Dev Log for September 10th, 2025

[wheezwer]

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Dev Log for September 10th, 2025!

Since the last Developer Log, we’ve been hard at work creating new Halloween items for Tower.

At the same time, a small portion of the team has been dedicating their efforts to another project outside of Tower (the one we mentioned in our 1.0 post). While we’re not quite ready to talk about it just yet, we’re really looking forward to sharing more when the time is right!

Also, some of our staff have been out of office, taking a much needed break.

Current Developments

Update 1.1.1.0

Between updates, we’ve been tackling some pressing bugs, as well as completing the Accelerate SDK, VR Support, and Arcade Phase 3.

Halloween

Lots of work is being completed for the Halloween Update! @Nuclearxpotato has continued work on an expansion to the Victorian furniture set, which is coming out beautifully! Get ready to make more authentically spooky, old-fashioned Condos with this set!

We’ve also been working on other items like a set of Sci Fi furniture, as well as progress on the long-awaited Halloween staves!

Victorian Furniture Set

Sci-fi Set

Deadwood Branch

Background Development

Moderation Tools/Updates

Some of us on the team have been taking some time to do a thorough look into improving moderation and have several proposals in the works.

These improvements include:

• separation of text hat bans and chat bans
  • This way, text hats can be moderated without unnecessarily removing chat abilities.
• username & avatar hiding for sexual/otherwise inappropriate usernames or avatars
  • Currently, this is handled through Steam profile reports, and in-game chat bans, but there’s currently no way to hide usernames and avatars on the game end, which leaves the decision to Steam’s guidelines, which are sometimes more lenient with sexual / offensive language.
• chat filter overhaul
  • We’re working on improving the chat filters in the game. Some notable adjustments we’d like to make are:
    • Cleaning up and streamlining both our toggle-able and non-toggle-able chat filters. This involves getting rid of some extra words, making it up-to-date for modern slang, rearranging some words placement to better reflect severity, and so on.
    • Dividing the filter options to better cover content. So, in practice, this would mean better defining the auto-enabled toggle-able swear filter to specifically catch actual “swears” and “harsh language”, and having a separate auto-enabled toggle-able filter for sexual words that might be used in casual conversation, and having some optional advanced toggle-able settings for non-explicit but questionable words or sensitive content.
      • We believe this will help with some of the frustrating chat issues that occur, because you’ll have more control over what types of language you’re okay with seeing instead of having one blanket filter. This proposal only affects the toggle-able filters, the racial slurs/hate speech filter will always remain enabled.
    • Adding more regional-specific language to the toggle-able filters. So, just expanding the swear filter to cover some regional variants of swears.
    • Adding some commonly reported non-English words to the chat filter. We’ve mostly been working on this for our Turkish playerbase, but if you have a suggestion for a language you’d like better moderation of explicit language for in Tower, we’d appreciate the feedback.

Other potential improvements include an auto-flag system to bolster user reports, but a lot of these other improvements will generally improve the experience on the user end and should reduce discomfort in the chat. Again, they’re currently in the proposal/planning stage, but we wanted to share them for a look behind the curtain, since moderation is an important topic in a chat community.

Along with proposals, we also have some changes already in effect, such as updates to the rules and more information about what happens when you make a report!

September Calendar

That’s a Wrap!

That’s going to do it for this week’s dev log! Be sure to keep an eye out for the next one!

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<3 PixelTail Games

[Acejinjo]

Ah, that explains the Catsack bot silence.
Looking forward to the new chat filters!
Would prefer a custom blacklist of non generic words. Like some spammy meme words for example. But hey, if it makes chat safe, then that’s okay!

The sci-fi items looks soooo good! I’ve been working on the Moon Condo on a new save so this will help a lot!
There’s never enough Victorian stuff so I’m grateful we’re getting more!
Keep up the good work guys!

[wallygraham]

The one hutch/ cabinet looks like the one My G. Grandmother used to have back when she was alive.

Def nabbing that.

[GoopGoop]

PATTERNS ON MY FURNITURE?? BEAUTIFUL WOODEN FURNITURE??? CHURCH PEWS??? I truly am spoiled

[anna]

OH MY GOD I LOVE ALL OF THE NEW FURNITURE, very useful in many builds, i’m very excited!! they look AMAZING

[PlucktheDragon]

A Sci-Fi Set! I’m looking forward for a furry-themed resort in the future, cuz I have to use canvas mesh to build test tubes for the character appearance room.

[Akela]

@wheezwer

At the same time, a small portion of the team has been dedicating their efforts to another project outside of Tower (the one we mentioned in our 1.0 post).

I meant to ask this back in the 1.0 announcement but forgot to, how come The Elevator will be standalone rather than a paid DLC expansion for Tower Unite? It would draw more people to TU and keep everything in its “ecosystem.”

I hope it’ll at least have some sort of connection, maybe some TU cosmetics if you buy it? That could still help lead more people to join this game.

[macdguy]

@Akela

I meant to ask this back in the 1.0 announcement but forgot to, how come The Elevator will be standalone

It’s a completely different game and runs on a newer Unreal engine.

We’ll definitely have crossovers with the two games, though!

[SinfulMonsoon]

More censorship? Really? Like the game didn’t have enough of that already, sometimes reaching ridiculous levels. Unnecessary waste of time. At least Halloween stuff looks neat

[wallygraham]

Unfortunately w/ the way payment processors are going, the censorship is probably needed…

[SinfulMonsoon]

Oh, don’t even mention that disastrous case😓

[Akela]

Most of what they’re changing/adding sounds like it’ll just affect and expand on the chat filter setting that you can already disable yourself. They’re not forcing additional censorship on you.

[dylanagain]

I don’t think I ever felt censored in tower lol.
Items look great! I’m so happy we get some victorian stuff in time for halloween, and the sci fi objects are very much appreciated too!
Don’t forget to continue the cooking feature hehe

[wheezwer]

The moderation changes aren’t making moderation more strict, they’re intended to update our backend to be up-to-date and adjust the way filters are categorized so users have more choice to prevent unnecessary frustration.

Every change is intended to give the user more options to curate the chat to their preferences and comfort level with the toggle-able filters, while not unnecessarily restricting words under one blanket toggle-able filter.

Other than that, we’re trying to ensure our filter for hate speech, racial slurs, and other seriously offensive language is up to date and reflects the geographical diversity of the playerbase.

If you’re concerned about stuff like the mention of an “auto-flag,” the proposal is simply to help bolster user reports and give moderators a more immediate information about potential rule violations in a users chat history, not act as any sort of automatic moderation.

EDIT: And if this is about the username/avatar moderation: that’s already an existing rule, but on the user-end it tends not to feel enforced/addressed unless a Steam profile report is approved by Steam. Steam is very helpful for that, but our rules sometimes cover topics differently than theirs. So the change is to just make it actually visibly moderated within the game, rather than relying on Steam.

[Bear_Inmind]

I wonder if the church that I’ve built has something to do with pews being added into the game.