With the new DLC for Two Point Hospital, Close Encounters, now available on Steam here (followed by console releases soon), we thought it was a great opportunity to dive back into the game! If you haven’t yet heard of this tycoon management game, you can check out the details with our review here.

Don’t be alarmed by the hospital setting; the illnesses you’ll encounter are all but ordinary and come with ‘punny’ alternatives. For example: Enjoy the visual details of someone walking into your hospital with a pan on their head and direct them to a treatment room where you remove it with a giant magnet! Since we wanted to get the most out of this game and feel compelled to achieve excellence, we went after the 3-star goals in every level. Below are some tips and tricks to help you avoid the same mistakes we made that resulted in figurative and literal dumpster fires.

Tips and Tricks for Two Point Hospital

You’ll notice that getting that first star is always quite easy but if you want to attempt the third, you’ll need to buy more plots and expand your hospital. This will obviously give you a lot more to manage. You might be making millions but when your expenses kick in, you can lose it all and maybe even go bankrupt if you’re not careful.

Creating Rooms and Hospital Layout

• You’ll want to start every level paused to save time and money by building the basics; Reception, GP Office, General Diagnostics, Toilets, Staff Room. Then hire the employees necessary to fill these rooms.
• Only build the minimum required size for all rooms in your hospital because the level prestige can be raised by spamming Gold Awards for your walls that you’ll want to unlock with your Kudosh ASAP. Even rugs are handy because you don’t really have to worry about them getting in the way of anything else.
• When planning out the layout of your hospital, be aware of your patients that need further diagnosis as they go to the GP Office to General Diagnostics and then back to GP. This means you’ll want to have them next to each other to shorten their walking distance.
• Placing rooms that help diagnose patients can lead to a higher probability of a cure. These rooms are: General Diagnostics, Fluid Analysis, X-Ray, and MEGA Scanner.
• You can greatly increase the overall health of the hospital by placing Hand Sanitizers in every room and in the hallways were there are drinking fountains. Also, don’t go placing too many garbage cans as this will just cause more work for your janitors and decrease your attractiveness when they fill up. You only need them near your vending machines and near treatment rooms for the pukers.
• Make sure to place Fire Extinguishers in every treatment room that has machinery you need to repair. Furthermore, place more than one as they are single-use only! You don’t want to worry about this after a fire breaks out.
• Placing Coffee Makers and Medicine Cabinets in every office (especially the GPs) will give your doctors a boost of much needed energy and diagnosis/treatment.

Essential Needs of Staff and Patients

• You’ll need to place a large amount of GP Offices at a certain point so make sure to reduce the queue lines by placing drink and snack machines, toilets, and news racks nearby. Your patients will sometimes take their time or leave the lines to do these things.
• Forget building cafeterias when you unlock them, they’re a huge waste of space, tie up your Assistants that are better used toward Reception, cause line-ups, and even seem to spread more germs. Don’t waste your Assistants’ time with Newstands either.
• Toilets can be placed in 3×2 areas so they’re great to fill in those awkward spaces you might have. Just make sure to have one or two of those in every major section as patients can and will relieve themselves on your floors.
• To keep everyone happy and improve your hospital’s reputation, do the objectives that pop-up and place a lot of decorations. Plants (mainly sunflowers) do the largest amount for a cheaper price and fountains are useful to put near your empty spaces by Reception.

Training, Marketing, and Research

• Do not hire staff that have the following traits: Cheese for Brains, Dirty Habits, Grumpy, Has a Dark Side, Litterer, Nasty, Nausea Inducing, Suffers from spontaneous bouts of snoozing, Tires Easily, Unhygienic, Unmotivated, Wants More Money, Weak Bladder, and Vengeful. These will have negative affects to happiness, efficiency, cleanliness, and more! These employees will ruin your entire hospital.
• Some staff traits don’t do anything but others will have useful qualities such as Motivated and Positive. As long as you hire based on these traits, you don’t need to worry about higher tier levels as much.
• You’ll want to train your employees often as this raises their happiness/morale with promotions and their patient treatments are more effective. Specialize your employees in specific areas such as Psychiatry. You can go up to level V in certain jobs.
• Make sure you know the difference between which rooms are for Diagnostics and Treatment so you can train accordingly. For example, GPs should be trained in GP higher tier levels as wells as Diagnostic boosts, and Nurses in Pharmacy can be trained in Treatment for a better curing rate.
• If you have a target to reach in a certain illness or you need to raise your reputation, create a marketing campaign specifically for it.
• Research everything and anything to upgrade your machinery and to unlock different rooms. Everything you research will carry over to your other levels so you only have to do them once.
• All three of those rooms can receive bonuses with certain objects. Place tons of encyclopedias in the Training Rooms, Servers (and ACs) in the Research labs, and more desks and Assistants in the Marketing rooms.

Other things you can do to help keep your hospital afloat are:

When you edit rooms, it kicks everyone out of them but don’t be afraid to rearrange or delete unused rooms as it will make things easier in the long run! You should also check up on your employees and fire staff that are under-performing. Then, keep checking your patients’ health and bump the ones that are near death up the queue line before they keel over! Finally, take your time and have fun!