Hints and Tips - Your little bits of advice

Magenpie

Magenpie
Not sure if there is a thread for these already, so apologies if I'm duplicating.

I keep forgetting the game is really new, and we're all learning at a the moment. I've discovered one or two useful things for myself which I now use regularly in my own game, and I'm sure other people have as well. I thought it might be good to make a list of them here, to share now and to help Keepers of The Future.

Perhaps this is lame, but I'm going for it anyway. ^^

Cash - Exhibit Animals - Titan/Goliath Beetles and Golden/Poison Frogs are your friends! They reproduce like mad and you can sell the offspring for a little cash boost, quite useful in the early stages. I've just sold 30 baby Goliath Beetles in my Franchise Zoo for $8500.

Cash - keep your zoo entry fee as close to the max as you can. The game lets you know if the guests think your zoo is too cheap or too expensive. If you look at the Zoo Overview and click on Guests, you can see how they feel about the price. A mildly grumpy face saying the ticket price is 'fair' is fine! :)

Early Gameplay - Start SLOWLY. Don't overspend or aim for the more exciting animals too soon - really good starter animals are Timber Wolves, Bison, Pronghorn and Grizzly Bears. They're easy to get, and the good offspring sell pretty well on Animal Trading. And the wolfies in partic are nice to watch.

Earning CC - Gold/Silver/Bronze Animals and Compare Mates - Don't just buy Gold animals, look for bargains in the Silver/Bronze range too. By comparing mates for good gene matches, you can easily upgrade the offspring to make some CC. Likewise, don't be put off by the odd yellow bar on a potential purchase in Animal Trade - if you check with the Mate Comparison, you may have found the partner of your own animal's dreams.

Earning CC - Because of the above, don't be afraid to sell Silver/Bronze animals on Animal Trading too. Don't over price them and they should get snapped up fairly quickly.

Habitat Barriers - click on the habitat door, and go to the last tab in the pop up window - there you can set timers for your keepers, mechanics and vets to visit each one. Particularly useful for barrier degradation - your mechanics will take care of them automatically once a month!

Feeding - the dreaded feeding problem. I know this isn't a popular idea, but once you've researched the food enrichment items, remove the standard feeding trays and troughs. It worked for me. (but I realise there are possibly still buggy issues around this.) And you can always add the trays/troughs back in if necessary.

Research - research at least the first 3 segments of every new animals you get. It gets you some enrichment items and Grade 2 food. You change the food grading by clicking on the barrier edge, and in the pop up window, go to the Animals Tab (the paw print.) That gives you details of the animals in the habitat and there's a drop down menu where you can change the food grade. Sticking at 2 until you've got some proper cash coming in is fine.

Temporary Habitat - I've found having a spare empty habitat with a basic hard shelter and some varied enrichment items really useful. When you get animals fighting because the offspring have matured, they can get injured. If the vet is called, they whisk the newly matured animal away and if you're like me, it then gets put back in the same habitat and the fighting starts again. I've put these animals into the Temporary one, just to get them fit, and then put them into Animal Trading. Also useful for Animal Trading overspill. But it's not a long term solution - the animals get sad pretty quickly without the right stuff.

Unspecfied Combined Habitats - there are some animals which don't mind sharing an enclosure, even if it's not mentioned in the Zoopedia. I've housed Bongo/Okapi/Tapir together, Lemur/Tapir, Pygmy Hippo/Greater Flamingo, Camels/Gemsbok. I bet there are more unspecified combinations out there.

I'm sure I'm repeating obvious things, but please do share your own best bits of advice, hints and tricks.

o/
 
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Dr4gon

Dr4gon
Don't forget that barriers and facilities only get repaired by a mechanic when they aren't busy doing research or anything else. The closest one, who is free at that moment, will run to the job. Mechanics who are on research duty will come if you call them, but only is nobody else is free. You can set your facilities to be maintained every month, but that works best if it's on a zone. If you don't zone your mechanics, the first one which is rested and not on a zone, will come to the repairs, if you ask.

A mechanic which is tired, will not repair your closure even when animals are escaping.
 

Vayman

Vayman
Enrichment - Don't go "all in" with the enrichment items you have researched. Hold some back so you can rotate them in and out. Otherwise, the animals will get bored and you'll have no good solution in the short term if you don't have any fresh ones to put in.

