Gone are the days of just pressing a button and waiting! The new Quick Time Event (QTE) system brings an active, skill-based element to candy production. Your reflexes and timing now directly determine the quality of your products — and therefore your profits!

When your Mixer starts cooking candy, you'll face a series of timing challenges. Here's what happens:

The Gauge Challenge
A moving cursor oscillates back and forth across a gauge bar. In the middle of this gauge, there's a green success zone. Your job? Press the E key at the exact moment when the cursor passes through the green zone!

Multiple Chances
Each cooking session includes 3 QTE challenges. You have about 5 seconds for each challenge to hit the sweet spot. The more successful hits you land, the better your candy quality will be!

💡 Pro Tip: Watch the cursor's movement pattern. It follows a smooth, predictable rhythm. Once you get the timing down, you'll be hitting perfects consistently!

Your performance across all QTE challenges determines your candy's final quality:

The QTE system isn't just about making the game more fun (though it definitely does that!). It creates a strategic choice you must make constantly:

Star Farming
Want to unlock those premium recipes from Bob? You'll need stars, and stars only come from Excellent quality. This means you must master the QTE system to progress through the recipe book.

Economic Impact
Let's do the math with a simple candy worth $10:

Over hundreds of candies, this difference is enormous!

🎮 Practice Makes Perfect
The more you cook, the better you'll get at reading the cursor's rhythm. Don't get discouraged by early failures!

👀 Watch the Pattern
The cursor moves in a smooth sine wave pattern. After a few attempts, you'll start to predict exactly when it'll hit the green zone.

⏱️ Don't Panic
You have 5 seconds per QTE. That's plenty of time! Watch for 1-2 full oscillations before attempting your press.

🔊 Use Audio Cues
Success and failure have distinct sounds. These audio cues help you learn the timing even faster.

🎯 Focus Mode
When QTE starts, ignore everything else. Those few seconds of concentration can mean the difference between profit and loss.

The QTE system transforms Candy Factory from a passive management game into an active skill-based experience. You're not just building a factory — you're becoming a master candy maker!

Do you have the reflexes to consistently produce excellent candy? Can you maintain your focus through batch after batch? Will you sacrifice quality for quantity, or become known as a perfectionist?

The choice is yours, but remember: in the candy business, quality is king!

Managing a candy factory is exciting... but it can quickly get complicated! Between your money, your progression, your objectives, and the notifications piling up, it's easy to get lost. That's why we've completely redesigned the game's interface to make it clearer and more intuitive.

💰 Your finances always visible
Your money is now permanently displayed at the top of the screen. No more digging through menus to know if you can buy that new machine you've been dreaming of! And this is just the beginning: premium currency is coming soon to unlock exclusive content.

🏭 Your progression at a glance
Right next to your money, you'll now find your factory level with an XP progress bar. You can immediately see how much experience you have left to gain before reaching the next level and unlocking new features.

⭐ Stars and reputation
Two new statistics are making their debut:

🔔 Smart notifications
Gone is the spam of messages cluttering the screen! Notifications now appear elegantly on the right side, with appropriate colors (green for gains, red for losses) and emojis to quickly identify the type of information. They automatically disappear after a few seconds.

Why it matters:
A good interface is like a well-organized factory: everything is in its place, you know where to look, and you can focus on what really matters — making the best candy in the world! This new HUD gives you all the essential information without overwhelming you, so you can make the right decisions at the right time.

In Candy Factory, you don't start with a gigantic factory full of high-tech machines. No, you start small... and that's normal! The new factory level system reflects your progression and rewards every step of your journey.

Everything you do in the game earns you experience points (XP):

🍬 Producing candy
Each candy produced earns you XP. The more complex and expensive the product to sell, the more experience you gain! For example:

The rule is simple: the higher you aim in quality and complexity, the faster you progress.

Levels become progressively harder to reach — that's normal, your factory is becoming more powerful!

It's a steady and satisfying progression that rewards your long-term investment, without ever forcing you to "start over." Your factory evolves with you, step by step.

