Build 26313478

The biggest update since launch. A fifth girl joins the restaurant, the kitchen gets four helpers you can buy, the plating table gets eight new decorations, and every dialogue portrait now moves. Your saves carry over.

Hoshiko, the fifth girl

On the day Yummy leaves for the pier, the night doesn't turn to morning. A light is burning on the island's highest hilltop. Follow it up. If you're already past Yummy's trip to the pier, the night comes at the end of your next day.

• She joins the restaurant with her own swimsuit, Riptide, and her own talk menu. Customers can ask for her by name.
• Six new recipes, taught one at a time as her devotion grows, each in a short scene: Hirame Nigiri, Hirame Sashimi, Crab Maki, Spicy Salmon Gunkan, Spicy Tuna Roll and her own Shooting Star Roll. Flounder comes to the kitchen with them.
• Sixteen new orders built on her dishes, from single plates to sets like the Spicy Duo and the Crab Trio, up to the Starry Night Feast, which uses all six.
• Her max-affinity story: take her back up the hill at full affinity for a night under a meteor shower. It ends in four voiced scenes, adds a fifth card to the Memories screen, and unlocks Nothing in her wardrobe.
• All 85 of her lines are voiced.

Kitchen tools

Four buy-once helpers on the shop shelf, each a Japanese spirit that takes over a piece of the busywork:

• Tsukumo Blade ($600): cuts whatever lands on a board.
• Spirit Makisu ($1,200): rolls the mat once the recipe on it is right, and carries the roll to the knife.
• Kitsune Courier ($1,800): fetches what the order needs and lays it out for you.
• Shikigami Chef ($2,500): make the first piece of an item and it makes the rest.

Each tool has a switch above the Roll it! button, so you can put any of them to rest when you'd rather do the job yourself. They never take anything out of your hand, never roll the wrong recipe, and stop while the game is paused.

Decorating the plate

• Eight new decorations join the Lotus Flower: Candle, Diamond, Copper Coin, Folding Fan, Feather, Scent Sachet, Satin Bow and Shell Dish, from $6 to $120.
• Three of them do more than tip. Each Copper Coin adds a tenth of the order's price to what it pays. A Scent Sachet keeps her perfectly still. A Feather makes her flinch at every piece you set down. One sachet cancels one feather.
• The Lotus Flower is now $30, down from $250. It cost about ten orders' pay, and you told us so.
• The item tray shows how many decorations are on the plate out of how many it takes (2/5, say), and turns red when the plate is full.
• A piece on the cursor now rotates through all four directions, a quarter turn at a time, instead of flipping between two. Rolls no longer skip a turn while you move them.

If you bought lotuses at the old price

Every lotus you still hold is refunded the difference. On top of that, every save from before this update gets a thank-you pack: five lotuses, three coins and one of each other new decoration, which also covers those of you who already used yours. A notice with your own numbers appears the first time you walk around the restaurant after loading.

The shop

• Clicking an item now asks before buying ("Buy Candle for $25?"), so a stray click while scrolling no longer spends your money. Escape cancels.
• A purchase now ends in a burst of confetti and stars. The old snow rendered as flat orange squares.

On the plate

• The leaves of Echo of Leaves now lie over each girl's body instead of standing stiffly off it, and cover her properly from every angle. Sushi still lands on them.
• Hair no longer sinks through the table when she lies down, and settles instead of flying around when the plate shakes.
• The wardrobe cards wear their leaves the same way, and their hair sways gently.
• The wardrobe is greyed out while a girl is on the table, so it can no longer be opened in the middle of a nyotaimori.
• A new card under the clock shows who is on the plate, with her affinity and devotion. Hover over it for the names.

A livelier restaurant

The girls no longer stand on one spot all day. Yummy and Hoshiko stroll the hall and sit on its benches. Kuroneko walks her corridor and kneels on the cushions of the south tatami room, which is now open. Arisa stays at her post. Everyone holds still while you're in a conversation, in the kitchen or at the table, and nobody walks into anybody.

Take Nami along as your companion and she now brings a little of the sea with her, swimming through the air beside you.

Portraits and voices

• Every dialogue portrait now moves like a Live2D drawing. The girls breathe, tilt their heads and blink, and their hair swings lock by lock. All five are drawn in the same style now: Yummy and Kuroneko are redrawn and keep their look, and Arisa and Nami are redrawn to match their 3D models.
• The round avatars on the end-of-day screen are redrawn for all five girls.
• Yummy, Kuroneko and Nami: lines that were cut off, misread or missing are fixed, Yummy no longer says one line twice, a few of Nami's lines that were much louder than the rest are levelled, and the talk-menu replies that had no voice now have one.

Orders

A recipe you've just learned now shows up far more often for the first three days. Before, a new single dish turned up roughly one day in twenty-five. In testing it now appears among the day's first four orders more than nine times in ten. Recipes learned before this update aren't boosted.

Achievements

Four new achievements: Mythical encounter (recruit Nami), Nami likes me!, Starstruck (recruit Hoshiko) and Hoshiko likes me!. If you've already done what one asks, it unlocks the next time you load your save.

Languages

• Portuguese is now Brazilian Portuguese throughout. Every line was reviewed and about 300 changed, and the language menu now says Português (Brasil).
• Korean was reviewed in full, about 330 lines changed: mistranslations and garbled recipe notes fixed, dish names made consistent, and consistent forms of address.
• Wrong characters in the found-recipe notes in Chinese and Japanese are fixed.
• The quest log had no text for taking Yummy to the pier, and one of Arisa's recipe lessons was missing lines in German. Both are filled in.
• Hoshiko, her story and everything else new in this update are in all ten languages.

A smaller install

The game takes less than half the space it did: about 1.6 GB, down from 3.7 GB.

Fixes

• Turning down the music did nothing to the restaurant's track until the day ended. It started at full volume every time the restaurant loaded.
• Finishing the last order on the day's list before closing time could leave the day stuck. It now ends after that order.
• The pattern bonus in the tip now follows how much of the pattern you've covered. Before, covering any one of its cells paid the whole bonus.
• On Nami, the plating patterns didn't line up with her body. They now sit on her the way they do on the other girls.
• The California Roll had salmon inside instead of crab, and its icon looked washed out.
• Pressing a number key in the kitchen swapped your tray for a demo set.
• The minimize button on the fish bucket did nothing.
• The tuna block in the kitchen was counted as salmon.
• The Spider Roll showed up as Eel Maki in every language.
• A Russian achievement title ended in a Ukrainian letter.

Thank you for sticking with the restaurant, and for every report. The lotus price above came straight from you. Keep them coming.