Staff Manager

An OpenRCT2 plugin that automates park staff management: it splits your paths (or ride queues) among handymen, security guards and mascots, assigns mechanics to ride exits, manages inspection intervals, and can automatically hire, fire and (re)assign staff as your park changes — always sending each staff member to their nearest free zone.

• Version: 0.9.0
• 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, Security, Mascots

• One area per staff member. The park's footpaths are split into equal, 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 path tiles each staff member should cover; the status line shows Paths · Needed · Hired · Assignable.
• Handymen mowing rule. Handymen with grass mowing enabled are left alone — only path‑cleaning handymen are managed.
• Staff are placed in their area. Each assigned staff member is moved into the centre of its area (onto a real path/queue tile).

🎭 Mascots — dedicated options

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

• Assign to queue lines (checkbox): place mascots along ride queues to keep queuing guests happy, instead of general paths.
• Queue tiles / mascot — max queue tiles each mascot covers (queue mode).
• Path tiles / mascot — tiles each mascot covers (path mode).
• Mascots per area — how many mascots share each area; > 1 = overlapping (the area grows so the tiles‑per‑mascot density is preserved).

🔧 Mechanics

• One mechanic per ride exit, each patrolling the exit plus the 3 path tiles leading up to it.
• Nearest‑mechanic matching: each uncovered exit gets the closest free, non‑busy mechanic.
• Inspection interval dropdown (10 min … Never) applied to all rides, independent of ride type. Newly assigned rides get an inspection triggered.
• Busy mechanics are protected: a mechanic currently inspecting/fixing a ride is never reassigned or fired.

👥 Hire / Fire

• If an assignment needs more staff than available, a dialog offers to hire the shortfall.
• If it needs fewer, a dialog offers to fire the surplus — newest staff first (busy mechanics are skipped).
• Dialog wording is grammatically correct per type, e.g. Hire 1 guard, Fire 3 mascots, Hire 2 mechanics, Fire 1 handyman.

🤖 Automatic mode

• Auto mechanics: on ride‑exit or staff changes, automatically hire missing / fire surplus mechanics and reassign — no dialogs.
• Per‑type auto toggles for handymen, security and mascots (one switch each): automatically right‑size and reassign when paths, land rights or staff change. These are debounced (path‑dragging fires many events) and loop‑guarded against the plugin's own hire/fire actions.

🔔 Notifications

Park messages report when staff are hired, fired, or assigned / reassigned to a different spot, e.g. Handymen: 5 assigned, 2 reassigned over 130 path tiles.

🖥️ UI & performance

• Resizable window with a section (and picture) per staff type; controls reflow to the window width.
• All heavy work (whole‑map scan, bulk actions) is chunked across game ticks, so the game never freezes. (OpenRCT2 plugin JS is single‑threaded; there is no true multithreading — long jobs are spread across ticks.)
• The map scan is cached and shared by all path staff; the density spinners recompute Needed instantly without rescanning.

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.sln 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 path‑staff section (Handymen / Security / Mascots):
   • Set the density (path tiles per staff; for mascots, the queue/path tiles‑per‑mascot and mascots‑per‑area, plus the queue‑lines toggle).
   • Click Calculate & assign … areas. If you don't have enough (or have too many) staff, confirm the Hire/Fire dialog.
   • Optionally tick Auto to keep that type managed automatically.
3. In the Mechanics section:
   • Pick an Inspection interval (applies to all rides).
   • Click Assign mechanics to exits now (offers to hire/fire as needed).
   • Optionally tick Auto mechanics for hands‑off management.

How it decides which tiles count

1. Scan every tile for footpaths (incl. queue flag), surface ownership and the park entrance (chunked across ticks).
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. Match staff to the nearest zone of the appropriate set (paths, or queues for mascots in queue mode), or into fixed‑size overlapping areas for mascots.

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 standing on a ride (track/exit) tile.
• staffhire reliability: hiring can occasionally be rejected by the game (money/limits); the plugin reports how many actually succeeded and assigns whatever exists.
• Icons: each section shows the built‑in staff icon. Distinct per‑type sprites aren't stable numeric constants across builds, so the same guaranteed‑valid staff icon is used for all types (editable at the top of the file via STAFF_SPRITE).
• Reachability vs. connection: a mechanic/handyman can only work paths/exits that are actually connected to the network.
• Matching cost: nearest‑zone matching is O(n²) per pass — fine for the usual dozens of staff; extreme counts (hundreds of one type) would be slower.
• Single‑player focus: actions are skipped on network clients.

Configuration (in‑file)

Near the top of staff-manager.ts you can tweak:

Changelog (recent)

• 0.9.0 – Renamed to Staff Manager; bug fixes for gardening area allocation and mechanic patrol areas.
• 1.0.0 – Initial release.

TODO

• Fixing bugs — continue shaking out edge cases in patrol-area assignment (gardening, mechanics, handymen) and staff hire/fire flows.
• Adding automatic management — expand the automatic hire/fire/reassign behavior so the plugin can keep staffing right-sized without manual intervention as the park changes.

Licence

MIT © Johannes