Like many stories, this one starts with a dream: a dream of putting up a café. Somewhere in the heart of the woods, Chef Gino makes his dream a reality. With him as the chef and his beloved Alessia as the manager, the quaint little café soon becomes a thriving establishment. The place is always packed, the crowd enjoying the delectable dishes on every plate. There’s music, entertainment, and fruity drinks flowing from the bar. It doesn’t take long before the café of Chef Gino’s dream turns into the go-to place all day, every day for the creatures of the woodland.
But that’s the thing: the café was Chef Gino’s dream. And while Alessia shared the dream with him, she wanted to take her skills to a whole new level by studying at the Meowchelin Culinary Arts School. With Chef Gino’s support, Alessia left for the prestigious school and studied there for 3 years. But in the interim, the café fell on hard times without a competent manager to oversee its operations.
Though Chef Gino was skilled in whipping up the most sumptuous meals, he wasn’t at all ready to manage the café outside of the kitchen. Over time, the once loyal patrons stopped coming as the place gradually fell into disarray. Out of all the staff that used to work there, only “Big Mouth” Oliver stayed, and he hasn’t been paid in three years!
Amid this disaster, Chef Gino one day receives a letter from his beloved Alessia that she’s coming home from the Meowchelin Culinary Arts School. Ashamed of what the once thriving café has become, Chef Gino decides to pull himself together and bring the café back to its former glory, with your help, of course!
Published by HyperBeard, the same folks who brought us other adorable titles such as Tsuki’s Odyssey, Campfire Cat Cafe is a fun yet relaxing restaurant manager game where you can decorate your café, serve guests, learn recipes, manage your crew, and even unlock stories!
In the beginning of the game, you’re left with the remnants of Chef Gino’s once busy café, which has nothing but a bonfire and a space that’s littered with trash.
In this tutorial phase, you’ll be asked to purchase basic furniture for the café, such as tables made of haystack. This is offered for free during the tutorial, but later on, you will have to pay for purchases with acorns. Acorns, as you will soon discover, are the primary currency used for most in-game transactions.
Surprisingly enough, a few customers will come in and order something. This is where you’ll be asked to put a menu. It’s a simple one in the beginning, but it’s crucial in getting more guests to come over. With a menu, you can learn new recipes, thus being able to serve more customers.
Certain guests have their favorite food, which they will consistently order whenever they visit the café. Sometimes, a new guest will come around and order something new so you need to keep your menu updated.
To take a customer’s order, all you need to do is click on the icon of the food on top of their head and the order will automatically be served after a brief waiting period.
Still, the café is in bad shape and the only way you can improve its furnishings is by earning more acorns from orders. This means you’re going to need more customers to come in. Luckily, Big Mouth Oliver, a member of your ever-loyal crew (or rather, the only member, for now), has the pipes to promote your café to the woodland creatures. With his booming voice and talent for singing, Big Mouth Oliver manages to entice a few more people to fill the seats, which you still have to buy more of!
Eventually, as your café becomes busier, you’ll also be able to unlock a bakery if you collect enough reputation points. Reputation points are represented by the number of stars in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, just under the bar indicating how many acorns you have.
Like the café, the bakery starts out empty and you’d have to upgrade it with various furniture to increase your reputation points and to entice more customers to order from it.
The bakery is 1 of the 3 places you can eventually unlock. The 2 other places are the Camp (which requires 200 reputation points) and the Sanctuary (which requires 1,000 reputation points).
More than just a place to order, the bakery is actually where you can bake bread for your crew. Yes, you can hire more staff, each of whom has different stats that can add to the tips you earn, your reputation points, the acorns customers pay whenever they order, etc. By baking bread for your staff and feeding them, you upgrade their stats, which can help your café turn in more profit.
Some crew members also have special abilities. For example, Baker Mario has a 15% chance of adding 1 heart to a piece of bread you’ve baked. Feeding crew members fills up a heart count, and feeding them enough pieces of bread will eventually level them up. Thus, the more hearts a piece of bread can provide, the faster a crew member can level up and improve their stats.
As you can see, managing a café is hard work! Before Alessia arrives, it’s your shared mission with Chef Gino to turn the café into a busy business, which is what this beginner’s guide for Campfire Cat Cafe is all about! With our tips and tricks, you’ll be on your way to earning more acorns, beautifying the café, raising your reputation, and unlocking more places, not to mention getting some freebies on the side!
Pick Up Acorns Manually
We’ve mentioned acorns a few times and how they’re important in primarily buying furniture to upgrade your café. But what we haven’t mentioned is that you need to pick them up!
