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Overview

Owner's Selection is the hands-on barista mini-game tied to The Cafe by Origen, the cafe chain players can buy and operate as part of the City Tycoon business empire. While a purchased cafe generates passive Fons income on its own, Owner's Selection lets the player step behind the counter, prepare each customer's order from raw ingredients, and earn a much higher per-shift payout than the passive baseline. It is the active counterpart to the cafe's resting income loop, and it lives inside the Hethereau Hobbies hub alongside the other timed mini-games.

How to Unlock

Owner's Selection unlocks automatically the moment the player buys their second cafe branch. The first cafe (the Bluebeard Road location) opens the cafe business as a passive income source, but the second cafe purchase, the Fiscus Avenue location near Wertheimer Tower, switches Owner's Selection on and adds it to the Hethereau Hobbies menu. The Fiscus Avenue branch costs 20,000 Fons and requires Cafe Management Level 5.

Until that second branch is purchased, the player can manage the first cafe passively but cannot enter the active mini-game. New accounts that want to reach Owner's Selection quickly typically focus their early income on stocking the first cafe consistently to build Cafe Management EXP up to Level 5, then save 20,000 Fons for the Fiscus Avenue purchase.

Gameplay Loop

A run of Owner's Selection is structured as a two-minute timed shift inside one of the player's owned cafes. During the round, customers enter the shop one at a time, each with their own order ticket and a patience meter that drains while they wait. The player has to assemble each order at the counter from raw ingredients and serve it before the patience meter empties. Successfully completed orders pay out Fons and contribute to the round's star score; expired orders cost potential rewards but do not end the run early.

Two facts about service order are easy to miss the first time through. First, dishes are not served on a strict first-come, first-served basis: any prepared dish can be handed to any customer who ordered that item, so a smart player batches similar orders and serves the most patience-pressed customer first within each batch. Second, base ingredients (cupcakes, bread and croissants, coffee concentrate) are made in batches rather than per-order. Brewing a fresh batch of coffee concentrate covers several customer orders, and a player who never refreshes the base supplies will eventually stall mid-shift waiting on prep work.

Menu Categories

Owner's Selection orders fall into three menu categories. Each category uses its own batch ingredient and its own counter station.

Chapters and Stages

Owner's Selection is structured as three chapters of ten stages each, for a total of thirty stages at launch. Every stage carries up to three star objectives (the Sales Target Achieved track), which translates to a maximum of ninety stars across the full chapter list. Later chapters require accumulated stars from the previous chapter to unlock.

Stage 1-6 introduces Danzaburou impostors, the activity's signature wrinkle. Danzaburou is a fake customer who wears a distinct red scarf and slips into the queue alongside real customers. Serving a Danzaburou breaks the player's combo and costs the round's score multiplier, so spotting the red scarf before handing over a finished dish is a core skill in any later stage. The hammer button on the counter is the dedicated removal tool: a single tap on a Danzaburou ejects the impostor from the queue without breaking the player's current chain.

Rewards and Stamina Cost

Each star earned in a stage pays 2,000 Fons and consumes 2 City Stamina. A perfect three-star clear therefore returns 6,000 Fons for 6 City Stamina, which is one of the highest Fons-per-stamina rates available outside the heavy vehicle hobbies.

Because the stamina cost scales with star count rather than per-stage, a missed third star simply leaves both the Fons and the stamina spend lower. There is no flat entry fee for trying a stage, which makes the activity friendly for learning runs.

Support Employees

Before each stage, the player can pin up to three characters from their roster as Support Employees. Each Support Employee applies their Life Skill passively while the round is running. Life Skills are character-specific business buffs that are independent from a character's combat tier; a low-tier combat character can still be a top-tier barista if their Life Skill matches the activity. To unlock the support effect, the character's Life Skill needs to be raised to at least Level 3, which is the slot that activates inside Owner's Selection.

The three most commonly recommended Support Employees, and what each one does for a shift, are listed below.

Other characters in the roster carry their own Life Skills. Many provide ingredient consumption reductions (typically around 1% per Life Skill level) or dish-pricing boosts, which compound into noticeable per-shift gains over a long Owner's Selection run. The placement screen surfaces each candidate's expected uplift before the player commits, so swapping employees per stage is a viable tuning knob.

Stage 1-9 Raccoon AFK Method

Stage 1-9 has a quirk that creators report can be turned into one of the lightest Owner's Selection grinds in the game. Community testing on the early Chapter 1 build suggests that the first wave of customers in Stage 1-9, roughly the first forty seconds of the round, spawns entirely as raccoon disturbance NPCs rather than ordinary order tickets. Raccoons are a class of unwanted customer that can be driven off rather than served, and a Support Employee with the right Life Skill can clear them automatically. Pairing the right two companions converts most of the round into hands-off score generation.

