Tiny Bookshop news & patch notes

We’re excited to bring Tiny Bookshop to new players with our first major Steam sale! Leave everything behind to open a tiny bookshop by the sea for 25% OFF this weekend; and for those of you who may also dream of opening your own restaurant? We have a delicious wishlist recommendation: Arcane Eats from our friends at Wonderbelly Games!

In Arcane Eats, the best deck-building mechanics get spiced up by cooking elements to add a new depth of flavor and strategy. Running a restaurant is rewarding but hard – you’ll have to satisfy hangry customers, balance the books, and keep the health & purity inspector at bay. 

Think like a Master Chef, keep cool in the face of challenging (yet charming!) customers, and try to impress legendary chefs like Guy Fairy to grab that 3 Mythril Star rating. You can get a taste in the Arcane Eats Demo and wishlist now!

This update is PACKED with new books! But we also have a few new surprises for you. Here’s all that is new in this update:

📕 A Library’s Worth of New Books!

Thanks to the incredible work of our Tiny Bookshop Book Council, we will be adding a total of 1,087 new books for you to discover and add to your TBR totems! So this is now the perfect moment to dive back into book recommendations! Here is a breakdown on all the new books by language:

447 English

107 German

113 French

77 Russian

61 Spanish

74 Turkish

65 Simplified Chinese

52 Traditional Chinese

31 Japanese

60 Ukrainian

🇺🇦 Ukrainian Joins the Shelves!

And as you can spot in the list above, Tiny Bookshop now supports Ukrainian! We're thrilled to welcome even more book lovers and readers to Bookstonbury! Thank you Inna for all your hard work!!! ♥️

💡 Quality of Life Features:

By popular request, players will now be able to save and load bookshop presets. This should make decorating so much easier. Create different layouts, swap between them, and experiment to your heart’s content!

🔍 We've also added the ability for you to zoom! Just a fun little feature for you to inspect and admire the lovely details in Bookstonbury.

💰 New Items for the Season!

We wouldn't be ending the year without some fresh decor for the season! Check out what's new on catalogue:

A cozy snow sled and… RUGS! Four brand-new rugs are now available to help you tie your bookshop together!

🔧 Bug Fixes and Improvements:

• Fixed that the boombox was missable

• Prioritised events in journal and newspaper so the most important info is the most visible

• Adjusted some tags of books

• Adjusted some tags of items

• Added "increases customer count" as a filter category in the customisation screen

• Added "Important" as a filter category in the customisation screen so you can find and track your quest items more easily

• Selected a nicer font for Cyrillic (RU and UA)

• Improved PS5 controller RGB mode: it now shows the color of the inspected genre in the stocking screen

• Made the UI shaders compatible with older hardware (ymmv)

• Adjusted the behaviour of some investigations to be more consistent

• Adjusted some timing-related narrative edge-cases

• And many more...

We have plenty more in the works for next year. 🐱

But for now this is our farewell to this year, thank you for making it incredibly special. You all have forever changed the lives of our little team of seven in the just 4 months since Tiny Bookshop released! Thank you!

Happy holidays, and see you next year!

Hi folks! After going back and forth with the Steam team, we were able to optimise Tiny Bookshop for the Steam Deck's screen fully! 🥳

With this update, Tiny Bookshop is officially Steam Deck verified! This patch also introduces the ability to zoom in, while your shop is at a location, so even the smallest text in speech bubbles will be readable.

This patch also sets the default back from Proton to Linux for the Steam Deck and Linux devices. This comes with two notes:

The Proton (Windows) and Linux native versions are identical, but you might see some faster loads in the Proton version, and faster runtime performance in the Linux version.

Note 1:

Load times can be a bit longer on Steam Deck / Linux. This is nothing new, but keep it in mind. Our theory is that thread priority is handled differently, leading to slightly slower load speeds.

Note 2:

If you haven't opened the game on your Steam Deck in a while, or you have been playing without an internet connection, your saves might be in the Proton emulated saves directory. Our game will load these automatically in Linux, and we've spent hours testing this to make sure it works properly. If you encounter any issues, you can try manually setting the compatibility settings to Proton, and keep playing there.

⭐️ Sit Back and Relax Award! ⭐️

General Fixes:

Save System Rework

Introducing: Self Repairing Save Files!

Regarding the Missing Save Files on Steam Deck:

Tech-y Deep Dive

What Happened, when the MAC saves got lost in the first week of release?

