Hello, Store Owners!
Update v0.1.2 is now available. This is the most extensive update for Home Store Simulator so far, with major changes to customer flow, Customer Satisfaction, employees, the economy, stock management, progression, save reliability, performance, and many other areas of the game.
As always, I have been listening very closely to your feedback. I read your Steam discussions and Discord messages, follow your bug reports and suggestions, and also watch gameplay videos to see how different players experience the game. Many of the changes in v0.1.2 were made directly because of the feedback you shared with me.
Thank you to everyone who has been reporting problems, sharing ideas, participating in Public Tests, and helping me improve Home Store Simulator.
What's New
New Customer Satisfaction System: A completely new Customer Satisfaction system has been added. Customer Satisfaction now directly affects how many customers visit your store each day. High satisfaction can increase customer traffic, while low satisfaction can reduce it. Product Variety, pricing behavior, and how you treat your customers all play a role in maintaining satisfaction.
Product Variety: Product Variety is now an important part of Customer Satisfaction. The system evaluates the different product types available in your store rather than simply counting different models. Offering a healthy variety of products is now an important part of growing a successful store.
Dynamic Customer Flow: The customer flow system has been significantly reworked. Daily customer traffic is now much more dynamic and is influenced by factors such as Store Expansion, checkout capacity, and Customer Satisfaction.
Pricing App: The previous Stock App has been changed into the Pricing App. It is now focused specifically on product pricing and includes additional filtering options to make price management easier and more organized.
Shopping App & Smart Stock Tracking: Stock tracking has been integrated directly into the Shopping App. New All, In Stock, Low Stock, and Out of Stock filters allow you to quickly find products that need attention and order them directly. Products now also display their On-Shelf and Off-Shelf quantities. Low Stock detection is adaptive and evaluates your recent ordering behavior separately for each product instead of relying on one fixed stock threshold for every store.
Improvements
Employee System: Employee behavior has received extensive improvements. Many employee-related problems reported by players have been investigated and fixed, making employees significantly more reliable during normal gameplay.
Smarter Restockers: Restockers can now make better use of products remaining inside a box. If products remain after working on their current task, they can look for nearby compatible slots and continue stocking them instead of unnecessarily returning partially used boxes to the Box Holding Area.
Customer Purchasing Behavior: Customer purchasing decisions have been significantly improved, especially when it comes to expensive products. Customers now behave more naturally and make more balanced purchasing decisions.
Customer Reactions: Customers now have a much wider variety of reactions. When a customer thinks something is too expensive, their reaction can now reference the actual product type, such as a refrigerator or washing machine, making their feedback clearer and more useful.
Performance Optimization: Extensive CPU and GPU optimization has been completed, with especially important improvements on the GPU side. Overall frame times, performance, and stability have been significantly improved.
Save System: The save system has been strengthened with additional recovery mechanisms. The game already maintained backup save data, and it can now also detect and attempt to repair certain save-related problems automatically when possible.
Checkout Bell: Based directly on player feedback, the checkout bell will no longer ring while a Cashier is actively operating the checkout.
Megaphone Audio: While watching a gameplay video, I noticed feedback from a creator that the Megaphone did not sound powerful enough. Its audio has been increased and improved so it now feels much more like a proper Megaphone.
Shadow Quality: The noisy shadow artifacts reported by many players have been greatly reduced, especially underneath products, around Checkout Counters, and in other areas where they were particularly noticeable.
Balancing
Economy Rebalance: The economy has been adjusted to provide more meaningful progression. I identified several situations where players could earn money much faster than intended, and the systems contributing to this have been rebalanced.
Customer Purchasing: Customers are now more selective when purchasing expensive products. They can still buy sofas, armchairs, laptops, refrigerators, washing machines, and other high-value products, but they are less likely to repeatedly purchase large numbers of expensive products one after another.
Simply filling your store with only the most expensive products is therefore no longer the easiest way to become rich. Product Variety, Customer Satisfaction, customer traffic, pricing, and overall store management now play a much greater role in building a successful business.
This does not mean earning money has become unnecessarily difficult. A well-managed store can still be very profitable. The goal is to make progression feel rewarding and meaningful without making it either too easy or too difficult.
License Prices: Product License prices have been updated and rebalanced to provide smoother and more satisfying progression.
