12-Month Sales Record

I was browsing through a list of trophies for Pocket Clothier. I have received everything except two :

• 5-Month Sales Record
• 12-Month Sales Record

Of course we have to get those two as well. But how? I thought it was impossible since the weather and economy change all the time. Those two factors make the Monthly Profit go up and down even if everything else stay the same.

It took a bit of effort but we finally did it.  *cheering*

It is most achievable at the beginning of the game. This is how we did it.

Step 1 - Increase Price to 20 %

I did this to increase the price gap I can work with. It may not be necessary but I will find out when I play again next time.

 ( Menu > Shop > Shop Policies )

Step 2 - Set up Shelves and Racks as usual while making sure Monthly Balance does not go red

Step 3 - Keep Monthly Balance as low as you can the end of the day

Before the last customer walks out of the door, you want to make sure the Monthly Balance is as low as possible but higher than the previous month. If it goes over too much, open Order Settings and click on Additional Order to do a Manual Order.

Click on Additional Order

You can order the same product again and again until you are happy with the number.

Increase the # of Orders by clicking on the left green arrow. Then Place Order

Repeat Step 2, and Step 3 until you get your trophies.

Other Tips

• If you think your Monthly Balance is very close to the previous month, save the game - so you can reload if needed.
• The shop is quite crowded in Month 12. You might want to buy a few more things earlier in the Month ( or Day if you prefer ). Otherwise it'll be difficult to make the next few months generate higher Monthly Profit

How to Develop A Perfect Dish

I have been wanting to do a guide about Dish Development in Cafe Nippon, but you know me, I try and avoid posting guides.  >_<  Anyway, I will give it a go here.

What I am going to explain is how Enna develops her perfect dishes in the game. There are other ways to develop dishes but this is how she does it. I am going to cover two main parts here :

• Taste, Appeal, and Price
• Inner Stats : Health Up, Brain Up, Texture, Aroma, Appearance, Volume, Rarity, Charisma

If you don't like the details, this is my favorite way :

1. Use Top-Class Pork as the 1st Ingredient, and Gold Flakes as the 2nd - Keep using this combination until there's no effect on the Dish's Inner Stats ( 100, 89, 100, 95, 100, 84, 100, 100 )
2. Use Aged Cheese ( one Ingredient only ) to develop, creating the final Dish with all Inner Sats 100.

Next, we will talk about the details.

Taste, Appeal, and Price

When we pick our Ingredients, we can see how compatible it is to the Dish we are developing. The compatibility levels are : 

1. Bad
2. Doubtful
3. Normal
4. Good
5. Perfect

If we mix ingredients that are either Bad or Doubtful, you will see a massage popping up half way of the development saying they are not compatible. If we choose a combination that are either Good or Perfect, we get a message saying they are compatible.

Not Compatible : Bad/Bad, Bad/Doubtful, Doubtful/Bad, Doubtful/Doubtful, Bad/Normal, Doubtful/Normal

Compatible : Perfect/Perfect, Perfect/Good, Good/Perfect, Good/Good, Perfect/Normal, Good/Normal















Price is generally effected by the rank of the ingredients. If we pick Gold Flakes, we can almost always get a Price Increase.

However, in the later play-throughs, I realized Taste, Appeal, and Price are a little random. It can generate different results even if we use the same Ingredients on the same Dish. That's when I realized I should focus on the Inner Stats first.

Inner Stats

Inner stats are totally predictable. You can even work out how many times you need to develop the Dish to make it perfect.

Each Dish has 8 Inner Stats : Health Up, Brain Up, Texture, Aroma, Appearance, Volume, Rarity, Charisma. Each Stat is represented by a number, from 0 to 100.

Each Ingredient also has 8 Inner Stats. However it's not shown in the game. Luckily we've got them all worked out. ( Ingredients and Numbers )

Before we see some examples, let's see how Dish Development works. There are 2 steps :

1. Adds 1st Ingredient's stats to Dish's stats
2. Adds 2nd Ingredient's stats to the result of Step 1

So you can see, it's not adding two Ingredients' Stats together and then add to the Dish's Stat. That's why we can get different result when we put the Ingredients in different orders.

