Vets not visiting enclosures for "a long time."

[Roxxsmom]

I generally stick with the default setting (1x a year, I believe) for vet visits to habitats. I found it worked better not to assign vets to work zones. With a decent-size zoo that has 35 or so habitat species, I usually have four vets trained up fully, and this will work fine for long stretches of play time. But at random intervals I will get a bunch of alerts that vets have not visited several habitats for "a long time." And it always happens in clusters, never just a lone habitat that was neglected.

To be clear this isn't related to crises, such as disease outbreaks, or anything that would take extra time for the vets. Also, this is franchise, and everything is researched up to full, so none are doing research. When I check the vets' workloads, they are all green.

So I don't understand why all the vets are fine with their workload and have no special crises to manage, but suddenly a bunch of enclosures are all being ignored at once all over the zoo. It's like they all stop working at the same time or something, but I can't find them stuck in a bait ball of zoo guests or anything like that.

There was one time I got so POed, I fired the entire vet staff and hired new ones. And interestingly enough, the new untrained vets did a better job than the old "five star" ones had. For a while, at least.

Anyone else encounter this issue? How to people organize their veterinary staff in larger zoos with multiple work zones?

 

[Cocolori]

Are they geographically in the same area? It may be that the vets just haven't 'patrolled' over there in a while by complete chance (none of them chose the correct path fork. I have no idea how it works and whether their inspections are radius triggered but like you I don't tend to put vets in workzones and occasionally get these alerts. Mine are usually one enclosure at a time though. Another possibility is that the game might run a periodic check so all the enclosures haven't been visited for variable amounts of time but the alert notification only checks every 30 in game minutes or something?

 

[iloveyourzoos]

Lowering the default interval for vet visits one rung might help with this particular notification. My sense is that the intervals determine when they get reminded and add the visit to their to-do list. It sounds like the default is enough for your layout most of the time (which is why the notifications happen infrequently), but occasionally they're lining up with breaks, other duties, or being on another side of the park, such that the notifications happen occasionally.

Lowering the default visit time should solve this because the cumulative time between visits wouldn't add up to the theshold the game has. But of course it will also increase their workload, so could have unintended effects.

If it's only happening occasionally, you might also decide to just leave things as they are, and simply call the vets whenever the occasional notice comes up. Especially if there don't seem to be any consequences other than having to occasionally remind them.

Another strategy is to remember that each visit resets the clock on their to-do reminders. and that calling a vet artificially moves that item up to the top of the list. So if you're getting multiple notifications at once, you may try to spread them out. You said that you have 35 habitats, so choose a year of in-game time to focus on vet rotations, and artificially call vets to 3 habitats each month (or 1 call every 10 days). Once you've set the schedule, then the notifications might stop coming in batches like that?

Good luck!

 

[Roxxsmom]

Thanks for the input. With larger zoos, I do try and put an extra vet building or two in so vets don't have to travel so far from enclosures to the clinics when animals are sick or injured. I don't know what effect this might have.

I was wondering about lowering the default visit times. One concern I had that it could make the issue worse by increasing the vets' workloads and lowering the threshold for game alerts. Still, it's worth a try. Like many things in the game, it's a sporadic issue, so it may take a while to know if changing the settings made a difference or not.

I find I can usually resolve the issue by going to individual habitats and pressing the call vet button, though the game doesn't make it easy. When I press on the alert, it takes me to the relevant habitat, the habitat is highlighted, but there is ability to open tabs and click on that button without first clicking on something else (a nearby building or animal) and re-clicking the relevant habitat gate. I don't know why the game won't just let you access the tabs when it takes you to the habitat with the alert.

What's frustrating about getting a huge pile of alerts at once, though, because the game lumps them together at some point (in excess of 15 or 20 or something like that) and you can no longer even access the individual alerts. It just says there are problems with multiple habitats or animals with a number and no way to tell which ones are an issue.

 

[iloveyourzoos]

What's frustrating about getting a huge pile of alerts at once, though, because the game lumps them together at some point (in excess of 15 or 20 or something like that) and you can no longer even access the individual alerts. It just says there are problems with multiple habitats or animals with a number and no way to tell which ones are an issue.

Yep! And even worse, there is often one even more important alert that comes at the same time and gets hidden by the volume.