Store & Warehouse Expansion: Store Expansion and Warehouse Expansion prices, level requirements, and progression requirements have been updated to provide a more consistent progression as your business grows.
Equipment Progression: Requirements and unlock conditions for various equipment have also been changed and improved to create a better progression curve.
v0.1.2 has already gone through Public Testing with members of the Discord community, but balancing is something that benefits greatly from feedback from a much larger group of players.
After playing the update, please let me know what you think. If progression feels too easy, too slow, too expensive, too difficult, or simply feels wrong in a particular area, I genuinely want to hear about it. I will continue adjusting the balance based on your feedback.
Bug Fixes
Customer Navigation: Fixed several situations where customers could become stuck while entering the store, moving toward product inspection positions, or reaching the front position of a Checkout Counter queue. Customer navigation after store furniture is moved or repositioned has also been improved.
Fixed an issue that could prevent a Checkout Counter from being moved while a Cashier was assigned to it, even when there were no customers using the checkout. If there are no customers at the checkout, you can now move it whether a Cashier is assigned or not.
Fixed several conditions where stock quantities could be displayed incorrectly. Stock values should now update and display correctly.
Quick reminder for Display Model products: Their product boxes must be inside the Warehouse to count as available stock. Their exact location inside the Warehouse does not matter. Products that are still at a Loading Dock or currently being carried by an Unloader as part of the unloading process are not counted yet because they are not yet available for customer sales.
Fixed an issue that allowed discounted product quantities inside the Shopping cart to be increased beyond the intended limit.
Daily Deals: Fixed an issue where purchasing all available Daily Deal products and then reloading the game on the same in-game day could incorrectly generate a new set of discounted products. This issue started after stock limits were introduced to Daily Deals. Daily Deals now once again refresh normally on a daily basis, as they did before.
Fixed interaction problems with pallets placed on the highest levels of Pallet Racks. Players can now reliably take boxes from and place boxes onto these pallets.
Fixed many additional Restocker and Unloader edge cases and task-related issues reported by players.
Various other minor bugs, visual issues, employee issues, and quality-of-life problems have also been fixed.
Customer Flow & Customer Satisfaction
One of the biggest changes in v0.1.2 is the way daily customer traffic works.
I received a lot of feedback that customer numbers did not increase enough as stores became larger and that daily customer traffic could feel too similar from one day to another.
The system is now much more dynamic. The exact number of customers still naturally changes from day to day, but your overall customer potential is now influenced by several important factors.
Store Expansion: Expanding your store increases its customer potential. A larger and more developed store can attract more customers.
Checkout Capacity: Additional Checkout Counters can increase customer traffic up to a certain point. Checkout capacity matters, but simply adding unlimited Checkout Counters will not increase customer numbers forever.
Customer Satisfaction: Customer Satisfaction directly affects customer traffic in both directions. High satisfaction increases your customer potential, while low satisfaction reduces it.
Customer Satisfaction is therefore one of the most important factors in the new customer flow system.
A major part of Customer Satisfaction is Product Variety. Product Variety is based on product types, not the number of different models you own. For example, selling 12 different refrigerator models still only contributes to the Refrigerator product type.
Don't rely only on expensive products. Alongside expensive products such as refrigerators, washing machines, sofas, and laptops, also offer more affordable products such as microwaves, coffee machines, blenders, kettles, and toasters.
The more different product types you sell, the higher your Product Variety can become.
For a product type to contribute to Product Variety, it must be properly displayed in the store and available for customers to purchase. Only product types from Licenses you have unlocked are taken into account.
As your Product Variety increases, Customer Satisfaction gradually rises. Insufficient variety causes it to fall. Hitting customers or having too many customers reject products because they consider them too expensive will also reduce Customer Satisfaction.
This creates a much stronger connection between how you grow your store, what you sell, how you price your products, how satisfied your customers are, and how many people ultimately visit your business.
Smarter Stock Management
The Stock App changes I previously announced evolved while I was working on them.
Instead of keeping stock information and ordering separated, I decided it made much more sense to integrate stock tracking directly into the Shopping App, where you can immediately act on that information and order whatever you need.
The previous Stock App has therefore become the Pricing App, while the Shopping App now handles stock tracking and ordering.
