Due to the lack of guides for this engrossing new game,
I decided to take a whack at it.
It's early release, and Im no expert *yet* (hehe),
so please give me suggestions and challenge my opinions.
Most of all --> ENJOY!
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REC CENTER TYCOON
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Imagine your dream recreation center...
..aaaaAANNNDD GO!
Click "STORY" to start a new file
* NAME your CENTER and your MANAGER and choose how he/she looks.
Your Rec Center's name will change with the name of the save file,
but the manager name is permanent for that file.
Save files are stored locally and cannot be moved or accessed from another
machine, YET. (Apparently the developer is working on this.)
*** CHOOSE MANAGER STATS
- ENERGY increases the time the manager can stay busy without getting tired, as
well as the speed of energy regeneration.
The Manager never sleeps or goes home, and the mechanics of the energy bar are
unclear.
Single activities don't drain it, but it tends to go down if the manager is
constantly busy.
I recommend a few points at first to prevent manager crashing,
but this isn't the most important stat to start.
- STRENGTH decreases the time it takes manager to build floors, walls,
and ceilings; as well as the time and money spent to repair purchased items.
In the beginning this stat isn't useful if you hire a builder to do the initial
work, but this can also drain your starting funds.
Strength pays off later when repair costs multiply as you buy more equipment.
Builder staff have their own "Construct" stat for this, so strength only affects
the build and repair speed of the manager.
- INTELLECT speeds up research time for new techs and passives in the skill
tree. Definitely important, and the earlier you boost this the more it pays off
by speeding up research. Don't go too crazy, but dump some points here earlier
rather than later. Researching also costs money, so intellect isn't the
end-all be-all of efficient progress in the tree.
- AGILITY increases manager movement speed and swim speed; also decreases time
taken to water plants, clean messes, empty garbage, and refill stock shelves. A
cousin to strength, but I find agility to be more important early on, especially
if you want to save money by leaving the janitorial work to your manager. The
speed boost is all around beneficial, and the swim speed might seem useless but
it pays off if you have to save a drowning patron yourself.
- CHARISMA lowers staff wage demand and increases the resell price of purchased
items (but not built objects like walls floors
etc..) I believe resale value starts at 50% of the
buying price and goes up from there with charisma, and down as durability
decreases. I rarely sell things because you can always relocate
purchased items for free.
Charisma also slightly reduces employee wages; and
slightly is the key word. I think this stat needs improvement, maybe more effect
on NPC interaction and wages.
The wage effect is small, but the earlier you lower wages, the more money you
save over all.
- In my opinion, start with Intellect and Agility as your focus, with a few
points in Energy (maybe to 7 or 8). Work up Charisma next, and finally Strength
as you begin to incur more repair costs. If you hire builders a lot you can
pretty much skip strength, as the staff NPCs have their own "Construct"
stat. However, saving money by keeping staff thin early on can be huge for
your finances. I hope to see at least minor tweaks to the weights of stat
effects, and maybe a revision of the energy and charisma stats.
*** START BUILDING on your vacant lot of grass and trees. Initial funding is
based on your choice of the three difficulty levels. Satisfy the conditions in
the box on the left before being able to open for business.
A proper room must have 3 things:
- Floor
- Walls (with at least one door)
- and finally a ceiling.
These are all available in the build menu. I haven't noticed any non-aesthetic
effects of the different building materials, but it may be the case that the
more expensive ones lead to higher NPC satisfaction.
- Walls don't need to be built over floors. In fact, a built wall always
creates a default "concrete floor" tile beneath it, which can stubbornly
persist after a wall is deleted.
- The "room" tool allows you to drag and place your choice combo of flooring
and wall type, but only in a rectangle, and does not leave room for a door.
However, you can pull out plans for a room and then edit them (even with the
game paused) to add doors over the plans, or create openings/breezeways with the
"remove plans" tool. No money will be spent until the objects are actually
built.
(I still prefer to customize the shape of my building by placing flooring and
walls independently, and I believe the room tool needs improvement before it
will be as useful as it could be.)
* PLACING PLANS is the first step in building walls or floors. A character
(either
the manager or a builder hired from the staff menu) must walk over and build
each tile, or carry a purchased object from the mailbox to your proposed
location. No money is spent on planned walls, floors, and ceilings until they
are actually built. This allows you to place a floor plan and then edit the plan
without wasting cash.
- You can sneak a door into an already dragged out room
plan, or delete part of a wall to add bump-outs or create irregularly shaped
buildings. You can do all this with the game paused, then un-pause and let the
builders get to work when you're satisfied with your plan.
