Game update: 30/04/14

We're rounding off April with a short break in France!

Notification for French update

It's not a big update by any means, but here's the usual list of new content anyhow:

Recipe ratings (1 hour)

Information in this post is correct as of Saturday 26th April 2014.

Following on from my introductory post two weeks ago, it's time to apply some recipe ratings to some dishes. Every other week I'm going to write a report on the recipes of a certain duration, starting with the shortest and working up to the longest. I've not assigned ratings to recipes of less than 1 hour in duration because they don't have the competition - I can't compare them because there are too few!

So we will start with the 1 hour dishes. For the shorter foods, we need to be careful because when we consider their stats on a per hour basis they tend to look outstanding relative to longer recipes. For example let's compare the Potato Wedges (Basic Oven) with Jerk Chicken (Basic Oven):

Recipe	Duration (hrs)	Profit/hr	Portions/hr	XP/hr
Potato Wedges	1	600	225	24.0
Jerk Chicken	12	363	121	6.8

Clearly the per hour numbers are superior for the Potato Wedges, but to capitalise on this, you would need to be alert and serving up the 1 hour recipe throughout the day. This is because to earn as much profit overall as for a single Jerk Chicken serving you need to cook it eight times. Likewise to match the total portions of the chicken, the wedges would need to be prepared on seven occasions. However the difference in XP per hour is enough to ensure that only four batches of the Potato Wedges are needed to top one Jerk Chicken.

Game update: 23/04/14

After weeks of Spring and Easter updates, we seem to have moved on.

Notification for Fairytale update

A Fairytale theme is today's offering. Here's a list containing all the new content:

Suggestions Box (Apr 2014)

Every month I list five things I'd like to see added, altered or abolished from the game. Because even though my long time of playing Restaurant Story clearly shows I love it, that doesn't mean it's perfect. Some of the ideas I'll air will be significant game changers while others will be low-key and irrelevant in the eyes of many of you readers.

In no particular order, here are this month's entries...

Game update: 16/04/14

Recently we've had Spring and Easter updates. Now it's the turn of the April showers, although I'm still putting it under the Spring banner.

Notification for latest Spring update

It's not the biggest update of the age, but here's a list anyway:

Introducing recipe ratings!

As regular readers will know, whenever new recipes are released, I tend to provide a commentary on their statistics before drawing some kind of conclusion about whether the dish is any good. Quite often these days this involves me descending into some superficial waffle for a few paragraphs before announcing that 'we've got a dud'.

So to provide some sharper analysis (and some sanity) to proceedings I've devised a method of giving a recipe a rating from 1 to 10. There are five contributing factors to this rating, each of which have a different level of influence on the overall rating. The following pie chart should give an idea of what I'm getting at:

The level 100 journey becomes insurmountable

If you're at level 99 then I suggest taking a look at your profile page. And brace yourself.

Previously it took one hundred million XP (100,000,000 XP) to move up to the coveted level 100. That was already borderline preposterous as it would take the average player quite literally decades to earn that amount of XP. However a select few who have ploughed huge amounts of money (I mean thousands of dollars/pounds) into the game have crossed the chasm and reached level 100.

However in the last couple of days, the level 100 club has been decimated, because the game's developers have changed the required XP to reach level 100 to one billion XP (1,000,000,000 XP). That's a hundred times more than before! Here's how it looked before and after the change...

Profile page for The Garlic Tree before XP change

Game update: 09/04/14

With Easter less than two weeks away, we've got a new box to celebrate.

Notification for Easter update

The Easter Box costs 24 gems and when opened will give the player one of nine decorations at random, with the bigger and better prizes the more difficult to obtain.

Here's the distribution list of the box prizes:

Spring 2014 goals content report

This past Wednesday a new set of goals for Spring was launched. Only by completing these goals can five items and three recipes be unlocked. In this post I'll take a look at this content.

But first a quick thought or two on the goals themselves. Very unusually, the first goal appliance was readily available to buy in the market without needing to be unlocked. It soon became apparent why, with the game's developers cheekily making Melon Seeds one of the required parts for construction, and not including it on the gift list. This made obtaining the seeds much trickier, not least because the opening goal required you to ask neighbours for butterflies. So those who rapidly sent out requests for butterflies to all their pals were effectively frozen out until the second day. It pays to be patient!

Shimmying on, the first content to be unlocked via the goals were the Blossom Table and Blossom Chair. I really like the look of these, to the extent that they've made it into the garden section of The Garlic Tree:

Blossom Tables and Blossom Chairs in The Garlic Tree

Spring 2014 goals (in full)

Please note that this set of goals expired on Monday 5th May 2014.

As part of this year's second Spring update we've been assigned the task of cheering Phoebe up by completing a set of goals!

As ever there's 34 days on the clock to finish these goals, meaning they'll disappear on Monday 5th May. With five items unlockable via the goals, let's get to it!

Here's the complete list of goal steps:

• Step 1: Puddle Troubles
• Step 2: Blossoming Business
• Step 3: Fruit Bar Fun
• Step 4: The Clouds Part 
• Step 5: Spring Serenity
• Sidestep A: Fruit Fusion
• Sidestep B: Flower Power
• Sidestep C: Oh Cherry Tree
• Sidestep D: A Spring Surprise

Game update: 02/04/14

Following on from a lovely Spring update last Wednesday, we may have trumped it here!

Notification for latest Spring update

There's a new goal set, with some really pretty Spring content to get hold of.

Firstly, here's a full list of new items: