Ice Coast Revival
How a forgotten New England ski hill comes back to life: the systems, the weather, and the people who try to run it. No spoilers for the exact knobs, just how the mountain works and how to get unstuck when it does not.
You revive a shuttered ski area: clear terrain, string up lifts, make snow, and give skiers a reason to drive up, all while the books stay in the black.
Time runs in winter seasons. Each operating day, skiers arrive in waves, check in, ride, ski, eat, and head home on their own schedules. Overnight the books settle, the weather rolls, snow and grooming update, and lift reliability gets tested. Between seasons the hill pauses for an off-season build break.
Lifts create uphill access. Their length, speed, carrier size, reliability, and operating cost all matter. A busy loading station forms a real queue.
Skiable ways down are derived from cleared, connected terrain. Authored runs let you name, sign, rate, groom, and reshape a chosen corridor within that terrain.
Snow guns buy reach, intensity buys overnight output, and snowcats groom only as much connected terrain as the fleet can cover.
The lot is comfortable parking capacity, not a wall at the gate. Overflow guests shuttle in with a mood cost. Expand the lot when overflow becomes routine.
Food, rest, lessons, rentals, and après venues serve different parts of a guest's day. Build-palette decor is mechanically relevant: varied decor raises Village Character with diminishing returns. It is not merely cosmetic.
Park features, a race course, and a cross-country loop give guests more than another lift lap. Their value comes from use, variety, and satisfaction, not just ownership.
The move tool relocates many built objects for a fraction of their price and previews whether the new site works. Demolition refunds only part of the original investment.
Buildings need a valid base or mid-mountain site. Lifts need legal stations and a way back down. When a placement rejects, read the receipt before changing the whole plan.
A lift is useful only when its top connects through skiable terrain to somewhere guests can continue. The ordinary network comes from cleared, snow-covered cells. An authored run does not paint a magical route over the mountain. It labels and manages a corridor made from that terrain.
Posted difficulty is a promise. If the terrain skis harder than its sign, mismatched guests are more likely to struggle, wipe out, and complain. A wide, connected return is usually safer than a clever-looking thread that pinches off.
Each night brings a forecast for the day ahead. Weather changes snow, demand, what price feels fair, and which lifts can operate.
Career weather slowly warms season after season. Low, southern hills lose reliable winter first. Snowmaking can defend a valuable core, but it cannot create cold weather. The lasting portfolio answer is elevation and latitude: expand toward colder mountains while deciding what role a warming hill can still play.
Capacity emerges from carrier size, carrier spacing, speed, and line length. A nominally large lift can still load in batches or leave a long wait if demand overwhelms it.
Default availability: telemixes and funiculars are not in Daily Challenge. Career reveals them only on mountains where they are signature lifts. Quick Play supports them underneath, but its exotic lift buttons are hidden by default.
Construction price: every lift combines a fixed terminal cost with a line-distance cost. The build catalog shows the cheapest legal starting price. After the first station is placed, the live line preview shows the exact distance and exact price before the second station commits the build. Longer lines cost more, while a shorter feeder no longer pays the same construction price as a mountain-spanning installation.
Lifts age. Older equipment needs more maintenance and faces greater breakdown risk. Closing a lift saves its crew and power for the day, but does not erase age or the underlying maintenance need. Replacing it resets its age.
Character grows from the number and diversity of venue types, varied decor with diminishing returns, village surfacing, venue grades, and the lodge tier. Recent settled guest satisfaction then strengthens or weakens that built foundation. Higher Character gives arriving guests a better first impression. This system is inactive in Daily Challenge.
A candidate must serve the guest's current need, be open, affordable, reachable from the guest's location, and have free capacity. Among candidates, archetype tastes and concept tags matter, as do menu price and price sensitivity. A great venue on the wrong side of the mountain or full at lunch is not a usable venue.
Meal demand is finite. Breakfast and meal guests choose among suitable places; a chalet can also divert a skier during a descent. A second similar venue can add seats, but it does not manufacture a second lunch for every guest. If the existing venue was not full, similar price and tags may simply split the same meal pool.
