Restaurant City Now Allows 24 Hour Cooking

As we told you in late May, Playfish has been hard at work bringing a feature to Restaurant City that many users have been clamoring for – 24 hour cooking. The time has arrived where such a feat is indeed possible, but this addition comes with much more complexity than simply allowing your restaurant to stay open for 24 hours.

First things first, to set your restaurant into motion, you'll need to click on the new sign in the lower left corner of the screen, where you'll be given eight options for how long you'd like to keep your restaurant open. If you are willing to come back every 30 minutes, you can keep your restaurant open for free, but for everyone else, the prices increase as you select more time.

Take note that if you choose a longer shift, you're actually spending more money than if you chose a shorter shift multiple times. As an example, if I wanted to open my restaurant for 24 hours, I could either choose the 24 hour option and pay 28,400 coins, or I could choose the 6 hour option four times (by logging in every six hours) and pay 20,400 coins instead, as just one alternative. In this way, shorter shifts actually save you money, which makes sense, as Playfish wants to encourage users to come back to the game sooner, rather than later.

Now that your restaurant will be open all day, Gourmet Points are obviously easier to earn (customers will now be constantly purchasing dishes after all), so Playfish has announced that they have increased the amount of points necessary to level up. Each user has been given a one-time point boost to keep them at their current level, so don't worry about losing progress.

To help you earn Gourmet Points and continue to level up, you'll be given bonuses for logging back into the game "on time," or at the end of the shift. The amount of time you have to login after a shift is the same amount of time the shift lasted – so, if your restaurant was open for six hours, you'd need to come back to the game within six hours after it closed to receive the bonus. Additionally, you'll earn more Gourmet Points for leveling up dishes and helping friends' restaurants.

One feature that has been removed entirely is Resting. If you happened to employ the feature and there are beds in your restaurant, you'll not only see you staff sleeping when the restaurant is closed, but your staff will receive a speed boost of 0.5% for the Red Bed and 1% for the Gingerbread Bed (the speed boost does not stack). Should you not care about these bonuses, you can sell the beds for 4,500 and 12,000 coins, respectively.

Additionally, arcade machines have been tweaked to have a fixed capacity of coins, rather than simply breaking after a certain amount of uses. The coins will collect over time and you can cash out your profits when the machines are full. As examples, the Retro Arcade Machine collects 30 coins every 15 minutes, while the Crazy Planets Pinball machine collects 80 coins every hour. They'll even collect coins while you're away from the game, which is a new feature entirely.

Finally, in celebration of the launch of 24 hour cooking, Playfish is offering all members of the Restaurant City email club a free Pocketwatch Stove, which was first released in the Alice in Wonderland theme a few weeks ago. You'll receive the Pocketwatch Stove automatically when logging into the game – if you'd like to use it, you'll find it in your inventory. It cooks food 2% faster than a normal stove. With so many changes implemented at once, this new feature might take some getting used to – head over to the game's page on Facebook to start becoming acclimated to the way things now work.

[via Brandy Shaul of Frisky Mongoose]