Burger Shift: Team Rush Burger Flow and Dumpster Duty

The free Prologue (Steam app 3821150, from 22 October 2025) is where Nova Telum Studio published real patch text. Kitchen Confidence on 29 October 2025 taught readable cooking. Burger Flow on 7 November 2025 taught wraps and tickets. Dumpster Duty on 3 December 2025 taught trash, stacks, tips, and Trainee / Supervisor / Manager. Later notes cleaned HUD, multiplayer customers, and the main-menu pointer at the Early Access app. Early Access from 11 September 2026 adds stations on top of this ruleset. It does not replace unwrap, stack handling, or the Trainee / Supervisor / Manager split.

Read this page as a behaviour guide, not as a museum. If you need the paid feature list, use Full Game Notes. If you need the buttons, use controls. If you need the sandwich, use how to cook burgers.

Kitchen Confidence (29 October 2025)

Kitchen Confidence is the late-October precursor, not a third ruleset. It made cooking readable and trays harder to mix up.

Draw on wrap paper. You can draw directly on the wrapped burger paper: a number, a smiley, a message, or a messy scribble. Use it as a table mark when voice chat is loud, not as a substitute for hovering the receipt.

Colour-coded done prompts. Input prompts for patties and croissants use colour-coding to show when they are perfectly done. Stop guessing doneness from a grey prompt. Pair this with the 85–90% flip habit; colour is feedback, not a reason to ignore the second side.

Cooking-side arrow. Patties get an arrow so you can see which side is on the steel. If you lose the arrow in a batch, you are watching too many patties.

Tray HUD receipt number. When you grab a tray, the order receipt number shows on the HUD. That is how you stop carrying table 6 food to table 11.

Chair collision fixes. Some chairs no longer snag you. That sounds tiny until you clip a four-top with a full tray. The same drop also added nearby player names, clearer table numbers on monitors, lockers that keep your current look, and an end-of-day list of tables that still need cleaning. Useful. Not Dumpster Duty.

Burger Flow (7 November 2025)

Nova Telum framed Burger Flow as control where it matters: wraps, tickets, and the UI that used to fight you.

Unwrap and re-wrap. Wraps stopped being one-way. You can open a wrapped burger to inspect it or to fix a missing topping, then wrap it again. That sounds small until you play with eight people. The person at expo can catch a dry patty or a skipped pickle without throwing the whole ticket in the bin. Practice the unwrap on Trainee before you treat every wrap as final on Manager.

Multi-carry slices. You can move more than one slice at a time. Assembly stops being a commute between the board and the pan. The risk is mixing tickets: if two burgers share a hand, call the order number before you set either one down. Multi-carry is a speed tool, not a reason to skip the inspection panel.

Receipt hover. Tickets are readable without walking back to the monitor. Hover the receipt, confirm extras, then touch the food. This is the anti-shout feature. Voice chat still helps, but the hover is how a quiet duo survives when two tickets want onion and one does not.

Patience alerts. The game tells you when a customer is about to leave instead of letting the bar die in your peripheral vision. Alerts are a rotation cue: finish the wrap in your hands, then look at dining, not the other way around. On Manager the alerts come faster because there are more bodies in the queue, not because the UI is louder.

Pause menu overhaul. Pause is no longer a last-resort tangle. Hosts should actually use it when a new player joins mid-shift or when someone needs the controls rebound. Join/leave chat messages from the same patch make those pauses less mysterious: you see who arrived instead of wondering why a name tag popped up over the fryer.

Inspection panel contents. Prep pans finally show the actual ingredient instead of a generic label. If you are restocking, look before you dump. If you are assembling, trust the panel more than a shouted colour. Combined with nearby name tags, you can ask a specific person for tomatoes instead of pinging the whole lobby.

Name tags and chat join/leave. Name tags display for everyone nearby, so you do not have to aim at a head to see who is who. Chat prints join and leave lines. In a 1–8 lobby that is the difference between a clean handoff and two people grabbing the same bun stack.

