Spring Update: Staff Improvements, New Decorations, Optimisation & More!

Hey everyone!

It’s been a little while,, but we’re very happy to be back with a new Vending Dokan Update: Galactic Springtime!

This update focuses on a few things we’ve been excited to revisit: improvements to the staff system, a fresh batch of spring and space-themed decorations, new build menu quality-of-life changes, plenty of optimisation work, bug fixes, and a very special collaboration we’re honoured to be part of.

Let’s get into it!

Supporting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital®

We’re incredibly honoured to be supporting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital® during the St. Jude PLAY LIVE Challenge Season event all through May this year!

St. Jude is one of the world’s leading research and treatment centers for childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases, working to improve care and survival rates for children around the world. (St. Jude Children's Research Hospital)

During the month of May 2026, Aftabi Games will donate $2.00 of the purchase price for “Vending Dokan!: Kozy Kiosk” (purchased here on Steam) to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital ® to support its mission: Finding cures. Saving children. ®

To mark this, we’ve also added a new I <3 St. Jude sticker to the game. Adding this sticker to your machine comes with some extra visual effects to help set the mood and celebrate the campaign.

Additionally, we’re also partnering with the St. Jude PLAY LIVE 2026 community, so hopefully you’ll get to see some of your favorite streamers not only play VD:KK, but also raise tons of money for an amazing cause in the process!

We’re super grateful for the opportunity to be involved, and we’d like to give a big thank you to St. Jude and the entire PLAY LIVE community for everything that they do.

Staff Improvements

Staff management has been one of the most requested areas for us to look at, so this update brings some important changes to how staff roles work.

The previous Inventory Management role has now been split into two separate roles:

• Restocker

• Inventory Manager

This gives each role a much clearer purpose and allows inventory staff to be much more efficient.

Restockers

The Restocker role works similarly to the old inventory management behaviour. Staff assigned to this role will leave the office, visit your machines, and refill them using the stock that you have available.

If you already had staff helping you keep machines filled, this role should feel familiar.

Inventory Managers

The new Inventory Manager role is focused entirely on managing stock inside the office.

Unlike Restockers, Inventory Managers will no longer leave the office, which means they can focus on their tasks more efficiently. Alongside tossing out empty boxes, they will now also shelve boxes from your deliveries.

That means when your orders arrive, Inventory Managers can pick boxes up from the floor and place them onto shelves for you. Combined with the Restocker role, this makes it much easier to create a more automated setup: order stock, let your Inventory Managers shelve it, let your Restockers fill the machines, and keep your operation running smoothly.

This is a big foundation for future improvements, too. In upcoming updates, we’re looking into expanding inventory management further with features like shelf filtering, so you can decide which items go where, as well as box combining to keep your office even tidier.

As this is a new role we expect to see some bugs with the system! Please report any issues you run into, we'll be monitoring this closely and push hotfixes!

Janitor Fixes

Alongside the new staff role changes, we’ve also fixed a number of issues with how staff behave.

Janitors should now clean alleyways and remove rubbish much more effectively. Staff should also drop boxes less frequently and generally behave more reliably while carrying out their tasks.

We’ve also made a few changes to the staff UI to make managing your team easier.

Staff are now colour-coded based on their role, making it quicker to see who is assigned to what at a glance.

We’ve also changed staff sorting. The previous drag-and-drop sorting system caused a lot of frustration, so we’ve replaced it with a simpler up-and-down sorting system. This should make reorganising your staff list much more consistent and less fiddly.

In future updates, we’d like to make the staff panel feel more like a spreadsheet, with proper sorting options for things like price, skill set, role, and more.

Spring Decorations

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Spring update without some new decorations to freshen up your locations!

This update adds a variety of spring-themed items to help your alleyways feel brighter, softer, and more seasonal. You’ll find newly drawable wisteria and flowers, which can be placed wall-to-wall or directly across walls. These come in both wall hook and ground pole varieties.

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We’ve also added new arches, spring-themed seating, and new lighting items designed to work with trellises. Your trellises can now glow with lighting as well as foliage, giving you more ways to create cozy garden corners and peaceful spring setups.

Make sure to use the collision checkbox while building if you want to stack multiple decorative elements together and create your perfect trellis arrangement.

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We’ve also added wall baskets that work beautifully alongside the new foliage. These give you a different way to create vertical greenery and can be placed freely around your locations.

Space Collection

In order to provide plenty of hype during St. Jude’s PLAY LIVE Challenge Season in May, we’re also introducing a new space-themed collection!

This collection includes a range of new neon signs inspired by stars, planets, rockets, and all things cosmic. These should help your builds feel a little more out of this world!

We’ve also added a new astronaut figure, which you’ll be able to collect through the Reward Machine.

Keep an eye out for more additions to this collection in the future!

New Light Cylinders

This update also introduces a new type of lighting decoration: Light Cylinders.

These hollow light cylinders illuminate your alleyways while casting patterned shadows based on their designs. We’re starting with three variations, but we plan to add more in future updates with different seasonal and themed patterns throughout the year.

Alongside this, we’ve added a new customisable decoration: a hinged blackboard sign.

You can customize it with any text you like, allowing you to create signage that matches your builds, highlights certain products, or gives your alleyways a more personal, lived-in feel.

Build Menu Improvements

We’ve also made some quality-of-life changes to the Build Menu.

We’ve heard that many of you wanted more control over how seasonal and collectible items appear, especially when certain items are out of season. With this update, we’ve added new filtering options so you can toggle categories like Halloween, festive items, and collectibles on or off.

We’ve also increased the number of columns in the Build Menu, so browsing decorations should feel quicker and more comfortable. With so many items now available in the game, these changes should make it easier to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Optimisation & Bug Fixes

This update also includes a lot of optimisation work and bug fixes.

As always, optimisation is an ongoing effort for us, and we’ll continue improving performance across future updates. For now, this patch should bring a number of improvements under the hood, along with fixes to several issues reported by the community.

Thank you to everyone who continues to send in bug reports, screenshots, videos, and feedback. It genuinely helps us track things down and make the game better.

2026 Roadmap Update

The in-game roadmap for Summer 2026 has also been updated, so feel free to take a look and see what we have planned for the rest of the year.

There’s still a lot coming to Vending Dokan, including new machine types, new ways to manage your business, and more features designed to give you long-term goals to work toward as the gameplay loop continues to grow.

Thank You

Thank you so much for reading, playing, sharing feedback, and being part of the Vending Dokan community.

We really hope you enjoy this Galactic Spring update! As always, please let us know what you think in the comments or come chat with us in our Discord community.

And if you’re enjoying the game, leaving a Steam review helps us a ton. It makes a huge difference for small teams like ours.

We’ll see you in the next update! 🌸