Update 0.2.1 - Performance & AI Improvements Patch

This update focuses on polish, performance, and AI behavior improvements.

AI & Employee Behavior

• Bakers and Restockers now block the player less. After you interact with trays/shelves, they will only act on those at least 10 seconds after your last interaction.

• Customers now choose the least busy and closest checkout, improving shopping flow and increasing overall capacity on certain layouts.

• Bakers now select the closest available oven.

• Improved customer pathfinding and general NPC navigation.

Player & Movement

• Minor smoothing improvements to player movement and jumping.

Escalators

• Fixed sticking issues; going up is now much smoother.

• Improved visuals and cleaned up low-poly looking areas.

Optimization

• Bakery and produce pallets optimized: only top-crate products are rendered. This reduces resource usage by up to 75% on full pallets (up to 4× more efficient).

Visual Fix

• Fixed an overlap issue that caused wooden crates to look incorrect when viewed from under pallets.

Balance Clarification

From now on, balance changes will only adjust cost values. The sales effect parameter is not affected by cost changes.

This means you will not need to readjust your prices again due to future balance updates. I know a previous update forced many of you to change prices after investing time into setting them up — I’m sorry about that, but it was a necessary change. Going forward, balance will be handled through cost adjustments only.

I may release one more small update over the weekend to clean up minor bugs. After that, full focus will shift to the upcoming Warehouse Update.