Parkitect is not a particularly rigid game - there are numerous ways to go about building a park that will still work.

This guide focuses on:

1. What you can do
   
2. How the game works
   (but without burying too deep into math)

This guide can also be found on GitHub[github.com].

Paths work pretty much like you would expect, with one thing to note: if a guest is "wandering around", they will not turn back unless that's the only way to go (e.g. dead end), which makes 1-tile-wide paths useful for routing bored guests where you want them to be.

Queues can be connected to ride entrances and allow guests to queue for a ride.

A single tile of queue fits 3 visitors and you might get an extra visitor at the end of the queue.

You'll generally want the queue line to be long enough to fit one batch of a visitors - so if a ride fits 20 guests, you'll want 7 tiles of queue. You can always have more, but be careful - if guests wait for too long in the queue, they might get bored and leave ("I hope X will be worth the long queue time!" means you're 3/4 of the way there).

Like many things in this game, maximum queuing time formally depends on a handful of factors (like guest's patience, ride's intensity relative to their preferences, or whether there's an entertainer cheering them on), but it's easier to not make your queues too long.

Technical: `Attraction.calculateMaxQueueingTime`

Guests will look for a bench so it on when tired, and can leave the park if they don't find one.

Guests also like to take a seat when eating, which is a good excuse to build some sort of a seating area close to your shops.



Aside: holding Shift while placing path attachments places them at all available sides of a tile at once, which is convenient for benches.

Signs allow you to control where people can and cannot go - be it guests or staff. They block specified groups from passing below them from their facing direction, which is great for one-directional paths.

For example, suppose you have a path leading from the ride exit back to the road. You don't want guests going in there - there's nothing to see. So you can place a sign and tick the "No entry for guests" checkbox.



Most types of food and drinks produce trash after being consumed (you can see a little trash bag icon next to the food type when selecting shops). The guests will carry the trash around and deposit it in a trash bin, or on the ground if they don't see any for a while.

There isn't much to note here except that the Large Trash Bin does, in fact, fit two times more trash than a regular one.

Have you seen "The scenery here is amazing!" in the Opinions tab of Park Info? Guests can think that once per 10 minutes or so, and positive thoughts are good for Experiences rating.

Usually the guests have a 10% chance to think that whenever arriving at a new tile with >65% decoration score and while having >65% Immersion, but Photo Spots make these easier to trigger, increasing the chance to 30% and lowering score thresholds to 32.5%.

In other words, it's good to have a couple of these in well-decorated spots of your park that people pass by.

Lamps are there to look cozy during nighttime (provided that you play with day/night cycle enabled, which affects nothing), but they take up space (where something useful could have been), so you might just make your own out of "regular" decorations. Here's a real lamp and a Wall Lamp on a Pillar:



As far as I can tell (having inspected `Guest`, `QueueingBehaviour`, and references to `TV`), these don't do anything whatsoever and are purely decorative. But you might as well - there aren't any mission-critical path attachments that you can place on a side of a queue anyway.

Guests don't like seeing these and you'll have to either builds walls around them or put pavillions over them, but also everything is forgiven the moment the path dips underground - this has no decoration effect on nearby paths, for example:



You can have paths go over other paths! And coasters be above or below the paths! And have paths go underground, or underwater, and generally overlap things as you please.



This can be handy on a few scenarios where space is limited, or to compress the park (but beware that a small park has more guests per square meter - see above).

Don't forget that you can pick up and move your employees (by clicking on them and then clicking "pick up") if you need a puddle of vomit or a broken bench looked at quicker.

Zones define where your employees will wander around when not occupied with a task. Zones can be arbitrarily-shaped, but do note: if you have this kind of thing



And the employee walks onto that single tile on the bridge after completing an assignment or walking back from a staff room, they will get stuck - you'll want to have a way to get off there (perhaps with a "no entry" sign from below and "no guests" sign from above) that's in the zone.

Janitors will clean up the messes that they stumble upon and the game will call the nearest available janitor to take out the trash or clean a shop/toilet.

As your park grows bigger, you'll want to assign some janitors to partol zones where the trash/messes is the most common (around shops and around rides with high nausea).

It is a good idea to assign your haulers to zones (stretching from the shops to the nearest Depot or Deliveries) so that they don't find themselves a kilometer away from the shop that has just ran out of stock.

Mechanics will repair broken path attachments that they stumble upon and are otherwise called up when the time has come to do maintenance on a ride or it broke down.

