Hydroponics Farm & Store Simulator News

Hello, Hydroponic Farmers 🌱

A brand new face is coming to your store and they’re bringing deals you won’t want to miss!
In this update, we’re excited to introduce the Salesperson NPC and a brand new category of items: Furniture that permanently boosts your store’s performance.



Every now and then, a Salesperson NPC will stop by your store to offer exclusive deals. Unlike regular customers, this NPC isn’t here to shop but they’re here to sell you valuable bundles and unique items at discounted prices.


Here’s what they might offer during their visits:

• Fish Fry Packs: Bulk bundles at cheaper prices than buying individually
  
• Wallpapers for Decoration: Personalize your store with new wall designs to better reflect your style, available in discounted bundles
  
• Exclusive Furniture Items: Decorative objects that come with permanent bonus effects for your store
  

The Salesperson will start visiting your store once you've entered Chapter 2 and completed your first day. After that, they may appear at random intervals between 1 to 4 in-game days around 7.00 - 12.00, so keep your eyes open!


The Salesperson will only stay until the end of the day, so be sure to interact with them before closing time. If you miss them, you’ll need to wait for their next visit. Don’t miss out some of the items they offer are only available through this special NPC!



Alongside the Salesperson, we’re introducing a brand new item category: Furniture that improves your store stats.
These aren’t just for looks, each piece of furniture provides a permanent passive bonus to your store’s overall performance.


Furniture items can affect the following key stats:

• Customer Growth: Increases the frequency of customer visits to your store
  
• Price Bonus: Raises the maximum price customers are willing to pay for your goods
  
• Employee Morale: Boosts employee working speed, improving effectiveness and efficiency
  

Each furniture item adds its effect permanently once placed, helping you grow your business more strategically over time. Want more foot traffic? Invest in items with Customer Growth. Need to raise profits per item? Focus on Price Bonus furniture. Trying to optimize restocking and harvesting? Employee Morale boosts are the way to go.

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We hope you enjoy this new layer of store building depth, and as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the update. Let us know what you think about the Salesperson mechanic and which furniture you’re using most!

And if you’re enjoying the experience so far, don’t forget to leave us a review on Steam—it helps us more than you know! 🛍️🌿

See you in the store—and don’t forget to check who’s knocking on your door!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3152540/Hydroponics_Farm__Store_Simulator

Hello, Hydroponic Farmers 🌱

A brand-new chapter has just arrived in Hydroponics Farm and Store Simulator. Chapter 15: Food Production is now available!

This update introduces a major shift in how you run your shop, now you can process harvested vegetables and fish into high value food product. From crunchy salads to flavorful soups and refreshing smoothies, your shop is about to level up into a full fledged food production center!



In Chapter 15, we’re introducing a new system called Production Tools. These machines allow you to take raw commodities like vegetables or fish and transform them into Production Items. This is a new ready to sell products with greater value, and contract potential.


Here are just a few examples of what you’ll be able to produce:

• Green Salad using leafy greens
  
• Fish Soup made from good quality fish
  
• Veggie Smoothie crafted with fresh vegetables
  

These Production Items sell at higher prices compared to their raw ingredient counterparts, offering you an opportunity to increase profits significantly. But that’s not all, they also unlock new contract types, giving you new goals and rewards for meeting demand from external buyers.



Before diving into food processing, you’ll first need to expand your store and unlock a new section called the Production Area. This is a dedicated space where you’ll place and operate your production tools. Once built, this area becomes the beating heart of your item processing operation.


From there, you can:

• Buy and place a variety of Production Tools
  
• Manage each machine’s ingredient requirements
  
• Collect finished products from the tool’s output into storage or put it into the shelf to sell
  

Each Production Tool is designed with its own unique recipe logic, meaning you'll need to prepare ingredients and manage your farming priorities to maintain a steady production line.



The process of creating Production Items is simple but strategic:

• Stock or Grow special-quality commodities from your growbed
  
• Insert these into the appropriate Production Tool
  
• Wait for the production cycle to complete
  
• Collect your new item and stock it on to storage or sell it into a shelf
  

To help sell these new items, you’ll gain access to a special new shelf type: the Food Rack. Designed specifically for processed commodities, this shelf makes it easy to display and manage your new products in the storefront.



To help manage this new layer of gameplay, we’ve also added options for better organization. You can buy and configure new storage cabinets to handle only Production Items and place it in the Production Area. This keeps your general inventory clean and helps you plan your resource flows more efficiently.


You can now set:

• Storage slots dedicated to specific processed items
  
• Rules for which employee stock up and interact with which storage
  

It’s all about giving you the power to customize your workflow and maximize both space and income potential.

