-made templates and will allow us to support players and creators with even more community-focused features in the future.

In Update 1, your library from the workshop will synchronize to your game and allow you to publish your templates directly to the Workshop.

Extra Feature 3: Arcane Orders

We heard your requests for some way to keep your tavern stocked with goods automatically and, with the help of some dark arcane magic, the "Arcane Orders" feature will allow you to do just that...

Extra Feature 4: Collapsible Build Menu

In Update 1, you’ll be able to see more of your tavern while in Build or Design Mode and reclaim your screen space with the collapsible build menus.

Extra Feature 5: More Efficient Simulation

While performance optimizations are part of our ongoing work, we spent weeks of additional dedicated engineering effort making the game run more efficiently. With Update 1, the game will play better across a range of devices (including Steam Deck). These initial optimizations largely focus on simulation efficiency, but we have further optimizations in the pipeline addressing rendering performance in future updates.

Update 1: When?

As you can see, Update 1 will ship with all our planned Roadmap features while also delivering so much more than we initially planned. We are still working on some last tweaks and a bit more internal testing, but the Experimental branch update should be available soon is already available. Once it's stable and ready, it will graduate from the experimental branch to full release.

Beyond Update 1

We hope Update 1 will demonstrate (beyond just words) that we truly care about your feedback and game-experience and see the Early Access journey as an opportunity to shape Tavern Keeper into something even better together.

Speaking of which:

You’ve told us you would like more freedom in expanding your taverns beyond the floorspace they currently offer, and while we initially ruled this out for being too challenging, you convinced us otherwise. We'll talk more about what we have in store in a future post...

Patrick

And the Tavern Keeper Team