The Chairlift is a Transport Ride in RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 and 2, available in RCT1's base game and all future installments.

(Thunder Rock Chairlift in Thunder Rock)

“Cars hang from a steel cable which runs continuously from one end of the ride to the other and back again.” - In-game description.

Table of Contents

Transport Ride General Information

Mechanics Specific to Transport Rides

(This section is present on all Transport Ride guides. It is put inside a spoiler to avoid repetition.)

Transport Rides are rides that exist to move guests around the park quickly and without tiring them out. They are generally quite cheap to build per track piece, although because Transport Rides are designed to be quite long to allow guests to access faraway areas of the park, their total cost to build can sneak up on you. If you wish to, Transport Rides can also be built as one station, functioning as a Gentle Ride of sorts, although sacrificing the ability to disperse guests around the park is also cutting out potential profit since it will only be accessible from one area of the park.

Despite their function, guests do not view Transport Rides any differently than other ride types, meaning that guests who tend to gravitate towards more intense rides will generally refuse to ride them. Guest pathfinding also does not take Transport Rides into account and they will not use them to get to a specific place in the park quicker or without expending as much energy. Guests will ride Transport Rides, but they will not do so with the intent of getting to a specific area of the park, and whenever they get on one, they will always exit the ride on the very next station (if it has an exit building).

Transport Rides also have a unique ability in that they can make any guest ride them if they are free. If a Transport Ride is free, then a guest will always be willing to get on the ride even if they are extremely unhappy and desperate to go home. This function presumably exists to emulate the aforementioned pathfinding element of using them to get to the park entrance quicker, although it can also have the opposite effect and keep them in your park for longer, which tends to take a cut of your park rating. This downside can be eliminated if the only station on the Transport Ride with an exit building is one very close to your park entrance. This can be used as a means of helping lost guests find the park exit, although this will also disperse every other guest who gets on the ride to the exit as well, meaning that they won’t be in your other park areas. The other downside of this is that you’re obviously not making any money with a free ride, so this should only be considered if you’re making enough money to comfortably offset the ride’s operating cost and make an extra profit on top of that. If you're playing in a park with unlimited money (like Arid Heights or Lucky Lake), all Transport Rides will count as "free" and this functionality will be enabled.

One implication of this feature is that if a part of your park is isolated from the rest and only accessible via a free Transport Ride, then the guests will eventually find their way back to the main area of the park by taking the Transport Ride back again. This is still a terrible idea as this leaves guests prone to becoming unhappy because they will attempt to navigate to a ride that’s in the main area of the park and won’t be able to detect that they need to take the Transport Ride back.

In spite of their noticeable downsides, Transport Rides can be quite good and building one in a large park is sometimes very useful as they have many advantages. Even though the guests won’t intentionally use it for this purpose, it will still help move guests around your park, and due to their very high ride capacity, can help fight overcrowding and make more money than you might expect since a larger number of guests can board them all at one time. Most Transport Ride vehicles are also sheltered meaning that they will provide a reliable source of ridership during a rainstorm.

In RollerCoaster Tycoon 1, all Transport Rides count as Gentle Rides for the purposes of Research. In future games, Transport Rides are their own Research option.

Transport Rides have low base Excitement Ratings, and are never intense or nauseating either. All of them having a base Intensity and Nausea of 0.50 or lower, and modifiers to those stats are not nearly as prominent as they are on other tracked rides. The Monorail and Miniature Railway in fact start with 0.00 for both of these stats and the only way that either of those two rides can increase this is through their max speed, average speed, and underground sections.

As long as your Transport Rides don’t fail any stat requirements, it is completely impossible for them to have stats lower than these. The Monorail for instance will never have an Excitement Rating of lower than 2.00 if you meet both stat requirements. Their low Intensity Rating means that they’re really good for guests who prefer less intense rides (doubly so for parks like Gentle Glen, which applies this intensity preference all around), although this also means that thrill-seeking guests will tend to complain that the ride isn’t intense enough and not ride them (again, guests do not view Transport Rides differently than normal rides). Their Nausea Rating is virtually nonexistent, so guests won’t become sick from being on the ride, although they might still throw up around the ride due to being sick from other rides in close proximity to the Transport Ride.