- The ceiling can only be placed over built wall tiles.
Unlike the floor, it must overlap the walls of a room.
The walls must be built, not merely planned, before a ceiling can be placed; so
you must finish building walls before ceilings, but floors can go in any time.
Floor can also be placed outside and NPCs will utilize the outdoor space,
especially if it's fenced in.
- Trees are automatically destroyed when anything is built within their 6-tile
footprint, and there is not yet any way to place new trees, so plan accordingly.
Regardless, trees seem to have no affect other than aesthetics for the player,
at least at the time of writing this.
* RESEARCHING requires a "managers desk", so once you have a proper room you
need to buy this right away and research the first equipment package.
The "Essentials" research gives you toilets, showers, lockers, garbages, and
water coolers.
- Carve out a small bathroom area by adding new walls inside your main
room, or bumping out a bathroom with some new walls, floor, and ceiling.
Purchase two toilets, one shower, and one locker to start. You can get more
later.
- Place a garbage bin somewhere central, as they have a radius of effect that
helps prevent messes within range, so don't stick it in a corner where much of
the radius falls on unused space. You can see this radius by clicking on a
placed bin. People need water too, especially since the only start for your
center is as a gym, so place a water cooler somewhere easy for customers to
find. Water cooler has no visible radius, and the mechanism of their effect is
not yet clear, but people will complain if you don't have them.
* ELECTRICAL wires are placed by clicking the "Utilities" menu and clicking
the power cord without the red X. The X one lets you remove placed cables. This
can be a little glitchy, so just trust it and plan your layout before placing.
Cables can go anywhere, and do not bother NPCs or interfere with any other
construction. They are fairly cheap, but should still be kept to a minimum to
keep initial cost down. Lighting fixtures are in the build menu (quite
unintuitive IMHO), you may want to consider where your lights will go before
placing any power lines. 100 watt bulbs are more useful as they fill twice as
much space and cost exactly twice of what the 50 watt cost is.
- Light isn't terribly important for the NPCs as they don't seem to
complain if it's dark, but lights will help you see what you're doing at
night, and you have to build some to open the rec center. Lights are placed on
the ceiling, so make sure you have ceiling over all your rooms (you can see the
green ceiling areas by clicking on the ceiling build tool in the "Walls and
Doors" section of the "Build" menu).
- Run the lines from the blue power box down at the street up to the building
and lay them efficiently toward your planned fixture spots. *lines need only be
adjacent to the power box and powered items, so don't waste money building
them the extra tile to overlap with things.*
* BODYBUILDING 1 is the next research you need before finally opening for
business. Like the "Essentials" research, this one is uncommonly fast to
research, so just knock it out asap. Put one of each type in your space, and
don't clutter them. All characters can walk over purchased items, but patrons
will complain they've stubbed their toe, or that it's too cluttered, if they
don't have enough space to walk around machines.
* RECEPTION DESK is the final piece of the puzzle.
Place this inside facing the door so that the green queue area leads from the
desk to the door.
The green can actually go out the door if you want to save space.
Don't forget to hire a receptionist before opening!
*** STAFF is the lifeblood of your center.
- Click the "Staff" menu icon in the bottom tray and find the green button "Hire
Worker" on the bottom left.
Scroll through the applicants to compare stats, preferred hours, and traits.
Find someone for the reception with high charisma and no major personality
flaws.
- TRAITS can be bad or good; common sense will tell you which is which.
- BAD traits:
"smelly" (causes bad reviews)
"unattractive" (causes bad reviews)
"high expectations" (higher wage cost)
"lazy" (slow response)
"unintelligent" (?)
"daydreamer" (wanders off)
"unreliable" (might go home)
"messy" (bad cook/janitor?)
"uncharismatic" (low charisma stat)
"slow-walker" (1/2 move speed, very bad. Slow-walkers have half normal speed;
fast walkers have double the normal; if they have neither trait they'll have
normal movement. These are the only three NPC move speeds. You can't see a
worker's movement bar until hired.)
- GOOD traits:
"attractive" (causes good reviews)
"clean" (good janitor/cook?)
"low expectations" (lower wage cost)
"fast walker" (twice normal movement speed)
"sympathetic" (high caring stat)
"charismatic" (high charisma stat)
- Neutral or Unknown traits:
"workaholic" (likes long shift lengths)
"loyal" (?) (more flexible hours?)