The Shopping App now includes All, In Stock, Low Stock, and Out of Stock filters, allowing you to immediately find products that are running low or completely out of stock and order them without switching between different apps.
Products also display their On-Shelf and Off-Shelf quantities directly in the Shopping App, giving you a clearer picture of your stock while ordering.
The new Low Stock system avoids using one simple fixed threshold for every player. A rule such as "less than one box means Low Stock" can become very misleading once your business grows.
Instead, the game evaluates each product separately and analyzes your last five orders for that product. It considers how much you normally order and how much stock you typically maintain.
For example, imagine your store has grown significantly and you normally keep around 100 units of a particular laptop in stock. If that stock falls to around 50 or below, the game can recognize that the product is becoming low for your store.
A small store and a very large store should not use exactly the same Low Stock threshold. The new system adapts to your own scale and recent ordering behavior for each individual product.
Employee System Improvements
Employees were another major focus of v0.1.2. I spent a significant amount of time reviewing employee behavior, investigating reported problems, and improving how the different employee systems work.
Many of these reports came directly through Discord. I personally replied to players, investigated the situations they described, and continued improving the system based on those reports.
There are simply too many individual Restocker and Unloader fixes and improvements to list every single one here, but employees should now work much more reliably and intelligently overall.
One important example, which was also requested by players, is the new Restocker behavior.
Previously, Restockers were much more focused on the specific slot connected to their current task. If products remained inside their box afterward, their behavior could be unnecessarily rigid.
Now, when products remain inside the box, Restockers can intelligently check nearby compatible slots and continue stocking those remaining products.
This makes restocking more efficient, allows employees to make better use of the products they are already carrying, and reduces the number of partially used boxes unnecessarily returning to the Box Holding Area.
Economy & Customer Purchasing
The economy and customer purchasing systems have also received major changes in v0.1.2.
I identified that players could earn money much faster than intended in several situations. Some Daily Deal issues contributed to this, but customer purchasing behavior was also an important part of the overall balance.
Customers still purchase expensive products, but their decisions are now more realistic. In real life, people generally do not repeatedly buy sofas, armchairs, laptops, refrigerators, and other expensive products one after another without thinking about it. Customers in Home Store Simulator now behave more naturally in this regard as well.
The days of customers buying sofas as casually as groceries are over. 🙂
This does not prevent you from making good money. A well-managed store can still be very profitable. The difference is that simply selling only the most expensive products is no longer the strongest strategy by itself.
Product Variety, Customer Satisfaction, pricing, customer traffic, and overall store management now work together much more closely as part of the economy.
Additional improvements have also been made to customer purchasing decisions in the background.
The customer reaction system has also been expanded. Customers now have many more possible reaction lines, and when they consider a product too expensive they can identify the actual product type they are reacting to. For example, a customer may tell you that a refrigerator or washing machine feels too expensive instead of only giving a generic response.
Performance Optimization
Performance was another major focus of v0.1.2.
Both CPU and GPU workloads have been optimized, with particularly important improvements made on the GPU side. Overall frame times, performance, and stability have been significantly improved.
Testing has shown very noticeable results. On some systems, performance increases of up to approximately 60 FPS have been observed. One player testing the update, for example, reported an increase from around 120 FPS to 180 FPS.
Performance optimization cannot be represented by one fixed FPS number because every computer has different hardware, graphics settings, bottlenecks, and starting performance.
The important improvement is the reduction in the time required to process and render each frame, which is measured in milliseconds. Because FPS and frame time are directly related, systems that were already running at strong frame rates, such as 70-80 FPS or higher, can sometimes show especially large numerical FPS increases when frame time is reduced.
The optimization work applies across the game, but the final visible FPS improvement will naturally vary from computer to computer.
There are still additional areas I know can be optimized further. I did not want to delay v0.1.2 any longer, so performance optimization will continue across future updates alongside new content, fixes, and other improvements.
Important Fix: Character Moving on Its Own
Since the Early Access release, some players have reported a very unusual issue where their character could sometimes move on its own.
I spent a lot of time investigating this because the problem was extremely specific and difficult to reproduce.
Initially, I suspected connected gamepads. Some affected players told me that completely disconnecting their gamepad stopped the problem. Since Home Store Simulator does not officially support controllers yet, this initially appeared to be the most likely cause.
