Sim Theme Park - All Parks - Current Route

This guide is available as a google doc with better formatting if you would prefer that: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V2fS2MDogeqkcod0D1apAsHdfCZ06BWy3pg-P1FqZlc/edit?usp=sharing

I sent this guide to a couple of my friends to make sure it was effective, and they seemed to like it. Hopefully other people will find it useful as well.

Run with this route

	Here is a video of one run I did with this route. I tried to commentate the run as I went, although I don’t know how useful that commentary necessarily was. At the very least, the run should make for good addendum material for this guide. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/566296680

Overview

	The goal of this category is to unlock all 8 parks in the game. You unlock parks with gold tickets. You get gold tickets by accomplishing goals or beating sideshows.

The first park is unlocked immediately. The two parks adjacent to it each require one gold ticket to unlock.. The other 5 parks each require two gold tickets to unlock. That is 12 gold tickets total to unlock all the parks.

However, you also need to unlock the camcorder to play the sideshows. The camcorder costs 4 gold tickets to unlock, which you will do in the first park. This means you will get 16 gold tickets total throughout the run.

You will often need to hire researchers to unlock the sideshows. In any park where you will want to do research, the first thing you should do is hire and train one researcher, then go to the research menu and set your research goals, and then hire and train the rest of your researchers. When you set your research, be sure to set the “Overall Research” slider to 100%.

Many research goals require other things to be researched first. In the guide below, this will be notated with something like “1st level sideshow research” (meaning nothing needs to be researched first) or “3rd level ride research (meaning two rides need to be researched first). 

As a final note, you can only have three parks open at a time. Make sure you close some of the parks when you finish with them.

Park One - Lost Kingdom: Prehistoric World

Gold Tickets in this park:
The Green Award (put trash cans near shops)
The Security Award (put a bunch of security cameras around)
The Path Award (have short lines for many rides)
The Aesthetic Award (have a park with many features, in this case the security cameras)
Fundamentals Ticket (have a park with a couple rides, a shop, and a sideshow)
Idol Smash (1st level sideshow research)
Dino Karts (3rd level ride research)

Most of the complexity of this run comes in the first park. In addition to playing sideshows, you will also get several of the floating gold tickets. Floating gold tickets you can get in any park, but you can only get each of them once in the game. You also get many more tickets in this park than normal (7 in this park, the next most you get in a single park is 3). You also need to research quite a bit more in this park than normal. Nearly half the run is just this park.

	The first thing you want to do is hire a researcher and start on research. Set Idol Smash to research, as well as any ride. You’ll need to research two rides before you can research Dino Karts. The different rides do actually take different amounts of time to research, but luckily you can just select the first choice both times and it works out fine.  ***MAKE SURE YOU START NEW RIDE RESEARCH WHEN PREVIOUS RESEARCH ENDS*** A lot of the time loss in this park will come from how long your research takes. You want as little dead time for your researchers as possible. This is true in every park, but it is particularly easy to lose track of research in this park, so it is worth extra attention.

As always, hire and train your first researcher, then start on research before hiring more. It doesn’t save a lot of time to do it in this order, but it does help to have your researchers actively working on something at all times. We would start a research goal before hiring anyone if we could, but the research menu can not be used until you have at least one researcher.

	For this first park, you also want to build a staff room. A staff room will keep employees happy and help to prevent them from going on strike. This isn’t really necessary in the other parks, but we spend enough time in this first park that there is a risk of researchers going on strike and ruining your run. Building a staff room will prevent this.

	The order you get the first five gold tickets does not really matter much. You’re going to have to wait for all the research to finish anyway, so you’re free to try things in a different order than I do them. I’ll list out how to get the tickets in the order I get them.

	Before I list them out, I also want to say that we do not know the exact requirements for each ticket. We know roughly how to get them. We have plans that seem to consistently work, and they have a lot of lenience to them, but we do not know how strict the bounds of these goals are.

TICKET ONE: THE GREEN AWARD

	The first gold ticket I go for is the Green Award. You get this by having trash cans next to enough of your shops. I recommend placing a shop near the entrance of the park, such that the entrance to the shop connects to the main paths of your park. Place a trash can next to that shop entrance. You can get the award without a shop attached to the main path, but you will need this shop for the fundamentals ticket anyway.

Then, place a trash can out in the park, somewhat far away from any wall, and place four shops such that each of their entrances touches the trash can. I also recommend not using the same type of shop for each of them. I usually use two shops of each type. Once you have this ticket, feel free to delete these four shops if they are in the way.

TICKET TWO: THE PATH AWARD

	The second ticket I go for is the Path Award. You get this one for having many rides with few lines to the rides. I start by building a long path out from the start of the park, and building two rides on either side of it. These two rides are really to help guarantee the fundamentals ticket. At the end of the long path, I start building a chain of rides. Just keep placing one ride at the tail end of the previous, so that the line for each ride only needs to be one or two tiles long. Keep placing rides until you have 5 or fewer rides left in your stock.