What happened, when the SteamDeck saves got “lost” a few weeks ago?

Hello, everyone! We’re back from an incredible week of Gamescom! After 3 years of attempts, we finally came back with an award, winning Gamescom's "Games for Impact" 2025! Thank you to everyone who has voted for us! 🎉 After another week off to recover and purge any remaining "con cough", the team is now back in the office and excited to continue supporting Tiny Bookshop. 💛

⭐ Tiny Bookshop has sold over 300,000 Copies!

It's still not been a month since the release of Tiny Bookshop, and we already sold over 300,000 copies across both Steam and Switch! At this rate, Bookstonbury is going to face over-tourism, and we'll have to call in more seagulls! In all seriousness, we are absolutely blown away! Thank you so very much for the support!

✨ What’s next for Tiny Bookshop?

Throughout this month, we will be going through our backlog of player reports, focusing on bug fixes, such as fixing issues with Steam Cloud saves, as well as improving the player experience of Tiny Bookshop. We have received lots of feedback and will be working to bring some much-needed quality-of-life updates, such as the ability to save your Bookshop loadouts 👀! While we're at it, we'll also be taking some time to think about new content we'd like to create! So stay tuned for that and much more coming soon.

📚 Tiny Bookshop Book Council

You might have already known, we’ve recently opened applications for a Book Council through our Discord server. We want the Book Council to help expand the current book selections available in Tiny Bookshop. Since our initial announcement, we’ve already received over 700 applications! While we’ve had many applications from people with expertise in books of the English language, we’d love to encourage more applicants with backgrounds in Japanese, Chinese, Ukrainian, Turkish, or Russian language books. If this sounds like you (or someone you know), we’d love for you to apply and help bring even more cultural diversity to Tiny Bookshop. As always, thank you all for your support and passion. You’ve helped make Tiny Bookshop what it is today, and we’re excited to keep building it together with you! Yours ever gratefully, neoludic games 🧡

• Adjusted/Fixed Maryam’s recommendation quest at the café not saving the progress consistently.
• Increased rain chance in spring slightly.
• Inspiring Klaus now counts anywhere, and not just at the supermarket.
• Adjusted Historic Tag. Changed it from “Written about the past” to “meeting a need of immersing yourself in the past”.
• Nerfed Professor Quest to make it less frustrating.
• Made cases visible and visually distinct to help you identify which one is currently active.
• Removed a dialogue gamepad deselection, that would lead to having to re-select dialogue.
• Made Play and Long mutually exclusive, as plays don’t tend to be over 450 pages.
• Added a bail-out book box, in case you are out of money and out of books.
• Adjusted the gardening fundraiser so it doesn’t keep subtracting money after the quest is completed.
• Fixed snow at Park.
• Fixed Nightmare Fuel-Effect never disappearing.
• Adjusted spacing of location genres in the journal to avoid overlaps.
• Improved the UX of colouring your bookshop.
• Made Spoiled Fish only placeable in one slot at a time, to avoid accidental smells.
• Fixed wildlife-board being obstructed at the fish-market.
• Made the Antique Lantern slightly stronger.
• Fixed a glitching shadow at the Café.
• Made rain a little more likely in spring.

Known Issue:

Weekend:

The First Week:

• Added a robust local backup system for saves (One on start-up and one whenever you save)
• Fixed an issue where the game did not start due to a Steam back-end change
• Fixed typos and adjusted some book tags
• Fixed an issue where in the final quest you would sometimes not get an important item
• Fixed the timing and conditions of some late game quests

Known issue:

• Fixed an issue that would sometimes arise when having back-to-back recommendations. Leading to a softlock.
• Fixed an issue where the plant-growing cutscenes would sometimes not reset properly.
• Fixed a bug where Tilde’s dialogue at the chess group in the Park would sometimes get stuck, blocking the rest of the day from progressing. This should fix similar bugs in other locations like Moira at the lighthouse or the concert being stuck at ""Wohooo"".
• Fixed a bug where Walt was not finishing the Writing Quest.
• Fixed a softlock where you could not confirm the pop-up on the gamepad after adopting the dog.
• Fixed the start of a late-game questline.
• Fixed a Harper cave spelunking UX issue.
• Further adjusted book tags.
• Made drama and play requests more distinct in CN and HANT.
• Fixed Seagull audio not being controlled by the volume sliders.

