The Mini Golf is a Gentle Ride featured in RCT1's Corkscrew Follies expansion and all future installments.

(Crazy Golf in Sherwood Forest)

"A gentle game of miniature golf." - In-game description

Pre-Built Designs

Technical Information

Stats

• Base Excitement Rating: 1.50
• Base Intensity Rating: 0.90
• Base Nausea Rating: 0.00

Stat Requirements

• At least one hole.

If this requirement is failed, the ride's Excitement Rating will be divided by 8, and the other two ratings will be divided by 2.

Stat Contribution Values

• Excitement Rating Value Multiplier: 50
• Intensity Rating Value Multiplier: 30
• Nausea Rating Value Multiplier: 10
• Soft Guest Cap Contribution: 23

Building Information

• Cost of Station Piece on Fully Flat Ground: $37.00 (Vanilla RCT2)/$37.50 (OpenRCT2)
• Cost of Straight Track Piece on Fully Flat Ground: $25.00
• Cost of Supports (per unit per tile): $3.50*
• Support Height Limit: 25ft/7.5m/+5

*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.

Other Information

• Guest Capacity: 20
• Sheltered: No

Building a Mini Golf

The Mini Golf is a tracked ride that comes with more in-guest interactivity than any other ride in the game.

The ride is very simple to build, consisting of just a station, level and gentle sloped straight track pieces, and tiny 90-degrees turns. It’s one of the very few tracked rides that can only have one station. It has a small support limit of only 5 units off the ground, which is the second smallest in the game, although on a realistic looking course, this will never become a problem.

From the special track piece menu is where you can access five different holes labeled from A to E. Hole A is a simple straight line with no obstacles, Hole B is a zigzag, Hole C is another straight shot except with a tunnel, and Holes D and E both feature 270-degree turns that curve upwards and bottleneck at the entrance. When you use either Hole D or E, you will also resume building in a new direction based on where the hole ends. In RCT1, only holes A through D were in the game. Hole E was added in RCT2.

Despite their differences in difficulty and appearance, all holes contribute the exact same amount to the stats. As a result, the optimal strategy to building the Mini Golf is to only use Hole A and ignore the other holes entirely, though if you're building a Mini Golf in the first place, you're already not aiming to optimize the park.

The Mini Golf cannot break down, so you don't a mechanic to maintain the ride.

Guest Interaction

As the Mini Golf is a guest-operated ride, there are a few aspects to discuss in how the game treats this. One of the most interesting things is that all 20 players are considered "vehicles" by the game, and all 20 "vehicles" are considered to be on the ride even if its corresponding guest is not on the ride yet. One particularly hilarious interaction that can happen due to this is that if you delete a track piece of the ride with the Tile Inspector cheat in OpenRCT2, the Mini Golf with suddenly "crash" once a guest reaches the deleted track piece. Using other OpenRCT2 cheats, it's possible to make Mini Golf rides with track pieces from other rides (such as coaster loops), and since the Mini Golf "vehicles" aren't meant to be used on those track pieces, guests will teleport past them.

Only one guest can be playing a given hole at any time. Any guests that arrive at a hole before a guest still playing that hole has completed it will stand at the start of the hole to wait to take their turn. This can frequently cause a cascading effect of multiple guests needing to wait for a hole to be open, resulting in more guests having enough time to walk towards the hole to join the train. The more difficult holes in particular are prone to causing this.

The long waiting times on the ride will also contribute to the waiting times off the ride too. Any Mini Golf design should have a queue line that is only about 1-3 tiles long. In fact, you may even want to not build a queue line at all and have the entrance connect straight to the main path.

One other quirk that comes from guests being registered as "vehicles" is the fact that all guests will walk at the exact same speed, regardless of their Energy or Nausea level. Similarly, guests will never throw up or litter while on the ride no matter how nauseated they are or how long they've been holding the litter. This also means that guests do not expend energy while walking on the track because it's technically part of the vehicle and not part of the guest.

How the golf ball travels is not understood, and may very well need an entire short novel to explain the mechanics of, but appears from a glance to be semi-random and will almost always make logical shots (guests will never putt the ball backwards for example), and it has collision physics with the walls and other elements of the track (the tunnel on Hole C). It also has friction and momentum physics, which can be seen on Holes D and E where it might fail to make it all the way up the loop and fall back down.