Example 1

Example 2

Notice numbers are capped at 100.

When Inner Stats are increased, Taste/Appeal/Price would usually increase at the same time. I haven't got any Taste/Appeal/Price decrease since I started using the combinations that would only increase all Inner Stats. ( Best Ingredients for Developing Dishes? )

In most cases, when Inner Stats all reach 100, the Taste/Appeal/Price are also at their maxed values. ( Taste/Appeal/Price Caps ) However, sometimes Taste/Appeal/Price are not yet capped. When this happens, I simply Develop the Dish without any Ingredients. Eventually they will be at the capped values. I sometimes throw in an Aged Cheese to increase the chance of making Taste/Appeal/Price capped.


Tips and facts :

• Chef's Cooking skill effects the time needed for Dish Development. A Chef with 999 Cooking skill can finish developing in one night.
• The higher the Dish Rank is, the more the Exp the Chef will receive ( Rank 9 Dish gives 900 Exp; Rank 6 Dish gives 600 Exp. )
• Simply Develop a Dish without any Ingredients to make a "Copy" of the Dish.

Useful Spreadsheets : See all spreadsheets available Here

• Cafeteria Nipponica Recipes
• Best Ingredients for Dish Developing?
• Ingredients and Numbers
• Taste/Appeal/Price Caps
• Treasure Hunt for Ingredients
• Treasure Chests

How to Rank Up Stores

This is based on my experience. It has been working pretty well for me. I hope it will work for you too.

There are a few things effecting your Store Ranking. ( check your Store Ranking in Menu > Area )

1. Store Popularity
2. Menu - The Dishes you Serve
3. Clientele
4. Staff
5. Furniture Type
6. Store Size

While some of the factors are related to each other, I will talk about them separately.

1. Store Popularity

Each Store's popularity can be found in Menu > View Info > Store Info. Click ( or Tap ) on the little triangles to see different Stores. As you can see in the picture below, the green bar indicates Region population, and the pink bar is the Store popularity.

I like to think of Region population as the number of a particular type of customers living in that region, and Store popularity is the number of seats we provide for that particular group in our Stores. This saying turned out to be confusing, let's try something different.

Let's think of it this way:

Green bar - How popular your store is in that particular region
Pink bar - How popular your store is to a particular group

Our first goal is to make all pink bars showing after the green

We can see in the picture above, Student, Youth, and Businessman have pink bars showing after green. So they are set for now.

We have to work on Hswife, Elderly, and Tourist's Store popularity by adding some new items - read  Tables and Decoration for more details.

Remodel the Store changes the region population.

Region population + Store population --> Customer Popularity

Once you see the pink bars start appearing in all groups, you are all set for the first step. Later in the game you will have more money and more items available. When you upgrade your tables and decorations, the store popularity will raise even more naturally. But we are only talking about our first step here. It's more important to get all pink bars showing than, making one of them all the way up and leave some green.

2. Menu

It is important to serve good food. What I usually do is serving a Dish that has the highest Taste and Appeal stats. Having multiple Dishes on the Menu would bring up monthly cost. It is recommended to server one Dish only for each store.

It is a good idea to master at least one Dish in the Starting Menu, so you can get a good start of the game.

3. Clientele

Quite often I get a Store Ranked Up message soon after new Clientele starts to visit the restaurant. ( As long as you've provided enough seats for them. the store popularity is high enough. ) I found the fastest way to bring in new Clientele is to run those Plans. ( Read more about it Here. )

4. Staff

Staff Numbers - A larger Store requires more Staff. 

The Skills - Skillful Staff serve faster.

5. Furniture Type

4 Seats or 2 Seats?
Generally, 4 Seat Tables are better than 2 Seat Tables. However, if you start seeing people walking to the door and leaving straight away, it means you need to replace some 4 Seat Tables with 2 Seat ones. Some customers don't have many friends to go out with, they would only take the 2 Seat Tables.

And of course you want to keep some Counters. Special guests would only use those.

Table Rank

After you get Store Popularity sorted, Tables upgraded to 4 Seats, it is about time to think about getting Tables with higher Ranks.