An open venue carries its own daily staff cost. Food, drink, and rental sales also collect guest transaction tax, while payroll tax and shared hill costs remain in the main books. The venue inspector therefore labels its direct contribution honestly: revenue after that venue's staff, before taxes and resort-wide costs.
Traffic matters as much as menu price. A room has to be reachable, open when guests want it, and large enough to take the crowd. Time inside is also time away from skiing, so a long meal or rest can trade lift laps for a better guest experience. More capacity helps only when the room was filling up in the first place.
The inspector compares the venue's settled winter pace with the capital invested in the building and its upgrades. A healthy, well-placed venue should normally earn back that investment over a few solid winters, not in one lucky day. A negative pace gets no invented payback date: fix its traffic, hours, fit, or staffing first. Ski school is read with its resort-wide lesson and instructor lines alongside the room's own desk contribution.
Food concepts belong to restaurants and cafes. Drink concepts belong to bars and lounges. Their tags also meet different guest tastes.
Eligible guest venues progress from Standard to Well-kept to Beloved. Grades improve the guest operation, including capacity, revenue, and satisfaction. Shops and ski schools do not use this grade ladder. Every grade is available without a lodge prerequisite.
Happy hour is a paid, same-day promotion on an eligible venue. It adds a booked resort amount and a satisfaction boost per cover, while affordability still uses the menu price the guest sees. A Venue Manager charges a daily retainer when there are venues to manage, learns from recent covers, considers tomorrow's demand, and may book happy hour automatically when the projection supports it.
The après band starts at 10:30. At restaurants, bars, and lounges it raises the menu price, the resort's take, and visit satisfaction. It also makes an already-present après guest more likely to choose a band venue. It does not create a new arrival wave or directly raise mountain demand.
The built-in lodge advances through Warming Hut, Base Lodge, Mountain Lodge, and Grand Lodge for a total investment of $750,000. The three steps cost $125,000, $225,000, and $400,000. Lodge upgrades do not unlock other content. Ski school, concepts, rental tiers, and venue grades are available on their own merits.
Instead, each tier amplifies the businesses the hill already has. At the full Grand Lodge, pre-cap demand is 20% higher, arriving guests gain 12 satisfaction points, and 65% of eligible lodge check-ins receive a concierge referral to a live venue. Dining and après rooms book 70% more per visit and seat 75% more guests. Rental bookings rise 75% with 50% more booked per rental, while lesson uptake rises 60%.
The Resort Hub panel shows what it can amplify now, referrals made and completed, rentals and lessons influenced, added money, added arrival satisfaction, extra guests wanted and admitted, and current winter payback pace.
Hub demand amplification applies to ordinary mountain demand. Ski-school reservations are added afterward and keep first claim on lesson seats and arrival capacity. The Hub's lesson-uptake boost applies only to organic walk-ins, since reserved students already committed to a package. Hub- attributed lesson money is a labeled subset of Ski School lesson receipts, not a second revenue line.
Rental tiers are resort-wide. Basic gear is the starting offer. Performance gear raises uptake, price, and rental satisfaction. Demo gear is a more selective premium offer, especially appealing to weekend warriors. More shops raise the resort-wide rental value with diminishing returns and improve beginner check-in mood. Each shop shows its own visits and attributed rental revenue, while all rental income still appears once in the resort-wide Rentals ledger line.
Each instructor supplies 20 core lesson spaces before Development bonuses. The school targets reservations from 45 percent of staffed capacity, with Welcome School and ticket price able to improve that target up to 75 percent. Reserved students take shared arrival slots ahead of unreserved demand and their package includes tuition. Organic walk-ins still need enough personal spending money and an unreserved seat.
A Beginner graduates to Intermediate after one completed Foundation lesson. An Intermediate needs three separate Progression clinics to graduate to Expert, and only regulars retain that progress between visits. Beginner recreational choices are green; Intermediate choices add blue; Expert choices add black, double-black, and glades. Trail signs govern eligibility, so a misleading posted rating can still expose a skier to harder measured terrain. Transfers and safe trips back to the base remain available at every ability.
