Since the release of Tavern Keeper last November, we have published over 70 updates ranging from adding quality-of-live features, responding to player reports, and (of course) bug fixes, but now our First Major Update is here!

This is the result of months of work, including another six weeks of refinement in our experimental branch (thank you, testers 💚).

Update 1 has some major features that we have wanted to bring to the game, and was also majorly influenced by your feedback. We’ve got an incredible range of players, and we can’t wait to see how you all take these new features and create some amazing taverns. Let’s dive in!

Go wild and customize the color of any item in Design Mode. Each object has a number of colors associated with it. Click on the object and you’ll be able to change each one individually, including the hue, turning it metallic or shiny, and generally making it look exactly how you want.
This extends to any item in Design Mode - make a spooky tavern of only dark, moody colors, or a verdant palace of forest green. Your choice!

We heard your requests and went all-in implementing full controller support throughout the game and are happy to say that Tavern Keeper is now also officially Steam Deck Verified ✅

Adding controller support was a huge undertaking. Our UI is handcrafted (and hand-animated!) in 3D, which meant that we had to implement this from scratch! But this also meant we were going through our entire UI and we took that opportunity to make several improvements which benefit everyone, regardless of whether you play using a controller or use keyboard and mouse.

Some noteworthy highlights:

• You can now scale the UI text to your liking.

• Right-click to close is now implemented and the new default so you can close any windows or de-select objects quickly by right-clicking (an often requested feature).

• There are more control bindings, you can now configure shortcuts to open the staff schedule, open the hiring screen and many others.

Additionally, we’ve added 16:10 screen support, integrated with Steam Input API (which means you can customize the controller bindings for pretty much any controller using Steam) and made sure you can switch between keyboard / mouse and controllers seamlessly.

We’ve heard your feedback that manually managing every single stock order can be cumbersome, so we added the Arcane Order system as a response. Sign an Arcane Order contract with any shop on the worldmap, set minimum and desired stock amounts and have your staff automagically order items.

You can also specify delivery times so you can have all your arcane deliveries arrive in a particular span of time. This enables you to optimize your staff schedule and ensure that fresh deliveries can be stored away promptly in your storerooms when they arrive.

You can set priorities, a daily budget, a money reserve and the cost of the arcane orders scale with our difficulty settings making this system add another level of strategic depth to the game.

Since release, players have created tens of thousands of custom design templates and have shared many of them using our share-code system, but there was no easy way to discover them in a central place.

Now, we have created a bespoke section of our website called the Tavern Keeper Workshop[tavernkeeper.com], which will allow you to publicly list your own creations and discover items published by other Tavern Keeper players!

You’ll also be able to:

• build a library of items you like

• create collections of items

• favorite items

• discover fresh or trending creations

The item library you build on the workshop automatically synchronizes to the game so you no longer have to manually copy/paste sharecodes.

If you want to get a head start, click here to check out some featured items[tavernkeeper.com].

The Workshop is our foundational feature to support creative players even more in the future. It allows us to feature designs, and featured items may appear as patron gifts in your game!

⚠️ Tip: If you are one of the many players who have created amazing Designs and you want to share them more easily with players, just log into the Workshop with the Steam account that owns the game and you can publicly list your existing designs for everyone to see.

Update 1 adds eleven new randomly occurring stories to encounter as you play. From disgruntled employees to enterprising smugglers, the world of Tavern Keeper continues to grow.

We added 391 more design pieces to Design Mode, further extending the big catalogue of building blocks available to you based on the feedback from players. There are now more basic building blocks with many curved, round and chamfered shapes. We added more flat icons which come in handy for posters and artworks and there’s a selection of flowers, organic shapes and broken bottles too.

Together with the Color Picker Tool, this unlocks even more creative flexibility for your designs.

Previously any moving parts of objects were inaccessible to the Design Mode which meant you couldn’t decorate them. This was frankly robbing(!) you of the opportunity to make, let’s say, any genius decorations to the outhouse door for example. This egregious oversight has now been corrected - in fact, you can now make a completely custom outhouse too if you so wish. Go for it!

