As it turns out, the animal medical profession isn’t the only dangerous job if you’re a cartoon cat that walks on two legs. As the Scary Shawarma Kiosk has taught us, working in food service involves fighting off skinwalkers left and right. Now it’s time for you to pick up a few shifts at the Anomaly Cafe. It gets pretty chaotic, so we thought a guide on how to play Anomaly Cafe was in order. Get it… order? Like you do in a cafe? Okay, fine, on with the guide.
How To Play Anomaly Cafe
First up we’ll talk about how to do your job. Then we’ll talk about the rabbit people who look like they’re made out of raw steak.
Cafe Basics
First thing’s first. Before you start worrying about the horrible skinwalkers out in the woods, you need to learn to run the food service. You are working in a cafe after all. So here’s the gist of your regular job, before the weird things start. Keep in mind that if you’re working as a team you can split the responsibilities up, for instance having cooks, servers, and someone on the register, but at least one person needs to take care of each of these tasks.
- Take a customer’s order at the register.
- Once you have the other, interact with the register to give them a table number. You’ll being their food to this table.
- Send the order through to the kitchen.
- Cook the food.
- Deliver the correct order to the matching table.
- Once the customer has eaten, collect and clean their plates.
Cafe Reputation
The stars on top of your screen is your cafe’s reputation. The higher it is, the better your earnings at the end of the day.
You can increase the reputation by:
+ Serving Customers
+ Serving high quality food.
+ Making repairs promptly.
The following things will damage your reputation:
– Missing Urgent orders.
– Serving wrong orders.
– Serving burned or over-mixed orders.
Cooking Basics
The cooking section of Anomaly Cafe is a set of mechanics in itself, so they get their own section. It’s done in a couple of stages, and getting them right is key to improving your cafe’s reviews, and making more money.
Fetching Ingredients
The first thing you need to to is pick up the raw ingredients. At the beginning, waffles will be the only food you’re making. So that’s pretty straightforward. We’ll use that as an example. When making a waffle, the raw ingredients will show above the mixing bowl in the center of the kitchen. You can add them in any order, and you can carry more than one at a time.
- Flour (Found on the shelving at the back of the kitchen.)
- Sugar (Found next to the flour.)
- Eggs (Found in the walk-in refrigerator through the right-hand door at the back of the kitchen.)
- Milk (Also in the walk-in.)
Collect all these and add them to the mixing bowl.
Heating The Dish
Once the waffles batter is mixed, interact with the waffle griddle to start cooking it. This starts a cooking gauge filling. You can do other things while it’s cooking, but you need to be careful. It’s importan to take the food off the heat after the cooking bar has filled up once, but before it’s filled up twice. You don’t want to burn the food.
Toppings
Once you have a cooked waffle you can customize it if the diner has requested butter, syrup, or later, fruit or whipped cream. You’ll find these against the back wall. After that, you just need to serve them their food.
Urgent Orders
Sometimes, a customer arrives and the order goes straight into the kitchen without the register, after this, a timer appears on the right of your screen. This is what’s known as an Urgent Order. You need to complete these for the timer runs out, or the customer will leave and you’ll get a pretty bad blow you your customer reputation.
Additional Dishes
As you make progress through the days, you’ll get access to more stations. This means you can make different kinds of food and drinks.
Pancakes
After you complete Shift 3, your should get access to the Pancake Griddle. This lets you take orders for pancakes as well as waffles. Pancakes are prepared similarly to waffles, with the same ingredients, though there is one key difference in the heating part. You need to cook both sides. So you wait until one side has filled the first cooking bar, then hit F to flip it. DON’T pick it up by accident, or you’ll have an uncooked pancake that you’ll need to trash. Only when both sides are cooked is it ready.
Coffee
Eventually you’ll unlock the coffee machine. Making coffee with this triggers a minigame where you need to stop the shrinking and growing ring inside the yellow or green zones on the cup. The better you do this, the better the quality of coffee. Unlike the griddles, you can leave coffee in the coffee machine without it burning.
Upgrades add decaff coffee and creamer. Once you get an ice machine, you’ll be able to add that to make iced coffee.
Milkshake Mixer
Around Day 14 you should get access to the mixer and the ice cream freezer. This lets you make milkshakes. You make these by getting some ice cream and adding it to the mixer. Like the coffee machine you’ll get a short minigame. Click/tap to fill the cup up to the fill line, then let go.
Like the griddles, if you leave a milkshake in the mixer too long, you’ll ruin it. Make sure you get it before the red bar fills up.
Anomalies
Once you reach Shift 3, you’re going to have to learn how to deal with some uh… irregular visitors to the cafe. Some customers should not be served. If something seems off about them, it’s your responsibility to pull the big level to the left of the register and deny them service. When a new customer comes in, your should not anything that seems unusual off off about them. You should also check the CCTV laptop on the right hang side of the counter to make sure what you see on the camera matches up.
These are potential signs of an anomalous customer:
- Unnatural Facial Expression. Empty eyes. Large teeth. Features that appear to be painted on.
- Order Irregularities. Their order looks strange or requests something that is not food, like ‘Flour’.
- CCTV Irregularities. They look different on the CCTV feed.
- Saying odd things. Customers that seem unfamiliar with basic tasks like how to ask for food is a red flag.
