Update — the cat café is open: service days, coins, upgrades, and a Sushi level

This is the biggest update since the playtest opened. It reworks the core loop around the thing testers asked for most: something to optimise for once a recipe works.

The cat café is open

• Every kitchen now feeds a café. Cats walk in, wait, sit, eat, react, and pay.
• Build your factory in your own time, then press START THE DAY. A timed service day begins, cats arrive on a schedule with one big rush, and you can keep building while it runs.
• Nothing scores and nothing spoils while you are planning.
• The coins you earn during the day decide the result: pass, 2 stars, or 3 stars.

Money and upgrades

• Every plate pays a base price plus tips for freshness and fast service. Coins persist between days.
• Beat your best day on a level to bank the difference. Your first 2-star and 3-star days pay a one-time bonus.
• A new Upgrades shop in the build phase: café furnishings that let cats wait in comfort, factory upgrades that halve a machine's processing time in every kitchen, and decorations. Anything can be refunded at 80% while planning.

New level: Sushi

• Four levels are now playable: the pasta tutorial, Hamburger, Sushi, and Ramen. Ramen unlocks once you have earned enough stars on the café levels.

Freshness is now time-based

• Food ages from the moment it is made, wherever it is — on a belt, inside a machine, or waiting on the counter. Serve within the window for full freshness; every extra second costs a little.
• A one-time explainer appears on the first level where spoilage matters. Click the freshness gauge to reopen it.

Controls guide

• Press F1 in any level, or open Esc → Controls. The key chips show your actual bindings and your keyboard layout.
• Non-QWERTY keyboards: the tutorial now accepts the physical WASD positions and shows the matching keys under a step when the letters differ.

Screens

• A new greeting card before each level: the dish, how many cats are coming, the day length, the coin targets, and how a plate is paid.
• A new results screen: stars awarded one by one, a coin count-up, and a Retry that restarts the day with your layout intact.
• HUD: a coin goal badge, a rush forecast, an ageing warning, and dishes-per-minute on the goal table.
• Level select shows your total stars and the coin band behind each star.

Tutorial

• The belt-anchor step has a looping demo clip, rotation is now taught, and the tutorial has no timer.

Fixed

• Dishes stacked on the counter while cats went unfed after loading a level from the menu or restarting.
• Stars were sometimes not recorded after a passed day.
• Cats leaving the café still counted toward the house cap during a rush, so arrivals were turned away from free seats.
• The 3-star target was unreachable on every level.
• Move mode and the belt tool could both be armed at once.
• Speed buttons un-paused the game behind the pause menu, and the camera zoomed while scrolling in Settings.
• Grill smoke and fire kept burning through a jammed line.
• Level-select pins did not respond to clicks.
• HUD elements showed through the greeting screen.
• Developer level-skip keys left in the previous build have been removed.

Also

• Japanese covers the whole new layer: café, shop, greeting and results screens, and the controls guide.
• The pause menu, world map, and controls card fit 21:9, 16:10, and 4:3 displays.
• The café pavilion has a roof that fades as you zoom in, and lighting has been re-baked on every level.
• The game pauses when the window loses focus.
• Steam leaderboards are paused for this playtest while the café becomes the goal.

The playtest is free and open — request access from this page. If you play, the feedback survey is the most useful thing you can send, and this build changes almost everything it asks about.

— Fbs Games