Whenever a customer pays for an order, they throw acorns on the ground, literally. Now, you might think it silly, but your customers are woodland creatures, after all (and so are you!). You need to pick these acorns up yourself so they can be counted in your virtual cash register. Since Chef Gino is busy making the food and Big Mouth Oliver is busy promoting the café, it’s up to you, the omniscient manager, to make sure all your “money” isn’t just gathering dirt on the ground.
Later on, you might get a helping hand by hiring Miss Balance, whose special skill is to pick up acorns or flour (more on this later) in a room 6 times. Once she’s done her part, she’ll rest for 295 seconds, the duration of which can be reduced whenever you feed her bread and level her up.
However, as a beginner, you can’t rely entirely on Miss Balance and it would take some time before you can hire her as part of your crew. That said, it’s best to get used to picking up the acorns manually yourself. From time to time, you might even pick up other items like tickets, shovels, nails, flour, etc. It’s easy and keeps your fingers busy!
Upgrade, Upgrade, Upgrade!
With more than a handful of acorns in your cash register, you can now pay for stuff that can beautify and upgrade your café!
Because you’re essentially starting from the ground up, you’re only going to be able to afford basic furniture in the beginning. But basic furniture is better than no furniture at all, so start saving up those acorns!
The café itself has 13 types of furnishings while the bakery has 10 (we’ll let you discover what’s at the Camp and the Sanctuary). Each furniture type is further classified into 7 or 8 subtypes that vary not only in appearance but also in the bonuses they give. Some may simply be purchased with acorns while others might require other materials such as wooden planks from completing tasks (more on this later) or by being bought with real money from the in-game store. A subtype of furniture may also require you to reach a certain amount of reputation points before it can be obtained.
Below is a shortlist of the types of furniture you’ll encounter at the cafe:
- Menu
- Food Truck
- Tables 1 to 6
- Campfire
- Dessert Station
- Beverage Stand
- Welcome Mat
- Hanging Decor
Similarly, here’s a shortlist of the types of furniture at the bakery:
- Oven
- Windmill
- Display
- Order Kiosk 1 and 2
- Storage
- Odds and Ends
- Boat
- Lighthouse
- Pier Decorations
The more expensive a type of furniture is, the more bonuses it gives when it comes to the price of dishes, how many acorns you earn whenever this type of furniture is used, the capacity of your tip jar, and how many reputation points you can gain upon acquiring this type of furniture.
Additionally, reputation points are important not only as a requirement to unlock more furniture areas, but they’re also necessary in progressing the story surrounding Chef Gino and Alessia.
You read that right, there’s a story that’s tied to the game and earning reputation points is the primary way for this mysterious story to unfold. Thus, aside from simply beautifying your café, make it a point to continue upgrading for more bonuses and story content!
Complete Tasks for Extra Rewards
Tasks are a staple in most mobile games and Campfire Cat Cafe won’t run out of them. Simply put, completing tasks by playing the game is a way you can earn extra rewards and even special items.
In Campfire Cat Cafe, there are 2 ways tasks are presented:
- One is by checking the individual task located on the upper right-hand corner of the screen. A task indicated here can be considered a long-term task, which might range from buying a piece of furniture to completing an entire set. Rewards for completing these tasks may vary, from acorns to gems, tickets, etc.
- Aside from long-term tasks, you also have short-term tasks when you catch the limited-time event for earning fish tokens. If you see the icon of a golden fish under the bar indicating your reputation points, this is where you can find a list of short-term tasks. These tasks are easier to accomplish than long-term ones, as they range from serving a number of customers to promoting the café a couple of times, and so on. Each time you complete one of these small tasks, you can claim acorns and fish tokens. Fish tokens you’ve accumulated are used to open up more rewards.
Make an effort to accomplish both short-term and long-term tasks when you have the chance. After all, you just need to keep playing and you’ll be handsomely rewarded for your efforts!
Promote to More Customers
As a loyal member of your crew, Big Mouth Oliver deserves to be awarded with Employee of the Year for three straight years. But it’s not just his loyalty that’s valuable to you and Chef Gino. What’s amazing about Big Mouth Oliver is in his nickname: his big mouth! And he doesn’t use it to simply chatter the days away. Instead, if you click the Promote button at the bottom of the screen, Big Mouth Oliver will start belting out some tunes to catch the attention of the woodland creatures to come and order at the café.
To attract a customer to come and visit, you need to click the Promote button 3 times. If you continue clicking, more and more customers will arrive. Depending on the amenities you’ve purchased for the café or the bakery, customers might choose to sit down at a table and order, buy dessert and drinks, or visit the bakery for some goods or to take photos.
Thus, to keep a steady stream of income and a jar full of tips, you need to keep promoting to customers. If you have some tickets, you can use those to get Big Mouth Oliver to auto-Promote for 60 seconds. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait a while before someone comes in to order.