• Removed contradicting requests for the length of books
• Removed contradicting requests for something light and academic
• Adjusted book tags
• Fixed being stuck at the cave investigation after telling Harper “maybe later”
• Increased priority of board game dialogue by Klaus
• Fixed more typos EN
• Fixed more typos DE
• Fixed the recommendation request appearing with a huge delay at the Hospital
• Ensured Seagullsaren’t talking when asking for help
• Fixed inspiration duration buffs having no effect
• Fixed untranslated dialogue line
• Fixed that the recycling bin falsely claims that it is paintable
• Fixed two instances of Harper while she’s giving the tour
• Fixed that players were able to skip the wintermarket sell-out collection dialogue
• Fixed permanently zoomed in on Walt’s shop in a rare edge case
• Fixed edge case where Harper did not collect the first beach quest if it had been completed close to or at the bonfire

Like the six-legged critters, bugs can sneak in from anywhere. And before we can address them, we need to identify them. The faster we can figure out what caused a bug, the faster we can fix it!

Here are a couple tips on how you can help with that, after you encountered one.

1. Play the game until the bug appears,

2. Then press F2 (depending on your configuration, you might need to hold down the FN key on your keyboard when pressing F2).

3. This brings up our bug report tool. Here you can give the bug a good name, and describe what happened BEFORE the bug occurred and describe the bug itself.

4. If you're open to being contacted with follow-up questions, you can enter your mail, but you don't have to.

5. Press send!

If you can't open the game, or prefer reporting bugs otherwise, you can also email us with a bug report to developers\neoludic.games.

It's still important for you to describe what was happening and what is happening in as much detail as you can.

Thank you for your help!

Dear lovely book and indie game enthusiasts! Your time has come!

🎉 You can now open your very own Tiny Bookshop by the seaside!!! 🎉

Thank you so much for being here with us. It means the world that you have supported us for so long, and none of this would have been possible without you all!

We sincerely hope you enjoy the game! A lot of love was put into it.

And after playing, it would be amazing if you could take the time to leave a review!

It would help us reach even more people who might love the game in the future 🫶

But most importantly: Have fun in Bookstonbury!

Yours ever gratefully,

neoludic games 🧡

Hello lovely booksellers 🧡

We simply had to make another post because we can’t contain our excitement!

🎉 Tiny Bookshop will finally release TOMORROW 🎉

and it all seems a little unreal, but in the best possible way! We sincerely hope you are as excited about this as we are.

❔We also saw some of you asking about the game running on Steam Deck.

❕While we’re still working on getting the official verification from Valve at the time of writing, we have tested the build on Steam Deck a lot and it works like a charm! So there should be no problem for any of you planning to try Tiny Bookshop on your Steam Decks right from the time of release! ✅

See you all tomorrow!

Your neoludics

It’s almost time, loyal bookworms! Only three more days until you can finally play Tiny Bookshop to your heart’s content!   Here’s a little timetable we’ve prepared, so that you can make sure not to miss our launch in 3 days!!

Thursday, August 7

🕙 10 am Pacific Time (PDT)

🕐 1 pm Eastern Time (EDT)

🕕 6 pm UK Time (BST)

🕖 7 pm Central European Time (CEST)

Friday, August 8

🕐 1 am Chinese Time (CST)

🕑 2 am Japanese Time (JST)

🕒 3 am Australian Eastern Time (AEST)

Happy week, and see you all then! 🫶

Your neoludics 🧡

Hello, budding booksellers!

We can barely believe it ourselves, but it’s true...

Tiny Bookshop releases one week from now, right here on Steam! 🥳

Our team here at neoludic games is so excited that all of our hard work has brought us here, and we can’t wait to share it all with you in seven days! 😱

A lot of you have asked us how long the full game will be, and thanks to our wonderful playtesters, we have an answer for you:

⏳ A main story playthrough will take about 25 to 30 hours. Unless you are veeery fast... Can’t wait to see the speed runs!

⏳ To complete every achievement, the game may take even longer. And the best news is: If you still don’t have enough of Tiny Bookshop after 30 hours, you can continue selling and recommending books until the end of time! While you may run out of content eventually, nothing can stop you from spending the rest of your days in Bookstonbury!

Thank you for your patience, and see you all on 7th August! 🫶

Your neoludics 🧡

This is all thanks to the fantastic and passionate work of the team at Ichineko Localization ✨

So if you haven't already, now is a great time to try out the demo in Turkish!

We can't wait for our game to finally come out on the 7th of August!