This is a bit more of an advanced feature but if you've ever tried to design your own chairs and tables, you’ll have noticed that they automatically react to where they are placed, so if say, you place a 4-seater table against a wall, the chairs that don’t fit in this location will automatically disappear. Generally pretty helpful!

This previously worked for custom designs too, but the Design Mode guessed which parts belong to a chair based on the visual position, which wasn’t always correct. Now, designers can override in which “socket” a design piece belongs to, via the Object Hierarchy, which will make it much easier to create the exact layout and decorations you want.

Unlocked at 2.5 tavern stars, Roasts are a new meal type. Take a single big chunk of meat, mushroom or sunroot and roast deliciously over a fire. Compared to soups or stews, they are easier to manage as they only require a single ingredient but beware: they also spoil quicker!

Thanks to feedback, we’ve also further rebalanced soups and stews. Soups and stews now give more portions and the optional third ingredient slot further increases portion size. Now soups, stews, and roasts all have their own strengths and tradeoffs, allowing for more varied strategies.

What’s better than a barrel rack holding three barrels? A Large Barrel Rack holding seven of course!

This new furniture piece also unlocks at 2.5 tavern stars, gives your storeroom that rustic barrel storage look and slows down spoilage more than the earlier drink storage options. Unlike the smaller rack, it does not have to be attached to a wall.

With Update 1 we have reworked and improved large swathes of the underlying systems, especially focusing on CPU usage. The game should run better and smoother throughout.

And of course that’s not all! There are many more smaller changes that address player requests, optimization, and more.

Here are some highlights (the full changelog follows below).

• Holding down Q/E now fine-rotates the camera. You can still use click and hold on the middle mouse button, but this should give you more flexibility.

• Build Menu is now faster, has better filtering and can be browsed with scroll wheel or shoulder buttons.

• Game Speed 3 no longer oscillates and is smoother and faster.

• You can now prevent rooms from auto-merging when building rooms via modifier key (toggle it by using Alt or Left Bumper + D-PAD Right on gamepad).

• The finance button now shows upcoming payments and the tooltip shows a detailed breakdown of loans and wages.

• You can now reclaim more of your screen space with the collapsible build menu.

• And much much more…

With Update 1 generally available now and given the sheer amount of changes, we’ll observe if there are any remaining issues we missed and deliver further updates if necessary. If you spot anything that doesn’t seem right, please feel free to press F3 in-game to report it.

Other than this, it’s onward on the journey through Early Access (see our Roadmap[tavernkeeper.com]). We’ve been hard at work on Update 2 for a long time which will introduce a whole new level ⭐, bringing your story under the mountain into the realm of the dwarves and introducing a bunch of exciting features, content and mechanics.

Until next time: Happy tavern keeping,

Patrick

And The Tavern Keeper Team

Here is the full changelog with some more details:

• Color Picker Tool in Design mode

• Full Controller Support

• Steam Deck Support and Steam Deck Verified

• 16:10 screen aspect ratio support

• Arcane Orders: Sign arcane contracts to automagically stock up your tavern when running low

• Tavern Keeper Workshop and integration

• New meal type: Roasts

• New furniture: Large Barrel Rack

• 391 New Design Pieces in Design Mode

• Ability to decorate animated objects

• Ability to assign decorations to Design “Sockets”

• UI Text is now scalable to your preference

• Eleven new random stories

• Featured Tavern Keeper Workshop items may appear as patron gifts (opt-out under Settings)

• Added Right-click to close and deselect (now the default)

• Collapsible Build Menu

• Scroll-wheel support in the build menu

• Long press Q/E now fine-rotates camera

• Press Alt (or Left Bumper + D-PAD Right on gamepad) while building rooms to prevent same-type rooms from auto-merging

• Reworked autosave to run on configurable intervals

• Confirmation popup when building walls or rooms would demolish existing objects

