Guide to Building a Maze in RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 & 2

The Maze (called "Hedge Maze" in RollerCoaster Tycoon 1) is a Gentle Ride featured in the first game and all other installments.

(Hedge Maze in Megaworld Park)

“Maze is constructed from 6-foot* tall hedges or walls, and guests wander around the maze leaving only when they find the exit.” - In-game description

*Even if your options are set to use Metric measurements instead of Imperial, the in-game description will not change.

Pre-Built Designs

Technical Information

Stats

• Base Excitement Rating: 1.30
• Base Intensity Rating: 0.50
• Base Nausea Rating: 0.00

Stat Contribution Values

• Excitement Rating Value Multiplier: 50
• Intensity Rating Value Multiplier: 0
• Nausea Rating Value Multiplier: 0
• Soft Guest Cap Contribution: 40

Building Information

• Cost of Straight Track Piece on Fully Flat Ground: $27.00 per full tile (Vanilla RCT2)/$27.50 per full tile (OpenRCT2)
• Cost of Supports (per unit per tile): $0.00 (Vanilla RCT2)/$1.00 (OpenRCT2)
• Support Height Limit: 30ft/9m/+6

Other Information

• Guest Capacity: 16 (Vanilla RCT2)/64 (OpenRCT2)
• Sheltered: No

Building a Maze

The Maze is a very weird Gentle Ride with a building process that is very different than any other ride in the game. It's the only ride where the "track" takes up a quarter of a tile instead of a full tile.

While you're building a maze, a quarter-tile of a ride will flash yellow. This designates where the "builder" is. Any time you click on one of the arrows in the Build section, this yellow quarter-tile will move that direction. Depending on what Mode you have selected, this will take one of three actions:

• Build Mode creates new walkable quarter-tiles whenever the yellow quarter-tile moves in the direction that it moved to. If this would run into a tile with no hedges, it will create a new hedge tile there.
• Move Mode allows you to move the yellow quarter-tile anywhere around the maze without creating walkways or hedges. You can't move outside the existing maze in this mode.
• Fill-in Mode functions just like Build Mode except that creates hedges instead of walkways. If it moves over a walkway quarter-tile, it will convert it into a hedge. If a full tile consists of only hedge mazes, the game will automatically remove that tile.

The Entrance and Exit buildings can be placed adjacent to any tile of the Maze and it will connect the building to a pathway in that direction.

The building mechanics of the maze are not too difficult, but it might take a while before you get used to it. Mistakes on building the Maze are more costly than they are on other rides since you get no money back if either a tile, or even the entire maze is demolished after being built. Thankfully, the ride is very cheap to build at only $27 per tile, so it won’t break the bank. Even if you do delete the whole ride, you’ll lose maybe $1000-$2000 at most.

You also cannot build inclines on a Maze. In the vanilla games, Mazes do not have support costs, so there's nothing stopping you from building a huge maze in the air if you want. In OpenRCT2, the Maze has a support cost of $1.00 per height unit per tile, so it's best to find a large plot of flat land to build on.

The Maze can be built in one of four different visual styles, Hedge Maze, Brick Blocks, Ice Blocks, or Wooden Fences. The different between the four is entirely cosmetic.

Guests do not care about how difficult the Maze is to solve, so the most optimal thing to do is to construct labyrinths and not mazes. It may look stupid, but since the guest’s pathfinding on the Maze is not particularly great, it’s by far the safest option. If the Maze is too complicated, guests will complain about being on the ride for too long and the queue line will also back up.

The game also does not check to see if it's actually possible for guests to reach the end. If you make a Maze with an exit that is blocked off, the game will still let you open it. The game will still calculate the stats for the ride as normal and the guests will still get on the ride, but they will never leave.

The Maze is one of the few rides in the game that can’t break down, meaning that it needs no Mechanics to maintain it and will always stay in operation. The Maze can still have an inspection cycle set, but even if it’s set to always be inspected every 10 minutes, no Mechanic will ever inspect the ride (unlike the Elevator). Its reliability score will still deteriorate over time, but just like the Crooked House, this has no effect.

OpenRCT2 Umbrella Feature

The Maze is additionally one of only a few rides in the games that cannot be built underground, but you can still shelter it with scenery. Guests will take out their umbrellas if it starts raining while they're in a Maze, but in RCT1, RCT2, and RCT Classic, no new guests will enter the Maze during a rainstorm even if they have an umbrella.

In OpenRCT2, guests that have an umbrella in their inventory will have a 50% chance of entering the Maze while it's raining.

Stats

The way stats work on the Maze is incredibly simple.

It has a base Excitement of 1.30, and a base Intensity of 0.50. It will then gain 0.01 Excitement and 0.02 Intensity for every tile that the Maze features, up to 100 tiles. This means that the Maze can reach a maximum base Excitement and Intensity of 2.30 and 2.50 respectively. Through normal gameplay, it is entirely impossible for a Maze to have a Nausea Rating of anything other than 0.00.

