DLC20 Discussion (maybe, but why not?)

Mjmannella

Mjmannella
Milurian said:
animals don't work in them though like yes the system says its 8m2 but put any animal in and if its under 100m2 the game refuses to calculate traversable terrain. You can however have a habitat thats over 100m2 with less than 100m2 accessible to the animal the total area just must equal 100m2
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Managed to get terrain calculated at 92m2
Tort1.png
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Richmountain112

R
The Aardvark said:
I just REALLY dislike a couple specific animals and I don't want to see them in the game, because they'd ruin the whole experience for me.
Seeing people wish for stuff that I openly dislike and don't ever want to see added makes me feel very negative, because it reminds me that, more likely than not, we'll probably get the Sumatran rhino or some dumb things like that. At this point the rhino is pretty much guaranteed with no way of avoiding it, and I'd frankly rather quit the game entirely than accept such a terrible choice being added.

Also, zookeeper and Americas were simply... bad. Other people have been "negative" about them and faced no backlash for that.
I don't see why I'm the only problem
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I personally think all the effort spent into those clones would have better spent in fully aquatic environments and animals like Sharks, rays, fish, and Japanese Spider Crab. Whenever I bring up fully aquatic animals, a lot of the time I get shot down because Frontier never made any in Planet Zoo.

Mjmannella said:
This is a good opportunity for me to bring up a hypothetical. Between these 2 sole options, which would y'all prefer?
Option A:
  • Honey Badger
  • Lion-Tailed Macaque
  • Sri Lankan Elephant
  • Blackbuck
  • Nilgai
  • Fishing Cat
  • Mugger Crocodile
  • No more than 60 new building pieces
  • No update that makes the existing Indian theme flexicolour
Option B:
  • Honey Badger
  • Lion-Tailed Macaque
  • Sri Lankan Elephant
  • Asiatic Lion
  • Indian Leopard
  • Himalayan Black Bear
  • Indian Wolf
  • 5 Exhibit Animals of your choosing
  • Update that makes the existing Indian theme flexicolour
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I'd take Option B for sure, it's clearly the better pick.
Five exhibit animals of my choice:
1: Purple Frog - never been kept in captivity but would be a fun pick.
2: King Cobra - Everyone seems to want one of these.
3: Climbing Perch - If it's big enough, it could even work as a habitat animal because they tend to forage on land.
4: Any Archerfish - Some of them live in India.
5: Blue Tarantula
 

PlanetJameson

PlanetJameson
Richmountain112 said:
I'm curious: is it possible to stack habitats on top of each other for something like an indoor zoo?
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It is. It’s a little finicky though. You basically have to make a floating island above the habitat below. I’ve done 3 levels stacked on top of each other and made it into a reptile house dome. You just have to be really careful when placing animals into the upper levels because sometimes the game will add them to the lower levels. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally fed Komodo dragons and Nile water monitors to the saltwater crocodiles. 😭🥴
 

Thylaco

Thylaco
Bughs said:
Would be cool if for india(?) themed dlc they would add free update of finally giving color vatiations to indian peafowls :)
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Any free update would be good.

Humble Bumble said:
Hey, been a while.

Great to see that the DLCs seem to be picking up in frequency again. I wasn't expecting to see anything again until September.

Honey Badger and another macaque are great additions. I see the elephant silhouette but I don't think this is another Asian elephant that people are assuming it is and I agree it doesn't make sense as we already have those. Instead I think that this is the African Forest Elephant,

Yes, the two most prominent animals in the artwork are the Honey Badger and Lion-tailed Macaque, which are both found in India, as are elephants but with the Pallas cat and baboon, and markhor the highlands pack turned out to be a zookeeper pack, this could be the same scenario. Even with artwork teasers the forum tends to get carried away down the wrong tangent so this is probably not an Indian Pack. :)

I think this might be a generic Forest animal pack (or an Explorers animal pack with base / field camp scenery)
  • vibes I get from 'scenery' in the artwork and African forest elephant.= forest
  • Lion tailed macaque are found in the Western Ghats = forest
  • Honey badgers whilst infamous for giving lions the middle finger, are quite versatile in habitats living in deserts, mountainous regions and forests.

so those plus four more habitat animals from a (still) broad selection i.e. guar, blackbuck, tree porcupines, tamandua, tapir, forest buffalo, coati, monkeys, wildcats, aye-aye, agouti, tree kangaroos, giant squirrels etc.
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There's no real doubt what is shown are Asian elephants from 4k resolution pics. The Asian elephant has 3 other subspecies/populations (Sri lankan, Sumatran & Borneo). They don't even make most meta wishlists, but notably shows up in the South & Southeast Asian one.