• Worldmap now displays shop markers and clicking them navigates to the region and opens the shop

• You can now instruct sleeping staff to do a job (and they will begrudgingly wake up and do it)

• Added command to instruct sick staff to stay in bed until fully healed

• Ability to disallow normal drink barrels to be used in fire extinguishers

• Added control binding for toggling walls (default to End key or Right Bumper + X with gamepad)

• Design Mode Object Hierarchy now supports multi-selection dragging and shift-click, shift-control-click behaviours

• New icon on items in larder overview if stock-deliveries are underway

• Clicking items in the shop or arcane orders will highlight existing stock in the larder overview

• Digital/analogue clock preference is now remembered

• Finance button now shows upcoming payments and tooltip shows detailed breakdown

• Enhanced story options for end-of-level stories

• When multiple Janitors are cleaning, they now coordinate better

• Soups and stews now give additional portions

• Optional ingredient in soups, stews now gives bonus portions

• Build menu now uses thumbnails and is much faster to navigate

• Placing decorative lights on furniture now contributes real brightness on the atmosphere system

• Hearths can now be built in hallways

• Staff now get a bonus when in a higher-tier staffroom

• Game speed 3 no longer oscillates

• Improved patron feedback when patrons can’t book a room

• Build and Design Mode now remember page positions

• Clone tool now shows the cost to clone an object on hover

• Context-menu now shows inline control bindings

• Light decoration scaling now scales the light range

• Banned rooms on staff now display with a clearer room overlay

• Problem banner now moves out of the way of the larder overview

• Tavern log now shows details about orders and deliveries

• Missing ingredient message now shows more details about what is missing

• Clicking a furniture a second time now selects the room it belongs to (allowing you to select a room that’s covered in carpets for example)

• Toilet now shows a ‘needs maintenance’ visual when it requires servicing

• Text decorations no longer clutter up the Design Mode menu

• Staff schedule now remembers what page you were on

• Dragging roles onto the schedule UI no longer skips hours when you drag too fast

• Off-duty staff now serves dishes from the food window if no one else is available

• Chef skill bonus now applies more granularly, not just at the end of the meal

• Skills of all chefs are used to calculate final flavor rating of a dish

• Chefs no longer wait for bread to finish baking when a side dish was ordered

• Patron message about missing side dishes now shows details

• Improved timing of the spoilage alert to be more useful

• Reserve for context menu on storage now shows more useful information

• Groups no longer try to fulfill optional needs before required ones

• Temporary job applicants from stories no longer stay in the job pool forever

• Staff now better take patron patience into account when taking orders

• Staff can now maintain furniture (such as the stoves) in staffrooms when they are off-duty

• Nerfed the Fear of the Dark trait

• Better idle wandering behaviour on staff

• Staff no longer wander far from the locker before their shift starts

• Doors can now be placed closer to wall-corners

• Beds can now be placed a little closer together

• Staff locker can now be placed a little closer to other furniture

• Staff names in wage tooltip are now clickable and support large lists of staff

• Gugamush gazettes no longer spawn with generic (non-Orc) content

• If you ignore random stories, they no longer respawn endlessly

• Building/dragging rooms performs better and stutters less

• Searching in the Build Menu is now faster

• Improved ambient occlusion performance

• Late-game save files are now up to 50% smaller and load faster

• Optimized and improved many of the games systems

• Enabled several actions to be bindable under controls

• Improved selection highlights on build menu and in the schedule UI

• Improvements to localizations across the board

• Achievement narrations no longer interrupt the narrator

• Build menu search is now more robust

• Schedule dialogs didn’t update to 24/12h clock setting

• Disabling a soup/stew on the tavern menu no longer removes it from the soup pot

• Chef flavor-bonus was incorrectly calculated

• Chefs sometimes did not fulfill food orders

• Chefs sometimes fetched partial ingredients when they needed a full basket

• Several cases of stuck staff

• After a fight broke a tap and it was rebuilt, the drink could remain off-menu

• Servers sometimes walked to far-off taps when a closer tap was available

• Servers sometimes served drinks directly from barrels

• Spoilage rate was incorrect in some cases

• Shelf-life on ingredients that are carried no longer show as ‘infinity days’