"reliable" (always on time?)
"flirty" (causes bad reviews?)
"sharp eye"
- SHIFTS Every worker has preferred shift lengths, so adjust their
shift in the staff window by scrolling the mouse wheel while hovering over their
shift hours until the numbers become green. Green shift length keeps your
workers happy, and no one wants to start their visit with a grumpy reception.
- Any worker can be any job, and you can switch them any time! click on a worker
in the staff screen and click "Assign Job" to pick their job.
- Make sure you have reception hired for EVERY hour you plan to be open, or you
will instantly get bad reviews* (I guess people hate getting in for free, go
figure.) You may want two receptionists to fill the day if you want to be open
for the maximum allowable without the "night hours" tech.
If you find a high-charisma "workaholic" (likes long shifts) you may be ok with
one person, but there's nothing wrong with having two people cause you are
paying by the hour either way.
* STAFF STATS are a bit mysterious. Staff and manager have different stats.
Unlike manager stats, hovering over them does not yield any description. Some
are fairly obvious, like a charismatic reception, or high construction for a
builder. I don't know if other stats affect each job, nor if each job
has only one pertinent stat, or more. *if you know more please tell
me!*
- The pertinent stats are, in my understanding:
reception = charisma; builder = construct; janitor = cleanliness; cook =
cooking;
lifeguard = fitness; and barista may be caring
or cleanliness or cooking or a combination.
Charisma is more often high than other stats and seems good for any job that
interacts with patrons.
* OPEN finally. Click on your little red sign by the road to choose your hours,
then click open (as long as the current time is within your chosen hours). I
recommend going for the max hours and hiring reception to match; the longer
you're open the better your profits are, even if you are paying more wages.
Once open you can start raking in the admission fees, then slowly researching
and buying more equipment to attract customers.
Keep the equipment varied, but don't spend all your money too fast. Shoot for at
least one of each gym machine and see if you need more.
You can click on an object to see how much it has been used that day. This
counter resets at midnight, so check it right before then for an accurate count.
* FURTHER RESEARCH
You need 10 members to get the "Financial Advisor" Research so you can change
your prices; this takes a while (maybe 8-10 days) and you can get everything
else in this column by the time you get 10 members.
- Go for "Merchant 1" next, then Bodybuilding 2". Don't worry about
"Construction 1" yet; it doesn't unlock very useful items, only the ability to
get further in that branch, and it all takes a while to unlock.
Arcades and vending machines will be your money-makers in the beginning. Get
blast processing and protein shake as soon as you can.
- Work toward researching "Night Hours". The more time you're open the more
money you will make, so hire the staff for it, they generally pay for
themselves.
Keep on the lookout for new employees to hire, they can change daily. If you
find a really good employee just hire them for something and grab them while you
can.
- Avoid bad reviews by keeping things clean and not having staff with negative
personality traits. Always keep plants watered, and spread them out evenly
around the center. Never leave the reception desk unattended or customers will
leave bad reviews. You can hire two receptionists for the peak times of day if
you ever begin to build up a line of people waiting.
- Research carefully, it is expensive. You can purchase more than one research
at a time and switch between them.
Research the automatic cleaning for the manager if you want, but repair and
stock and watering can wait behind other researches.
- Swimming pool can help get members. Get more lockers for the pool. Lifeguard
chair doubles range of lifeguard vision. Pool tiles can be extended partly
around chair to maximize vision radius over the water. Manager can save a
drowning patron, just run and swim in manually and click on them and hold it to
save them.
- Change game speed with Spacebar, 1, 2, 3 keys to let time fly by or stop. Once
staff is set up and you are making a profit each day, you can run time at
maximum and let the money come in. Just keep things clean and research if you
want. Time isn't an issue as the game just goes on forever without anything
missable (except phone calls), so you can let it run on extra fast and rake in
cash for as long as you want.
- Once you have "night hours", "class hosting", and an event room you can really
bring in the money. Don't miss phone calls, they might be lucrative event
offers.
Remember to schedule classes well in advance to allow time for sign-ups so you
can have a full class each time. Each trainer can only host one class per day.
Yoga mats are the required equipment for BOTH the Yoga and Aerobics classes.
It's good to have a few trainers so you can host classes throughout the day.
* I'll continue to update this guide as I learn more about this great new
game. It is early release so there should be substantial changes coming.
I'm no expert but I enjoy playing this so far and there is a lack of guides out
there.
Feel free to add your suggestions or argue with my descriptions.*
