Discussion Thread #3 - What do you wish you'd known before starting your first zoo?

[Bearcat9948]

I wish I knew that I’d get there eventually. I’d say that I underestimated what a steep learning curve it would be. I still struggle with making buildings. Exploring zoos and blueprints from the workshop helped enormously but I had a frustrating start.

Yeah. I should've learned to stay off the Planet Zoo subreddit for a little while when I was starting out. It's frustrating being proud of your first habitat and then PoisonBlade posts a 1 to 1 recreation of the Petra or something lol.

This is really interesting to me since I see lot of people doing exactly this - why do you think you should start elsewhere, and where would you recommend starting?

I think generally, and I'm basing this off myself and also conversations with others, when you start a new map it can be pretty overwhelming to just have this gigantic open void. There are so many possibilities that it's easy to overload your brain, and you end up not actually building anything because you're overthinking things. That's why it's become more popular for people to download terraformed maps that some brave souls have spent hours crafting and uploading to the steam workshop.

I think it's generally easier to get started when constraints of terrain (hills, rivers, cliffs etc) force you to build vs a giant open, flat field.

If I don't find a zoo that fits what I'm looking for, and I just start with the void-zoo maps, I usually try and picture what the first habitat would be and go from there. All my zoos usually have a base habitat that's unrelated to any section (like Africa, or animals of the rainforest etc), usually it's flamingos or lemurs or something else small. Around that I build a welcome area with restrooms and some food options, and then work backwards and forwards accordingly.

 

[Iben]

It's hard for me to say what I would have done differently in my first zoo, because that zoo was in ZT2 aaaages ago. The lessons I learned there have essentially carried over so I can give a of those tips here as well!

• Plan your zoo well, but don't overplan. It's easy to get lost in the entire planning phase and precisely plan out everything to the smallest of details. Once you're then done planning, the amount of stuff you want to do will be so overwhelming that your plan will just remain... well... a plan. Give yourself room to breath and to experiment whilst you're building. If a plan isn't working don't feel bad about scrapping things (even if it's half your zoo ).
• Draw out your plans. You don't have to do it on paper, you can just use the terrain brushes ingame to give yourself an idea of which areas will be where and how they will intersect with each other. It will give you a much better idea of how everything flows together. But as always; give yourself room to also change things in the moment if need be.
• There is such a thing as "good enough". Not everything is going to be your best work nor has to be. Sometimes good enough is good enough.
• Think about the story before you start building. The story influences your buildings. If you're making a small roadside zoo you're not going to have big modern buildings, if you're making a big billion dollar zoo you're probably not going to have very simple brick buildings.
• Zoos don't usually just build an exhibit and then another and another and another. Exhibits are usually grouped in zones, so it's a good thing to try to think of those before you start building. A zone can have whatever story behind it you want. It can be a country, a location, a species, you name it and it will work!

I'd wish I'd knew all the release dates for the DLC's, so I know when I need to start on a habitat for a particular animal in one of the DLC's.

But, and I know that this is probably going to be a bit tiresome for the CM's here, I kinda agree with this. Looking at Tharmachati which is my big "first" zoo in Planet Zoo, I do feel a bit limited with not knowing where the game plans to go. I'm not saying I'd need like a full on release date schedule with every animal in it, far from it, but rather a vague roadmap that gives us an idea of what's to come.

This is a building game after all, and a lot of us like to plan and map out what we want to do in our zoos, and now we're often faced with things like "hmmm this area I planned out for an aviary, should I just build that with the mesh pieces with some font piece birds; or should I wait until we potentially get an aviary pack with actual birds".

On the other hand I totally understand that things need to be kept a bit more secretive, but I think there's a spot right in the middle that could work.

 

[Eltanin Casciani]

Also, I always recommend dedicating the first hours to terraforming the map. Flat zoos can get boring over time, while unevenness forces you to find creative solutions.️

I really love the terraforming idea, I think that's a good one for me to keep in mind! I'm used to flat surface areas for working with due to far too many hours in the Sims games, but variation is part of what makes PZ builds interesting!