Open the ski-school building to see students promised and still due, completed reserved lessons and walk-ins, named graduates, terrain they unlocked, trained race and guide participation, student satisfaction, current regular progress, and the direct contribution from lesson sales plus school-attracted tickets after instructor and desk costs. A skier's card and diary show current ability and clinic progress; the Locals Book preserves those facts for returning regulars.
Every skier has an ability, budget, energy level, day plan, tastes, and a drive home. They arrive with an initial mood, then react to the actual queues, runs, snow, variety, price, venues, activities, and incidents they experience.
An early departure is not automatically a protest. Open the skier card and read the trip diary before treating it as a capacity or satisfaction failure.
Especially memorable great or poor visits can create a regular. The Locals book keeps their name, home, visit history, satisfaction memory, quirks, memorable moment, and whether they learned here. A returning regular arrives with mood influenced by that remembered satisfaction. The book's return suggestion is based on the person's quirk and recent experience, not a generic checklist.
High satisfaction makes a warm regular relationship more likely, and ski school can strengthen it, but regular formation is not guaranteed. A memorably bad day can also produce a dissatisfied local who remembers.
Individual satisfaction settles into the day's average. Reputation moves gradually toward that result instead of snapping to it, and reputation then compounds into future demand. Returning regulars are a second, personal memory path: their own satisfaction history shapes their next arrival. A good day therefore helps both the public stars and the chance of familiar faces coming back.
A reopened hill can carry reviews from before you took over. Those old ratings weigh on its public stars at first, but every real guest visit replaces part of that history. Run good days, earn better reviews, and the old reputation eventually disappears.
The GM controls three departments: lifts, staffing, and snow. Delegate all three or keep any domain manual while the GM runs the others. Lift delegation handles openings and routine lift decisions; staffing delegation adjusts the crew policy; snow delegation manages grooming and snowmaking decisions. The controls live in Operations.
The maintenance policy trades recurring cost against age-related breakdown chance: Deferred is cheaper and riskier, Routine is the middle, and Preventive spends more for reliability. A separate seasonal maintenance plan is stronger: once purchased, it prevents age-related lift breakdowns for the rest of that season and can be set to renew when the next season begins. Neither choice repairs a lift that is already broken.
Lean, Standard, and Extra guest-service crews change the combined wage line and the mood guests bring through check-in. The combined payroll covers operating crews across lifts, venues, patrol, race and cross-country activities, and delegated management. Some specialist lines, such as instructors and Development hires, remain separately legible where their system owns the cost.
Patrol improves arrival confidence, prevents the morning avalanche event after storms, and reduces the chance that a wipeout becomes an injury. If an injury happens, staffed patrol responds without the outside-help charge. Patrol Training stays hidden while injury incidents are disabled.
Career hills can receive one business notice when a winter begins. The card stays open while the hill runs and gives several operating days to decide. Ignoring it applies the conservative default shown on the card.
A claims-priced insurance renewal can be accepted, paired with a paid season-long risk package, or exchanged for a higher deductible. The risk package starts claims cooling early and caps growth. The higher deductible lowers the daily general-liability premium but raises the existing cash response costs if another injury occurs.
A regional energy spike raises the existing power and snowmaking lines for a limited window. The hill can absorb it, hold the existing snowmaking dial at Economy for the window, or buy a winter supply contract that caps the increase. Economy snowmaking lowers both cost and snow output, so thin coverage can still cost visits. Finance names the active window and the season review records how the choice played out.
The one-time lighting install covers T-bars and regular chairlifts, plus their served runs. Day skiing continues until 20:00, cross-country stays open until 19:00, and après ends at 20:30. A separate after-work wave pays a reduced ticket. Unlit lift types close at dusk. Extra crew and power for each lit, operating lift are folded into the usual wages and power lines rather than printed as a separate night-skiing expense.
Guests judge price against context, not one permanent ideal. Storms and thaws weaken the context; powder, holidays, and a strong park can support more. Raising price reduces the number who want to come and hurts price fairness when it outruns the day on offer. Lowering it can fill the hill while surrendering revenue per guest. The Report and Daily Ops Meeting show the direction without exposing the hidden best price.
