Helpful information on Zookeepers

How can I send you my save game? My keepers are not feeding my animals in franchise. Lost 2 giant pandas, 4 red ones. Tried everything. Work zones, no work zones, moving huts closer, food enrichments closer to entrance ... they just dont do it. I even tried to remove all stuff and buy new one. Nothing is working. Lost about 3000k leafs bcs of dying animal. Im sad and TIRED to play. Dont want to start again. Got 650k profit on that zoo.
 
My keepers are always bringing food too. But i still have some animals starving not getting their part of the food. In smaller exhibits i dont have any issues. Ive got an exhibit with around 25 zebras and buffalos and a gorilla exhibit with around 10 animals. In both of them it happens pretty often, that one or two of the animald are starving.

Do you have some exhibits with 10 or more animals in it?
 
Nope, I had big zoo with crocodiles, garials, tortoeses and red pandas. I made profit, put all animals in storage and started to rebuilt everything. I managet to build Giant panda and Red panda habitat for start. Two animals in each habitat. And they died. All accessable for staff, for animals, but staff seems to be cicled somehow. To go prepare food, and dont put it in things when they enter exhibit.
 
Given the cost of food, how many trays people place and how many people are struggling with their finances, having the keeper fill everything is not a good idea and would make people struggle even harder. It also wouldn't make any sense. Zoos carefully monitor those things, they don't just drop a ton of food for each bear and hope they don't become obese.
It might also cause a conflict in the case where you have too many animals compared to your feeders. Should they still drop food on the ground, or should they just fill the trays?


Once the existing bugs are fixed, I believe the current system is good enough. Even if they added another system as an option, I'd keep that one. Keepers just take care of all the work for you, you don't have to think about it, which means you can focus on the other aspects of the management.
 
Given the cost of food, how many trays people place and how many people are struggling with their finances, having the keeper fill everything is not a good idea and would make people struggle even harder. It also wouldn't make any sense. Zoos carefully monitor those things, they don't just drop a ton of food for each bear and hope they don't become obese.
It might also cause a conflict in the case where you have too many animals compared to your feeders. Should they still drop food on the ground, or should they just fill the trays?


Once the existing bugs are fixed, I believe the current system is good enough. Even if they added another system as an option, I'd keep that one. Keepers just take care of all the work for you, you don't have to think about it, which means you can focus on the other aspects of the management.

Its a management sim, but taking the management out of our hands. That doesn't make sense. Does placing a lot of extra trays cost money? Sure. Maybe you shouldn't place extra trays without a reason? Lots of decisions you make cost money and can ruin your zoo. Like I said its a management sim.
 
Its a management sim, but taking the management out of our hands. That doesn't make sense. Does placing a lot of extra trays cost money? Sure. Maybe you shouldn't place extra trays without a reason? Lots of decisions you make cost money and can ruin your zoo. Like I said its a management sim.

A management sim with a ton of other management aspects already. If you make us micromanage every single little aspect, might as well play on an Excel sheet, we won't have time to look at the animals anyway. Maybe you also want to need to order the food and haggle with various producers? Oh, and have to build a whole infrastructure to move the animals? That's management too.
There is a limit to how much management is enjoyable for most people. As it is, there's already plenty to do, and a lot of people are struggling, sometimes even with the most simple aspects, like "don't keep a shop that doesn't bring profit", "put your animals in quarantine before you put them in their enclosure" or "make sure your gorillas have enough climbing space". You make it harder, you lose them all.
 
A management sim with a ton of other management aspects already. If you make us micromanage every single little aspect, might as well play on an Excel sheet, we won't have time to look at the animals anyway. Maybe you also want to need to order the food and haggle with various producers? Oh, and have to build a whole infrastructure to move the animals? That's management too.
There is a limit to how much management is enjoyable for most people. As it is, there's already plenty to do, and a lot of people are struggling, sometimes even with the most simple aspects, like "don't keep a shop that doesn't bring profit", "put your animals in quarantine before you put them in their enclosure" or "make sure your gorillas have enough climbing space". You make it harder, you lose them all.