Security Guards catch vandals if they see them breaking things, but also make the vandals less likely to appear in the first place. See "Events" section of this guide for explanation.

Entertainers walk around and occasionally wave at guests, which counts towards positive experiences for them.

The exact impact of this is hard to measure, but also it's a low price to pay for "Oh no, a shark! 😄"

Sometimes scenarios have the Deliveries building masked from the start, and sometimes you'll have to do that yourself (which can be a bit of an inconvenience since you can only build within the park, and Deliveries usually pokes out of the build area).

While you're there, you can also build a couple shops in front of Deliveries that will be quick to restock:


Essential for shops far away from the Deliveries - you wouldn't want your haulers to carry boxes across half the park, would you?


If you don't have one, employees will just sit on a bench wherever, and guests don't like seeing that (No way, people work here?).

It's like a depot, but only for dropping trash into it.

You don't need these very often because the trash comes from the food, and food comes from the shops, and your shops are probably close to a Deliveries or a Depot already (both of which accept trash).

For most staff types, level affects stamina (how long they can go about before needing rest) and for janitors and mechanics it affects cleaning/maintenance speed, respectively.

In a big enough park it can be handy, but till then - don't worry about it.

Each guest's Experiences Rating is calculated as

(number of positive opinions) / ((number of positive opinions) + (number of negative opinions))

You can see a list of these on the Thoughts tab when clicking on a guest, or Opinions tab in Park Info. Neutral opinions (marked with a 😐) don't count as either positive or negative.

If you are playing through the campaign or just trying to build a Big Park, you might be wondering what does the guest count depend on, and how do you get more guests in your park.

Short version: build more rides, preferably different and/or exciting ones.

Long version: Each ride attracts

(ride's excitement rating) * 0.8 * (0.8 + 0.2 * (ride's satisfaction rate))

guests, so a ride with 50 excitement and 100% satisfaction will yield you extra 40 guests or so. Having more than 3 of the same ride will apply a slight penalty to their bonus (-10% at 4, -19% at 5, -25% at 6, -30% at 7, -33% at 8 or more).

Each shop attracts up to 5 extra guests, depending on its satisfaction rating.

Park's overall rating is used roughly as a multiplier (~half the guests at 50% rating), but can't drop below 15%.

Technical: `Park.calculateMaxGuestCount`

Generally it's good to leave park entrance fee at default value of $1 and rely on ride fees, but the scenarios will occasionally ask you to build a park where the rides are free.

In such case you can set the park entrance fee to roughly 2x of the sum of all rides' would-be admission fees.

Technical: `Park.calculateValueFor`

Time to time the game will bestow a random event upon you. Some are good, some are less good. Events are chosen based on their weight, so 2x the weight makes the event 2x more likely to be chosen instead of other events.

Makes one of the shop resources 10..50% cheaper for a time.

Event weight of 1.5

Makes one of the shop resources 10..50% more expensive for a time.

Event weight of 1.5

While active, ride repairs are ~3 times less effective at restoring safety.

Event weight is set to (1 / (average safety))², and thus:

Increases max guest count by 1/9 .. 1/3 for a time.

Event weight of 1.25

Decreases max guest count by 1/9 .. 1/3 for a time.

Event weight of 1.25

A handful of guests (8..15) turn into vandals.

Vandals act mostly like normal guests, but will periodically break your path attachments (benches, lamps, trash bins), which makes them happy and makes the rest of the guests passing by the tile not so happy. An engineer will repair path attachments that they walk by, but you can also drop them yourself next to broken things (use "vandalism" overlay).

Security guards will catch and ban vandals when they see them, but you can also do so yourself - you can tell them apart by them wearing black backwards baseball caps, bandanas, and by the "Vandal" trait in the last tab. The "Ban" button is in the first tab.

The event weight formula goes like this (in `VandalismWaveEvent`)

guest ratio = (guest count) / ((guard count) * 220)
rating ratio = 1 - (park overall rating) * 0.1
event weight = min(2, (rating ratio) * ((guest ratio) ^ 1.3))

So, assuming Park Overall Rating of 90%,

Guest count can be anything between (park guest count) / 10 and (park guest count) / 4, but no less than 20 and no more than 50.

Event weight of 0.75.

Picks a random open & reachable ride, but apparently only rides with intensity under 100.

Same guest count rules as above.

Event weight of 0.75.

Makes guests more likely to pick the given ride, which doesn't mean too much.

