My Hotpot Story is a new game for the iOS and Android platforms where you run your very own hotpot restaurant. Your goal is to build your restaurant and increase its size, diversify your menu and add new items to please, your customers, and transform from a tiny restaurant, into a very large, very successful restaurant. You can earn coins and diamonds, and you can even play a merge puzzle game in order to unlock new flavor elements for recipes.
Read on for some tips and tricks for My Hotpot Story!
Serving your customers is a fairly simple premise; all that you have to do is take their order, swipe left to go to the kitchen to prepare the food, then tap the food after it’s been cooked. After you tap the food, your customers will automatically be served.
Once they finish eating, first, collect their checks. Next, clean up the tables, and a new set of customers will walk in, and the process will be repeated.
To make it easy to figure out what to do early on, tap on the quest menu and complete quests in order, even after you finish with the tutorial. These quests will earn you significant coin rewards, and these rewards can be reinvested back into your restaurant in order to add new food, new furnishings, and increase your restaurant rating.
Once you get enough money to hire staff members, start hiring cooks, wait staff, hostesses, and more, in order to automate your job. You will not have to actively tap anything anymore although you still can if you want to, and the more staff, that you hire, the less that you actually have to tap and the faster service gets done.
Whenever you are offline, your restaurant will continue to collect income. Even when you are not playing actively, check back after a few hours to collect your income. These coins are extremely important, because of the restaurant upgrades that they will allow you to purchase.
Be sure to constantly add new furnishings to your restaurant, as well as upgrading the furniture that you already have. Whenever you are in a specific area, such as the hall, the kitchen, or outdoors, you will have a list of items to upgrade that go with the area. Scroll past the upgrade list for items that you already have, and you will see all the items that you don’t have yet but are able to unlock. As you upgrade and unlock these items, you will be able to increase your restaurant ranking, adding more stars and different elements, such as tin, silver, gold, etc restaurant.
It is especially important to continue adding tables in the hall area. You can have up to four tables at a time, and each table can seat up to four customers. Just continue to make sure that your kitchen is upgraded enough to handle all of these customers at the same time, and that you have enough staff to deal with the rush.
You can also continually unlock new recipes, especially as you add restaurant elements. There are three different restaurant elements, and each recipe unlock will require one of each. The recipe that you unlock is completely random, and new recipes can make you more money and satisfy more customers.
In order to get the recipes for new food or a new garnish, tap the lucky cat anytime that it’s glowing. You will get one of each of the three flavor ingredients for food for free, or you can get two each by spending 10 diamonds.
Additionally, you can unlock flavor elements for a new broth, such as sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and spicy. Play the match game and spawn the various items for each element, such as the lime for sour, then merge items together until you get the elements themselves. Once you have one each of the flavor elements, then you will be able to unlock a brand-new broth.
You can get 10 free diamonds by watching an advertisement video, and the best part about this is that you can watch as many advertisement videos for diamonds, as you want to, with absolutely zero limit. Simply go to the diamond store, and claim your free diamonds, then wait for 60 seconds, and you will be able to claim them again.
Additionally, you will be able to spend 10 diamonds on earning a stash of cash whenever you want to, so technically, watching videos for diamonds is also the fastest way to earn cash in the game, even faster than simply waiting for off-line income to pile up. Plus, the amount of cash that you get increases as you upgrade your restaurant.
There are three different ratings that you have to increase in order to upgrade your restaurant. The first is the facility rating, which increases whenever you upgrade furniture and appliances. This is fairly easy to upgrade and not extremely time consuming, but it usually takes longer than upgrading your staff.
The staff rating is the second category, and this can be increased by hiring new staff and upgrading your current staff members. Not only is this, arguably the easiest and fastest one to upgrade, but the more staff members that you have, the more that your restaurant can automate itself, and the more cash that you will earn while you are offline.
The food rating is the third category, and this is arguably the one that takes the longest to upgrade. In order to upgrade your food rating, go to the “develop” button to unlock new food, then go to the “menu” to upgrade the star rating on food that you have already unlocked.
As you upgrade your restaurant, you will start to unlock entirely new areas. For example, the VIP area becomes available after you hit Tin 3, and this allows you to build big, expensive tables, and accommodations in order to feed large crowds, so these are excellent for earning more money.
Once you hit Bronze 1, you will be able to unlock the arcade machine outside of the restaurant. This machine will allow you to play two different mini games in exchange for tickets. These tickets can then be traded in for prizes, with four leaf clovers and food elements being the main thing that you can find. Purchasing food elements will allow you to unlock new food far more quickly than just waiting for the lucky cat to give you ingredients.
Four leaf clover’s are useful because they will allow you to increase the tier rating of a specific type of food. This can be done once the food has been upgraded to five stars. The best foods to tier up first are the ones that are used most frequently; your absolute best bet are the broths, because they are unlocked so infrequently.
You can unlock new broths (and complete specific quests) by merging flavor bottles together. This can be done in the match game where you collect flavor elements. There are five different levels of merging for each different flavor element before you get to the bottle of extract, and this requires a total of 32 of the basic item.
For that reason, it takes forever for your broths to be unlocked, because you have to do so much merging in order to get each individual flavor element. Be sure to collect whatever the lucky cat picks up, though, especially if you have been off-line for a while, because often they pick up merged items.
There are some other areas that you can unlock when you get far enough into the game, and when your restaurant is at a high enough level. To start with, we have the theater. In order to unlock the theater, you need to be at a restaurant level of Silver 1.
The theater is a place where you can provide your customers with dinner and a show. There is space for multiple tables, so, of course, you can serve more food here, but in the staff menu, you can also hire actors to perform shows for the customers.
The final area that you can unlock is the buffet. In order to be able to unlock the buffet, you need to have a restaurant level of Gold 1. Not only that, but you also need to be the owner of 20 uptier dishes, 10 uptier sauces, and 10 uptier broths. This is an accomplishment that takes it absolutely forever to do, because of how many upgrades you need to do just to be able to unlock five stars in a dish, let alone also to be able to tier it up.
The buffet is an absolutely massive room, and it doesn’t look quite like your typical American buffet restaurant; it actually bears more of a similarity to a conveyor belt sushi restaurant. You can hire more weight, staff, and more chefs to help you deal with the extra traffic created by the Buffay, and then you can watch the money pile in.
Offline income is a great way to earn money, but an even faster way to earn money is by turning off the automatic, sleep on your phone screen, then setting your phone down with the game active and falling asleep, or doing something else that takes hours to do. With the game active, the money will pile up faster than it would have if you were offline, and you will be able to do this trick for an unlimited amount of time as well.
Not only that, but there are a couple of additional bonuses to doing it this way. One is that the lucky cat will count tables and give you rewards, which we all know about because we’ve been collecting restaurant dish elements, right from the beginning. The lucky cat will also bring you various ingredients, which you would normally have to merge other ingredients to get. collected these in order to speed up the process of unlocking new dishes.
When the wait staff has thought bubbles over their heads, tap on the waiters and waitresses in order to pop the bubbles. They may also occasionally drop items. These items might seem useless at first, but their uses will be revealed eventually.
For example, a customer may come in randomly, asking if anybody has seen his car keys. You might pick up a set of car keys by tapping the waitstaff, so then you will be able to give him the keys and get a reward.