Burger Flow also cleaned a cluster of kitchen bugs that tell you how the food is built: soda cups now keep their flavour after you add ice, so ice-then-soda is a real sequence; a collision glitch that ate the top bun when you placed a full bun is gone; invisible ingredients on a combined interact in multiplayer were fixed. None of those are recipes. They are proof that ice, bun halves, and labelled sodas are first-class objects.

Dumpster Duty (3 December 2025)

Dumpster Duty turned cleanup into a station. It also retuned difficulty so beginners get time and veterans get traffic.

Bins fill. Kitchen bins and customer receptacles fill gradually. At 100% they block until someone empties them. Instant cleanup is gone. If nobody owns trash, the line dies with a full burger in hand and nowhere to throw the paper. On a two-player crew, trash is a between-tickets job. On eight players, give it to a floater or to an NPC employee once hiring exists in Early Access.

Place one from a stack. You can set a single item down without dropping the whole stack. Prep pans, buns, and tray building stop being all-or-nothing. Use it to plate one drink while you still hold the next cup.

Grab or merge stacks. Point at a stack while you are already holding items and you choose: take the whole stack without emptying your hands, or merge the aimed stack into what you are holding. This is how Dumpster Duty wants you to restock under pressure. It is also how you accidentally fuse two tickets if you are sloppy. Look, then merge.

Tray prep. Grab a tray and right-click items onto it while you hold it, or keep placing onto a tray that sits on the counter. Dining-room service got faster because the tray is a tool, not a destination you walk to empty-handed.

Tip bonuses and voice. Faster service pays extra tips. Customer voice lines and reactions were rebuilt so a good handoff and a bad handoff do not sound the same. Speed is now a money statistic, not only a patience statistic. That matters for Early Access progression, where cash is supposed to buy upgrades.

Difficulty split. Trainee doubles customer patience — the teaching lane. Supervisor adds about 10% more customers than before. Manager adds about 35% more, with a faster, louder queue. Raise difficulty only after unwrap, stack place, and bin emptying are automatic. A Manager lobby that still treats trash as optional will leak tips even if the grill is perfect.

Later Prologue patches

These notes do not replace Burger Flow or Dumpster Duty. Install them. Do not rebuild a role around them.

9 December 2025 — performance 0.4.2. A small update titled Improved performance 0.4.2. If hitching made patience alerts unreadable, this is the note you wanted. It does not change wrap rules.

20 December 2025 — multiplayer customer visuals. A bug fix for online and LAN sessions where customers were missing their glasses, did not hold burgers while eating, and showed the wrong photos in the patience alert. Patience alerts still name who, table, and time left. They just needed the correct face attached. If you host co-op, this is why a guest might have described ghost diners in December 2025.

7 January 2026 — UI Fresh Look and customer comments. Two same-day notes. UI Fresh Look shifted to a cleaner, more professional HUD so tickets and alerts are less noisy. A follow-up small improvement moved customer comments closer to the head and added missing customer feedback lines. Read the face, not the far corner of the screen.

11 September 2026 — Early Access menu popup. The Prologue news feed added a main-menu popup that points at the full Early Access app (3804930). The copy lists Drive-Thru, fryer, ice cream, employees, and progression as the paid kitchen’s extra stations. The Prologue remains a separate free app. The popup is a pointer, not a merge of the two executables.

What still matters in Early Access

Drive-thru cars, fryer baskets, ice cream, and hired staff are new tickets and new feet. They do not delete Burger Flow or Dumpster Duty. You will still unwrap a wrong burger at the window. You will still merge bun stacks during a rush. You will still lose a lane when a bin caps. You will still pick Trainee to learn and Manager to get paid.

Carry the habits forward: hover the receipt, inspect the pan, empty bins before they brick, and set difficulty on purpose. Then add window and fryer coverage from Full Game Notes and the shift planner. The Updates Hub is the index if you only wanted the dates.