Event weight of 1.5.

You can read the game's description of the stat by clicking on a guest, clicking Stats, and moving your mouse over the "Immersion" label. Here are the key points:

Amount usually depends on the cost of a decoration, with more expensive decorations granting more decoration rating (shown: $100 statue vs $250 rocket).

A 1/4 scale clock is as good as a full-sized one:

This is great news if you're trying to boost decoration rating of good-looking yet inexpensive scenery (because you can just hide little clocks/rocks inside it) and bad news if you were hoping to impress the game with your mountain-building skills.

In other words, you are highly encouraged to cover up undesirable objects - more on this in the next section.

For tracked rides (coasters, go-karts, log flumes, etc.) in particular, you can get 15 or so extra excitement by decorating both the ride and the queue accordingly (doesn't have to be maxed out, just fairly green). This directly translates to extra money that you can charge per ticket and is generally encouraged.

"Flat" rides also benefit from decoration, but not as much.

Experiment with different decorations and watch the Decoration overlay in Visualizers (enable after opening the Views panel on the left) to see what works and how. Here are some notes:







(in other words, be careful with building a cool castle around your ride)




A doorway and windows around the toilet render it invisible to a naked eye.



Perfectly camouflaged

Visibility calculations appear to be based around bounding boxes, which means that things like umbrellas or pavilions more or less act as a 1x1x1 tile block.

General notes:

• If you place a shop next to a road that an entrance can be reached from, a shopkeeper will enter the park through an entrance, but if you don't, they'll appear in the shop immediately.
  
• Some items make trash, some don't - for example, pizza needs more ingredients, but leaves no trash. You can tell by the little icon next to the food item.
  
• Assuming default park entrance fee, you can make shop items a little more expensive if you want to squeeze more money out the guests, but generally you don't have to.
  
• Exception to above rule, guests are willing to buy even fairly expensive umbrellas when it's raining.

If a guest has a map, they might open the map and look at where they need to go instead of wandering around aimlessly. It's a good idea to have a kiosk at the park entrance and then a couple more around the park if it's big enough.

If a guest runs out of the money, they will generally start walking home, but: if there's a cash machine, they might get some money out of it and stay for a little bit more.

A guest is allowed to spend between 140 and 280 currency units total, depending on their generosity (technical: `Person.getMoneyLimit`).

Guests will not pee themselves too easily, but still it's good to have a toilet once in a while - especially since this means that each individual toilet will have to be cleaned less often, on average.

A little different from the rest of the shops in that:

1. It is loaded from the front, meaning that the guests get to see your haulers carrying boxes and be upset about that.
   
2. You never have to clean it.

The number of visitors that'll get to be upset about boxes can be greatly reduced by hiding the tile before the vending machine under a pavilion or a little structure:


These can act like any shop that you have access to, but are much smaller, making them a great choice if you're going to make your own building around the shop and won't want parts of the original design poking out.

Occasionally you'll get access to these. If a guest is about to throw up (running around while covering their mouth with their hands) but makes it to the First Aid Room, you won't have to clean up after them. Unfortunately, the guests are kind of bad at it - even if you have a First Aid Room right in front of a ride's exit, the guests still might throw up on the ground.

Each visitor decides their perceived value for a ride based on a handful of factors like its intensity relative to their preferences, generosity, or rain protection during a rain, but overall you can set the ride entrance fees to 15-20% of their excitement (so if a ride has 60 excitement, you can charge $12 for it) and no one will complain.

If you'd like to see for yourself, I made a mod (GitHub[github.com], Steam) that shows you what each visitor thinksabout rides' pricing.

Technical: `Attraction.calculateValueFor`

A ride is considered to be officially rain-protected if 80% of its track/area has roofing over it.

Rain-protected rides will continue to operate during thunderstorms, which is convenient for certain scenarios.

Partial rain protection will still count for purposes of guests' interest during normal rain.

Don't beat yourself too hard over how this looks - many of the real-life "rain-protected" rides have a relatively simple roof or a building that they sit in, and the few "rain-protected" coasters tend to sit inside a hangar of sorts.

Key takeaway: an exciting ride should do most of the things that its kind can do - if it can do inversions, have a loop or two; if it can go fast, have it go fast at some point; if it can do sharp turns, have a couple of those. Descriptions of rides usually hint at what the game expects you to do.

The actual boring math[parkitect.fandom.com] (warning: fandom dot com) behind calculations involves numerous rules and graphs.

