Two Point Museum: Beginners Guide to Get Started on Your Dream Museum
Here are some tips to get you started with Two Point Museum!
It has been nearly seven years since the series began, and now, the latest Two Point game is here – Two Point Museum. After letting players manage a hospital and a university, this latest game tasks players with handling a museum. Well, more accurately, players end up managing multiple museums in a quest to display all sorts of artifacts and artworks.
While managing a hospital and a university turned out to be lots of fun in the previous games, if you ask us, Two Point Museum may just be the most appealing series entry yet. After all, visiting a hospital or a university campus (at least if you’re not a student) in real life isn’t exactly a fun time. On the flip side, visiting an IRL museum is often a fun learning experience. So, building a dream museum is definitely something we were looking forward to with this new game.
Of course, our excitement for this game is also partly because we’ve played and enjoyed the previous Two Point games. But if you’re someone who has only just heard of the series, or are only now deciding to jump in, here’s a handy beginner’s guide on Two Point Museum.
But first, a quick rundown of what to expect.
All You Need to Know About Two Point Museum
Two Point is a business simulation series where your goal is to manage an organization and help it grow, hiring staff and undergoing various building expansions, all while making sure it earns enough money.
For the latest series entry, the goal is to design and run a museum. At first, players start with just one museum, but as the game progresses, they get access to more museums, with each featuring a unique theme. One may be focused on marine life, while another is an unusual museum that displays supernatural-themed exhibits.
When it comes to managing the museum, the goal is not just to make money, but also to educate visitors with various exhibits from across the world. Aside from money, another key “currency” that you’ll want to keep in mind is Buzz. In the game, Buzz is generated when visitors see a well-explained and intricately decorated museum. The more Buzz you have, the more donations you get, giving you more money to expand the museum.
Having exhibits is key to getting more Buzz, and you can get them through Expeditions. You personally won’t go to these Expeditions though as you’ll have to assign your staff members to them. These staff members are also the ones key to keeping the museum running. Thus, you’ll want enough staff to keep operations smooth, while still having some to send on Expeditions to help fill up your museum with various eye-catching exhibits.
This is the core loop of Two Point Museum, but there are plenty of systems here to chew on. Thankfully, the game is designed to be highly accessible, enough that even total newbies to simulation games can easily learn the game. This is thanks to the well-thought-of systems that make the simulation elements much more approachable, as well as the tutorial which should give you knowledge of all you need to know at the beginning.
Of course, given the game’s deep mechanics, there are things that the tutorial doesn’t highlight particularly. Thus, we have six tips that we highly recommend you follow, especially if you’re new to the Two Point series.
Tip #1 – You Can (and Should) Pause the Game
Two Point Museum has lots of mechanics and options. As such, it can be quite difficult to keep track of everything, especially when visitors start coming in droves to see the exhibits that you have on display.
Thankfully, you can make running your museum much more manageable with the pause function. While hitting the Esc key pauses the game and brings up the game and settings menu, there’s also a pause button in the bottom left corner of the HUD. This pause is different as it basically freezes the museum, but it still allows you to manage it.
Yes, that means the visitors and staff are paused, but you can re-arrange stuff in your museum, as well as add decorations and signs. You can also use this time to check your finances and plan for Expeditions. As such, this is an important tool to use so you don’t get overwhelmed. Plus, it becomes invaluable the more you expand.
Tip #2 – Make Sure to Hire and Train Staff
Even at the beginning of your Two Point Museum journey, you will need to hire staff to keep the museum running. These staff members range from ticket attendants to security – important jobs for any museum.
As your museum gets more exhibits, you’ll need more staff members to keep up. Thus, hiring staff members is important, but that doesn’t mean you can simply go on hiring sprees without much thought. That’s because staff members have traits, some of which are positive while others are negative. As such, it’s important to look at each staff member’s profile, especially as the game doesn’t automatically tell you if a staff member is a good hire or not.
When you have them hired and doing a good job, it’s also important to train them in the Staff Room. Training increases their levels, and after every five levels, they gain more abilities that are useful not only in the museum but also during Expeditions.
Tip #3 – Always do Expeditions
As we mentioned above, Expeditions are the way you get more exhibits, though they’re far from easy to complete. Each Expedition requires a select number of Experts, and success can come at a great price if carelessly done. That’s because Expeditions have potential Negative Events. For instance, an Expedition can have an event where an assigned Expert gets injured or goes missing in action, effectively removing them from the game along with all the leveling at training you’ve invested in them.
Even with the potential Negative Events, you should still always do Expeditions as much as possible as getting more exhibits is one of the key ways to progress the game. Plus, there are ways to mitigate these events, one of which is assigning the right Expert. The Expert must be trained and equipped with items like the First Aid Kit, which can prevent one potential injury. You can also increase XP with the XP-dition Journal, reduce expeditions costs with the Haggling Handbook, and more.
Some staff members have specific traits or abilities that eliminate certain Negative Events. Thus, training Experts is key to getting the most out of Expeditions without exposing your team to risks.
Tip #4 – Don’t Overhire
Because it’s recommended to always go on Expeditions, you may be tempted to hire as many people as possible. Getting a healthy team size is great, but be careful not to overhire as staff costs are often the biggest part of your expenditures.
Having too many people on your payroll can affect the profitability of your museum. Even if you’re the most charitable museum manager, it’s still important to make sure the museum doesn’t lose money so it can continue running.
Because the game doesn’t explicitly tell you that you hired too many people, what’s important to keep in mind is the Finances button on the bottom menu and the income indicator in the upper right as it shows how much staff costs are eating into your bottom line.
Another thing to keep in mind so you don’t overhire is to make sure none of your staff members are idle. If they’re not working in the museum, they would ideally be on Expeditions or training. Just don’t work them too unfairly of course.
Tip #5 – Don’t Hesitate to Switch Museums
When your first museum gets a star, you’ll then unlock another museum to manage. This happens surprisingly early on in the game, enough that we kind of neglected building the other museums up early as we focused on the first one.
Soon, you’ll realize that you shouldn’t hesitate to switch museums when you get more of them. That’s not only because of the profits mind you, but managing more at the same time is key to going on more Expeditions.
As you get more exhibits, you’ll come across Expeditions that require specific specialists which can only be hired in other themed museums. If you neglect your other museums, you’ll find yourself locked out of Expeditions, meaning growth slows down as the rate at which you get new exhibits slows down.
Tip #6 – Use Visualizations to Clearly See Your Exhibit Buzz, Decorations, and Knowledge
In Two Point Museum, you can increase the Buzz and Knowledge that exhibits help generate by adding decorations and signs in their vicinity. As such, it’s tempting to simply put as many decorations and signs as possible, though that’s not ideal as you may be simply wasting time and money. That’s because each exhibit has a cap on decorations and signs that increase their Buzz and Knowledge generation.
This can be tough to see at a glance, especially when there are lots of visitors roaming around. While you can pause, it’s often not enough to give you a good idea of how to optimize your museum more.
To help with this, the game has a Visualizations feature which gives you various display options. These include Exhibit Knowledge, Exhibit Decoration, and Exhibit Buzz. Each option transforms the view into a heatmap of sorts which highlights how many decorations and signs are near each exhibit. Thus, with just two clicks, you can see which exhibits are already fully optimized and which ones need some extra additions.
Note that these tips are helpful in the game’s first couple of hours, and while these are still important to keep in mind in later stages, the game does introduce more wrinkles to the gameplay loop to keep things fresh.
Still, if you follow these, you should have a much easier time building and managing your range of museums, all while educating visitors and making a profit along the way.
Two Point Museum is available now on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.