Companion Setup

The two Support Employees that drive this method are Sakiri and Nonoly. Sakiri's Security Life Skill is the worker that auto-handles raccoon disturbances, walking them out of the cafe before the player has to react. Nonoly's Life Skill multiplies the score earned each time a raccoon is driven off, which turns the auto-cleared first wave into a strong contribution toward the round's Sales Target rather than a stretch of dead time. With both pinned, the player benefits from the auto-clear and the score multiplier on every raccoon Sakiri sweeps out.

Sakiri alone is enough to make the method work. Without Nonoly the raccoons still get driven off automatically, but the round produces less score per ejection, so the cycle takes longer to clear the Sales Target.

Cycle Time and Stamina

Creators report the following cycle figures, both of which use City Stamina at the same per-stage rate as any normal Owner's Selection three-star clear:

• With both Sakiri and Nonoly pinned, a Stage 1-9 round resolves in roughly 30 seconds and burns about 14 City Stamina per cycle. Most of the Sales Target is met before the player needs to do any meaningful counter work.

• With only Sakiri pinned, the cycle stretches to roughly 40 seconds for the same stamina spend, because the score multiplier from Nonoly is missing and the player has to lean a little harder on real customer orders to top off the Sales Target.

These figures come from community testing on the closed-beta build and should be treated as approximate rather than data-mined values. They can shift if the Stage 1-9 raccoon spawn pattern is rebalanced in a later patch, or if either character's Life Skill scaling is tuned at launch.

Why It Suits Idle Sessions

Because Sakiri's Security skill drives the raccoons off without input, the player is mostly tapping to enter the next round and confirm the result rather than serving customers in real time. Across a full City Stamina pool the loop works out to roughly four taps per minute, which is light enough to run on a phone in the background while at work, on commute, or alongside another activity. It is the most input-light of the active Owner's Selection grinds and a good fit for sessions where the player wants stamina burned with minimal attention.

It is still worth treating Stage 1-9 as one option inside the broader Owner's Selection rotation. Higher chapters carry their own three-star stamina returns and are needed to push the chapter unlocks; the raccoon method is best understood as a low-attention way to clear a stamina bar rather than the only way to spend stamina in the activity.

Service Tips

• Brew base ingredients early. Coffee concentrate, bread, and cupcake batches all cover several customer orders at once. A shift that runs out of base supplies stalls into a long catch-up period that costs both stars and patience.

• Watch for the red scarf. Danzaburou impostors break combos when served, so visual identification is the first defense. The hammer button on the counter is the dedicated removal tool and never costs a combo penalty when used on an impostor.

• Batch similar orders. The non-strict serving order means the player can prepare two coffees at once and hand them to two different customers, smoothing out peak rush moments.

• Route Sakiri into Danzaburou stages. Once the impostor mechanic kicks in at stage 1-6, Sakiri's auto-removal essentially neutralizes the entire risk without the player having to track every red scarf manually.

• Rotate Adler in for coffee-heavy stages and Skia in for sandwich-and-cake density. The two skills complement each other and are individually strong on the stage types that match them.

• Treat early stages as practice for the dense ones later. Chapter 1 unlocks the Chapter 2 gate, and Chapter 2 unlocks Chapter 3, so a clean three-star sweep through the first chapter pays dividends on stamina efficiency for the entire activity.

• Park the activity inside the wider daily routine rather than grinding it in one sitting. Owner's Selection draws from the same City Stamina pool as every other progression hobby, so spreading shifts across multiple sessions keeps the Fons-per-stamina rate maximized without burning the daily cap on a single visit.

Relationship to The Cafe by Origen

Owner's Selection and The Cafe by Origen are two faces of the same business. The cafe chain is the persistent business unit: it owns the storefront, the inventory, the employees, and the passive income line. Owner's Selection is the active mode that the cafe owner can enter during a shop's open hours to amplify that income for a session. Both share the same employee roster, the same menu pool, and the same Fons economy.

Players who want to maximize cafe income usually run a hybrid loop. The cafe pays passively in the background while the player is doing other content, and Owner's Selection sessions are layered in whenever the player has stamina to spare and wants a higher per-minute Fons rate than the passive baseline. Both layers feed into the same City Tycoon progression track.

Related Pages

• The Cafe by Origen - The cafe chain that hosts Owner's Selection.

• Hethereau Hobbies - The hobby hub Owner's Selection sits inside.

• City Tycoon - The progression track that gates cafe ownership.

• Business Management - Broader system overview that includes Owner's Selection alongside other shop types.

• Fons - The city currency Owner's Selection pays out.

• City Stamina - The shared daily pool the activity draws from.