I started recreating a real life zoo, which was too big to fit in the map, so I shrunk it down. But not enough, so I had to jump through some hoops to get everything to fit. I also rotated the zoo to make it fit "better" (it doesn't) whichnow causes the sun to be in the wrong spots compared to real life.

I 100% anticipate scale being the thing I struggle the most with to start! I am very bad at gauging appropriate measurements, both in-game and in real life

It's good sometimes to develop the "vibe" of your zoo from your exhibits rather than your entrance sometimes. At places, you'd first develop this grandiose entrance, meanwhile the contents of your park won't necessarily reflect the entrance that you have. Every zoo I've been doing recently, I've been just developing my parks from the inside-out, doing trails of exhibits first before I even touch the entrance. It helps you to build more of a story and more of a general theme that gets reflected on the outside of the park.

Not to mention parking lots are living hell

At least my impulse to want to build enclosures rather than amenities or other structures seems like the right way to go! I hadn't even considered parking lots

 

[Aramar]

Actually, I liked not knowing anything before building my first zoo. It's nice to be surprised and learn on the way.

 

[TeaBear]

If you`re the type of person that easily sinks several dozens of hours into buildings, likes to start with a finalised landscape (because you will hardly find a perfectly flat square kilometer in most places on earth to build onto) and then plan the layout of your zoo right on the aforementioned landscape for most realistic results before even "officially" open it to the public with most important key buildings already in place, in every other mode than sandbox:

I always build what i simply call cash cow setups, a super barebones micro zoo with cheap wall pieces instead of barriers to spare upkeep costs and usually not more than 2-3 different kinds of habitat animals. But still with everything to ensure max happines for them.

Stay within the entrance area to get free power (so you don`t waste money on power generators and their upkeep costs)

Only one staff member of every kind on minimum wage (just enough to keep them from going mad). Only exception for an additional mechanic to unlock building styles and stuff

Only one vendor in an information booth with those info-in-ear pods (don't know how they`re called in english) for free to help maxing out guest education.

Vendor machines for everthing else.

One, maybe two restrooms that guests have to pay ~50 cent for usage.

At least one terrarium species (most of them have insane reproduction rates) to quickly max out conservation stats. As the conservation rating seems to be a one way thing that never can drop you only have to release enough animals to max it out once and then sell anything else afterwards for cash.

Rise ticket prices just high enough so guests will think it´s fair. For kids it`s always one dollar less than for adults.

Maxed out research for all available animals, info signs and donation boxes EVERYWHERE so guests can impossibly miss them (altough it should be nearly impossible, these "zoos" are really just one single 20m long road with staff paths leading around minimum sized habitats)

Plaster everything that benefits from building pieces and decoration with them. Just place the same thing 80 times on a building. Also place buildings close to each other so one single building with 6 dozen spheres plugged on it can imbue other buildings with its beautiful charm.

Always pick 2 of the cheapest and one of the middle priced marketing campaigns to max out your marketing rating for the cost of only 5000$. I'm not sure if for example the 3 campaigns with highest costs actually draw in more guests, but given that i didn't notice a change even though the 3 simultaneously running campaigns with highest influence cost a fortune it just seems like a waste of money.

With these tips and a bit of additional micromanagement wizardry i already managed to squeeze a nearly full 5 star rating (It must have been 98% or so) out of a "zoo" with only 5 species (altough with african elephants and great pandas because of their high ratings) on highest difficulty and 95% of buildable area untouched by any infrastructure.

Difficulty settings seem to be pretty insignificant by the way, because doing this with lowest and highest difficulty didn't seem to have a noticeable effect, at most it just takes a tiny bit longer.

Oh, and i had a monthly income of around 500,000 dollars, pretty helpful to fund nearly every project.


