If you are just getting started in Nivalis Nights and want your noodle bar to become a steady source of income, there are a few things you should set up correctly from the beginning. You don’t need a complicated restaurant to start making good money.
In this guide, I’ll show you how I would set up a noodle bar using only Noodle Soup, including how much stock to buy, how to arrange your seating, which staff to hire, and how to keep your wages under control.
The goal here is simple: make your noodle bar profitable enough that you can spend more of your time exploring Nivalis instead of constantly worrying about the restaurant. Some of these tips may change with future updates, so keep that in mind.
Nivalis Nights Noodle Profit Guide – Ingredients
This guide assumes that you have a relatively new game and have already completed the basic tutorial.
For this setup, we’re going to focus entirely on Noodle Soup.
You should already have the basic tables, chairs, and stools available from the tutorial.
The main things we’re going to optimize are:
- Ingredients
- Seating
- Staff movement
- Staff skills
- Staff working hours
- Food prices
- Stock management
Step 1: Optimise Your Ingredients
For now, I recommend sticking with Noodle Soup.
The recipe requires three ingredients in equal amounts:
- Chicken
- Onions
- Ramen
The vendors you need are located on the opposite side of the market.
At the beginning, I recommend buying:
- 30 Chicken from the Butcher
- 30 Onions from the Greengrocer
- 30 Ramen from the Greengrocer
After buying them, interact with any cabinet inside your noodle bar and put the ingredients into storage.
Don’t Waste Money on Fresh Ingredients
One of the biggest things you’ll need to manage is ingredient spoilage.
You’ll run into several problems:
- Running out of ingredients
- Buying too much
- Ingredients spoiling
- Spending too much on stock
There is a useful trick here.
Ingredients with less than two days of expiration are usually around half price.
However, these nearly expired ingredients will spoil overnight.
That means buying nearly expired ingredients can actually be a great strategy in the morning. Since you’re going to use them throughout the day, you can save around 50% on their cost before they spoil.
In the afternoon, I recommend buying fresh ingredients instead. This reduces the chance of them spoiling overnight if you don’t manage to use everything.
How Much Stock Should You Buy?
This depends on how many seats you have and how busy your noodle bar becomes.
Ideally, you want to finish the day with around 1–4 of each ingredient left.
That gives you a little backup stock without leaving a huge amount of food sitting around and potentially spoiling.
With around 11 stools, you can expect several busy periods throughout the day.
If we estimate around 3–4 major rushes with every seat filled:
11 stools × 4 rushes = 44 meals
You can also get around 1–3 extra customers between the main rushes.
If we estimate another 8 meals from these customers, that gives us roughly:
44 + 8 = 52 meals
So, as a starting point, I’d aim to have approximately:
- 52 Chicken
- 52 Onions
- 52 Ramen
at the beginning of the day.
Check Your Stock at 15:00
Around 15:00, check your stock again.
If you started with 52 of each ingredient, you ideally want to be around 26 of each by this point.
If you’re significantly below that, you may need to restock.
At the end of the day, check what you have left.
If you’re consistently ending with too much stock, reduce the amount you buy the following morning.
Keep adjusting this until you’re finishing most days with only around 1–3 meals worth of ingredients left.
Once you’ve done this, your ingredient spending should be much more efficient.
Step 2: Use Stools Instead of Tables
This is one of the biggest changes I recommend making to your noodle bar.
The tables and chairs you start with might look nice, but they’re not particularly efficient for a noodle business.
The problem is the amount of walking your servers have to do.
A server needs to travel between the kitchen and a table multiple times for every customer:
- Take the customer’s order
- Deliver the food
- Clear the empty bowls
Because of the way the restaurant is laid out, your server has to walk around the bar to reach the tables.
With stools, the distance is much shorter.
The server can essentially take only a few steps between the customer and the kitchen.
Sell the Tables and Chairs
As soon as you can, I recommend selling the starting tables and chairs and buying the cheapest stools available from the furniture store on the other side of Meridian Market.
You can fit approximately 11 stools.
That’s around 7 more stools than the starting 3.