Update: if you'd like a more convenient exploration of ride metrics, I made a mod for it (GitHub[github.com], Steam workshop).

I'll summarize the important parts:

Note that:

1. Some rides have enough different parts on the right that a little scrollbar appears
   
2. Some parts have controls (like target velocity for brakes) that appear on the bottom of the window, and availability of these can vary by ride type.

Apart of depending on whether you're meeting expectations for the ride type, there are also some contributing factors:

• Decoration
  Per earlier, decoration rating of ride and/or queue can increase excitement.
  You can view per-segment decoration ratings in the Graphs tab.
  Maximum decoration contribution varies by ride type.
  
• Ride length
  Tracked rides that are less than 35 seconds long are penalized, so it's good to not make your rides too short.
  Technically rides have optimal length that adds a little excitement, but the bonus is so small that it's usually not worth pursuing.
  
• Intensity
  Rides with intensity above 90 are also penalized, though the effect is not noticeable unless you go way overboard with it.
  
• Underground transitions
  Dipping the track into the ground (counts so long as a tunnel frame appear on it) adds a little excitement (+7 for 1 dip, +12 for 2 dips, +15 for 3-4 dips).
  Having more than 4 dips gradually diminishes this bonus, causing it to vanish completely at 8 dips.
  
• Cars per train
  You get +1 excitement for every car in a train (set in Settings tab), up to +5.
  Having more cars per train is also good in general (more on this shortly).

Technical: `TrackedRideStats.calculateRatings`

Ride intensity is affected by:

• Maximum velocity
  (shown with Statistics tab open)
  
• Biggest drop height
  (also shown with Statistics tab open)
  
• Number of inversions
  
• Maximum G-forces
  Max positive longitudinal G-force (acceleration) doesn't count, but max negative longitudinal G-force (deceleration) does, so trying to decrease intensity by adding brakes may not work like you think.

Nausea for tracked rides is affected by:

• Maximum G-forces
  (as in, picking the largest of 6)
  
• How long the visitors are subjected to lateral G-forces
  Roughly translates to "how many sharp turns do you have"
  
• Number of inversions
  Roughly +3 nausea per inversion, caps at +40.
  
• Number of drops
  +2 at 5 drops, +6 at 10 drops, and +10 at 15 drops - in other words, it's hard to mess up your coaster with drops.

As the general rule, the more visitors your ride can fit at a time, the better.

For majority of rides, maximum number of cars per train depends on station count with a set maximum; some rides have multiple trains that are one car each (in which case maximum number of train-cars depends on ride length).

Also note that car count affects train physics, so you may need to run a test after changing it.

Guests will buy on-ride photos 15-20% of the time if offered, which means that there's no harm in adding a couple cameras in exciting spots.

A lift will catch and pull a train so long as any train segment touches it, which means that you often only need one or two well-placed lift tiles to prevent a train from rolling back down the hill.

These allow you to have more trains, which is advantageous for long rides and can be used to artificially increase ride length (by making visitors wait for the next track section to be cleared) on short rides.

You can have more than one set of stations on a ride, which makes it more of a transport ride (the visitors will drop out on the station next after the one they've entered).

Having multiple stations causes ride stats to be unstable (as stats from the two segments interfere with each other).

To make it a little easier to build rides, the game is willing to auto-connect tracks within ±1 vertical unit (typically 1/4 of a tile) of destination altitude.

This can be used for several things:

• Sharper slopes/drops
  For example, the steepest 2-tile flat↔flat transition that Wild Mouse usually allows is ±1 tile, but you can scale ±1.5 tiles this way.
  
• "Speed bumps"
  Each counts as a drop.
  
  Add 3 flat tiles, then replace the first two by slope up + flat (flat tile will become a short drop)
  
• Mini-drops
  Each counts as a drop and can be used to quickly add underground transitions.
  
  Add 3 flat tiles, then replace the first two by slope down + flat (flat tile will become a short slope up)
  Remark: if the tunnel entrance is on the same or next track piece after the one with tunnel exit, the two may count as a single tunnel section - add one or more non-tunnel tile between such sections.
  
• Sloped curves and half-helixes for rides that don't have them
  Good for compact builds, but also good for just building cool-looking water rides.
  Take a turn away, slope up/down as necessary, and return to the original route. Then remove the detour and connect the curves.
  When doing multiple sloped curves in a row, remove one slope at a time from a detour.

