Career Mode Walkthrough

Overview

If the career mode interests you, this guide aims to give you ideas and methods on how to complete the objectives of each stage, and through that, gain mastery in managing your finances and crafting rides!

Options and other things to set before getting started

Before getting started, it’s advisable to check the options menu to see what changes can be made in the gameplay section:

Each of these settings certainly has influence on how the game will be played, and depending on your preference, can be enabled or disabled for a different experience.

• Global Vertical Snapping – actually pretty recently added, Global Vertical Snapping simply makes it much easier to align scenery, rides, and paths up on a consistent vertical scale. For some ride types, such as water rides, this can be a huge help, but otherwise can stand in the way of creating really fluidly-crafted coasters and rides, or otherwise restrict park decoration.
• Reputation – The reputation game mechanic will cause rides to have different prestiege scores over its lifetime, which slowly alters how much income the rides can make. Usually Reputation acts on such a slow scale that it usually isn’t a huge factor in how the game is played. Certain scenarios will also force this option off (so it says. I haven’t seen any that force it to be on). My personal recommendation is to leave it on, as there’s only a fairly odd window late into a ride’s lifecycle where the effects of this mechanic are detrimental.
• Security Features – The security mechanic will necessitate security guards around your park to prevent guests from robbing other guests, and vandalizing path items such as benches and trash cans. Like with the reputation mechanic, certain scenarios will force this feature to be on (usually after entering the medium-difficulty stages). My personal recommendation is to leave it off, as it’s more of a nuisance than anything, and you will constantly get notifications about how people are getting robbed every few seconds.
• Disable Collision – Utilized for customization more than anything, disabling collision will allow you to place various objects overlapping other objects. Disabling Scenery Collision will allow you to place scenery objects such as walls and archways over existing rides, while Disabling Ride Collision will allow you to place rides and coasters through existing scenery and terrain (i.e. nothing stops you from having your coaster clip through the ground. Disabling Terrain Collision allows you to clip the ground through existing rides. If you don’t care for realism or want maximum flexibility on how to craft and decorate your parks, you can turn the settings off.
• Coaster Friction Controls – Turning this setting on gives you free-reign to adjust how much speed your coasters gain and lose when coasting on tracks. Lower friction will allow your coasters to go longer on fewer drops and maintain more speed through track elements, but is harder to control and can generate higher fear ratings. In addition, turning this setting on can make coaster designing (and coaster sharing) much more complicated unless friction settings are shared.
• Allow More Interchangeable Coaster Cars – This feature lets you use models of coaster train that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to use on certain track types. For the most part, the choices of car you can use usually will make sense, but there’s still some bugs with the system that even the option itself points out (default sound effects and clipping, so they say). If you can handle a couple of visual bugs, I’d say go for it.
• Staff Management Features – If checked, this forces you to contend with more detailed processes of dealing with your staff, such as managing breaktimes, paying them enough to avoid them going on strike, vendors leaving their stalls, and even straight-up modifying the pay rates of staff members. Because the feature was introduced a year after the game came out, though, it’s not an option available in most scenarios – frankly a good thing, since the feature adds a lot more management challenge!
• Disable Track Limits – No no, this doesn’t allow you to recreate the monster death machines from RCT that launched your coaster out of the station at 1400mph sadly. What this setting does is let you place sections of track that normally wouldn’t be possible for your coaster in question. This means you can have features such as wooden roller coasters doing heartline rolls. It doesn’t seem to have any effect on non-coasters either.

Most of what I discuss in the level introductory paragraphs explain themselves: you have your finances, starting rides and staff, facilities, and options listed. However, I do also list the starting population of your park, as well as the type of guests that are within the park:

Park guests come in three categories, usually showing up in groups. The three categories are:

• Adults – Groups of grown-ups. Adults tend to be the all-rounders of Planet Coaster, since a good deal of them can range from just being casual visitors and groups of friends or co-workers, to die-hard coaster fanatics. In general, Adults could have a preference for any type of ride, but generally can handle scarier stuff (and will, if it’s more exciting). Their nausea tolerance isn’t outstanding though.
• Teens – Energetic and independent youngsters looking for a good time, Teens tend to have much more intense tastes in rides, and can have high and even very high preference for fear. They tend to have higher tolerances for nausea as well. To keep their interest, you’ll need a park with lots of thrills.
• Families – Families include groups of adults taking along their children. They stand at the opposite end of teens, and have groups that largely prefer low-fear rides. They accordingly have lower preferences for nausea as well, but this isn’t always a given. To keep families interested, build gentler rides. In addition, certain types of rides (mainly inverting thrill rides and coasters) can’t even be ridden by children. Inversely, Families also tend to spend the most at your shops.

Depending on the hints given in the scenario, the rides available, and the type of crowd you have in your park to begin with, you might want to use your advertisement tab to try and reshape your population to fit the kinds of rides you’re making.

I also sometimes discuss “maximizing profit” on rides. There is a method of using your ride’s prestige to determine what is essentially the perfect pricing – guests won’t gloat about how your rides are “very good value” (too cheap), or complain that they’re too expensive. There might be some slight adjustments to this ratio based on how long you want people to queue for, but this amount (discovered by Brothgar on ) is basically taking your ride’s prestige amount, and dividing it by 37.6147541, and then rounding the result. By utilizing this method, you can basically have absolutely balanced ride profit based on your prestige.

The method used here doesn’t apply to shops at all, and won’t work for transport rides either since they don’t have prestige. This is probably part of the reason why I hate scenarios that force you to use those features. Also, if you decide to charge an entrance fee for your park, your guest’s tolerance for ride prices will be much lower (i.e. throw the ratio above completely off).

Captain Lockjaw’s Buried Treasures

Plunder through these scenarios with Lockjaw. Arrrrr you ready?

Scenario Theme: Pirates/Coastal
Difficulty: Beginner
Location: Somewhere north of Madagascar?

The very first of the career options available, Captain Lockjaw’s Buried Treasures are mainly presented as a way for players to get into the swing of things on how Planet Coaster operates. The scenarios tend to give you plenty of freedom on how to accomplish goals, and will generally ease you in with some fairly solid park infrastructures.

STAGE 1: Pirate Battle

Objectives

• Easy: Attract 800 guests, and build 2 rides.
• Medium: Attract 900 guests, and build 4 rides.
• Hard: Attract 1100 guests, and acquire $15,000

Overall Difficulty: Very Easy
More than anything, Pirate Battle is a demo level rather than an actual challenge, as it shows off many of the game’s unique features and capabilities, presenting the player with a large, highly-detailed scene, combined with a small pre-existing park layout with all the necessities.

The default park is already equipped with solid fundamentals that can care for basic visitor and park needs. You start out with $5000, around 690 guests, most of which are adults, and can withdraw a single $1000 loan with 3% interest.

Existing rides and facilities include a single Chief Beef stall, selling hamburgers. Rides include a Rocktopus gentle ride, named Commotion in the Ocean, and a high-prestige wooden coaster named The High Seas, both of which are New and have no wear-and-tear. Your initial staff, aside from the shop attendant at Chief Beef, includes 2 Janitors and 1 Mechanic.

At the start, you have no track or coaster rides researched. The research tree of this scenario is also fairly restrictive, which is somewhat of a shame if you want to develop this park into something extreme. Beyond the main battle scenery piece and the rocktopus ride, there is a fairly large stretch of flat land where you can build extra rides and facilities.

Aside from just building some extra rides (which is easy, just take any rides you’d like and place them down in the openings), your park will also want to do with the other guest essentials. Placing a drink stall and bathroom will be useful, and their placement will do better near the exit of your wooden roller coaster. Having these essentials in place will ensure that guests stay in your park, and having them at strategic positions such as this will maximize their income potential.

Speaking of which, the security features in this level are optional, and likely will be best left off to expedite the completion of the level – when guests are robbed, the happiness of the victim is heavily impacted, and they usually will feel like leaving after that. If security guards are recruited, not only will they incur extra charges on your payroll, but once they catch the robber, they will always be booted out of the park, reducing guest count further. If you do want to run this level with security features on, make sure to place plenty of cameras to protect your roads, and keep guests occupied with new rides – the more time they’re having fun, the less they’ll be inclined to rob people!

Aside from the potential for security guards (if you want to take on that challenge), the starting staff roster is perfectly sufficient for the existing park, so long as you don’t expand a huge amount. provided you don’t go on for too long, it’s entirely possible to complete this stage without a mechanic.

The rides in place are already pretty well priced for their prestige scores, but can be tuned up a little further to maximize income. Once a few good new rides are set up to back them up, it won’t be difficult to hit the target cash for the last objective.

Research in this stage generally isn’t too costly to stop you from reaching your goals, so if you want to be ambitious and design a coaster or track-ride for your park, it’s perfectly acceptable (and in reality will generate more income than necessary!) Later parks will require you to specifically build track-based rides with requirements, so you can use this to practice or take it easy.

STAGE 2: Creature Awakens

Objectives

• Easy: Hire 2 Janitors, and build 2 rides.
• Medium: Hire 2 Mechanics, and build 5 rides.
• Hard: Hire 2 Entertainers, and attain 1000 guests.

Overall Difficulty: Easy

Creature Awakens gives the player a much more minimalistic start, with only a single Information Booth and a powered track ride, The Kraken’s Lair, to begin with. The Kraken’s Lair is an extremely high-prestige ride that takes an extensive tour beneath the map’s surface. The ride also has a priority pass queue (using passes sold by the info booth). I do recommend taking a bit of time to view the ride’s camera, as there was a pretty significant amount of work put into arranging its scenery!

Most of the starting guests in this park are teens, and the general happiness of the guests is rather low, likely due to the lack of any really thrilling rides to go on. Teens tend to favor higher intensities, and while Kraken’s Lair is well-crafted and prestigious, it isn’t a very exhilarating ride by the numbers.

The financial start of this scenario begins you with $10,000, but no way to take out loans. This makes it risky to build tracked rides, as the costs can easily be protracted and leave you with an unfinished ride. It’s recommended not to attempt designing a track until you have a good income basis from other rides.

It should also be noted that the terrain in this scenario cannot be altered. This restriction will come up a few other times throughout the game, so keep it in mind. In this case, most of the land of Stage 2 is somewhat hilly, which can make it more difficult than average to place standing rides. It also means that The Kraken’s Lair should probably be kept in place, since it has a lot of custom-designed terrain and scenery work done that would make a lot of the shaping around it pointless if it were removed.

The available rides you start out with include a pretty solid variety of standing rides, a powered track ride (of the same type as the Kraken’s Lair), a log flume, and a steel roller coaster. The research tree of this scenario is more extensive than that of the Pirate Battle, so there’s more room to experiment given everything else.

The paths point out plenty of venues for possible extension of the park. They’re also covered in trash somehow, despite there being no food stalls. With that, let’s get started!

Obviously, hiring your staff should be a first priority, since the paths are so messy. Get your 2 janitors out, and set up some extra rides.

Honestly, Information Booths in this game are so useless, it probably is best if the Info-Booth building is entirely demolished and replaced with some more useful rides and stalls. Provided you don’t bulldoze the info booth, though, make sure to put your priority pass queues on a very high priority and make them as short as possible to maximize the amount of bypass they get. Giving priority passes an extremely unfair advantage on popular rides is basically the only way to maybe get income from them. And that’s a big maybe.

The order of the staff-hiring goals is also the rough priority in which you should place each of the staff types. Janitors are basically needed if you plan on keeping any guests, as any food/drink will generate trash that they’ll need to clean up. Mechanics only become relevant (in numbers greater than 1) once you have a network of rides, which coincides with the higher ride requirement of the medium objective. Entertainers are questionably required, but can be useful for focusing guests into certain parts of the park.

If you keep things simple at the start, this scenario will pose little challenge, and your income will snowball up considerably once you got extra rides in place. The objectives can be completed in any order you wish (i.e. you could just hire 2 entertainers off the bat if you wanted to just get that out of the way), but the order presented in the objectives is optimal for keeping income flowing, and you don’t want to overcharge yourself before you have solid fundamentals for a park.

STAGE 3: Pirate Cove

Objectives

• Easy: Reach a Monthly Profit of $1000, and attract 600 guests
• Medium: Build a coaster, and reach a monthly profit of $2000
• Hard: Pay off your loans, and reach a monthly profit of $4000

Overall Difficulty: Easy/Medium

Pirate Cove is just as much a lesson in finances as it is sort of a gimmick stage. The level start you off with a very well crafted entry-area, with some existing shops and stalls selling food and drink – 2 chief beefs, and 2 cosmic cow milkshake stalls, one opened, and one closed for each. There’s several dead ends around the park equipped with “coming soon” signs that can be sold to clear the path, gain some money, and expand some extra rides into.

Your starting staff roster includes the generic 2-janitor 1-mechanic layout from the first level, which is decent for a semi-developed park (note, this isn’t a developed park…) The guests general demographic includes mostly families, but the starting population is low enough that this isn’t a huge factor in the long run.

Dominating most of the map is a big sandy opening with some caves and scenery, with a coaster station at one end. The game will push you to finish this coaster for the medium difficulty objective, but the seeming financial situation will likely make this seem difficult:

You start out initially with $7000, combined with an already-withdrawn $10,000 loan. You will be paying for upkeep of your existing stalls and interest with no existing rides to generate income, so you best get started quickly.

The tasks posed in this scenario can be daunting, as the loan situation places you on a pretty tight budget through the game. However, there is a secret to this map that can make things notably easier:

So if you read the scenario description, it mentions Peg-Leg Pete buried and forgot where he put some treasure. As it turns out, inside one of the caves beneath the entryway to the sandy coaster area, you might notice a bit of a glow…
A closer look reveals it is in fact Peg-Leg Pete’s treasure! a pure-gold treasure box which can be sold instantly for $7,500. Incidentally, this makes the treasure box the most expensive single item in the game.
This isn’t an end-all for your financial troubles, though, but it will give you a good basis upon which to design your starting rides and secure further income. Create some simple standing rides, and get things rolling. Use the rest of your cash to pay off the loans as fast as possible, as the less time you spend in debt, the better.

While a good number of the buildings in the initial “Pirate Village” area of the park are locked, all the buildings with facilities and shops are unlocked. In reality, the cluttered nature of this part of the park makes it difficult to place any rides nearby them to maximize income, so feel free to demolish or move the facilities nearer to the action. Otherwise, it’s usually best to start placing your attractions beyond the nearest “Coming Soon” sign to minimize the walk between the stalls and your rides. 2 of the stalls start out closed, and honestly, until the park expands more, it’s best to keep them that way.

The mechanic can be fired until you get started. This can be an acceptable move if you didn’t discover the chest.

If feeling courageous, you can design the incomplete coaster to fill in the sandy area and create a pretty solid centerpiece for your park. The requirements for the ‘design a coaster’ objective do not include any requirements for ride stats, so it can be a pretty awful coaster and still pass for the objective (so long as it doesn’t exceed limits in nausea or fear). The high amount of scenery around the coaster’s location means it almost certainly will have a great prestige rating.

