Disabling Seasions But Keeping its Stuff - Want to disable weather or make plants in season year-round? You can do so with my new Seasons Tuner Mod
Improving Sims 4: The past month, I've spent every day tinkering The Sims 4, making quality of life improvements, gameplay changes, and new difficulty settings for the game. If you'd like to learn more about my project, visit the post on Patreon where you can download it now.
Customizing your menu based on your chef's skill level is important to managing a restaurant in Dine Out.
Choosing the right items for your menu is part of managing a restaurant. In The Sims 4 Dine Out you can select from a few hundred different drinks, appetizers, main courses, and desserts to feed your customers. You are able to select up to 30 items from each category, so the menu can be rather broad, but you could also go with a smaller menu. The food's quality and the customer's perceived value of it are important factors along with others covered elsewhere in my Dine Out Guide. This guide will teach you a bit about how all of these things work and help you to profit more from their business.
Pick What You Want for the Menu: You're Not Restricted
Feel free to make an ice cream parlor, or a place that only serves drinks (like a bar) and some appetizers as many of them tend to do. Your customers will not be upset there is no main course, they come in with expectations that are realistic. What you do need are drinks and at least one type of food or dessert item in order to really profit from customers. Chefs won't seem to cook any faster if you have only drinks or foods, and you're missing out on them ordering an extra item. One table can easily be a few hundred Simoleons.
Selecting high-difficulty dishes is unwise at first. You'll be told the chef has no idea what they're doing - base your selections upon their skill, start small and grow a successful business.
Dish Difficulty Ratings
Each dish and drink on the menu in The Sims 4 Dine Out has a difficulty rating, from 1-5. This directly relates to the likelihood your chef can make it normal quality. They won't make an excellent quality level 5 dish unless in a great mood and around level 8 cooking skill. Around 5 they can start to cook it without warnings, but you will be notified if you've put a dish on the menu that is too hard for your chef.
Until your chef can skill up, it's therefore best to keep your menu on the lower end. You can put a higher markup so long as you have foods the chef is capable of cooking. Once the chef is high level, pick foods that are harder to cook.
Quality Perception
Food must be at least normal at upper ranks for a customer to give you high marks in quality, but it doesn't mean they'll give you a bad mark. More neutral. You've got to put out excellent food of the highest level if you want to get the best quality score. This is not required for a 5-star restaurant, given the other factors you can use such as good service and ambiance. But given the below data, we can see there is a penalty for having food that is too low difficulty (it would need to be excellent) and foods above rank 3 begin to give a bonus if the chef can make it at least normally. This quality adder stuff basically means the dish is harder and more likely to be made poorly from a low-skill chef.
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| Recipe Difficulty | Customer Quality Perception | Final Quality |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.77 | 0 |
| 2 | 1 | -20 |
| 3 | 1.5 | -40 |
| 4 | 1.8 | -60 |
| 5 | 2.5 | -80 |
Cooking Speed
You're able to tell your chef to either cook normally, carefully, or quickly by managing them. This selection sticks until you change it. Carefully will slow them about 20% but also increase food quality. Quickly does the reverse. So you can technically go with foods for the menu that are skill level 2-4 and put the chef on quickly, and most of their food will turn out acceptably. This can help you to turn a profit and simultaneously run a busier restaurant so long as you have a good layout.
Meal value is a factor for star rating that only comes up as positive if you've not chosen too high a markup. It is based on the quality of the dish as compared to the price.
Select a Markup
You can pick the markup from a dropdown on the manage restaurant interface. This determines how much profit you make - 100% is double the value of the original item, so a $20 item would go for $40. You are first charged, then profit when they get their food.
Markup to Customer Value
There's a direct relationship between your Markup and the customer's perceived value. If you can put out quality food without going too high on price, they will rate your restaurant high in that area. This is referring to quality rating (poor, normal, excellent), not skill level. Remembering food quality factors in, here are the values based only on price. If food is high quality, it'll work more in your favor when it comes to rating the restaurant.
