Scenery Guide & Tricks

[Broxzier]

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.

Edited April 29, 2016 by Broxzier
Formatting to fix the merge.

[Broxzier]

Clearing weeds

Of course OpenRCT2 has this cheat that will make all grass clean, but there's another way of clearing grass that works in both RCT1 and RCT2. It's free and easy, all you have to do is use the Land-tool, and simply click the tiles you want to be clear. Don't move up and down while doing it, or it might cost you money.This is probably not an intended feature, but it's neat!

Mountains

Making mountains look realistic in RCT can be quite a challenge. Even when using the mountain tool, you're still restricted to the slopes it creates for you. Luckily there's a trick to add a little bit of randomness to your hills. When you are zoomed out 2 or 3 levels higher than normally, you are able to not select a tile while using the land tool (or basically any tool really). You on slopes you are able to place your mouse just over a pixel that doesn't point to any tile. When you do this, left-click and hold it. When you've done that you can move your mouse about, and it will higher and lower the tile that you are hovering over, because there's no tile you have selected. By moving fast you can move off the hovered tile, and higher/lower another one. By randomly moving your mouse about you'll be editing a different tile all the time, making it look random on your screen.It's hard to explain with just words, so I made an animated gif to illustrate how it works. It's not the best mountain ever, but it displays how it is done.

Since a short time you're able to use the mountain tool with a bigger area - This is excellent for when you want the mountain to not be as steep. Quick addition: This is what the ground looks like for a flat park that I made earlier:

Even without all the scenery, rides and stalls you can still tell where the paths were, where the stalls were placed, where some rides stood. It's easy to do and adds to the look of your park a lot.

Edited April 29, 2016 by Broxzier
Fixing the format since the forum merge made it look funky.

[kangoeroe]

Thanks for the tips some thing i didin't know. I had the most problems with the control key, now i know how to do it. I tought it was just as in RCT3 that you pres shift and up, and then hold control to do that, but it won't work that way. Gonna try it out.

[SnowMew]

A lot of this is pretty helpful and that park really looks really beautiful with fencing and more effort on the paths.Granted in the scenarios I just go for what works but in flat land sandbox I'll probably consider putting a lot of effort in.

[RuneLaenen]

Oh wow, I never tried the thing with the handyman. Quite genius actually :D

[raqubits]

That tip about the handyman is an absolute lifesaver! Thank you for the tips.

[Broxzier]

I added a bit about mountains, I hope this is useful for some of you.

[imlegos]

Fun Fact: In Disney parks, you will never be 30 feet away from a trash can. This is because studies show that a human would go about an average of 30 feet before tossing their trash. (Funnily enough, RCT bases littering on amount of tiles walked, if I knew what it was, I could probably find a way to exploit it.)

[brandonmarks94]

to see some cool stuff you can do with scenery (in game scenery and custom) check out the tycoons paradise servers in OpenRCT2


this is what im working on currently

Edited December 14, 2016 by brandonmarks94
added picture

[Broxzier]

Looks nice, but I didn't make this topic to let people advertise in it. Please start a new topic for that.

[SpiffyJack]

If I may add a sincere tip regarding @Broxzier awsome circle rolling the mountains effect shown above. But more importantly prior to using the Slope tool however intended. I'm guessing for many builders this will make you chuckle... But unless it becomes second nature, the probability of a complete meltdown in the future is high. 

1. Always save file first. Use a temp name if maybe you have something else going on elsewhere and you not sure if you are actually ready to over write the working file.

2. Be aware of all surrounding terrain heights and distance between heights when adding terrain.

3. As you can see from the checkered lift point, even the smallest adjustment can be devastating, and if you start the circular motion quickly, it's the beginning of a bad day.

 

Hope this addition is useful for this post.  

  

 

[Kowiji]

Knew about the Ctrl holding one, But never worked, Actually got the hang of it while we're a couple years later and I'm building a coaster for New Elements.

[TheNoseKnows]

The underground handyman trick doesn't seem to work in OpenRCT2, only RCT2. Handymen in OpenRCT2 will only water plants up to one tile above them, but you need at least two tiles' clearance in order to place an underground path.

Edited August 14, 2019 by TheNoseKnows

[Ruedii]

Anyone know how to build tall walls made out of stacked walls?  Do you build the top wall and use the control trick to slide it up?

[RollerBoaster]

2 hours ago, Ruedii said:

Anyone know how to build tall walls made out of stacked walls?  Do you build the top wall and use the control trick to slide it up?

In ORCT the aligned objects should change colour when you're at the same level so you can match things up- still worth checking from all four rotations though as sometimes the bit you think is perfectly placed from one viewpoint soon turns out to be somewhere else when you rotate the image.

 

The ctrl trick usually negates having any problems - it places things at the same height- but if you still do:

 

It's best to start at the lowest level- this may be above ground level sometimes eg for a ride entrance structure. Not tried but you could maybe build the whole wall then delete the lower bits in such cases if it makes it easier to align things.

 

Uneven ground can make things tricky- if you can't line objects up with their neighbors you may need to level the ground below so they raise/lower in the same increments. Ride/other scenery bits can also be a similar problem- in which case you may need to build further out or amend your plans if something's in the way.

 

Finally with walls etc for stacking - and also for neighboring walls/fences etc - check where the grey border is so you're building on the same edge- each tile has an edge for walls/fences etc, for example with a wall or fence by a path you can build it on the path tile edges or the edges of the tiles next to the path. It's easy to slightly misalign walls if you don't check they're matched (you get a grey border round the aligned tile)- it's useful though as you can sometimes deliberately misalign things to build round other things in the way, it's sometimes better to be slightly misaligned than leave a gap (for example if building a wall round a kiosk)

[RollerBoaster]

Just found this- if you can't tweak your scenery positioning in-game sometimes this helps but save your game as a backup first- some clever tricks (probably not these ones) can have odd results judging by some custom parks I've seen, so backing up means you can always take a step back if something unexpected happens.

 

https://forums.openrct2.org/topic/2889-guide-how-to-make-better-minejungle-roofs-using-the-tile-inspector