If you failed to find the chest, however, it is also possible to complete the ‘design a coaster’ objective by taking a cheap pre-made design and placing it somewhere. “The Madness” is a solid coaster design included with the game by default – Being a “Crazy One” type coaster, it’s already available at the start without research, and can be placed for a paltry $3000 dollars (approximately).

If further money is needed, various other trees and random objects around the park can be sold, as most of it is unlocked. Most of the income required will be obtained from maximizing the prices on your rides according to their prestige.

Princess Amelie’s Fairy Tale

Princess Amelie requests your aid in revitalizing her kingdom.

Scenario Theme: Fantasy/Medieval/Classic
Difficulty: Easy
Location: Eastern Europe

Princess Amelie’s challenges retain some pretty easy setups, but with a bit more structure in how the challenges need to be accomplished. Most of the levels in this part of the career focus on building your parks from the ground up, leaving some pretty extensive room for interpretation of the goals.

STAGE 4: The Great Tree

Objectives

• Easy: Achieve a Scenery Rating of 110, and Reach a monthly profit of $3000
• Medium: Achieve a Scenery Rating of 130, and build a coaster:
  • At least 5 Excitement
  • Less than 5 Nausea
  • At least 500 meters long
• Hard: Achieve a scenery rating of 160 and a park rating of 750.

Overall Difficulty: Easy

The Great Tree is a scenario that places a lot of emphasis on developing your park’s aesthetic. To begin with, the setup is extremely simplistic, and leaves a lot of room for expansion. The main entrance leads towards the central setpiece of the level – the great tree – and beyond that, to a branching set of paths that contain a single gentle ride: Magic Twirl.

Aside from this, you have no staff, no shops, and no facilities. Your park begins with a guest demographic of mostly families. And with not much to do, most people aren’t super-happy.

Both the area around the pathways beyond the tree, and the tree itself, are adorned in a huge array of lanterns, giving the park a wonderful glow at night and raising its scenery rating to 104 to begin with. There’s no restriction on terrain modification, so it’s perfectly possible to level the tree to the ground if you wanted to (the tree is in fact just an elaborate terrain construct). Removing the lamps, however, would negatively impact the scenery rating and set you back in achieving the main goal of this map.

You begin with $5000 to spend, and can withdraw a $10,000 loan with a very low interest rate. In general, expanding the park is very little of a challenge when it comes to finances.

Of particular note is that the research tree includes every single scenery item in the game, a small selection of standing rides and track rides, and no coasters. The last point has some implications about the silver-star objective…

First things first is to get a solid start with your staff and rides. Build a thrill ride to offset the Magic Spin’s gentle ride. Most of your park development will take place around the Magic Twirl, and guests won’t mind the long walk to your park’s meat. Get your staff set up as well, obviously starting out with janitors.

The goals of your park consistently emphasize scenery design. You can either spend time crafting buildings around your park to raise this score, or otherwise get some elaborate items from the Steam Workshop and place several of those around the premises. When it comes to scenery in Planet Coaster, Quantity is Quality – the more parts you use and the more money you pour into your set pieces, the more rating and prestige your scenery will generate. Steam Workshop scenery also tends to work well, as other players do tend to get very detailed in what they make! If you do want to take the prefab route, you likely will want to get to work on researching different scenery items.

Coming to the medium-difficulty objective, you are only given 2 options for coasters: mine trains and wooden roller coasters. Of the two, the wooden coaster is capable of much more severe angles, and thus is more likely to reach the requisite stats. It’s best to keep the design for this coaster compact and twisting, as spending too much time on a chain lift or trying to maneuver to reach the station can negatively impact your ride’s stats. Placing a premade design, or crafting around the terrain are both acceptable, given how flat the land is on this map aside from the tree.

As for the hard difficulty park rating objective, this can be achieved by continuing to keep your guests happy and supplied with food/drink and attractions. The scenery you’ve built up around the park will also play a big role in boosting your rating further (though if you built a good spread of rides already, it’s likely that your park rating will hit the requirement before scenery does). Failing this, ratings can quickly be boosted by advertising the park.

STAGE 5: Silversmith Manor

Objectives

• Easy: Achieve a park value of $15,000 and a park rating of 300
• Medium: Achieve a park value of $20,000 and a park rating of 600
• Hard: Achieve a park value of $30,000 and pay off your loans.

Overall Difficulty: Medium

Silversmith Manor takes place on the open and flat estate of the Silversmiths, with the central Silversmith Manor standing tall in the center of the map. The terrain is immovable, and the buildings that make up the manor are not removable. The park starts with one ride – a highly-decorated water ride, Rolling River, which has fair prestige and decent wear-and-tear. Much like the darkride from Creature Awakens, it’s not recommended to remove this attraction, despite its awkward positioning.

You initially start out with $10,000, as well as a withdrawn loan for $25,000 with a 10% interest rate, which is easily the highest interest seen in the game so far. Aside from the already removed loan, you can take out a second loan of $10,000 with an interest of 18%, making this the largest total loan value you’ve been able to take out so far.

As the mission description states, you get dramatically less money back from selling scenery in this scenario than in others. Usually the resale value of scenery objects is 75% of the value. Here, it’s only 25%. The mission description doesn’t lie about preference for older rides either, as most of your starting repertoire of rides are gentle in nature. You start with no coasters, and the ones you do receive are on the much more compact end.

Aside from Rolling River, the park has no facilities, stalls, or staff. The starting population of your park is mostly teens.

The best place to start is by building facilities and rides nearby the bridge leading into the manor. Thanks to path/scenery collision being nonexistent, you could theoretically carve pathways through the manor (I even slapped a restroom in the door to the manor of all places), but the positioning will make it highly difficult to expand rides into this area.

A big blue arrow inside the station of Rolling River gives you a hint: the default queue setup for Rolling River is extremely inefficient, requiring guests to walk all the way to the back of the station to exit. To improve the effectiveness of this station, it could be beneficial to swap the position of the entrance and exit, as this could also allow you to create a potentially longer queue. Though keep in mind this also will limit the space available for other stalls or facilities at the manor itself.

Rolling River likely will break down at some point during the scenario, so it’s best to get set up with a mechanic. Thankfully, because Rolling River’s default queue length is so short, the consequences of a breakdown aren’t too severe, so long as you’ve set up some other rides to back it up.

The starting repertoire of rides is overall very underwhelming, and will prove to be the largest impediment to attaining a high park rating or paying off your loans. It’s advisable to get started on research ASAP so that you can get your first coaster and create a real crowd-pleaser. While building a railroad will do wonders for your park value, it won’t generate much income. The best bet for a backup ride to build in the meantime likely will be a well-decorated powered-track ride (Magic Katz), as the combined track and scenery will be enough to create a prestigious and profitable ride, with high value in the park.

As the scenario description states, if you do decide to utilize advertisement, always aim for families. The alternative is to try to research and design a big wooden coaster, but there are some pretty solid upper limits to how crazy the design can get in terms of excitement.

STAGE 6: Good Gully Miss Molly

Objectives

• Easy: Reach a monthly profit of $1500, and attract 400 guests.
• Medium: Reach a monthly profit of $3000, and a park rating of 600
• Hard: Sustain a monthly profit of $6000 for 2 months, and build a coaster:
  • 5 Excitement or more
  • Under 6 Nausea
  • At least 900 meters long
  • Attains max. speed of 70mph
  • The biggest drop must be 65 meters or taller.

Overall Difficulty: Easy

The Good Gully is a blank slate – relatively speaking. There’s no rides, facilities, staff, or even guests to start with in the park. You start out with $5000 in the bank, and can withdraw 2 different loans: a 20% interest $10,000 one, and a 25% interest $5000 one.

The biggest challenge of the scenario is the map itself – you cannot alter the terrain, there’s a variety of unremovable dragon animatronics around the place, there is an invisible height limit of 46 meters above sea-level, and the structure of the land is extremely hilly, adorned with several caves, cliffs, and an extremely deep valley. Inversely, your repertoire of rides for this scenario consists of a lot of extreme and very profitable thrill rides and coasters, even from the start.

The confusing terrain also isn’t helped out by the fact that the path structure of the park isn’t established yet. So far, this is the most freeform level we’ve seen, so let’s get to work!

Good Gully sets out a pretty nice strategy in general for conquering most challenges you’ll face in ground-up scenarios – you start out by placing standing rides, defining a central hub that has shops, and then build some larger, higher-prestige tracks and coasters nearby that. In my run, that hub ended up being directly across from the entrance, down a large bridge leading to the main flat area.

Flat rides are good to get started with as well, because the amounts of flat land to place these rides is limited. Once they’re established, you’ll then have to contend with designing track-based rides around them. On the plus side, the unique terrain and abundance of nooks and crannies means you can experiment with some cool cave-delving designs once you have the money.

Most of the goals of this scenario are fairly routine – so long as you’re handling your finances and park layout properly, as well as paying for your shops properly, you’ll build up sturdy income and rating in no time. Once we get to the Hard gold star objectives, however, things change around a bit. One objective’s fun to do, the other not so much.

First is creating a coaster to match the given requirements. You might be thinking “Whaaa? The maximum drop height’s larger than the max. height of the map!” You’re right. Starting from your entrance plateau, it’s not going to be possible to create a drop large enough to fit the bill. Thankfully, however, the large expanse of land across from there is significantly lower than sea level (-26m), and can provide just enough space to accomodate a large enough drop. Then there’s the much more obvious solution of the gully itself:

The scenario will consistently hand you big, sweeping coasters that excel at doing massive drops. Probably the most indicative of this trait is the starting “Equalizer” hypercoaster model, which can be built to drop off into the ravine and loop through back to the starting station. This is one method of making a satisfactory coaster.

Also, to add to that, this is possibly the first scenario where you likely will need to design your coaster on-scene to really be able to create a satisfactory design. Technically, you could find a coaster blueprint that could match the terrain and requirements of the objective, but manually handling the design, what with the extreme terrain of the park, ends up being much less of a hassle.

After you have your coaster set up and a good repertoire of rides, now comes the unfun part of attempting to maximize your income for 2 consecutive months. The best way to handle this objective is to minimize your unnecessary expenditures (i.e. research and overpaid workers), and essentially hunker-down and wait for the cash to flow in, provided everything is correctly set up. Keep in mind that certain costs, such as construction, don’t count against your income, so you theoretically could work on expanding your park further to try and more securely clinch your victory, by adding a new money-maker.

Chief Beef’s Meaty Challenge

Join Chief Beef’s Hotdog Squad and cook up some tasty parks.

Scenario Theme: Urban/General Theme Park/Realistic
Difficulty: Medium
Location: South Atlantic USA (North/South Carolina??)

As the ‘medium’ label of this section of the Career mode would indicate, this is where things begin to pick up in terms of management. Many of Chief Beef’s scenarios place emphasis on handling already established parks, and figuring out how to expand or salvage them profitably.

Chief Beef’s Challenges are also the first set of levels that force Security Features to be enabled. Time to get used to utilizing those Security Guards!

STAGE 7: Chief Beef Raceway

Objectives

• Easy: Build a 900m Go-Kart track, and Build two 3.0 Excitement rides.
• Medium: Build two 500m Go-Kart tracks, and Sustain a monthly income from shops of $2500 for 2 months.
• Hard: Build three 4.0 Excitement rides, achieve a park rating of 1500, and build a coaster:
  • 7 Excitement or more
  • At least 750m long
  • Average speed of 25mph or more

Overall Difficulty: Hard

Chief Beef raceway has a massive expanse of vaguely italian-themed land, with a heavy staff population and lots of stores. To start with, you have 3 janitors, 3 security guards, 1 mechanic, and 1 entertainer. You also have a Pizza shop, 2 drink stalls next to eachother, and a Hamburger shop. All of the staff, stall attendants included, have basic training, while your security guards have advanced training (3 pips).

Your starting finances have you with $10,000 to spare, and no starting loan. You can only take out a single $5000 loan for this scenario, so building expansively can be a little difficult.

The park has only one ride: the titular Chief Beef Raceway, which starts out as a 479m Go-Kart track that makes 2 laps and has an extremely high prestige. The raceway doesn’t just include the active race track, but also small pieces of unfinished track that reach all the way across the map in various decorated areas. These provide pretty clear hints about what you’re supposed to do to fulfill those Go-Kart length track objectives. Aside from this, the Raceway has seen a bit of wear and tear from age.

A lot of the existing coasters and rides you have available at the start place emphasis on speed, with at least 3 of your coaster options having launches as a possible means of locomotion.

While the terrain can be manipulated, and there’s a pretty fair amount of clear, flat land deeper in the park, there is a huge abundance of immovable buildings nearby your main attractions, which will make it quite difficult to achieve some of the objectives.

Chief Beef raceway gives you some difficult starting conditions, despite the appearances – your staff, while happy, are also demanding a pretty high paycheck by default, so it’s advisable to dock that ASAP without getting them too mad. You can even go so far as to fire your entertainer, since they won’t do much good unless perhaps told to patrol shops.

The raceway itself is another major factor. While expanding it is easy, it’s also highly advisable not to go overboard when doing so, as the required victory lap of the ride can make the queue times for this attraction be insidiously long. Like, I’m talking in excess of an hour here. All the more important to set up some good side-rides. Because guest throughput is going to be a big factor, it’s a good idea to maybe invest in getting a small coaster up and running.

As far as what to actually do to expand it, it’s completely sufficient to sever the areas leading into the tunnel to instead follow the section of track down alongside the coast (seen above, highlighted in blue). After the track reaches the backhoe, demolish it and loop back around to rejoin the main track. This length of raceway will usually end up being around 1000m. On the other hand, attempting to follow through with the whole track potential laid out is an exercise in futility and will make the throughput of the ride AWFUL.

Chief Beef Raceway also hangs very close to the ground on most of its design, sometimes clipping through in some places. If you want to match this style, it’s worthwhile to go into the game options and turn off track collision with terrain.

Chief Beef Raceway will break down, and it will eat into your funds as each person in the queue leaves and gets their refund. It’s best to try and avoid this by doing a refurbishment ASAP before you’ve lost too much money from park management.

All the shops can be moved, save for the Pizza pen (which is in an awful and awkward location). It’s advisable to close that shop down and reduce its attendant’s wage to 0$. That in mind, prepare yourself by creating a plaza in which to build some flat rides off of. Having the exits of these rides, as well as the big raceway, feed into this pavilion will ensure maximal income from your stalls. The diagram on the left shows good prospective locations for shops.