I'm hoping they're stand ins for something else, as the key art hasn't shown up on twitter yet (usually it's within a day of the stream).

Doesn't invalidate the conclusion ofcourse, it is still a possibility. The architecture style in particular isn't one I've been able to pin down so far.
 

ChicoGenialoso1

C
The Aardvark said:
Frontier seems to have some weird priorities when it comes to geographical areas...
Oceania got all the essential iconic animals, and now it's got a roster that, while pretty small, is very diverse, with all animals having different habitat requirements. A tree kangaroo and echidna would be nice, but the current roster is perfectly fine with me.

Europe ended up with a fairly good selection of animals considering how underrepresented it usually is in zoo games. Just like Oceania, it has all the essentials for a pretty substantial European section.

North America falls in a similar category as Europe, although even more varied; it makes a lot of sense, considering how much more biodiversity you can find in this region. Sea lion, alligator, cougar, armadillo, lots of common zoo animals that are very popular even outside of America. There may still be a couple of holes in the animal selection (namely the American Black Bear), but overall we've got all the animals it takes to make a great North America section.

And now we get to the big ones.
Africa of course got the most animals, and it makes sense considering how many common zoo animals originate from Africa. It basically got two dedicated packs (Africa and Arid), with other additions in basically every non-regional pack, minus aquatic. The grassland and desert part of Africa is definitely very fleshed-out, with dozens of animals available.
Tropical Africa, however, got a limited number of additions over the years, and it's still carried by its base-game animals (which, to be honest, make up a very good selection)... The only thing missing now is some kind of smaller monkey, perhaps a guenon.
Madagascar also got enough animals to create your average Malagasy section, which usually means a couple lemurs and fossa.

Similarly to Africa, Asian animals are also easy to find in any non-regional pack. In addition to that, while "Asia" as a whole never got its own DLC, we got packs for Southeast Asia, Eurasia, and now what looks like India/South Asia.
As of now, Southeast Asia and Central Asia have some of the best representation in the game, with well-balanced and varied rosters, and while South Asia has a few holes they will hopefully be filled by the upcoming pack. Even the Middle East has a few animals, although most if not all of them are shared with Africa.
The only region that may still be missing a couple animals is East Asia, with several people advocating for species like the raccoon dog and other Chinese/Japanese animals.

And now, the big issue everyone is aware of: South America.
While every other continent got its fair share of animals, including Europe and a few specific regions of Asia and Africa, the most biodiverse continent in the world got repeatedly shoved under the bus - even in what was supposed to be a dedicated pack. On paper, South America has 46 species in-game... But in reality, if we exclude all the nonnative domestics and exhibit animals, we end up with a mere 20something habitat animals. Applying the same treatment to Europe, we get approximately 18 animals.
The thing that's really frustrating about this roster, aside from the limited number of animals, is the actual choice of species itself: two of these very limited animals are domestic camelids, two are caimans, and most of the other animals aren't even exclusive to South America, but rather shared with North America (noteworthy examples include the peccary, armadillo, flamingo, and cougar). As a result of this, we can't really make a South American area that really stands out, because it's going to be either filled to the brim with the exact same things that are already in a North American section, or incredibly empty, with only the few "big ticket animals" and not much else.
After nearly six years, it's almost unbelievable that we only have two monkeys from the region - one of which was added this year. The Americas Pack that we all waited so long for gave a small boost to the roster, but didn't fully commit to fixing the problem and instead gave us the Bighorn and coyote (which I actually love, but not as much as a coati or mara).
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Totally Agree. Its curious how Frontier manages their representation about the continents. The worst part about it is that, since we already had an America-Centred DLC recently, we'll have to wait a while for them to return to that continent again.

About Asia, yeah, that's what I was talking about, Much of Asia is underrepresented (I pray that this new DLC is South Asia, and in the future. I hope that The East Asia could be a possibility in the future (maybe in this year, or next one), and altough there are animals that could be included (Tanooki, Japanese Serow, Yak, Golden Snub-Nosed Monkey for example), will they be popular enough to attract attention?

