Guide to put waiters in right startup positions (no trial and error)

Are you frustrated with your waiters, because they always go to the wrong positions? Here I will introduce a way to 100% ensure your waiters are in correct positions. You don't need to do trial and error anymore, as you will understand the logic on the waiter placement and place them according to your will. This is very useful especially to people who are using island layouts, to ensure that the waiters won't go to the same island. (To understand what island layouts are, you can readIHOP UHOP's Guide to Island Layouts)

1. Waiters start next to one of the stoves.
Usually they will stand at the opposite position to the cook (i.e. in front of the stove). However if there are obstacles (tables, chairs, walls, etc) next to the stove, they will choose the position according to this priority:



One of the interesting thing here is that if the 7 squares next to the stove all have obstacles, the waiter will not appear in the restaurant. Therefore it is good to keep this priority in your mind when you place your stove.

2. The order of stoves, cooks & waiters are determined.
This maybe hard to understand, but this is the key thing for you to know where your waiters will be. Your 1st waiter & your 1st cook will stand next to your 1st stove, your 2nd waiter & your 2nd cook will stand next to your 2nd stove, and so on.

Here is an example:


This is my employee list. You can see I have numbered the cooks & the waiters from left to right. This is the orders for the cooks & the waiters.


The stoves are placed in order from left to right (with the method to be explained below). You can see that the waiters and the cooks are in the same order as they are on the employee list.

One thing to note here is that the order of the stoves is determined when you first load into RC, but the order will be messed up after you touched any of the stoves in the redecoration screen (this maybe a bug, but I don't think it is harmful enough to be fixed by playfish) Therefore in order to see the correct order, you always need to reload the page after you have made any changes to your layout.

3. Now you can find out the order of your stoves by understanding the order of your cooks.Since you know the order of your cooks from the employee list, and the order of the stoves is the same as the order of the cook next to them, so you can now find out the order of your stoves.

For example, I have this layout:


by comparing this with the employee list, I can number my cook:


The order of the stoves is the same as the order of the cook next to. So now if I want to make the stoves to be places like the one shown above, I can move them like this:


Save the game and reload the page and I will see them nicely ordered.


4. Now to make sure the waiters are placed correctly, you just need to place the corresponding stoves correctly. If you have 2 waiters, just need to make sure the 1st and the 2nd stoves are placed correctly.

For example, I want to make this 2 islands layout:


In order to make my 2 waiters separated in different islands, I just need to make sure that the 1st stove is put in one island, and the 2nd stove is put in the other.

I can find out the order of my stoves using the method above, and then place them like this:


Now after I save the game and reload the page, I can have my waiters correctly placed:



This is how you can ensure your waiters to be placed correctly. Even if in the future, people need to create a 3rd island for the 3rd waiter, this method will still can help to make the waiters placed in different islands, by putting the 1st, 2nd & 3rd stoves in different islands. Thanks for reading this guide, hope it can help you