Shop income in general is very haphazard and ‘trend’ based – i.e. how many guests in your park are generally hungry or thirsty, or want souvenirs. It might even be a good idea to micromanage your shops by opening/closing them based on whether people are complaining about food, and even charging low prices for facilities can help make the medium-difficulty objective less brutal.
(bathrooms and ATMs mainly – less so for first aid as you don’t want guests barfing on your paths)

Once you’ve either gathered enough income from your shops, or you just have enough money in general, you can proceed to design a coaster to fulfill the hard objective. Much like with Good Gully Miss Molly, the game strongly pressures you to build a specific type of coaster. In this case, it’s a powered-launch coaster, as this coaster type will typically charge through the whole track at high speed. Without a chainlift to worry about or a max. drop height, the coaster overall will achieve a much higher average speed, while still fulfilling the requirements of the challenge.

As stated in the diagram, designing this coaster well enough will enable you to draw in enough of a crowd to make a secondary center for your guests to buy merchandise and food. This can potentially be utilized to complete the medium objectives, but overall could require some micromanagement in opening/closing shops to minimize lost profits. Aside from the shop income objective, most of this scenario is pretty easy-going, and it gets easier the more you begin to branch out from creating go-kart tracks (again, they’re awful at generating income).

STAGE 8: Oak Island

Objectives

• Easy: Build a ride with 3.0 Excitement, and build a coaster:
  • 5 Excitement or more
  • 400 meters or longer
  • At least 1 inversion
• Medium: Build two rides with 5.0 excitement and build a coaster:
  • 6 Excitement or more
  • 700 meters or longer
  • at least 5 inversions
• Hard: build three rides with 6.0(!) excitement, and build two coasters:
  • 6 excitement or more
  • below 4 nausea
  • 1500 meters or longer
  • at least 10 inversions

  and the other one…

  • 8 excitement or more
  • below 6 fear
  • reaches 80 mph

Overall Difficulty: Medium

Oak Island starts you out with an impressive spread of a park on a secluded island. The island’s terrain can’t be altered, and tons of the structures on it are locked.

As for what’s already in place, the park has several rides, all of which are about a decade old and show lots of age-related wear. If reputation is enabled, you will see all the rides have the “Classic” reputation, giving them bonuses to their popularity and profit potential. The rides in place include:

• Tornado – A large and effective wooden roller coaster
• Flying Chairs – standard standing ride
• Hyperspin – another standing ride, least popular ride in the park.
• Steam – powered track ride with Luna Mobiles, most popular ride in the park, with the highest prestige.
• Big Wheel – standard ferris wheel, most popular gentle ride.
• Venetian Carousel – surprisingly popular for a carousel at the far end of a pier?
• Oak Island Steam Train – A transport ride with stupid EFN stats and only one station.

Your park’s staff includes 6 janitors, 1 mechanic, 1 entertainer, 2 security guards, and a literal army of stall attendants (17). In addition to all those rides, there’s stalls all over the park, many of which are locked into undeletable buildings.

The finances of this scenario are the tightest seen yet, starting you off with only $3000. Given the state of the park as it is, though, this isn’t bad. The map also gives you access to a single $10,000 loan with an 18% interest rate.

The population of the park is generally already very happy and expansive. The majority of visitors are adults by a narrow margin. Teens are the outlier and least common in this park at the start, which is an important consideration to make.

While most of the rides and tracks already in the park are fairly old, you do have a selection of pretty advanced coasters to start out with. The research tree of the level also runs pretty deep and has a ton of other, advanced standing rides. This is another key part of the scenario.

Compared to the weird and unintuitive challenges that Chief Beef raceway threw at you, this scenario should provide you a pretty relaxed breather level.

First off, hire another mechanic ASAP. The aging condition of all your rides means that a lot of them will start breaking down within a few months of eachother, which can hit your income pretty badly if it’s a ride like Steam or Tornado. Once you’re rich enough, it’s a good idea to refurbish the rides when they break down to minimize downtime. To get a bit of cash back (and because your park isn’t dependent on ratings or income as far as objectives go) it’s a good idea to straight-up sell the steam train, as it doesn’t really draw in a lasting crowd and has no possibility for prestige bonuses.

Many of the guests in the park have happened to been visiting for quite a long time. This means many of them are also short on money (because there’s no ATMs anywhere). As you prepare to expand, it’ll be key to put some of these down so that your guests can continue spending. Otherwise, many of your new rides (and old rides) will fail to make income.

To minimize unnecessary expenditure, it’s a good idea to close many of the food stalls around the park and reduce the wages of their staff. Most important is probably the set of stalls inside the entrance promenade (i.e. the white building with a black path bridge leading into it from the mainland).

The starting layout gives you a couple of good places to expand to. Most obvious is the huge expanse of land beyond Steam encircled by the steam train, which contains a tiny beach village. If you felt exploitative, you could utilize the steam train to be transport to and from your area for new rides, but keep in mind – if you have reputation enabled, these new rides are going to be competing for attention versus very old and venerable rides, meaning a lot of guests won’t take the effort to visit them (esp. if they’re short on cash).

Because so many of the rides you’re crafting for this scenario are going to be big thrill rides, you’ll also need to reshape the parks demographic to better suit it. Adults are generally OK with these types of rides, but it’s teens that’ll be drawn the most to your creations – while also being the shortest in supply at the start of the level. Use advertisement to draw those teens in! Those new rides will be a lot more reliable and ultimately profitable in the long run.

The terrain offered by Oak Island is generally flat enough to allow you to import a blueprint to quickly complete the coaster challenges without having to custom-craft a design, but this can be a bit hairy for the last coaster needed. The intent of the ‘inverting’ coaster goal also generally hints that it’s going to be the same coaster gradually growing larger and more extreme. By the end, you’ll likely end up with two impressive modern coasters – a 10-inversion looping coaster, and some manner of massive giga or launched coaster.

Placing the standing rides with the right stats also isn’t as simple as it might first seem – espcially for the gold star, as many of the standing rides do not exceed 6 excitement. Research will be necessary to discover the rides needed – various standing rides that will fulfill the requirements by default include the Wild Blue, Looper, and Cube (their stats increase slightly with a repeat testing). The animation sequences of various rides can be experimented with to try and enhance their stats, but generally it’s somewhat of a waste of time to try this out.

STAGE 9: Downtown

Objectives

• Easy: Hire 2 security guards, Catch 4 pickpockets, and Raise average guest happiness to 40% (with at least 600 guests in the park)
• Medium: Catch 15 pickpockets, keep less than 2% of the park population from robbery for 2 months, and raise average guest happiness to 60% (with 600 guests still)
• Hard: Keep less than 2% of the park population from robbery for 6 months, raise your average guest happiness to 80% (still with at least 600 guests), get a monthly income of $5000 for 3 months, and finally pay off all your loans.

Overall Difficulty: Medium/Hard

The land of Downtown is mostly flat, adorned with several urban structures around the place that cannot be removed. A central park clearing is available to quickly create extra rides. As you might’ve guessed from the level’s description, though, that’s not the main focus this time around…

Once you zoom in on the main area of the park, you’ll discover that the park’s… Uh, kind of a clusterf***. There’s trash everywhere, trash bins and benches all over the park are knocked over and destroyed, people are miserable, and shops all over the place are closed. By a narrow margin, your biggest demographic is teens.

Much like with Oak Island, Downtown is also pretty replete with pre-existing rides:

• Gears of Fear – A steampunky thrill ride
• Zozo – An aging thrill ride that can only carry 8 people. Probably better off as scrap, might be named after that one slum from FF6.
• Rush Hour – A powered track ride, most prestigious ride in the park by a wide margin.
• Central Line – A monorail, probably better off not existing. The monorail extends outside of the park’s boundaries between the two entrances.
• Whirlwind – An aging spinning coaster with poor prestige, largely due to almost no decoration.

Your park’s staff starts out with the usual 2 janitors and 1 mechanic. There’s no entertainers or security guards. Much like with Oak Island, your park’s 348983 stalls has a matching horde of shopkeepers to attend all of them (almost all of which are being paid massively inflated paychecks). True to the scenario description, this is likely to offset their general hatred of working in this trash heap.

Your two janitors are on separate work rosters at the far ends of the park – one in the business district, and another in the city gardens.

You start out with $3000, as well as a withdrawn $5000 loan. You can also withdraw a $2000 loan. Both of the loans have a brutal 30% interest rate. With the state of both your finances and guest finances, both parties are going to have to be pretty frugal to get through this scenario.

Because the staff wages of this stage are artificially inflated (i.e. staff gets really unhappy if you don’t pay them enough) it’s really a case of picking your battles here. Close down all the shops, save for the ones next to Rush Hour, and the ones in central park where all the other rides are. You’ll also want to get some spare cash by removing the unnecessary monorail, and possibly even the Zozo as well.

First order of business to make people happy is to clean up all the trash. This will likely be a passive effort as you redouble your actions to get the rest of the park into working order. Keep your starting set of janitors running at a fair wage, and either remove their work roster, or set it to central park (where most of your rides will be, as well as where literally all the trash is).

Next up is to get another mechanic, who will be key since they’ll both keep an eye on your rides and repair all the broken path items. Path item repair can also be done manually, but at the very least the work will keep your mechanics occupied while waiting for a ride to break down (they will).

For the security situation, start out by getting your requisite guards, and jack their payroll way up, otherwise they’ll be unhappy and fail to catch any criminals. The guards can do plenty of work if also backed up by a network of security cameras (under the scenery options). I suggest placing cameras around places where vandalisms occur, as well as anywhere where a guest might have been robbed. Once the paths and items are cleaned up, guests should naturally become happier over time, and by now you should get rid of the security cameras. Also, to keep barf off the streets, it’s a great idea to place a first-aid outside the exit of the Gears of Fear ride, since it’s a chunder machine.

By selling your monorail, you should have enough money to replace it with a more useful ride (you’ll likely want a small roller coaster prefab). The new coaster will generate a lot more thrill and happiness than the older rides and draw in some much needed income.

With time, the security objectives will easily sort themselves out. The last objective to complete will almost certainly be achieving a high monthly income. Shops are not the way to go about this – the staff demand really high wages. Instead, create awesome rides; prestigious rides! Even go so far as to emphasize scenery to maximize that prestige and get high income.

Dex-R’s Science Shenanigans

Science-fiction scenarios with Dex-R.

Scenario Theme and Setting: Sci-Fi/Industrial
Difficulty: Medium
Location: Australia

Dex-R’s scenarios offer more esoteric challenges than those under Chief Beef’s roof, and emphasize key features of the game such as wages, specific profit, and research over general park building. Most of your parks will start relatively under-developed, and will place you under some odd restrictions.

Thankfully, Dex-R’s challenges don’t require you to have security features enabled, and I highly recommend having it done this way. Reputation features might also be best disabled as well, as some of the levels in this set take a while to complete (i.e. due to research…)

STAGE 10: Night Encounters

Objectives

• Easy: Achieve a Scenery Rating of 50, and Reach a monthly profit (from rides) of $3000
• Medium: Build 5 rides, and reach a monthly ride profit of $5000
• Hard: Reach a park rating of 1000, and Reach a monthly profit from rides of $10,000

Overall Difficulty: Medium

There’s good news and bad news for this park. First, the terrain in this level is expansive and flat. Though you can’t modify it (and there’s a big honkin’ burning ship in the middle of it), the smoothness of it will make it quite easy to build new rides of all types within its borders.

Your guest demographic starts out pretty happy, and mostly consistent of teens and families. You have 1 janitor and 1 mechanic, and the park is already equipped with 2 Forge rides at each near corner of the map. Below the entrance are basic facilities – a first-aid station and a bathroom.

OK, NOW, for the bad news. First off is your finances: you start with $500, and cannot withdraw any loans, so money’s going to be a huge problem if you don’t know how to maximize profit. Also, the scenario description wasn’t kidding, all the research was stolen, and you cannot place any rides or shops until you research them. With your only source of income and attraction being your two starting rides, you’re going to have to get the most out of them until you plot up some new items!

Night Encounters certainly throws you a curveball and places some really tight restrictions. However, once you understand the kind of game it’s talking, the reduced options make it a rather easy (and boring) level.

Before anything, assign research for the basic food and drink stalls, and choose a ride to begin plotting up. In the meantime, it’s best to get cracking on that scenery rating criteria. Place more decorations around your forges, as this not only will jack up your park’s rating, but it will also increase the Forge’s prestige from queue scenery, allowing you to charge more for them and get more income! You’ll only need enough to get the queue scenery ratings up to 100%.

With the prices on your forges properly adjusted for their increased prestige, they will be enough to get you the bronze difficulty objective. Keep decorating near your paths, and hold fast until you can place your new facilities and rides. The silver income goal will also topple pretty easily once you get a third ride set up. Having just one food and drink stall present will go a long way to keeping guests in the park and visiting your rides.

The real impasse of this level comes at the hard difficulty, demanding a high park rating and an exceptional ride income, twice as before. To make matters worse, the research tree of this level doesn’t have any track-rides or coasters, meaning the usual big-hitters for this kind of income you’d be looking for aren’t available here. Best suggestion is to return to the basics: add more standing rides, decorate each one with various building pieces, and price accordingly. Eventually, your ride income should break the threshold with enough well-decorated rides (poorly decorated ones won’t make back their costs), and the scenery itself will further bolster your park rating until it meets the requirement.

STAGE 11: Golem Rampage

Objectives

• Easy: Achieve a park value of $35,000, and a park rating of 350
• Medium: Achieve a park value of $50,000, and a park rating of 700
• Hard: Achieve a park value of $75,000, and build a coaster like this:
  • 5 excitement or more
  • under 6 nausea
  • 1000m or longer
  • an average speed of 25 mph

Overall Difficulty: Medium/Hard

Once you get over the initial shock of the awesome giant death monster looming over your park, we can see its starting setup is very strange. While the map is mostly separated into flat plateaus, a big wall runs down the center of it (that the golem is kind of stumbling through). The golem also has left a wake of destruction behind it, creating a deep ravine. Overall, this terrain divides the park up into 4 openings.

Our starting repertoire includes a Monorail with 4 stations (corresponding to each opening). The entrance quadrant is decorated with a sort of missile-base getup, and includes a food and drink stall (gussied up as a dropship. Unfortunately it can’t be moved). 2 of the lots that the monorail stops in are mostly empty behind the golem, while the last stop includes a couple of orbital cannons laying into the creature.

The starting selection of rides at your disposal are actually quite extensive, including a great array of coasters and track rides (phew).

You have no starting staff aside from the stall attendants – neither of them are trained, and they are both demanding a $300 wage. All wages are doubled in this level. Also the paths are covered in trash, people are disappointed in general, and most of your guests are adults.

You start with $8000 and have no loans you can take out. Time to get to work!

Even though the level description states that it wants you to build around your monorail, as well as the fact that the entire monorail track contributes $15,000 to your park value, it might be worth it to destroy the thing in favor of just joining the four corners of the park together with path. This would make it easier for smaller staff groups to navigate the park, or otherwise focus your development on just one quadrant. Regardless of what you do, the starting quadrant is crowded with a bunch of scenery buildings, and likely won’t be a great place to start planning to develop. If you do decide to join some of the separate parts of the park together, make sure to use lots of benches, and set some work rosters for your staff.