6. Store Size

You can fit more Furniture and Staff into a bigger size Store -->  higher Store Popularity. I was able to have Rank 1 Stores in the 1st and 2nd Area. ( Sunny Village and Greenville ) without any expansion. I don't usually expand in those two Areas simply because I move them soon after they reach Rank 1 or I've discovered all the Chests, depending on what I wanted to do there.

If you have done all of above, then having Rank 1 Stores is just a matter of time.

Best Ingredients for Developing Dishes?

Edit: Updated some of the values. ( 4 Nov 2012 )

Maybe if I were a good programmer -- but I'm not. Plus I don't think I can be bothered to use my human eyes and brain to sort this out by hand. *sigh*

Maybe Lazycat can do it? He is the best person at solving this sort of problem using his programming code. Let's ask him! I linked him the Ingredient Effects and anxiously waited for his reply. "No problem." OMG, he said yes.

I was too excited to sit still so I left to do the dishes. Within an hour, I got the result and the code itself!

Here's what I requested for :

A list of Ingredient combinations that would only give positive effect on the dish to be developed.

With a bit of editing, I came up with two tables.

1. Aged Cheese is not involved
2. Aged Cheese is involved

Aged Cheese is the only Ingredient that would give all the attributes a plus. However it can be difficult to get. You might want to save it till your Dish is nearly perfect.

Before you say IT DOES NOT WORK, please read the explanation after the Tables.

Table 1. Aged Cheese not involved

Table 2. Aged Cheese involved

Okay, Let's explain.

Why does it not work sometimes? It gets tricky when the Dish in development is close to perfect. Have a look at the pictures below. We can see, when the same Ingredients are put in different orders, we get different results because it follows two rules:

1. Whenever the attribute is over 100, it's set to 100
2. 1st Ingredient first. -- The game actually adds up the Ingredient 1's attributes to the Dish first, calculates it, and then adds the 2nd Ingredient's up.

Take P 1, Brain Up attribute as an example:
     Top-Class Pork does +22 to Brain Up, but Gold Ice Cream is already 100, so it's set to 100, then Gold Flakes does -11, so the final result is 89.

Let's look at P 2 Brain Up attribute:
     Gold Flakes does -11, to Gold Ice Cream's 100 -- that's 89. Then Top-Class Pork's +22 brings it over 100, so we get 100 as a result.

P 1. Top-Class Pork 1st, Gold Flakes 2nd

P 2. Gold Flakes 1st, Top-Class Pork 2nd

That's why, with Table 1, when your Dishes are close to perfect, you might not get the result you expect. However, with Table 2, as long as Aged Cheese is the second Ingredient, you can expect the attributes buffed up.

Tips and facts:

- Aged Cheese and Green Onion are the only two ingredients having no negative effects.

And of course, if the result is still not as expected after you've finished reading this, it is probably just me having some typos.  :p  Please do let me know. Thank you.

Many thanks to Lazycat again for being so amazing.  :D

Seebs made a really cool applet to help us find the best possible combination based on the ingredients we have, with this tool there is no need for guess work anymore.

"... lets you enter a dish's current stats, select the ingredients you have, and it'll tell you which combination gives the largest boost to stats." - Seebs

Here's a link to it : The Cool Seebs Applet  ( Thank you, Seebs! )

Have fun cooking!

- Enna

Develop Dishes Without Any Ingredients

Enna has been so silly. She did not know it is possible to develop dishes without any ingredients. Yup, she, not me. -.-

Select the Dish you wish to develop, Remove all the Ingredients, Start Cooking!

Now Enna can reproduce her Chicken Bowl without waiting for the hard-to-get-in-the-early-months Boned Chicken and Rice. She can also make extra high rank dishes without wasting ingredients or getting the perfect attributes effected.

We had a Top-Grade Sushi with all attributes maxed to 100, but the Taste/Appeal was 899/999.  ( The maximum Taste/Appeal for this dish is 999/999. ) When we tried developing it without any ingredients, the Taste went all the way up to 999. Wasn't it wonderful!  =D

Yeah, I know I know. I decided to spend some time playing Diablo 3 the other night, but the server was down for maintenance.  T_T  Therefore, I started a new Cafe called Happy Enna.

