Food Outlet — a attraction kind in the city builder.
Food Outlet is a concession attraction kind that draws a modest crowd but serves it at very high capacity, so it almost never overflows and steadies venue revenue.
Food Outlet is one of the attraction kinds a venue lays out. Each placed attraction carries its own appeal, capacity, and upkeep: appeal sets the share of routed demand it wins when several attractions compete, capacity caps how many guests it can clear per tick, and upkeep is the per-tick gold it costs to run. Food Outlet sits at the profile described above.
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Demand and popularity
Each tick the venue draws a share of the city's population, scaled by happiness — a happier city
sends more guests, but demand never falls to zero because a happiness floor keeps a minimum draw.
That incoming demand is the popularity signal: it is split across the placed attractions in
proportion to their appeal, so a higher-appeal attraction wins a larger slice of the same crowd.
Queue states
When the demand routed to an attraction exceeds its per-tick capacity, the surplus guests cannot
be processed that tick — they overflow and are turned away. The aggregate overflow across all
attractions is the venue's queue pressure: zero overflow means every guest was served, while a
growing overflow means the layout is under-built for its draw. Adding capacity (more or
higher-capacity attractions) drains the queue; raising appeal without capacity deepens it.
Satisfaction
Venue satisfaction is a value between a fixed floor and 1.0. It is 1.0 whenever demand is fully
served (no overflow), and it declines as overflow grows relative to demand — but it never drops
below the floor, so a venue is never reported as completely failing. Satisfaction directly scales
revenue, so an overflowing venue earns less per served guest as well as serving fewer of them.
Revenue and upkeep
Revenue each tick is throughput times the gold earned per served guest, scaled by satisfaction,
minus the total upkeep of every running attraction. A venue can therefore run at a loss if its
upkeep outweighs the gold from a small, dissatisfied crowd. Balancing appeal against capacity —
and trimming idle high-upkeep attractions — is the core of keeping a venue profitable.
Breakdown markers
The tick result carries a per-attraction breakdown, sorted by attraction id, so each attraction's
routed demand, throughput, and overflow can be read individually. These breakdown markers are how
the inspector surfaces which specific attraction is the bottleneck (high routed demand, capped
throughput, large overflow) versus which are idle (low routed demand, spare capacity).
Guest (mote) states
Guests are shown as small moving motes flowing from the venue entrance to attractions and back.
A mote that reaches an attraction is a served guest; a mote that cannot enter (overflow) peels
away from the queue. Mote density visualises demand, and the colour/peel-off of motes visualises
the overflow and satisfaction the numbers above describe.
Accessibility
Moving motes and animated queues are decorative. Under the operating-system Reduce Motion
setting (and the in-app reduced-motion toggle) the venue renders a static snapshot: motes are
drawn as a still field at their tick positions, queues are shown as static fill bars rather than
flowing animation, and the numeric demand / throughput / overflow / satisfaction readouts remain
the authoritative, non-animated source of every state. No venue state is conveyed by motion alone.
Related pages
- Hosting building: Fairground and other venue-capable buildings.
- Demand source: Happiness (scales draw) and Population (sets the pool).
- Earned resource: Gold (venue revenue).
- Showcase / leaderboard: Venue revenue highscore and the city leaderboard.
- Achievements: Full House (serve a venue with no overflow).
Update history
- Introduced: venue / attraction core (E08-C-011). Wiki page added in interaction backfill batch 2 (E16-C-039).