You can change the markup at any time. Here are the customer value multipliers which will help you get to 5 stars.
| Markup | Profit on $40 Dish | Customer Value Multiplier |
|---|---|---|
| 100% | $40 | 1.75 (highest) |
| 125% | $50 | 1.5 |
| 150% | $60 | 1.25 |
| 175% | $70 | 1 (even ground with normal quality) |
| 200% | $80 | 0.85 |
| 250% | $100 | 0.65 |
| 300% | $120 | 0.5 (very difficult to get high marks in value) |
Let's see what we can learn from this. Most players who start a restaurant and leave it at 100% are pretty much shorting themselves if they've chosen to keep the the chef can produce at least normal quality, so you should probably go with at least 125% markup and get the little bit extra. Obviously a higher level chef will make better food and if you can get it above normal (excellent quality), you will see customers happy with the prices even at a 200% markup. With a chef consistently going with normal quality, a 150% markup is OK, if they can do excellent at least part of the time you want to go higher.
I focused heavily on this portion for a reason. Along with service, wait time, and food quality, the customer value is a very important metric in getting your star rating higher. These are perhaps the four most important, with other things such as ambiance being extras that help boost you to 5 stars.
We now have a Youtube Channel with over 50 guides in video format to go along with the huge site I've already created. Check it out and consider subscribing if you like my style.
The Sims 4 Seasons expansion now has options! Want to disable weather or make plants in season year-round? You can do so with my new Seasons Tuner Mod
The past month, I've spent every day tinkering The Sims 4, making quality of life improvements, gameplay changes, and new difficulty settings for the game. If you'd like to learn more about my project, visit the post on Patreon where you can download it now.
Cottage Living Guide! Here is my guide to new features in the Sims 4 Cottage Living Expansion
You can also find handy Cottage Living Cheats
I have much more to come, since you can actually write a few guides about this pack!
Blender has been incredibly useful in video production, so I made my own Physics and Simulation Improvement Addon that lumps a ton of unique tools into one compact interface.
Snowy Escape Cheats
Lifestyles in Snowy Escape
Climb Mt. Komorebi
Sentiments in Snowy Escape
Rock Climbing
Skiing Skill
Snowboarding Skill
I've released a guide to Sentiments in The Sims 4 & Snowy Escape.
There is a new platform tool in The Sims 4. There's also a new Sentiments system, but it'll take some time to create a guide to that. Players can also use rental lots in any world now by changing lot types of builds in manage worlds.
I've created a massive List of The Best Mods in The Sims 4 that should be very helpful to new players and those who have not yet explored modding and how much it can do for your gameplay.
New - Secrets I have a new guide to secrets in the game. If you prefer, you can also watch a video about secrets in Sims 4.
Nifty Knitting is now available. Learn all about the stuff pack on my guide page here.
NEW - Nifty Knitting CheatsNew features in the Sims 4 June 2020
The Sims 4 Eco Lifestyle Guide
Eco Footprint: How it Works
Neighborhood Action Plans
How to Cheat in Sims 4 Eco Lifestyle
Civil Designer Career
Insect Farms & Bio Fuel
Fabrication Skill in Eco Lifestyle
Juice Fizzing NEW
Traits and Aspirations in DLC
Gameplay Ideas for Sims 4 Eco Lifestyle
Updated
Trait Cheats Updated
Traits List Updated
Aspirations List Updated
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This is inspired by a new series in which I start at toddler and gradually take on the major bonuses. Here's a link to the full playlist!
I now have a guide page to Tiny Living Stuff where you can learn about Murphy Beds, the new death, as well as the lot bonuses you'll receive if you manage to keep the size of your lot down with this new pack's Tiny Home Lot Type.
New I now have a guide to Making Super Sims in The Sims 4. Look for a text version within the next 72h. It won't have THAT much more info but it will help out as a checklist.
This was inspired by a series, "Let's Play a Super Sim" in which I start at toddler and gradually take on the major bonuses. Here's a link to each part for people who are interested. You can also see the Let's Play as a Playlist on Youtube.
The Sims 4 Discover University has been announced for November 15 for PC/Mac and December 17 for Xbox and Playstation 4 consoles. Click to learn more about the pack, see my summary of the livestream or read our FAQs below.
Other Guides to Discover University:
New Lot Traits: Study Spot and University Student Hang Out
New: Discover University FAQ: Gameplay Features
New Video The Sims 4 Discover University Gameplay Tips Video
More videos coming soon!
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Comments (5)
(Sorry, my accounting student brain at play here) XD
In a restaurant you own, travel there and click on Restaurant Settings>Edit Restaurant Menu. Again mouse over an item you want to remove and click the small 'x' or add anything you want by clicking the empty slot.
You can't have multi-functioning lots in The Sims 4 as such and restaurant lots need to have that allocation for the items to work correctly but I've seen builds that mix a few ideas together such as a swimming pool and a restaurant and so on.