Update v2025.17.5.4 - Employee Upskilling: Nutrient and Food Production Role
Hello, Hydroponic Farmers 🌱
Your employees are getting smarter!
With the upcoming updates and beyond, we’re introducing a major expansion to employee behavior and task management through our new Employee Upskilling system. This update adds new specialized roles for employees, giving you more control and automation across your farming and food production operations.
Employees can now assist with nutrient maintenance across your growbeds. As long as you have nutrient stock available, employees assigned to this task will automatically monitor and apply nutrients to any growbed that needs it. You’ll be able to configure nutrient behavior per growbed to control how it is maintained.
This new task depends on the employee’s Maintenance skill, so be sure to assign the right staff for the job. With this feature, maintaining healthy crops becomes less manual and much more efficient.
Starting from Chapter 16, employees can now help prepare ingredients for food production tools. Whether you’re crafting smoothies, salads, or soups, employees with the correct priority setting will fetch required commodities and deliver them directly to the production machines.
This reduces downtime, keeps your production cycle moving, and allows you to focus on bigger picture management. After unlocking chapter 16, you can toggle this behavior via each employee’s priority settings menu.
Also unlocked in Chapter 16 is the ability for employees to automatically transfer finished production items into storage. Once your food production machine finishes a batch, employees with this task enabled will pick up the result and store it accordingly, keeping your area clear and organized.
Just like with ingredient delivery, this can be managed using each employee’s priority setup, giving you complete control over who does what and when.
To support these new behaviors, we’ve also improved how you manage your storage systems. You can now configure each individual box slot with a specific State setting to control how it’s used:
- Shelf Restock – Can be used to supply shelves
- Food Production – Can be used for production tools
- Locked – Cannot be accessed or used by employees
These new options help you ensure that ingredients are reserved for the correct purposes, and that rare items or critical stock are protected from unintended use.
This milestone update also introduces several community-driven improvements and quality-of-life changes across the game:
• Store Name Editing
You can now choose your store’s name during New Game setup. Already have a save? No problem—you can rename your store by interacting with the store sign outside your shop.
• Salesperson Refinement
The Salesperson NPC now follows a more controlled pattern.
• Improved Grid Snapping
The grid snap size has been reduced, giving you finer control when placing furniture and decorations. This allows for more precise layouts and better optimization of your store space.
• New Achievement to Unlock
A brand-new achievement has been added to mark this milestone. It’s a rewarding goal for players who reach this point, so make sure to complete the new challenge and claim your badge of progress.
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This Employee Upskilling update brings deeper automation, smarter workflows, and more control to your daily operations. With employees now able to assist in nutrient care, ingredient prep, and post production handling, your farm and store will run more smoothly than ever.
We’re excited to see how you use these new tools and behaviors to expand your operation. And as always, thank you for being part of our Early Access journey!
Happy farming and go organize your employee to better help you! 🧑‍🌾🔧🥗
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3152540/Hydroponics_Farm__Store_Simulator
Your employees are getting smarter!
With the upcoming updates and beyond, we’re introducing a major expansion to employee behavior and task management through our new Employee Upskilling system. This update adds new specialized roles for employees, giving you more control and automation across your farming and food production operations.
New Skill: Nutrient Maintainer
Employees can now assist with nutrient maintenance across your growbeds. As long as you have nutrient stock available, employees assigned to this task will automatically monitor and apply nutrients to any growbed that needs it. You’ll be able to configure nutrient behavior per growbed to control how it is maintained.
This new task depends on the employee’s Maintenance skill, so be sure to assign the right staff for the job. With this feature, maintaining healthy crops becomes less manual and much more efficient.
New Role: Food Runner
Starting from Chapter 16, employees can now help prepare ingredients for food production tools. Whether you’re crafting smoothies, salads, or soups, employees with the correct priority setting will fetch required commodities and deliver them directly to the production machines.
This reduces downtime, keeps your production cycle moving, and allows you to focus on bigger picture management. After unlocking chapter 16, you can toggle this behavior via each employee’s priority settings menu.
New Role: Food Restock
Also unlocked in Chapter 16 is the ability for employees to automatically transfer finished production items into storage. Once your food production machine finishes a batch, employees with this task enabled will pick up the result and store it accordingly, keeping your area clear and organized.
Just like with ingredient delivery, this can be managed using each employee’s priority setup, giving you complete control over who does what and when.
Storage Control Update: Usage States
To support these new behaviors, we’ve also improved how you manage your storage systems. You can now configure each individual box slot with a specific State setting to control how it’s used:
- Shelf Restock – Can be used to supply shelves
- Food Production – Can be used for production tools
- Locked – Cannot be accessed or used by employees
These new options help you ensure that ingredients are reserved for the correct purposes, and that rare items or critical stock are protected from unintended use.
Additional System Improvements
This milestone update also introduces several community-driven improvements and quality-of-life changes across the game:
• Store Name Editing
You can now choose your store’s name during New Game setup. Already have a save? No problem—you can rename your store by interacting with the store sign outside your shop.
• Salesperson Refinement The Salesperson NPC now follows a more controlled pattern.
- They no longer appear repeatedly in a row and will visit your store every 1 to 3 days, offering a more balanced rotation.
- When they arrive at your store, you will hear a sound and see a notification to let you know they've arrived.
- Also, an issue where the Salesperson would remain stuck in front of the store after completing a purchase has been fixed.
• Improved Grid SnappingThe grid snap size has been reduced, giving you finer control when placing furniture and decorations. This allows for more precise layouts and better optimization of your store space.
• New Achievement to UnlockA brand-new achievement has been added to mark this milestone. It’s a rewarding goal for players who reach this point, so make sure to complete the new challenge and claim your badge of progress.
---
This Employee Upskilling update brings deeper automation, smarter workflows, and more control to your daily operations. With employees now able to assist in nutrient care, ingredient prep, and post production handling, your farm and store will run more smoothly than ever.
We’re excited to see how you use these new tools and behaviors to expand your operation. And as always, thank you for being part of our Early Access journey!
Happy farming and go organize your employee to better help you! 🧑‍🌾🔧🥗
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3152540/Hydroponics_Farm__Store_Simulator