Power Leveling

Power Leveling

Ray Coffer worked as a Ninja waiter for a long time. He took his time leveling.

One day, he was called in to be a temp 5-Star Chef. After a few months, he decided to get back to being a Ninja.

Right after the the job change, the Assistant spammed the screen with lots of messages. I was like "Woah!" The Screen looked like the picture on the right. All the sudden everyone changed from Kitchen to Floor leveled up at the same time. What happened?

It turned out that after your staff become a level 5, 5 Star Chef, they still keep accumulating the Exp, secretly. When you do a job change, the Exp will be used on the new jobs.

Chefs gain Exp much faster than those working in the Floor Area. Therefore it is a good idea to swap people around every now and then. Chefs can also gain Exp from Dish Development. How much Exp they can get from Dish Development depends on the rank of the Dish :

1 Star Dish => 100 Exp
2 Star Dish => 200 Exp
3 Star Dish => 300 Exp
and so on
9 Star Dish => 900 sweet Exp.  :)

A small Tip here -- Switch the staff before you Change their Jobs, otherwise the Assistant will not let you go easily.

I switched Ray Coffer from the Kitchen to Floor before he finished developing the Gold Ice Cream. It was so funny to see him jumping up and down with the new dish.   ^_^

A Monkey Chef ?

Discovering New Dishes

The cute Assistant always knows better than our chefs. Whenever we are about to discover a new dish that's not in our Recipe collection, she says "A great combination."

After the new dish is discovered, the new Recipe will be added to the Recipe collection.

I haven't had any luck finding more new Recipes. If you are the lucky one, please do leave a comment so we can share around.  :)  Thank you!

Discovering New Dishes

Hina and Her Soba in Detail

Let's so straight to the point. How do you get the Housewife Hina and then receive Soba from her?

There are two main stages:

1. Getting Hina to visit
2. Serve a Rice dish

Pic 1 : Hina's Arrival

Pic 2 : Steps of Getting Hina

The sequence is like this :

Artist -> Lingerie Seller -> Adventurer -> Singer -> Celebrity -> TV Personality -> Exec. Assistant -> Hina

Artist gives Point Card.

Lingerie Seller gives Hostel Promotion.

Adventurer gives Theme Song.

Singer gives Add Spring Water.

Celebrity gives Endorsement.

TV Personality gives Free Vouchers.

Exec. Assistant does give you a plan but it does not help getting Hina.

Therefore, to quickly get Hina, the best way is to run those plans as soon as you can. Once you run the plan, the next housewife starts visiting. If the plan is not done by the time that particular housewife reaches 100 points, the next housewife will start coming anyway.

There isn't a plan from Exec. Assistant you can run to get Hina though. You will just have to wait until Exec. Assistant reaches 100 points. Although, I've read if you have Seafood Soup on the Menu, it will also trigger Hina's visit. ( I didn't have Seafood Soup on my Menu when Hina came. But you can give it a go if you are curious. )

Now, Stage 2 : Let's Serve Rice

Most people have trouble here. I was suggested serving Crab Fried Rice last time but it took ages so I decided to server all kinds of Rice dishes and finally got her. This time, I decided to try just plain Rice ( 4 Stars, Brain up 73, Aroma 90, Appearance 22, the rest 100 ). Hina came in, tried the Rice and gave me the Soba straight away.

I've also noticed, if she followed her friends in, even if she tried the Rice, she wouldn't say a word. That is why sometimes we need to wait a bit.

I was just curious so I reloaded the game and tried serving Crab Fried Rice. ( 5 Stars ) Five months passed and she had tried the dish many times but she just kept quiet. So I am wondering, since Crab Fried Rice worked for some people, maybe it's a little random each playthough?

I hope this helps people getting the Soba. If you have any questions, please leave a comment and we will try and work it out together.

How to Remove A Dish

Aww, I have not been lazy about posting. It is just that I have been working on a really big list for Cafe Nippon. It kind of requires me to play though the whole game. I am just going to post a small one here today since I have not finished that big project.