Closing a ride while the visitors are on it generally leaves them upset, so you can either:

• Time it right
  Close the ride the moment the visitors start exiting the train and before the new visitors start getting on it (you can pause-unpause the game to time this better).
  Surely enough, this only works if you have one train.
  
• Physically block the entrance to the ride's queue
  The visitors will stop at nothing (not a "no entry" sign, not even a solid wall!) if they see a ride entrance, so you can remove the entry tile from the queue and replace it with a one that turns upwards/downwards so that it cannot connect to the road:
  After there are no more visitors in the queue nor on the ride, it can be safely closed.

A coaster is complete if the train makes it back to the station. So why make a whole coaster when you could make half of it?

Here's the deal:

• You cannot have chainlifts in a reversing coaster because they'll stop the train from going back.
  
• You can have LSMs in a reversing coaster because they don't stop the train on the way back.
  
• You cannot have multiple trains in a reversing coaster for obvious reasons.
  
• This only works with "conventional" coasters - no "powered" rides like Log Flume or most of the "scenic rides".

This mostly limits you to coasters with LSM (more on this shortly) but results are outstanding.

Take this, for instance:

Not a good coaster by most definitions - short, weirdly-shaped, and look at those "decorations"! Anyway,

With overall lack of features and duration it would usually have excitement of 35 or so, but instead it has 80, because every feature counts twice in a reversing coaster.

For coasters capable of both LSM and inversions, you can keep them amusingly compact if you want: https://steamoss.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2914550685

If you don't have LSM, what can you do? Not a whole lot - you only have your initial speed ("chainlift speed" in settings) so this mostly affords you to push the coaster over a little hill and have it do a few dips and turns before reversing and rolling back to the station.

But there's one ride that's quite remarkable for these machinations: the Mini Coaster. Cheap and small, Mini Coaster's standards are so low that even the bare minimum counts as adequate performance. Conveniently, bare minimum is exactly what we're going to do here.

Let's start with the general layout.

Going at its initial speed of 5km/h, the ride lasts 40 seconds and has excitement rating of 21.8, which is arguably much more than it should have.

Noting the tips from earlier, let's add a couple tunnels - one by replacing two flat tiles by a dip down + auto-connect, and another by simply tilting the turn a little bit. Since this is a reversing coaster, each tunnel will count twice, bringing us to the optimal tunnel count.

The excitement rating is now 40.8 - not only did we get +15 excitement from adding tunnels, but also increased peak velocity somewhat.

Finally, let's add some decorations. For the sake of this example, I'll just place two rockets and a fountain on the queue line.

This brings the decoration level to Amazing and the ride now has excitement rating of 55.

A variation of this design called Boomerang For Cowards started as a joke between me and a friend, but quickly became a staple in our campaign parks as it turned out to be upsettingly profitable for its humble construction cost
https://steamoss.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2914830456

When a ride breaks down, there's a small (scaling from 10% to 0.3% depending on ride's safety) chance that station brakes will fail.

This isn't very harmful for "normal" coasters and usually means death for multi-train coasters like Wild Mouse, but for a reversing coaster this means that the train will roll past the station, and off-track. And if a cart falls onto the ground, the visitors perish - even if this happened at 3km/h after a 10cm drop.

For this you can add a little upturn behind the station that the train shouldn't be able to roll over even if brakes fail:


Technical: `TrackedRide.triggerRandomBreakdown`

Ferris Wheel is great at keeping a large number of guests occupied for a while, and also almost comically slow at loading/unloading them.

It's so slow that, with Rounds set to 3 (default), you cannot have more than a few tiles of the queue because guests will get bored and leave and it will not turn a profit unless you place entrance/exit right in front of the middle tile of the ride.

With 1 round, rain protection, and some decoration the Ferris Wheel will eventually pay for itself, but is that why you're building these?


Oh good, two of them.

This one's even slower at loading/unloading guests!

Functionally similar to the Ferris Wheel, but better at loading-unloading guests (especially if you place entrance/exit right in front of the door).

Higher towers are slightly more exciting, but also take longer.

Not a very exciting ride, but you can fit it in a 3x3 area, and what else can do that

It's like some of the more intense nausea rides, but without the high excitement rating that usually comes with them. Consider doing something else instead.

Both comically inefficient (one guest at a time!) and hard to properly decorate, this sure is a ride

Provided that you haven't been building your rides too close to each other, you can later add a Car Ride or Gentle Monorail Ride that twists around other attractions.