More importantly, your staff won’t have to waste as much time walking around.
The shorter paths mean your servers can serve more customers, which means you can potentially operate with fewer staff.
Step 3: Optimise Your Staff
You can manage your staff hours by interacting with the tablet near the entrance of your noodle bar.
There are three main roles you need to think about:
- Cooks
- Servers
- Cleaners
How Many Cooks Do You Need?
For Noodle Soup, there are two cooking interactions on two separate machines.
Because of this, I recommend having at least 2 staff members with cooking enabled.
You can click the chef icons to enable or disable cooking for individual employees.
Having two cooks helps keep both machines running and prevents cooking from becoming a bottleneck.
How Many Servers Do You Need?
For the setup I described above, I’d recommend around 3 servers.
When the rush arrives, there is simply too much work for one or two people to handle comfortably.
Having 2–3 employees with the waiter role enabled gives you enough coverage to handle those busy periods.
How Many Cleaners Do You Need?
For cleaners, I recommend keeping only 1 employee enabled.
You obviously need someone to clean the restaurant, but cleaning doesn’t happen constantly.
The bigger problem is that when an employee goes out to clean, they’re away from the kitchen and serving area for quite a while.
A dedicated cleaner can therefore be more efficient than having multiple employees constantly switching between tasks.
Since the amount of mess is relatively low and spread throughout the day, one cleaner should generally be enough.
Understanding Busy Hours
Your busiest hours may vary, but the busy periods I experienced were around:
- 08:00
- 13:00–15:00
- 19:00
- 21:00
Make sure you have enough staff working during these periods.
You don’t necessarily need your entire team working all day, though.
Don’t Waste Money During Dead Hours
There are also periods where there isn’t much for your staff to do.
The quieter times I experienced were around:
- 11:00–12:00
- 15:00–16:00
- 23:00 onwards
Instead of paying everyone during these quiet periods, you can reduce the number of active employees.
You can also use these periods as shift-change times, where one employee finishes and another starts.
This lets you save money without sacrificing coverage during the important rushes.
Step 4: Hire the Right Employees
To hire new employees, head over to the job board.
You’ll see all the available workers and their information.
There are two things I would pay the most attention to:
- How many hours they want to work
- Which jobs they can perform
There are a few important things to understand about wages.
How Staff Wages Work
You pay employees by the hour.
If you give someone exactly the number of hours they want to work, they’ll generally be happier to work for a lower hourly wage.
If you force them to work more or fewer hours than their preferred schedule, you’ll need to compensate them with a higher hourly rate to maintain the same happiness.
Employees with more skills can also cost more per hour.
Because you’re paying that amount every hour they work, even a small difference in hourly wages can add up quickly.
Hire Employees Who Fit Your Schedule
If you want employees who can work throughout most of the day, look for people requesting 10+ hours.
On the other hand, if you want to save money by covering only the busy periods, you can hire employees who want fewer hours and use them for part-time shifts.
This lets you build your staff around your actual customer traffic instead of paying people to stand around during quiet periods.
Avoid Overqualified Employees
One mistake I would avoid is hiring too many generalists.
Employees with all three skills can be expensive.
If you only need someone to cook, there’s usually little reason to pay extra for someone who can also perform several other roles.
For example, if you have a three-skill generalist who you only use as a cook, replacing them with someone who only has the chef skill can reduce your hourly costs.
The same applies to servers.
If a waiter becomes unhappy because you’re asking them to work longer hours, you may be better off replacing them with someone who specifically wants longer shifts.
A Flexible 3–4 Person Team
You can also build a team of around 3–4 employees who have both chef and waiter skills active.
Employees generally move toward the nearest available task, so this can help reduce unnecessary walking and downtime.
The downside is that these flexible employees can cost more than dedicated single-skill workers.
To compensate for this, reduce the number of employees you have active at the same time and avoid unnecessary overlap.
Take Your Time With Staff Schedules
One of the best things you can do is experiment with working hours.
The game pauses while you’re adjusting the schedule, so you don’t need to rush.
