Park Management
Become the ultimate theme park and water park tycoon
Building the theme park and water park of your dreams is only the beginning, now you need to keep it running! Effectively managing your theme park creations is key if you want to continue to expand and see new guests enjoy a once in a lifetime day out.
In this beginner’s guide, we’ll cover the basics of managing your theme park, along with helpful tools and tips to keep your park in the green for years to come.
Park Management Tools
Planet Coaster 2 features management tools that provide insight and valuable information on how your park is performing, including areas which could benefit from your attention.
Park Management Menu
Chief among these tools is the Park Management menu, which includes an overview page and dedicated sub-menus.
Overview
The first page of the Management Menu gives you a quick overview of how your park is performing and the biggest issues you are facing:
- Park Essentials: A snapshot of your park performance, with scores for:
- Park Rating – a summary score calculated from Attraction Prestige, Scenery Rating, Unique Attractions and Park Reputation. The lowest performing of these scores has the biggest impact on your overall Park Rating.
- Attraction Prestige – the quality of the attractions in your park. Adding more prestigious rides helps to attract and impress guests.
- Scenery Rating – the quality of the scenery in your park. Adding more prestigious scenery items in locations visible to guests not only improves your Scenery Rating, but it also elevates the experience of visiting your park to a whole new level.
- Unique Attractions – the number of unique attractions in your park. Adding more attractions gives guests more fun things to do in your park.
- Park Reputation – how happy guests are with your park. Monitoring and addressing guests’ moods and thoughts can help to improve their experience and influence their opinions of your park.
- Top Guest Thoughts: highlights the most common thoughts that guests around your park are having, helping you too quickly identify common themes.
Park Options
The Park Options sub-menu allows you to customise your park's details, set ticket prices and review your Park Rating.
Guests
See how much guests are enjoying your park, and the demographics that you could target with advertising.
Attractions and Shops
Review your rides, pools, shops, facilities and utilities to ensure they are in tip top condition and performing well.
Staff
See what your staff are working on, review their schedules and check in on their morale.
Research
Spend your Research Points to discover new attractions and utilities for your park.
Finances
Review your cash flow and access breakdowns of your income and costs. If you are in need of money quickly, you can take out a loan to pay for whatever you need.
Did You Know?
Heatmaps
New to Planet Coaster 2, heatmaps are a powerful tool for easily spotting areas of high or low performance in your park across a range of different areas.
Most heatmaps will highlight big issues for you in red. Anything which isn't an issue will be blue.
Heatmaps can be toggled at any time by selecting the Heatmaps button in the top-centre of your screen.
Heatmaps are available for:
- Guest Experience, including:
- Mood
- Entertainment
- Hunger
- Thirst
- Toilet
- Nausea
- Energy
- Panic
- Luxury
- Sunburns
- Staff, including:
- Staff Morale
- Staff Pay
- Staff Breaks
- Utilities, including:
- Power Supply
- Water Supply
- Water Cleanliness
- Finances, including:
- Profit
- Scenery, including:
- Score
- Cleanliness
- Operations, including:
- Condition
- Pool Safety
Managing Finances
Money makes the world go round and your theme park is no exception!
Make sure your profits stay in the green and you’ll be delighting guests for years, slip into the red for too long and you’ll struggle to keep the gates open.
Across your park you’ll have a variety of sources for income and costs.
- Income:
- Entrance fees
- Ride tickets
- Priority Pass tickets
- Shops
- Costs:
For example, building a new ride or shops will increase your income, but requires power and staff to run which will cost you money.
Price Points
Increasing your prices can improve your income, as long as you can keep your park and rides busy – and your guests happy!
Pricing everything perfectly is vital to the financial success of your park. There are a number of automatic Pricing Modes to help you get started:
- Bargain - The price that all of your guests will be willing to pay.
- Premium - A higher price that not all guests will tolerate.
- Dynamic - An advanced mode where you control the range of prices, depending on queues.
- Custom - Tweak the price however you'd like, even setting it to Free.
Pricing can be set across your park, at shops, rides and the entrance itself. Set the price too low and you’re essentially leaving money on the table, but set it too high and you might put your guests off!
