Waterpark Simulator Star Staff: Mama, Kade and the Rest

What the star next to a name means

The star is a credit, not a quality rating. The 1.0 patch notes explain where these characters come from, and the developer answered the obvious follow-up on the Steam forum when players noticed that some star hires were worse than ordinary applicants.

So treat a star hire the way you treat anyone else in the list: read the stat block before you pay. Some are the best in their role, some are expensive jokes, and a few players simply hire every star they see because they like the faces. Where to find the hiring screen and how the staff cap works is on the staff guide.

The two you unlock from posters

Mama and Kade are not random. Each has a poster on a wall, and clicking it adds them to your hiring list. The player who first posted her stats placed Mama's poster between the main building and the research building. It reads "got beef? MAMA'S ON IT" over a woman in pink holding a rolling pin.

1. 1Find the poster on the wall and interact with it.
2. 2Open the hiring list. The poster hire sits at the top with a star beside the name.
3. 3Check you can cover the daily pay, then hire.
4. 4Fired Mama to get a quest done? Click her poster again; one player was able to rehire her the next day.

Star hires players have rolled so far

Everyone else with a star turns up in the normal hiring list, rarely. One player got four stars by roughly day 90 of a normal game, three random plus Mama, and then none at all over the next 60 days. The list can be refreshed from the button at the top right, which costs one research point each time. One player hunting stars saved up points first and reloaded the save whenever twenty refreshes turned up nothing.

Mama after the September updates

From 13 September players on both the Steam forum and Reddit reported Mama tiring out almost immediately. One PC player posted in the developers' bug thread that her endurance was stuck at 150 with a cooldown near two minutes, even at level 3. Another compared their level 2 Mama, at 150 endurance and nearly two minutes of recovery, with CaseOh's level 1 hire showing over 500 endurance and a 30-second recovery. A third said she now loses a big chunk of energy every time she evicts someone and is always on break.

If yours is stuck at 150, the only difference anyone has pointed to is that the player with normal stats had fired and rehired her from the poster, so it is a cheap thing to try. Report it in the pinned bug thread with your version number; the updates page will say if a patch touches her.

When a star hire blocks your quest

Mama's usefulness has a cost. Several museum and Yogi steps need troublemakers to exist: clean graffiti left by vandals, tase the nasty guests, channel energy into visitors. With Mama at the entrance, players found the vandals were thrown out before they ever reached a wall.

• Since update 1.0.91 the simplest fix is the Day off button in staff management, covered on the staff guide. She stays on your books and just is not there.
• Before that, players fired her and rehired her from the poster the next day, and others suggested walling her into a small box until the quest was done.
• For the Taser step, one player tased the Mafia man outside the park repeatedly instead, which does not compete with Mama at all. The Channel Energy page has the full step.

Famous faces in the crowd are a different thing

Star staff work for you. The recognisable visitors do not. Players have spotted cameo guests including Egg, Mark E. Plier, Choco, Speedy, Cyr, Rae and Mr. Dee, and CaseOh himself turns up as a visitor in some parks, sometimes shoving the player on his way through. They are guests you cannot hire. If you stream, your own viewers can walk in as named guests or join the staff list through the Twitch integration.

More of the hidden characters, items and places are collected on the secrets page.