Planet Coaster 2 guide to help you run your dream park

11.6.2024
By Sarah Thwaites, Contributor
Planet Coaster 2 is the sequel sandbox management sim from developers Frontier Developments. In it, you take control of a theme park, managing the customer experience by training staff, creating rides, managing schedules, and setting prices. Our Planet Coaster 2 guide contains helpful tips and tricks to keep your park running smoothly as you grow your amusement empire from scrappy funfare to full-blown adrenaline wonderland.

If you are entirely new to the series or business management simulators, the game includes a comprehensive prologue that covers the basics of building your park. A difficulty menu also allows you to tweak aspects like Land Cost to make the opening hours of your adventure a little easier.
 

Create small, efficient activity hubs


Rome wasn’t built in a day, and nor is the theme park of your dreams. The open space provided by a fresh save file can feel like a blank canvas, with plenty of room to add convoluted and expensive attractions. While eye-popping rides will certainly attract visitors, longevity and success come down to building your empire one ambitious project at a time. With this in mind, creating compact areas for parkgoers to explore and filling them with affordable flat rides like the Teacups will generate steady income without too much overhead.

Among the rides, you also need to place amenities like food and drink stalls and ATMs, and the most efficient way to do this is by creating central hubs between sections of rides. Not only does this mean your patrons won’t have to travel too far to get what they need, but you won’t need to pay extra staff to man the shops. Keeping this hub idea consistent as your park grows means you’ll have good coverage across the map without overspending on building costs and workforce. Think of the structure of Disneyland, which peppers in little hubs for restaurants, toilets, and cash machines for convenience among the rides.
Planet Coaster 2 Guide To Help You Run Your Dream Park Heat
Once you have those basics down, you can start dressing up your park with an exciting roller coaster or purchasing useful add-ons like pool sunbeds. Both of these actions add to a Prestige metric that attracts more guests. You can view each ride's prestige by selecting it with your cursor and scrolling down to the Important Stats section.
 

Pay attention to customer needs


Planet Coaster 2 is not all about spending hours crafting the most vomit-inducing ride—you also have to manage the experience of your attendees, whose money you need to hoover up to keep the comically-sized lights on. There are three age ranges of visitors (Adult, Teenager and Child), and they will all have individual likes, dislikes, and ride preferences. You will need to oversee eight needs to ensure they keep spending money and leave a good review, including:
  • Entertainment: Decorating your park with beautiful scenery or hiring entertainers can satisfy this need. If you’ve played Planet Coaster, this need was previously named "Happiness."
  • Energy: To help with energy, you’ll need ample seating and rest areas for guests to take a beat and recoup.
  • Hunger: Making sure visitors are well-fed is essential, and you can do this by providing plentiful food options across the park. The price of each item within the shop can be changed, as can the menu.
  • Thirst: Staying hydrated and well-fed go hand in hand, and this system works almost identically to Food. Adding vending machines near rides further from your central amenities hubs can help alleviate your guests' thirst.
  • Toilet: Your guests will use the toilets as they need, especially near food and drink areas. You’ll need to hire janitors to maintain the stalls' quality so they can continue to be used. If they are too dirty, guests will not use them.
  • Nausea: This need is affected when parkgoers ride too many nausea-inducing rides. You can avoid this by keeping the ride types diverse in each area of your park.
  • Panic: Similar to Nausea, Panic is caused when parkgoers ride too many scary rides. It can be helped by planning a variety of rides in each hub of your park. Panic can also occur when pools don’t have adequate Lifeguard coverage.  
  • Luxury: To satisfy this need, you’ll need to add souvenir shops to your park. If you have limited funds, place them in areas where guests are most happy, as this is where they will spend the most money.
In Planet Coaster 2, your patrons also battle the elements, with rainstorms and sunburn affecting their experience and subsequently your park’s overall rating. To alleviate this, ensure that the areas across your map have plenty of covered spots to protect them from Mother Nature, especially while they wait in lines. Additionally, you can stock your Guest Services buildings with Suncream and Umbrellas, which will earn you some cash and help avoid cranky customers. To check the weather forecast, select the cloud icon in the bottom right of the screen or press K on your keyboard. If you’re curious to see how your guests feel about any of these needs, you can use the Heatmap at the top center of the screen and toggle between them to see how they are performing, or check out customer impressions in the Guests tab of the Park Management menu.
 