• Soups were not spoiling in the soup pot when they should have been

• Several cases where cooking got stuck

• Some ingredients got stuck to the floor when staff dropped them

• Refilling the fire extinguisher used sometimes drink barrels even if extinguisher barrels were available

• Low stock alert sometimes was shown for items with plenty of stock

• Bread-oven stirring animation could in rare cases produce a giant dough ball

• Patrons who try to wander to an inaccessible taproom position no longer get stuck

• Patrons could rate the tavern down for services that couldn’t exist

• Socialize need sometimes stayed unfulfilled when it should not have been

• Patrons could get stuck waiting to dry at a heater (after rain) even after they were already dry

• Patrons sometimes got stuck after a conversation

• Patrons sometimes tried to go to bed in the midst of booking a room

• Patrons couldn’t always retrieve their room key at the registration desk

• Patrons could get stuck at the dartboard after saving and loading

• Patrons would try to use an empty scroll rack 

• Patron gifts sometimes appeared extremely tiny on the floor

• Sleeping characters were visually offset from the bed when they went to bed after a fight

• Footlocker stayed locked and closed if a patron fled the tavern due to a fire

• Visiting groups could get stuck in conversation

• Patrons sometimes double-rated their beds

• Patrons were sometimes rating bars and tables

• Bulletin board with a price of 0 was not rated by patrons

• Group satisfaction display was inconsistent

• Historic pawns on the Patron Attraction Board sometimes incorrectly showed that the tavern was closed

• Bulletin station got dirty outside but wasn’t cleaned unless manually instructed

• Incorrect alerts of missing cleaning gear and mops when staff was finishing a cleaning task

• Mop could get stuck to Staff after their polish task was interrupted

• Dogsbody could get stuck inspecting stock and ignored other tasks

• Staff could not be renamed if they appeared in a story

• Several cases where staff could get permanently stuck

• Staff could take items from rooms they were banned from, even though the item was available elsewhere

• Staff on leave could still start a fight or be pulled into one

• Staff sickness alert badge information was not always correct

• Staff who stress-slept while standing would sleep for a very very long time

• Some tasks remained assigned to specific staff when they were fired

• Some custom templates had the wrong build cost

• Tables couldn’t be placed flush against a wall if there was another table on the other side

• Building the same wall back after deleting it, no longer fails if props where snapped it

• Decorations did not always give the right refund amount

• Grouped items in Design Mode could deform when using undo/redo

• Sometimes furniture was left in a squished state after building

• Discounted build items didn’t always work well with filtering in the build menu

• Decorations on wall could contribute decoration value to the wrong room

• Filth atmosphere overlay could tint a prop green when it should not appear

• UI would stay hidden after ESC-cancelling a build room action mid-drag

• Booked entertainer time in the Stage info panel was off by one hour

• Accommodation tavern menu would show incorrect info on what patron will book which room

• Bankruptcy alert badge was off by one hour

• Bankruptcy handbook triggered when taking a loan

• Some items were stuck outside after delivery

• Playing the starter level on Challenging could sometimes cause chaos events to start a fire

• New job applicants notification didn’t trigger when it should

• Soup pot sparks could sometimes fly through a wall

• Some rooms spawned infestation nests even they should have blocked nests

• Fixed several typos

• Fixed several issues with tooltips across the game

• Fixed many miscellaneous errors and exceptions

It's April 1st already in parts of the world but I'm happy to say that this isn't an April Fools' post: Update 1 is now available as an experimental built.

As we announced here, Update 1 is much more substantial than initially planned and comes with a ton of new features, improvements and fixes.

Important: Please only use the experimental version if you want to help us test the features and report issues before it goes live for everyone. If you don't want to deal with bugs and want the fully polished experience instead, we'd recommend you wait until Update 1 graduates from experimental.