Did You Know?
How-To Make More Money
There are a few different approaches you can take if you’re strapped for cash in Planet Coaster 2:
- Cut your costs – fire inactive staff members, close shops with low profit and remove excess utility buildings. Head to the Finances sub-menu of the Park Management menu to identify your biggest costs around your park.
- Increase ticket and shop prices – raising the price of a ticket on your rides or items form your shops can be the fastest way to increase income. Try using Dynamic pricing to make the most profit, without putting your guests off.
- Free park entry – it might seem counterintuitive when you’re trying to make more money, but making park entry free will increase the footfall in your park, meaning more guests with cash to spend on ride tickets or at shops.
- Invest in the future – rides will be less attractive to guests over time, so you need to keep investing in new rides and attractions for your park.
- Create a Priority Pass – make extra money from your best attractions with a Priority Pass. Learn more in our Priority Pass guide.
- Keep guests happy – the happier your guests are the more they will spend in your park. Learn more about Keeping Guests Happy in our guide.
- Improve your Park Rating – attract more guests to your park by increasing your overall Park Rating with new attractions, more scenery, prestigious rides and happy guests.
Loans
If you find yourself low on money, the Loans screen can help. Taking out a loan will give you an immediate cash injection, but you'll need to pay back more than you borrow. You’ll also have to contend with a Sales Cut that increases your costs until the loan is repaid.
The amount you can borrow is determined by your Park Value – the total value of everything in your park. The closer you are to the maximum you can borrow, the larger the Sales Cut will be. The Sales Cut is the percentage of your money from sales which will automatically be taken to pay off the loan.
It's possible to pay back some of your loan early to reduce the Sales Cut, so long as you can spare the money.
A loan can make the difference in a pinch but be careful not to borrow more than you can afford to pay back, or you might find yourself stuck in a financial hole!
Did You Know?
How-To Take Out a Loan
When cash is tight, a loan might make the difference in keeping your park open.
- Open the Finances sub-menu of the Park Management menu.
- Select the Loans tab.
- Select Add New Loan.
- Adjust the Loan Amount to the amount you need. Keep an eye on the Sales Cut and Debt Acquired values.
- Select Confirm Loan when you’re happy. You now have a loan! Your loan will be paid off automatically, but you can pay some, or all, off early by selecting Pay Off Loan and adjusting the amount you want to pay off.
Marketing/Advertising
Advertising your park is an excellent way to encourage more guests to visit!
Simply choose the demographic that your advertising will target, assign how much you want to spend over time, and wait for your advertising campaign to do its magic.
Some guests will have preferences, such as a preference for coasters, depending on their demographic. Appealing to guest preferences will encourage them to spend more money at your park.
Before starting a new advertisement, you’ll need to meet a baseline of these preferences in requirements. After all, you need something to market!
How-To Create an Advertisement
- Open the Guests sub-menu in the Park Management menu.
- Open the Advertising tab.
- Select the Advert you’re interest in running from the available option.
- Ensure you meet the requirements for the selected Advert by selecting View Requirements. If you don’t meet these, either fulfil the requirements and come back later, or select an alternative advert.
- Select Create Advertisement.
- Set the Cost Per Hour for the Advert. This will impact how quickly the target audience will be reached.
- Confirm your choice and the Advert will start running! All Ad campaigns will stop automatically when they reach 100% awareness, but they can also be stopped early be selecting the End Advertisement button.
Did You Know?
Some guests will only come to your park if certain requirements are met through advertising.
Park Rating
Park Rating is an overall measure of how amazing your park is. A higher Park Rating will increase the number of guests coming to your park.
Great Attractions, Scenery, and Park Reputation are all required for a high Park Rating. Focusing on the lowest scoring of those is the best way to improve your Park Rating.
How-To Increase Park Rating
Increasing your Park Rating is key if you want to encourage more guests to visit your park.
- Visit the Park Rating sub-menu of the Park Management menu.
- Select the metric which has the lowest performance.
