Meadgard tavern upgrades are bought with the gold you take during service, and they come in five kinds: service equipment, crafting stations, menu and variety, decor and staff, and permanent boons. The named track that holds all of them is "Upgrade Valhalla" — unlock new weapons, shops, cosmetics, crops and recipes.
Meadgard tavern upgrades: the five kinds
- Service equipment. More tankards and an additional mead dispenser. Placing a second dispenser strategically makes the night much easier, because refilling the barrel is otherwise one player's entire shift.
- Stations and crafting. The stations you craft and cook at are built for scrap by Ernst the Carpenter, so the crates you smash on the day trip are what pay for the building work.
- Menu and variety. New recipes, mead blends and potent dishes, unlocked separately, and each recipe also carries its own rank upgrade with rising ingredient costs.
- Decor and staff. Customise the tavern's look, and hire quirky staff to take jobs off your hands.
- Permanent boons. The top tier: unlike stations and recipes, they do not need replacing.
What to buy first
The early economy is deliberately tight — it is possible to finish a whole shift perfectly and still not have enough coin for a single upgrade. The order the demo supports is:
- A second mead dispenser. It removes the biggest time sink in the shift and usually pays for itself within a night or two.
- More tankards. Fewer trips to the barrel for the same number of drinks.
- Extra chairs, if you want to seat more guests — seating is a separate purchase from the room.
- Only then more dishes, which cost ingredients you may not have brought home.
Where that money comes from is in the gold guide.
The gold has to be picked up off the floor
None of this works unless the coins are collected: customers throw their coins down when you serve them, and your balance only goes up when somebody physically picks them up, with a goblin half a second behind them. The coin goblin guide covers that part of the shift.
The menu is an upgrade too
Recipes, mead blends and potent dishes are bought or unlocked rather than found in the wilds, and each dish you add to the menu changes what the room is able to order that night. The recipes guide covers how the book, the menu and the rank-ups fit together.
The developers' own framing of the whole loop is that every successful service brings gold and you reinvest it to handle bigger crowds and grander feasts — so the upgrades are the progress, not the reward.