toolcratewhat's new

What's new

New tools, new games, and improvements, newest first.

  • New Eight emergency and everyday-carry tools, in a new Emergency group on the home page: a torch and SOS signal (screen light, phone torch, Morse and the mountain distress signal), an emergency info (ICE) card for your wallet and lock screen, My Location (coordinates, plus code and British grid reference to read out on a call), a water purification calculator, a power cut food safety timer, a power bank and battery runtime calculator, a lightning distance calculator and a wind chill and heat index calculator. The figures come from official guidance, linked on each page.
  • Site The tag buttons on the home and games pages now always show the right number of tools in each, and a few tools have better tags.
  • New Emergency Kit Calculator: how much water and food your household needs to manage on its own for 72 hours, a week or longer, with a checklist to tick off (babies, children, pets and medical needs included). Choose where you live to see your own government’s advice (14 countries), and add a reminder to check your kit every six months to your calendar. The amounts come from current EU, UK, US, German and Swedish guidance, all linked.
  • New Pool: 8-ball with real ball physics, an aiming guide and the proper rules (fouls, ball in hand, the 8 last), against a computer at four levels that plans its shots on a copy of the table, or against a friend on the same device.
  • Games In Pool you can now shoot by dragging the cue back on the table and letting go, and play full screen; turn your phone sideways for a landscape table.
  • Games Pool has spin: set where the cue strikes the white for top spin, back spin or side, with the guide showing where the white will go. Balls now slide before they roll, as on a real table, and the computer uses spin on Hard and Expert.

  • Games Chess has ten computer levels instead of three, from a beginner who sometimes plays any move to a much stronger engine that thinks for up to 8 seconds (the new level 7 beat the old Hard 7 games out of 8). It thinks in the background, so the page never freezes, opens with real opening lines, and there’s a Hint button for your move.
  • Games Air Hockey’s computer now plays properly: it reads where your shots are going, lines up and strikes, aims away from your mallet and plays bank shots, with a new Expert level. A puck resting against a side wall no longer gets stuck out of reach.
  • Games Pinball has a new table: a skill shot, drop targets that light a kickback, a saucer that locks balls for 3-ball multiball and jackpots, a bonus multiplier and ball save. Flippers hit like the real thing, and the ball can no longer get stuck bouncing behind them. Touch either half of the table to flip.
  • Fixes The games that talk (Shape Party, Colour Match, Animal Sounds and others) now speak on phones from the very first tap, and always in an English voice.

  • Tools Every unit converter now shows a quick way to work the answer out in your head (km to miles: multiply by 5, divide by 8) and where you’re likely to need it.

  • Privacy The tools that open your files or secrets now tell your browser to refuse any request to another website, so “nothing is uploaded” is enforced by your browser, not just promised. See how to check.
  • Security The PDF tools use the latest PDF.js (6.3), which also shows Chinese, Japanese and Korean PDFs and JPEG 2000 images properly, and a booby-trapped PDF can no longer run code when it’s opened.
  • Site Your data: see everything toolcrate keeps in your browser (favourites, game progress, saved work, settings), back it up, move it to another phone or computer, or delete it.
  • Site Every tool and game has a Report a problem link at the bottom, which says which page it’s about and, if you like, your browser and device. Crashes are also reported automatically and anonymously, so they get fixed sooner (see the privacy policy).
  • Site Pages no longer jump about while they load, and there’s an accessibility statement.
  • Site No more “Allow ads” question in the UK and EU: Google’s own rules decide which ads appear there (limited, non-personalised ones unless you’ve agreed to more through Google).

  • New tools Five more PDF tools, all free, with no upload and no watermark: Sign PDF (draw, type or upload your signature, and add the date, text and ticks, on any page), Fill PDF Form (type into a form’s boxes on the page, or as a simple list on a phone), Redact PDF (black out names, emails, phone and account numbers so they’re really gone, and check that they are), Organise PDF Pages (rotate, delete and reorder) and Add Page Numbers.
  • New tools Three security tools, with a new Security filter on the homepage: Is This Link Safe? (paste a link or a whole scam text to see where it really goes, and the tricks it uses), a Password Strength Checker (how long it would take to crack, why, and an optional check against leaked passwords that never sends the password) and Encrypt Text & Files (lock a message or file with a password, using AES-256).
  • Site The tools that open your files and secrets (all the PDF and image tools, the password tools and more) no longer show ads. They show a live count of requests to other sites at the bottom, so you can check for yourself that nothing is uploaded.
  • Site With toolcrate installed on Android, you can share a PDF, picture, link or text to it from other apps, and on a computer, open PDFs and images with it. It offers the tools that fit.
  • Site Save for offline: keep all the games, or the whole site, on your device for a flight, and they update themselves when you’re back online. The Noise Generator now plays like music, with play and pause on your lock screen, and without the little gap it used to have.
  • Privacy In the UK and EU, you’re asked before any personalised ads are shown, and can change your mind with “Ad settings” at the bottom of every page. Visits are now counted without cookies or any way of telling visitors apart; see the privacy policy.

