- 01Forecast near-term demand
- 02Choose supply and storage
- 03Prioritize consumption
- 04Review remaining shelf life
Perishable inventory
Inventory deteriorates over time, with storage changing its useful life. More stock reduces shortages but increases waste and preservation costs.
The player's decision
Use the oldest stock first or fulfil a better-paying order that requires fresher ingredients?
Original scenario
Original setup: expect three to five customers tomorrow, but the fridge holds two portions. Extra purchases prevent shortages while unrefrigerated leftovers expire the next day.
Start with this prototype
Build a three-day stock puzzle with two shelf lives, a two-slot fridge and visible demand ranges. Track waste, shortages and profit by batch age. Let players retry the same day with a different plan.
Change one variable
Hold average demand fixed while increasing variation; observe whether safety stock responds to uncertainty.
What to observe in a playtest
Can players identify which batch will expire next day and explain both waste and shortages from the record?
Take the full design card
Includes rules, scope, tuning questions and sources for further planning. It does not create a project automatically.
Original analysis · version 1
Common pitfall
Merging identical items must not erase batch age and invalidate earliest-expiry planning.
Observations and sources
Cases refer to public documentation. Developers and community wikis are credited separately; document review is not a claim of hands-on testing.
- RimWorld
Food spoilage depends on temperature and differs from outdoor deterioration: a preservation-system comparison.
- Project Zomboid
Food has fresh, stale and rotten states. The cited Build 42 example concerns food condition, not a retail system.
Brief for the studio
Opens the AI studio with the brief below in the input. You can edit it. Nothing starts automatically.
Build a three-day stock puzzle with two shelf lives, a two-slot fridge and visible demand ranges. Track waste, shortages and profit by batch age. Let players retry the same day with a different plan.
Covers are original AI-generated style illustrations. Game names reference publicly visible design choices and remain the property of their owners. This atlas does not supply screenshots or assets from those games. Prompts and combinations are original drafts for new games.