Schedule I update 0.4.7 brings four groups of big-spending customers to town

TVGS released Schedule I version 0.4.7 on 9 October. Called “Special Customers”, the update adds four travelling customer groups that turn up in town from time to time and buy large quantities of their favourite products. It also brings new cosmetics, floor-level buildables and another laundering business.

The four groups are hippies, a party bus, businessmen and bikers, each made up of six to nine named characters. To make them feel less like props, they come with new behaviours: talking on the phone, working on a laptop, sitting on the ground, dancing and revving motorcycles. A new console command, queuecustomergroup, lets you call a group in on demand.

Hyland Medical now has an interior and can be bought as a business. The patch notes also raise laundering capacity at three existing fronts:

• Post office: 4,000 to 5,000
• Car wash: 6,000 to 8,000
• Taco Ticklers: 8,000 to 12,000

The hardware store now sells black rubber mats in three sizes, and Bleuball’s Boutique stocks a Persian rug. On the wardrobe side you get aviators, helmets, ties, tie-dye shirts, three hairstyles and seven facial hair styles. TVGS also rebuilt the avatar appearance system from scratch, because the old one would not have coped with user-created cosmetics, which are planned for a later update.

Players with large saves should notice a difference. Stored items are now pooled instead of being created and destroyed, which the patch notes say reduces stuttering in late-game saves with many employees. Icons for mixed products are generated more efficiently, saving several hundred megabytes of memory in late-game saves, and a memory leak when exiting to the menu is gone.

In multiplayer, thrown physics props no longer fall out of sync between players. The frame drops when pouring water or additives into a pot or grow bed are fixed as well.

Developer Tyler wrote in the Steam post that the update took longer than planned because its scope grew and parts of the code needed sizeable refactors. Two more updates are being built alongside it, and both are due before the end of the year.

The studio has also hired a technical artist, Roald, who made nearly all of the art in 0.4.7. He is now doing a pass over the existing art for consistency. Once that is done, TVGS plans its first map expansion.