Hello! Following the rework done to employees, today’s patch features some changes that make them more efficient in addition to more fixes and a new hand device.
A small issue in which employees would sometimes drop their box while finishing restocking is being investigated, it may have to do with the new time acceleration perk.

Changelog:

- Winter event has been removed.

- Implemented a new device requested by the community: the ordering device. It allows players to order products by clicking on shelves in store or spots in storage and its shopping list is shared with the one in the manager’s blackboard. Six physical devices can be found below the perks blackboard. Controls:
* Right click to add the selected product box from the shopping list.
* Left click to subtract the selected product box from the shopping list.
* Build (E or assigned key) to buy the cargo.

- Related to previous, MART OS 2.0. star perk will make the new ordering device show useful additional info like how many products of a certain type you have in store (in boxes too) or how many boxes you need to fill the store. If players add up both values, they will know how many boxes of a certain product they need in order to fill their store and hence managing their stock in a much better way.

- Rewrote part of the restocker code in a more efficient way, the freezes that occurred when employees were assigned to restock but there was nothing to do should be gone.

- Rewrote part of the storage manager code, employees dedicated to it should prioritize storage in the following way:
* First: labeled shelf that matches the product. From closest to the manager’s room to the farthest.
* Second: Any unlabeled shelf. From closest to the farthest.
* Third: labeled shelf with any unassigned spot. From closest to the farthest.

- Employees dedicated to storage managing should now merge boxes if possible. Also improved this behavior for restockers.

- The cases where employees would take the same task at the same time should happen less often now.

- Players should now be able to change names of hired employees when clicking on their names in the Assignment tab. Make sure to accept the change by pressing Enter.

- Players are now be able to select their preferred clock acceleration factor from 2x to 5x, which could be useful when high factors make employees miss their pathing in certain layouts.

- Looking at storage boxes in shelves will now also make product information appear on the top-right corner.

- Added a new button in the game’s main menu for copying the game’s logs in the clipboard, this way players having a certain issue won’t have to copy it from the saves folder. It also removes some useless parts automatically.

- Fixed a collision issue while placing bamboo potted plants.

- Closing and opening checkout lanes is now restricted to the manager’s permission.

Greetings players, during last month the threshold of 10 million downloads was surpassed among more than 8,5 million unique users. The two members of this project wish you all a cozy new year.

Thanks for playing and here's a toast to a year hopefully full of constant updates and good brooming moments.

Changelog:
- Implemented a new kind of perks in the improvement blackboard called Star Perks, these will cost more than one franchise point and will feature advanced upgrades. So far, the following are available:
* A perk that converts the trash container just outside into a recycling one.
* A perk that updates the software in the pricing machine and introduces an option for it to automatically set all products pricing to the desired percentage.
* A perk that makes time pass five times faster. Can only be triggered during nights when all customers have left the store and employees are busy in restocking or storage. Once acquired, a clock will appear in the manager’s room and players will be able to click on it to activate/deactivate the feature. If employees finish their restocking tasks it will deactivate by itself. This kind of time altering features may be expected troublesome, if issues are found feel free to post a topic about it.

- Implemented a skin system for brooms and the first five skins are rewards that can be acquired from a capsule machine in front of the supermarket that uses winter event’s rewards as coins. Some skins are rarer than others and their rarity is indicated by their respective star color in the broom-selecting machine (gold, silver and bronze).

- Players’ broom skin of choice can be set in a machine next to the capsule machines until a more refined way is developed. Skins are only visualized when a player is carrying them.

- Moderately increased the threshold for cashiers to level up as it was too fast. Players may notice a reduction in their cashiers’ grades.

- Cashiers leveling up will progressively decrease the time they take in checkouting products added to the time saves provided from perks. Note for now this will reach a cap inherent to how the game queues NPC tasks but it should be noticeable.

- Security crew leveling up will also make them progressively hit thieves faster.

- Employees will suffer a small speed penalty if they are not happy.

- Implemented a secondary way of managing stats, this could improve problems related to a few players crashing every new day.

- Implemented a system that will move old backups to an auxiliary folder in the save location, this way Steam Cloud won’t act wrong when trying to sync too many files (there’s a limit).

- Added a new setting in General options for hosts to automatically end the day if desired in case they want to go AFK in an online game.

- Adjusted potted sprout and potted bamboo decoration colliders so they can better overlap with other entities or the store.

- Fixed an issue related to thieves that made them drop the same product several times in a row instead of the actual list they stole.

- Limited opening and closing the store and buying space expansions to the manager’s role in multiplayer games.

- For better readability, unlock/require information fields in the perk’s blackboard will now display bigger if there’s only one field to show.

- Extended Winter event until day 8th for the stragglers and Minigrusches will always give a star token.

Have done some changes to employee’s code in preparation for next week optimizations like game’s freezing when employees are assigned but have nothing to do, better restocking and storage prioritization, or employees merging boxes contents when assigned to storage.