Before Update #4 you could hire a manager but not instruct one. If they overbought, your only levers were trimming the menu or clearing storage by hand. Venue Management Settings changed that: each venue now has its own supply target, its own spending cap, and its own notification switch. This page explains what each option does and how to choose a target without overcorrecting.
1. Where the Settings Live
The controls are not global. Open the venue overview window for the specific location and you will find Venue Management Settings inside it. Everything you change there applies to that venue only, which matters once you are running several locations with different menus and different customer volumes.
- Availability: the settings are tied to venues you operate, so they appear once a venue is yours to manage.
- Independence: one venue can run Lean while another runs Extra. There is no city-wide default to fight against.
- Verification: the target you pick is reflected on your shopping list — ION LANDS names this as the practical way to confirm what managers will buy.
2. The Four Restocking Targets
Each target is expressed as a quantity of each required ingredient, not a cash amount and not a total item count. A venue with a twelve-dish menu therefore buys far more at Normal than a venue with a four-dish menu, because "5 of each required ingredient" multiplies across every ingredient the menu depends on.
| Target | Documented amount | Pick it when |
|---|---|---|
| Lean | 2 of each required ingredient | A low-traffic venue, or one with a very long menu where you want to cap exposure |
| Normal | 5 of each required ingredient (default) | Steady trade you have not needed to think about |
| Extra | 10 of each required ingredient | A high-volume venue where an empty ingredient mid-rush costs you reviews |
| Recent Sales | Based on meals sold in the last 4 in-game hours, minimum 2 | Demand swings hard between lunch, dinner and night shifts |
3. The Daily Restocking Budget & Live Tracking
The budget is the more important of the two core controls, because it is the only hard ceiling in the system. A restocking target tells the manager what to aim for; the daily budget tells them when to stop. Venues pay for their own orders out of venue cash, so an unbounded manager is a venue that can spend itself into a hole while you are elsewhere in the city.
Update #5 Improvement: The interface now displays the "budget currently used" directly beside the daily restock budget you've configured. This eliminates guesswork, allowing you to see in real time how much cash your manager has spent so far on today's deliveries.
✓ What the budget does
- Caps daily restocking spend per venue.
- Works together with the target rather than replacing it.
- Displays live expenditure so you know when the ceiling is being approached.
- Is the primary mechanism that brought runaway-spend reports under control.
⚠ Watch for this
- Set the budget too low and a busy venue will still run out of ingredients, which costs you reviews.
- A recipe the manager cannot buy ingredients for will keep the restock objective firing — check the menu, not just the budget.
- The budget is a cap, not a target. Under-spending does not automatically mean the venue is healthy.
4. Connecting Greenhouses: "Use Greenhouse Stock" (Update #5)
Before Update #5, venue managers had no direct bridge to your agriculture enterprise. You had to manually transport harvested vegetables and mushrooms into venue walk-in freezers. Update #5 introduced the "Use Greenhouse Stock" toggle in each venue's management settings.
✓ The Autonomous Restaurant Supply Loop
When "Use Greenhouse Stock" is enabled, your venue manager inspects the dedicated storage inside your owned greenhouses before placing commercial vendor orders. If your greenhouse storage has ripe scallions, mushrooms, or chili peppers, the manager pulls them at zero procurement cost. Only ingredients missing from your farms will draw against the venue's Daily Restock Budget.
Combine this setting with the Automatic Harvester (Farming level 15) and RePlanter 4000 (Farming level 16) in your greenhouses to create a virtually zero-expense culinary business. Full details are covered in our greenhouse farming guide.
5. Restock Notifications and the Shopping List
Update #4 added a per-venue toggle for restocking notifications, which controls whether those messages appear in the top left of your HUD. Once you are running several venues, per-venue switches are the difference between useful signal and a wall of noise — consider leaving notifications on only for the venues you are actively tuning.
The shopping list is the other half of the loop. Because your chosen target is reflected on it, the list is the honest answer to "what is my manager actually buying?" If the list looks wrong relative to your target, the problem is usually the menu: it may rely on ingredients no vendor sells, or your budget may be too low to reach the target at all.
6. How to Diagnose a Venue That Is Still Losing Money
Since Update #4 the automatic "Restock Ingredients" objective only appears once a required ingredient's stock drops all the way to 0. That change makes the objective a much better diagnostic than it used to be, because it now fires on genuine emptiness rather than routine top-ups.
Check the budget before the menu
A budget set below the cost of one full restock means the venue can never reach its target. Inspect the live "budget currently used" counter, then raise the limit to a sustainable level.
Toggle "Use Greenhouse Stock" on
If you own greenhouses, ensure the checkbox is checked so the manager exhausts free homegrown ingredients before spending restaurant cash.
Remember your recipe edits are now local
Update #4 stopped player recipe customisation from affecting the whole city. Your edits apply only to venues you own or rent, so other venues keep using original recipes.
If the money drain predates Update #4 or persists after you have tuned the budget, work through the manager money drain fixes. To understand which staff actions compete with restocking, read the ten-step pipeline in the staff management guide; to decide what to put on the menu in the first place, see the cuisine and recipe guide. Every official change is indexed in our patch notes archive.
❓Frequently Asked Questions
Where are the Venue Management Settings in Nivalis Nights?↓
What are the four restocking targets?↓
What does the daily restocking budget do?↓
How does the 'Use Greenhouse Stock' setting work?↓
What is the 'budget currently used' indicator?↓
Does changing the restocking target change how much food I sell?↓
What is the shopping list showing me?↓
Can I set restocking notifications per venue?↓
🔗Related Nivalis Guides
Unlock Harvesters and feed your restaurant menus directly with homegrown crops.
Every official change since launch, and which systems it touched.
If your venues are still bleeding money, work through this before touching the menu.
Hiring, shifts, and the ten-step staff task priority pipeline.
Menu size is the biggest driver of how many ingredients a manager has to manage.