What I proposed adds no additional micromanagement. It only gives additional options for players who want to take advantage of it.
 
There’s at least two improvements that could be made to the keeper behaviour, 1. Just have the keepers bring food straight to the enclosure without having to check them first, in real life keepers feed animals on a schedule not based on weather or not they look hungry, they would never walk into an enclosure at feeding time just to walk back out and get food. 2. Just have them fill every container the the enclosure, because why wouldn’t they anyway?
 
There’s at least two improvements that could be made to the keeper behaviour, 1. Just have the keepers bring food straight to the enclosure without having to check them first, in real life keepers feed animals on a schedule not based on weather or not they look hungry, they would never walk into an enclosure at feeding time just to walk back out and get food. 2. Just have them fill every container the the enclosure, because why wouldn’t they anyway?

Not gonna disagree with your first point, which I find perfectly valid. Second point, however, has two counter-arguments:
  • food costs money
  • obesity
 
Not gonna disagree with your first point, which I find perfectly valid. Second point, however, has two counter-arguments:
  • food costs money
  • obesity
I’m hoping just having less feeders would fix that, but i guess it depends on how often the keeper replaces them.
 
Not gonna disagree with your first point, which I find perfectly valid. Second point, however, has two counter-arguments:
  • food costs money
  • obesity
Unfortunately, I cannot tell my keepers to take 40 kg of food and put 10kg into each of the 4 feeding areas I have throughout the enclosure for my animals to eat at. Or even say, fill this one all the way, but have a bit in these other ones here in case an animal is hungry and far away from the other feeding area because the time progresses so fast that it might literally starve to death before it reaches that other food station. I don't design my habitats this large, but in some of the career mode scenarios, you have to put up with this design because that is how the development team decided was the "model" of a zoo that is fully functional and is ready for expansion. That is what the whole scenario of Grand Caldera Safari Park is and that is the only park I have had an issue with feeding in thus far... not to mention the plethora of other problems that run rampant in it to make me wonder how the hell it was considered successful enough to even be called a zoo rather than a cesspool let alone be fit for expanding.
 
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You really need to completely overhaul the feeding system if it is this complicated for players to figure out. Most of this information isn't in-game & to ask players to go through a laundry list of bullet points (that you have to find on a message board-most of your players will never see this) in order to troubleshoot the problem is not a good solution. At some point you have to just take a step back, see this list and think, "Yeah, maybe we made this too complicated."
 
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It has all been working fine for me thankfully but glad to have a few points clarified. I have had a few struggles with big enclosures with 3 or 4 species in, I think setting the keepers to specific types of job should help with this.
 
Keepers will only prepare enough food for the amount of animals in the habitat, so if you place down an unnecessary amount of feeders, your Zookeepers will not fill them.

This becomes a problem once you make a really big enclosure. I made a huge walk-through habitat for lemurs. There are eneugh feeders throughout the habitat but if the keepers decide to refill the feeders on the nothern section, then all animals that are on the south side of the habitat will starve because the animals don't seem to be intelligent enough to know where the food is. And because you never know which feeder will be refilled, it's also hard to place them strategically. At least we shoud be able to manually give keepers the order to refill specific feeders.
 
I see another issue here with this design... I built a huge exhibit with all African grassland animals, so lots of animals needing lots of food, the same keeper is just walking back and forth putting food down... Not only are the animals eating it faster then the zookeeper can place it, i'm having animals starve to death because the one zookeeper can't handle all the food on their own. They need to have it so more than one zookeeper can fill food at the same time, so they can get everything filled asap.
 
Arboreal feeders don't work for me
I don't know if you had the issue that I had but when you place arboreal feeders in the air the keepers need a route to it so for me when I placed an arboreal feeder on a structure I needed to create a ramp with something zookeepers could walk on. So i built a ramp with climbable logs leading up to the feeder. Hope this helps. I think it would be cool if they added a pulley that you would place near a suspended feeder which keepers could use to fill the arboreal feeders.
 
Thanks for the comprehensive info.
Please still consider changing keeper behavior, or to introduce the option to choose between current behavior and 'fill everything mode'. (I prefer option to choose.)
 
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