The Production Item system is more than just a new feature, it’s a game changer for how you play. It adds a new goals and strategies through contract integration and also selling from store. By adding this system, we hope to offer a new layer of satisfaction for players who love building efficient farms and stores and who are always looking for new ways to optimize, automate, and grow.

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Other than that, we also addressed several player requests to improve employee behavior. One of the updates focuses on how employees handle excess stock during restocking. Previously, leftover items were returned to the table instead of storage. Now, employees with a restocking stat of 50 or higher will automatically place excess stock back into the storage.


We can’t wait to see how you build out your Production Area and start cooking up something special. As always, we’re listening to your feedback to continue improving the Early Access experience.

If you’re enjoying the journey so far, consider leaving us a review on Steam. It really helps our small dev team!

Thanks again for being with us, and happy farming & food crafting! 🥗🐟🍹

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3152540/Hydroponics_Farm__Store_Simulator/

Hello, Hydroponic Farmers 🌱

We’re back with another quality of life update for Hydroponics Farm and Store Simulator! As always, your feedback continues to guide our improvements. This time, we’ve focused on delivering features that give you more control, clarity, and smoother gameplay along with a few bug fixes to keep things running as expected.

Let’s take a look at what’s new in this patch:



1. Keybind System (Keyboard + Controller)
You can now customize your controls for both keyboard and controller! Whether you prefer WASD, arrow keys, or a custom layout, you can set the controls that work best for you. Gamepad users can also freely remap button actions.

2. Auto Claim System
Claiming objectives no longer needs to be done manually unless you want to. With the new Auto Claim option, your objective will be claimed automatically to ensure a smoother gameplay process and don't need to back and forth checking tablet menu. Don’t worry, you can toggle this feature on or off anytime from the Settings menu.

3. Player Movement Speed Settings
A new option in Settings lets you adjust how fast your character moves. Whether you prefer a relaxed pace or speedier steps, the choice is yours.

4. Employee Activity Info
Wondering what your employees are doing? Now you’ll see a small activity label under each employee’s name, showing exactly what task they’re currently handling. This makes it much easier to monitor and optimize task assignments.

5. Improved Employee Behavior
Employees now act smarter when it comes to harvesting:

• Prioritize growbeds with the highest number of ready to harvest commodities
  
• Continue harvesting other growbeds with the same commodity if the harvest box isn’t full yet
  

These behavior updates are designed to make your employees more effective and efficient. By focusing on high yield growbeds and reducing unnecessary switching between crops, employees can now complete harvesting tasks faster and with less backtracking. This helps maintain smoother workflows, especially when managing many growbeds.

• Fixed an issue that prevented harvesting plant from certain growbeds
  
• Removed repeated “Customer path blocked” notifications to reduce UI clutter
  

We’re continually improving the game during Early Access, and your input means everything to us. If you have ideas, encounter bugs, or simply want to share feedback, we’d love to hear from you.

And if you're enjoying your time in the world of hydroponic farming, leaving a review on Steam is very helping us! 🌿

Thanks again for all your support. See you at the next updates of the game! 🐟💧

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3152540/Hydroponics_Farm__Store_Simulator

Hello, Hydroponic Farmers 🌱

Thank you once again for being a part of our growing community! Your feedback whether through reviews, discussions, or testing has helped shape each step of this journey. We’re back with a regular update that brings new quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes, many of which were directly inspired by your suggestions.

Let’s dive into what’s new in this new updates:


1. Growbed: No Harvest / No Planting Settings
You now have more control over your growbeds. With the new toggle options, you can prevent employees from harvesting or planting on specific growbeds. This gives you more flexibility in managing planting cycles and assigning tasks to your team.


2. Faster Commodity Transfer Animation
We’ve heard your feedback about slow animations during commodity transfers. We’ve now increased the speed of animations when commodities are moved—especially when placing items into delivery trucks or during general transfers. This should make daily operations smoother and more enjoyable.


3. Updated Market Orange Marker Behavior
The orange marker on the store door is now smarter. It will automatically hide when you’re not looking directly at the door, reducing unnecessary visual clutter while working in other areas.

4. New Setting: Freeze Moving Fish Animation
A new performance setting has been added! You can now choose to freeze the animation of moving fish to help reduce processing load and improve performance on lower-end devices.


5. Numpad Control for Cashier Credit Card Payment
Handling customer payments at the cashier is now even easier! When processing credit card transactions, you can now use the numpad keys for smoother and faster input.


