planet zoo journal #1: opening the garden of arden
In December, I stumbled upon PawsBuild’s YouTube channel and started watching his backlog of videos. My favorite series was the Ethical Zoo with a focus on animal conservation, recycling, and eco-focused construction materials. I went back and forth during several holiday and winter sales weighing how much I might enjoy playing the game myself versus watching someone who knows what they’re doing. Although I have an extensive history with farming games and dollhouse simulation like The Sims, I have had less success with city builders where pathing, utilities, and population management is a major focus. But I kept getting pulled into the plants and animals. They’re just so cute!
After a day of doing chores, I treated myself to the base game. I struggled with career mode’s lack of explanations, and I decided to dive straight into franchise mode instead.
I’m having SO much fun even with underestimating how big habitats should be, wonky path placement, and not really knowing how to construct my own buildings. But seven years (~five hours of gameplay - I pause a lot) into the zoo, we’re doing pretty well for ourselves!
Here's what I've accomplished:
Lay down paths creating a Y-split to two habitats and plopped down all of the necessary staff buildings to get started. I used the pre-built structures since I'm not confident in my building skills.
Installed the Collared Peccary habitat. We currently have six adults, a couple juveniles (with more on the way), and released two adults into the wild. This is one of the first habitats you encounter when entering the zoo and it's a pretty big pull for guests!
Installed the Baird's Tapir habitat. We have two adults and one juvenile and have released one adult into the wild. This is the other main habitat from the split entrance. It's not as robust since we keep the numbers smaller, but the babies are adorable!
Added an Exhibit for Golden Poison Frog and Lehmann's Poison Frog and maxed out research on both. I've seen a lot of tips emphasizing that exhibits are very useful for the early game because you can earn a good amount of money from them and that's been true so far! I've kept the highest quality frogs in storage for when our current population start to age, but aside from that, we have been raising plenty of offspring.
Added an Information Center and Loony Balloons Stand near the exhibits to start increasing our income from additional sales. It's funny seeing the balloons floating off in the air (though I do feel a little bad that those probably aren't very good for the environment...)
Increased education after first inspection. My education was really low at first because I accidentally installed advertising screens rather than education ones. After I fixed this and added a few extra speakers, our education has been steadily improving! My longer goal is to have an Educator on staff so that we can do talks/feedings.
Installed a Giant Galapagos Tortoise habitat with two adults, realized it would be too small if they had babies, expanded it, moved over the water filtration system and added extra power. I love the plants in the Tortoise exhibit but wish that I had more confidence building rock structures! I would have liked for them to have a rocky hard structure rather than one of the pre-built ones, but maybe I can work on that as a goal. The baby tortoises are SO stinking cute and we've added some extra feeding enrichment for them.
Added a drink and food stand with a little park area with benches. Now that we're selling consumables, I also placed more bins around the park to help with litter.
Installed an American Bison habitat with two adults who had a baby already! I made this area extra large because ideally I would like to add a few Pronghorn Antelope for cross-species enrichment; however, the market never has any affordable males. I have two good female antelope in storage for now, but it's just a waiting game to find them at least one mate. For now, the bison are quite a spectacle on their own!
Hired more staff (a second vet, mechanic, and keeper) to help manage our research and workload. Our mechanic was especially getting a bit overworked and never had time to do research because there were always barrier repairs that needed attention.
Added an exhibit for Gila Monsters and Mexican Red Kneed Tarantula. Originally, I really wanted this to be an enclosed exhibit area so that visitors could escape the rain, but I got too scared to build. I need to spend a little time in sandbox mode to experiment with structures so that I can spruce this area up.
And that's where we're at right now! We have well exceeded our starting funds (40,000 - > 113,000) and our Americas section is starting to feel relatively robust. I still have ideas before I want to dip into other continents, such as:
Add Timberwolves and Grizzly Bear in prominent locations. I want these to be big features that have a spot set aside for education talks. I want a cave for each animal and lots of trees for the bears and a big water area. I might experiment with a recessed habitat where people can peer down. I think the wolves will be near the Collared Peccary and the Bears will be near the Bison. These will flank the staff buildings.
Somewhere between those features, I want to add another shopping area with covered exhibits featuring more reptiles such as snakes and iguanas. This will add another sitting area since because it will be a bit of a walk to around that portion of the park.
There are still many more spiders and crawlies to add as well. I can fit a few more in the existing shopping area, but the others might get tucked on the other side of the bison and around the tortoises.
That's plenty for now! I haven't settled on which continent we will expand to next... Maybe Europe on the side with the wolves and bears and Asia next to the tortoises. We might open a second gate for Africa in the back once we reach that section. But that's getting way ahead of myself; I don't want to expand too quickly and get overwhelmed and hit with lag.
One step at a time ʕ ꈍᴥꈍʔ