Spreading into another quadrant via monorail will pretty quickly fill it up, especially if you have a high-prestige ride over there. This will necessitate the inclusion of separate janitors, mechanics, and shops for that part of the park, as well as likely extra pathway (otherwise people get super crowded in and tons of people will clamor to queue for the monorail to get back to the entrance) Balance of park attractions and shops is key.

With the opening area covered in trash, it’ll be a good idea to place a janitor there. The high wages of the staff will mean you likely will want to only start hiring mechanics once a ride has broken down. (Also, another reason to trash the monorail – each individual station breaks down independently, and will necessitate a separate mechanic for each station.)

While building rides will be the fastest way to increase your park value, it’s not the safest, as you don’t have loans to fall back on. While placing rides, consider investing heavily in scenery once again. Maximizing prestige will allow you to charge more for your rides, enabling you to offset your higher staff wages. You’ll also want to make sure you’re maximizing stall output, as your guests will actually pretty quickly crowd the existing shops. Make sure to charge lightly for facilities to minimze their impact on income, and make back losses.

After gaining enough residual cash, you’ll likely want to use the enclosing nearby the main entrance to design a modestly-sized coaster. Make sure to capitalize on the coaster’s main advantage of throughput and choose a design with large seating, as this will enable you to get a much greater flow of income. With that in place, the cash will be rolling in big time, enabling you to offset most of the setbacks that were imposed on your park in the first place. With that in place, it should be a piece of cake to get the easy and medium objectives out of the way.

The final objective requires you to create a pretty large coaster. While the EFN stat requirements aren’t anything outstanding, 1000m is extremely long (literally a kilometer/almost a mile), and the resulting ride basically will likely be a massive coaster that encompasses coverage all over the park. The minimum nausea rating makes it difficult (though probably not impossible) to create a tight, twisting coaster that fits the length requirement.

The biggest challenge of this scenario is managing expansion properly. Things might seem to be going well, with funds solidly in the black for a while, but if you get too cocky and expand your paths out too thin, you’ll find things going sour pretty fast. Pace your additions to the park carefully, and this scenario shouldn’t be too much of a hassle.

STAGE 12: Shops ‘n’ Drops

Objectives

• Easy: Reach a monthly profit from shops and facilities of $2000, and 500 guests.
• Medium: Reach a monthly profit from shops and facilities of $4000, and 1000 guests.
• Hard: Reach a monthly profit from shops and facilities of $6000, and a park rating of 1000

Overall Difficulty: Medium/Hard

The tract of land that this level hands you is probably one of the oddest seen yet. While it’s mostly flat, it is also extremely narrow and has the entrance in the middle. The midst of the map is dominated by a bazaar of sorts, including several empty “rental” buildings. Unlike in past levels, just about everything in there is unlocked and can be freely moved around (or even removed) at your convenience.

Guests are generally fairly happy at the start of the scenario, with a very even distribution between all types of groups. The park has 1 ride, the Looper, 3 shops: 2 burger stalls and a milkshake stall, and a bathroom.

Your park staff include 3 shopkeepers and 1 mechanic, charged at regular rates (PHEW). Note that food and drinks generate trash, Looper is a fairly high-nausea ride… And you have no janitor.

You start with a pretty nice supply of $10,000, and can draw out a big heap of loans this time: a $20,000 one for 5% interest, and a $5000 and $1000 pair of loans with 3% interest each. You start with a decent spread of different coasters, rides, and shops to use, with a research tree heavily focused on rides and stalls.

So whlie most players probably will get PTSD from Chief Beef’s raceway, you thankfully won’t see the same hellish combination of ungodly long ride times and locked shops that you saw over there. Unfortunately the final demands are still much higher, but 90% of income generated from your shops is positioning, and there’s no shortage of positioning potential on this map. The scenario is flexible, and has objectives that do not require consistency (from an inherently inconsistent mechanic).

Right at the start, some optimizations can be made on shop positioning, as well as including a few other essentials. You’ll want to place an extra food or drink stall near the exit of your Looper. Also consider having a new ride built nearby the Looper that leads into the same exit area, to double chances of item sales. Looper has a very poor guest throughput (only carries 8 people per ride), so while guests will emerge from the ride usually pretty hungry and thirsty from waiting, it also only lets through a thin trickle of people.

Looper also will break down pretty quickly into the scheme of your park’s life, so get a mechanic ready to deal with that. Performing a refurbishment at the same time is also a good tactic.

The type of shops and facilities you build are key, and research will be necessary. Building a park normally will ensure you have a good infrastructure, but your starting selection of shops lacks many souvenir shops, or the ever-important ATM (ensuring guests both stay, and buy more merchandise.) You start with a Hats Fantastic shop for gifts, but it’ll be that in tandem with the Looney Bloons stalls that’ll get you real sales (Just A Momento never seems to really work). Get started on those as soon as you feel comfortable with your financial situation, and then place gift shops near the exits of your rides.

While your park certainly can become successful (money is almost never the issue in this scenario), in the bigger scheme of things your room for expansion is extremely limited, and the awkward proportions of the park also means you won’t have the benefit of being able to surround your shopping area from all sides. My recommendation for accomplishing the shop goals, in light of this, is to carefully keep an eye on which of your shops are making income, and which aren’t. Notice where guest traffic is flowing, and influence it to pass through pathways that have shops. Hiring entertainers also seems to help a lot with merchandising (in retrospect probably why Chief Beef Raceway started you out with one).

After you’ve gained a solid financial foundation (I had built up $50,000 naturally over time), change gears. Reduce the prices of your rides, as that is not where your income should be coming from. You can’t sell souvenirs to people who already have them, so now begin advertising to get some new blood into the park. Make sure to pick who you advertise to carefully, as you can only put on 2 TV ads at once – check in your guest tab to see which ones spend the most at your shops. For my case, it turned out to be families, and in turn, be prepared to expand your ride variety to include the rides that will interest your demographic.

It’s better to train staff up before building another shop, as that adds even more management you have to handle. If your finances are good, it’s advisable to also overpay some of your staff, as this will keep them happy when the job is slow (otherwise, skilled staff members quit, wasting the time you spent training them.)

]If you’re still having trouble maximizing profit from your shops (I know I was) there’s a couple of weird methods you can use. One is to actually overcharge for your merchandise, and use “Extras” on your shops to give basically everything you sell “A Lot” of toppings. Another, more extreme way (that can cost you a lot) is to close your entire park, empty out everyone, and then re-open it to invite some fresh blood back into your park. Keep at it, and you’ll eventually hit the mark!

BONUS STAGE: Gulpee’s Island Paradise

Gulpee makes great sodas, but he isn’t great at building theme parks. Can you help him out?

Scenario Theme and Setting: Tropical
Difficulty: Medium
Location: Africa (roughly around Botswana)

Introduced with the new Anniversary Update, Gulpee’s scenario right now only has one extra level. Its main prupose is to introduce the new Staff Management features.

Objectives

• Easy: Attract 500 guests (with avg. happiness of 60%), Obtain a park value of $15,000, hire 5 vendors (who stay on staff for 1 month and are 60% happy), and have no staff member leave for 2 months.
• Medium: Attract 1000 guests (with avg. happiness of 70%), Obtain a park value of $35,000, hire 10 vendors (who stay on staff for 1 month and are 70% happy), and have enough staff buildings to accommodate 10 staff members.
• Hard: Attract 1500 guests (with avg. happiness of 80%), Obtain a park value of $60,000, clear your loans, hire 15 vendors (who stay on staff for 1 month and are 80% happy), and train 10 of your staff to Expert status (rank 4).

Overall Difficulty: Medium

Starting you out in a pretty beach area, Gulpee’s Island Paradise is essentially a fledgling park. While it’s got looks, there’s nothing to do there yet, and people who show up will just about immediately leave. At the start of the scenario, your park has only 30 guest groups. Terrain cannot be modified, so constructing rides (especially blueprints) is going to be a bit of a challenge. To its credit, the layout does give you a few flat areas to place standing rides deeper into the park layout.

Your starting ride selection includes plenty of good family-oriented attractions, particularly in the coaster department. Of note is the new Water Coaster design, and the Weisshorn and Monte Leone standing rides. The research tree of the level allows you to angle your park development more towards older crowds – but keep in mind that family groups will spend the most at your shops!

As one would probably guess from the objectives, this scenario’s all about staff management. Your park starts out staffed by 3 janitors, an entertainer, and one vendor (note that you have two Gulpee Soda stalls at the start). Compared to the normal game, staff members in this scenario will accept smaller paychecks, but you’ll need to keep an eye out for their wellbeing to make sure they’re staying on top of the job.

Of particular note to the direct right of the park entrance is a food court area that concisely shows off the new features of the update, including the staff building facility. Staff will go in here when they need rest. Selecting the staff building and looking at its options is a good idea, as you can apply perks to the staff building to help determine what it does best (though this does impose extra costs). With its positioning near the food court and the expansion potential, this will likely be the lookout spot for your various vendors.

Finances are a bit tense, but workable for this level. You start out with $6000 in the bank, and 10k loan already taken out at the start of the level. You also have access to several other loans, including ones for $5000, $2000, $1000, and $20,000. All loans have a 20% interest rate.

The best place to start is with a couple of simple housekeeping tasks: you’re not going to need 3 janitors in your park at the start, and questionably don’t need the entertainer either, so feel free to get rid of those extras. If you keep the entertainer, know that he’s being paid a massively inflated paycheck, and can be kept happy with a much lower amount. Finally, even with a stall being empty, the simple act of it being open still incurs operation costs, so choose one of your Gulpee stalls to keep closed until the park expands. This scenario might be about making your staff happy to a degree, but you’ll need to make your park be able to draw in crowds first – and idle workers do not make for happy ones.

Get started on making some rides immediately. Focus them mostly around your food court skeleton, as you’re going to want to try your best to funnel guests back towards here and keep your staff active. Because a lot of the scenery on this level is locked, and the terrain can’t be edited, this will most certainly be a challenge. Placing a bathroom in this area will also help immensely. A good starting combo of rides will likely be a standing ride, and a good track ride. Remember – you have a lot of loans in this level, and there isn’t any caveats or objectives for trying to push a profit here, so feel free to go deep.

After you’ve started securing some solid income with your rides, it’s a good idea to move on to building a food shop for your park. The nice thing about building shops now is that, even with the staff being separable from the stalls, constructing a stall still will automatically hire a new vendor. Thus building a food stall will raise your vendor count to two! Following this, consider looking into your options for staff room perks – the most directly useful ones will usually be Staff Healthcare (for shop vendors in popular stores) and Staff Entertainment (largely for your mechanic). You might also want to place more decoration items nearby it – as it turns out, having a well-decorated staff room helps staff recover their energy faster. The current decor of the room gives it a 71% rating, so add a few more nice details to max that stat out!

Speaking of staff management, you probably should prepare to deal with the other staff you’ll need in your park – security is on for this scenario, so as soon as you get your first robbery report, hire a guard to deal with it. A mechanic is also obviously a given. Consider that the Mechanics and Security Guards are likely going to have completely different patrol routes than your janitors and vendors, so it will also be a great idea to give them their own break room – by default, staff rooms can hold up to 3 people without inducing extra costs.

In addition, compared to classic Planet Coaster, the full uptime of a staff member is going to be equal to roughly 2 staff here, so usually it’s a good idea to time the hiring of extra staff such as Vendors with when the first gets tired. This way, the staff can swap between work and rest for their shifts – which is extremely important if you want a park with high throughput at stalls.

You likely will be able to get all of the easy objectives easily by just naturally coasting along with park expansion – so long as you’re not hiring too fast, it’s usually easy to keep staff on the roster without them quitting, and even 2 good rides can draw in a large enough crowd for the objectives. The one exception to this is the requirement for at least 60% staff happiness, to which probably the fastest solution is just paying all your staff more. After that is maintained for a month, you’ll get your first star, and be fast on your way to completing this scenario!

The silver objective will be achieved through natural expansion, with the extra 5 vendors likely coming from the addition of gift shops nearby popular rides. By now, money really should be flowing in very rapidly, so paying your staff good salaries isn’t much of an issue. The big issue will come when you reach the gold objectives, as it’s now pretty easy to run out of space, as well as difficult to expand with more stalls.

The last objectives can be reached by continuing to expand your park, possibly to the back islands. A second food court should get you the staff requirements you need. It’s better to take it slow on training your Staff instead of using the Education perk. With a bit of patience, this scenario should complete naturally.

Festive King Coaster’s Crackers

Bring some cheer to the festive King Coaster.

Scenario Theme and Setting: Stuff
Difficulty: Hard
Location: The North Pole

Added in (obivously) back in December 2016, Festive King Coaster’s challenges have a surprisingly non-christmas-themed spin to them, and mostly focus on careful, frugal expansion of strangely-arranged parks. The common theme between all the scenarios is that money is in short supply, and your funds can go extremely bad if not managed properly. Despite this, most of the scenarios have a pretty freeform approach, but will nonetheless require shrewd playing in order to complete successfully.

Despite the later release date, these challenges are a bit easier than the other two hard difficulty stages, and generally throw you less curveballs. They also do not require either Security or Reputation to be enabled.

STAGE 13: Festive Funlands

Objectives

• Easy: Attract 400 guests and have a scenery rating of 50
• Medium: Attract 800 guests and have a scenery rating of 100
• Hard: Attract 1600 guests and pay off your loans.

Overall Difficulty: Medium/Easy

Festive Funlands starts off as an entirely empty park – no staff, no rides, no shops, and no guests. All of the details that we discuss here will be the terrain, research, and the funds.

First off is the landscape: it’s mostly flat with very light hills (almost seems to be set up from the sandbox arctic setting map). The only notable landmark is a big rocky plateau upon which a cute gingerbread village is set up upon (depicting, among other things, a grisly scene of vehicluar gingerbread manslaughter). Terrain is fully modifiable, but the gingerbread village is locked. It’ll be within your best interest to probably get some paths and rides up there (despite the difficulty) since it otherwise doesn’t contribute to your park’s scenery rating (which currently is starting at a paltry 9).

Your starting research has given you a couple of appropriately winter-themed gentle rides and a few thrills, as well as some pretty alright wooden coasters. You have a fair number of stalls at your beck and call as well, and can research more. The big restriction in this level, however, comes from scenery – only the festive candy-themed parts are available, preventing you from utilizing lots of normal prefabs, and certainly a huge chunk of the blueprints available on the workshop.

Your finances are also a curious situation, as you start the scenario off with $5000, and have also withdrawn a loan for… $5000, with an interest rate of 18%. There’s also a $10,000 loan with a 15% interest rate, and a $15,000 loan with a 12% interest rate. Regardless of what you do, you’re going to need to make a profit from your park in the long run.

