Overview
This guide is designed to explain the special events in the game and how to handle them successfully.
Normal Gameplay
In Lunch Truck Tycoon, you will encounter several types of events in addition to normal gameplay. First, let’s outline what happens normally in this game:
- Supply and demand – restocking appropriate resources for your customers and their locale
- Paying the bills – earning money beyond just breaking even
- Unlocking new items – improving the quality of your service through additional product offerings and features
- Game progression – using the resources you have to create a sustainable business
- Sped-up gameplay – once you have your setup there’s not really any point in keeping the game at a slow pace, since you don’t actually control it*
*I will explain exceptions to this
Special Event Overview
Now that we have an idea of what normal gameplay looks like, let’s go over some aspects of the special events. Special events help players:
- Earn more money – earn a monetary reward for any type of special event…if it succeeds
- Be more aware of customer interests – adjust your map location or recipe to be successful
Types of Special Events
There are 3 types of events you will see early in the game. You are not required to participate in them, but it wouldn’t hurt to try those without an entry fee!
- Sellout Event – sell a target number of food items within a specified number of days. Scales proportionally with the highest difficulty of Cook-Off you’ve unlocked.
- Recipe Perfection – Customers will give you feedback on a menu item and you can adjust the recipe to their liking. Takes place over several in-game days. Also scales with difficulty.
- Cook-Off – Compete against other food trucks in a timed challenge. Get feedback from taste testers and submit your recipe. Very similar to the Recipe Perfection Event, but with a much shorter time limit. The amount of time you get decreases with increasing difficulty…Reaches hard difficulty when you are around Lv. 20+. Costs money to enter!
For the latter of the event types, I recommend setting each of your ingredient counts right away to:
- 5 on Easy
- 10 on Medium
- 15 on Hard
Adjust those counts according to feedback as follows:
- “Less” = -2 of that ingredient
- “More” = +2 of that ingredient
- “Almost” = =/- 1 of that ingredient
- No complaint = don’t adjust the ingredient, it’s perfect!
Sellout Event
These are possibly the easiest events in the game. Since your goal is to sell a certain number of items in the specified time period, try:
- Setting up shop in an area you know customers will buy that item. This will require trial and error, but sometimes the solution is obvious. Want to sell coffee? Go to the city. Want to sell frozen desserts? Go to the beach. Want to sell hot chocolate? Go to the ski area. Some desired items are less transparent…for some reason university students like peanut butter cups. Again, this will take some experience.
- Stocking up on that item. Because you can’t sell what you don’t have! And what’s leftover can be sold another day.
- Unlocking relevant upgrades. Upgrading your food truck, and purchasing customer-count modifiers will help. You need traffic to sell enough items!
- Avoiding cell-phone tips…unless they mention a location you were going to anyway. Cellphone tips help boost profits, but they won’t bring in customers who want something different than usual in the area you’ve chosen to sell food in. You will likely lose an entire day of potential sales for a certain menu item if you waste time in the wrong location. For example, if you want to sell out on coffee, don’t go to the beach. Some customers may order coffee, but not the majority of them. Likewise, don’t expect business-people in the city to buy all your popsicles!
- Avoiding price drops to encourage more sales. I’ve tried this several times and this strategy is often masked by the fact you are in the right or wrong location to sell a product. Try selling short on popsicles at the beach. Guess what? Customers were going to buy popsicles there anyway. However, I wouldn’t recommend marking up an item over about 100% of your cost of the item (i.e. double your cost of the item) or passersby may show a double ($$) symbol above their heads to indicate they will not buy an overpriced item.
Make sure to always calculate your cost of the item and price it accordingly. You can do this by dividing your total cost by the number of items you are getting. For example, $10.00 for 6 hamburgers translates to $10.00/6 = about $1.67 per hamburger. You should charge at least $1.75 per hamburger (because the game only provides increments of 25 cents) to break even. You can easily get away with charging $3 per hamburger even during a sellout event. Keep in mind, fancier food trucks have higher operating costs.
Recipe Perfection Event
These next two events require close attention to your customers. As explained previously, certain phrases will indicate what you need to adjust and by how much. Aside from that you should:
- Decrease your gameplay speed by toggling the speed button
- Increase your customer count to get more feedback
- Keep stocked up on your target item
- Go to an appropriate location for buyers (eg. analyze your popsicle recipe at the beach and your coffee recipe in the city)
- Follow the above guidelines on how to interpret customer feedback
- Avoid cellphone tips that will distract you from testing your recipe (eg. don’t go to the Slums when you need to test your Italian ice recipe)
Cook-Off Event
This is probably the hardest event as it’s got a tight deadline to submit your recipe. To suceed, be sure to:
- Start adding ingredients while the announcer is speaking. The timer starts counting down while the announcer is talking! (See above recommendations.)
- Also, use the above guidelines on adjusting ingredients.
- Buy relevant upgrades! Use a better foodtruck when possible, and increase your customer count…and gain more feedback.
- Avoid entering a contest you can’t win. When your game’s Cook-Off difficulty increases to Medium, you may want to wait to enter until you have a food truck that attracts Medium customer traffic, etc. Otherwise you may be wasting the entrance fee. Competing foodtrucks may be at a higher level than you and be at an advantage.
Mission Statement
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