Hello there, Bookseller! With Steam Next Fest just around the corner, we’re back with some exciting updates!

Well, firstly is of course, we'll be in the next Steam Next Fest, from June 9 - June 16th! 👀 And secondly, as Tiny Bookshop gets closer to launch, our demo could really use a refresh! Check out what we have been working on:

✨Demo Refresh for Steam Next Fest!

Believe it or not, the original Tiny Bookshop demo is almost a year old now!

Since then, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes, listening to your feedback, making improvements, and polishing up the experience. And as new indie devs on the scene, we have learned so much from this experience! So for the upcoming Steam Next Fest, we are relaunching the Tiny Bookshop demo TODAY, on the 7th of June! Players can experience the first 3 days of Tiny Bookshop with some improved features and quality of life additions.

Now I know what you must be wondering.. What's New in the Demo?

We've written up a whole changelog with all the new things that you can expect!

→ Check Out What's New Here!

🐛 What To Do if You Find a Bug!

We done our best to ensure smooth gameplay for this demo refresh, but if there is anything that fell through the cracks, check out what you can do on our Bug Report Post to give us a heads-up!

Tiny Bookshop - So you've found a bug while playing the Tiny Bookshop Demo? - Steam News

🌍 Quick Note on Demo Length & Languages.

We know many of you were hoping for an extended demo. We hear you! And we’re just as eager to share more!

Sadly, due to logistical issues regarding localisation, we’re unable to expand the demo at this time! 😭

With just two months to go until release, we’ve decided it's best to keep the demo at its current length and focus our remaining time on polishing the full game, so it’s truly ready for your hands come launch day!

Thank you so much to everyone for your support! And as always, our Discord server is where we'll be making major announcements. If you're excited for Tiny Bookshop, and love meeting other cozy gamers + booklovers. Feel free to join the community! Until next time, Bookseller!

Hello Booksellers! Our tiny team been quietly tinkering behind the scenes, dusting shelves, sorting books, and listening closely to your feedback. With the refreshed Tiny Bookshop demo, this is what you can expect:

⭐ What's New in the Demo Refresh? ⭐

1. 📚 Book Recommendations

First up, let’s talk about one of Tiny Bookshop’s most unique feature. We’ve received so much feedback from the demo, and we’ve been hard at work making improvements. In this new demo refresh, we’ve revamped and made a bunch of adjustments to improve the recommendation system.

• Clearer Book Requests – We've massively reworked and reworded NPC requests. They are now easier to understand, more sensible, and their responses are slightly less harsh.

• Favourite Book Hint – If someone mentions their favourite book, you can now view its description right within the request, saving you a Google Search side quest.

• No More "Meh" – Customers no longer respond with apathy when given semi-fitting book suggestions (rude). Instead, they’ll be pleasantly surprised when you recommend an unexpected book. Everyone should be willing to try something a little bit different!

• Always An Answer! – We’ve also tweaked how customer requests are generated. Now, customers will ask for something that matches a book already in your current inventory. That means fewer “sorry, I don’t have anything” moments and more satisfying decisions.

• Polite Bookseller – Don't lie to your customer! By popular demand, "Sorry, we're closed" is now changed to something more fitting!

• Difficulty Indicator – There's now a difficulty indicator for recommendation requests, making difficult requests a little more obvious and hopefully rewarding.

• Dual Genre Tutorial – We've added a tutorial explaining how books can belong to multiple genres. Think Dracula, is it a classic or fantasy? It’s both!

• Less Duplicated Books – You are now much less likely to find the same book twice, when going through your shelf.

• Recommendation Sale Boost – After you nailed a recommendation, customers become Inspired, briefly boosting everyone’s chance to make a purchase. May your kindness spark bookish joy!

2. 🫶 Accessibility

Secondly, we know coziness feels different for different people, so we’ve introduced a host of new accessibility settings to make Tiny Bookshop more accessible to players with different gaming needs!

General:

• Recommendation Timing – You can now adjust how long customers will wait for book recommendations, giving you more breathing room to play at your own pace!

• Auto-Accept Recommendations – Don’t want to click recommendation bubbles at all? No problem. Let the game auto-accept them for you!

Mouse and Keyboard:

• Pause on Tooltip – We've added a setting to automatically pause the game when reading a tooltip. This is especially useful when inspecting timed effects and detailed info.

• We removed the need to click and hold or click and drag completely on mouse and keyboard.