Aside from the restrictions posed in terms of the gingerbread village, rides, and scenery, this is a pretty standard tycoon challenge. The loan situation will place you on slightly tighter constraints than normal, but with shrewd business skills, you should be able to make back your money without issue.

On that note, $5000 is a very bare-bones budget to start creating your park. It’s perfectly possible to take out one of the other loans under the finances tab, and put the $5000 one back (which might be beneficial, as while the monthly payments are a bit higher, the overall interest rate is less intense for the amount of money given). Set up a basic start with a couple of rides, and wait for the guests to come trickling in.

The general lack of money and the fact the terrain is generally somewhat unforgiving (with may slight inclinations) means you’ll want to take this slow. Be frugal, and only hire your staff once you need them. All the more important, because the flattest area of land to place rides and set up a good central pavilion for your park are pretty far down the initially placed path – it’ll take a while for your guests to start using the park.

Thanks to Frontier’s selection of blueprints, fulfilling the scenery requirement for the bronze difficulty isn’t difficult, and your starting standing rides can be nicely decorated around even by just using their prefabs. Beyond this, Festive Funlands isn’t a tough level at all if you know what you’re doing, thanks to pretty basic level objectives otherwise. Once you’re in the black, everything else topples by nature as you expand the park. Granted, the level can be extremely unforgiving if you handle your finances poorly, but many of the previous stages should’ve prepared you for this plenty well.

If desired, you can essentially bum-rush the 1600 guest requirement for Gold by advertising a ton once your finances are stable and your loans are gone.

STAGE 14: Cavernous Coasters

Objectives

• Easy: Reach a monthly profit off $1500
• Medium: Reach a monthly profit of $3000 and build this coaster:
  • At least 6 excitement
  • At most 5 fear
  • At least 600m long
• Hard: Sustain a profit of $6000 for 3 months

Overall Difficulty: Medium/Hard

The terrain of this level is probably some of the most gorgeous in the game, featuring a sunken grotto within which a subterran lake awaits. Of course, the exotic terrain comes with some significant baggage: you can’t tunnel through the surrounding walls, and much like Good Gully way back from the Easy scenarios, there is a height limit that will prevent you from building above the surface’s height. The terrain provides both practical and strange challenges to park building – more unexpectedly, lighting can make it difficult to see what’s going on in some of the far corners of the map.

There’s a bit of a network of paths outlining where you could potentially expand to. Already, the park has a bit of development, including a fries stall and coffee shop in a shared, towering building near the entrance. The building can be moved and modified freely. You also have a pair of starting rides: A kick-flip thrill ride, and “Radius Deep”: A radius ferris wheel (the largest ferris wheel variety in the game). Their prices can be improved by adding some extra decoration, as while the area is exotic, there isn’t much discrete scenery to speak of. There are no facilities, or staff. Your starting park demographic is mostly consistent of teens.

Unique to this level, there is a maximum number of guests you can have in your park at any time, capping off at 600. In practice, this will place a limit on how large you’ll want the park to be.

There are no starting tracked rides, and a pretty small collection of standing rides to build. Unintuitively, your starting selection of coasters include the pretty-extreme hypercoaster and hydraulic launch models, which are both likely overkill for the mission objectives.

Your finances start pretty narrow, at $3000. You have 2 loans available; a $5000 one, and a $2000 one. The interest rates of these small loans are pretty severe, so be judicious about withdrawing them.

Anyone keeping up with the sequence of scenarios so far will probably notice a bit of similarity here between this level and Molly’s Gully – A fixed-terrain park with extreme restrictions, limited height, and goals focusing on producing profit and a unique coaster in the given setting. Compared to what the easy scenario contained, however, things aren’t going to be nearly as clean as they were back then.

If you haven’t already, try and get used to using Shift to vertically place your facilities and rides, as without it, you won’t get very far on the bumpy terrain this venue offers up.Also helpful would be to use the “Set Lighting” tool next to the undo/redo buttons in the lower/right part of the HUD, as this can allow you to shine the sun in different corners of the caverns to give yourself some better vision (in some cases it’s actually easier to see what’s going on at night than it is at sunset). One last thing to do to make your life easier is to readjust your camera – go into the Camera seciton of your options and turn on “No Clip”, as this will enable your camera to pass through the walls of the grotto if you want to get a good, distant look at your park.

Expanding slowly and carefully will be key to ensure that you retain enough wiggle room to build a requisite coaster. At the same time, though, building up to a position to be ready to build such a coaster will be difficult with your starting rides – the Radius Deep especially has an extremely long ride duration (10 minutes!) which will not only limit the number of runs the ride can do per month, but also cuts heavily into your guests time, preventing them from queueing and riding other rides! I highly recommend demolishing it. Though you can strategize around its long ride duration by supplying the exit area with lots of shops/facilities, for most players, its eccentricies are going to prove much more of a hindrance than a benefit.

Getting income from your rides will also be difficult due to scenery placement – unlike most other scenarios where most of your scenery will come naturally by placing it on the ground, you’re going to either have to live with floating trees/animatronics, or otherwise craft platforms of sorts to carry your scenery to boost the ratings of your rides (which can work, constructing pillars out of natural stone pieces both fits the look of the level, and provides a sizable boost to scenery ratings). Even though the grotto has a beautiful look to it, guests don’t exactly respect cool sweeping terrain, and only notice actual scenery objects. Figure out some decoration solutions and boost those ride prices.

Once you get a third ride up and running, with some good decorations, you’ll hit your bronze profit goal in no time. You could even knock out the silver one at the same time with that setup! (In my case, a setup of Bumper Derby, Kick-Flip, and The Cube were able to generate almost $3500.)

The low finances in this scenario in general mean you’ll either need to wait a while to begin developing your coaster to gather good backing funds, or research a cheaper coaster design. The research tree includes the plans for the hybrid wood/steel coaster, Iron Fury, which is cheap and can invert, but will require pretty tight mastery of inversions to get the required EFN score. Also note, if you’re going for monthly profit goals straight off the block, research costs for coasters can cost a pretty penny. I don’t recommend researching more than one thing at a time.
(The research tree, after the hybrid coaster, leads into the multidimensional coaster, which is both extremely expensive and very difficult to work with. Though it is cool I guess.)

Researching the Iron Fury also guarantees that you unlock a satisfactory premade blueprint for the objective: the Hybrid coaster Red Steel, obtains 6.8 excitement with 4.7 fear, and is 1001 meters long. With several inversions (including a Zero-G roll near the end), it earns its EFN ratings pretty handily.

If you do want to design a coaster that fits the bill by freehand, my advice is to focus on low-G sequences, usually with gentle curves and lots of airtime. Inversions taken at a low speed also do well. The objective can be a bit hairy, since most good coasters designed by players tend to have 5+ intensity (which, in any other situation, would be quite acceptable.) My best advice would be to aim purely within “acceptable g-forces”. Vertical Gs should never exceed 2-3, and never dip below -1, while Lateral Gs shouldn’t exceed 1-1.5. Another pre-made rollercoaster available in this scenario, Downforce (actually a coaster we’ll see again in the next level!) also fulfills the EFN requirements, but isn’t long enough.

For the final Gold Difficulty objective, it’s time to repeat the tactics from Good Gully and hunker down. With a solid coaster in place, the money should be rolling in much faster. Pay off your loans and wait it out. If more income is needed, it’s also a good idea to research a gift shop and pair it up with your most popular ride (It’ll probably be that coaster). The limited number of guests you can acommodate in the park will mean that you won’t want to expand too far, otherwise the ride maintenance costs will outdo the sales revenue.

STAGE 15: Back from the Brink

Objectives

• Easy: Attain a park value of $50,000
• Medium: Attain a park value of $60,000 and build this coaster:
  • 5 Excitement or more
  • 5 Intensity or more
  • 4 Nausea or less
  • At least 750 meters
• Hard: Achieve a park value of $75,000, A park rating of 1250, and pay off your loans.

Overall Difficulty: Hard

Back from the Brink hands you an already partially-developed park, and essentially lets you do with it as you please (neither any scenery nor the terrain is locked). You have a vast expanse of land at your disposal, with a good margin of empty, flat area for you to expand. Most of the nearby development consists of a forest, with a lake deeper into the park. The park already has a pretty structured, branching layout, complete wtih a central pavilion with an animatronic Kraken statue (named King of the Lake). Only the branches off of the right lead anywhere, with the other directions ending in “Coming Soon” signs.

Your park starts out with a decent selection of rides and shops: A Teacups ride, Venetian carousel, and Downfall, a very basic Launched coaster that seems to be partially unfinished in terms of scenery. Also unique, the teacups and carousel are locked, so they cannot be moved or demolished. All three of the rides are towards the right, deep in the forest, and suffer from low reliability, having a reported rough 80% downtime. Apparently the park’s lack of mechanic has taken its toll.

There’s also a closed thrill ride, “PC Hammer” that is untested and is not hooked up to anything in terms of paths and nearer to the lake. Like the others, PC Hammer is also locked. The shops in the park include Gulpee Energy, Chief Beef, and Information, all bunched up nearby the entrance of the park.

You also have a basic starting staff of 2 janitors and a princess ameile enteratiner. You also have all your basic shopkeeps. Much like the open rides, your guests are all bunched up in the right-side forest area of the park. Most are adults and only moderately happy.

Finances are the most polarizing part of the scenario: You start with 0$ and have withdrawn a loan of $50,000 with an 18% interest rate at the start (paying $4750 a month!!) You can also withdraw a smaller $10,000 loan with the same interest rate. In short, you’re essentially going to be paying loan interest through the whole level.

Of all Festive King Coaster’s levels, this one has the most potential to go catastrophically bad if you aren’t savvy at positioning your park elements. With proper tactics, though, it falls about as simply as the other levels so far have.

The name of the game here is not just making profit – it’s about expanding properly, and maximizing that expansion. Your starting setup already is very close to the easy-difficulty value requirement, so from there it’s a matter of proper management and positioning. The best starting moves here are to reposition your shops much closer to the rides, possibly even sell your information kiosk (again, most useless crap in the game) and when you get the chance, hire a mechanic.

You will need to be frugal, as the interest on your loan is going to drain your money extremely quickly. I highly suggest raising the prices on your rides to fit their prestige scores. With time (and as guests requeue) this will generate enough revenue to counteract your loan payments. It should be also noted, there are no trash bins in the park at all, so make sure to plop some of those down by your rides. Lowering your loan payments can help you get a foothold, and much like in Chief Beef Raceway, the entertainer is extraneous at the moment. Let Princess Ameile eat cake.

Literally as soon as you manage to break even on your funds, you should get that mechanic, as your existing rides have seen a bit of wear and tear – they will break down (usually it’s Downfall to go first). As soon as this happens would be my suggested time to do three things: Withdraw the other loan, order a refurbishment of the coaster (and any other rides that break), and set up the queue and exit for the PC Hammer and test it (The animation sequence it has is all low swings, which produces awful EFN scores. Change it up.) Since people leaving the queue will proceed to eat up more funds, I suggest accomplishing this all while you’re paused. After the ride is fixed, you could even go about decorating the queue more to raise the ride’s prestige, allowing you to charge more and make back some of the money you lost. It’ll be a good idea to perhaps keep a single mechanic on Downfall (and the carousel since it’s nearby) at all times to make sure it doesn’t break down too often – with all its brakes, hydraulic launch, and advanced parts, it has a very low reliability score.

Once you have Downfall under control, you can focus more on expanding further with stalls and rides naturally, which will eventually result in the Bronze objective being completed. By now, even with your large loan, your income should be stable enough to stave off financial ruin.

At the silver objectives, you likely will end up completing the two at the same time – You need to attain an extra 10,000$ in park value, need to make a reasonably large coaster, and happen to have a loan that allows you to take out an extra $10k. Using that money, you can make yourself a pretty decent coaster within that price range, that fulfills the given requirements (in reality, it’s likely to cost more due to the length requirement and fear). My personal recommendation is to build this coaster over the lake, which will help balance out the park load and draw more guests towards your lonely PC Hammer. Your best bet for fulfilling the requirements for this coaster is to go with lots of airtime and few inversions. Naturally, design large and fast. The American Arrow is generally a better option for this coaster than the inverted design, or the wing (which is more expensive).

For the final objectives, it’s time to batten down the hatches once again. If the coaster was sufficiently large enough, you basically should only need to construct one more ride to hit the park rating and value goals. After that, focus all your money on paying off loans. You can essentially stumble over the finish line with negative money if you need to, but with solid park setup, you should be able to fight off the interest payments without too much trouble, even at maximum payment rate.

King Coaster’s Royal Decree

Can your skills impress the King of Coasters?

Scenario Theme and Setting: Hellish monstrosities emerging from the ground
Difficulty: Hard
Location: Brazil

King Coaster, being this game’s mascot, probably has the honor of the gimmickiest of stages in the game, often requiring you to account for very strange challenges, or otherwise use some careful ingenuity to get through. You’ll need some vertical thinking and exploitation to get through these ones.

As a small bit of consolation, his stages do not require either security or reputation to be enabled (as security was added to the game later). Good luck.

STAGE 16: Monolith

Objectives

• Easy: Reach a monthly profit from rides of $2000, and build 4 rides.
• Medium: Reach a monthly ride profit of $4000, and build a coaster like this:
  • 5 Excitement or more
  • 4 Fear or more
  • Below 6 Nausea
  • At least 750m long
• Hard: Reach a monthly ride profit of $6000, attract 1200 guests, and pay off your loans.

Overall Difficulty: Hard

Certainly one of the most expansive parks we’ve seen so far, Monolith also has a dynamic landscape, replete with mesas and bumps, which will make ride placement a bit of a challenge. Towards the far end of the park is a huge canyon, full of various Kubrickian Mololiths. These structures are all locked in place, alongside various other decorative features around the level (such as raging hellfires inside some of the chimney-rock like structures and the scaffolds). Terrain cannot be modified.

Your starting park has no staff, no facilities, and 2 rides: Psychola, and The Cube, both of which are broken down and have been completely worn down. Despite being well-decorated with scenery, they have pretty awful reputation scores, likely due to breakdowns.

Finances in this level are tough, but highly flexible. You start out with $10,000 and a withdrawn loan for $20,000. The level has an impressive 4 different loans you can take out (including the one you have already): loans for $10,000, $5000, and $30,000. All of the loans have the same interest rate of 12%. While this will give you lots of finances to extend a coaster with, it can also be disastrous if you fail to make the money back to pay for them, so be careful.

Your starting loadout of coasters… Er, coaster, only includes the spinning coaster type, a few standing rides, and absolutely no track rides. You’re going to need to do some research to discover an effective coaster type that can fulfill the requirements set out for this stage (or possibly make a really good spinner coaster…)

Your park is lightly populated and has a slightly higher number of teens than anything else. Guests are not very impressed at the moment. Let’s change that.

