Animal feed cost explosion

Vigilante

Vigilante
I have a really big problem. At some point in the game, the cost of animal feed becomes so high that I can no longer make a profit. I have at the moment in my Tiger Park 3 enclosures and the feed quality set to 1. Nevertheless, the feed for the animals should cost 51k. That becomes also each year more, although no animals come to it. The costs are so high that I do not get them balanced by donations or business.

When I restart the game, the costs are normal for 5 minutes and then they explode again.

Does anyone else have the problem and maybe a bug tracker link to report it? Maybe someone has a solution to the problem?

This is really annoying.

Thank you in advance.
 

CoasterBill

C
I am having the same issue. I dont know if there was an unintentional issue with the patch but the animal food prices seem broken now. I was running a fully profitable zoo yesterday and I have only added one habitat today and no extra personal and I just went from 90k to at one point -50k. Here is a screenshot of the finances. I have about 6 lions, 4 zebras, 4 springboks, 3 giraffes, 6 alligators, and 2 tigers. I have lowered the food to level 1 and two from all and this did not help. I also let go about 5 staff and same issue. You can see the average year cost about 85k and then the day after the patch the cost went to 180k.
20191114212047_1.jpg
 

JPrin

J
There is an issue in the bug tracker for this. It is a bug from what I can tell. I had the same issue lots of animals lots of donations then I got lions and as I added lions their feed costs increased exponentially. At one point I had 15ish lions and my feed cost was $85,000 a year, which was more than my zoo income. It wasn't until I got rid of the lions that the cost came down but it was too late the zoo was already bankrupt. Something is definitely out of whack. You can check the food cost of the individual exhibits by clicking on the exhibit and then going to the second to last tab I think. You can use this to find which exhibit it is that is killing your zoo and hopefully get rid of it until the issue is fixed.

To see bugs in the issue tracker search for food cost and there are a few of them.
 

Wolfen75

Wolfen75
Seems like finally other people are building zoos that are big enough to realize it.

I am telling this since days.
Today i gave up on my 100-hour-zoo and closed it before it drove me nuts.
On small zoos, if you know what you're doing, you can make so much profit that you can compensate this madness.
 

Fortunanovesia

F
Suffering the same at the moment with my gorillas.

Tried to open a second exhibit and my costs are exploding.

It seems like you have to earn money with the smaller exhibits/animals to maintain bigger/more expensive animals.

But is this really intended?
 

Vigilante

Vigilante
As annoying as that is for everyone: I'm really glad I'm not the only one. Unfortunately, I didn't see a suitable entry in the bug tracker, otherwise I'd have joined in. If someone has time and knows where the link is, please post the link. I have already lost 3 zoos due to this bug and now I only build naked zoos, without any effort, so that I can at least breed until the bug reappears.

Edit: Ok, I found the matching link. If anyone still has the problem, please report it here so that as many people as possible report to the same issue link:

https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/6406
 
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Vigilante

Vigilante
Sorry to double the post, but this is important. I found a solution that worked for me.

1) Game on pause.

2) Then deletes all feed troughs (even the employment toys that have to do with feed)

3) Deletes all zookeepers' huts. Really extinguish, do not turn off power. That doesn't work, I tried.

4) End pause and wait until the first animals get hungry.

5) Quickly pause again.

6) Rebuild everything.

7) End pause again.

8) Redistribute the work orders. Then you send the keepers to the feeding places.

9) Restart the game.

10) Now it gets vicious. Because all animals are fed emergency, it becomes really expensive. With me well 800k. But after that the feeding costs seem to have restarted again and you make profits again.


Okay, after two hours, the rubbish starts all over again. So it didn't work as hoped.
 
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Kinah

K
Same thing happened to me. I had over a million and running strong in my franchise. Just logged in and watched my money start plummeting. I'm in August and have spent WAY more in animal feed than I did the previous year, and nothing has changed. I went from 60k profit to -30k and dropping. I exited out in hopes of saving this zoo instead of losing it like my first franchise.
 
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Dae

Dae
My first franchise zoo is bankrupted and also waiting for an update that fix the costs issue. I keep the second zoo small to not go bankrupted again, but it's really sad to not be able to develop a zoo because we don't have any way to really manage things that have a big impact on costs: can't really manage staff, can't manage feeding...
 

Fortunanovesia

F
I cant even take part at the community challenge with a normal zoo anymore. Everytime i wanna breed some Gorillas the food costs are ruining my zoo.

Thats kinda pointless.

Foodcosts are one of the biggest issues in the whole game at the moment imo.
 
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Fortunanovesia

F
No chance.

Franchise mode is unplayable for me too.

I think its related to missing donations.

I remember in the beta you received tons of donations. Some of my boxes had hundreds of thousands dollars for donations.

when i look in my boxes now, most of them receive just a few hundreds, some of them even nothing. Guests are happy, have a great view, but there are just nearly donations.
 
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Wolfen75

Wolfen75
Fortunanovesia said:
No chance.

Franchise mode is unplayable for me too.
Click to expand...

Works with small zoos when you know what to do.
I have two 10-habitat-zoos now that are making 20.000$ - 70.000$ profit.

But isn't enjoyable at all and the more animals you add the more chances you have that the made up random cost for animal food is killing you again.

edit: and while i was writing that 2 bengal tigers got adult and i had 2 auto-injured animals again
so much fun
 

Kai

Kai
Fortunanovesia said:
No chance. Franchise mode is unplayable for me too.
Click to expand...
It's doable. Ive got a small zoo (~2400 guests) with 4 albino cat breeding pens + 14 exhibits (on contraception). It currently makes a steady a profit every year (I'm even using rank 3 food).

I did find the food costs for gorillas to be extortionate though - hence why I bought them for the challenge instead of breeding them myself.
 

Fortunanovesia

F
i had 48k for my first exhibit with 5 gorillas and 39k for my second exhibit with 11 gorillas.

my flamingo exhibit with 14 animals is around 0,5k and my red pandas (2-5) are around 0,2k
 

ArtiX

ArtiX
There is also a second weird "money-drain" bug. The refunds. I haven't experienced it in a few days now, but a while back i occasionally had the 'refunds' explode on me every now and then, and the food bug came on top of it. (I did not go bankrupt amid the cost explosions, hehehe)
It doesn'T make much sense when you can't see any cause for the problem.
The refunds is a nice thing, but i feel the simulation lacks way too much depth to have it make any sense.
 

Fortunanovesia

F
there has been an issue/bug with refunds related to the speakers in your zoo. Each speaker has a zone and when those zones are cutting each other it annoyed the visitors that much, that they left the zoo and went for refund.
 

ASalton1

A
Yea the food cost mechanic or bug sucks. I’ve found that it helps to send some of your meat eating animals to storage temporarily once they have offspring because babies eat a lot too. I have to keep my lions in a group of 3 and put the male on contraceptives once one of them has a litter because the more I have the more they cost to feed. Once the cubs are 2 almost 3 I take him off and let him breed again. I have to manage breeding very carefully in order to keep cost down.
 

Kinah

K
All my animal feed is level 1. Literally nothing changed in the last few years. I was making 50, 70, 90k a year, more and more every year. Then BOOM. It's only September and I'm over 150k in animal feed and losing 30k and rising.
 
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