Don’t forget to manage your staff


Taking care of your staff is critical to increasing productivity, as certain building types will require different staffing requirements. For example, food stalls require Vendors, and technical maintenance jobs require Engineers. How fast your employees perform their tasks is based on their Staff Morale (Very Happy, Happy, Content, Unhappy, Miserable) and can be viewed in the Staff partition of the Park Management Menu, or by selecting them on the map. To keep them happy, your staff must have breaks every four hours, so make sure you have enough team members to cover stalls and rides in the interim, as well as ample Staff Buildings for them to relax in. If your staff are Miserable for two workday cycles, they will quit, and you’ll need to hire more staff to replace them.

A diverse range of rides and facilities is another crucial aspect of growing your business in Planet Coaster 2, and you can do that by unlocking Blueprints in the Research Tree using Research Points. To accrue points, we suggest adding a Mechanic Workshop to your park as soon as possible and assigning your Engineers to the building. Once you’ve earned a good pool of points, head to the Research partition of the Park Management Menu. All advancements are separated by category (Coasters, Tracked Rides, Water, Power, Transport, Flat Rides, and Flumes), and you’ll need to buy every option per Chapter to access more advanced rides and features. Depending on what kind of park you want to create, we recommend perusing all the options in each category to avoid wasting your points.
Planet Coaster 2 Guide To Help You Run Your Dream Park Janitor
Once you start growing the business and have multiple areas to manage, it’s best to assign your staff to custom sections called Staff Zones. To do this, select the Staff menu in the bottom bar, select Staff Zones and hit Create New. Here, you can paint areas using your cursor. To assign them to this area, return to the Staff menu at the bottom bar and select Staff Schedule. Toggle the Schedule View to Staff Zones, pick out a staff member, and assign them to your created Zone. To apply this around the clock, select Advanced Settings, choose the zone you want them to be in, and hit Apply All-Day. This process stops your employees from running around the park between random jobs and wasting time—just make sure there are staff rooms in each area for their breaks.
 

Take time to plot out your paths


In Planet Coaster 2, you’ll need to use various path types to maintain the flow of traffic across your park, including:
  • Path: The path option is the terrain, allowing patrons to move around the park. They will not deviate from this, so ensure it’s connected to all your rides and amenities. Where there are lots of interactable buildings, it’s best to have wider paths to avoid any bottlenecks or congestion. Use the Heatmap to quickly see where all your guests are going.
  • Queue: Queues connect the main path to a ride entrance. To avoid riders being stuck and not spending cash while waiting for rides, it’s best not to make the queue too long per ride.
  • Staff Path: This route enables staff members to move efficiently across the map by keeping areas clear of visitors. It also ensures that regular patrons don’t swarm staff buildings.
If you find you’re running out of space, you can elevate your paths. To do this, toggle the Terrain Style to Suspended. Once raised, the path can run over the top of decorations and other paths, but don’t forget to leave enough space for a gentle ramp to decline onto the main park paths.
 

Make a splash with water park features


Planet Coaster 2 adds water parks to the mix as a major new feature, and while it might seem like a whole new set of rules, setting up your own Wet ‘n’ Wild is very similar to running the dry rides within your business. After spending time making a water park, these are the essential factors for success:
  • Pool Pass: This ticket allows patrons to access the pool area. You will need a Guide Services Building nearby to sell them; otherwise, guests cannot access the area.
  • Changing Room: These buildings enable guests to change into swimwear before going to the pool. Like the pool pass, guests cannot use the facilities without getting changed.
  • Lifeguards: Each pool area requires a Lifeguard to ensure Pool Area Safety so swimmers who need help won’t Panic.
Once you have the basics, adding accessories like diving boards and water rides like a Lazy River, Wave Machine, or Flume will raise the area's Prestige rating and drive traffic towards it. While not essential at first, once your pool area gets a lot of visitors, we recommend adding a retail shop called the Splash Emporium for guests to spend more cash on inflatable goods and satisfy their Luxury needs.
Planet Coaster 2 Guide To Help You Run Your Dream Park Waterpark
That’s everything you need to know to run a successful park in Planet Coaster 2. With these tips, you can get out there and build the theme park of your dreams.

Planet Coaster 2 is available on the Epic Games Store.