As the scenario description states, the level will cause your rides to face a greater amount of wear and tear than usual. Funnily enough, this probably will feel more like playing classic Roller Coaster Tycoon rather than the snail’s pace at which rides break in this game, but do note the disastrous effects that breakdown refunds can wreak on your funds. The Monolith is one of the only stages that will demand some micromanagement from the player.

Obviously, first things first; hire a mechanic, possibly even two. Janitors won’t be needed at the start until you set up some shops, though setting up some first-aid is also a great idea, as both Psychola and The Cube have pretty high nausea ratings. the rides will have extremely poor wear-and-tear ratings even after being fixed, so it’s also a good idea to order some repeated inspections to remedy that, or order a refurbishment (which costs money…) and set the inspection time to the lowest possible period of 10 minutes. In addition, the placement of the exit on the Psychola ride is extremely poor and requires the mechanic to circle all the way around to complete a repair or inspection. I recommend rotating it so that the control panel (the small box with the staff member in it) is nearest to the exit path.

Once you have your rides up and running and price them accordingly, hitting the monthly profit threshold is quite easy, even before building 2 extra rides. What will make your job a little difficult, especially combined with the naturally lower reliability of your rides, is the positioning of rides is mostly relegated to a few selcuded flat areas around the terrain. Unless you’re willing to engineer a strange spiraling staircase to go to and from your ride, you’ll have to space your different rides into those pockets. Be very careful about expanding into adding food/drink stalls, as this will necessitate further costs of stall staff and janitors. For now, keep your focus on building rides.

With well-managed entrance and exit positioning, 2 mechanics should be enough to keep 4 of these rides at bay. Training them is also a good idea, as doing so will allow them to restore a lot more durability to your rides, as well as doing it much quicker, and therefore more time for guests to enjoy the rides! Once a mechanic gets “Skilled” (3 pips), they can perform some extremely effective repairs. Make sure to raise those wages as well… (Standard mechanic wage at skilled tier is $315). Inspections still take time, and a mechanic will need to wait for a ride to finish to start and inspection, so choose carefully when to have them done. The evil power of the monolith guarantees you’ll need to tell your mechanics to manually inspect rides if you don’t want them to break down.

After a few months, your ride income likely will level off due to filled queues and lowered ride throughput. That’s your sign that it’s time to A: start placing shops to buffer your income, and B: begin research on coasters. The spinner coaster is unintuitive to design with, and lends itself to higher than average nausea scores, though it is a good option for a general ride for extra income. The next coaster you unlock, the mine train coaster, is not super-flexible in its track design, but can likely do the job. Beyond that is an inverted 2-seater, which can also perform pretty well.

The main park body doesn’t give you a lot of room for building a normal coaster or to use a blueprint, so much like in Good Gully, it’s recommended to build one that dives into the ravine that the monolith is sitting in; it allows you to create big drops, and has plenty of pre-made, immovable scenery that can boost your ride’s prestige. With how hectic it is to maintain your rides and finances in this scenario, I highly recommend taking this map into sandbox mode and designing your coaster blueprint in there. With an emphasis on fear and excitement, and low nausea, you’ll likely want a fast coaster without many gut-wrenching spins.

Designing a coaster will give you more than just a great ride, but also a ride that has a much greater degree of throughput for guests, generating a whole lot more income. Of course, the monolith itself will be wearing it down super-fast, so I highly recommend hiring a new mechanic to specifically keep an eye on it. With proper management, the silver income objective should topple, no problem.

The gold objectives will mostly naturally be tackled once again, but you’re going to need to keep a very close watch on all your rides to ensure they don’t break down during the month you are shooting to hit the mark – just because you reach $6000 income from rides halfway through the month, doesn’t mean it won’t get taken back by a last-minute breakdown. From there, it’ll generally be in your best interest to keep some shops up and running to generate consistent revenue. 4 rides and 1 coaster should be well enough to draw in the required 1200 people, and with time, you’ll get your money to pay back your loans.

STAGE 17: 💀

Objectives

• Easy: Achieve a park rating of 500 and a monthly profit of $2500
• Medium: Achieve a park rating of 850 and a monthly profit of $6000
• Hard: Achieve a park rating of 1200 and sustain a monthly profit of $8000 for 3 months.

Overall Difficulty: Hard

This quaint little western-themed park has a pretty extensive village area, adorned with little buildings and pathways. Most of them are locked into place, but thankfully all shops and facilities in buildings can be moved freely. As you get deeper into the park, you might notice things get slightly more dilapidated, until you hit the “Final Frontier” (a wall made of wooden scaffolds), leading into… THE SKULL. The level screenshot doesn’t really capture the effect that this thing has, this gaping maw that appears to be sucking in and swallowing various cacti and buildings.

Let’s discuss your park’s starting loadout: You have a decent spread of shops and rides available in your park, including one open Mexelente shop, and several other closed ones: Chikitiki, Chief Beef, Gulpee Energy, “Ye Olde Information”, and a Street Fox Coffee that seems to be kind of getting eaten by the skull. The park also has facilities, including two toilet blocks (make sure to wash yer hands), a closed ATM, and a first-aid block “Surgeon DOc Brown” (sic) next to your carousel of all places.

Speaking of which, your park has several standing rides: A venetian carousel “Old Rouletter”, a Psychola, and a Gears of Fear named “Engine of Chaos”. All rides are closed but are in generally good condition.

Your only staff member (outside of all the shopkeepers) is a Miss Ellie Entertainer. All staff members are being paid their normal wages.

As for the guests, all of them are misreable as hell, and there’s only 29 groups to start with, the majority being adults. This doesn’t really matter, because everyone at the moment is heading home since there isn’t anything to do.

Also the paths are caked in trash, so it’d probably be a good idea to get started cleaning that up. Guests in this scenario have their happiness drained EXTREMELY fast if they see messy paths.

On the plus side, your selection of buildable rides is pretty flexible to begin with, so there’s some potential to do so on that front.

You start with $5000 and can’t take out any loans, so it’s time to get frugal.

The big challenge this level will pose is that all guests in your park are going to be miserable basically constantly, driving your rating to the ground. You’ll want to get the trash cleaned up and your rides opened ASAP to start entertaining guests. You’ll need to achieve a balance between your money, and your park rating – and with guest happiness offering up to 25% bonus rating dependent on happiness, you’ll want to get people’s spirits up as much as possible.

Unlike with the Downtown scenario, having the cleanup be done passively will be a much larger impact to your park ratings and effectiveness, due to just how severely trash influences guests. You’ll want to spend a fair amount on getting a mob of janitors (some temporary perhaps) to get the paths cleaned. Firing the entertainer, while tempting, can be held off as she does provide some pretty sizable happiness benefits to people she entertains (possibly even more than normal in this scenario). Setting up some kind of network to entertain guests, after you get funds stable, is a good idea. Like with most other young parks, you can hold off on getting a mechanic for a bit.

To get guests happier, really examine what their thoughts are either by clicking on individual guests, or by looking in the park management menu under the guests tab. Usually this will give you a good idea on where you’ll need to expand. And usually, what people will want at this stage is more rides. So get to it! As usual, a coaster is going to turn the most heads, and there’s a very wide, flat expanse of land at the Richo Rancho deep in the park that’d be perfect to design a coaster or place a blueprint. There’s also a clearing next to the carousel and psychola that is pretty blatantly meant to hold another flat ride (it has a fake facade of a building on it saying “For Sale” and a dumpster).

Because your income requirements are based on total park income, the statistic is also going to factor in costs of managing your park. That in mind, you’ll want to expand carefully. Even if your rides and shops make huge bankroll, it won’t mean a thing if you’re hemorrhaging money from your costs of maintaining control of multiple rides. You should be able to hit both of your bronze objectives after you set up 5 rides, maybe 4 if the new one is a pretty good high-prestige one.

All the objectives from there are mostly to the same tune, so keep expanding and managing your income. Particularly important is to keep your paths clean, so your staff is mostly going to be focused on janitors and entertainers to keep your park rating up. With each expansion to a new ride you construct, you’ll want to ensure there’s trash cans in place as well. If you really need to hit a certain park rating threshold, you always can advertise to artificially boost the rating for a second.

$8000 income per month (for 3 months!) is one of the largest figures we’ve seen in the game so far, but in general, income snowballs in quickly once you get the trash and easier income objectives solved. Using that money to make your park an impressive sprawl will ensure that you soon hit the goals for your final objective.

STAGE 18: King Coaster

Objectives
The objectives for this level demand building many different types of coasters, each that will require their own technique. For convenience, I’ll give each a codename:

• Easy: Build 2 coasters that fulfill these criteria. I’ll call these ones The Basics:
  • Have at least 5 Excitement
  • Are longer than 500 meters
• Medium: Build two different types of coasters:
  First one, The Giant:
  • At least 6 excitement
  • At least 4 fear
  • 750m or longer

  And the second, Mini-Jumper:

  • Doesn’t exceed 40 mph
  • Has at least 5 seconds of airtime
• Hard: Build three different coasters that fit these requirements:
  So first off, The Colossus:
  • At most 6 Nausea
  • 1000m or longer
  • Average speed of at least 30mph

  Then, The Serpent:

  • At least 7 excitement
  • Under 4 nausea
  • At least 8 inversions

  And lastly The Rocket:

  • At least 8 excitement
  • At most 5 fear
  • An average speed of at least 35 mph
  • A biggest drop of 100 meters!

Overall Difficulty: Hard

King Coaster park has a pretty simple landscape once you get past his beautiful rocky face – everything around it is mostly light hills. Unlike in many past scenarios, the terrain here is fully modifiable, and none of the buildings in the park are locked. The paths branch out from the entrance, pointing out a couple potential places you can extend your park to.

Your park starts with no shops or facilities in place, and is staffed by a mechanic, and three King Coaster entertainers. Your park also has one ride: Coaster King! A hydraulic-launch coaster with fairly high prestige and filling in for one of the required coaster designs in the easy objective. The design of the coaster is actually pretty plain, and doesn’t have great EFN stats. It mostly serves as set dressing for the big stone King Coaster landmark, appearing as his tongue. That said, it is pretty well decorated beneath the ground, and is worth a ride in first-person. Something very important to note, Coaster King has seen considerable wear-and-tear, and will break down about halfway into the starting month. Prepare accordingly.

Your starting building options include a few standing rides, some basic facilities and shops, no track-rides, and only two types of roller coaster: steel looping, and hydraulic launch (same type as Coaster King). You will need to do research to fulfill your objectives.

Your guests are fairly content at the moment and consist mostly of teens. The hardest part of the scenario is finances by far, as you only start with $7500 and have no loans to withdraw.

Aside from this basic knowledge, King Coaster doesn’t have any catches or twists – what you see here is what you get, so it’s time to get started.

King Coaster simultaneously tests your skills at managing a successful park, while also providing a bit of a puzzle of the types of coaster you’ll need to fit for each of the objectives. The Steam Workshop can almost certainly provide plenty of designs that can fit the bill for each coaster you need, but you’ll still have to fit all those tracks together into something workable. And because you have no loans, all income is going to rely on your ability to profit from your stalls and rides.

Coaster King, on its own, is pretty ok at generating income. Straight off the bat, you probably aren’t going to need 3 entertainers to keep everyone in your tiny park happy, so feel free to get rid of 2 of them, or all of them.

Right at the beginning, you have three courses of action you can take to counter the impending breakdown:

• Order repeated inspections. This will keep your mechanic very busy, and is also somewhat problematic considering it will dig into rider’s time as you wait for him to complete inspections. It also requires lots of micromanagement, but this option is the least costly and will at least guarantee that you keep making some income.
• Build a standing backup ride: Your park at the moment is all teens and grownups, with no families, so setting up a standing ride to keep them entertained when Coaster King breaks down is a good course of action. Keep in mind, however, that your starting selection of research has no First-Aid station, and your starting thrill rides all have pretty high nausea ratings. Hire a janitor to counteract the barf.
• Use a Blueprint: This is probably the best course of action if it’s available to you, is to just place down a good coaster design that fulfills the first easy objective, as this will grant you a high-prestige, thrilling coaster for your park-goers to ride while Coaster King is repaired. However, both your starting coaster models don’t have any blueprints you can afford by default, so my suggestion is to either go searching for one that fits the description, or to import the scenario into sandbox and build something neat there. You can attempt to build a coaster quickly in the given timeframe manually in the scenario, but there obviously isn’t much time for live testing.

Refer to the below section on tips on how to design the first coaster. Don’t worry, though, the first one is extremely easy and can be done in a variety of ways.

Once you’ve stabilized the situation and achieved the bronze star, you should easily remain in the black. At this point it’s time to prepare for your next design fiscally. Start placing down some facilities – food and drinks, establish a central plaza, and hire your janitor/set up trash bins. While this is ocurring, you can start researching new coaster types, while counterbalancing the costs with your 2 nice coasters and your merchandise. Researching the First-Aid station will also be a high priority.

Since designing coasters for this level is important, it’s also good to know the order you’ll get coasters as you research. Do note that you can complete all the scenario goals with the starting coasters alone if you wanted, but a lot of these coaster types are very well suited to the later required designs:

• Loony Turns (I don’t know why the level doesn’t just start you off with this one.)
• Wendigo Junior Coaster
• Dragon Junior Coaster and Spinning Coaster (research paths unlocked simultaneously)
• Mine Train Coaster and 2-Seated Inverted Coaster
• Wooden Roller Coaster (Gnarler, unlocked via Mine Train Coaster)
• Equalizer Hypercoaster and 4-Seated Inverted Coaster (Unlocked via 2-seated inverter. The 4-seated inverter is a dead end.)
• Wing and Anubis Hypercoaster (Unlocked via Equalizer)
• Launched Wing (Unlocked Via Wing)
• Pioneer Swinging Coaster (Unlocked via Anubis? Also a dead end.)
• Tiamat Prototype Wing coaster (Unlocked via Launched Wing. Dead end.)

By the time you get your third coaster running, you likely should have stable enough income to also design your coasters while in the scenario (can easily get up to $100,000 of spare cash passively). King Coaster’s final level really highlights sort of the biggest issue of Planet Coaster’s career mode, because even when handed challenging win conditions, there’s no time limit or end point in place to prevent the player from just continuing to expand the park until they inevitably end up in the black.

That all said, it’s now time to discuss the actually tough part of the level: The Coasters!

King Coaster RollerCoaster Design Guidelines

This section of the guide includes specific tips on how to achieve each coaster objective on the list, because it’s mostly too long to fit into the actual scenario guide, whoops.