The amount of Park Value that Transport Rides contribute to your park is roughly average for non-coaster tracked rides. The Monorails and Miniature Railway all share a very interesting distinction of being the only rides in the game that feature a negative number in their Park Value contribution multipliers. In the case of all three, their Nausea Rating has a contribution multiplier of -10. This means that the Nausea Rating of these rides will actually detract from your Park Value, although since their Nausea Ratings are always very low, this has a very minimal effect overall, and the other two ratings will more than offset the Nausea penalty. All Transport Rides have a similarly average contribution to the soft guest cap, though in the case of the Miniature Railway and both Monorails, this amount will be low in relation to the amount of money you’ll most likely need to spend to build the ride.

Technical Information

Stats

  • Base Excitement Rating: 1.60
  • Base intensity Rating: 0.40
  • Base Nausea Rating: 0:50

Stat Requirements

  • Ride length of at least 492ft (150m)
  • Less than 50% of the track underground
  • More than one station

The first two stat requirements will divided all ratings by 2 if they are failed, and the third one will set its Excitement Rating to 0.00.

Stat Contribution Values

  • Excitement Rating Value Multiplier: 70
  • Intensity Rating Value Multiplier: 10
  • Nausea Rating Value Multiplier: 0
  • Soft Guest Cap Contribution: 55

Building Information

  • Cost of Station Piece on Fully Flat Ground: $48.00 (Vanilla RCT2)/$48.80 (OpenRCT2)
  • Cost of Straight Track Piece on Fully Flat Ground: $32.00 (Vanilla RCT2)/$32.50 (OpenRCT2)
  • Cost of Supports (per unit per tile): $0.50*
  • Support Height Limit (ft/m/height units): 190ft/57m/+38

*Vanilla RCT2 does not decimal points in its support costs. Instead it will round down or round up to the next whole dollar amount at certain height intervals to equalize the amount as if it were spending a decimal amount. In OpenRCT2, it will correctly spend the decimal amount every time.

Building a Chairlift

The Chairlift is very different from either of the Monorails and Miniature Railway in both construction and functionality. Unlike those rides, the Chairlift does not need to be built as a full loop of track to function (and it in fact, can’t function if you do build it as a full loop of track) as it travels to one station on one side of the cable and then goes back down on the other end.

On the ground, Chairlifts are the most expensive Transport Ride in the game to build (tied with the Suspended Monorail) costing $33 per straight track piece to build, as opposed to the Miniature Railway which costs $17 per straight track piece and the Monorail which cots $21 per straight track piece.

The Chairlift however also has the smallest support cost of any Transport Ride (other than the Elevator which does not technically have any supports) of only $0.50 per unit of height. If we raise both rides off the ground by 6 units of height, which is the Monorail's support limit, we can see that the Monorail's straight track piece price has overtaken the Chairlift. This means that the Chairlift becomes dramatically cheaper than the other options the higher up it is built. Additionally, because it doesn't need to be built as a full loop of track, the Chairlift has a much lower average building cost than the Monorail, Suspended Monorail, or Miniature Railway.

The speed of the Chairlift works differently from other Transport Rides. Its speed is a value that you set yourself on a range between 2mph to 9mph (3km/h to 14km/h) and it will always function at that speed. In stark contrast to the other rides which move at a snail’s pace if they need to go up a hill, the Chairlift doesn’t slow down when moving uphill, making it the best option at navigating hilly terrain. Since guests expend more energy when moving on inclines compared to flat pathing, a Chairlift in a mountainous park can help stop them from getting tired too quickly.

9mph might not sound particularly fast, but one unique advantage of the Chairlift is that it doesn't slow down when it needs to go uphill compared to the other Transport Rides which slow down massively if they go up. This means that not only is the Chairlift extremely useful for building over your entire park, but it also doesn't sacrifice performance to do it.