Not very effective, but surely amusing.

When set to Football mode and properly decorated, this is the most profitable flat calm ride.

Parkitect has a whole range of rides that can spin the guests until their lunch falls out. A coaster can easily match the intensity while having much lower Nausea rating, and you won't have to hire a janitor specifically to clean up countless puddles of vomit next to the ride exits.

Second smallest rides after the Motion Simulator, duration and intensity of these can be adjusted by changing their height.

Notable for being 1.5 tiles tall, meaning that you can easily build other things on top of it.

It can be hard to tell what you're doing with Go-Karts since the game can't figure out the actual excitement rating until you let in the visitors and you can't test them with dummies.

But don't worry - so long as it's well-decorated, at least 70-80 seconds long (if it's not, increase lap count), and fits 12+ guests, you'll get 60+ excitement out of it.

And if you'd like an exciting track, build a racing kind of track - 4 laps, 10-15s per lap, 1 drop, and 1 tunnel per lap (further reading[github.com]).

Featured earlier in this guide, the Mini Coaster is a good, cheap low-intensity ride.

Slightly more capable and expensive than a Mini Coaster, this one can be pushed to intensity of 50 or so.

Fairly unique in that it has lap count, which allows for some elegant designs.

Cool-looking and generally expensive to build.

In campaign, the game will periodically tempt you with these in missions where there's not enough starting money to build both a Cool Coaster and the rest of the park.

Thanks to its ability to do sharp sloped turns, a Wild Mouse can possess any intensity rating - all while being not too nauseating and being much cheaper than big coasters that it can imitate.

A signature "corkscrew" element on a Wild Mouse (front)

We have occasionally built Wild Mice styled after one or other Big Coaster while giving these matching colors and names like "Steel Impcoaster". Good fun.

As once finely coined by someone, make sure to always do a test run of your coaster with dummies, lest your Bobsled Coaster becomes a Bobslay Coaster.

Public transportation? In my park?

If your park is big enough, visitors might walk all the way to a ride that they like, have a go, and then say "well, I'm tired, better go home". You can get a taste of this early on in Victoria Lake if you choose to build something at the other side of the lake.

Transport rides help with this - visitors can take a transport ride to get where they want to be, or just to get somewhere if they are wandering around.

With how slow these things are moving, they really could use an on-board cafeteria - should you use these for more than a short scenic ride, the guests will be starving by the time they get out.

Moves guests up and down! There are about two spots across the entire campaign where elevator is legitimately useful.

Not fast, but pretty cute.

These can bounce back and forth on the same path, meaning that you don't have to complete a "circle" if your train goes between two points.

And don't forget that you can build transport rides underground! Your park can totally have a subway-monorail if depth permits.

You might not think much of the silly log ride, but it's cheap and easy to get exciting (all you need is some turns and a drop or two), making it a good choice for the campaign, and a great low-intensity ride in general.

As a scenic ride, it can do sharp turns, but it can also do little drops, which allows for some interesting designs.

A more intense version of the river ride with some fun track pieces.

Fun, cute, and pleasantly inefficient at generating any sort of revenue.

A great attraction for a mildly successful park with enough place for a swimming pool.

If you only have Paddleboats and not Bumper Boats, don't worry - guests treat these like Bumper Boats anyway, ramming into obstacles or each other. Honestly, pretty accurate.

Outside of sandbox, you have a couple things to think about.

If you're going for the "complete non-optional objectives by X" golden goal, you might spare yourself some pressure by pausing after starting the scenario.

Take a look around, set some foundations, check what buildings you get to play with this time.

A full list of things to consider (to avoid forgetting about them later) would be around:

• Some shops, benches, and a couple trash cans.
  
• A toilet.
  
• One of each employee type and a Staff Room.
  
• An Info Kiosk and/or a Cash Machine, if available.
  
• Change Research target if more thrill rides aren't what you want.
  
• 1+ ride of each intensity group (low/medium/high) so that there's something for everyone.

Researching a category unlocks a random building from it.

Each scenario has its own set of buildings that can be unlocked in each category, so you may not always get what you want.

Since both optimal ride attendance fee and added maximum guest count are linked to rides' Excitement ratings, it all comes down to building more rides that the game considers cool.

As mentioned earlier, tracked rides are much better at this than flat rides.

