If you are familiar with the WAX blockchain then you probably are at least semi familiar with the TACO ecosystem. So I won't go full boar into the background of TACO but I will give a brief overview to set the stage.

TACO is a ecosystem but it also a cryptocurrency on the WAX blockchain. There are 3 currencies within the ecosystem $TACO & $SHING & $ONI. For this guide we don't really care about $ONI. But we will need TACO and SHING. 

So what are Venue's? Let's let TACO give you the brief overview.

Venues are the foundation to the TACO ecosystem. If you are invested into TACO you probably have 1 or a few Venues or you at least have thought about buying one until you saw the price of them.

Don't believe me?

Have you played Brigade? You have to work at a Venue that has unlocked Brigade.

Have you played Acryptia? You have to play after you select a Venue to play at.

Have you played Combz? yeah me either (kidding)

What I am trying to get at is that Venues are the bread and butter of TACO. Now that we got that out of the way lets dive into what a Venue can do.

So at their core each Venue can make ingredients because each Venue is a specific ingredient. 

Above you can see the rarities and which ingredient each rarity falls into. These are my Venues currently and you can see which ones can make what ingredients.

To be clear: "House of the Horde" is on loan to me so that I can help level it up and also make this more detailed guide. Byron owns that Venue and you should really check out his own ecosystem and all the sick artwork he creates on various blockchains here https://discord.gg/YXnDXBNyyQ 

Upgrading your Venue:

The real fun starts when you upgrade your Venue to level 10 because at that point you will be able to craft ingredients. But even at level 0 you still earn passive SHING. Here is the list of what you unlock at what levels:

There are plenty of tools out there to tell you what you need to level up certain levels but the general rule of thumb is this:
Leveling up will cost some combination of TACO until level 15. Then from level 16 to 100 levelling up will cost some combination of TACO and Ingredients. Than from level 100+ it will cost TACO, Ingredients and EXP. 

TACO you can get from multiple ways, swapping for it or earning it.

Ingredients you can get from buying on secondary, making them if you have a Venue of that ingredient that it at least level 10.

EXP you get after your Venue is level 100 and when people work Brigade at your Venue.

Lets take a look at House of the Horde for example. If you go to https://app.tacocrypto.io/venues you will see all your Venues. Click on the yellow arrow of the Venue you want to upgrade.

That will bring up this screen.

Now you can see that in order to upgrade to level 151 I will need the following in my wallet.

5 TACO tokens

1 Cilantro ingredient

1 Chili Powder Ingredient

1 Red Bean Ingredient

1 Avocado Ingredient

1 Salt Ingredient

In that screenshot you can see that I have everything except the Salt ingredient. So let's go get a Salt Ingredient since I do not have a Venue that can make one.

Option 1 is to go buy one on secondary 

https://nfthive.io/market?collection=taco&schema=ingredient&term=Salt&order_by=offer_asc 

You can see the cheapest is 21.14 WAX. But there is a cheaper option. If we go to Taco Swap we can see that 21.14 WAX is worth 253,868 SHING currently. 

Every Ingredient will cost 200,000 SHING to produce from those Venue owners. BUT high rarity Venues will charge more then the straight 200,000 SHING in WAX for an ingredient because well they are more rare. (obviously).
So what can you do? Well there are a few HIGH Venue level communities that allow you to pay for an ingredient at cost if you are a part of those communities. For example QHOP and Exordium Enigma. Or if you have a buddy that has that Venue. So in QHOP's Discord server I will ask my friends to ask me a Salt and whomever replies, I send them 200,000 SHING and they send me the SALT. 

It's great because well I do the same for them if they need the ingredients that I can make. It's a mutual benefit situation.

Perfect example. I just asked for a Salt and this is the exchange

I have redacted Sadisty's name for anonymity.... that's how it works right? :)

Now if we go back to the Venue upgrade screen you can see I have all the ingredients that I need to level up to 151.

So now I click on "Power up to 151" and sign the WAX transaction.

And then you can see you Venue has levelled up and a 16 hour timer starts. You can only upgrade your Venue once every 16 hours.

Something to note is that when you upgrade your Venue it resets the EXP back to zero. In the previous screenshot you can see that I had 1083 EXP and after upgrading that cost 1,000 EXP it went to zero. Just something to keep in mind.

Other VENUE features:

Now lets dive into the other things Venues can do.

If you go to your Venue and click on "Services" you can see everything you can do at your level. 

I am going to click on the Brigade Level 100 option and I get this:

It lets you change the fee associated with people who work Brigade at your Venue. If you have automators enabled it will default to at least 25%.

If you click on Level 140 Automators you get this popup

So if you are like me and forgot where to go to do the actual Venue stuff once you hit that level go to 'Services' and you can do the stuff there.

That is all for this first episode of TACO. Stay tuned for more!

Images have been taken from the TACO Whitepaper https://whitepaper.tacostudios.io/gaming/taco-universe/venues or various TACO websites.