Parking capacity is the number who can park comfortably at once. Spaces recycle as guests drive home. Overflow still arrives by shuttle, pays an extra handling cost, and starts less happy. Parking itself does not cap admissions. The lift network supplies both a comfortable carrying level and a harder daily arrival rail. Guests served above comfort can mean crowding and queues; demand beyond the hard rail is turned away.
Guests use features they encounter on a compatible run. A completed feature passage adds trail-variety satisfaction, while the number and diversity of built feature types raise overall park quality. Repeating one object and building a varied park are therefore different strategies. Park quality also improves arrival appeal and the price context. Pond skimming is a late-season, low-mountain feature and expires at rollover.
A valid downhill course needs lift access and a skiable finish below its start. Non-beginners can enter. Racing begins at 13:00, takes entries until the window closes or the field fills, and charges no entry fee. Finishing creates satisfaction; the top three receive extra podium satisfaction. Owning a course also adds a daily race-crew wage, even on a quiet card.
Draw a valley cross-country loop from the build palette. Eligible guests can take one outing before wind-down, paying the lap fee and receiving completion satisfaction. The crew costs money each operating day; climbing terrain makes the outing slower.
Biathlon is an upgrade to an existing cross-country loop, not a separate trail. A subset of cross-country guests skis repeated laps, detours to the range for a prone shooting stop, then rejoins the loop. The shooting lap adds satisfaction. Other guests keep using the ordinary loop.
The Career rival can create several distinct incidents:
A success offer reflects the target hill's recent earning power, reputation, assets, and attached debt. Before you confirm, the card shows the headline offer, then a transparent 20% total cut: 8% broker fee, 5% legal, escrow, and filings, and a 7% earn-out holdback. The net wired at closing is shown underneath.
Accepting a targeted offer transfers that hill and keeps the rest of the portfolio running. Its operating income, caretaker revenue, and upkeep end; Apex takes the attached debt; earned peak-star gates stay open; and operations move if it was your active hill. The sale and full closing breakdown enter the Career ledger. Accepting an offer for your only hill is a deliberate cash-out: the net proceeds and history survive, one winter passes, and you return to the region to buy again. If the treasury is below the re-buy floor, the failsafe immediately returns the founding hill and may charge cash above the survival reserve. Refusing a qualifying offer instead awards the Independence badge, provided you have never sold to Apex.
A goal with several clauses is checked as one package at nightly settlement. Its clauses must be true together on that check; partial progress is not banked as separate completed clauses. Peak-reputation clauses use the hill's remembered high-water mark, while cash, debt, capacity, and built-project clauses use their current values. Once the complete goal latches, it stays complete.
Founder legacy uses its own ladder. The highest rung whose full set of clauses is true can latch, so a strong operation may skip past an earlier celebration. A clause in one legacy rung does not substitute for a missing clause in another.
Trail Board is the management list for authored runs: edit a corridor, change its posted rating, set grooming priority, and read rides and status. Trail Map paints those posted corridors on the mountain so you can understand the guest-facing network and navigate it. Use the Board to change a run and the Map to see the system those choices create.
Venue inspectors and Buildings show today's visits, revenue attributed to the facility, allocated daily upkeep, and daily ROI where the revenue can be split honestly. The lift inspector shows exact riders today against that lift's daily capacity, including the percentage used. These are operating readouts, not new ledger entries.
Direct guest venues can show their own covers and sales. Their displayed staffing cost is an approximation based on the standard daily venue operation, so founder effects, area modifiers, and settlement rounding can make the resort-wide wage line differ.
Chalet meals are direct visits and can be assigned to that chalet. Shop visits and each renter's already-booked rental revenue are attributed to the shop the guest reached, but the resort still records rental income once under Rentals. Records from before shop tracking have no honest visit or revenue split, so they remain a support-only view instead of showing a false zero. Ski-school lessons, attracted student tickets, instructor wages, and desk costs are also resort-wide. With one school, Finance attributes the full direct program contribution to it. With several schools, each inspector shows the clearly labeled shared program total instead of inventing a split. Resort Hub-attributed lesson uptake remains inside that lesson total.
