Building habitats off of cliffs?

[Shire_Folk]

Hey everyone, first time player for Planet Zoo here. Been playing for about a week and I'm loving it.

However, while I'm doing the careers zoos, I'm on Meyers Lake and I've run into a bit of an issue that I'm looking for some advice on. I'm setting up my habitat for the Siberian Tigers and I've run into a bit of a snag.

(please ignore the free-floating drink shop. I'm not concerned about how bad it looks to just be defying gravity)

I've extended the space out from the cliff using some construction floors and glass walls to give a bit of an interesting tiger bedroom space, but I cannot get my null barrier to recognize the constructed floors as being there. I know and regularly use constructions and nature rocks with a null barrier going through them in other arears, but is this then impossible to artificially give myself more terrain despite the fact that the tigers would totally walk on it? Barriers have to be tied to terrain regardless if an animal can walk right past it?

Any insight would be awesome.

 

[WolfofAnarchy]

As far as I know there's no way to do that without installing a mod. The point of those floating islands is that your barriers are confined to them. I know that wasn't the response you were hoping for, but I don't think there's any way to do what you want.

 

[Nioell]

Simply build the barrier around the hills and it'll all be in there, it doesn't have to be on the same ground level to count as part of the habitat. So pull the barrier down to the lower level and make sure the floor pieces are inside the barrier line when you look down on it then it's gonna work just fine.

Oh and if all that area you surrounded by the null barrier is for that tiger it should be more than big enough even without the additional floor space already.

 

[Shire_Folk]

As far as I know there's no way to do that without installing a mod. The point of those floating islands is that your barriers are confined to them. I know that wasn't the response you were hoping for, but I don't think there's any way to do what you want.

Thanks for the reply. I kinda figured that that was the response I'd get, but I just wanted to make sure that it wasn't possible to make floating constructed habitats.

 

[XT]

The barriers link to terrain, not construction items, (not sure they even recognize them).

 

[sturmovik]

Little more information on what XT said. The barriers do link to terrain only, but it is possible to work around this to achieve the desired effect.

You do this by using the terrain tools, ideally before adding construction items or anything else, to add a thin layer of terrain in the place and shape you want the structure to eventually be. Second, build the null barriers. Finally, you build the structure (making sure that all walls are inside the barriers) with floors just as close to the terrain as you can sink them. The animals (and people, you can use this for guest buildings too) will walk on the terrain under the floors, and any "clipping" effect of their feet going through the floors will be so minor as to be nearly invisible even as close as you can get.

This is most easily done before any other construction since, as you may know, the terrain tools don't really interact well with placed objects; however, you can work around this. Use the multi-select tool (looks like a rectangle, in the very bottom right corner of the screen) to highlight and select the entire building as a unit. Once the whole building is selected, you can move it all as one piece; "park" it out of the way (even just high in the sky) until you get the terrain/barriers the way you want it, then use the same tool to move it back down.

As a last step, just for visual effect, note that this will leave you with a near-floating building supported by an implausibly thin layer of terrain. If you want, add rocks or a few more layers of floor below the building to make everything look more solid.

Finally, I only learned some of these things by asking nearly this same question on a forum two years ago. If anything here is useful to you, take a few minutes to find another question on some forum that you can answer, or at least help with. Pay the community forward.

Hope this is useful, and keep building!