Let’s face it… More than half the fun of playing Planet Coaster is building and letting your creativity flow, but for some people building the crazy stuff you see all over the Steam Workshop seems next to impossible. The question I get time after time is always, “How do you build all that cool stuff?”. Well, with these pro tips I’m going to share with you guys you’ll be master builders before you know it.
1. Become Familiar With The Game Toolset
This may seem obvious, but until you have spent a few hours in game playing around with all of the different building tools and scenery items available to you, you’re not going to be building the Taj Mahal. Think of all of the scenery items and building pieces like a giant box of legos. Until you know all the different lego pieces you have, you can’t build anything. Coming up with an idea out of thin air is next to impossible when you are just starting. Go online and look at pictures of buildings and then try to recreate them in-game. Start with something simple, then on your next build try something a bit more complex. Keep doing this over and over. Each time you do this you will come up with new unique techniques at how you created a shape. Stick this into your library of tricks and next thing you know, you’ll have an idea and the techniques on how to pull it off.
2. A Building Is Nothing More Than Combined Shapes
When you keep this in mind, creating complex looking buildings is a walk in the park. Just break it down by shapes, and emulate that process over and over. Also keep in mind, to make something more interesting to the eye, use levels and depth. When you create a building, don’t just plop down a square box with a roof. Adding levels and depth will take it to that next level. Levels are what they are… more stories on the building. Depth is added by things like a terrace, balcony, alcove and the like.
3. The In-Game Shapes Are Your Best Friend
I have seen so many different creative uses for the shapes by this point that nothing really surprises me anymore. Me personally, I like using them to add a splash of color to the walls like wallpaper by “painting” a stripe on the wall with them and to get angles on buildings. Hell, you can build an entire building out them like I did with my Guggenheim Museum build. I’ve even seen people use them to “skin” existing scenery pieces in the game, like plating on the sci-fi pieces. One guy built Freddy Kruger out of them on Reddit!
4. Keep Buildings Separate and as One Unit
This is going to sound confusing, but try to stay with me. To make things easier for yourself, try and keep your buildings as a single unit. By this I mean, once you originally create a new building on your map, when you add to it, be sure to highlight it first and then select “Edit Building”. If you fail to do this, any pieces you try to add to your building will actually be laid down as a new building the overlaps with your original structure. After a while of this, you have 40 “buildings” with each consisting of a few pieces to make up your one structure. This makes moving things around a serious pain in the ass. It sounds confusing, but when you are in game you’ll know what I’m talking about. When you are ready to work on a new structure in your park, then you lay down a new building. Also, if you upload things to the Steam Workshop, the people there appreciate this.
5. Take Advantage Of Being Able To Merge Items
One of the coolest things Frontier did for us creative types when making this game was allow us to be able to “merge” all of the different items. With this ability, you can take one object and literally turn it into something else. You can also sink things into the ground so you can only see certain parts of things. For example, you can take a tall tree like a Poplar tree and sink it down in the ground so only the tip shows. By doing this you’ve literally converted the tree into a bush. I have seen people take a water fountain basin and turn it into a globe by literally placing it vertically, using the advanced move and duplicate tool, spinning it 15 degrees, placing it again and so on until they spanned a full 360 degrees. The only limit with doing these advanced techniques are your imagination. For a good example of doing this technique I highly recommend a visit to the YouTube page of the one and only Silvarret. He wrote the book on this technique.
6. Use Items Unorthodoxly
Just because an in game item is labeled something like “Rough Concrete Flat Roof” doesn’t mean you can’t use it for other things, like perhaps the ground of a large plaza? Always try to “think outside the box” when creating. This is what the game is all about. I’ve seen people use the glowing orange signs to create pools of lava, the swords to create intricate lamp-posts and fence pieces, and the sci-fi barrels to create hubcaps for a food truck. This brings ya back to tip #2.
7. Grab Inspiration From Real Life and Hollywood
I mentioned this earlier in passing but wanted to make it a point. Using Google images to come up with ideas takes away a lot of stress. Look at pictures of Disneyland, Six Flags, Universal Studios etc and see how they did things. You’re bound to come up with ideas from this. Another fun thing to do is theme your rides after your favorite movie. Trying to build iconic vehicles and buildings from the movies for your parks is a fun way to spend your weekend! The Ecto-1 build by Sdanwolf or any of the Star Wars creations on the Workshop are great examples of this. I threw my hat in the pot with this “Last Starfighter” build.
8. Don’t Forget The Landscaping!
Landscaping around a building will often times make or break the build! Sometimes I’ll look at something I create and think it sucks, but once I’ve put some landscaping around it my opinion on it flips 180. Also, when you do the landscaping don’t forget about setting up lighting for your newly created building. Lighting and the placement of them will often times enhance the look of the building.
9. Grab Items From The Steam Workshop and See How They Were Built
There are tens of thousands of items you can download into Planet Coaster as “Blueprints” all for free on the Steam Workshop. This is good for two reasons. For those of you who just want to play the game and mess around with the management aspect and don’t want to build anything you can populate your park with others creations nice and easy like. And the other reason is by laying down something that someone else built into your park, you can literally dissect it and see how they pulled it off. This is a good practice to add new techniques into your building repertoire. Go here to check out my Workshop. (Shameless plug!)
10. Practice Practice Practice!!!
It isn’t rocket science… The more you play Planet Coaster and spend time building, the better you are going to get at it. You’ll find yourself using certain techniques over and over, and others just once or twice, but it is those small details you add that will make you stand out on the Steam Workshop! Without using all of these methods to improve your building skills you won’t be able to take your builds to that next level!
Now stop reading this and go fire up Planet Coaster and start creating! What are you waiting for?
The screenshot on the top of this post is from my Las Vegas Strip Park build. Check it out here. Be sure to check out all of my other Planet Coaster coverage here. Leave your thoughts or any tips you think I may have missed down in the comment section below. Thanks for stopping by!