The Basics
We already have a single design that satisfies the criteria in the default Coaster King we have at the start. The requirements for this ride are so nonspecific that it really can be any kind of coaster you’d want, so long as it’s decently exciting and somewhat long. Even then, because it’s still early in the campaign and funds are short, you might want to use the simpler american arrow design type for this coaster rather than another powered-launch. If feeling very adventurous, you could knock multiple coaster objectives out of the park at the same time as this one. But if you’re going for the blueprint route, your coaster design will need to be pretty cheap, and likely will keep things simple. A pretty good coaster can be made with The American Arrow for around $7500.

The Giant
This design will need to be long, and pretty intense, so it’s recommended to use another launched coaster or looping coaster instead of anything researched down the road. If you decided to utilize The American Arrow type in the “Back from the Brink” scenario, you can easily reuse the design here, as the requirements on whole are less restrictive. If you’re designing from the ground up, my advice is to have some decent lateral Gs for fear, and to potentially overshoot your length requirement, as it could knock out the easiest Gold Coaster design as well.

The requirements for this coaster entirely eclipse the Bronze difficulty coaster, so if you wanted, you could trash your previous design (or King Coaster) once you have this one up and running. Rides are rides, though, and they do generate income and draw in more guests.

Mini-Jumper
Thanks to cost and research order, this generally is the best option to go after in the early game. As the name would imply, this coaster will have lots of airtime hills, but will be offset by a very small maximum size, thanks to the extremely low max. speed. As you can see, the tallest drop on my design ended up being only 15 meters, so that’s a pretty good barometer for how tall your first dive should be, and just how little momentum you’ll have to work with. The Loony Turns model works well for this coaster requirement, making it a good option for early game. In general, you’ll want to find a coaster that can be designed compact, and is capable of very steep inclines and dives.

“Airtime” is specifically generated when the coaster crests a hill with 0 Vertical Gs or less (hanging upside-down on a loop for 5 seconds does not count as airtime, even though it is negative Gs). In my opinion, this is one of the toughest of the coasters to actually design, even when it is the least expensive, as maximizing the duration of your negative Gs without blowing them hugely out of proportion can be quite a challenge.

If you’re tight on money, it might be advisable to keep this one closed if it isn’t a greatly-designed ride. Of all the coasters I crafted up in this level… This one was the only one that consistently failed to make income.

The Colossus
This coaster’s demand for a decently high speed, long length, and low nausea means your best bet likely would be a pretty simplistic Launched Coaster (not unlike Coaster King.) In my scenario, though, my “Giant” design managed to also overlap with the requirements for this goal. If you can, do attempt to conglomerate the design’s requirements as much as possible, as this will minimize the clutter that’ll fill up your park with this many coasters.

The Serpent
This one can feasibly be achieved by using the American Arrow once again, though by now the Boa should be a decent option as well. Unless you’re doing something horrendously wrong, your nausea ratings really shouldn’t ever break above 3. That said, this is essentially a test on your ability to build inversions correctly, so that your riders don’t go too slow and get bored, and don’t go too fast over an inversion and end up losing their lunch. Well-maintained inversions will produce very notable excitement boosts, so you’ll know when you’re doing it right.

The Rocket
The final coaster you have to build for this level is, bar none, the hardest coaster design in the entire game, requiring an outstanding excitement score, but at the same time fairly low fear, alongside a massive 100 meter drop and needing to move over 35 miles per hour on average (which isn’t hard with a gigantic first drop, but this’ll forbid you from cheating the system by placing trim brakes to make things more manageable). This objective is clearly hinting you to create a massive hyper or giga coaster, which excel at this sort of stat loadout by focusing heavily on airtime and huge diving drops. The only issue is, we haven’t built one that requires such scale. On top of the massive height, you’ll need to handle the extreme speed this coaster will move at, so this coaster’s going to need a lot of room. Thankfully, since it’s a bit difficult to build shops and pathways over King Coaster’s stone face, that’s a great place to build a coaster over and around to accomplish this objective. Still, you’ll need to finely strike a balance between thrill and force to get this design down. You’ll need to narrow down your fear-ratings on all sections of the track to at least below 6, and inversely, are going to need to be scoring above 7 excitement over the majority of the track (excluding your lift hill and brake run).

From what I understand what exactly generates high excitement differs from coaster to coaster. But for the Hypercoaster model, your best bet will be to use Bunny-hop airtime hills, with a sharp incline upward, then a gradual slope downward that generates slight negative Gs (more than -1) and gracefully arcs until it’s heading down again. Mastering this technique, you should be able to eventually forge a hypercoaster worthy of this objective. Of course, you can attempt any other coaster model to fulfill the challenge, but the naturally huge scale of the hypercoaster will probably suit this objective best.

If you’ve completed all the coaster design successfully, give yourself a pat on the back – you just beat the original final level of Planet Coaster! Now you have a gigantic dreamland of rollercoasters you can play with that generates ridiculously high income.

Miss Elly’s Round-Up

You gotta make a big splash to succeed here. Can you tame the wild frontier?

Scenario Theme and Setting: Wild West/Desert
Difficulty: Hard
Location: Northwest Mexico (San Diego, CA?)

Miss Elly’s challenges were added to the game possibly later than any of the other Hard challenges, providing exploration of the most new and unique game mechanics, including Security, Fireworks, and a whole new variety of objective types with extra caveats and specifications. Her scenarios aren’t like King Coasters, in that she won’t hit you with unexpected complications such as doubled staff wages or guests mysteriously being unhappy. What she will bring at you, however, are some highly-demanding objectives. It’s not difficult to see why her career campaigns are placed last in the list.

As stated above, her later inclusion means that some of the scenarios will enable Security features, so be prepared to wrassle with those again!

STAGE 19: Miss Elly’s Diner

Objectives

• Easy: Achieve a Ride rating of 450, and 700 guests with at least 70% guest happiness
• Medium: Achieve a Scenery rating of 80 and attract 1200 guests, With at least 80% of guest happiness
• Hard: Achieve a Park rating of 1500, attract 1500 guests With at least 90% of guest happiness, and pay off your loans.

Overall Difficulty: Meduim/Hard

This scenario starts you off with a pretty modestly successful setup, but as the objectives state, you’re going to need some focus to keep your guests super-happy. This is a no-nonsense, no-gimmicks challenge that will test your raw skill.

First off, this stage is gargantuan, and encompasses a huge amount of usable territory, most of which is entirely flat, save for a ravine and a lake. The landscape is dominated by a single 2-lane roadway (that people are just walking on… yeah) that will be your central artery through which guests navigate your park and will arrive at the starting main attraction of Elly’s Diner, which includes a pretty extensive set of buildings, including a gas station and Drive-In theater. All of the buildings (and their corresponding shops) are locked, as are even the small detail-work pieces of the stripes on the road! But the trees and rocks around the map aren’t, and you are free to modify terrain.

The long roadway poses the main challenge this map will give you; guests will take a very long time to walk towards your attractions, which means less time spent enjoying rides and spending money. You’ll want to keep people interested to maximize your profit from them, and until your park becomes super-expansive, the dead-space will be a constant issue. The entrances are also at both ends of the roadway, so you can’t benefit by building heavily around one entrance – you’ll have to get your guests to converge somehow.

You start with one expansive, high-prestige wooden coaster, The Sixty-Six’er. It’s a pretty big coaster, and has strong EFN stats. The diner area is filthy with shops, several of which are closed to save money. There’s 9 shops in total.

Aside from shops, your staff consists of 2 janitors, a mechanic, a security guard, and a Miss Elly entertainer. Guests are pretty happy in general, with the noted minority being families.

Your finances start you out with $10,000, coinciding with the 10k loan you have withdrawn with a 2% interest. You can also withdraw a larger $20,000 loan with a 20% interest rate. In general, finances are very lenient for this scenario… And boy howdy, it’s a good thing they are.

Guests entering and leaving are going to be a huge factor to your income in this scenario. To keep the interest of the guests already in your park, you’re going to have to start out by expanding aggressively. Build a couple of rides, and get straight to work on research on an ATM – the more money guests can spend, the more time they’ll be in your park. Don’t be alarmed if you go into the red for a while after you’re done building the new rides – it’s going to take a while for new guests to show up.

Alternatively, or additionally, this might be the one level in the entire game where using transport rides can be beneficial, and the research path includes a steam train right off the bat, so you could begin progress on this as well. A good incentive for this to consider is that guests can also litter on the open roads on their way out of the park, making for a poor first-impression to new guests – something to consider when aiming for guest happiness. A similar thing is also to be considered when taking into account how empty the path to the actual park is scenery-wise (though decorating around the road can be a legitimate way to boost your scenery rating for the silver goal), and also the distinct possibility of robberies happening on this open highway. Combine that with needing to manage work rosters and… All put together, you can see why it’s probably a good idea.

If you do take this route, start by building your train from the entrance across the bridge to the diner. Possibly shut the pathway off to force guests to take the faster route, or even charge money. When making a transport ride, you’ll want to designate the behavior of each station to maximize inward-flow of your guests, as well as carefully design the track to make the return trip as short as possible (to minimize entrance-station queue time). The best way to accomplish this is to have the inbound station (the one that will have the train go to the exit) either leave immediately if there’s no second train (or you just don’t want people to exit via the train, since there’s another entrance), or you have it not block the station if there are multiple trains. The track should also be designed with (perhaps unintuitively) a longer path to the park and a short path out of it. Keep in mind that using a steam train is a pretty stop-gap method, as it both is outclassed utterly by the 55 mph monorail, and won’t be necessary once your park needs to get way bigger. The best things to put on the entrance side of this transport is a mechanic to maintain the entrance station, and an entertainer to keep guests at least interested if they have some weird reason for not wanting to queue up.

You’ll want to balance when you choose to build this transport: building it too early will make too big of an impact on your income for it to be profitable, while building it too late will give too much time for crimes, trash, and other negative factors to build up on the open road. A good time to attempt building a railroad or monorail is when you have maybe around 4-5 rides, with 2 high-prestige coasters (including the sixty-six’er.)

The majority of the shops are closed at the start for pretty good reason. It’ll take a while, even for the existing guests, to get hungry or thirsty enough to start buying your stuff. Once they reach that point, though, the diners really draw in cash. Keep an eye on guest needs, and strategize when to open your shops. Some of the shops (such as the Monsieur Frites stores and Street Fox Coffee) are in extremely awkward positions, and will facilitate either rides built nearby them, or just being closed the whole campaign.

Research is strongly encouraged in this scenario. In addition to aiding the transport situation, it has a wide berth of excellent coaster models at your disposal, allowing for plenty of coaster variety. That said, the starting coaster repertoire can easily serve you through the whole level.

After you’ve established control of the financial situation, the rest of the objectives fall fairly easily – proper park management will easily leave your guests with a happiness in the upper 90s throughout the whole campaign. From there, it’s basically a matter of continuing to build bigger and better rides to draw in more and more guests. And much like with prior rating/population challenges, the objectives on gold can be bum-rushed by marketing your park.

STAGE 20: Goldmine Tower

Objectives

• Easy: Get 600 guests, and build 2 coasters:
  This one I’ll label The Woody
  • 5 excitement or more
  • 4 fear or more
  • 750 meters or less
  • 3 inversions or less
  • Able to reach a monthly profit of at least $1000

  and this coaster, I’ll call The Sidewinder

  • 4 excitement or more
  • 3 nausea or less
  • 750 meters or less
  • 4 inversions or more
  • Able to reach a monthly profit of at least $1000
• Medium: Get 900 guests, and build 2 more coasters:
  First is The Iron Horse
  • 6 excitement or more
  • 5 fear or more
  • between 800m and 1450m
  • average speed of 30mph or more
  • Able to reach a monthly profit of at least $2000

  and this, The Hangman

  • 4 excitement or more
  • 4 fear or more
  • between 800m and 1450m
  • 4 inversions or more
  • average speed of 25mph or less(?????)
  • Able to reach a monthly profit of at least $2000
• Hard: Get 1200 guests, and build YET EVEN MORE COASTERS:
  Whiplash
  • 6 excitement or more
  • 4 fear or less
  • 1000m or longer
  • average speed of 25mph or more
  • Able to reach a monthly profit of at least $3000

  and I’ll label this: Tombstone

  • 7 excitement or more
  • 5 fear or more
  • 4 nausea or less
  • 1500m or longer
  • 5 inversions or more
  • Able to reach a monthly profit of at least $3000

Overall Difficulty: Very Hard

In addition to demanding an immense number of coaster designs, Goldmine Tower also demands mastery of designing a great park by drawing in crowds and making a profit. Similar to the King Coaster campaign, the scenario demands you create a load of awesome coasters, but this time around, the restrictions are much more precise, and combined with your setup, can lead to some troubling results.

The good news is that you aren’t fighting this fight alone – the park already has you equipped with a single mechanic and a single mine-train roller coaster: Magnificent Thunder, which weaves through a castle in the very middle of the map and has an impressive 1000+ prestige. This ride alone is fancy enough that it can pretty solidly generate income. You do, however, have no stalls or shops on the map to start out with, and the coaster is locked, and can’t be modified. This map has security features disabled, so you don’t have to worry about babysitting your guests with a watchful eye.

The bad news comes from the terrain: all the buildings and land you see is not movable, so what you see is what you get: You have an entry area decorated with a western-style town getup, leading into your main park opening: a round field with a lake in the middle, within which Magnificent Thunder is housed. From this opening, there are three other branches that lead off into their own round enclosures, each of which have their own path and small town-decorations pointing towards them. Aside from this, the rest of the map is unforgiving, rocky cliffs and crags.

Staff members are also charge 1.5x for their service in this level. Be careful when expanding your employee base, and likewise, be cautious when expanding your park’s floorplan – the larger the park, the more staff you’ll need, and the skeleton that this map lays out is going to make your park run pretty thin.

As an added bonus, the central lake area of the park is equipped with a fireworks show, which is activated by a display sequencer within one of the belfries of the Goldmine Tower. The fireworks show activates each month (night), at 7PM. Since Elly’s campaign was added to the game later than the rest, it’s essentially a demo for what the new fireworks are capable of. (The fireworks show is potentially long enough to satisfy the fireworks show objectives in the next level… So if you wanted to, you could plop this map into a sandbox mode game and steal the fireworks setup as a blueprint.)

Your financial state isn’t as stellar as it first seems, either. While you do have $25,000 in the bank to start with, you also have already withdrawn a $75,000 loan. With a 1% interest rate, that’s going to be draining $750 from your coffers each month.

Your starting research has you equipped with only very basic standing rides and tracked rides. No shop research is needed (you have all stalls, AND almost all scenery!), but the main focus really is coasters, which starts you off with a selection of wooden and hybrid tracks. Research will be necessary, on top of loan payments…

Ironically, the issue with this scenario doesn’t really come down to satisfying guests, or even securing income – the massive amounts of scenery around Magnificent Thunder means it’s going to be an extremely strong contender throughout the whole level – perhaps a bit too strong. Its central position is going to make it a highly-profitable and popular ride among most guests, which will, in turn, detract from the popularity of your other coasters. In addition, the small island it’s on makes it awkward to put stores nearby it.

