The Ferris Wheel is a Gentle Ride introduced in the base game of RCT1 and is available in all future installments.


(Ferris Wheel in Six Flags Belgium)

“Rotating big wheel with open chairs” - In-game description.

Table of Contents

Technical Information

Stats

  • Base Excitement Rating: 0.60
  • Base Intensity Rating: 0.25
  • Base Nausea Rating: 0.30

Stat Contribution Values

  • Excitement Rating Value Multiplier: 60
  • Intensity Rating Value Multiplier: 20
  • Nausea Rating Value Multiplier: 10
  • Soft Guest Cap Contribution: 45

Building Information

  • Size: 1x4
  • Base Cost: $450.00
  • Cost of Supports (per unit per tile): $1.00
  • Support Height Limit (ft/m/height units): 25ft/7.5m/+5

Other Information

  • Guest Capacity: 32
  • Sheltered?: No

Building a Ferris Wheel

The Ferris Wheel is a very tall and thin ride, with its size working to its advantage and its detriment. The ride is only a single tile wide, and both the entrance and exit buildings can be placed on the single-tile areas. This allows you to work the ride into very weird areas that other flat rides wouldn't due to their width.

However, while the Ferris Wheel is compact in terms of its width, its predictably not compact in terms of its height. If you were to build a Ferris Wheel and a path on ground level, you'd need 11 sloped path pieces to be able to build the path over the Ferris Wheel. This is tied with the Swinging Inverter Ship for having the largest path clearance requirement of any flat ride in the game.

It's one of the costlier Gentle flat rides at $450.00 to build, and also has a low support limit of only 5 height units. Neither of these are particularly significant though.

The Ferris Wheel does not have reskin options, but you can still customize the ride by changing its number of rotations and the direction it rotates. The Ferris Wheel can be set to either "Forward rotation" or "Backward rotation", which is purely a cosmetic effect. By default, the rotation is forward. You can also change the number of rotations from any number between 1 and 8 in the first game, and 1 and 3 in all future games. In the first game, the default number of rotations is 2. In all other games, this is changed to 1. Changing the number of rotations will affect the stats of the ride.

This number is a bit misleading. When a guest gets on one of the chairs, the ride will check the number of rotations that the ride is set to do, rotate all the way around that many times and then move to the next chair for a new set of get on the ride, and for any guests already on that chair to depart, and repeats the process. This means that the number of rotations any guest will ride the ride for is whatever this number is multiplied by 16. This very quickly adds up in ride time, and even setting this number to 2 will result in guests complaining about the ride taking too long and wishing to get off. For this reason, every Ferris Wheel should always only do 1 rotation.

Stats

The Ferris Wheel starts with a Base Excitement, Intensity and Nausea of 0.60, 0.25, and 0.30 respectively, then gains 0.25 of all three stats for every rotation it does. Assuming you aren't playing RCT1, this results in an Excitement between 0.85 and 1.35, an Intensity between 0.50 and 1.00 and a Nausea between 0.55 and 1.05.

Despite being an open ride, it does get any bonuses from being next to other rides or water, but it does have one of the largest scenery bonuses in the game with a BonusScenery value of 41,831.

To visualize how large of an effect this will have, here we have two Ferris Wheels that are both set to do a single rotation. The red Ferris Wheel has no scenery bonus whereas the blue one has reached the scenery bonus cap of 50 scenery pieces. Because of the high BonusScenery value, it gains 1.49 Excitement (and no Intensity or Nausea) through just spamming Cattails around it. The rotation bonus is not affected by the scenery bonus. If the blue Ferris Wheel were set to do 3 rotations, it would still only gain 0.50 of each stat.

This means that if you build a Ferris Wheel, it can be a good idea to place some scenery around it to increase the ticket price. Unlike in real life, the view your guests would receive from being at the top has no effect on the stats. If there's no scenery around it, building it completely underground will give it the same stats as if it were built on top of a mountain.

Throughput and Profit

Despite having the highest guest capacity of any Gentle flat ride in the game, the throughput of the Ferris Wheel is quite slow due to how long each chair will rotate for before the guests on it will be able to get off of the ride. Even at the shortest setting of one rotation, it can only handle about 400 guests per year. Due to this low throughput, guests will also complain about the queue time, even on the fastest possible setting, and even if the queue line is only a few tiles long.

Due to its high Excitement Rating value multiplier, the Ferris Wheel is able to keep a decent ticket price relative to its stats. Even with only a single rotation, it's able to have the exact same price range for all months as the Circus despite its Excitement Rating of only 0.85 as opposed to the Circus's 2.10

Below is a table for the maximum ticket of the Ferris Wheel for all age values, assuming that the Ferris Wheel only does one rotation and has no scenery bonus.

At its 5-13 month old price, the ride would make about $270.00 in one year (assuming the ride didn't break down a single time that entire year, nor was there any rain). If the Ferris Wheel had a maximum scenery bonus, its 5-13 month old price would jump from $0.80 to $3.00, which would increase the yearly income of the ride from $270.00 to about $1,150.00. The scenery bonus has such a large effect in fact that its 200+-month old price would be higher than the 0-5 month old price of one with no scenery bonus.

Verdict

The Ferris Wheel is generally a weak flat ride on its own since it has a very slow throughput and will almost always lead to queueing guests losing their happiness because of the wait. As you can see above, maximizing that scenery bonus does a lot of work, so you should always build scenery around your Ferris Wheels where possible. With the maximum scenery bonus, it can start making some solid money though the queue problem will still be present.

Due to being a single tile wide, it can also fit in narrow spaces, which will work to its favor if you just need something to fill space.

Other Gentle Rides

[to come soon]