  • Tools All the PDF tools in one place: free PDF tools to merge, split, compress and convert PDFs, with no signup, no upload and no watermark. Each one now has step-by-step instructions and answers to common questions.
  • Fixes The DNS Lookup works again with Cloudflare’s DNS service, which had started refusing its requests.
  • New tools Ten more: a Scientific Calculator (degrees or radians, history, memory), a Pregnancy Due Date Calculator (from your last period, conception, IVF transfer or a scan, with scan dates), a Sleep Calculator, JPG to PDF and PDF to JPG converters, Webcam and Microphone tests, a Keyboard Tester (dead keys, double-typing and rollover), and Fuel Cost and Electricity Cost calculators.
  • New tools Seven OSINT (open-source investigation) tools, with a new OSINT filter on the homepage: Social Media ID Decoder (when a post on X, Discord, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Bluesky, Mastodon or LinkedIn was really made, from its ID or link), Email Header Analyser (an email's route, sending IP, delays, SPF/DKIM/DMARC and signs of spoofing), Sun Position & Shadow Calculator (the sun's angle and shadow length for any place and time, and the times a shadow in a photo fits), Google Dork Builder (advanced search operators with presets), Username Search (a username's profile on 100+ sites), DNS & Email Security Lookup (every record plus SPF, DMARC, DKIM, MTA-STS and DNSSEC) and Document Metadata Viewer (author, company, software, dates, edit history and comment authors in PDF and Office files). Everything runs in your browser; the DNS lookup asks Cloudflare or Google's public DNS directly.
  • Tools The live sound meter in the Decibel Calculator is far steadier. It switches off the browser's automatic gain and noise suppression, which kept changing the level on their own, and averages like a real sound level meter (Slow or Fast response). The figures update four times a second, and there's now an average (Leq), min and max, plus a calibration offset to read approximate dB SPL.

  • Tools The Baby Age Calculator has a Share link button: it gives you a link with the date of birth in it (and the name, time and due date, if you've added them), so family can open it and see the baby's age on the day they look. Opening someone else's link doesn't replace the baby saved on your own device.
  • Site A link to a page that leaves off “.html” (toolcrate.cc/tools/json-formatter) or ends with a stray slash now takes you to the page instead of “Page not found”.
  • Games Shape Party has a new Find the shape mode: it asks for a shape out loud (“Find the star!”), and the child taps it. A wrong one gives a gentle wiggle and says what it is. All six shapes are now drawn the same size. Word Guess accepts about 8,700 five-letter words as guesses, nearly twice as many, so rarer real words like THANE are no longer rejected.
  • Tools The developer tools now have a proper code editor instead of a plain text box: line numbers, syntax colouring, bracket matching, code folding, search and replace (Ctrl+F), and Tab to indent. In the JSON Formatter, JSON Diff, YAML ↔ JSON and XML Formatter, mistakes are underlined where they are as you type, with the reason when you hover. Also in the SQL Formatter, CSS Minifier, CSV ↔ JSON, Regex Tester, cURL Converter, .env Parser and both Markdown tools.

  • New tool Baby Age Calculator: how old your baby is in weeks, months and days, their corrected age if they were born early, how many weeks pregnant the birth was, and the dates of milestones like 100 days, the half birthday and 1,000 days, which you can add to your calendar.

  • Tools The Image Compressor and Image Format Converter now use the same encoders as Google's Squoosh: MozJPEG for smaller JPEGs, WebP, AVIF (often half the size of a JPEG) and OxiPNG for lossless PNGs, with sharper Lanczos resizing. The compressor can also hit a target file size in KB, handy for upload forms.
  • Tools The PDF Compressor has a new default mode that recompresses the photos inside a PDF and leaves the text alone, so it stays selectable and searchable. Photo-heavy PDFs often shrink to a fraction of their size.
  • Tools The QR Code Scanner now reads barcodes too (EAN, UPC, Code 128, Data Matrix, PDF417, Aztec and more), finds every code in a picture, copes with rotated, inverted and blurry codes, shows Wi-Fi codes as network and password, and accepts pasted screenshots.
  • Tools The Diff Checker now uses the same algorithm as git, compares 100,000-line files in a moment, highlights the exact words that changed, has a side-by-side view, and saves a standard .patch file. The File Hash Checker handles files of any size — multi-gigabyte ISOs included — with a progress bar and a Cancel button.
  • Tools The Markdown Previewer and Markdown ↔ HTML Converter now follow the CommonMark standard exactly, so they match GitHub, with tables, task lists, footnotes, autolinks and syntax-highlighted code. HTML back to Markdown copes with pages pasted from the web or Word.
  • Fixes Every game was put through thousands of random taps and key presses. Simon Says no longer breaks if you press Start while a pattern is playing, and Sound Cylinders no longer breaks if you change the number of cylinders mid-match. File tools now explain empty, damaged or wrong-type files instead of doing nothing.

