Forest Golf Planner is one of Kairosoft’s latest mobile titles, that’s categorically a business simulation game centered around developing and maintaining a golf park. Although the game’s title itself gives a fairly good idea of what the adventure would be all about, Forest Golf Planner surprisingly encompasses more than just managing a golf club exclusively for profits. Tending to customers on a more personal level as well as considering golf course design and club house amenities for your patrons actually takes priority over income.
The 8-bit style graphics and overall visual design of Forest Golf Planner gives an impression of it being a simple game, yet it comes with a plethora of unique features and mechanics that ensure a wide array of experiences for every player.
Forest Golf Planner is actually very different from the conventional business sim games that let you earn money continuously and ensure profits regardless of what you do. While holding the same level of simplicity and straightforwardness with most sim games, as far as game mechanics go, you can actually experience losses on a weekly, quarterly, or even an annual basis in Forest Golf Planner. Maintenance costs, along with other expenditures, are something to take seriously in the game. However, cutting costs are as good as increasing profits to ensure the business’ survival.
The tutorial session that greets you in Forest Golf Planner makes it very easy for players to secure a good grasp of its core concepts. As new features become available following progression, a quick guide is provided for it as well. Forest Golf Planner is a casual game that you can make progress in regardless of how much free time you can spend on it.
However, more time spent, especially with strategic applications will yield better results. If you have just started playing the game and aim to reach the top ranks, then our Forest Golf Planner beginner’s guide can help you not just to sustain your golf club, but to help it develop to become one of the best courses in the world!
1. Prioritize Investments That Help Earn Income
Forest Golf Planner starts your adventure off with you having a basic golf course opened as well as the club house. The first golf course you have will expectedly be as simple as it comes and your club house will practically be close to empty.
There will be furniture and fixtures available for purchase and the starting capital you have permits the purchase of several items to start improving your business. However, careless consumption of your money without being mindful of the monthly maintenance costs can lead to a net loss sooner than you expect.
Just like businesses in real life, every bit of investment you put into your enterprise is not expected to yield income returns immediately. As purchases that lead to increasing your capital takes time to generate profits, it can be expected that costs of running the business will initially be higher than the profits it can realize. As such, it will be wise to keep expenditures at a minimum for the first months, or even years of operations to ensure that you have enough cash left to cover costs of operations.
There is already an abundant supply of items for you to purchase initially, and certain milestones further unlock new furniture and decorations you can use to improve your golf courses as well as your club house. As exciting as it is to purchase everything you feel you can afford, prudence, especially on the early months or year of operations is very important.
2. Add And Level Up Different Facilities In The Club House
As the exclusive entry and exit point, as well as a regular hang out area for your loyal patrons, your club house stands as the busiest area across the entirety of your property. Where there are more people lies more opportunities for earning, so make sure to capitalize on stalls that sell different products to help sustain the golf club’s expenses. Although hearts and nature points are likened to currencies as can be seen in the upper right corner of the screen, our primary focus will be on generating coins or money.
On the main menu, which you can access via the “menu” button on the lower right side of the screen, the build feature has a separate tab for the clubhouse. Clicking on the tab and scrolling up and down will show you different facilities as well as decorations you can use to upgrade the club house. While there is limited space to work with inside the club house, it should be more than enough to leave you with plenty of items to put up, leaving more than enough space as well for customers to freely move around and enjoy it.
There are basically 2 types of items to purchase and put inside the club house: ones that can earn you income, and others that provide comfort for your patrons. Note that comfort is also given value in Forest Golf Planner as happy customers leave hearts that you can use for different purposes as well. While practically every item you install within the club house can lead to customers leaving hearts when they interact with it, it is best to purchase and install more of the stalls that directly yield additional income.
For starters, the ice cream stall, bakery, and vending machine stand as your sources of extra income but more will become available with each progress. Pay phones are an essential and unique facility that can help earn you nature points whenever customers use it. Tables, sofas, and other decorations help earn you hearts but do not directly yield added income for the club house.