And just in case you`re wondering why i put in so much effort to basically enable sandbox in challenge mode just to get everything done before even opening my zoo officially: Altough sandbox mode got most of the necessary options to play it like in challenge mode, there is still no option to reset vet and mechanic research and i really like to keep the sense of progression that comes with them. Even worse than that is that mechanic workshops in sandbox mode are utterly useless, or become useless once you unlocked everything in challenge mode. I wish you could still assign mechanics to them to get bonuses similar to like it works with vets and research facilities. Like assign one mechanic to get a 5% cost reduction for barrier and/or building upkeep.

 

[Eltanin Casciani]

I wish I knew that I’d get there eventually. I’d say that I underestimated what a steep learning curve it would be. I still struggle with making buildings. Exploring zoos and blueprints from the workshop helped enormously but I had a frustrating start.

I have to say, I understand this feeling! It's very daunting being someone that works on the title and knowing that anything I make at the start is going to be very basic, when you have a community of pro's that you're admiring every day!

Spam donation boxes.

Place ATMs! Guests can and do run out of money to spend. If you want to milk them for all they're worth, ATMs are your friend.

Build shops, because guests quickly get hungry and thirsty and will spend lots of money there. Also don't forget bins and caretakers, or you'll end up with a filthy zoo.

Place viewing areas away from the main path, or it will clog with guests.

Don't place high profile animals near the entrance.

Make sure your main path 'loops', so your guests don't need to turn around and clog your main path.

Most exhibit animals breed like crazy and quickly die, especially when played on >> (very fast)

Build with %rotation instead of free rotation, so everything easily aligns in your design.

What I did in my first zoos: place cool animals near the entrance, on a single path, too few donation boxes, forgetting ATMs, and not placing shops at all. Also placed many exhibit species for easy and quick money, then forgot them and ended up with empty vivariums. And my buildings were crooked because I only used free rotation.

This is a BRILLIANT list of tips and includes a lot of stuff I wouldn't have thought of, I'll definitely be referring to this when I start!

Actually, I liked not knowing anything before building my first zoo. It's nice to be surprised and learn on the way.

This is a nice view to have on it as well, and it's nice to hear about people enjoying that experience!

 

[PeppyPepp]

What a wonderful thread! Lots of great tips.

Out of all the ones that have been already said, I'd like to add spacing. Realizing that not everything has to be crammed up together even if you're making a small zoo. Realistically, there's a lot of small dead spaces in zoos. Also, I don't always need to fill out those dead spaces, sometimes just a nice fence and long/short grass will do. I have a tendency to fill up every empty spot, and I'm really trying to be okay with not filling everything and telling myself it looks fine even if it's simple like that.

Another tip that would come in handy at the start is making sure you can estimate the guest flow. Some spots are going to get crowded very quickly especially if there are shops/animals nearby. It's important to keep a nice flow throughout the zoo so you don't get these massive crowds of people blocking your paths. (We could really use one-way paths hint hint )

I remember my very first zoo. It was a desert franchise, and I pretty quickly grasped the economy side of things so I never really had financial issues with my zoos. My very first habitat was peacocks. Visually, it was an abomination. I didn't play Planet Coaster so the controls were totally new to me. Now, I'm a total pro. With the controls that is, not the building, haha!

 

[NZFanatic]

One thing I wished at the time was that I'd played Planet Coaster so I'd have at least some frame of reference for the advanced move and pathing system. I have the hang of it now, but back then, man, it was overwhelming.

 

[KönigDerKaffeebohnen]

For me there are 2 kinds of things i would have liked to know.