Demand is how many people want to come after reputation, weather, price, marketing, events, and other appeal are applied. Served arrivals are those admitted after the lift network's daily rail and any mode-specific limit. The difference is turned-away demand. Parking overflow changes the experience and cost, not that served cap.
Report gives a complete cause breakdown across 13 rows: Arrival experience, Price fairness, Crowding, Ski patrol, Lessons & guides, Lift queues, Runs & trail fit, Snow conditions, Trail variety, Falls, Races, Cross-country, and Venues & dining.
Each per-visitor figure includes every guest who arrived that day, including guests who already left. The live satisfaction mean answers a different question: it averages only the guests currently on the hill. The two figures therefore do not have to match while a day is underway.
Operating profit is the day's revenue minus recurring operating costs, including wages, power, maintenance, snowmaking, grooming, and interest. Cash also moves when you build an asset, receive loan principal, repay principal, buy a seasonal plan, or sell something. A profitable hill can have a negative cash-flow day because it built a lift. An unprofitable hill can show more cash after borrowing. Read both the operating net and the cash balance.
Net worth answers whether the operation is building lasting value. It is cash, plus the depreciated book value of lifts, buildings, and equipment, minus outstanding debt principal. In Career it also includes hill and area rights at their historical cost, and subtracts bank, SBA, and inherited debt. Borrowing raises cash and debt together, so a loan draw does not make you richer. Building converts cash into an asset, whose book value then declines over its useful life.
Book net worth is not an offer price. The separate What Apex would pay read uses earning power and an EBITDA multiple for a market-side view. Keep the two questions separate: what the books say you own, and what a buyer might pay for it.
Career Finance files income, balance sheet, and cash flow statements for each hill and for the consolidated portfolio. The archive retains the latest 40 filed winters. Its year line and selectors show the exact oldest and newest winters still available.
The deed price is what you pay in cash or finance through an SBA note. The SBA note only reaches the smallest hills on the coast: anything with more than 300 feet of vertical is past what that lending program covers, so the region's seven real mountains are cash or petition purchases. The Region panel keeps the Finance button visible on those hills and says why it is closed. A hill's fuller appraisal still drives caretaker income and its books. An unimproved hill sells for the lower of what you paid and its appraised value, less the sale fee. Improvements add their built value on top. The Region panel also subtracts attached debt in the net amount you will receive.
A bank loan supplies cash now and charges interest each settlement until repaid. Early repayment saves future interest but consumes cash today. Some founder or Career financing conditions block a new hill-level loan; Finance keeps the control visible and explains the restriction. Loan proceeds and principal repayment change cash, while interest changes both cash and profit.
The hill keeps four tax ledgers. Property tax follows the book value of lifts, buildings, and equipment. Payroll tax follows every wage line, including instructors. Guest transaction tax is collected on food, drinks, and equipment rentals, while lift tickets, lessons, and parking are outside the local tax base. Income tax accrues on positive pre-tax income each day. Its payable is visible in Finance and leaves cash at winter close.
General liability coverage follows skier visits and terrain-park exposure. A winter with injury incidents raises the following winter's premium, while clean winters gradually bring it back down. Property and casualty coverage follows plant and equipment book value. Workers comp follows wages. Career hills have modest local rate differences, so a community hill and a destination resort may not quote the same premium. The Insurance & risk row in Finance shows the live claims multiplier and explains an active renewal choice.
On Blue Square and above, Development gathers the long-term capabilities behind three departments. It does not replace the controls in Operations or Village. It shows how those systems connect and adds permanent choices with visible prerequisites.
Career keeps one shared roster of up to six captains across your whole portfolio, three professions deep: a Mountain Operations Director, an Executive Chef, and a Snowsports Director. A paid, profession-specific search brings three named candidates the next career morning, each showing plain 1-to-5 ratings for Job Skill, Leadership, and Teaching, plus a stated strength, weakness, signing cost, and daily wage.