Bob the chef has a secret: an old book filled with extraordinary recipes that he only shares with the best producers. To earn his trust and unlock these recipes, you need to prove your talent... with stars!

Stars can only be obtained one way: producing excellent quality candy.

During production, you must complete mini-games (QTEs - Quick Time Events) that test your attention and reactivity. Based on your performance:

One rule: perfection! The more precise you are in your mini-games, the more stars you accumulate.

In the Bob menu, you can now consult Bob's recipe book. You'll see:

✅ Unlocked recipes: ready to be produced
🔒 Locked recipes: with the number of stars needed to unlock them

Warning! Unlocking a recipe consumes your stars. Choose carefully which recipe to unlock based on your goals. A more expensive recipe won't necessarily earn more if you don't have the machines to produce it efficiently.

This system rewards mastery rather than playtime. You can unlock recipes quickly if you're good at mini-games, or take your time and progress at your own pace. You decide your strategy:

In the candy world, your reputation is everything. It's not just measured by what you produce, but by your reliability, consistency, and ability to deliver the promised quality. The reputation system tracks each of your actions and builds your renown over time.

🍭 Produce quality
Each candy produced impacts your reputation based on its quality:

This system will unlock new possibility in the future.

We've completely rebuilt the save system from the ground up, and fixed a critical bug that was preventing new players from experiencing the game properly. Here's everything you need to know about these important updates!

🔒 Secure and Reliable
Your factory progress is now saved with built-in integrity checks. The system uses cryptographic validation to ensure your save data isn't corrupted or tampered with. This means:

💾 What Gets Saved
Every aspect of your factory is now properly saved:

🔄 Fresh Start Option
Want to start over? The game now includes a proper reset function accessible from the menu. When you reset:

🐛 The Problem
There was a serious bug affecting brand new players: if you had no save file when starting the game for the first time, the introduction sequence and first tutorial quest wouldn't trigger. This meant new players were thrown into the game with:

✅ The Fix
We've completely reworked how the game detects new players:

Automatic New Player Detection
The game now properly recognizes when you're playing for the first time by checking the HasSeenIntro flag in your tutorial data. If this flag is false (meaning no save exists or you've reset), the game automatically triggers:

Post-Reset Flow
When you reset your save, the exact same sequence triggers, ensuring you always get the proper introduction whether it's your first time or your tenth fresh start!

How It Works Behind the Scenes
(Don't worry, you don't need to understand this — it just works!)

When you start the game or reset your save:

The HasSeenIntro flag is automatically set to true after you complete the introduction, so you won't see it again on subsequent loads — unless you reset your save!

🎮 Better First Impression
New players now get a proper onboarding experience. The game teaches you the basics, introduces you to key characters, and gives you clear objectives from the start.

🎓 Guided Learning
Instead of feeling lost, you'll learn the game mechanics step-by-step through the quest system, making the learning curve much smoother.

🔄 Replayability
Want to experience the full tutorial again or start completely fresh? Just hit reset and you'll get the full new player experience!

🛡️ No More Lost Progress
The improved save system means your hours of work building your candy empire are safe. No more mysterious disappearing money or lost recipe unlocks!

⚡ Faster Loading
Save files are now optimized and load faster than before.

📊 Better Metadata
Your save files now include useful information like:

🔐 Anti-Cheat Protection
The save system includes checksums that detect if save files have been manually edited. While we trust our players, this protects the integrity of leaderboards and achievements (coming soon!).

🔄 Forward Compatibility
The new save system is designed to work with future updates. When we add new features, your existing saves will be upgraded automatically without losing data.

For New Players:
You'll now get a proper introduction to Candy Factory! The game will guide you through your first production, introduce you to Bob, and explain the core mechanics. No more confusion about what to do first!

For Existing Players:
Your progress is now more secure than ever. The new save system protects your investment of time and ensures that when you load your game, everything is exactly as you left it.

For Players Who Want to Reset:
You can now safely start fresh anytime you want, and you'll get the full tutorial experience again. Perfect for trying new strategies or just experiencing the story again!