Theme Hospital Hints
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PC | Submitted by AndyHints
Using the Build Time
The first thing you should think about when you enter a new level is Planning. If you don't plan your hospital well enough, you'll soon run out of space, and your patients will be wandering all over the place. When you start a level, in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen you'll see the Build Timer. This gives you about two to three months of free time to plan and build the start of your hospital without the worry of patients. Use the time wisely because you cannot get it back.
Think of designing your hospital as a production line. What are patients going to use first, and are they going to need them again? What rooms will they use last, and will it matter if they are a long walk away? Think about dividing your hospital up into diagnosis and cure sections, as these two areas of your hospital will be completely separate. Once a patient has been diagnosed and sent to be cured, he or she will rarely return. Corridors for your patients to walk in are important too. Design your hospital so that all your rooms have easy access, and leave plenty of space to put benches outside rooms. Patients hate standing up, so you'll need about three benches per room.
First, you'll need a receptionist to welcome patients to your hospital. Always place her at the entrance so that she can see the new patients right away. Remember to leave some space for a few benches and another reception desk or two. You won't need a huge reception area, as your aim should be to get your patients seen by a GP (general practitioner) as soon as possible. Also, after a year or so, your single receptionist may not be able to cope with all the patients entering your hospital, so you'll need to put down some more reception desks and receptionists.
Build a GP Office
Next, you should have a GP's Office. This is the most important room in your hospital because patients will need to visit a GP first, and it is the only room where a patient can be told what his or her disease is. All the other diagnosis rooms do is increase the diagnosis percentage.
As your GP's Office is going to be visited first, always build it near the receptionist. This cuts down the distance the patient has to walk. It's a good idea to leave space for a few more GP's Offices for when you expand. Building them in one place may seen messy, but it allows you to quickly look at each of them without hunting them down. The lines of patients at a GP's Offices can grow quite quickly, so keep a constant watch.
Diagnosis and Research Rooms Are Next
Your diagnosis rooms are the main machinery of your hospital. They will be constantly seeing patients and adding to the patient's diagnosis percentages. It's a good idea to keep these rooms close to the GP's Offices so the patients don't have so far to walk. Leave space for more diagnosis rooms as they will get full up quickly and the more you have of them, the better.
Not all the diseases will use every diagnosis room, so it's no good just building a General Diagnosis Room and a Psychiatric Room and hoping it will all go well, because it won't. You'll soon get lots of patients with incomplete diagnosis, and when you start sending them all to be cured, you'll have loads of deaths on your hands.
The only way to get more diagnosis rooms is to research. You should build a Research Room as soon as possible and get your doctors studying. Put at least a few researchers in the Research Room and adjust the percentages on the Research Screen otherwise nothing will be done. It may be expensive to do, but you'll reap the rewards later. The Research Room can be built anywhere in your hospital as patients will rarely go there.
The Cures Section is Last
The last section of your hospital is your Cures section. The first Cure Room you should build is a pharmacy, as this room is used the most. Later in the level, you may need more than one pharmacy, especially for emergencies, so keep some space free. The Cure Rooms are only going to be visited once, so they can be on the outer reaches of your hospital. These Cure Rooms may be expensive, but as soon as a few patients get cured in them, your reputation will grow, and even more patients will arrive. The money will start rolling in. Operating Theaters and Psychiatry rooms are different from other Cure Rooms. Only think about building these once you have the staff to use them (two surgeon or psychiatrists), otherwise you'll have massive lines of patients outside the rooms and no way of curing them. As Psychiatry Rooms both diagnose and cure patients, you should put them somewhere between the Diagnosis and Cure sections to keep the patients flowing smoothly.
Support Staff and Rooms
The final rooms which you will have to think about placing carefully are the Staff Room and the Toilets. Staff Rooms can be out of the way of the hustle and bustle of your hospital, but Toilets will need to be where patients can get to them.
Although you will need only one Staff Room at the start, as you begin expanding, you'll have more staff and a wider area to cover. Your Staff Room will soon become overcrowded and congested, and patients will be forced to wait. You can build more than one Staff Room, so spread them out around your hospital. The further a member of staff has to walk, the longer it will take them to get back and this can create massive lines.
