Scenery Guide
Placing scenery to make your park look nice is for me the main reason to play the game. I’m sure many of you agree. It takes a lot of time to get much detail into your park, but the results are always nice to see. Also, adding scenery around a ride makes it more exciting for the guests!
First Off Some Basics
While placing scenery in your park you can move things up by holding shift and moving your mouse up. This feature was missing in RCT1, so if you wanted to place something above the ground you had to move the ground up, place it, and then move the ground down again. When building a roof for example it can be tedious to move a roof piece up over and over again. RCT2 has a neat feature for this as well. After having placed one roof piece, hover over it and press and hold the Ctrl button. While holding Ctrl you can move around, with the piece of scenery being placed at the same height.
This gif illustrates how this works. The first three blocks are being placed with just Shift + move up. After the third block is placed the Ctrl key is being held down, and then nine other blocks are being built at the same height without having to move up every time.
This is useful for when you want to build something large above the ground.
Foothpaths
You can’t go without them, so why not make them look good as well? Placing some benches, lamps and some trash bins here and there seems fine, but you can do more!In most real parks that I have been to in my life, footpaths are usually quite large. They aren’t just 3 meters in width, but often closer to 10, sometimes even more. Only the alleys and exits are usually small. By making your paths wider you’re creating a new style already. One thing that really adds to the details is the ground. Every time you make a footpath, try to make the ground under it from dirt – grass doesn’t grow near the edges of a footpath if people keep walking over it, or when there’s some wall build there. Personally I also do this for rides and stalls, places where grass cannot grow I place dirt, and where supports stand I place the dirt/grass mix.Next to your paths build a fence or a wall, especially near water. Park owners don’t want children to run around and end up falling in the water, so they build fences to prevent this from happening. On top of that it also makes your park look more appealing too. Make it look fancy, combine multiple types of fences and get a nice effect.Here are some simple examples of what you can do with paths:
Don’t forget to place benches and trash bins now, and think about where to place them. I usually place lamps 4 tiles away from each other, and across each other on a path. In between then I usually place one or two benches, and one trash bin – there’s no such thing as too many trash bins. When I’m in a real park I hate walking around with something you want to throw away, so why would you make your guests do it?You can go even further and create squares! The people love it, in this park there’s usually around 50 people just on the square walking around or sitting while enjoying a snack.
Trees
Gotta love them. Trees are easy to place, and make your park look more appealing in no time. Just placing them randomly about. Not much more to say here.
Flowers
I don’t place them much myself, but it really fits a park for guests that can’t take too wild rides. One problem with flowers is that they need to be watered. While there’s no problem with it when a flower patch is located next to a path, there is a problem for patches that are two tiles or further away.To prevent flowers from drying you can do the following. It might seem cruel, but it’s only a game after all. Handymen can water plants that are located up to two tiles below and above them. This means that if you have a path, and next to this path there is a flower patch on a piece of land that is two tiles higher, the handyman can still water it. Using this trick one can build a path right under the flower patch, making sure that all patches can be reached (1 tile offset), and making a handyman walk on it only for watering the plants.This illustrates of how I usually do this. After building it, the path near the entrance can be removed, and the land can be moved up again – trapping the handyman underneath.
That’s it – I might add more on scenery later on. Please let me know what you think of it.