Securing high income from your new coasters will be a matter of raising their prestige enough to even hold a candle to Magnificent Thunder. That said, the fact that Magnificent Thunder is such a gentle coaster with low EFN stats means that it and the coasters you’ll craft will fundamentally cater to different demographics in your park – while Magnificent Thunder is a family ride, your new coasters can easily fit the kind of scene that teens or adults would enjoy more readily.

Since ratings and guest retention isn’t a huge factor in this scenario, you can hold off on building shops and stalls until a bit later. The same goes for janitors, with that in mind. Because the park’s layout is so expansive, it’s going to be worthwhile to possibly hire separate mechanics to look after things, and put them on work rosters – the last thing you need is one of your coasters breaking down and sapping that huge loan you have taken out.

Your massive funds for most of the level will mean that you can freely build your coasters in the campaign without much concern for running out of money (especially because Magnificent Thunder draws in such massive income). This is also good, since the objectives in the level also emphasize brevity of your coasters, so in practice, making them really shouldn’t take long anyways.

Designing your coasters well will tend to draw in more than enough people (Already with the bronze coasters in place, I was nearing the silver population goal), which in turn will give you even more guests to ride your coasters. Much like with Coaster King, you can almost entirely neglect standing rides in favor of more coasters. Magnificent Thunder can and will break down due to its age – this can be exploited in order to direct a little more income to your other coasters. Inversely, you’ll only want to have this happen once you have at least 2 other coasters set up, otherwise the people leaving the queue will hit your income hard. All the more reason to get another coaster up ASAP. Until then, have your mechanics inspect the ride, and inspect it often.

Research on new coaster types likely should begin after you’ve completed your first coaster. Compared to Coaster King, which had a deep research tree, Goldmine Tower’s research tree for coasters is very broad, starting you off with four different options, quite a few of which branch off. Look at the diagram to the right to see the full tree. Personally, the ones that branch out of the Equalizer coaster, as well as the looping designs, seem the most practical, but you can get creative!

Goldmine Tower coaster Guidelines

Much like with Coaster King, this scenario demands many different coaster designs to fulfill the objectives. And much like with that scenario, I’ve got examples, tips, and pictures of how to accomplish each of these objectives:

The big thing to emphasize on these coasters is their maximum-length limitation. This means your coasters are going to have to be concise, sweet, and effective in order to fulfill the EFN and spec challenges, while also racking in the necessary income. As stated before, accessorizing these coasters with lots of scenery will help a ton with their prestige and popularity.

The Woody
Necessitating decent Excitement and Fear, the Woody otherwise requires pretty bog-standard coaster stats and can be pretty easily completed by using the standard wooden roller coaster model (either type works.) As stated above, the largest issue will likely be designing your coaster too long (especially if you’ve been going above and beyond the call of duty for a lot of the coasters needed in previous levels… Like I have). Keep the fundamentals of good coaster design in mind – using effective drops and airtime to make a great experience, and you can churn out a good coaster.

If you do want to include inversions, be very conservative with them. The starting loadout you have for coasters does include two hybrid models that can invert (also the Steel Vengeance update means that you forever have a hybrid coaster available in every level now…) The requirement for minimum fear will guarantee the coaster created caters more to your older guests rather than children.

The coaster I ended up making was able to reach its requisite income with a prestige score in the Low 800s. Decorate or design your coaster with that much prestige, and it should be able to make more than enough cash to get the goal. Also keep in mind that longer rides will, naturally, create a ride with a lot more prestige if the EFN stats are still good (going as close as possible to 750m works well.) And don’t worry if you don’t immediately reach your income goal when you get to that prestige, as it can take a while for guests to react to a new ride’s appearance, as well as some time for prestige to allow you to update your pricing. As more guests enter your park, it’ll become easier and easier to meet this threshold – just as long as another coaster doesn’t eclipse its fame.

The Sidewinder
The sidewinder coaster model will demand inversions, and will need to do them competently. Since the nausea threshold on this coaster is rather low, you’ll likely only want to go through with the bare minimum for inversions on this coaster – doubly so considering that it’s going to be pretty short.

Since this will be made pretty early-on in the campaign, it’s best to just use what you have – pick a hybrid wooden/steel coaster, and build using that. Aside from keeping nausea low, this coaster design can be even less impressive than the previous, considering the more lax excitement requirement.

The silver difficulty coasters get more restrictive in terms of their requirements, but are still fairly easy in terms of finances and can be made in a good size, and have relatively few restrictions on how you get the matching stats. They also won’t need nearly as much gussying up to reach appropriate prestige levels (though you’ll still want to outdo your first coasters.) That said, research will help you discover possible coaster models to let your park diversify designs for these challenges. Good coasters that can make the necessary bankroll will likely want 900-1000 prestige.

Iron Horse
Standing at one end of the spectrum of coaster types, Iron Horse asks you to create a high-speed, high-intensity ride with a fairly substantial average speed. Though the design on the left shows me using a Hypercoaster, I actually wouldn’t recommend using that coaster type since it was really hard for me to get above 5 Fear without deliberately screwing up the track to generate ridiculous amounts of Gs (any Gs in excess of about 7 or 8 will automatically drive down guest willingness to ride, even if the fear score appears decent.) That said, go fast and go rough, because you’ll want to make something with exceptionally high fear and will want to wind it pretty tight to leave room for your next designs.

Other tips, avoid using block sections and slow chainlifts (set chainlifts to maximum speed, or use a coaster that launches instead) as these could possibly lower your avg.speed values on repeat tests (My screenshot right now shows it at 35mph, but in practice, the block section lowers the average speed to 14 due to waiting times)

Hangman
This coaster is basically the complete opposite of the other, with very lax excitement requirements and the need to go much slower than average. Going with an inverting coaster is highly recommended here, as inversions can generate a lot more excitement than trying to do some kind of bizarre tight airtime coaster. Even then, there isn’t a maximum speed cap, so feel free to have moments of high speed, such as a few large drops. The big key is to go at a pretty lax pace just around certain track elements (i.e. turns at tops of hills) and take full advantage of elements such as slow, long chainlifts, and various brakes and block sections. Thanks to the EFN requirements, the slowness must not impact the ride experience too heavily.

The biggest challenge you’ll probably face when making this one is fulfilling that fear requirement (above 4.0). On both of these coasters in the silver bracket, it’s very easy to make pretty good coasters that fit the other requirements, but then fail on the fear sections due to being too low. The fact the EFN stats of this coaster might be underwhelming will mean it likely will need some extra decorating to make the cut (not much, though, length contributes a lot to prestige once again.)

GOLDMINE COASTER GUIDELINES PART 2 BECAUSE THE CHARACTER LIMIT IS TOO LOW BUT THE CHARACTER LIMIT FOR SECTION TITLES IS RIDICULO

While not as ultimately demanding as the gold coasters handed to you in King Coaster, these two final designs throw you pretty nasty curveballs you’ll need to deal with. What’s more, by now you’ll probably be aching for real estate to build these big bad coasters, and even still, will need some good scenery work to back up your creations. A prestige score of around 1100-1200 is desirable.

These will not only be the toughest coasters to design, due to length and requirements, but also the most difficult to make profit with if you’re building them last – many guests will not have the money to ride these coasters once they’re completed. Consider setting up ATMs nearby these new coasters, or even closing down some of your previous ones.

Whiplash

Whiplash stands at a surprising extreme, similarly to the final coaster of King Coaster – it demands a manageable 6+ excitement score, but a less than 4 fear score. Your coaster is going to need to be deliberately gimped in terms of g-forces and ultimate excitement, but given the speed and length requirements, will still require a big track and high speeds. You’ll once again need to design big, gentle, and sweeping – just not as extreme as requiring a 100 meter drop. Consider designing many of the drops and hills of your coasters with gentle slopes as opposed to going as steep as possible.

By and large, the best choice of coaster type for this one will be a Hyper or Giga coaster, as these not only excel at airtime and straight, gentle designs, but they also can be ridden by children – due to their low fear preference, this will make your ride an experience to rival Magnificent Thunder. Giga Coaster is the optimal choice since its cable lift will enable a faster hill-climb speed.

Because the coaster will be gentle and have lower-than-average EFN stats, you’ll need to emphasize decoration around the track heavily.

Tombstone
Once again, the styles of these coasters stand in direct contrast. Whereas Whiplash will demand a smooth, flowing ride with low intensity, Tombstone will demand you to go all-out with your coaster design, making a long, intense, and very exciting ride. With the above 5 fear requirement once again in place, you’ll need to go a bit rougher than usual. The Torque, a looping, launched coaster, is an extremely good candidate for this coaster type since it can achieve much higher speeds than your standard coaster and going through inversions speedily. The nausea requirement, unless you’re once again severely fudging up your airtime sequences or spinning way too much, shouldn’t be a huge factor.

With some perserverance (and maybe some population manipulating) you will eventually get your goal, and can celebrate your coasters making enough income with the fireworks show at the end of the month! With the number of coasters this level demands, this can easily end up creating one of the largest and most insanely profitable parks in the game; I ended this level with over $100k in the bank, 3000 visitors, and a 2000+ park rating. And about 10 frames per second.

STAGE 21: Starship Hangar

Objectives

• Easy: Build 3 rides that generate at least $1500 monthly income, and get a park value of $25,000, with a park rating of 500.
• Medium: Achieve a park value of $60,000, a park rating of 1000, build 10 rides that can generate $10,000 monthly income, and a fireworks show that holds the attention of 100 guests for 30 seconds.
• Hard: Achieve a park value of $100,000, a park rating of 1250, clear ALL your loans, build 7 rides that can generate $15,000 monthly income together, and a fireworks show that holds the attention of 250 guests for a minute.

Overall Difficulty: Very Hard

Welcome to the Nazca Lines I guess! Starship Hangar is really only a small part of this level’s larger scheme and theme, as it focuses on utilizing the new Fireworks Show mechanics of the game to create an odd and very specific set of goals for the player – this is the most anal level yet, and has a ton of nested objectives, so make sure to click all those drop-down arrows to understand what’s going on.

First, the terrain: Very flat, obviously dominated by the iconic bird-design from the Nazca Lines, but the terrain and the Starship Hangar set dressing are not modifiable. This all said, the park layout gives you a fair amount to expand into, but is certainly a good deal smaller than some of the other maps that Elly’s scenarios have given you.

The park starts as a clean slate otherwise – no guests, rides, shops, or staff. However, as a bit of warning, Security IS enabled for this map, so make sure to set up your security infrastructure as you expand. Your starting rides are pretty simplistic, though you do have a fair selection of compact steel coasters at your disposal at the start. However, the research tree for this scenario runs very deep, giving you a whole slew of coasters to research even from the get-go.

Similar to all the previous Elly scenarios, finances are scarce. You start out with $7500 in the bank, and already have a big honkin’ $25,000 loan taken out at a nasty 18% interest rate (forcing you to pay $2,375 per month by default. Best get started with building that park ASAP. You can also withdraw two other 18% interest loans: one for $10,000, and another for $5000.

Much like with Goldmine Tower, Staff Wages are multiplied by 1.5. Keep that staff minimalized…

Straight into this level, your coffers are going to get hit hard and heavy by your loan payments. I suggest either pausing immediately or start building your first rides quickly, as the loan’s rate and size means you’re basically going to be completely broke within 3 months unless you start making back. Thankfully, you can reduce the monthly payments you have to make down to $1000, and do have access to other loans.

Before getting too heavily into trying to get a ride up-and-running, you’ll want to ensure that your park’s logistics are set up well. This can be challenging, as the entrance comes in through two side-by-side pathways, and if you fail to link up both of those to the main body of your park, half the people arriving to visit it will be stranded. My advice is to set up a thick pathway leading into the big empty Nazca Lines section of your park. There, you will absolutely want to set up some kind of central pavilion that branches out to your different rides.

The best bet for a starting ride likely would be some manner of coaster – most preferably one that can be ridden for all ages. The only one we start out with on this front is the “test pilot” multidimensional coaster (which is expensive and complicated)… As well as steel vengeance, thanks to that one update.

Alternatively, you can build a cheaper coaster such as a Star Loop, and then later set up some family rides to help your other guests out. I recommend the coaster start, as it’s easiest to build a coaster very nearby the entrance, meaning you can quickly start building up some income with a coaster there. Even with your entrance pathway set up, you can still build a coaster up on either of the sides for quick income.

A single coaster with solid design can hold your income easily, and actually hit the income mark for the first objective by itself with proper decoration. From there it likely will be a waiting game – slowly accruing up your income while gradually planning expansions. Most likely following your coaster, you’ll want to set up a gentle ride (rocktopus is the best option without research), as a thrill ride not only will be redundant, but you don’t have the first-aid station available for development just yet. My combination for the easy objective was a big coaster (a $9k inverter) and a pair of Rocktopus’. From there, best bet for getting the requisite park value would be to decorate around your rides heavily.

Stalls and Staff should come as late as possible, as the costs to maintain a large staffing force will cut heavily into your funds. The costs this level throws at you with monthly loan payments will require you to make income, but also not push it too fast. Once you are built up enough to attempt staffing, you’ll likely want to start with your mechanics, then put in drink stalls and bathrooms (guests will get thirsty first before hungry), janitors, food, and finally once you begin to get reports of crime, maybe consider investing in security.

Moving into the silver park objectives, the best bet would be to focus almost entirely on coasters and track-rides from now on, as these will produce the most drastic boosts to park performance. I recommend aiming to pay back, or at least lighten your loan load a bit at this point, to make it easier to finance exploring different options for firework-show making.

The big reason you want to go with a pavilion is exactly for this: to grab the most attention among your guests, you’re going to want to set up your fireworks in view of a a location with a lot of them… Your pavilion. It’s the same general principle that the fireworks show on Goldmine Tower was designed around, but yours can obviously be on a much smaller scale. If you don’t want to faff about with display sequencers, there is once again a big selection of premade fireworks shows you can get off of the Workshop. The Silver fireworks objective can easily be achieved by placing the default “Steady Buildup” blueprint included by default adjacent to a place with lots of guests.

Gold objectives are once again in the same vein, but with the added caveat of also having paid back all your loans. By now you probably should be aiming for quality over quantity with your rides, so pick and create some impressive coasters to put around your park and decorate with. The selection of track-based rides in this scenario are extremely disappointing (the only one you get is Go-Karts, and we all know how bad they are at pushing through guests.) The fireworks show objective can even be completed just by activating the same sequence twice in a row, once you have enough guests.

Overall this stage is more of the same as previous levels, albeit feeling like the game throwing every single challenge at you at once. It starts out daunting, but in the end just requires a ton of patience, and after you beat the loans, it just becomes a moneyfest where you can basically solve all your problems by expanding fiercely after that. Shamefully, the Planet Coaster career mode goes out with less a bang and more a whimper. But with that, all of your career challenges have been completed!