Habitat cleanliness is a disease risk bug?

[Roxxsmom]

This is one I haven't encountered before. I am continuously getting the alert that my monitor habitat cleanliness is a disease risk, yet there are no droppings on the heat map, the water system is working fine, and when I summon the keeper and they show up, they leave satisfied that the habitat is clean and the animal is fed. There is no poop for them to vacuum up. The cleanliness on the habitat overview is stuck at 50%, though. The one monitor currently in this good-sized habitat has high welfare. No protesters have shown up yet, so I am guessing it's just one of those annoying bugs. I haven't yet experienced it with any other habitats.

Has this shown up for anyone else since the latest patch? Is there any way to "reset" this, short of tearing the habitat down and re-building it?

 

[Firestar97]

Did you already try if it helps to delete the Gate and replace it with a new one?

Or maybe the same Reset Trick for Climbing Structures would also work for this Problem, which would mean that you would just need to delete the complete Barrier (including the Gate) and then reverse the Action.

Hope my Ideas are helpful

 

[Roxxsmom]

I'll have to try that. What's odd is that the gate doesn't appear to be bugged. The keeper is going in and feeding the animal just fine, and for all that the warning about disease risk is constant, the animal never actually gets a disease. At first I thought some poo was clipping in from the adjacent lemur habitat, but they weren't getting a warning about cleanliness, and even when their enclosure is 100% clean, the monitor's warning persists.

 

[FoxyDee]

The only other thing that comes to my mind is rotten food, but not sure if that shows in the heat map or not, happened to me when the rotten food was not accessible to the keepers.

 

[Firestar97]

The only other thing that comes to my mind is rotten food, but not sure if that shows in the heat map or not, happened to me when the rotten food was not accessible to the keepers.

This just reminded me about the Situation when Guests always threw Pizza into the Water Moat of the Okapi Enclosure in one of my Zoos. I would definitely recommend to also check for that. If there is Food, make sure that the Zookeeper can reach the Area where it is. It can need a Eternity to be removed

 

[Roxxsmom]

Deleting the barriers then undoing it seemed to help. At least the constant alert went away, so thanks for the suggestion. I should have thought of that, but the keeper wasn't having trouble getting into the enclosure or feeding the animal, so it wasn't bugged in the usual way.

I have some moats, and thankfully no one has thrown food into them. Yet.

But the whole "animal has eaten guest food" dynamic puzzles me. I can play for hours with no issue, then WHAM, that happens with an animal--most often a wolf, hippo, or elephant. And once one guest feeds the animal, it keeps happening over and over but always with that same animal. Or maybe it's just a matter of the alert being stuck on forever, even after I place signs instructing people not to feed animals, raise the barriers to "un throwable" height, and send the animal to quarantine for a while and so on. It's like the animal ends up with a permanent bellyache, or maybe an insatiable craving for guest food that allows them to snatch it through any barrier.

The only way I've been able to clear an "animal has eaten guest food" alert once it happens is to sell or release the particular animal, or if it's one of my valuable breeders, to park it back in the trade center and eventually use it in a different zoo.

There seem to be game watersheds with other issues too, such as a stable work zone that runs just fine for hours with no issues with barrier maintenance or animal feeding, but at some point all the workers decide to go on break at the same time, and animals start escaping and starving and their enclosures become filthy, even though the number of enclosures and animals in the zone have not increased and the number of workers has not decreased.

I guess there are random glitches that just happen.

 

[iloveyourzoos]

For the "animal has eaten guest food" alert, I've found that it usually remains on for me until the next time the animal eats... which can be quite a while, since the guest food is apparently enough to make them not hungry, yet also leaves them sick and with less nutrition.

I still send them to quarantine immediately when I get the alert -- which in other cases both heals and feeds them -- but doesn't apear to do the trick with this particular alert.

 

[Firestar97]

I have some moats, and thankfully no one has thrown food into them. Yet.

You should really be happy about it. When it happened in one of my Zoos, it needed a Eternity to be removed. I've thought it would stay there forever.

But the whole "animal has eaten guest food" dynamic puzzles me. I can play for hours with no issue, then WHAM, that happens with an animal--most often a wolf, hippo, or elephant. And once one guest feeds the animal, it keeps happening over and over but always with that same animal. Or maybe it's just a matter of the alert being stuck on forever, even after I place signs instructing people not to feed animals, raise the barriers to "un throwable" height, and send the animal to quarantine for a while and so on. It's like the animal ends up with a permanent bellyache, or maybe an insatiable craving for guest food that allows them to snatch it through any barrier.

That's weird. When it happens in my Zoos it only happens extremely rarely. I don't even put Signs there because after it happened, the Animals are normally safe for a Eternity.

Maybe there's something you're doing wrong but don't know what it could be. Maybe it could have something to do with low Guest Happiness or you need a Security Guard. But those are just Theories.

 

[Roxxsmom]

The guest food thing is pretty uncommon. I can play for hours without getting it, but then one comes out of the blue and becomes an ongoing issue.

I am mystified by the whole security guard dynamic. I hire them, and they at low efficiency, spending most of their time sitting around in the break rooms, but I still get vandalism and so on. Security cameras don't seem to make much difference, nor does adding restrooms and food and so on to make guests happier. I always seem to have about 10% of needy guests in the heat map, no matter what, but most are pretty happy.

I've run across another weird bug from time to time, and it drives me kind of bonkers. I get an alert for a particular habitat: "Keeper (or mechanic) can't reach habitat due to work zone set up" as if the gate isn't connected to the path or no one is assigned. However, in these cases the habitat is most definitely connected to the path, as are the keeper hut and workshop in their work zone. In fact, it seems to happen most often when the buildings are really close to the gate. The appropriate workers are assigned, and sometimes there's even just one enclosure in the whole zone. The workers actually do visit the habitat just fine, and the message goes away on its own after a while. Deleting barrier and redoing doesn't help the way it sometimes does with stuck staff.

I've reported it on the issue tracker for a zoo where this was happening constantly with a particular habitat, and I even sent my saved file, but we never figured out why it happens. Trashing and rebuilding the habitat from the ground up on the same plan didn't help either. So it appears to be related to a particular geometry with the path, buildings, and habitat gate where the workers can path, but for some reason the game thinks they can't.

It's not exactly game breaking, but it bugs me to have an alert up I can't do anything about, even if it isn't really an issue.