Hello, Hydroponic Farmers 🌱
A brand-new chapter has just arrived in Hydroponics Farm and Store Simulator. Chapter 15: Food Production is now available!
This update introduces a major shift in how you run your shop, now you can process harvested vegetables and fish into high value food product. From crunchy salads to flavorful soups and refreshing smoothies, your shop is about to level up into a full fledged food production center!
Welcome to the Food Production Era
In Chapter 15, we’re introducing a new system called Production Tools. These machines allow you to take raw commodities like vegetables or fish and transform them into Production Items. This is a new ready to sell products with greater value, and contract potential.
Here are just a few examples of what you’ll be able to produce:
- Green Salad using leafy greens
- Fish Soup made from good quality fish
- Veggie Smoothie crafted with fresh vegetables
These Production Items sell at higher prices compared to their raw ingredient counterparts, offering you an opportunity to increase profits significantly. But that’s not all, they also unlock new contract types, giving you new goals and rewards for meeting demand from external buyers.
Unlocking the Production Area
Before diving into food processing, you’ll first need to expand your store and unlock a new section called the Production Area. This is a dedicated space where you’ll place and operate your production tools. Once built, this area becomes the beating heart of your item processing operation.
From there, you can:
- Buy and place a variety of Production Tools
- Manage each machine’s ingredient requirements
- Collect finished products from the tool’s output into storage or put it into the shelf to sell
Each Production Tool is designed with its own unique recipe logic, meaning you'll need to prepare ingredients and manage your farming priorities to maintain a steady production line.
How Production Works
The process of creating Production Items is simple but strategic:
- Stock or Grow special-quality commodities from your growbed
- Insert these into the appropriate Production Tool
- Wait for the production cycle to complete
- Collect your new item and stock it on to storage or sell it into a shelf
To help sell these new items, you’ll gain access to a special new shelf type: the Food Rack. Designed specifically for processed commodities, this shelf makes it easy to display and manage your new products in the storefront.
Stay Organized with Production Storage
To help manage this new layer of gameplay, we’ve also added options for better organization. You can buy and configure new storage cabinets to handle only Production Items and place it in the Production Area. This keeps your general inventory clean and helps you plan your resource flows more efficiently.
You can now set:
- Storage slots dedicated to specific processed items
- Rules for which employee stock up and interact with which storage
It’s all about giving you the power to customize your workflow and maximize both space and income potential.
The Production Item system is more than just a new feature, it’s a game changer for how you play. It adds a new goals and strategies through contract integration and also selling from store. By adding this system, we hope to offer a new layer of satisfaction for players who love building efficient farms and stores and who are always looking for new ways to optimize, automate, and grow.
Updated Restocking Behavior
Other than that, we also addressed several player requests to improve employee behavior. One of the updates focuses on how employees handle excess stock during restocking. Previously, leftover items were returned to the table instead of storage. Now, employees with a restocking stat of 50 or higher will automatically place excess stock back into the storage.
We can’t wait to see how you build out your Production Area and start cooking up something special. As always, we’re listening to your feedback to continue improving the Early Access experience.
If you’re enjoying the journey so far, consider leaving us a review on Steam. It really helps our small dev team!
Thanks again for being with us, and happy farming & food crafting! 🥗🐟🍹
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3152540/Hydroponics_Farm__Store_Simulator/