Spoil spoilers

This week's update brought with it a new set of goals. On the face of it not all that momentous or eye-catching, but soon players around the community were scratching their heads when the first recipe required to be cooked, the Hot Chocolate, spoilt within four minutes of being set off despite being advertised as a 1 hour dish.

But is this the only case of a recipe attracting flies at a different time from when we'd expect? The general rule that we live and die by is that the amount of time between a dish being ready to serve and spoiling is equal to the amount of time it takes to prepare. So for example, a 3 hour Grilled Cheese set off at 9am will be ready to drop on a counter at 12pm and will spoil at 3pm. Or will it?

There have been no shortage of occasions when I have loaded up Restaurant Story over the years and expected to find the flies descending but have been pleasantly surprised. Usually I just move on at this point but eventually I decided some further investigating was in order. Back in the late summer and early autumn I spent a few weeks testing the true spoil times of the various durations of recipes, and would like to (finally) present the results.

Before we dive in, a couple of disclaimers. First and foremost, and as I've just mentioned, this probe was carried out some months ago - it's not beyond the realms of possibility that the results are out of date, although I have no reason to believe that to be the case. Also, I've only tested one recipe for each duration so if there are any variations within recipe lengths then I'm stuffed. But again there's nothing to support that.

Right, here we go then. The following graph plots the recipe duration against the full spoil time. By full spoil time I'm talking about the total time in hours between a dish being set off and going off. There are two sets of points - in blue are the assumed spoil times if we consider a recipe to take the same time to spoil as it did to cook, and in orange are the actual spoil times I measured.

I urge you to click on the graph to view a larger version.

As you can see the two sets of points do not coincide. In reality we get longer to serve a recipe than has always been assumed, with the amount of bonus time allowed generally growing as we move up the durations.

For the first few dish lengths the gap may not appear all that notable, but that is more down to the scale of the graph. In truth those dishes under 1 hour in duration allow much longer prior to spoiling than the general rule suggests. That makes sense since having 1 minute to serve French Toast or 5 minutes to serve Omelettes would just be cruel.

But the additional spoil time on top of the recipe length continues as the length rises and indeed it outpaces the change in duration. Have a look at this second graph which plots the dish duration against the additional spoil time beyond what we'd expect.

Again I encourage you to click on the graph to get a better look.

So if the general rule held we'd be staring at a straight orange line along the bottom, with no additional spoil time for any recipes. This is clearly not the case.

With the exception of the 45 minute length (for which there is only one entry - the Cranberry Pie on the Thankful Oven) the total time from preparation to spoiling for recipes under 1 hour sums to 2 hours. For example, a 15 minute dish has an additional 90 minutes of spoil time - add that to the preparation time and the standard spoil time (which is equal to the recipe's length) and that brings us to the magic 2 hours.

Beyond the 1 hour bracket the trend begins to move upward. From the 2 hour length through to the 10 hour length we get an additional 30 minutes of spoil time for every extra hour of cooking, starting from a 1 hour bonus at 2 hours. The result of this is that by the time we get to the 10 hour duration we have 5 hours of added spoil time.

Beyond this the extra spoil time tends to jump in line with the recipe duration, until we get to the 22 hour (1 day) length. This of course represents a four hour jump from the 18 hour bracket (we have nothing in between) which explains the significant leap up to 11 hours of bonus spoil time.

That just leaves the 46 hour (2 days) category. Here the entire trend is broken with only 6 additional hours given on top of the expected 46 hours to serve up.

This is all very well, but how do these findings affect the way we play the game? Well, let's take the example of a 4 hour dish. It's 10pm and my alarm is set for 7am the following morning. Under the general established rule the recipe will be ready to serve at 2am and will spoil at 6am. That's no good to me. But I have found that there are 2 hours of extra spoil time for a 4 hour food, and that means that in reality it won't be until 8am that the flies are knocking on my door. Therefore I can safely cook the 4 hour recipe overnight.

Just to summarise, here is the complete list of recipe lengths and actual spoil times. Here the spoil time is defined as the period from a recipe being ready to serve through to spoiling:

Recipe Duration	Actual Spoil Time		Recipe Duration	Actual Spoil Time
1 minute	1h 59m		7 hours	10.5 hours
3 minutes	1h 57m		8 hours	12 hours
5 minutes	1h 55m		9 hours	13.5 hours
15 minutes	1h 45m		10 hours	15 hours
30 minutes	1h 30m		12 hours	18 hours
45 minutes	1h 8m		13 hours	19.5 hours
1 hour	2h 30m		14 hours	21 hours
2 hours	3 hours		16 hours	24 hours
3 hours	4.5 hours		18 hours	27 hours
4 hours	6 hours		22 hours	33 hours
5 hours	7.5 hours		46 hours	52 hours
6 hours	9 hours

So there we have it - spoiler alert! Hopefully at least some of this post made sense, and I certainly hope that it may provide you with some handy information going forward as you plot your way through Restaurant Story in the future. Now go and enjoy cooking a 4 hour recipe overnight!