  • Click and Place Decorating – In customisation, instead of clicking and dragging. You can now simply click to pick up and click to place when decorating your wagon.

  • New Camera Control Setting – "Cursor at Screen Edge", which can be used instead of the default "Click and Drag". This moves the camera as you hover near the screen borders.

Controller:

• Hold-to-Confirm Settings – Sometimes throughout the game, we ask you to hold a button to confirm an important choice. Because this can be a problem for some players, you can now toggle a setting that removes that requirement entirely.

• Customizable Movement – To move the view, it is still necessary to move and hold one of the sticks in the desired direction. So stick sensitivity and movement speed can now be finely tuned in the settings to feels just right.

• Optional Haptics – While our haptics are subtle, you can now turn them off completely if you prefer to play without haptics, or may find haptics uncomfortable.

Ease of Use Enhancements:

• Smarter Graphics Defaults – The game will now do its best to approximate a combination of settings that works well on your device on first launch.

• Settings Tooltips – All settings now contain detailed tooltips to help you understand exactly what it does.

3. 📒 Journal Updates

Your journal has received some much needed glow-up:

• Chapter Navigation – Flipping through your notes is easier than ever.

• Calendar Page – There's now a brand new calendar page in the Journal, showing you upcoming events, and helping you keep track of all the things that happened this seasons.

• Bookshop Stat Page – The new Stats page gives a detailed overview of your shop’s current setup and how it’s affecting your business. Great for aspiring expert booksellers who want to fine-tune their strategy.

• Character Pages – There are now pages dedicated to Special Friends you'll make, with space to document memories and quests.

4. 👗 Visual Updates

• Customer Variety – There's now more variety in people's outfits. They can show up wearing hats, bags, umbrellas or raincoats, and so much more!

• Better Visual Effects – We've reworked the visual look of the game, and improved the look of shadows and visual effects throughout Tiny Bookshop.

5. 🎶 Sound Design

• Morning and Evening Music – We’ve added peaceful morning and evening music to frame your day in a gentle ambience.

• Recommendation Music – The recommendation scene now has chill music to help you get into a thinking space!

• New Sound Effects – We've added new sound effects to book recommendations and journal navigation.

6. 🎨 Customisation

• Item Filters – We added filters to easier find that one item you want to decorate your bookshop with and make it easier to try out different builds.

7. 🗞️ Newspaper

• Sales Report – From time to time you will get a sales report in your newspaper to see how you are doing.

We hope these changes will help give players a better gaming experience and give you a good taste of what's to come in the full release!

🐛 What To Do if You Find a Bug! 🐛

We done our best to ensure smooth gameplay for this demo refresh, but if there is anything that fell through the cracks, check out what you can do on our Bug Report Post to give us a heads-up!

Tiny Bookshop - So you've found a bug while playing the Tiny Bookshop Demo? - Steam News

As always, thank you so much to everyone for your continuous support! And have fun book selling!

Until next time!

It has been a long year filled with development, fine-tuning, and lots of planning (and occasional struggling), we can finally see the finish line! On August 7, you’ll be able to pack up your wagon, stock your shelves, and start your bookselling adventure by the sea! So if you haven't already, wishlist Tiny Bookshop so you'll be notified when it launches this autumn!

⭐️ Cozy Family & Friendly Games Celebration! ⭐️

→ Click here to Subscribe!

✨ What Comes Next? ✨

Let the countdown to August 7 begin!

🌱 News for April!

✨ LudoNarraCon by Fellow Traveller

✨ Gamescom Latam BIG Festival

Ever since Gamescom, we have been hard at work developing Tiny Bookshop! A lot of exciting progress has been made! While we don't have a release date for you yet, we have been sharing lots of behind-the-scenes goodies over on our Discord, Instagram and TikTok! So feel free to follow us for all the latest scoops going into 2025! Join the Tiny Bookshop Discord! November has been packed with events, here is a recap of all that's been happening!

✨ Cozy Quest 2024

✨ DevGAMM Awards 2024

✨ Save and Sound 2024

You can come see us face to face at the Indie Arena Booth of Gamescom 2024, on August 21st – 25th!

We are also nominated for two Gamescom awards, and YOU can help us win!

Vote here! (Only from Wed 21 to Thur 22)

While you are exploring the Indie Area, why not participate in our cute sticker rally?

And last but not least, here is a sneak peek at the new merch we have prepared for you at our booth!