The first is, just have fun, its okay to suck.
Its completly normal to not be good in the start, so dont get frustrated when your first builds look like literal .
You wont build like any of the more experienced players, but thats okay and natural, because guess what? They are experienced and you arnt.
+ i actually really had a lot of fun in my first zoo, figuring things out and trying to challange me with the new stuff.
It went something along the line of:

zone 1: figuring out controls
zone 2: building my first building and stuff im proud of
zone 3: "Holy ! I can build tunnels!!!!" + terraforming in general
zone 4: "holy ! My builds can actually look great!" aka starting to learn how to make stuff really detailed and pretty + getting all the dlc. You may also know this as the taiga zone and the first where i started posting here
zone 5: "Planning, whats that?" aka the ambitous and everytime new arranged southamerica section
zone 6: Panoramas aka africa
zone 7: "help my zoo got to big qwq. My computer is cooking me alive"

Now im confidently working on my next zoo, and im really proud of it so far! It was really fun to learn everything as i went along in my old zoo, but it feels really great to have a project were im proud of everything from start to finish.


The second thing is, the x button exists.
You might be laughing now, but for the first 5 hours of this game, aka my first real session i didnt knew how to rotate stuff. I knew it was possible, but i didnt find any option in the settings with the key bindings.
In the end i watched a building tutorial the next day and that was it, but especally for casual players i think the x button should be part of the first tutorial. Just something like "Oh no! Somebody played a prank and turned this sign around! Pls click on it and use the x button to turn it back around" would have been great and very helpful. After all not everybody would have the patience to find out how it works/even know that there is an option, and thats quite the shame honestly.

 

[HeatherG]

One thing I wished at the time was that I'd played Planet Coaster so I'd have at least some frame of reference for the advanced move and pathing system. I have the hang of it now, but back then, man, it was overwhelming.

It's a definite plus to have had Planet Coaster before playing PZ. I can imagine how overwhelming it was.

 

[jcp011c]

Not so much things I didn't know but things I hadn't really figured out. The advance move for items (beyond just the horizontal movements), how to align to grid, how to make more interesting pathways ; with or without railings, non-rounded pathing, elevated pathing - though I did figure out that last one pretty quickly.

I think more building techniques were things I didn't know - how separate certain pieces from a build, how to make grid size adjustments; also with pathing, like turning OFF the path snapping to barrier (I still chuckle over my facebook rant over that one!)

Anything related to building underground or having partially underwater viewing areas. I'm still not great at it but I've figured it out. I still haven't figured out how to make a sunken habitat that looks pretty and the gate area isn't a train wreck. It's clear that any kind of setup involving below ground level is not my strongest area.

Those that mentioned knowing DLC - ha! Yes, I guess there's a point to that. Although I did make sure that I left space for one missing animal in most of my zoos, sure enough they turned up eventually, so I was at least able to add them in without any issues.

Animal wise, not catching on to the escape points for animals quickly enough at first, and managing the habitats that had fights going on due to overcrowding when the young mature. Sometimes that still slips by me.

Finally, the knowledge that the peafowl really did not need to be in all my zoos, sure they seemed nice at first but I'm still weeding them out. They did teach me about dirty habitats though.

 

[Antimony96]

I wasn't a Coaster player and hadn't played any construction simulators before PZ so I've had to teach myself construction. Tutorials have helped but it's still much harder work than I ever could have imagined. But the more I figure out the more fulfilling it gets.

 

[XT]

That the amount of 'rise' when you do stairs and ramps can be adjusted in that second screen, because that toggle needs to be scrolled down to be seen. Same for changing the color of concrete barriers - these things require scrolling to see. For ages I was doing all sorts of work arounds to have my stairs be less than 4 meters.

Better information on water - to this day, placing, adjusting, understanidng water remains a big obstacle.

 

[yoav_r]

I'd be much better had ai known how to work with the "flatten" and "tunnelling" toggles of the path. They are seriously complicated to learn.

 

[Eltanin Casciani]

I am learning a lot that is going to help me be less overwhelmed I think!