The Chairlift is also the only Transport Ride with access to tiny turns, which combined with the support limit, allows it to be built in much more compact spaces than all of the other Transport Rides.

The Chairlift also has a very bizarre quirk in its stations. On the first station, Chairlift cars stop at the tile closest to the cable whereas they will stop on the further station piece away from it on the second station. This means that the optimal placement for the entrance building is on the first station tile on the first station, and the last station tile on the second station. You should also always set the minimum waiting time on every Chairlift to 0 seconds so that guests don’t wait for their car to start and the next set of guests can board their car almost immediately afterwards.

Stats

Any time you build a Chairlift, you should always set its speed to 9mph. Increasing the speed decreases the ride's Exictement Rating, but increases the amount of guests it can process through at any given time whereas decreasing it does the opposite. The rate in which it affects both of these do not scale linearly with each other though. If we look at the Thunder Rock Chairlift found in Thunder Rock (which is the ride used in the guide's thumbnail and opening image) for example, its Excitement Rating if we test the ride at 4mph is 2.51. If we speed it up to 9mph and retest the ride, its Exictement Rating has dropped to 2.34.

This means that the Excitement has only dropped by about 7% whereas the ride is also moving 225% faster than it was previously. This is a very small drop in its ticket, but the dramatically higher speed results increases its ride total profit over a given time because of how much more quickly you're getting paid per rider.

The Chairlift and Miniature Railway are uniquely, the only rides in the game which lose Excitement for having underground sections. This is because the BonusSheltered value for the Excitement value of both rides is coded as a negative number. In the case of the Chairlift, this number is -19,275.

If we use Thunder Rock Chairlift to test this again and remove its single underground track piece, use the landscaping tool to lower the land, then place the track piece overground, the Excitement Rating has jumped up from 2.51 to 2.59. If you intend on making the Chairlift free to make use of its ability to make any guest ride them (see Transport Ride General Information for more details), then this doesn't really matter. But if you want to use your Chairlift to make profit, you should avoid going underground at all if possible.

Speaking of stats, the Chairlift has a very odd stat requirement that it must have at least two stations. If it fails to meet this, its Excitement Rating will be set to 0.00 (whilst keeping the other two stats untouched). This is the only stat requirement in the game which doesn't divide a ride's stats by 2, 4, or 8 and instead sets it to a specific value. It has two other requirements, which are that it needs to be at least 492ft (150m) long, and must have less than 50% of the track underground, which both divided its stats by 2 if either of them are failed.

Vehicles

Another part of the Chairlift that affects its stats are its vehicle options, of which the Chairlift has two of them: The standard Chairlift Cars from the base game, and the Ski-Lift Cars which were added in RCT1's Corkscrew Follies DLC.


1. Chairlift Cars
2. Ski-Lift Cars

The two cars are identical in base performance, but they're also surprisingly different to each other in many different gameplay applications. The Ski-Lift Cars gain a bonus to its Excitement and Intensity Ratings, but also not sheltered rides which means that guests won't ride them if it starts raining. Because of this, the standard Chairlift Cars are the way to go in parks that use the Cool and Wet climate, and are probably still the better choice in the Warm climate too. In the Hot and Dry climate where rainfall is quite rare, the Ski-Lift Cars might be a little bit better, but sticking with the standard cars is probably fine (and will be useful in the off-chance that it does rain).

The RCT1 variant of the Ski-Lift Cars have dramatically higher rating bonuses, but because the Intensity and Nausea on the Chairlift is always very low, the effect this has is minimal at best.

Verdict

Overall, the Chairlift is one of the better Transport Rides in the game. In spite of its low top speed, it has a number of useful advantages from being incredibly cheap to build, having a very high support limit, having a compact turning radius, and not slowing down when it goes up hill. It's extremely useful for building high over your park and navigating mountainous terrain. If you need height, the Chairlift is definitely the way to go.

Other Transport Rides