Hello internet. Welcome to part 3 of... let's just call it PPCCM right? In part 2 I actually built a coaster and started work on the 'fantasy' themed park segment. But with growing popularity and population comes the need to spend way too much money on syrup diluted into water. So it's time to pay some attention to the main street.

Before even that though, there's the small issue of block brakes for the first coaster to work out. While I was taking a break from playing, I thought about it a little more and fixed my original plan. All this means for this case is moving the block brakes before the U-turn they were originally after and setting up some loading options:

Here's some block brake tips:

• Since block brakes slow or stop the train, it would be best to put them at the peak of a hill, where the train is moving slowest anyway.
• ... But ideally you want to set up the timing and flow of the coaster so that the trains never need to stop at all, except during breakdowns blocking the station.
• If the train has to stop on the brakes, your Excitement rating will suffer since people don't like waiting around and you may also be lacking speed you would have otherwise carried through from before the brakes.
• You can only run one fewer train than there are 'sections' in your track. You always start with effectively two sections, separated by the station and the lift hill (even if the section between the station and lift hill is non-existent).
• The easiest way to get two trains running at once is to use the minimum departure interval/max waiting time to force the second train out of the station and onto the lift hill just before the first reaches the block brakes.

In this coasters case, it's slightly inverted since the lift hill is after the brakes, but more or less the same idea. Also bear in mind that the train has to be in the station long enough for all the people to disembark and the next set to load. For Loony Turns, that time can be very low, since each car is very small. This is where the Entrance/Exit planning for coasters also come into play. It's almost always best to load on one side and disembark on the other, since you can then have the Exit much more central to the train and reduce how long people are slowly walking along the station platform.

Small problem, a lot of text. But now here's some pictures again as we move back to the main street. First, it's time to use the 'box of OCD preparedness' to line up the new building. Originally, I was going to just build the new building from the box directly but since I'd already trained the staff of my stalls and didn't want to go through the hassle of splitting and recombining buildings, I instead used the box to align two sets of walls:

Then came a little fiddling around getting the shops in a decent position with even paths. It's usually a good idea to set the shops a little way back from your main paths to leave space for the queues of people:

I quite like the modern, Planet Coaster style buildings for the generic unthemed central street, so I reused the old buildings parts whilst making the new one and shamelessly stole design ideas from the premade blueprints. Here's the basic shape of the building finished:

And here's the fancied up and decorated product complete with sky-bridges to nowhere for now, and of course everyone's favourite mascot illuminated above his shop:

While I was building this though, I also began to realise that just having shops in the central street wasn't really going to work. The park was already getting quite spread out, and currently very one sided. The temporary rides in the main street are still keeping some population around, but having another shop out in the castle area will be worth it. So I made a little shack.

Meanwhile, the first coaster has been running smoothly with it's new configuration:

Monthly profit has risen to over $2000 from it's previous level of around $800, just from the increased throughput the block brakes allow. So with all that money flowing in I've also been busy with research. I've now unlocked every 'flat' ride, so to end part 3 here's a little arrangement of signs I built out in the field to help me figure out a reasonably logical way to partition the rides between the different themed areas. Some of them are obvious, like the Victory swinging ship for the pirate theme and Looper for the Sci-Fi theme, but many are a stretch or just plain whatever was most generic and left over:

In part 4 the rest of the fantasy themed flat rides get built, along with the appropriate scenery.

Side note/Edit: Just after posting this, the Planet Coaster Winter update hit. It sounds like a decent selection of fixes and new content, even a couple of new flat rides. Most notable things that I see in the patch notes are a new 'reputation/ageing' mechanic for rides, better staff management in the management window, syncing of shop prices toggle and some more subtle changes to coaster construction and simulation. Will be interesting to see how much those might change the stats of my currently running coasters, but most of the new stuff won't appear before the next couple of parts; I've already buffered a little ahead of here.