Is there any way to build while paused in the first game, either properly like in RCT 3, or via a workaround, like the auto-pause tool for Locomotion? I've been googling for a mod or tool or unofficial patch, but can find nothing.

If not, is there at least a way to do it in the sequel?

I don't recall any trainer to offer this functionality, some of their features might help you to work around that, like make all rides new, reset park date and such, but this sounds like overkill if you only want to win a scenario, not build a megaproject.

RCT2 has a coaster designer mode, just a featureless flat land where you can build rides to save for later... not overly helpful if you want to build something into the landscape of a given map.

Saving the game, building the coaster while ignoring the park falling apart, exporting the coaster then reloading and dropping in the prebuild one might be your best bet if its mostly overground.

So the answer is probably No.

Alright, thank you. It's not really about winning scenarios, but winning with style - making a park I can be proud to save and then return to later. And proper pause functionality would really help. Yeah, that's an acceptable workaround.

Still, I'll be leaving the thread open for a while in case somebody does know of a proper solution.

Awesome, I actually got a solution after so many years! Thank you!!

Somewhat hilariously, I only came back to this thread after it came up as the first result when googling "rollercoaster tycoon mod build while paused" just now. I've been looking for anything good to play when on my phone, preferably something ported from PC since made-for-phone games are such crap, and I thought of RCT. Well, turns out there's an Android version of RCT Classic. But immediately upon starting a mission I was turned off by this problem yet again. It's an even bigger problem on phones since the controls are so cumbersome. But the spark to play this again was still there, so I decided to check if a solution had shown up since the last time I checked, at least for the PC version. And here we are!

And if I didn't have enough good news for one day, it turns out I can also play OpenRCT2 on mobile! So I even managed to complete my original objective!

It made me so happy to see this reply! I'm glad my answer helped you out.

And I had no idea that there's a mobile version; thanks for that info!