Chef RPG gives you the opportunity to cook food in your very own restaurant. It can be a lot of fun, but it's not too easy to figure out at first. Read on to learn about the HUD and the save game system; after that, we'll give you a quick walkthrough of the first few days of the game!

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The above Chef RPG HUD image shows the game when the restaurant is open. Most of these HUD elements will not apply when you're moving around in the world.

1. Restaurant Status: This shows you whether the restaurant is open, closed, or in the process of closing.
   
2. Ingredients Indicator: This shows you where to get ingredients when food has been ordered by a customer.
   
3. Orders Queue: This shows the orders that are not currently being cooked by you or your staff chefs. The oldest orders are on the right-hand side of this queue and they get cooked first.
   
4. Cooking Queue: This shows the orders that are currently being cooked[techraptor.net] by you or your staff chefs. As with the Orders Queue, the oldest orders are on the right-hand side of the queue and they get cooked first.
   
5. Clock and Calendar: As with most games, the top right of the screen shows you the current time of day, the day, and the date. Certain businesses are not open on certain days. If you stay up too late, you'll pass out and wake up at Valentina's Clinic at 10:00 AM the next day, and you'll be charged a fee.
   
6. Cooking Indicator: When you've grabbed the ingredients for a recipe, this icon will show you where you need to take them. In this case, the player character must take the box of ingredients to the Stove.
   
7. Auto-Cook: This allows you to turn the Auto-Cook feature on or off. This allows you to skip cooking minigames[techraptor.net] on stations where you've unlocked this feature, but the quality of dishes will be based on your character's cooking skill.
   
8. Close Restaurant Button: Pressing this button will cause your restaurant to close. No new customers will come in, but you will still have to serve any additional food orders made by seated customers. You can press it again to "Force Close" the restaurant, but you won't get any gratuities from seated customers and you'll suffer a Reputation penalty.
   
9. Tool: Your active tool is shown here. Tools are only used when you're harvesting ingredients out in the world.
   
10. Consumables Hotbar: Consumable food items can be placed on this small Hotbar so they can be used immediately. Consumables have a short cooldown before you can use another.
    
11. Health: The standard health bar. When this reaches 0, you pass out and wake up two days later in Valentina's Infirmary. You'll also lose some money.
    
12. Stamina: The standard stamina bar. Harvesting ingredients, firing a bow, or cooking food will deplete your Stamina; it can only be restored by consumables. If your Stamina bar runs out, you'll pass out and wake up in Valentina's Clinic at 10:00 AM the next day. You'll also lose some money.
    
13. Available Dishes Inventory: Clicking on this button shows you how many of each dish on your menu you can cook with the ingredients remaining in the refrigerator.

Chef RPG uses a combination of autosaves and checkpoint saves. Each save file actually contains three separate save files:

• Your last autosave, manual save, or exit save are all the same file.
  
• The "ZZ" button represents a save file from the last time you woke up after sleeping in your bed.
  
• The "!" button represents a save file from the last story quest you completed.
  If you make a serious mistake and you want to go back to an earlier point in the game, selecting the sleep save file is your best bet. Make sure to actually make it to bed regularly so you don't lose too much playtime if you want to save scum!

As you might expect, the "X" button on a save file will delete your save file.

Now that we've explained the HUD and the save system, it's time to get moving with this Chef RPG Guide! As always, we'll go over the basic mechanics and the first few days of the game.

Your first step will be to create your character. You'll have to enter a name and choose sex, physical appearance, and clothing as you'd expect with most games. Selecting your Speciality will give you three starting recipes for free of a particular class; for example, selecting Rotisseur will give you 3 recipes that require meat.

You'll also want to spend your Skill Points. I recommend putting 2 points in everything and getting Cooking to 3 to start; you can tweak your build as you level up and earn more Skill Points through normal gameplay.

Your journey begins on a train to White Ash Harbor. A disheveled android named Hasel will greet you at the train station and take you to Le Sequoia, your new restaurant. She'll give you a quest to meet some of the important merchants in town, starting with Uriel the butcher.

You'll subsequently meet Mae-Lou the vegetable merchant, Nabiha the fruit merchant, and Aloys the fisherman. Each of these merchants will give you some kind of welcoming gift.

It's a good time to get some ingredients while you're in town. Open your inventory and learn all of the recipes you've collected and/or purchased.

Look at the required ingredients for any recipes that use the Chef's Counter or the Stove. You'll only have these two cooking stations[techraptor.net] at the start, so you won't be able to make any of the others just yet. You'll want to buy as many of these ingredients as you can from the vendors.

Vendors' inventory is randomized every day. For example, it's possible that Uriel the butcher may only have Eggs for sale and nothing else. It's important to keep a healthy supply of ingredients for the recipes you can cook because you might not be able to buy them on a particular day if you run out. Make sure not to spend all of your money; hold on to at least $1,000 or so.

You'll also want to find some plain Coffee, a consumable item that restores +20 Stamina. This is the most efficient consumable that restores Stamina. It can be found in several vending machines throughout the town; take some time and investigate them all to find the spots that sell Coffee.

Return to your restaurant and meet up with Hasel. She'll walk you through setting up the furniture and hiring your first employee. Then, she'll have you go through a test run of cooking and serving customers.

Employees are fairly cheap when compared to the kind of profit you can make as long as you keep the restaurant open for at least 3 or so hours. I recommend having 2 waiters (or 1 waiter with the Overworker trait) so you don't have customers waiting for too long if your waiter(s) need to take a break.

It should be noted that your employees have a rarity score. Rarer employees will have better stats and they can do a better job (and work for longer periods).

The pool of available employees will stay the same until you spend money to get a new pool of employees. Keep this in mind if you want to hire more people for your restaurant in the future!

Unfortunately, the refrigerator is broken and it will need to be repaired. Complete a task for Bianca in town and she'll fix it up for you.

With the fridge fixed, you're now able to open the restaurant for real. Make sure you put Coffee on your Consumables Hotbar so you can restore your Energy if it gets low while cooking, then open the restaurant.

Work as long as you reasonably can. You'll want to close down the restaurant at around 9:30 PM so you have enough time to finish feeding your remaining customers. Then, go to bed.

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