Aside from having a fully booked café, Promoting will occasionally attract new guests. Similar to your crew, guests have their own stats and bonuses, which you can check out in the Guestbook.
Some might pay more for orders, leave more tips, or even let you play mini games from time to time (more on this in the next section). By attracting new guests and serving them, you have a bigger pool of patrons to satisfy, which ultimately leads to more profit. Thus, work hand in hand with Big Mouth Oliver and he’ll make sure everyone knows the café is the best place to be!
Entertain Special Guests
Further to guests, there are those who visit the café bearing something more than the commonplace hankering for delicious meals. These special guests won’t sit at a table, but interacting with them will give you the chance to earn additional rewards if you indulge them for a little bit. Of course, there are tons of regular and special guests you’ll meet over time, so we’ll introduce just a couple of the special ones in our list below:
- “On Time” Jett: A stork bearing random mystery gifts. If you click on Jett, they’ll ask you to choose between 3 gifts, which can be anything from acorns to gems and everything in between.
- Fiz the White: An adorable white mouse riding a bubble. If you click on Fiz the White, they’ll present you with a colorful meter bearing various numbers that correspond to the amount of acorns you can earn. Your objective is to make the moving ticker land on the highest number so you can earn the most acorns. You have 3 tries and when you’ve spent all your chances, Fiz will add up all the acorns you’ve earned during each attempt and give them to you.
- Twilight Pablo: A fluffy alpaca with a bag full of stars. The stars have scattered from Pablo’s bag and you need to help them find all 3 stars that have escaped. These stars will be partially hidden around the café and all you need to do is click them. The caveat is that one of the stars you might find is Angry Sirius. In the event that you do, you have a choice to continue helping Twilight Pablo or give up the search.
- “Witty” Bran: A proud lion with a big golden mane. Unlike the other special guests, Witty Bran doesn’t have a mini game, but when you do interact with him, he has a chance to drop 100 to 800 flour packets for 60 seconds, which you can collect after watching an ad. Flour is as important as acorns as you need them to make bread in the bakery.
- Luna: A beautiful magical cat who may (or may not) be the moon incarnate. For Luna’s mini game, she’ll ask you to help her prepare a bento box. She’ll describe a food item and you need to choose between 3 pictures of food that would fit the description. If you get it wrong, you can choose to receive hints by watching an ad or give up.
If you get succeeding questions wrong, you can continue by watching an ad every time you give her an incorrect answer. She’ll describe 3 kinds of food and every time you get the answer right, she’ll reward you with acorns. The total amount of acorns you receive will be summed up after you get all 3 answers right.
- Bilitis: A very colorful ram. When you interact with Bilitis and watch an ad, customers can tip 10 to 800 Love Tokens for 60 seconds. You also get access to the Pride Store, where you can spend the Love Tokens you’ve earned in exchange for wonderful but time-limited rainbow-themed furniture.
Again, these are just some of the special guests you’ll meet, and there are many more who will visit the café eventually, so keep an eye out for them!
Learn New Recipes
For the café to be successful, you can’t just offer one type of dish and call it a day. You need to have variety in the meals you serve so make it a point to learn new recipes whenever you can!
New recipes can be found in the café’s Menu. Learning a recipe, in this case, means unlocking new dishes with acorns. The more complex a dish becomes, the more acorns you need to spend to unlock them.
Because you’ll be splitting your “finances” between upgrading the café and learning recipes, you might be wondering: When is the best time to add something new to the menu? It’s when you notice that a new regular guest has visited.
Usually, if you click on any customer’s order that’s already included in the menu, they will be automatically served. However, if a new customer arrives and their order isn’t on the menu yet, a red X will appear on the thought bubble displaying their order and they’ll walk away if you try to serve them.
Thus, be observant about who orders in the café and make sure the food they want is included in the menu.
One other advantage of checking your menu and updating it is that you get to familiarize yourself with the dishes being offered, making it much easier to answer Luna’s questions whenever she comes around. Review the food items from time to time so Luna will never catch you off guard!
Feed Your Crew
Speaking of food, your crew also needs some nourishment! When you finally unlock the bakery after gaining just 30 reputation points, you’ll also be able to access the Crew button at the bottom of the screen.
As we mentioned previously, baking bread and feeding it to your staff will level up their heart meters and increase their individual stats. But first, you need to save up for an oven and install it in the bakery. Once you’ve purchased an oven, you need a minimum of 1,000 flour packets to bake 1 piece of bread.
Flour can be obtained from a special guest like Witty Bran or a regular customer like Daddy Doge, whose bonus stat is an 8% chance to tip 25 flour 6 times while paying from a table.