For example, very few flat rides (mostly drop towers and expensive spinning rides) can have Excitement of >50. But you know what else has excitement of 50? This Mini Coaster:


You don't have to build The Greatest Coaster Of All Times right away, small coasters like Log Flume or Mini Coaster can work just fine, and will help you grow an income to build bigger and more ambitious contraptions as time goes on.

If there's not a "no loan debts" condition and you're running short on time for non-optional goals, you can totally take a loan.

More broadly, all scenarios can be completed without taking loans, but taking a loan to build a good coaster can pay off.

What the game might want from you and what you can do with that:

• Guest count
  See "Maximum guest count" in the "Park metrics" section
  
• Ticket count
  Each time a new guest enters your park, that's a ticket.
  It's easier to treat the two as the same instead of waiting for guests to get out of the park.
  
• Happiness rating
  Check ratings in Park Info (on the left) and guest overlays in Visualizers to figure out what you need to work on.
  
• Experiences rating
  See the "Park metrics" section.
  
• Cleanliness rating
  If the park starts with a bunch of broken path attachments and garbage around it, it'll be easier to erase those paths and build them anew.
  
• Overall rating
  A combination of all other ratings - generally keep guest metrics in a good shape.
  
• Operating profit
  See "Finances" section above
  
• Coasters with excitement rating of X
  See "Tracked rides" section for tips; for purposes of this goal, Log Flume is a coaster.

In a good tradition, many of the campaign scenarios include one or other gimmick. Here are some of the more unusual ones and how you can approach them:

• No ride fees
  If you can't charge for the rides, you can charge a much higher entrance fee.
  Figuring out the price requires a little micro-management (keep increasing the fee bit by bit while no one's complaining about it being too high) and then you can bump it a little more whenever you add another ride to the park.
  The key here is momentum - so long as you keep building more (and varied) rides, you'll keep getting more visitors, all while admission fee grows ever-larger.
  
• No loan debts
  This doesn't mean that you can't take loans, just that you'll have to pay them off to win.
  
• (limited land)
  A great excuse to practice fitting coasters into small spaces, but also: have you noticed that you can have coaster tracks go over other coasters and tracks?
  
• No building above set height
  Don't forget that coasters can also dip underground if that's what you need for a good drop!
  
• No building while paused
  This means that you can pause so long as you unpause before placing something down (holding the thing is okay, unpause before clicking).
  In multiplayer you can split responsibilities (someone builds shops, someone builds tracked rides) and be fine.
  
• No tracked ride blueprints
  If you absolutely need to replicate your masterpiece in one of these scenarios, you can make a blueprint that has everything except for the ride itself - perhaps even some floating objects to serve as a guideline for where the track has to go.

You can save sets of objects as a "blueprint" and place these later.

This is handy for reusing common parts between parks, or making a noteworthy (be it compact or high-excitement) coaster design and then making variations of it in different parks.

You can also download blueprints from Steam Workshop or mod.io. Placing down other people's designs can be less interesting, however: looking at what other people are doing can still be valuable to study ride elements or decoration tricks.

You can also find a number of mods on both Workshop and mod.io.

Thanks to Steam's rather-lean rules on submissions, mods in Parkitect can do a variety of things - from adding new decorations and rides to changing fundamental game mechanics through memory patching.

If you'd like slightly more control over placing objects without getting into custom decorations, you might be interested in the following:

• Transform Anarchy (Steam · mod·io[mod.io])
  If you've used 3d software before, you'll like this one - this mod adds a position-rotation gizmo when placing objects, allowing for fine placement and duplicating/tweaking existing objects through the Pipette tool.
  
• Rotation Anarchy (Steam · mod·io[mod.io])
  Adds ability to rotate objects on all 3 axes and in specified steps.
  Technically superseded by Transform Anarchy, but I still use it to place objects with specific rotations.
  
• Construction Anarchy (Steam · mod·io[mod.io])
  Lets you override grid sizes and place usually-grid-aligned decorations wherever you want.
  Can be a little janky when enabling/disabling it mid-game.

If you've ever wished to see your park in first-person view, there are a couple mods for that:

• CoasterCam (Steam · mod·io[mod.io])
  Lets you see your rides from a guest's perspective.
  
• PeepCam (Steam · GitHub[github.com])
  Lets you walk around your park and see how it looks from the ground level.

Thanks for reading!

Also this guide has been lying around in drafts for over a year (until I figured out how to not write it in BB Code) so if something is missing, that's why, and let me know.