If you do want to test this, you can read how to opt-in to the experimental version here.

Here's the changelog:

• Design Mode Color Picker

• Controller Support

• Steam Deck support (16:10 screen, scalable tooltips, controller)

• https://tavernkeeper.com/workshop integration

• Arcane Orders - automagically order supplies.

• Collapsible Build Menu

• More Efficient Simulation

• More Stories

• More Design Items

• New Meal type: Roasts

• Decorate Animated Objects

By popular request:

• Right-click now cancels actions by default (R now rotates furniture).

• Q/E now fine rotates the tavern. Double tap Q/E to rotate in steps.

These are configurable in settings if you prefer the old ways.

• Improved scenario end stories with new options.

• Fire extinguisher now has a setting to disallow using drink barrels as a fallback.

• Fear of the Dark trait is nerfed.

• Staff can now maintain the stove in staff rooms while they are off-work.

• You can now assign manual tasks to staff even if they are asleep (how rude) - they'll then wake up and do them.

• Banned rooms now show a red overlay for clarity.

• Sick Staff can be told to stay in bed until they fully recover.

• Hearth can now be built in hallways.

• Disabling a soup while selected in a pot no longer removes it from the pot.

• If you decline to interact with random stories, characters will no longer spawn indefinitely each day.

• Staff now receives bonus happiness in higher-star staff rooms.

• Updated the Item Workshop with new items.

• Tavern Keeper Workshop "featured items" can now appear as patron-gifts (configurable).

• New auto-save interval settings.

• Larder overview now shows out-of-stock and in-transit items.

• Finance button now shows outstanding loan debt.

• Missing ingredient message now shows needed vs. actual amount.

• Clock now remembers preferred digital vs. analogue setting.

• Decoration Hierarchy now supports Shift-click and Shift+Ctrl-click selection.

• Scroll wheel is now supported in Build Menu.

• New wall mode toggle key binding ('End' key).

• World map now shows shop markers on mini-map.

• General CPU performance improved significantly.

• Game speed 3 no longer oscillates and is smoother.

• Browsing the Build Menu, especially with custom templates, is now a lot faster.

• Game startup is quicker.

• Loading a save file is now faster.

• Performance for heavily decorated taverns increased significantly.

• Performance for players with lots of custom templates increased.

• Crafted items (like soups) were not properly spoiling while in the soup pot.

• Spoilage was incorrectly calculated.

• Serving meals with bread when bread became unavailable could lead to endless waiting.

• Staff sometimes went to far-away taprooms when drinks were available nearby.

• Patrons were sometimes served directly from barrels.

• Patrons incorrectly rated bars and tables.

• Beds were sometimes double-rated after patrons stayed.

• Patrons could sometimes use a scroll rack when no scrolls were remaining.

• Ghost items appeared after building decorations.

• Staff with the Lethargic mental break trait could end up sleeping for a very long time if no bed was available.

• Drinks were disabled on the tavern menu after a fight destroyed a tap which was then replaced.

• Patrons would glitch when walking to a seat for a long time.

• Fires could trigger in starter level from chaos events.

• Patrons complained 'too hot' when drying themselves in front of a heater.

• Low stock alert triggered for items with plenty of stock.

• Build animations left furniture sometimes in a squished state.

• Loading an old save that was in the middle of a storybook could result in an error.

• Tavern log could end up with wrong tooltips.

• Scaling placed decorations with keyboard did not update correctly.

• Dragging in the Schedule UI would leave gaps if you dragged too fast.

• Flag ratings were sometimes incorrect after loading.

• Various typos fixed.

• Not all new content has been translated or has voice overs yet.

• Sound Design on Arcade Orders are not in yet.

• Some UI parts are still a bit fiddly to use with controllers.

If you do give the experimental branch a try, please report any issues you see with F3 or use the experimental Steam sub-forum here.

Thanks for following along :)

We suspect we'll update this version a few times in experimental and will keep further changelogs here.