You can get away without having any Toilets in your hospital, but patients will quickly get angry and urinate on the floor. Left unchecked, you could be facing a vomit wave, epidemics, and failure. Build a Toilet in each new plot and close to Cure Rooms, especially the Operating Theater. Patients will only be wanting the toilet after spending a few months in your hospital, by which time they will be waiting for their cures.
Advanced Tactics
Now that you have your hospital up and running, keeping it maintained is another matter. You need to know your win criteria for that level. Look at the Status Screen and keep a close eye on the win criteria bars. If you put your mouse pointer over the bars, tool tips will appear telling you how much you have and how much you need to get 100 percent in that criteria. Hospital Value is all of your material wealth and can only be boosted by buying new objects. If you just need Hospital Value to win, then buy some more rooms the more expensive, the better. You can then do the reverse if you need money but have plenty of Hospital Value. Selling some rooms could help you finish a level sooner. Some levels will not require you to gain lots of cures or money so take advantage of this.
Buying good staff is very important because, as the level progresses, the staff available for hire will become worse and worse. Don't be afraid to buy lots of staff early, especially surgeons, even if you haven't got an Operating Theater. These doctors can still work in normal Diagnosis Rooms, and they will take another worry off your mind. If you still don't have enough doctors of a certain type, which may happen a lot in the later levels, train them and teach other doctors the skills in the Training Room. Only consultant doctors can teach, but it doesn't matter if none of your consultants have the right skill. Just train a doctor with that skill to consultant level and then set him teaching instead. Try and teach him multiple skills while you are doing this. This will then give your staff more than one possible job, and then you'll always have skilled staff, like surgeons, at hand. You can also put a skeleton and a bookcase in the Training Room. These will speed up the training of the doctors.
Hire more staff than you need because you may have a sudden rush of patients. Also, staff will need to go to the Staff Room, so others will have to take over their jobs. Be careful that you don't overdo it though, as all these staff will cost money.
Plants, radiators, and fire extinguishers are often difficult to place down. You'll need lots of radiators as staff and patients get cold quickly. Put radiators in the most frequently used rooms and in corridors. Corridors and rooms are completely separate when it comes to heating, so a radiator in a corridor will not heat a room. Larger rooms will require more heating, but the radiators do not have to be spread out as they will each heat the whole room. On the other hand, the heat in a corridor will depend on how far away a patient is from the radiator. If you have hardly any radiators, then they will have no effect on staff and patients, and they will freeze. Place them by seating and room entrances. Think about placing drinks machines close by as well, as the hotter a patient it, the more thirsty he will get.
Plants require watering, so the more plants you have, the more Handymen you will need. Plants make patients happy, but dead plants have a negative effect, so keep on top of them. A Handyman will not water a plant he can't get to, so keep a good eye on them.
Fire extinguishers may seem useless, but they do the same job as plants and don't need watering. They also delay the explosions of machines, therefore they are more useful in rooms. Attracting patients to your hospital is difficult. A good way to get your reputation up is to drop your prices a bit. This will give you the edge over the computer players you need. Try not to kill patients. This may sound obvious, but it does affect your reputation, and you can get large cash bonuses at the end of the year for not killing any patients.
When you have a Research Room and you research the Computer or the Atom Analyzer, if you have the money, buy one, as they will accelerate all your research. Once you have researched all the rooms, don't stop there. Research all your drugs to 100 percent, otherwise you'll be killing your patients unnecessarily. Improving your machines is also a bonus because a machine with a high strength will require less maintenance and will not be damaged by earthquakes as much.
Keep repairing machines because the more times they have been used before being repaired, the more chance there will be that the strength will be reduced by one. Don't let the strength go below about seven, as it will then tend to drop rapidly and blow up when you're not looking. Replace these machines when you need to as well.
Earthquakes can severely damage you machines, so if you get an earthquake warning, slow the game down by pressing '1' and look at all your machines. Repair those that need it and replace those which are in danger. Don't build a room once you've had the warning, as it will most likely be damaged and a possible waste of money.
Shortcuts
To help you play the game well, there are a number of shortcuts you should learn. On the Patient Information Panel, you can click on the spy windows with the left mouse button to zoom to that patient, and then right click to cycle through all the other patients in the hospital. You can do the same with each type of staff and left clicking on the staff photo will take you to the Staff Screen.
