Tinker Island Tips, Cheats and Strategies

Tinker Island: Survival Adenture is an adorable little survival game from Tricky Tribe and Kongregate. You’ll need to guide the actions of a number of shipwrecked survivors as they attempt to Swiss Family Robinson the place up, with the ultimate goal of getting off the island for good. Gamezebo’s Tinker Island tips, cheats and strategies will help you make the most of your castaway adventure.

Explore and Expand

Always explore new locations. The only way you’re going to find supplies – at least in the early game – and unlock new structures to build is by exploring, so get out there!
Make sure you can afford to explore an area first. Every time you begin to explore a new location for the first time, it’s going to cost you. Most likely food. If you don’t have enough stored, you aren’t going anywhere.
There’s safety in numbers. Aldo clubs. Clubs are pretty safe. Point is, you’ll sometimes run across aggressive animals while exploring and the higher the collective combat value (it’s the red bar with the sword icon), the easier it’s going to be to take care of whatever’s bothering you. So augment your attack power by sending people out in groups and/or giving them weapons.

Tinker Island Tips, Cheats and Strategies

You don’t have to fight. If you aren’t ready to deal with a threat – not enough health, want to come back with more people, etc – then just run away. The vicious animals will wait courteously for you to return. Seriously.
Buildings that increase storage space are extremely important. Tents, tepees, whatever – if you don’t keep upgrading the maximum amount of supplies you can hold, you’re going to have a really tough time building anything else.
Try to build as often as possible. You won’t always have the supplies to build what you want, but every single thing you can craft is useful. For example, if you don’t have enough wood to upgrade the bonfire, try a workbench. Or when all else fails, spend a bit of food to craft some health potions. You can never have too many health potions.

Gathering spots are awesome. Unlike early-game resource gathering, where you can only acquire a set amount of materials and then the source runs dry, you can eventually craft and use special structures that supply limitless amounts of goodies. Just assign someone to the spot and they’ll rake in an hourly haul of useful things.
Check your achievements. It’s not overtly mentioned, but every time you complete a given achievement you’ll earn gems that can be used to speed up tasks, buy supplies outright, or unlock new survivors. You’ll know you’ve earn one (or more) if you see a number appear on the menu icon in the top-right corner of the screen. Just tap the icon, then tap on the Achievements button and scroll until you find it.
Revisit previously explored areas. Many of these locations will allow you to collect special items that you’ll eventually need to craft more advanced things – you can see what you might find in the trio of little boxes to the right of the location’s info panel. Even if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you’ll likely come away with a few extra resources like stone or even gold.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Crafting requires resources. You can see how much of what a given craft project needs underneath the bars used to show time and amount of work – right where it says “Cost.” You won’t be able to start a project until you have everything you need, but you only ever have to pay the cost when you start a project for the first time.
All tasks have two main factors: time and amount of work. The time indicates how long (seconds, minutes, hours) it will take any number of survivors to complete one “cycle” of the job. The amount of work needed to complete a task is indicated by a numbered bar you need to fill. Every time a cycle is finished, the bar will fill depending on the stats of the assigned survivors. Once it fills completely you get your stuff!

Stats determine how much work gets done, not how fast. If a survivor has, let’s say a craft stat of 5, that means they’ll contribute 5 points towards a crafting task every time they’re assigned. It will not make the crafting process any faster, no matter how high their stats are or how many people you include on the project.
Use those stats to your advantage. If you have a couple of survivors with really high gathering stats, and there’s a gathering point that requires a lot of work before you can collect the rewards, send them both in. It’ll require fewer attempts that way. Similarly, if a task is almost done, don’t assign more survivors to it than you need to. For example, don’t waste a survivor with a skill of 8 and another with a skill of 6 on a task that only needs 2 or 3 more points.

You can assign multiple survivors to one task, or assign several tasks at a time. If you want to really push through a tough assignment – say a 2 hour job crafting a storage upgrade – then you’re better off piling highly skilled people on. If you want to work on several projects at once, you can simply put one survivor on each task and have all of them going simultaneously.
You can also stack different job types such as crafting or gathering. Just assign someone to a job, then tap that job window to pull up the menu and select a new one to assign another survivor to.
You cannot add more survivors to any jobs that are in progress. If you want to have more than one person doing a thing, you need to make sure you assign them all at the same time.
Crafting items will help individual survivors, but equipping them is semi-permanent. Once you make a thing and give it to someone, you’re not getting it back. You can replace the item with another item later, but the replaced item is discarded.