It may appear to you that it is quite simple to remove a dish from the menu. But I didn't think it was possible the first time I played the game. I thought the only way to remove a dish was to switch it to another dish. I only realized later that you can just simply remove a dish.

Here's How:

1. Menu > Dishes > Select Dishes
2. Select the Dish you wish you remove
3. Click the "Remove" Button on the bottom left

Simple as that!  ^_^

My next post will be Hina and her Soba. I realized a lot of people are still having a bit of trouble getting her Soba. I will make a post about that in details.

Where Do You Get Shark?

It was from the 3rd chest we found at that place, Veggie Market in Greenville. We opened the chest up and found those pieces of paper:

3rd Chest, Veggie Market, Greenville

Oh, yes! More Recipes!! So you need Shark Fin Soup + Caviar + Foie Gras to make Bird's Nest Soup. What about Shark Fin Soup? As you see in the picture, Shark Fin Soup Recipe is missing more than half of the paper!

Could this Bird's Nest Soup be our masterpiece dish? Could it be the most expensive, exotic food we are able to serve our customers? Do you know where to get Shark meat?

We started to panic. We decided to go through all the treasure hunting places to find the recipe. Or even, maybe the Pumpkin company may sell Shark meat? We talked to all the customers, served them all kinds of dishes even if they are not very profitable.

We found nothing. T_T Our chefs were all very anxious. WHAT IF other restaurants found the recipe FIRST!? We Googled, and Wikied. To our surprise, we found the Shark Fin Soup Recipe from 大盛りグルメ食堂. The Japanese had made it already. Luckily they were so kind and shared the secret.

The truth is

• There is no Shark in Cafe Nippon. ( They made it that way so it's safe for kids to play. :p )
• Shark Fin Soup is made of Seafood Soup, Tasty Fish, and Secret Sauce.
• The Shark Fin Soup Recipe is discovered by Chefs developing dishes.

Note: The Story above is made up by Enna for entertaining purpose. She sometimes thinks she lives in the game she plays. She also talks about herself as a third person occasionally. For the full list of Cafe Nippon Recipe, please click Here.

How to Hire the Special Employees

We can hire special employees one by one from the Plan. We have to first negotiate with them. There are three options when we do so :

• Raise the salary
• Send small gifts
• Send expensive offers

As most employers would do, I always neglect to raise their starting salary. And that is why when I read that you can get all of the special people by just sending them expensive offers, and keep the starting salary to 0.1k, I had to give it a go.

Does it work? Yes. Is it worth it? It depends.

Hire Alton Green

Take Alton Green in the picture as an example, I sent him loads of expensive offers and hired him successfully. It cost 630k in total. But I get to pay him 0.1k per month until he asks for a pay raise.

I tried again. This time I raised the starting salary without any other gifts or offers. I managed to get him by giving him a starting salary 2.7k. ( 32.4k/year ) This turned out to be a better outcome for me as I usually just start another game soon after the game "ends" ( 16Y 3M )

If you are just playing this game for the first time. I wouldn't worry too much about those special people. If you do want to give it a go, save first, that way you can just go Menu > System > Title Screen > Start and load it back if you are not happy with it.

Here's a list of special people you can hire ( sorted by their first names )

1. Alton Green
2. Ann Nonymous
3. Balsa Mick
4. Clemin Tyne
5. Ginela Clawson
6. Gordon Ramsly
7. Julia Kid ( Thanks to Hasseno for the info <3 )
8. Margie Fuller
9. Natalie Duvet
10. Pine Appleton
11. Rachel Raygun
12. Snowy Hilton

Good luck and have fun!  =D

Note : We know the skills of the special staff will be carried onto the next game you play if you manage to "finish" the game ( 16Y3M ). We don't know if the salary will be carried or reset to 0.1k again when you try and negotiate with the special employees in the new game. I will update the post when I find out.

Confirmed by shukuen that special employees' salary won't be carried over to your next game. Therefore if you have already hired some with expensive salary, don't worry. How much you will need to pay them in the next game is depended on the negotiation next time.