As a combination of management and sim game, Two Point Museum offers its version of the usual campaign or mission-based mode. It puts you in the shoes of an up-and-coming curator who’s tasked with renewing several less-than-stellar museums and gives you a wide variety of challenges across different locations.
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But, what if you finish the campaign? Or maybe you just want an easier experience with fewer restrictions? Or do you just really like a specific map and only want to play on it for a while? It might be time to dive into Sandbox Mode and explore the freedoms it offers.
Sandbox Mode, Explained
Unlike Campaign, which gives you pretty strict guidelines and a bit of a story to follow, Sandbox Mode is completely open-ended, and this option is available from the main menu.
Sandbox Mode isn’t as restrictive with locations and what’s available, so you automatically have access to every type of Expert regardless of the map you pick.
This means you can have Aquariums in the naturally hot climate of Bungle Wasteland’s map, or run a Space-themed museum at the seaside Passwater Cover sooner and easier than you might in Campaign.
Some things still need to be unlocked, like certain, more advanced Points of Interest and Workshop Projects that were story-related, like the Judgement Cloud.
You also have access to every type of Workshop Project you’ve unlocked in the Campaign, and even some you haven’t if you pick Casual Mode, and this includes more location-or-focus-specific ones, such as the Nets used for Marine-related Expeditions.
It gives you over 20 save slots, and a sizable amount of customization to make things easier or more difficult by allowing you to select one of three basic difficulty modes, and then further adjust several individual stats.
For example, if you’re someone who loves to decorate and make a super-uniquely designed museum, you can use Sandbox Mode as a trial run for designs you’d like to incorporate into the Campaign or give yourself tons of starting cash so you don’t have to worry about going broke designing your museum.
For people who like a harder difficulty or find the Campaign a bit too easy at times, you can use Hardcore mode to customize and make yourself a variety of ultra-challenging saves to play around with, all without worrying about messing up your Campaign’s progress.
Sandbox Mode Options
The first option you’ll get in Sandbox Mode is to pick one of the many save slots, and then what location you want to start at.
You’ll get a choice between any of the locations you’ve unlocked in the Campaign except for the Campaign-exclusive Exhibition Levels, and more will be available as you unlock them.
You aren’t locked to a single location in Sandbox Mode, as you still have a version of Curator Class available in this mode, so you can go to the other locations you didn’t pick in the beginning and start museums there as well, either for free or for Kudosh.
The second option you’ll get is a list of nine customizable settings for that Sandbox save that you can use to tailor your experience, and with three different modes you use as a baseline – Casual, Career, and Hardcore.
|
Setting |
Casual |
Career |
Hardcore |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Objective Progression |
Total Buzz |
Traditional |
Traditional |
|
Thief Threat |
None |
Low |
Medium |
|
Plots |
All Locked |
All Locked |
All locked |
|
Starting Cash |
1,000,000 |
250,000 |
50,000 |
|
Starting Kudosh |
1000 |
100 |
0 |
|
Donation Multiplier |
150% |
100% |
75% |
|
Salary Multiplier |
100% |
100% |
100% |
|
Min Monthly Grant |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
Max Monthly Grant |
10,000 |
7,000 |
5,000 |
You can edit the settings of any existing save to rename it and tweak some of the settings, but you’re limited to changing the Name, Objective Progression, Thief Threat, Donation and Salary multiplies, and the Min and Max Monthly Grants.
All the stats in each mode can be customized to your liking, regardless of what they start as, but there is a big difference between the modes that can’t be changed is the maximum values of some options.
- Casual gives you much more lenient maximum values, allowing you to focus on building, expanding, and decorating your museum as much as you want as soon as you start.
- Career gives you moderate values, and makes it almost one-to-one with Campaign as far as difficulty if you don’t change the settings.
- Hardcore gives you the most restrictive maximum settings, forcing you to make do with much lower cash to start with, and will make you really plan and make your museum as efficient as possible with little room for error, even if you adjust certain settings.
|
Setting |
Casual |
Career |
Hardcore |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Starting Cash Maximum |
2,000,000 |
500,000 |
100,000 |
|
Starting Kudosh Maximum |
10,000 |
1000 |
500 |
All Sandbox Options Explained
|
Sandbox Option |
What It Does |
|---|---|
|
Objective Progression |
Lets you decide the overall type of progression objectives you’ll be given during the Sandbox version of Rising Star mission objectives. You can pick between Total Buzz, which is just objectives based on meeting a certain amount of Buzz, or Traditional, which gives you a varied selection of objectives, similar to that in Campaign. |
|
Thief Threat |
Lets you dictate how Thieves will work in that Sandbox save. You can eliminate the threat, or choose between three other settings: Low, Medium, and High. Low means you’ll have a small number of Thieves that show up occasionally, and on rare occasions, one of the Thieves’ Guilds will target you. Medium means you’ll have a moderate number of Thieves that show up somewhat often, and you’ll be targeted by the Thieves’ Guilds more frequently. High means you’ll have a large number of Thieves, they’ll show up at a high frequency, and you’ll have more of the Thieves’ Guilds showing up alongside normal Thieves. |
|
Plots |
Lets you decide whether you want all the plots on a map locked and they have to be unlocked via objectives like normal, or whether you have them all available from the start. |
|
Starting Cash |
Lets you decide how much cash you want to start with, from between zero and 500,000. |
|
Starting Kudosh |
Lets you decide how much Kudosh you want to start with, from between 0 and 1000. |
|
Donation Multiplier |
Lets you decide how much or how little Donations will give you in percent, from between zero, meaning they give you nothing, and 200 percent, which doubles how much a person would give normally. |
|
Salary Multiplier |
Lets you decide how much or how little of a Salary Increase your Staff will want from anything that makes them want a salary increase, such as training, in percent. It ranges from between zero percent and 200 percent, which doubles how much they would want. |
|
Min Monthly Grant |
Lets you decide the minimum amount of money you can get from a Monthly Grant of between 0 cash and 7,000 cash. The Monthly Grant is based on your museum’s overall performance and Star Rating. |
|
Max Monthly Grant |
Lets you decide the maximum amount of money you can get from a Monthly Grant of between 0 cash and 7,000 cash. |
Ideas For Sandbox Mode
With how open-ended it is and the different values between the modes, you can go all-out making a museum, or give yourself the toughest challenge possible, and everything in between.
It can be tough to decide what you want to do first in Sandbox Mode, or what sort of challenge you want to start with, so here are a handful of ideas you might want to try:
- If you want something tough, start with Hardcore mode with only the base amount of cash, and challenge yourself to make each plot of your museum a different theme. You can forbid yourself from venturing outside that theme until you unlock those plots, and with the lack of starting funds and optionally lowered donations, you can further make yourself need only to use lower Buzz Exhibits.
- For a fun challenge, you could start with the Casual mode and give yourself a massive sum of starting cash, such as the base 1,000,000, but raise the Thief Threat to High. With that money, you could hire tons of Security Guards and use the funds to set up a full surveillance system as soon as you begin. This would give you something similar to the County Archives Security Exhibition, but a bit easier of a start, and a personal objective could be to complete the Rising Star objectives without losing all your exhibits early on.
- If you want something more relaxed but different, go for Career mode and give yourself the maximum amount of money, with only minimally changed options except for All Plots Unlocked. Go ahead and demolish the starting museum on your map choice, and pick one of the other plots to start from. You can give yourself a personal objective of building up to making something on that original plot last.
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