Cafe World – By Zynga
October 6, 2009
| Publisher | Zynga |
| Platform | online |
| Multi-account | no |
| Type | Simulation |
| Initial Review Date | 10/6/09 |
| Last Updated | 10/6/09 |
| FAQ | |
| Files/Tools | Calculator |
Cafe World is a combination of Restaurant City and FarmVille. Initially it strongly resembles Restaurant City as you have some stoves, 1 person tables and can hire friends as waiters. To this extant many of the strategies that work in RC work in Cafe World as well. The difference however is the way in which food preperation works. Your cook does not cook to order, but rather it’s done caffeteria style. You pick out some foods and cook multiple serverings of that food. Once cooked the food is then transfered to a serving table where it is picked up by your wait staff. Because you’re esstentially making all of your meals ahead of time, there is no advantage to where you place your ovens relative to the serving tables. These changes affect your strategy somewhat but proably the easiest way to think of the game is as a two part game.
Part 1, is the same as FarmVille. You pick out your dish (seeds) which you then begin to cook. These cooking times for some dishes can be as long as 2 days. Once the food is cooked it begins to rot. Thankfully it rots at the same rate at which it was cooked. If you do not transfer it to the wait table before this time elapses the food will go bad and it becomes unservable. Once you have collected your food (harvested) your stove will be dirty. You can then Clean (Plow) the stove for 15 coins to make it usable again. At which point you can start the whole process over again. Just like farmville the xp you gain comes from cooking and transferring your food.
Part 2 of the game is the same as restaurant city. Once your food is cooked it begins to be served to customers who walk in the door. Each happily served customer will increase your “thumbs up” rating. The higher this rating is the faster customers will file into your restaurant. Just like in restaurant city you want to minimize the walking distance of your wait staff. The difference is that instead of having to wait for a cook to cook the food they can immediately serve from the pre-prepared food stack. This means that a single waiter can handle a very large number of tables by them self.
Now, I will point out that because the game is still new not all of the pathing AI has been worked out. This means that if you trap your waiter (the ideal setup) sometimes the pathing will foul up and they won’t be able to reach a table despite the fact that they are standing right next to it. What’s more, the waiter’s actions get put into a queue of sorts. This means that because they can’t reach that table they will simply stop serving food all together. The only remedy I’ve found is to make sure your waiter can get out if they need to. The result is that every now and then they will randomly take the long way around to complete some task. I hope to see this problem corrected soon as it’s pretty annoying.
Getting started
Now, ideally you would want to sell the high profit long cooking time foods. The problem is, that if those are the only foods you cook you won’t make any money (and therefore get to play) until a day or so has passed. Thankfully, you can serve one dish type for every wait table you have. To take advantage of this, set half your ovens to cook the long lead time food that you want. Then use the other half to cook things like hamburgers and fruit salads. These items have short turn around times which will allow you to start serving food right away. Additionally, you’ll be able to earn xp at a fairly fast pace allowing you to easily level up a few times.
I think this game presents an interesting challenge. I look forward to looking into the cooking times to develop strategies. I have noticed that you gain a substantial amount of xp for the long cooking time items when you transfer them from the oven to the wait table. I wonder if this means that the short lead items may not be as useful for leveling as they initially seem.
|
|
| Part 1: Cafe World – By Zynga |
| Part 2: Cafe World – Food Profit Margins |
| Part 3: Cafe World – Flying Food |
Steelowl's Videogame Tools 
How long after a 12 hour & 24 hour dish has cooked does it rot?
dishes take as long to rot as they did to cook. So a 12 hour will rot 12 hours after it’s done cooking and a 24 hour will rot 24 hours after it was done cooking
CafeWorld Calculator available at http://martabak.org/cafeworld/
(fyi, cafe point from ‘Kung Pao Stir Fry’ until ‘Impossible Quiche’ is not available yet)
I just leave my servers trapped behind the counters, no need to let them wander. They’re much faster if they don’t move at all. I’ve noticed that if you have your counters set up in a “C” shape around them, they won’t serve from the counter at the corner, so I have a stove or just a blank space there. Here’s my current setup:
SSSS
___SCCC
SSSC___C
where S=stove and C=counter
I wanted to make a diner style restaurant and put a bunch of tables in front of and around my serving counters.
Prays for formatting…
00000
0 0
*XXX*
Where 0 is a table, X is a serving counter, and * is a plant.
What happened is that the waiter spawned behind the serving counters and since she couldn’t reach the front of the tables she simply stood there and served everyone, and cleaned tables instantly and without moving.
Although it was unintentional, I was able to hit the max buzz rating of 105 in the first night with only 7 tables. I was also serving close to 1000 dishes in an hour with no way of keeping up short of making fruit salads 24/7.
OK formatting didn’t work real well, let me try again…
00000
0 0
*XXX*
One last try then I give up…
00000
0___0
*XXX*
Very cool! 🙂
I hope you don’t mind but I tried this out and after getting it to work wrote up an article on this. You’re right about how crazy fast your buzz points build, ended up maxing out after an hour or so.
thank you for sharing
here’s a trick with the pathing that i figured out using farmville strategy
Put a row of tables in front of the counter and trap the waiter. situate the counters so that they touch every other table (if the “counter” totally blocks all tables it won’t work). then situate other tables within the restaurant. The waiters will look like they’re serving the counter only but the tables they can’t reach will be cleaned and served as well.
I hope they don’t fix this. I was able to fit quite a few tables in a tiny restaurant.
You missed out the fact that in cafe world buzzpoints are not are crucial as the popularity in restaurant city.
Cafe World is about achieving balance..
Restaurant City is revolves around getting as high popularity as possible…
I use the “trap your waiter” method too.
If it happens that your waiter walks out of the counters, just click on customize –> select the counter that your waiter walks out from –> and click on the tick again.
That solves the problem. My waiter stays trapped in the position after performing the above act
The pathing works fine, I dont know what crack you are smoking. Just make sure there is at least one cell of free space behind each chair and the waitress will go anywhere.
I wish you were correct. Unfortunately I have watched as my waitress has walked out from behind the counter, all the way around to the other side to clear a table. When earlier she had been able to serve the same table from where she was just fine.