Each tile on the Maze up to the 100 hard-cap will contribute to the stat bonus even if they're not actually possible for the guests to reach. Below is a Maze that has 100 tiles, but only 10 of them are actually possible to reach by the guests. The algorithm that calculates the tile stat bonus does not check for this, and the ride still gets the stat bonus from all 100 tiles.

The only other stat bonus that the Maze gets is through scenery. Placing rides next to a Maze will have no effect on the Maze's stats, although it will still affect the stats of the other ride.

Pathfinding

The pathfinding of guests on a Maze is very weird, but it's actually quite simple how it works. It also varies depending on what version of the game you're playing.

In all of the vanilla games and all versions of OpenRCT2 released before August 1st 2020, the game picks a direction completely at random each time a guest encounters an intersection, ignoring whether or not it's possible to go that way. If the direction is valid, the guest will go that way. If the direction is invalid, the game chooses the next direction in clockwise order and repeats this process. A direction is considered invalid if there's either no path for the guest to go, or if it's the direction that the just went came from. An exception is made for dead ends, and guests will walk back the way they just came from if there is no pathways in any other direction. As long as there is more than one way to go though, guests will never do this.

A quirk of this system is that it has a very heavy bias for guests walking towards the left in intersections where guests can move either left or forward. In this case, guests will have a 75% of moving left since three of the four directions (right, backwards, and left) will all result in the guest moving left. The guest will only move forward if it randomly chooses to move forward.

If the other option was to move right instead of left, the situation is reversed. Now, three of the four directions (backwards, left and forwards) will result in the guest moving forward. The guest will only move right if randomly chooses to go right.

In all versions of OpenRCT2 released after August 1st 2020, this directional bias no longer exists. Instead, the game picks every direction at the same time, and randomly chooses a valid direction for the guest to move.

Each quarter-tile that has more than one direction for the guests to move is considered an intersection. This means that you can make a “maze” that consists of nothing but an entirely empty field. Even though there's nothing preventing a real human from walking in a straight line to the exit, the guests will meander around and get stuck because the game will execute the random direction chooser at every quarter-tile the guests walk to.

Guests will periodically stop in place to jump and peek over the hedges. This is purely for visual flair and has no effect on guest pathfinding, although it does result in the ride taking slightly longer for the guest to complete since it will no longer by moving forward for about two seconds.

Throughput and Profit

When the Maze is built as a normal ride within the spirit of the game, it's not a great ride since the pathfinding algorithm will result in the ride only having a throughput of a few hundred guests per hour. Due to the fact that the Nausea Rating also does not contribute anything to the price, the maximum ticket price of any Maze will never be very high. The Crazy Castle pre-built with the scenery for example, when it's less than 5 months old, has a maximum ticket price of $2.40 in OpenRCT2, or $7.60 in all of the other games.

Exploiting the game to build Mazes that aren't proper mazes however, and the profit can increase dramatically. Because the Maze has no length requirement, there's no real penalty for building single-tile Mazes other than the slightly smaller ticket price. With one single tile, $27 can actually create the smallest and cheapest functioning ride in the entire game, and the one with the highest ratio of Soft Guest Cap contribution per dollar spent. 100 single-tile Mazes can be bought for only $2,700 and will increase your Soft Guest Cap by a whopping 4000!

A one-tile Maze will have a base Excitement Rating of 1.31 (assuming it has no scenery around it), and since the Intensity doesn't contribute to the ticket price, this is the only stat that matters. If will only have a maximum ticket price of $1.80 for the first 5 months, but due to its extremely small size, it can reach a throughput of several-thousand guests per hour. Even with its tiny 5-13 month old price of only $1.40, this can still net about $10,000 per hour! Due to the fact that it can't break down, it will generally stay consistent with the amount of profit it makes as well.

Every time you build a Maze, always change the maximum number of people on the ride to the highest it can go to. In the vanilla games, this is 16, where OpenRCT2 increases this to 64. Guests won't complain about overcrowding while they're in a Maze, so even on the tiniest Maze design, there is no downside to increasing the guest capacity.

This also obviously has the added bonus of increasing the Maze's profit in parks where guests pay for the rides.

Verdict

The Maze is, like many other rides in the game, at its absolute worst when built the way the game intends for you to build it. Regular mazes have low throughputs, which combined with their low ticket price, means that they don't make very much money.

When hyper-optimized though, a single-tile Maze can reach one of the highest possible throughputs in the game and spamming them around will massively increase your soft guest cap. You'll have to decide for yourself if that takes too much of the spirit out of the game for you.

Even if you build a regular Maze though, they can still provide a scenic set-piece for your park and it's generally a very pretty ride to look at.

Other Gentle Rides

[to come soon]