 

[Jeeminee]

I didn't play PC either and when I got PZ at first it was a big struggle to learn how to build. The scenario's didn't help in this a lot, and , to be honest, you want to make your own zoo and not only playing all the scenario's first. So after the first 4 scenario's or so, I wanted tot start my own zoo.
I went looking for an ingame building tutorial movie or something like that. Only there wasn't one and started to follow soms YT tutorials.(So I give a big thanx to all the YT 'bers giving a helping hand in this! )
Started off with some ingame blueprints and changed them a bit.
Building with groups, and when to build on or off grid, struggling with paths, it took me about three months to getting around a bit.
So I was really missing a bit of an ingame practical help in building.

BUT, what I later realised was, the more I was learning, the more I began to love how this game works. Yes, it takes time to build things. But when the game is too easy with building, you don't have to put so much effort in it, and you don't really bond with your zoo,animals and creations. At least I think I would be bored more quickly and might leave the game, even while I love to learn about the animals too. This way You learn a bit while playing and this is the beautiful secret of this game, at least for me.

Downloading other zoos from Steam is not only fun to look at, you can learn a lot from that too. And it is very inspiring too!

So did I miss something to begin with? yes, and this it can be better. But be a little patience with yourself, and take the time to figure things out. It will be worth it!

 

[99perretth]

Donation boxes, donation boxes, donation boxes! I spent the longest time on my first zoo struggling to break even, until I started placing them! Such a gamechanger!

Wish there was different designs/styles tho. Changing colour is not enough

 

[Jeeminee]

Wish there was different designs/styles tho.

yes ,that would be nice to have indeed.

 

[SotF]

Some of the breeding rates would have been nice to know.

Some of the animals have a massive rate that is a pain to judge early on, especially for some of the larger and combined habitats that are often a pain to deal with.

 

[SanRazo618]

I played ZT2, rct3 and planet coaster a ton before this game (basically my childhood! Except PC of course that was my renaissance) I didn’t have a computer capable of playing a lot of PC so I played it when I could at my cousins computer. Then I jerry rigged my school laptop with boot camp when PZ came out to play it. I played PZ and PC simultaneously and learned the controls. That was definitely the first barrier to entry getting used to the controls. It definitely reminded me more of rct 3 because of the Frontier connection but updated. I knew how to plan and build parks/ zoos because of my lifetime of playing these games so that wasn’t an issue. But in the planet games I feel like to a certain extent I pack things in to close together. I kind of made it a part of my style but I am consciously trying to space things out more. In PZ the main thing that caught my attention was franchise and still to this day that’s most of what I play. It reminds me the most of the classic zt2 challenge mode that is still the best zoo simulation experience (because the random events making your zoo feel alive.) I got used to the economy first. Bankrupted my first zoo because I had too many animals too quickly. So now every time I start a franchise I build a habitat and donation boxes and fast forward the game and wait till I have money to build the way I want. (It’s kind of cheating but I’m world building a high budget franchise of zoos and theme parks. They have the money to start a new zoo.) then I think about the scale of my zoo/ it’s story. My flagship Solaire Zoo is a high budget top tier world class highly themed zoo with a lot of storytelling (ex: animal kingdom) however it’s my oldest still active zoo so a lot of the older areas need to be redone and rearranged to fit that mold and fit in the dlcs that have been added. My second zoo Baja California zoo is a mid sized desert zoo focused on specific breeding programs and showcasing animals by biome instead of location like Solaire zoo. And then my third zoo Spirit Falls is a local zoo/ nature reserve with a focus on local wildlife and some more classic zoo animals. I love this zoo for it’s more practical but slightly themed look. Plus it’s all in a beautiful forest instead of sunny Florida for Solaire or scorching desert like Baja California. World building and lore/ story really help when building. And as you improve your zoo the older parts you renovated become part of your history you can write about in a history section of your zoo. (Sidnote: I’m rebuilding my first bankrupt zoo again as a more open animal park with minimal animal borders. It will be located on Puerto Rico and be called San Juan Animal Park like the original bankrupt and deleted franchise zoo)