Every time a guest makes a shot, the guest will wait for the ball to stop moving, then walk over to where the ball is and take another shot (if it didn't make it into the hole), or grab the ball and move to the next hole (if it did make it into the hole). If the guest happens to get a hole in one, it will jump in excitement before moving to grab the ball from the hole. Despite the appearance of the ride's fencing and barriers, guests cannot putt the ball off of the ride.

Running Cost Quirks

Additionally, one of the most characteristic aspects of the Mini Golf is its stupidly high running cost. In Vanilla RCT2, the smallest possible functional Mini Golf course somehow costs more to operate than the Neptune's Knot pre-built for the Giga Coaster.

Additionally, the rate in which this scales is very weird. Whereas other tracked rides attempt to scale logically, the Mini Golf does not. The Wooden Roller Coaster pre-builts Woodchip and Texas Giant scale in relation to their ride times, and while the scale isn't perfect, it's much more logical than the Mini Golf. Compared to the tiny Mini Golf from before, the Garden Golf pre-built which contains 11 holes and 25 other track pieces, costs less than $10 more to operate per hour.

This happens due to the same "vehicle" quirk we mentioned in the section above, and all 20 "vehicles" are equated in the running cost even if they aren't physically on the track yet. Due to a quirk in the way single-train vehicles are registered by the game, and the internal values that increase the ride's running cost by vehicle count, this results in the Mini Golf spiking massively in running costs from its "vehicle" count whereas every other element of the ride barely contributes.

OpenRCT2 fixes this by adjusting the internal values that contribute to the ride's running cost. Instead, each "vehicle" contributes nothing and the other values are tweaked to result in running costs that scale smoothly with the size of the ride. Here we have the smallest possible design from before and both pre-builts put together.

Stats

The stats of the Mini Golf depends almost entirely on the number of holes it has and how long the track is. The Mini Golf only has a single stat requirement which is that it needs at least one hole. If it fails to meet this stat requirement, its Excitement Rating will be divided by 8, and its Intensity and Nausea will be divided by 2.

The Mini Golf can get a lot of extra Excitement Rating, which can result in surprisingly high Excitements on a Mini Golf. The Crazy Golf in Sherwood Forest for example, has an Excitement Rating of 3.77 in spite of its relatively short length due to its high BonusScenery Excitement value of 27,887. Its other two main contributors to Excitement are its BonusTurns value, which comes from adding turns to the ride, and its BonusProximity value, which comes from other other rides near it.

As with most other rides, it also gains Excitement based on whether or not the ride is sheltered. On the Mini Golf, this is the only possible way to increase its Intensity or Nausea.

The vanilla game also appears to have a coding error in which the first six holes benefit from bonuses intended for inversions. OpenRCT2 fixes this mistake.

Yet another weird quirk about the Mini Golf is how the ride length is determined. The length is determined by how much the first guest who gets on the ride walks while they are on the ride, and the length stat will slowly tick up as they keep walking. This means that the more that guest struggles to complete the holes, the more the length counter will increase. As a result of this, entirely identical Mini Golf courses can have two different numbers measured as its length.

These two Garden Golf pre-builts show off this point. The left one has a length of 1,476ft while the right one has a length of 1,502ft because the first guest who got on the right one needed to take more footsteps to complete the track than the first guest who got on the left one.

This can effect the ride's stats as the "longer" ride will get a larger Excitement bonus from the ride length, although in almost all situations, this increase will be negligible. Once the length of the Mini Golf has been calculated, it will never change no matter how well any future guests do.

Throughput and Profit

Although you can charge a fairly high ticket price for a reasonably decorated Mini Golf design, the ride will never make much money due to its incredibly low throughput. Its tendency for guests to get stuck waiting compounds into the ride taking a long time for many guests to complete and resulting in even tiny queue lines being too long before the guests start to complain that they've been on the ride for too long. On nearly every Mini Golf design, its maximum throughput will only be somewhere between 100 and 200 guests per hour.

In fact, it's not uncommon for the Mini Golf to lose you money instead of making it in the event that you make a design you can't charge a lot for.

Verdict

The Mini Golf is one of the worst rides in the game. Its throughput is slow, guests will wait forever, and it may very well cause you to start losing money instead of gaining it. Even when it does make money, it'll never make more than a few hundred dollars per hour.

However, it's also a very pretty ride that can add a lot of charm to the park. If your intention is to build a ride to help with scenario completion, it's best to ignore the Mini Golf entirely. If however, you reach a point where you just want to build something nice and have money to throw out, a Mini Golf can make a beautiful scenic setpiece.

Other Gentle Rides

[to come soon]