After further investigation, together with the information I received from affected players, I discovered a more unusual cause.
The game's default movement input system was also listening to joystick-style input devices. As strange as it may sound, certain USB or Bluetooth peripherals that are not actually gamepads can sometimes be detected as joystick-like input devices. Depending on the device, this can even happen with certain headsets or other connected peripherals.
This could create unintended movement input even when the player was not using a controller.
The movement input system has now been changed to prevent this identified cause from moving the character unexpectedly.
If you previously experienced this problem, I would especially appreciate it if you could test it again in v0.1.2. If your character still moves unexpectedly, please leave a comment under this announcement or contact me through Discord so I can continue investigating.
Save System Improvements
I have also continued strengthening the save system.
A small number of players experienced save-related problems. Through Discord, several of these players sent their save files directly to me. I personally inspected and repaired the affected files and sent them back so they could continue playing without losing their progress.
Those cases also helped me improve the save system itself.
Home Store Simulator already maintained backup save data, but additional recovery logic has now been added. When possible, the game can detect certain save-related problems, inspect the available data, and attempt to repair or rebuild the necessary information automatically.
Of course, no save system can guarantee recovery from every possible type of file damage, but the system is now considerably more resilient and can recover from certain problems on its own.
Public Testing & Discord
I have also started using Public Test versions before major updates, and I want to make this process much more systematic going forward.
When a Public Test version is available, you can join it through Steam by opening Home Store Simulator's Properties > Betas section and selecting the available test branch.
I will also soon create a dedicated Public Tester area on the Home Store Simulator Discord server.
Players who want to participate voluntarily will be able to share basic information about their system specifications and help test updates across a wider variety of hardware configurations.
This will allow me to communicate directly with testers, collect feedback in a much more organized way, and identify potential problems before updates are released to everyone.
I strongly recommend joining the Discord server if you want to report bugs, participate in testing, share suggestions, or contact me directly.
Discord makes investigating problems much easier because you can send screenshots, videos, save files, and detailed explanations of exactly what happened. I try to respond as quickly as I can, and I personally work with players when they report problems.
Join the Home Store Simulator Discord
There are also many additional fixes reported through Discord that I have not individually listed in these patch notes because the announcement would become unnecessarily long. In many cases, I have already personally replied to the players who originally reported those problems.
Coming Next
v0.1.1 and v0.1.2 focused heavily on strengthening the core foundation of Home Store Simulator. These updates introduced meaningful new systems while also improving reliability, balancing, employees, customer behavior, save safety, and performance.
That work will continue, but future updates will not only focus on bug fixes, system improvements, and performance optimization.
New features and new content will continue arriving alongside those improvements.
I know many of you are waiting for more products, more product types, more decoration options, more customization, and a richer store-building experience.
I have some announcements coming soon that I believe many of you will be very happy to see. I want to keep the details as a surprise for now. 🙂
I will also be updating the Steam Store page soon and adding a proper roadmap so you can see much more clearly where Home Store Simulator is heading and what I want to build in the future.
I also plan to use social media more actively so you can follow development, upcoming features, and what I am currently working on more easily.
My long-term vision for Home Store Simulator has always been much bigger than simply placing individual products around a store.
I want your store to eventually feel like the huge home-furnishing stores we all know, with complete spaces and rooms built around different themes and purposes.
I want you to be able to create complete room setups such as living rooms, bedrooms, children's rooms, and many other spaces, then decorate and design each one differently according to your own style.
That means more products, more furniture, more decorations, more variety, and many more ways to make your store feel unique.
Most importantly, I do not want to make all of these decisions alone.
I genuinely value your ideas, opinions, criticism, and suggestions. In upcoming announcements, I will ask the community directly what you think about different ideas and future systems. I want to discuss these decisions with you and use your feedback to help shape the game in a direction that as many players as possible can enjoy.
I believe Home Store Simulator has a very bright future, and your support is a huge part of the reason I believe that.
I will continue doing everything I can to improve the game, listen to you, and make Home Store Simulator better with every update.
And especially to everyone who purchased Home Store Simulator: thank you so much for your support. It genuinely means a lot to me.
Thank you again for all of your feedback, bug reports, suggestions, Public Testing, and support. ❤️