	While you’re doing this, you will likely run out of money! When you start running low on cash, take out a loan. There are several loans you can choose from. Just take out the first one, which will be the largest one. You don’t need to pay it back.

TICKET THREE: THE SECURITY AWARD

	The third ticket I go for is the Security Award. You get this one for having a lot of security camera coverage in your park. It doesn’t seem to be about the number of cameras. It’s much more important that they are spread out a bit. I try to place 16 total cameras, essentially a 4x4 grid, with each roughly 8 tiles apart from each other. This is very loose. You can get it with fewer cameras. You can get it with having them much closer together than this. This guideline has just been the most consistent for me. If you watch one of my runs, you will see what this might look like.

TICKET FOUR: THE AESTHETIC AWARD

	You get the Aesthetic Award for having a “large park full of beautiful features”, according to the advisor. We don’t know what the specific details for this are, but a “large park” seems to relate to having a lot of rides, and we have found that security cameras count as “beautiful features”. Once you have the cameras placed for the Security Award, and the rides placed for the Path Award, you should just get this one along with them.

TICKET FIVE: THE FUNDAMENTALS TICKET

	You get the fundamentals ticket when the advisor tells you that you have “a handle on the fundamentals”. We believe the requirements for this are to have at least two rides, a shop, and a sideshow. You should already have many rides and a shop connected to the main path. You should also have Idol Smash researched at this point. Go ahead and purchase Idol Smash and place it somewhere. Feel free to get rid of one of the rides, or some of the cameras to make room for it if you need to.

	I also recommend placing it near the entrance of the park. When you use the camcorder, you will have to walk from the entrance of the park to whatever sideshow you want to use, so it is beneficial to keep sideshows near the entrance.

TICKETS SIX AND SEVEN: IDOL SMASH AND DINO KARTS

	At this point you can go into the menu and purchase the camcorder. Wait until both Idol Smash and Dino Karts have been built before using it. Time does not pass when you’re in camcorder mode, and so research does not progress while you use it.

	When you build Dino Karts, you will need some room for it. You will likely need to delete a few cameras, maybe a ride. It is a track ride, meaning you design the layout for it. Just make a short loop. You don’t actually need to connect the line of the ride to the main path. It doesn’t have to be connected to anything for you to ride it. You also want to go into the ride’s details, and set the duration to 2. The duration relates to the number of laps the race takes. You can win the race in one lap, but it is rare. In my experience, if you can’t win in two laps, you won’t win in five laps, and you would just waste time by taking longer.

	Once Idol Smash and Dino Karts have been built, enter camcorder mode and go earn your tickets. The minimum score to win Idol Smash is comically low, I believe it’s around 21. This is the same score for all of the “Smash” type sideshows. Once you have that many points, you can sit back or go nuts on it, it doesn’t make a difference. Dino Karts doesn’t have much of a strategy. Just try to hug the inside walls, and try not to bump into the people ahead of you. If you can tell you’re going to lose Dino Karts, go ahead and quit the race and reenter. This is much faster than trying to finish it.

	When you leave this park, you should have three tickets. Go left to unlock the Halloween Park, but do not open it. Go right to unlock the Wonder Land Park, and do open that one.

All The Other Parks

	The rest of the parks will all follow the same format, and really don’t need their own full walkthrough. I’ll list out which parks you’ll go to, and the sideshows you’ll play in each park. Be sure to follow the research guidelines in the overview of this guide.

Park Two - Wonder Land: Land of Dreams

Gold Tickets in this park:
Fruit Shy (available immediately)
Giant Puzzle (1st level sideshow research)

You should leave this park with three tickets. Go up to the second Lost Kingdom Park.

Park Three - Lost Kingdom: The Park That Time Forgot

Gold Tickets in this park:
Sun Shooter (available immediately)
Strength Bird (available immediately)
Giant Puzzle (1st level sideshow research)

You should leave this park with four tickets. Go right to the second Halloween Park.

Park Four - Halloween: Ghost World

Gold Tickets in this park:
Giant Puzzle (available immediately)
Fortune Teller (1st level sideshow research)

The fortune teller sideshow is a little strange. Just mash X until it gives you a gold ticket.

You should leave this park with four tickets. Go left to the first Space Zone Park.

Park Five - Space Zone: The Final Frontier

Gold Tickets in this park:
Strength Rocket (1st level sideshow research)
Giant Puzzle (2nd level sideshow research)

You should leave this park with four tickets. Go up to unlock the second Wonder Land Park. Go right to unlock the second Space Zone Park. This is the end of the run.

OTHER NOTES

	If you have any other questions about the run, feel free to join the discord, or ask XandoToaster wherever you can find him.

Solving the 3x3 sliding tile puzzles

There are a lot of tutorials for these kinds of puzzles around, but I thought I'd try to make my own and share it here: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeBng9jkL5A&feature=youtu.be

Name	Author
Sim Theme Park - All Parks - Current Route	XandoToaster 4 years ago
Solving the 3x3 sliding tile puzzles	XandoToaster 5 years ago