Repairs in Tavern Keeper are carried out by employees assigned to the Dogsbody role or the Generalist role. You cannot directly control a character to hammer away at broken items. Instead, you must hire or schedule workers who possess maintenance duties, ensure the damaged furniture is physically accessible, and set repair priorities so your tavern stays functional.

Staff Roles Responsible for Repairs

Maintenance in Greenheart Games' tavern management sim is strictly tied to employee assignments. Two specific roles cover maintenance tasks:

  • Dogsbody: This dedicated role handles repairs, manual construction tasks (such as laying foundation expansions), clearing debris, and hauling stock between delivery zones and storage shelves.
  • Generalist: A flexible hybrid role that can switch between cleaning, serving, stocking, and repairing depending on immediate tavern demands.

Specialized roles like Chefs, Servers, and Janitors do not perform standard maintenance by default. A Janitor only sweeps, mops, and polishes floors. If you only have dedicated Janitors on shift, damaged furniture will sit untouched regardless of how dirty or broken it becomes.

Step-by-Step: How to Repair Broken Furniture

When furniture sparks, cracks, or breaks completely, follow these steps to ensure your staff repairs it promptly:

  1. Assign the Proper Role: Open the Staff Schedule menu and locate an active employee. Toggle their current hour block to either Dogsbody or Generalist.
  2. Verify Room Access: Click on the employee and inspect their room permission settings. If an employee is restricted or banned from entering a specific room (such as the Taproom or Kitchen), they will ignore any repair tasks inside that room.
  3. Inspect the Damaged Prop: Click on the broken item (such as an outhouse, dartboard, or beer tap) to open its information panel.
  4. Prioritize the Repair Task: In the item's info panel, locate the maintenance prompt or active repair task and click Prioritize to bump it to the top of your staff's task queue.
  5. Clear Obstructions: Ensure the prop displays no "Unreachable" warning. If chairs, decorative walls, or narrow doorways block the path, staff will abandon the job and walk away.

Fixing the Broken Tap in the Gugamush Scenario

A common roadblock occurs early in the third campaign scenario set in the desert city of Gugamush. When taking over the abandoned tavern, you arrive with a filthy taproom and a broken beer tap that prevents you from serving patrons:

  • The resident orc worker, Onic, begins the scenario assigned strictly to the Janitor role.
  • Onic is also banned from entering the Taproom by default.

To fix the initial tap without spending scarce early gold on a replacement:

  1. Click on Onic and select the Ban from rooms icon.
  2. Click the Taproom outline to lift the restriction, allowing him to enter.
  3. Open the staff schedule and change Onic's assignment from Janitor to Generalist or Dogsbody.
  4. Click the broken tap in the taproom and set it to high priority. Onic will walk in and repair the tap so you can hook up your starter barrels.

Repair Priorities and Disaster Management

Official game mechanics dictate how automated repair queues work across different room setups and events:

How Staff Prioritize Damage

According to game updates released by the developers, staff automatically prioritize completely broken furniture over lightly damaged furniture. Furthermore, workers will fix broken or sparking props before moving on to standard Dogsbody tasks like hauling crates. Critical functional stations—such as your sole Food Window or single service tap—are treated as urgent repairs and can even draw off-duty staff to resolve them.

Earthquake Damage in Domhain

In the dwarven mountain campaign scenario of Domhain, blast mining triggers frequent earthquakes. These tremors rattle the tavern, knocking over chairs and degrading the durability of furniture across multiple rooms. Because structural wear accumulates rapidly during mining events, you should maintain at least one dedicated Dogsbody on every shift specifically to patch up furniture between tremors.

Fire Damage

When fires break out from cooking stations, lanterns, or unattended accidents, your staff must first equip firefighting buckets or extinguishers to put out the blaze. Once the fire is extinguished, the damaged item remains in a charred, broken state. Click the burned object to trigger a repair order. If an item is reduced to complete ash or deleted by extreme fire damage, it must be replaced through the build menu rather than repaired.

Routine Maintenance for Facilities

Items such as outhouses, toilets, and dartboards suffer natural wear and tear from patron use. Toilets and washbasins eventually trigger a "Needs maintenance!" warning in their info panel. If left unattended, patrons will refuse to use them, causing satisfaction ratings to plummet. Dogsbodies will automatically cycle through maintenance routines if their schedule allows sufficient working hours.

Troubleshooting Unrepaired Items

If your staff members are ignoring broken items despite high priority flags, check for these common causes:

  • Shift Overlaps: Staff on break or sleeping in the staff room will not leave their beds for routine maintenance. Check your timetable to confirm an on-duty Dogsbody is actively clocked in.
  • Pathing Conflicts: If an item was rotated too tightly against a wall or placed under an awkward staircase angle, staff may be unable to reach the interaction socket.
  • Unreachable Doors: Make sure internal doors connecting your staff room or storage area to the taproom have not been accidentally locked or designated as patron-only.