Tavern Keeper Work Schedule Guide: How to Set Shifts and Roles

Managing your Tavern Keeper work schedule requires unlocking your first tavern star, building a staff room, and mounting an Employee Schedule Board on the wall. Once placed, the board lets you assign active working hours, stagger day and night shifts, and designate specific job roles—such as Chef, Server, Janitor, or Dogsbody—for every hired employee.

How to Unlock the Staff Work Schedule

In the early tutorial stages of Tavern Keeper, all employees operate under an unchangeable default routine where they perform basic tasks as generic staff. You cannot adjust individual work hours or lock employees into specific jobs from the start.

To unlock full control over your staff roster:

1. Reach a 1-star tavern rating in your active scenario (such as Riverbottom or Halflington) by fulfilling customer requests and service requirements.
2. Build a designated Staff Room if you have not done so already.
3. Open the Build Menu and place an Employee Schedule Board onto an unobstructed wall inside the staff room.
4. Place Lockers inside the staff room. Lockers are required to provide uniforms, which allow staff members to take on specialized roles rather than remaining default generalists.
5. Click on the Schedule Board and select "Open Schedule" to access the roster management interface.

Step-by-Step: Setting Working Hours and Roles

A frequent point of confusion on the Steam forums stems from the scheduling interface controls. Clicking directly on a worker's timeline does not automatically paint hours unless you have actively selected a role or preset first.

1. Select a role on the left sidebar: Click the icon for the role you want to schedule (such as Server, Chef, Janitor, or Dogsbody).
2. Assign hours: Click and drag your cursor across the hourly time blocks on the employee's timeline to apply the selected role.
3. Remove working hours: Select the "Off Work" icon on the left, then click or drag across the hours you want that employee to rest.
4. Copying entries: As added in official patches, you can right-click existing schedule entries to quickly copy and paste shift blocks across different staff members.

Customizing the Generalist Role

If you want a worker to handle multiple responsibilities—such as cooking and cleaning while strictly avoiding the bar counter—you do not have to settle for the default generalist setting:

1. Look below the "Generalist" option on the left menu, where individual sub-role checkmarks are located.
2. Toggle the specific checkboxes on or off (for example, leaving Chef and Janitor checked while unchecking Server).
3. Paint the customized Generalist block onto the employee's timeline.

Staff Tiers, Shift Lengths, and Personality Traits

Hiring staff requires balancing wage costs, skill perks, and daily hour limits. Higher-tier staff demand significantly shorter workdays, which directly affects how you schedule tavern coverage.

Factoring in Commute Time and Shifts

In Tavern Keeper, an employee's shift begins when they start walking from the staff room toward their workplace, not when they arrive at the station. If your tavern layout involves long corridors or multi-level cellars, staff can lose almost an hour of productive labor just walking to their posts. Stagger shifts so replacement workers clock in before current workers clock out.

Managing Negative and Shift-Specific Traits

Employee traits significantly impact schedule planning:

• Night Owl / Prefers Night Shifts: Staff members with this trait gain unhappiness if scheduled between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM. Schedule them for overnight cleaning, restocking, and maintenance while the taproom is closed.
• Wants to Sleep in Darkness / Underground: Keep their assigned beds away from brightly lit service areas or exterior walls.
• Working Too Much: Exceeding an employee's maximum comfortable hours (such as running an unskilled worker beyond 14 hours) triggers happiness drops, which lead to fights, slow walking speeds, or work strikes.

Aligning Staff Shifts with Room Hours and Duties

Your tavern's operations rely on coordinating staff presence with room accessibility:

• Taproom Hours vs. Staff Shifts: Click your Taproom zone to view its Room Schedule. If your taproom opens to patrons at 8:00 AM, schedule your Dogsbody and Janitor to clock in at 6:00 AM or 7:00 AM. This gives them time to clean footprints, restock kegs, and prep food windows before doors open.
• Update 2 Staff Duties: The Digging Deeper update introduced Staff Duties. Within their primary role, you can instruct specific servers to focus exclusively on serving drinks at the bar counter while others deliver to seated tables, or split kitchen staff between prep work and active grill cooking.
• Schedule Presets: Using the preset functionality introduced in Update 0.69, you can save custom shift layouts and reapply them to new hires without manually repainting the timeline.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why can't I click or paint hours on the Schedule Board?

You must first click a specific role icon (such as Chef, Janitor, or Off Work) on the far-left panel. Once an active role brush is selected, clicking and dragging across an employee's timeline will register and fill the hourly slots.

Why won't my staff light stoves or heaters during their time off?

Workers only interact with maintenance objects when scheduled on active duty. If staff rooms become too cold during the night, schedule a Dogsbody or maintenance-capable worker to take a brief shift during off-hours to stoke fires and maintain heating units.

Can staff take on specialized roles without lockers?

No. Lockers provide the uniforms necessary for specialized roles. Without lockers built in the staff room, employees are restricted to generalist assignments.