Weather and market events

Two outside forces change from day to day: the weather, which affects your reviews, and market events, which affect what you pay for ingredients. Neither is hard to plan around once you know what each one does and what it doesn't.

Weather

How the forecast works

• The game keeps a forecast for each area, one weather type per day. Weather types include sunny, clouds, fog, dust, rain, storm and several kinds of snow.
• The weather day changes at 08:00, not at midnight.
• Only the days the game has already worked out are fixed in your save. Days further ahead are rolled at random once the game reaches them, so a long-range forecast isn't final until it's generated.

What weather does to stars

Each review records how uncomfortable the customer was from rain and from snow. Only the larger of the two counts:

weather penalty = 0.75 × max(rain discomfort, snow discomfort)

• That's up to −0.75 stars per review, which is as much as perfect comfort or perfect cleanliness is worth.
• Discomfort depends on whether the customer's seat is covered. Covered and indoor seats protect customers from it.
• Fog, dust and clouds don't appear in the review formula. We haven't verified whether storms count as rain, so the site flags storm days as bad days just in case.
• We haven't found weather changing how many customers come out. Treat that as unknown rather than zero.

Tips

• If your area gets rain or snow often, covered seating (indoor tables, parasols) is a permanent fix that pays off on every bad day.
• If you're close to a star target for a level-up, keep the last push away from a run of rainy days.
• On bad-weather days, uncovered tables are where your worst reviews come from.

Market events

At any time the economy tracks at most one shortage and one surplus. Each is tied to a category tag (for example one kind of ingredient, or furniture) and runs over a fixed range of days:

The exact size of the price change is worked out while the game runs, so we don't give a number here.

What market events don't change

Customer satisfaction depends on your menu price, not on what the ingredients cost you, and the price cap comes from the recipe and your venue level. So a shortage cuts your profit per dish, but customers won't like the dish any less unless you raise its price. Before raising a price to protect your margin, check it against how price affects satisfaction, especially the cliff above a group's budget.

Stocking up has a cost of its own: freshness counts toward review stars, so ingredients bought far in advance and kept for a long time can lower that part of your score (we haven't measured how fast freshness drops). Buy for the next few days, not the next few weeks. A manager with a good managing level also lowers purchase costs (see Staff).

Try it

• Load your save under My Save to see the forecast, the current shortage and surplus, and which of your dishes use affected ingredients.
• Find vendors and ingredient prices in the vendor wiki.