- Being made of meat and asking which customer tastes best. Come on, are you even TRYING at that point?
Sanity
Sanity is basically a measure of your health in Anomaly Cafe. If you lose all your Sanity, that’s the end of your cafe career. You will lose a little passively due to job stress, though much larger drains come from interacting with Anomalies. You can restore some by getting coffee from the employee break room. This respawns after a short cooldown, so try and use it as soon as you need it. A cup of coffee gives three sips, and each restore 15% of your sanity. Keep in mind that having as cup of coffee on your person takes up a backpack slot, so it’s not ideal if you’re hauling ingredients.
Events
A few different things might happen in the course of your shift that aren’t the same as Anomalies, but you will need to react to them accordingly. The ones we’ve run into are detailed below.
Power Outage
Occasionally the lights will go out. This will cause the customers to get upset and your cafe reputation will go down. To fix it you’ll need to head out the back door in the break room to the back yard and find the fuse box. You’ll find… something tampering with it. Interact with them and send them away.
Burst Pipe
If you see a snowflake icon appears in the walk in, you’ve got a burst pipe. You’ll need to go in and complete a minigame where you land the wrench icon in the yellow or green zones twice to patch up the break. If you don’t fix it, it will start to flood the kitchen.
Fly
A huge, rather alarming fly appears in the kitchen. You’ll need to grab the metal pan and give it a firm whack to dispatch the thing before it creates problems.
Scary Larry
Scary Larry is a raccoon who, despite his name, is not a monster. He just orders a scary amount of food. Expect like three or four orders at once. Dear lord Larry, slow down.
Classes
Like many games in the genre, Anomaly Cafe has a class system. Slightly different form most though, this class system is more of a character select, with the different staff members having quite distinct designs and skillsets. There five classes currently, (one of them Robux paywalled) with more on the way.
King
- Starting Equipment: $50 Cash
The default class, King is a balanced all-rounded. Starts his shift with $50 and 100 Sanity, has a small buff to cooking speed.
Pyro – Unlocked in the class screen for 110 Bells.
- Starting Equipment: Metal Pan
The trainee chef, Pyro has a higher cooking speed buff than King, and starts with a Metal Pan. Starts shift with 100 Sanity.
Jim Jam – Unlocked in the class screen for 500 Bells.
- Starting Equipment: None
A monkey and trainee server. Starts with a higher Sanity score at 200, moves 5% faster than the default, and earns 10% more on orders they serve. Any dish with bananas in also gives another 10% earnings boost.
Mr Wolfgang – Unlocked in the class screen for 1500 Bells.
- Starting Equipment: Coffee
Don’t talk to him until he’s had his coffee. Fortunately, Mr Wolfgang starts with one in his inventory. Drinking coffee also gives him a 15% cooking speed boost. A bit of a perfectionist, he gets a 15% earning boost for perfect orders. He’s also pretty charismatic, and earns 5% more tips. Starts with 150 Sanity.
Lemon – Unlocked in the class screen for 180 Robux.
- Starting Equipment: None
A more RNG-based character. Lemon is the fastest character currently, with a 10% speed buff. She also improves tips the most with a 20% tip boost. There is a catch though, she can have good or bad luck each shift, which might shift how things play out.
Items
After around 5 days, Bonny will come in and set up shop in the break room… I mean literally. She’ll sell you items out of your cafe earnings that might help you.
- Bells – $300
- Gives you 10 Bells in currency. (You can use this to buy classes, if you didn’t notice.)
- Posters – $150
- Increases customer patience by 5%. You can stack this up to 3 times.
- Plants – $180
- Increases customer patience by 10%.You can stack this up to 3 times.
- Medkit – $1500
- You can use this to revive one downed player.
- Coffee – $200
- Acts just like the coffee cup from the coffee machine, but you don’t need to wait for the cooldown on that. Good if you’re having some major Sanity problems.
- Pan
- Bring non-stick justice to 3 Anomalies.
- Talisman – $600
- Instant banish an Anomaly. Great to save your Sanity.
- Tip Jar – $180
- Increases the chances of larger tips.
- Backpack – $320
- Lets you carry an extra item.
Scrappy
Also in the break room you’ll find scrappy the PC on the desk. This computer lets you upgrade your stats with money. You can increase the following:
- Cooking Speed
- Walking Speed
- Machine Operation
- Batter Quality
Tips
Well, you know how to play Anomaly Cafe. Struggling a bit with some of the mechanics? It does get a bit hectic. Here are a few tips to maximize your efficiency.
- Make the most out of the post-shift time.
- You can spend as long as you like hanging around post-shift. Once the shift is over you’re safe until someone hits the bell to start the next shift.
- Preload your mixing bowls and coffee machine.
- You can add all your ingredients to the mixing bowls and coffee machine between shifts. That means your first waffle, pancake, and coffee order are ready. (Unless it’s decaff, but you can pick the coffee up to use later.)
- Try and keep an eye on customers when they enter.
- This can by tricky if you’re busy in the kitchen, but some anomalies give tells that are harder to see once they reach the counter.
- Get a talisman.
- These might be $600, but they are a really efficient way to deal with Anomalies. Just be aware that you can’t use them on anomalies at the counter.
- Some urgent orders are anomalies.
- They will start their shenanigans after you fulfil the order. You can ignore it.
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