For the ice cream stand, bakery, and similar stalls that generate income, stocks of items for sale will be limited. At some point, these shops will earn enough XP to reach the next level, increasing the price per unit sold, quality of merchandise, as well as its number of stock available per month.
There are extra points awarded that you can freely distribute between quality and stock. Higher quality means that its products will more likely be bought while higher stock numbers make its stock more difficult to be emptied out per month.
While the idea of always emptying stocks seem appealing, there is what we considered as lost opportunity for sales whenever this happens. You would naturally want to ensure that customers will always be able to purchase what they want, which leads to the idea of putting up another similar stall to ease the first one in terms of limited stocks.
However, keep in mind as well that every bit of item you place has its relative maintenance cost. As such, it is also ideal to look into each attributable maintenance cost relative to how much each stall makes you on average.
To have a much better idea about what each facility actually does, you can click on the menu button, then info, and finally “Facilities”. This will list all facilities inside the club house as well as how they affect your profits on a monthly basis. Based on this list, you can more or less tell if the facilities you have for earning profits are enough to sustain the maintenance costs of the other items that do not contribute to earnings.
You can tap on any item on the list to see a more detailed presentation of their attributes. It is here where you can appreciate the potted plant’s ability to generate nature points and the friendship plaza’s trait that improves your customer’s golf skills.
3. Plan The Layouts Carefully
Designing the layout of the entire golf club, from the club house down to each of the golf courses you will have, forms a huge part of what makes Forest Golf Planner a fun and exciting adventure. There is a lot of liberty that comes with how you get to design everything and the plethora of items to put up and install does not fall shy of ensuring that every player will have a unique golf club design in every respect.
There are no permanent designs in Forest Golf Planner and players can just as easily modify a layout or completely alter it much like the first time. However, removing items or even simply relocating them has its attributable costs. Although it is only 50 coins for each removal and only 200 coins for each relocation, any kind of additional costs should be avoided as much as possible, especially in the early months of your adventure.
Some objects like trees certainly need to be removed. However, this is almost entirely applicable whenever you want to put up a new golf course. Trees removed also earns you nature points, which in turn can be consumed to upgrade each golf course. Before even considering to remove trees and open up a new golf course, be sure you have more than enough capital to ensure that it can fully operate once you have built it.
For all other renovations, most especially within the club house, early ones can be avoided with a more careful layout planning to begin with. Based on our experience, the wide open space available early on as a result of having limited choices of facilities can entice you to put up more duplicates to fill up empty spaces. As you make further progress and unlock new items later, however, you will likely be inclined to swap in some facilities either for better appeal or for increase productivity.
Keep in mind that there will be plenty more new facilities and decorations that becomes available with each milestone you reach so always remember to allocate ample space for them within the club house as well as the available golf courses. Changing designs will be necessary from time to time but the less instances of it being done means the less expenses you also incur.
4. Keep Your Patrons In Mind With Each Golf Course Design
You can very much come up with your very own unique golf course design in Forest Golf Planner. So long as the base requirements of a tee box, a fairway, and a hole are satisfied on each course, the presence and amount of roughs, hazards, and other objects become considerably optional. If you think about it, there will be no such thing as a perfect golf course in the sense that everyone will love it given that each person has different opinions about its overall design.
In Forest Golf Planner, you will likely be primarily influenced by your own preferences in terms of designing your golf course. To some extent, you would perhaps be inclined to place as many items within it to make it more appealing to you. While decorations as well as every item in the golf course comes with its own set of effects, however, what is important to be mindful of is how your customers feel about it.
Forest Golf Planner will let you build and design numerous golf courses throughout your career, each one being an equal contender to the annual ranking of supposed golf courses in the world. Starting off with ranks that leave you in the thousands, you would naturally want a course in your golf club to make its way to the top 100, for starters, and slowly but steadily work towards earning a top ten spot and ultimately secure the number 1 rank.