- On the right side of your screen, you will now see what you need to do to reach the next star rating for that metric e.g. build 1 new attraction.
- Complete the requirement for a new star in your lowest performing metric and your overall Park Rating will improve.
- Repeat this process until you have a 5-star park!
Did You Know?
Managing Staff & Guests
What’s a theme park without the people?
Both Guests and Staff will require some wrangling to keep happy and working well.
Guests
Guests are looking for your theme parks and water parks to give them the best day out ever, so there’s a lot you need to do to help keep them happy.
You can find an overview of how effectively you’re satisfying your guests’ needs in the Guests sub-menu of the Park Management menu.
Learn more about guests, their needs and moods, in our Guests and Keeping Guests Happy guides.
Staff
Staff keep your park running, doing everything from operating rides to clearing up rubbish.
You can find an overview of all your staff members, including their Status, Salary and Morale in the Staff sub-menu of the Park Management menu.
Learn more about Staff, their schedules and functions, in our Staff and Keeping Staff Happy guides.
Weather & Seasons
New to Planet Coaster 2, you now need to contend with the weather and the seasons as you run your park.
In the bottom right of the screen you'll find a Weather Forecast. This helpful tool will tell you the current weather, what weather is coming up today, and what weather is coming up over the next 2 days.
Weather will have different effects on your guests – for example rain will cause your guests to seek cover and sunny weather can cause sunburn. Guests will be more inclined to navigate towards different attractions based on the weather. A coaster in the pouring rain isn't very appealing, but a sunny swim in the pool might just hit the spot.
Did You Know?
Different Seasons and Biomes have different weather patterns, so some weather will be more or less likely depending on when and where your park is.
You’ll need to keep the weather in mind when building your park, ensuring that your guests have enough access to shelter, umbrellas and suncream. Learn more about the effects weather can have on guests in our Keeping Guests Happy guide.
Research
Research Points can be used to acquire new coasters, rides and more!
By assigning a Mechanic to a Mechanic Workshop, you'll generate Research Points as long as they're there. The Research tree can be accessed by opening the Research sub-menu of the Park Management menu.
When playing Campaign, your research options are limited depending on the chapter that you’re currently on – however, anything you research will be shared across all over levels.
Research every tech within a chapter to access a repeatable node and spend Research Points to gain that node's unique benefits.
How-To Get More Research Points
Research points are the key to unlocking new rides, attractions and facilities for your ever-growing theme park!
- Place a Mechanic Workshop. These can be found in the Facilities section of the browser.
- Workshops will have a negative effect on your park’s scenery score so place them away from guest areas or hide them with plenty of decoration.
- Make sure your Workshop is accessible to your staff by connecting it to a staff path.
- Open your Workshop to start earning Research Points! Your points will slowly accumulate over time, but only as long as you have a Mechanic assigned to the Workshop.
- A Mechanic will be automatically hired when you open this facility, but you can also assign a Mechanic in the facility info-panel or in the Staff sub-menu of the Park Management menu to cover breaks.
- View your available Research Points next to your Park Rating in the bottom-left corner of your screen. Select them to access the Research menu, where you’ll be able to view the research tree and all the available items you can spend your points on.
Park Maintenance
Your attractions and facilities will need maintenance to keep them running in the long term.
Keeping an attraction regularly serviced by a Mechanic will give you the green Serviced badge, this will ensure it doesn't breakdown. If a ride is not serviced frequently enough, Ride Condition will start to deteriorate permanently.
Critically low Ride Condition can lead to breakdowns and require repairs.
Ride Condition can only be permanently restored with a Refurbishment.
While a ride is shut down for repairs or Refurbishment, your guests can’t access it! You’ll need to judge when to complete repairs in order to keep your park running, but without interrupting the fun of your guests.
Some facilities, including generators and water pumps, also require maintenance. Failing to service these facilities will result in a Condition Penalty, making them less efficient. Fail to service them enough and this can lead to a breakdown, shutting the utility down entirely.
Did You Know?
As with rides, the only way to permanently restore the condition of a utility is to complete a Refurbishment.
Learn more about facilities and their role in your park in our Facilities guide.
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