Staff Manager

An OpenRCT2 plugin that automates park staff management: it splits your paths (and ride queues) among handymen, security guards and entertainers, assigns mechanics to ride exits, and can hire, fire and (re)assign staff so the right number always patrol the right places — sending each staff member to their nearest free zone.

• Version: 0.9.1
• Type: local (single‑player / client‑side)
• Licence: MIT
• Min API: 34 · Target API: 77
• Source: staff-manager.ts (TypeScript, compiles to dist/staff-manager.js)

Features

🧹 Path staff — Handymen, Guards, Entertainers

• One area per staff member. The park's pathways are split into contiguous patrol areas and one is assigned to each staff member.
• Nearest‑zone assignment. Every staff member is matched to the closest free zone to where they currently stand, minimising walking.
• Only relevant paths. Path counting uses a flood‑fill from the park entrance and keeps only tiles on park‑owned land — so unusable public streets (e.g. Bumbly Beach) are ignored.
• Configurable density. A spinner sets how many tiles each staff member should cover; the stats table shows Hired · Needed · Difference per type.
• Handymen split in two. Handymen are classified by their orders:
  • Cleanup handymen patrol the path and queue network.
  • Gardening handymen water and mow the park's grass/scenery tiles, with each connected garden area guaranteed at least one gardener.
• Staff are placed in their area. Each assigned staff member is moved into the centre of its area (onto a real, safely‑placeable path/queue tile).

🎭 Entertainers — dedicated options

Entertainers have their own controls instead of the generic density spinner:

• Tiles / Staff — how many tiles each entertainer covers.
• Staff / Area — how many entertainers share each area; > 1 = overlapping (the area grows so the tiles‑per‑staff density is preserved).
• Queue toggle — include ride queue tiles in the patrol set, so entertainers can keep queuing guests happy instead of only patrolling plain paths.

🔧 Mechanics

• One mechanic per ride exit. Each mechanic patrols the exit tile plus the path tile directly in front of it (chosen by checking every cardinal neighbour for an actual footpath, rather than trusting the exit's stored facing direction).
• Busy mechanics are protected. A mechanic currently servicing a ride is never teleported or interrupted; they keep their patrol area but finish their job first.

👥 Hire / Fire

• Adjust staff count button hires or fires the right number of every type at once to match the calculated Needed counts — hiring when understaffed, firing staff when overstaffed.
• Oldest staff first. Surplus staff are fired oldest‑first for a stable, consistent result.

🖥️ UI & behaviour

• One resizable window with an Enabled toggle and a Hired / Needed / Difference stat table per staff type.
• Assign builds every type's patrol areas from the most recently scanned tiles and teleports one staff member to the start of each new area.
• Staff teleports are serialised through a single queue, because OpenRCT2 only supports one peep being “picked up” at a time — overlapping pickups would otherwise clobber each other.
• A status line reports the scanned counts, e.g. Path tiles: n, Queue tiles: n, Garden tiles: n.

Building

This plugin is written in TypeScript against the community-maintained @openrct2/types package, which provides official OpenRCT2 plugin API typings and is installed as a dev dependency via npm install (no vendored .d.ts file is checked into this repository).

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18+ (LTS recommended) with npm — required to install dependencies and run the TypeScript compiler. Verify with:

  node -v
  npm -v

• OpenRCT2 installed at least once, so the local plugin folder (or your own custom location) exists to deploy into.
• Optional: Visual Studio 2022/2026 with the Node.js/JavaScript workload if you want to open openrct2-staff-manager.slnx and build from the IDE instead of the command line (this runs the same npm run build script under the hood).

1. Install dependencies: npm install.
2. Build: npm run build.
   • Compiles staff-manager.ts to dist/staff-manager.js.
   • Then automatically copies (deploy.js) that file straight into your local OpenRCT2 plugin folder:
     • Windows: Documents\OpenRCT2\plugin\
     • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/OpenRCT2/plugin/
     • Linux: ~/.config/OpenRCT2/plugin/
   • Override the destination with the OPENRCT2_PLUGIN_DIR environment variable if your OpenRCT2 user directory is somewhere else.
3. Use npm run watch while developing to recompile on save (note: this only recompiles; run npm run build again, or press the game's plugin hot-reload, after a watch recompile to redeploy the file).

Installation

1. Run npm install then npm run build (see Building) — this compiles and deploys staff-manager.js directly into your OpenRCT2 plugin folder.
2. Start OpenRCT2 (or, in single‑player, use the plugin hot‑reload).
3. Open it from the map / red‑toolbox button → “Staff Manager”.

Usage

1. Open the window from the toolbox menu.
2. For each staff type, tick the Enabled checkbox to include it.
3. Click Adjust staff count to hire/fire the right number of each type based on your settings (this is what fills the Needed column).
4. Click Assign to build patrol areas and move staff into them.
5. Tune the per‑type spinners (tiles/staff, entertainer staff/area, handyman gardening density, entertainer queue toggle) and repeat steps 3–4 as your park changes.

How it decides which tiles count

1. Scan every tile for footpaths (incl. queue flag), surface ownership and the park entrance.
2. Flood‑fill from the park entrance across connected footpath edges.
3. Keep only reachable tiles on owned land, split into paths and queues.
4. Scan gardening tiles — tiles with mowable grass or waterable scenery — grouped into connected components.
5. Match staff to the nearest zone (paths, or paths+queues for entertainers with the Queue toggle on), or into fixed‑size overlapping areas for entertainers. Mechanics get the exit tile plus the adjacent path tile.

If the entrance can't be found, it falls back to seeding from owned path tiles.

Notes & limitations

• Mechanic dispatch: the scripting API doesn't expose which ride a mechanic is dispatched to, so “busy” is inferred from the mechanic not standing on a footpath tile.
• Patrol areas can't be verified to be connected: areas are split by cardinal adjacency and disconnected pockets are merged to the nearest centroid, so a patrol area is generally reachable — but unusual layouts can still produce awkward shapes.
• Teleport vs. patrol: a staff member's patrol area is always built in full, but the physical teleport target is the nearest safely‑placeable path tile, since the game rejects placement on obstructed tiles (benches, scenery, queue TV, embedded ride elements, etc.).
• Single‑player focus: actions are skipped on network clients.

Configuration (in‑file)

Near the top of staff-manager.ts the default tunables are defined as flex stores. They're exposed directly in the UI, but their initial defaults live in code:

Changelog

• 0.9.0 – Renamed from the plugin's original working title to Staff Manager; added per‑staff‑type enable controls; rewrote the UI; improved entrance detection, mechanic patrol assignment (cardinal‑neighbour front‑tile matching, busy‑mechanic protection), gardening granularity, and patrol connectivity; removed leftover console logging.

TODO

• Fix patrol‑area edge cases — continue shaking out issues in area assignment (gardening, mechanics, handymen) and the hire/fire flows.
• Automatic staffing — consider optional automatic hire/fire/reassign so staffing stays right‑sized as the park changes without pressing the buttons.

Licence

MIT © Johannes Holzhäuer