  • Tools The Unit Converter now does volume: millilitres, litres, teaspoons, UK and US pints, gallons and fluid ounces, cups and more. The BMI and calorie calculators take your weight in stones and pounds.
  • Games Word Guess accepts about 4,500 everyday five-letter words as guesses instead of about 1,000. Word Scramble uses real words only, counts any word made from the same letters (EARTH or HEART), and takes your answer as soon as you've typed it. Tic-tac-toe has a new Medium level.
  • Site Search puts the best match first and understands phrases like "jpg to png" or "kg to stone". The tip calculators start from the usual tip where you are, and more money tools show your currency. Dates read the British way (28 Sep 2026), and gallons and pints mean imperial unless marked US. The site now works fully even when your browser blocks cookies and site storage.
  • Fixes The Password Generator always includes every character type you tick. The YAML converter now handles all of YAML, and the Number Base Converter handles numbers of any size, including negatives. Debt Payoff totals are exact. Plus fixes in the Markdown, fraction, palindrome, PDF splitter, time zone and word-counting tools.

  • Instruments Virtual Piano now plays a real recorded grand piano, has a sustain pedal (hold Space), and works with a USB MIDI keyboard, touch-sensitive and with your pedal.
  • New Quick conversions: 38 one-job converters for everyday units, like cm to inches, kg to stone (with stones and pounds) and °C to °F, each with the formula, a worked example and a table.
  • Site Money tools show your local currency (with a picker to change it). You can favourite a tool from its own page, and recently used tools now include ones you reached from search. Text is easier to read, and the whole site now passes automated accessibility checks, including for screen-reader users on game boards. Fonts load from toolcrate itself, with no third-party requests.
  • Instruments Virtual Drums has a real crash cymbal: a bright, shimmering wash that rings out, instead of a beeping chord. Virtual Violin has a completely rebuilt, far more realistic bowed sound, with vibrato you can switch off, keyboard play and double stops. The piano, xylophone, guitar and violin now fit your screen with no sideways scrolling, and the xylophone is laid out like a real one.
  • Fixes A full check of every tool found and fixed several bugs. Body Fat Calculator results were about 6 points too low. The CSS clamp() rem output scaled far too little. The Syllable Counter and Readability Checker now count syllables much more accurately. The Markdown tools handle links with brackets in them, like Wikipedia's. The PDF Splitter gives you a plain PDF rather than a ZIP when there's only one file.
  • Security The Passphrase Generator now uses the EFF's 7,772-word list, so a default 5-word passphrase has about 65 bits of entropy instead of about 31. The random number generator, name picker, dice and coin flip now use your browser's cryptographically secure randomness for fair, unpredictable draws.
  • Site Everything now uses British spelling: colour, centre, maths, metres, favourites and so on. Searching with American spellings still finds the right tools, and Word Guess still accepts American spellings as guesses.
  • Site Press ? on any page for its keyboard shortcuts. A mistyped link now suggests the page you probably meant, and recently added tools and games show a NEW badge.
  • New tools A set of decision-making tools: Decision Matrix, Pros & Cons Weigher, Pairwise Ranker, Expected Value Calculator, Risk Matrix & Register, Eisenhower Matrix and a Decision Wheel. Find them all under the new Decisions tag.
  • New game Deckbound, a roguelike deck-building card battler: build a deck from 30+ cards, collect relics, read enemy intents and fight 13 floors to the Crate King. Includes a daily run.
  • Games Chess puzzles: 200 checkmate puzzles from mate in 1 to mate in 3, with hints and a daily puzzle. After any daily challenge, a "Next daily" link takes you straight to the next one.
  • New tool Text Pipeline: chain steps like trim, sort, dedupe, find & replace, JSON, Base64, URL encoding and SHA-256, with a live preview after every step and a shareable link for your pipeline.
  • New Quick answers in search (press / or Ctrl+K on any tool page): type 12*7, 5 km in miles, 20% of 150, uuid, password, #ff8800 or 2d6 and press Enter to copy the answer.
  • New Daily challenges: the same puzzle for everyone each day in Sudoku, Word Guess, Minesweeper and 2048, with streaks and a spoiler-free result to share. See today's list at the top of Games.
  • New Your stats: every best score, time and win count in one place, plus a one-click backup of all your saves that you can restore on another device.
  • Games Dungeon Crawl rebuilt as a proper roguelike: choose your route room by room, read enemy intentions before you act, unlock class abilities, pick a perk every level, find gear in four rarities, and take on the Daily Dungeon.
  • Games Ares Crossing: three difficulty levels, route choices (shortcut, standard, or safe), scavenging, auto-drive, and rationing that actually matters.
  • Games Sudoku: pencil notes, hints, undo, arrow-key movement, and your puzzle is saved if you leave.
  • Games 2048: undo your last move, and pick up where you left off.
  • Games Connect Four: undo, tap anywhere in a column (or press 1–7), a new Medium difficulty, and choose who goes first.
  • Site Pages load faster, and site search (press /) now finds every tool and game.

  • Site New Crates page: meet skycrate and newscrate, toolcrate's sister sites.
  • Games Ares Crossing: branching decision events and crew you can recruit on the road.

  • Tools Noise Generator: a play timer, and you can switch noise colour without stopping.

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