Staff and Employees
Staff are the employees who work the venues you own in Nivalis. Every business you run, from the inherited noodle bar in Meridian Market to a restaurant or a nightclub, is served by the people on its roster, and their skills, hours and wages sit between what you cook and what you earn. This page collects what the developers have said about hiring and scheduling, and what an official gameplay video released in September 2026 shows of the staff panel. Interface details from that footage are pre-release and can change at launch.
Your First Employee
The game begins with one employee. Banor, a former restaurant owner, agrees to stay on at the noodle bar handed over by Thaddeus Carminus. He knows the business and the neighborhood, teaches the basics of running a food operation, and doubles as the tutorial for staff management: managing a single employee's schedule is one of the first things the management interface asks you to do. In pre-release footage Banor is on the roster of a bar named Ramen Noir with a shift of 10 to 22, which matches the bar's posted opening hours. That footage is consistent with Ramen Noir being the inherited bar, although no first-party text has said so.
Hiring, Firing and Roles
The management interface in the footage carries a Staff heading, although the staff and working schedule panel shown is displayed under the Overview heading, so which heading holds which function is not yet settled. The developers have confirmed that you hire and manage staff, and the footage shows hiring, shift setting and hourly wages. The wider staff mechanics, such as how skills affect service or whether overwork reduces performance, have not been described in first-party material; the three unlabelled skill icons and the mood-style bar in the footage are the only visible hints. At venue level 3 a location can hire a Manager, a special role that restocks ingredients across your locations, collects goods from your greenhouse and boosts the efficiency and morale of the rest of the staff. Whether hiring a character's friend as staff affects that character's goodwill in the relationship system has not been confirmed.
In the September 2026 footage the panel that handles all of this is headed "STAFF AND WORKING SCHEDULE". It lists each worker on a row of their own, followed by rows marked "EMPTY SLOT" with a "HIRE" button beside each, and a "WORKERS LIMIT" counter reading 3/10 for the venue shown. Whether the limit of ten is fixed, tied to the venue type or raised by upgrades has not been stated; only the 3/10 reading is attested. How new staff are found in the city, beyond that button, has not been shown.
Shifts and Venue Hours
Shifts are set on a timeline. The footage shows a "VENUE WORKING HOURS: 10 - 22" label above an hour ruler that runs from 08 through midnight to 02, the same end point as the city's 2 AM curfew. Each worker has a bar on that ruler showing their hours, and the bars are dragged to move a shift: across successive frames one worker's bar moves from 08 to 18, to 09 to 19, to 10 to 20 and finally to 11 to 21, with the label updating as it goes. Whether the venue's own hours can be changed from this screen is not shown. The storefront confirms the hours from outside: a terminal by the noodle bar's door in promotional art reads "OPEN 10:00 to 22:00".
Why a schedule matters beyond wages has not been described in first-party material. Whether lunch and dinner rushes need fuller coverage than the off-hours, or whether overworked staff perform worse, remains unconfirmed, so for now a shift bar is a confirmed decision about hours and wages and only possibly one about performance.
Wages
Each worker row in the footage carries an hourly wage next to a coin icon, with minus and plus buttons to adjust it. The three workers shown were paid 5.00, 5.00 and 5.50 per hour. Wages are the main running cost of staff, and the developers have said a Manager is worth hiring only if you can afford the salary, so over-hiring at a small venue is the obvious risk. Whether raising a wage affects mood or performance has not been stated.
Skills
Three skill icons follow the wage on each row, each with a rating from 1 to 3 in the footage. The icons are a chef's hat, a server carrying a tray, and a figure holding a mop or broom, but the stat names are not printed on screen and the developers have not published them. Whether the skills affect service speed or quality has not been described; a roster that covers all three icons is a reasonable expectation as venues grow, not a confirmed rule. Treat the icon reading as a description of the artwork rather than a confirmed stat list.
Mood
Each row also shows a small face beside a ten-segment bar, with only a few segments lit for each of the three workers shown, and the faces differ from one worker to the next. The bar is not labelled. A mood or morale reading would fit the developers' description of a Manager boosting staff morale, but that is a reading of the artwork, not a published mechanic.
Workers Seen in Pre-Release Footage
The venue in the September 2026 footage had three workers on its roster. Two of the names, Antonina Banner and Case Gates, appear nowhere in text and have no published description; they are recorded here because the page's subject is the system, not the people. The roster is from a save six days in, so it is not the starting state, in which Banor is the only employee.
Worker | Hourly Wage | Shift Shown | Skill Ratings (Three Icons) |
|---|---|---|---|
Banor | 5.00 | 10 to 22 | 3, 2, 2 |
Antonina Banner | 5.00 | 11 to 21 | 2, 2, 3 |
Case Gates | 5.50 | 08 to 18, later dragged to 11 to 21 | 1, 3, 1 |
Managers
The Manager is the one staff role the developers have described in detail. It unlocks at venue level 3 and is expensive to hire, but a Manager can restock ingredients across multiple locations, collect harvested goods from your greenhouses and distribute them to whichever business needs them, and raise the efficiency and morale of the other staff. Pushing a first venue to level 3 before opening a second is the sensible order, because the time a Manager saves grows with every extra location.
What Is Not Yet Known
The names of the three skills and how they are trained or improved.
What the ten-segment bar measures and what happens when it empties.
Whether the ten-worker limit is fixed or depends on the venue.
Whether venue working hours can be changed by the player.
How staff are found or recruited in the city, beyond the "HIRE" button on an empty slot.
All of the above are absences in the published material as of 21 September 2026, not confirmed omissions. See the Business Management page for the wider management loop and Cooking and Recipes for the kitchen side of the same venues.