If you right click on either the emergency timer or the epidemic timer, you will bring up the Information Panel for the first member of that emergency or epidemic. If you keep right-clicking on the timer, you'll cycle through all those patients. This way, you can easily see who has what disease and then you can quickly move them around your hospital.
Epidemics can be a pain on busy levels. Make sure that you can handle one before trying to cover it up. If it is a visual disease, then you may not have the cure machines for it. The same may be the case for emergencies. If you have an emergency of more than six for only one room, you will probably not be able to cure them all in time. Leave space for extra rooms. It is often a good tactic to just build the room for the emergency and then delete it afterwards. You'll still make a profit if the room is cheap.
If you don't take care of your staff very well, they will start asking for pay rises or bonuses. Letting them rest frequently is one way of preventing this, so lower the Staff Rest bar on the Policy Screen to about 30-50 percent as staff start to get annoyed when they are 60 percent tired. Make sure you have plenty of Staff Rooms to cope with the increase of resting staff. Plants and Fire Extinguishers make staff happier as well, and happy staff make better diagnosis' and cures.
Lines
One of the most important parts of Theme Hospital are the lines for rooms. If you let your lines get too long, then you'll start to get traffic jams. People will leave, vomit, and die. Considering this, it's a good idea to watch your lines and keep them to a bare minimum. If your line gets above four, then build another room. Rooms that will clog up quickly will be the GP's Office and the Pharmacy.
If you still have problems with the lines, then adjust the Max Queue Sizes on the Queue Panel (to bring this up, click on the room's door). If you have a lot of GP's Offices in a row, then careful manipulation of these numbers will even out the lines in the rooms and then you can leave them to run themselves. If you have patients dying or part of an epidemic, then you can move patients to the front of the line by bringing up the Queue panel and then dragging the patient on to the door symbol.
It is a good idea to watch single rooms, particularly the Psychiatric Room, when you only have one psychiatrist because he can sometimes go into a different room if the line is empty. He will then stay in that room and not notice when the Psychiatric Room has a six person line. The best way to combat this is to hire more psychiatrists as one can take over once the other has left.
Litter Bug
Once you have entered the cheat for all items on the difficult level and wait for the computer to buy a building. Select your litter bomb and place them all of over their building and "KABOOM" the computer's hospital will be covered in litter!!!!!!
Theme Hospital Cheats
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PS1 | Submitted by James Tyrrell (Chimpmasterblue@hotmail.com)Level passwords
1. S, S, T, O, S, X, S, X
2. X, O, S, T, T, O, S, X
3. O, O, T, S, X, T, O, T
4. S, T, O, S, X, X, T, O
5. O, T, S, O, X, T, O, S
6. S, T, S, O, X, S, X, O
7. S, T, T, O, X, S, T, O
8. X, T, S, O, T, O, S, X
9. T, S, X, T, O, X, T, S
10. O, S, X, T, S, X, O, S
11. T, O, S, O, T, S, O, T
12. O, S, X, X, S, O, S, T
O= CIRCLE
T= TRIANGLE
S= SQUARE
X= X
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PS1 | Submitted by SerenaNo More Rats
If rats have infested your hospital, just cover the rat hole with a drinks machine and in a few minutes the hole disapears.
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PS1 | Submitted by Paul SkellyExtra Constuction Time(For building rooms)
When you first start the level pause the game and go to the stop-watch symbol and press L1
until the indicator reaches the left of the bar then carry on with your game and the days will be longer so you have more time to build.
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PS1 | Submitted by AnonymousClean Hospital
If you have a full hospital that is very dirty, you can save and reload it to get it sparkling clean again!
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PC | Submitted by GamesRadarCheats
To enter the codes you have to get a fax first. Press the green ? button that shows up from time to time at the bottom of the screen to get to it. Then just use the mouse to press the numbers on the fax machine and press the send button.
ý 7827 - After you win the level go to a rat shoot level
ý 24328 - Enable the following codes during game play
ý SHIFT-C - Get $2000
ý CTRL-C - All research completed
ý CTRL-M - Skip to the end of the month
ý CTRL-Y - Skip to the end of the year
ý CTRL+S - Doctor with special stills
ý CTRL+E - Makes one emergency
ý SHIFT+1 - Extra patient
ý SHIFT+I - Change patients illness
ý F11 - Level lose
ý F12 - Level won