Just like the café’s tip jar collects acorns, the bakery’s windmill also produces flour packets passively, which you can collect in bulk after a certain waiting period.
Each time you bake bread, you’ll get a random type of bread that corresponds to a certain amount of hearts. These hearts are necessary for leveling up your crew and filling up their heart meter.
Often, leveling up comes in increments of 10, meaning filling up 1 heart from the meter is equivalent to eating bread that has a total amount of 10 hearts. To fill up the next heart in the meter, you need to feed your crew member bread that has a total amount of 20 hearts, and so on.
Upgrading some furniture items in the bakery, as well as Baker Mario’s stats, for example, will increase the number of hearts that a piece of bread can offer.
Which crew member you’re going to prioritize leveling up first will entirely be up to you, though we recommend starting with Big Mouth Oliver, Salesman Frank, and Baker Mario. You can split your bread among these 3, or you may also split the bread evenly between all the crew members you’ve hired. With the latter, however, leveling up might be extremely slow so it’s better to focus on a few crew members first just so you could take advantage of the bonuses leveling up can provide.
Otherwise, you can focus on just one crew member for the time being, like Salesman Frank, whose bonus skill is to get customers using the order kiosk in the bakery to give tips in the form of flour packets.
Claim Dailies
Similar to most mobile games, Campfire Cat Cafe also rewards you for logging in daily so check the game every day! Daily rewards can get you various freebies, from gems to exclusive furniture and even crew members without having to pay acorns to hire them. Even if you don’t feel like playing the game, you can simply login just to get dailies so you don’t miss out on any of the free offers. The good news is that daily rewards don’t reset even if you’ve missed a day.
Watch Ads for Some Freebies
Aside from claiming daily rewards, you can also get more freebies when you watch ads. Since ads don’t always appeal to players, Campfire Cat Cafe won’t force you to watch them and you do have the option to refuse watching one. However, consider giving a few seconds of your time to ads as they can get you the following freebies:
- Get Big Mouth Oliver to autopromote for 60 seconds. Usually, you need to spend a ticket to get Oliver to autopromote, but by watching an ad, you don’t have to spend anything. You can do this around 2 or 3 times before the offer disappears, though it will come back at a random time later.
- Collect more tips and flour. Depending on the upgrades you’ve invested in both cafe and bakery furniture, the tip jar and windmill can only hold onto so many tips and flour packets, respectively. Eventually, the tip jar and windmill will be rendered full, and it will be time for you to collect your earnings. By watching an ad, you can double the number of tips you collect and get 1.5 times more flour packets.
- Bake bread even without flour. If you’re short on the required 1,000 flour packets to bake bread, you can simply watch an ad to continue baking. You can do this 3 times. Otherwise, you need to spend tickets to bake or wait until you have enough flour packets. Once you’ve earned enough flour and have resumed baking with them, you’ll only get to watch another round of ads once you’ve run out of flour again.
- Receive all gifts from On Time Jett. As mentioned previously, you can select 1 of the 3 gifts On Time Jett offers. However, if you watch an ad, you can receive all 3 gifts for free.
- Continue searching for stars if you’ve found Angry Sirius. While helping Twilight Pablo recover his lost stars, the star you click on might turn out to be Angry Sirius, a red star with, well, an angry face. If you find Angry Sirius, you can watch an ad to continue searching for other regular stars. Otherwise, you’ll be asked to give up the search.
- Double the rewards from Fiz the White. Once Fiz the White tallies the total number of acorns you’ve acquired from his little challenge, he’ll give you the opportunity to watch an ad to double your earnings.
- Double the rewards from Luna. Aside from letting you receive hints and continue helping her pick the correct food item she describes if you’ve made a mistake, Luna will also give you the chance to watch an ad so you can double the rewards you can receive from completing her quiz.
- Get more Love Tokens from the Pride Store. If you access the Pride Store, you can get more Love Tokens by watching ads, which you can do 3 times before the offer becomes unavailable. Bilitis doesn’t necessarily have to be present for you to access the Pride Store. All you need to do is click the rainbow icon on the left side of the screen.
- Get 2x free gems from the Store. Occasionally, the in-game Store will offer you 5 free gems. If you watch an ad, you can get 10 gems.
With this, we conclude our beginner’s guide for Campfire Cat Cafe! Hopefully, you’ve learned more than a handful of tips and tricks to help bring Chef Gino’s café back to the thriving business it once was, and just in time before Alessia comes home!
What’s your favorite furniture item? Do you have a crew member you really like? Who’s the most adorable customer? More importantly, how do you think Chef Gino and Alessia’s story would progress? Share your thoughts in our comment section below!