Increase and decrease an employee’s hours and watch how their happiness changes.
Try to get their schedule as close as possible to the number of hours they actually want.
If you can do that, you can often lower their pay while keeping them happy.
Remember, their hourly rate is paid for every hour they work, so even a small saving can become significant over an entire day.
What About Staff Skill Levels?
The exact benefit of higher skill levels isn’t completely clear yet.
Employees do level up their active skills over time, but the exact impact of higher skill levels may change as the game receives updates.
It would make sense for higher skills to increase interaction speeds, but the difference isn’t always immediately noticeable.
This is something I’d keep an eye on as future patches arrive.
Step 5: Further Noodle Bar Optimisations
Once you’ve optimized your ingredients, seating, and staff, there are a few more things you can do to increase your profits.
Increase the Noodle Soup Price
You can change the price of your Noodle Soup using the tablet near the entrance.
I recommend increasing the price by +1 whenever every seat is being filled during every major rush.
Keep doing this each day until you start noticing empty seats.
Once you see customers leaving seats empty, reduce the price by -1.
If you can maintain a 4–5 star rating, you should gradually be able to charge significantly more than the default price.
The important thing is not to increase the price too aggressively.
You want to find the point where you’re making more money per meal without losing too many customers.
Make Use of the 08:00 Opening Time
If you don’t have any staff scheduled for 08:00–09:00, your shop won’t open until 09:00.
This can actually be useful.
You can use that extra hour in the morning to restock your ingredients properly before the busy periods begin.
Instead of paying employees to stand around while you’re preparing the shop, you can do the preparation yourself.
Consider Closing Early
You can also take advantage of the end of the day.
If nobody is scheduled from 23:00 onwards, the shop will close.
This gives you a free hour to collect your leftover ingredients and sell them back to the merchants.
Doing this can help you avoid losing money from ingredients that would otherwise spoil overnight.
If you manage your stock correctly, you can potentially eliminate most of your food spoilage losses this way.
Remove Spoiled Ingredients Quickly
If something does spoil, remove it as soon as possible.
Spoiled ingredients may potentially cause other ingredients to spoil as well.
You can sell spoiled ingredients to a vendor, although you’ll only receive 0 lims for them.
So don’t rely on selling spoiled food for profit. The goal is to avoid spoilage in the first place.
Should You Hire a Manager?
Managers are useful, but I wouldn’t rush to hire one when you’re just starting out.
The biggest problem early on is that a manager can spend your money buying stock constantly.
You’ll also have to pay the manager while they may spend much of their shift doing very little.
When you’re still building up your wealth, I’d rather manage the stock myself.
Once you’ve built up around 1,000 lims, you can start considering a manager.
However, remember that you’ll still need to maintain a cash reserve of roughly 1,000 lims so the manager always has enough money available to purchase ingredients.
So, don’t hire a manager immediately just because you can.
Should You Use Tables and Chairs?
I wouldn’t completely ignore tables and chairs forever.
You can eventually expand your noodle bar and add them, but they create a much bigger workload for your servers.
You’ll need significantly more waiter staff to handle the longer walking distances.
That additional staff cost can offset much of the extra profit you gain from having more seats.
For that reason, I’d recommend maxing out your stools first.
Once you’ve got your stool setup working efficiently and have plenty of money, you can experiment with adding tables and chairs.
The main idea behind a profitable Noodle Soup business in Nivalis Nights is efficiency.
You don’t need to throw money at your restaurant. Instead, focus on buying the right amount of ingredients, keeping your staff close to the kitchen, scheduling workers around your busy hours, and avoiding unnecessary wages.
My recommended starting setup would be around 11 stools, 2 cooks, 3 servers, and 1 cleaner, with staff schedules adjusted around your actual busy periods.
Keep checking your ingredient usage, slowly increase your Noodle Soup price when your seats are consistently full, and avoid hiring a manager until you’ve built up a decent cash reserve.
Once you’ve got this setup running smoothly, you should have a much more stable income source and can spend more of your time exploring Nivalis instead of constantly managing your noodle bar.