If you’ve played restaurant simulators before, you’ll probably find the mechanics in Kitchen Scramble familiar. If you haven’t, or if you need a little pick-me-up if you’re stuck somewhere, you can try out these Kitchen Scramble tips, tricks and cheats the next time you start a new game.
This tip is especially applicable if you’re a newbie in restaurant-based games. The learning curve here isn’t too steep, but you need to pay close attention to the tutorial because the things you will learn here are things you may not be able to learn if you try to learn the game by yourself. So far, we can say that the controls here are quite simple – simply click on the ingredient to choose it, and make sure you’ve got the ingredient needed on a recipe in order to select an appliance.
Ever been to a restaurant so often that the waiters and waitresses instantly know what you’re going to be ordering? That’s pretty much the case in Kitchen Scramble, as you’ll encounter many customers who have dishes that they order most, if not all of the time they frequent your food truck. Customers will initially appear with a question mark over their head, which means they’re thinking of what to order; the question mark stays for a few seconds. And while they may throw a curve ball at you and order something you weren’t expecting, it’s not uncommon for customers to be predictable when it comes to the meals they order.
Consider these examples. The trucker dude in this game tends to like fatty, heart-clogging foods; at first, he likes bacon, but he eventually tends to order burgers. Then there’s the news reporter, who goes for salads at first, but lets herself go a bit and opts for onion rings a few levels later.
This one’s inevitable, as there will be times you’ll end up preparing the wrong dish for a customer. While we did tell you that many customers are predictable and often order the same thing over a certain number of levels, you may end up guessing wrong. If this happens, then you can discard the dish, throw it in the trash can while still early, then cook the menu item that they want.
While it’s a good idea to wait for the question marks to disappear and be sure about what your customers want, you wouldn’t want to take too long on an order either. Like in real life, customers want to be served quickly, and if you take too long, you’ll be ticking them off. The hearts next to a customer’s head indicate their patience; five hearts means that they’re in a good mood and willing to wait. The amount of your tip depends on the number of hearts remaining when you serve them, so it literally pays to be fast and furious when serving up food for your customers.
You’re running a food truck, not a five-star restaurant. Food truck customers usually have little time to waste, so make it snappy for the sake of your tips, and your success in the game.
Aside from working fast, you also have to work in such a way that you can do two or more things at the same time. You’ll often see that there are several customers at your window, all waiting for their food, so you have to practice trying to serve them as quickly as possible. In other words, multitasking, aside from speed, is another essential skill to learn in this game.
But you can’t multitask if you aren’t armed with the right tools for multitasking. You can upgrade your appliances to allow for faster preparation times and greater bonuses. For example, the preparation time will go from 15 to 10 seconds if you upgrade your frying pan the first time. Also make sure to keep your inventory maximized as well so you can be better assured of serving more people quickly.
While your customers have a heart meter, you do so as well. The remaining hearts on a customer’s meter will go towards yours once you’ve served them; what you want to do here is to max out your heart meter. Once you’ve maxed it out, you’ll be “on fire,” meaning you can earn more tips from customers than usual. That’s what makes it important to serve up a five-heart order; if a customer has all five hearts left, that’ll give you a heart boost that maxes out the meter automatically.
Yes, we’re finally getting to this important aspect of Kitchen Scramble – coins. Of course, you’ll be earning coins by serving your customers, with more coins for serving them faster. Aside from simply completing those orders quickly, you can also pile up a ton of coins by buying premium ingredients for your food items. These ingredients can be purchased in the respective menu before the start of a game. Also, if you don’t mind being social when it comes to playing this game, you can ask your friends for coins via Facebook. But we’d rather go with the premium ingredients strategy rather than asking friends for coins; we know how it feels, as there are just some Facebook users who cannot stand game requests.
You can also watch ad videos in order to earn coins; if they’re available, this is a good way to add to your budget. And going back to the social side of things, merely connecting your game to Facebook and inviting friends to play can also earn you coins with little effort. If you do invite friends, be sure it’s someone who doesn’t mind receiving these invites, because you wouldn’t want people to unfollow you or worse, unfriend you for being the guy or gal who arbitrarily sends game requests.
Kitchen Scramble comes with its own energy mechanic, and the game’s equivalent of an energy unit is supplies. Supplies, in this context, means cooking ingredients, and you definitely wouldn’t be able to cook anything if you didn’t have ingredients, right? You’ll start the game with 50 ingredients, with one game session costing you ten supplies each. Once you’ve run out of them, you’ll have to wait some time before the supplies get replenished.
You can use your coins to buy supplies (a bit more on that later), or you can go to the in-app store and, with some real-life money, plunk down a nominal fee to get some. But if you aren’t willing to spend in-game or real currency and don’t like waiting, you can try the time lapse cheat and advance your phone or tablet’s time by a couple of hours. You can then return to the game with a full supply of, well…supplies.
At the Food Truck Market, you’ll be able to buy most of the supplies required for your truck. You’ll find this in every city you travel through, and keeping this in mind, you should save your coins for purchases at the Food Truck Market of a new location. Your coins will be best spent on power-ups that can help you avoid certain situations or remove constraints from certain tasks or items in your truck.
Kitchen Scramble works under the premise of a “workday,” meaning one in-game equivalent of a 24-hour day. Each workday has its share of objectives, which may include those based on your earnings, as well as those based on how quickly you do things. Finishing an objective successfully will get you star tokens; you can earn up to three star tokens per game session, with one token per star mastery.
Another way to earn star tokens is to complete a city’s objectives. But what do you use these tokens for anyway? They can be used to skip specific token gates that would require you to deposit something in order to unlock the rest of the game’s map. But if you don’t have enough tokens, you can always replay previous levels, as the game would tell you to do.