We’ve also worked on polishing the game by resolving several issues found by our testers and community members:

• Fixed an issue where growbeds and shelves became unresponsive after being used by employees
  
• Fixed a visual bug causing the player’s wrist to appear broken in certain animations
  
• Adjusted aquarium glass brightness at night to make fish easier to see
  

As always, your support means the world to us. If you find anything unusual or have ideas for improvement, don’t hesitate to share your feedback through the in-game tool or our community page.

And if you’ve been enjoying the game, we’d love to hear your thoughts in a Steam review—it helps more than you know! 🌿

Until next time, happy farming and store managing! 🐟💧

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3152540/Hydroponics_Farm__Store_Simulator/

Hello, Hydroponic Farmers 🌱

Thank you so much for playing our game and for being an incredible part of our journey. Your feedback, whether through discussion comments, in-game feedback, livestreams, video content, or other channels, has been invaluable to us. We truly appreciate your passion and insights as they help us improve and grow together.

Now, we’re excited to bring you the latest update, which introduces new quality-of-life features to enhance your store management experience. Here’s what’s new:


1. Employee Reset Feature
Employees may sometimes get stuck and stop moving, preventing them from performing tasks. To fix this, you can now reset an employee by approaching them within 50 cm and clicking on them. If you're using a controller, press the RB or A button to reset them, allowing them to move and work again.



2. Employee Direct Harvest to Inventory
Employees with a harvest skill of at least 60 will now place harvested commodities directly into inventory instead of putting them on the table. This improvement helps streamline the workflow by reducing unnecessary item transfers and keeping your storage more organized. With this feature, managing harvested goods is now faster and more efficient.



3. New Storage Interaction
The storage system has received several important upgrades to improve flexibility and control in managing your resources:
• Multiple Access Support
Storage slots can now be accessed by multiple employees and players at the same time. Previously, each slot was limited to one user, which often created bottlenecks. This change significantly improves efficiency, especially in high-traffic areas.
• Reset Storage Focus
You can now clear the current focus commodity from a storage slot. This makes it easier to repurpose storage space as your inventory needs change.
• Smarter Employee Stocking Rules
Employees will now only place harvested commodities into storage slots that either match both commodity type and quality, or into unlabeled slots. This helps ensure a more organized storage system and reduces mixing of different item types.
• Storage Slot Locking
You can now lock specific storage slots to prevent employees from interacting with them. This gives you greater control over which resources are preserved, ideal for managing limited or rare stock.
• Commodity Replacement Confirmation
When changing the commodity type in a storage slot, a confirmation dialog will now appear to help avoid accidental changes.



4. New Shelf Interaction
Shelves have also been improved with new functionality to make product display more adaptable:
• Reset Shelf Focus
Just like with storage, you can now clear the focus commodity on a shelf, making it easier to adjust your merchandising strategy on the fly.
• Price Tag Visual Update
When a shelf has a focus commodity set, the price tag label will update its view to reflect this focus more clearly, helping players and employees easily identify what belongs where.



5. New Growbed Interaction
Growbeds now offer more intuitive management for your planting activities:
• Reset Growbed Focus
You can now reset the focus on a growbed, making it quicker to change planting priorities without needing to manually clear or reassign crops.
• UI Overlap Fix
We’ve fixed a UI issue where interface elements would overlap when trying to change a growbed’s focus. This makes the growbed interface cleaner and easier to use.


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Other than the features mentioned above, we’ve also been working on fixing a variety of bugs, both from your helpful reports and our internal QA. Here are some of the key improvements:

• Fixed an issue where all employees could get stuck when resetting one of them
  
• Fixed employees getting stuck while restocking
  
• Added logic to ensure employee reset can only be triggered when the employee is stuck
  
• Fixed a bug where infected plants couldn’t be harvested
  
• Fixed an issue with the focus commodity not working when switching from “none” to a specific commodity (case: shelf not empty)
  
• Fixed employees restocking the same shelf repeatedly
  
• Fixed a bug where shelves could be stocked with two different commodities
  
• Fixed a storage error when selling items still in the equipment drop zone
  
• Fixed employees not restocking shelves to full capacity
  
• Fixed employees getting stuck on growbeds
  
• Fixed an issue where the game wouldn’t open when using the Czech language
  
• Updated UX hover collider priority between inventory and inventory slots
  

As part of our commitment during Early Access, we always open to all feedback and suggestions to make this game as mature as possible. If you encounter any issues or have suggestions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts. 🌿

And, if you’re enjoying the game, we’d love to hear your thoughts in a Steam review. It really helps us grow and improve the experience for all.

Thank you for being part of the community, and happy farming 🐟🌿

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3152540/Hydroponics_Farm__Store_Simulator/