Climbing up the ranks will most certainly require a lot of time, patience, and effort but normally operating within the usual cycle, even devoid of purchases and improvements will still yield you an increase in rank from time to time. This just means that your golf club will continue to flourish naturally over time and proper management of it along with certain upgrades from time to time merely speed up progression as fare as ranks go.
Customers in Forest Golf Planner are unlike customers in most business sim games. Each one is unique and has unique stats and preferences, making it important for you to impose a more personal touch when dealing with them. Although elements of randomness are still attributable to each customer, these mostly relate to how they proceed going into and leaving the golf club.
Your customers, just like you, will begin as beginners as far as golf is concerned. Each one will have low grade skills making them more suitable for easier and simpler golf courses. As they continue to play over and over, their skill levels increase and so do their grades from E all the way to S rank. With each one’s growing expertise comes the notion of providing more challenging courses, whether it be by making an existing course more challenging or creating a new hole that more suitably fits their supposed changing preferences.
For starters, we recommend keeping each golf course different in terms of general difficulty. Upgrades you can perform on it do not necessarily have to make it more challenging, but rather make it more appealing for visitors and patrons to spend time in.
With each new golf course you put up and develop, you can incorporate more roughs and bunkers for the challenge, but be watchful of its amount as well to not necessarily turn off even the best players in your roster of patrons.
One observation we realized after consistently watching customers play is that they cannot seem to deviate from making shots directly aimed towards the whole. This habit is beyond your control and will be something to keep in mind with each design concept you are planning to do.
What you would want to accomplish should still follow having different challenge levels associated with each golf course design but make the challenge level consistent with how easy or difficult it will be for your customers considering the habit that they can never break.
Another unique feature in Forest Golf Planner to keep in mind is that the happiest customers in the golf club tend to spend more. Golfers who score great in their games will have a very distinctive aura. These players will then be going through each available shop in your club house and basically buy something from each one.
This makes it important for you to ensure that they continue to be satisfied with their performance as it positively impacts their behavior, which ultimately affects your golf club’s profitability.
5. Keep Training Your Customers
Despite your patron’s initially low level of golf skills, each one of them can only get better over time. Every game they play will result in higher stats that will ultimately yield higher skill levels. From the main menu, you can check the info option and choose “Customers” to see each one’s level of satisfaction and skill grade. Clicking on their name will pull up a profile that shows their max distance, as well as level of control and putting.
More often than not, every customer you have will not rank up fast enough on their own and while some will request for you to train them, you will often have to take the initiative to help them get better. Under the manage option of the menu, choose “Requests”. This will lead to an option for you to train your customers. You can choose available holes for training and we recommend going with the easier hole first.
After choosing the hole where the training will take place, you will see the same list of customers as in the customers menu, showing each one’s level of satisfaction as well as skill level. Keep in mind that each lesson will cost hearts and while there are other uses for it, this is one of the most fundamental needs you need to constantly address. With promotions or advertising being the only other essential use for hearts earned, managing how you expend it is relatively easier than managing cash.
In terms of choosing which customer to prioritize over others, you should give more importance to levels of satisfaction over individual skill grades. Although there are other factors that can influence satisfaction numbers, giving the customer a lesson guarantees an increase in their satisfaction rate. A training session consists of 3 distinct parts, each with its own focus on the customer’s golf skills.
The training session actually requires active participation from you, as there will be a moving indicator on the bar and you need to time your tap right for the customer to perform in the training. It is not necessary to have perfect precision for this mini game of sorts but the closer you tap on each marker, the better the customer’s performance. The customer’s performance on each training stage determines how many points their skills will go up and the overall performance determines how much their level of satisfaction increases as well.
Beyond consistently being able to train any of your customers, it is best to prioritize those who request for it. Other than training lessons, be sure to take note of other customer requests, particularly with regard to their preferences of decorations to see in your golf course. These requests will certainly be more challenging to fulfill and will also impact the way you design each course. Likewise, any additional object you place on the golf course will impact its price as well as its difficulty.
