Greetings players, during last month the threshold of 10 million downloads was surpassed among more than 8,5 million unique users. The two members of this project wish you all a cozy new year.

Thanks for playing and here's a toast to a year hopefully full of constant updates and good brooming moments.

Changelog:
- Implemented a new kind of perks in the improvement blackboard called Star Perks, these will cost more than one franchise point and will feature advanced upgrades. So far, the following are available:
* A perk that converts the trash container just outside into a recycling one.
* A perk that updates the software in the pricing machine and introduces an option for it to automatically set all products pricing to the desired percentage.
* A perk that makes time pass five times faster. Can only be triggered during nights when all customers have left the store and employees are busy in restocking or storage. Once acquired, a clock will appear in the manager’s room and players will be able to click on it to activate/deactivate the feature. If employees finish their restocking tasks it will deactivate by itself. This kind of time altering features may be expected troublesome, if issues are found feel free to post a topic about it.

- Implemented a skin system for brooms and the first five skins are rewards that can be acquired from a capsule machine in front of the supermarket that uses winter event’s rewards as coins. Some skins are rarer than others and their rarity is indicated by their respective star color in the broom-selecting machine (gold, silver and bronze).

- Players’ broom skin of choice can be set in a machine next to the capsule machines until a more refined way is developed. Skins are only visualized when a player is carrying them.

- Moderately increased the threshold for cashiers to level up as it was too fast. Players may notice a reduction in their cashiers’ grades.

- Cashiers leveling up will progressively decrease the time they take in checkouting products added to the time saves provided from perks. Note for now this will reach a cap inherent to how the game queues NPC tasks but it should be noticeable.

- Security crew leveling up will also make them progressively hit thieves faster.

- Employees will suffer a small speed penalty if they are not happy.

- Implemented a secondary way of managing stats, this could improve problems related to a few players crashing every new day.

- Implemented a system that will move old backups to an auxiliary folder in the save location, this way Steam Cloud won’t act wrong when trying to sync too many files (there’s a limit).

- Added a new setting in General options for hosts to automatically end the day if desired in case they want to go AFK in an online game.

- Adjusted potted sprout and potted bamboo decoration colliders so they can better overlap with other entities or the store.

- Fixed an issue related to thieves that made them drop the same product several times in a row instead of the actual list they stole.

- Limited opening and closing the store and buying space expansions to the manager’s role in multiplayer games.

- For better readability, unlock/require information fields in the perk’s blackboard will now display bigger if there’s only one field to show.

- Extended Winter event until day 8th for the stragglers and Minigrusches will always give a star token.

Have done some changes to employee’s code in preparation for next week optimizations like game’s freezing when employees are assigned but have nothing to do, better restocking and storage prioritization, or employees merging boxes contents when assigned to storage.

Hello! Christmas event made its way between employees’ patches. Back to improve those employees again!

Changelog:
- Implemented a small winter event which will be active at least until next week. In order to activate it players will need to purchase and place at least one Christmas Gift as decoration and wait until approximately the end of the day for it to start. Have a broom in hand and watch for something unusual roaming your store.

- Each time that the event is done players will collect Star Tokens, these will serve to purchase certain items in the future probably starting with some winter brooms skins in New Year for next patch.

- Added both Christmas music in intro and ingame.

- Added two more Christmas props: a snowman and a giant candy cane.

- Added five more materials to the paintables tablet: snow plus four different types of ice.

- Implemented a switch to optionally turn off the snow effect for a minimal performance gain in some cases.

- Tasks in Employee’s Assignment are now color coded for better visual recognition.

- Added a new silly experimental hat.

- Implemented three new buttons on top of the Employee’s Assignment tab:
* First one assigns a particular task to all employees at once.
* Second one allows to save the current task priorities of all current employees in five different slots.
* Third one allows to load these priorities.

- Fixed an issue in which the new recycling boxes button would appear but the perk was not acquired yet.

- Employee’s happiness should now sync correctly to non-hosts players.

- Ordered boxes with products will now try to spawn in a more retrained way in order to avoid physics to push them underground in some rare cases (could happen if a really big amount are ordered at the same time).

- The issue in which employee’s names were occluded by hats should be fixed.

- Doubled the number of products produce trays bring in boxes.