A hired captain posts to one owned hill at a time, and reposting them elsewhere is immediate. Only one captain from each profession can be posted at any single hill, though several of your hills can each carry their own. Wherever a captain is posted, their full benefit travels with them: a Mountain Operations Director trims nightly hill maintenance, an Executive Chef lifts booked guest-venue revenue, and a Snowsports Director adds lesson spaces per instructor. A hill without a posted captain keeps operating and earning caretaker income normally; captains sharpen a portfolio, they do not gate it.
A posted captain can also run a paid, multi-day local crew training project at their current hill, advancing it through three stages. Each finished stage leaves a smaller version of the captain's benefit behind permanently at that hill, even after the captain later moves elsewhere. Moving a captain away pauses an unfinished project without losing its progress; training continues on inactive hills because it settles with the nightly career close, not a background sim.
Basic Snow and Coverage reporting is part of Operations. Mountain Operations talent points buy permanent capabilities one at a time. The Guest Services Manager unlocks detailed What Skiers Want reporting and charges a daily wage, but adds no hidden demand bonus.
This branch leaves steel and pipe in the world. Capital is only the beginning: staffed plant, power, closures, and concentrated outage risk remain operating choices.
Beneath the captain board, each department has a permanent talent tree. Mountain Operations, Guest Experience, and Skier Development all draw from the same point pool. Locked cards disclose the earlier talents and resort facts they require, such as lifts, snow guns, lodge upgrades, instructors, venues, lessons, and real use of the hill.
Talents are the long game inside Development. The live Development desk is the complete authority for current nodes, prerequisites, and effects; the highlights below explain the shape of each branch.
Points are earned by guest-serving operating days, not by calendar days and not by cash. A day the hill served nobody pays nothing. Your first point arrives after three guest-serving days. Later awards are paced to fill the complete buyable tree over three guest-serving winters. All three departments spend from one shared pool, so every purchase is a choice among the three branches. Most nodes cost one point; the live card always shows the cost before you buy.
This branch buys information and control rather than steel.
This branch leaves steel and pipe in the world, and each piece carries operating consequences described in the section above.
The hands-on branch, built around a shop that keeps old iron alive.
This department buys the village's identity, its circulation, and its evening life. Its branches cover venues, village improvements, rentals, itineraries, and staffed automation.
The school branch, which turns first-timers into regulars who keep coming back.
Teaching that happens on the hill itself rather than in a lesson.
The competitive and club side of the department.
The Development desk hides planned work and shows the complete set of talents that can actually accept a point.
The meeting opens after each settled operating day. It is the bridge between what just happened and what you choose for tomorrow.
Closing the clipboard leaves the hill paused so you can build or inspect. Opening the next day closes the books and starts the morning at normal speed. The meeting explains causes and consequences without revealing a hidden perfect answer.
Difficulty changes the live economy and operating pressure. Blue Square remains the classic ruleset and the behavior of an older save with no difficulty recorded.
On desktop, WASD pans, Q and E orbit, and the wheel zooms. Keyboard shortcuts can be rebound in Settings.
On desktop, Z pauses, X runs at 1×, C runs at 3×, and V runs at 10×. While placing or moving a building, R rotates it. Otherwise, R opens Report. Today's Desk page uses J, and ride-along POV uses P. You can rebind each action in Settings.
Turn on the cell inspector from the gear menu or press I to read a tile's snow, slope, and operating cause.
Use the paused hill to compare overlays, inspect a route, and make tomorrow's changes without losing operating time.
Press Esc on desktop or use the menu button to pause, save, or return to the main menu. The region map has its own Main Menu button.
Career autosaves nightly into one of five slots. Quick Continue opens the latest slot. The slot screen can start, select, or delete saves.
Newly opened hills record the terrain survey they were built from. Older saved hills are marked as Legacy terrain when a newer survey exists. Updates never replace a saved hill's terrain, buildings, or forest baseline. Your existing mountain stays yours.
An emailed sign-in link syncs browser saves across devices. The pause menu can also download a backup file for later import.
Career founders change tools, constraints, crowd mix, and legacy. Difficulty is a separate choice and owns the broader economic pressure. The selection cards show the exact founder effects before you commit.
The Career map starts low and warm, then opens paths toward higher, colder, snowier mountains:
Each hill's story and local history arrive through the Career itself.