6. Advertise As Often As Possible
Any kind of business venture will always require some kind of promotion, not just to create awareness of its existence, but also to consistently remind patrons that it is doing well enough to be able to afford to do so. Opportunities to advertise may not be a constant in Forest Golf Planner, which is why every time a campaign becomes available, you should always consider to go for it.
Campaigns are aimed towards promoting a specific golf course so it can happen that multiple campaigns are launched simultaneously especially once you have several courses up and running. There will always be 2 options on how to go about advertising. Flyers will be the cheaper alternative and cost 20 hearts for each one while online advertising will cost 60 hearts per run.
While online ads may later on provide more popularity boosts for a golf course, we recommend sticking with flyers for starters. This is because you will primarily have a limited amount of hearts to spend especially with training constantly being done to improve your customers’ skills.
There is a shop as well that you can access under the manage option in the menu. New decorations here can be bought using nature points while additional facilities can be purchased using hearts. Be sure to save some hearts for some new facilities that can further boost your club house’s popularity and profitability.
7. Prepare Your Courses Well Before Holding Contests
Once you have successfully created 3 holes within your golf course, groups of customers will be flocking in to ask that they hold a tournament inside your golf course. This is considered as a huge opportunity for you to boost earnings and have more customers as well as increase satisfaction levels of different patrons.
Primarily, groups will require to play in at least 3 different holes for a tournament to happen but what is important to consider is the group’s general preferences with regard to the dominant traits that each hole has. If you remember our quick breeze through customer requests earlier, with regard to trait preferences on the courses like wanting flowers and so on, these same preferences apply to groups that are involved in the tournament.
Before you actually begin the tournament, it helps to pay attention to the general satisfaction level the contestants will have playing on the selected holes as indicated by the smileys. Before proceeding, however, consider making some improvements to the selected holes before deciding to hold the tournament. Keep in mind that nothing can be built on any of the holes while the tournament is actively running so be sure to keep each one at their best fit before holding the contest.
Alternatively, once you are capable of opening up more holes, consider focusing on specific dominant traits for each one. This will make it more feasible for you to cater to different customers and groups not just for the regular play sessions but especially for important tournaments.
8. Follow The Path Towards Ranking Up
Progression in Forest Golf Planner can be felt across the various indicators of growth you see around you. You can tell that your golf club is moving forward from the number of customers to their growing rates of satisfaction and skill level. Likewise, having more courses open and how each becomes slowly filled with items can be a good indicator as well. Last, but definitely not the least, the amount of money you have as well as improvements in profitability reports you obtain quarterly are also reliable indicators of growth.
There are certainly an abundance of factors to consider just how much your business grows over time in Forest Golf Planner but what we consider as the ultimate indicator of progression is the course rank. The course rank starts off with 0 stars and this applies to the entirety of your golf club.
Under the info option of the menu, an overview of the golf course will tell you your golf course rank as well as other important details relating to it. Under the manage option, however, you can check the rank up option to see the qualifications you need to satisfy for you to successfully request for a course rank up.
Initially, the requirements to reach a 1-star rank requires you to open 3 holes, have an annual sales amounting to 5,000G, and be able to put up about 5 stores. Satisfying all these conditions render you eligible for a rank up, which opens plenty more of opportunities for you to improve your golf course. There is, of course, no rush in accomplishing this feat but be sure to consistently check on it and strive as much as you can to reach the next rank.
While Forest Golf Planner can certainly leave you with a lot of idle time to just watch customers come and go and do different things within the golf club, it will certainly become a much different scenario that will test your multitasking skills sooner than you think. Just the same, Forest Golf Planner tends to become quite more addictive the more things become busier especially with a plethora of new things to look into as well as new items to mix in with ones you have installed on the holes and the club house.
Although we feel that there is plenty more of features and scenarios we left for you discover, this is where we will end our Forest Golf Planner beginner’s guide. We are fairly confident that our collection of tips and strategies we discussed above will serve as a solid foundation where future strategies can be built upon. If you have, by chance, uncovered additional tips, tricks, or strategies on top of what we already provided, you are very much welcome to share them with us and your fellow readers below!