Hi everyone, it's patch time again! There's a lot of changes in this patch, including some new features, lots of quality-of-life improvements and more. In fact, it's now way too long to post as a Discord message so I'm going to put it into a thread
Garage and Workshop
One of the biggest changes this patch is the reworked garage and workshop. The garage has been shuffled around to enable it to store 25 crates. It also now supports more than just appliance crates; you can also get upgrade kits which can be used to turn crates into upgraded versions.
The workshop, above the garage, contains a large, fancy machine that shoots out sparks. It also has a big, glowy button that you can press. It also allows you to craft your crates into other things (honestly mostly more crates). Most importantly, for the moment, you can combine any three crates (or two of the same) to get a new, random crate, and you can combine crates with upgrade kits to get an upgraded version of that crate. Look out for more recipes - including recipes for new things not yet available in the game - coming in later updates.
(This is definitely WIP, in particular the machine model is still WIP, and there aren't many recipes yet)
Seeded runs
Both map creation and the main gameplay have been updated to allow for seeded runs. This means the randomness is (mostly) predictable based on a given seed. The map creation should create exactly the same map every time. In game, you should be offered the same cards (assuming you follow the same choices), the customer groups should be the same (again if the same cards are chosen) and you'll get given the same shop choices. This means that two plays on the same seed should be pretty close to equivalent. There isn't (yet) an option to specify a seed, but for the moment there is a new noticeboard in the office which offers two special layouts; one that changes every day, and one that changes every week. These are "fixed seed" runs, so choosing one of these layouts (and any dish you want) will mean you play the run with the same seed as everyone else who uses them.
In the future, expect these daily and weekly challenge runs to come with special modifiers that make them even more unique and unusual!
Interaction improvements
As part of the general QoL improvements throughout the playtest, I've reimplemented two major interaction systems in the game; first, the system that determines what you're trying to interact with, and second, the system that handles picking up and putting things down.
The result of this should be that the game is better at determining when you're trying to interact over corners. It's also now possible to interact with something by standing on it; if you want to clean a mess you can now stand on the mess and interact (you might need to make sure you're not looking at something else). Finally, the game is now better at working out when you're staring at a wall (surprisingly often from what I've seen from playtesters) and will now let you place things at your feet in this case. This should make it easier to put things up on walls, etc. There's also some range tweaks to fix a few "over reaching" bugs that were happening in v0.15.
The way the game handlings things being picked up and put down (which honestly is surprisingly complicated) means it should be more reliable in those interactions. It also means it now finally supports a new feature that a lot of people have been keen on.
Trays
You can now purchase a tray station which provides a holdable tray. A way to carry two things at once is a very common feature request, and I've tried a lot of ways to make this possible in a way that didn't make interacting with things really awkward. The tray is a player upgrade (watch this space) which allows you to carry two things while you're holding it. Hopefully using the tray will feel quite natural, but I expect I'll be watching a lot of playtester streams to see how people find it, and please let me know what you think. The only major caveat is that you can't place things on a tray that is put down - think of the tray as a tool that you can use, rather than a place you can store things. The tray can also currently hold anything, including plated dishes, dirty dishes, not-dishes, and other trays. Holding other trays is not advised and will be disappointing. You definitely can't take things from item sources (like the fridge) while holding a tray, and you probably can't do actions while holding the tray, depending on if I've remembered to change that in between writing this patch note and releasing the patch.
Host stands
The host stand, and the upgraded version, have been removed.
Coffee tables
Don't worry, though! The host stand has been replaced with a new coffee table, which acts like an automatic host stand, except that you have to place it with enough space for the full group to sit. People can't be served food at coffee tables. This should enable you to make use of the spare space in your restaurant, and make it harder to create restaurants will lots and lots of automatic host stands.
Chair and Post fixes
A few things that have annoyed people for a while about chairs have been fixed:
Player management
As part of upcoming improvements to the game's menus and options, the multiplayer options menu (which was previously just the game privacy setting) now has a list of connected players, and the host can now use this to forcibly disconnect the input of other players. This should mean if you have a stranded input from a disconnecting Remote Play player you can now remove the player without much difficulty.
Disconnecting a controller (e.g. if it loses connection or gets thrown through a monitor after you get a Discount Desk) will now pause the game (so you can reconnect the controller or write some forceful yet constructive feedback, respectively). Other players can use the menu button to continue without you (if your controller is irreparable in both cases).
LiveSplit
This seems to be a popular run tracker for speed runs. You can activate this by going into the menu, options and enabling it there. You need to have LiveSplit with the LiveSplit Server component running. When this integration is active, the game will automatically tell LiveSplit:
I think this is slightly different to how most people are doing the speed runs (particularly the timer only starts when you begin the first day). I feel like this evens out loading times and allows people to play more varied strategies, but it's great to see lots of people participating in speed running, so I'm happy to adjust this according to feedback.
To enable this, you need LiveSplit and the LiveSplit server component. You should then start and set up LiveSplit normally, making sure to start the server. You can then start the game and enable LiveSplit integration in the options menu. Once you've done this, you can see the status in the bottom left of the screen. This integration is a bit simple at the moment and is designed to be only enabled while you're actually doing a speedrun - using the integration without the server running will cause a stutter at the end of each day so you should turn if off if you're not using it.
As a side note, I chose LiveSplit because it seemed to be what a lot of people were using and straightforward to implement. I don't have any experience with it. If you have feedback, please let me know!
Other bits
Speed running season is in full swing, and to celebrate that people finally appreciate the floor buffer, it has been (floor) buffed so that it now refreshes the duration of buffed floors if you walk over them again. An automatic version has also been added.
There are also a number of bug fixes and balance changes, particularly Closing Time? should now work as intended, stir fry can be plated with sides, and more!
There's also a new dish in the game.
Features:
Balance Changes:
Fixes/Other:
Fixes/Other:
Features:
Fixes/Other:
Balance:
Fixes/Other: