Block Sections Guide

What are Block Sections?
Block Sections are a section of track on a coaster that ends in some form of special track piece which can safely bring the train to a complete halt. Outside of a few rare exceptions, only one train is allowed on a block section at any given time so a train will stop and wait at the end of its current block until the block section ahead is completely free of trains. Thus, in general, the maximum number of trains on a coaster at any given time is number of block sections minus one since one block section must always be clear so that trains can continue to move through the layout (Note: there are some situations in which the game will not allow you to add more trains even if you add more block sections. More research is required to determine why some block sections don't add train capacity).

Special track pieces that count as a block include block brakes, stations, lift hills, and elevators as well as the Tilt Coaster's special Seesaw element.

Where to Place Blocks
As a general rule of thumb, you'll always want to have at least 3 block sections on your ride to allow for at least two trains. This is relatively easy to accomplish by having a coaster with a station, a lift hill, and a final brake run ending in a block brake. This ensures that there will almost always be a train in the station loading and unloading while another is on the ride's layout.

For rides that replace the standard lift hill with an LSM Launch, you'll likely want to place a block just before the ride's first launch if it doesn't launch directly out of the station. If it does launch directly out of the station, you may want to place a second block brake between the final brake run and the station.

For rides in which the layout is especially long, you'll want to place what's commonly referred to as a Mid Course Brake Run or MCBR for short. This is a block brake that comes roughly halfway through the main layout of a ride. Typically on real life coasters, these are brakes which do not trim the speed of a train as it passes through but can bring the train to a complete halt if necessary.

When placing a MCBR, always remember to design the rest of the layout so that the train can still complete the layout in the event it does come to a complete stop on this brake run. An easy way to test this is to check the trim checkbox on the block brake and set the speed equal to your lift hill speed since trains will always leave a block brake from a standstill going the same speed as the lift hill is set to. Once you verify the ride can pass this section at this speed, you can uncheck the trim or raise its speed to make the ride a bit more thrilling when it doesn't need to stop at this section.

Balancing Block Sections: More Trains, More Problems?
Balancing Block Sections to make a coaster as efficient as possible can be a more difficult task than it first seems. The ideal set up of block sections allows a train to flow through every block section freely while only coming to a stop when absolutely necessary such as in a station. While you're free to add however many trains as the game will allow and it will increase the throughput of the ride a bit, if the block sections are not balanced, you'll find the train coming to a halt at the top of your lift hill or worse, mid ride. This can negatively impact the ride's excitement rating impacting how much you can charge for the ride. If it stops for too long or too many times, guests can start complaining that the ride is taking too long. Plus, the longer a train is stopped outside of a station, the longer it's doing nothing to contribute to your profits.

In general, you'll want your block sections to last a roughly equal amount of time so that the train only comes to a stop in the station or perhaps for a short period of time on a block brake just before the station. In addition to placing the MCBR roughly halfway or further into your coaster's main layout, you'll want to play with the minimum and maximum waiting times in the station in order to space the trains out properly through your ride. If you find your ride is still stopping too often mid-ride, it may actually be worth removing one of the trains and seeing if the excitement of the ride improves. If it improves enough, you'll be able to charge more for the ride which can more than make up the difference in having a slight increase in the ride's capacity.

The Killer Bee Example
Let's put what we've learned to the test by looking at an example of how balancing Block Sections can really improve a ride. In the Adventure Island scenario, players start with a vertical drop coaster called Killer Bee. While this ride has great stats, its very low throughput and low entry price severely limit its earnings potential out of the gate. By default, the ride runs only two trains which dispatch 35 seconds apart. This results in a capacity of roughly 62 theoretical customers Per month. If you look at the ride's settings, you see that it can actually support three trains instead of the starting two. You may expect adding the third train will boost the theoretical capacity to 93 customers, but instead you'll find it only increases it by 9 or 10. If we close the ride and edit it, we can turn on the Blocks Visualizer. This will show where the block sections are. As we can see, the entire ride's main layout from the first drop to the brake run is one big block section. This is a big reason why our third train didn't make much of a difference: the ride has to wait a long time between train dispatches to avoid stopping at the top of the lift hill because the block section afterwards is so long. This means our third train will have to wait for the station to clear which means it's doing little to help our capacity problem. With a higher capacity train, this might be fine but given the limited capacity of the Vertical Drop Coaster's trains, this really hurts our maximum capacity. Even if we were to change the ride's price from $4.50 to $15, the max profit for month with this three train version would jump from $88.65 to about $295.50. This is a substantial jump for sure, but with some modifications to the ride, we can increase this value dramatically.

Balancing the Block Sections
Let's make two fairly minor modifications. First, we'll add a MCBR to the the ride. We'll want to place this roughly halfway through the ride and at a point in which we know we'll be able to finish the layout if the ride comes to a halt on this brake run. Since everything after sidewinder inversion (the inversion next to the lift hill) is relatively low to the ground, we'll adjust the layout so instead of turning and going directly into the barrel roll, we'll instead go up into a MCBR before doing a turning drop into a barrel roll.

Since the station is also three tiles long, we'll delete the middle tile and add a regular track piece, then move the exit to our new section station we've made. This will allow a train that is waiting to load to unload passengers further speeding up the process. With this set up, we can safely run 4 trains so let's do so. Finally, since there's no longer a need for the trains to wait 35 seconds to leave the station since the ride's block sections are much shorter, we'll decrease that to 25 seconds. Here's the block sections map after these modifications.

Final Results
After letting the ride run for a while, we can see the theoretical capacity of the ride has jumped from 71 customers per month to 115. The max profit for month has now also spiked to $1,239.63: a far cry from the $54 we started the scenario with. We can also see that every one of our train is actively doing something to benefit us: two trains are traversing the layout, one train is unloading to increase efficiency, and one train is loading thus generating revenue. We could probably make further adjustments to the wait time on the trains to increase the profits even more, but for now we'll leave it here since it's going a long way towards funding our park now.