Yeah, Altough Madagascar already has good representation, I feel like there's still one or two animals missing (Mainly, I want the Aye-Aye). And I have a feeling that no matter what, we will continue to see more African animals

About North America, I've been saying that the American Black Bear could possibly be the Anniversary Animal. I hope I'm right
 

PlanetSoyJak

P
I spoke with a person who had connections with Frontier and knew what was going on around the scenes. They were an ex-employee so they have no idea anymore what's going on but during their time dlcs were planned years before with a whole time chart.
 

AndyZoos

A
PlanetSoyJak said:
I spoke with a person who had connections with Frontier and knew what was going on around the scenes. They were an ex-employee so they have no idea anymore what's going on but during their time dlcs were planned years before with a whole time chart.
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This is pretty much general knowledge (both for Planet Zoo specifically, and honestly, how most games with DLC are planned out. Though Frontier also deviated from those plans at times (e.g., the shift to animal packs).

But it's really hard to know whether or not this is the case anymore given the fact that DLC per year have been drastically reduced, how much recent rosters have mostly ignored the meta wish list, etc. What was happening back in 2019-2021 is pretty irrelevant now.
 

Moonfox

Moonfox
The Aardvark said:
It's the same as the three we already have, except brown and a bit smaller.

The Indian rhino is from the base game, and I have no problems with it, but from the start it was clear that they were eventually going to shoehorn one of the African rhinos in a later DLC...
And so we got the white rhino. I would have liked this animal to be in base game instead of the Indian one, but oh well.
...and then Arid Pack rolled around. Now, I loved most of the animal selection in Arid (especially the gazelle, addax, wild ass and dromedary), but the presence of our third rhino made me seriously consider skipping the pack. Especially considering that, while I can see a few minor differences between the white and Indian rhinos (which also have different ranges in different continents), I can't find any significant difference between white and black rhinos. They look virtually the same, they're from the same area, the only real change is the colour and the addition of the desert tag. Some people will point to its different diet and ecology, but how does that reflect in game? It just has two extra enrichment items that the white rhino can't use (but the Indian can).
The Sumatran rhino would basically be a carbon copy of the Indian one, except with a few brown markings here and there. It's basically a cosmetic variant of an animal we already have, an animal we already got THREE separate times. In addition to that, it's not even found in captivity anywhere so really it's even more pointless.

It's basically like if they added a Qinling panda. It's an obscure, smaller, brown, rare version of something we already have for free.
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You can’t tell the difference between rhino species. As an ex zookeeper, I think the rhino species are all dramatically different in appearance, behaviour and their conservation programs. I’ve seen 5 year olds competently spot the differences between black and white rhinos.

You’re also getting very upset over a problem you invented for yourself. There’s absolutely no sign a rhino is coming in this pack. You’re allowed to feel how you want about DLC inclusions, but you look pretty silly choosing to be so upset about a situation that only exists in your own imagination.
 

FoxyDee

FoxyDee
The Sea Blimp said:
edit: if my theory is correct this may also rule out the asiatic lion but chances are we get both and the sumatran rhino
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They would not choose the Asiatic Lion. Base game cover has already a lion on it.

NachoB said:
Or they know how much everyone would be hating this pack hard if they do that... Though they went coyote for.americas and didn't care so who knows lol
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Lol, you guys really overestimate importance of the cover animal. It is there to look good and catch attention, but no-one really decides if they buy the pack based on what species they chose for the cover…cmon… “oh, they chose the animal that I do not like for the cover? Yeah, not buying the pack.” That is silly.
 

Marvinb

Marvinb
I dont think were gonna get another dedicated revisit to SA. Which is unfortunate since there are still alot of animals from there that i want and the last pack did barely adress any of them.

But i personally think a more general rainforest animal pack isnt out of the question with like 3-4 more south american animals and a couple more from across the world like nile croc, fishing cat and lowland anoa for example.

The one im kinda scared for is the mara tho. For the longest time i kinda expected them to show up in a shrublands/savannah type pack, but the concept is getting the same treatment like the mountains and islands ideas got before where alot of the main animals are getting added in other packs. This time its the rhea, honeybadger and likely also the blackbuck
 

Frogstrich

Frogstrich
I Am Surprised That In This Whole Country Themed Pack Discussion No One Brought Up Madagascar. It's Pretty Similar To Australia And India Where The Pack Could Refer To The Country Or The Continent/Subcontinent/Island. And Despite The Lack Of Fossa And Coquerel's Sifaka It Still Could Have A Decent Roster For A Pack Like The One Below.
Madagascar Animal Pack.png
 
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