Viewing Animals - Guests will stop and view animals at the strangest places. I had some standing on the steps to my solar generator to get a view of bears, which they could have gotten a better view of if they just kept walking. Close off barriers (no windows, no openings) to route guest traffic to your liking.

Vendors - When starting out, you likely don't need any vendors. With only one or two habitats, guests aren't going to be around long enough to get hungry or thirsty. With that said...

Heat Maps - Make liberal use of these. They'll tell you when guests are getting hungry/thirsty and approximately where you should place vendors.The heat maps will also reveal if you've got something unpowered (like a speaker) or if there's some water not getting cleaned.

Work Zones - Create them, name them appropriately, and assign staff. You'll be able to more easily identify problem areas if you know who is working where.
 

NL_Mutso

NL_Mutso
Early gameplay - Tortoises bring in good donations, and you can find them on the market for cheap $. Having both tortoises from the start is a steady flow of $.
Reptiles do pretty good overall in donations and are cheap..

Animal population control - Use contraceptive when needed, you don't want too much offspring. Offspring = more food = more costs. Especially with reptiles you can have a lot of offspring in a short time !

CC - Don't waste CC. Don't buy CC animals with your first CC.. Focus on getting $ animals for your first 3-4 enclosures..

Study the zoopedia before buying - Check the requirements for animals. Sounds obvious but you don't want to buy 2 male lions for the same enclosure.
Çheck animal before buying - Make sure you are buying the right gender / decent stats (no infertility - there's an extra white icon on the right side if it's infertile) / and the right age.
You don't want to buy an animal, which is about to die soon. Some people ask a lot of money for an old animal..

Breeding - When an animal species is 1 male/multiple females, try to get full potential out of this. Males from these species are cheaper. Save some good female offspring in your animal market. When the male dies - buy a new male and you can add the good female offspring in the enclosure. The good female offspring will provide the next bloodline..

Plan out your animal exhibits - Don't put too much 'high maintenance' animals in the same spot. Putting lemurs/peafowl/macaque monkeys in the same area, will be very keeper-time consuming. They breed very well and dirty up their enclosure very fast..

Education speakers - Should be a standard when you add a new enclosure. Try to cover most visitors paths. It's also a great way to show when your enclosure is empty (the circle turns red when those species aren't present in that enclosure anymore). Don't overlap circles, you want full blue circles !
 

Jileha

J
NL_Mutso said:
Çheck animal before buying - Make sure you are buying the right gender / decent stats (no infertility - there's an extra white icon on the right side if it's infertile) / and the right age.
You don't want to buy an animal, which is about to die soon. Some people ask a lot of money for an old animal..
Education speakers - Should be a standard when you add a new enclosure. Try to cover most visitors paths. It's also a great way to show when your enclosure is empty (the circle turns red when those species aren't present in that enclosure anymore). Don't overlap circles, you want full blue circles !
Click to expand...

Some additions to the two above:
Check animal before buying: Check the seller of the animals. Often, sellers put all the offspring of an animal pair on the market simultaneously and often at the same or almost the same price, so chances are that they will show up in the listing next or relatively close to each other. You don’t want to buy animals from the same litter of the opposite sex because you don’t want to inbreed them, and even not to breed with one of your existing animals since you’d want to keep the gene pool as diversified as possible.

Education speakers: If you have shy animals in a habitat, make sure that the radius of impact of the speaker does not reach into the habitat as the noise will stress the animals out, even if you use one-way glass.
 

Guitarmike47

G
Oftentimes I find it's not worth my time trying to sell off an animal for conservation credits. For some of the lower-level species like lemurs, the difference between the price you'll get for an average animal in the market and the price you'll get by just releasing them to the wild is minimal. You can generate a fair amount of cc quickly by taking a low-level species that is easy to breed and just releasing them into the wild.

Also, I sometimes find it challenging to fill an enclosure with enough climbable stuff to keep the animals happy. Note that some but not all trees are climbable. You can filter by property-->climbable to see which ones are.
 

Moosegun

Moosegun
Learn and understand workzones - they are vital when building anything other than a simple zoo. If you do not understand how they work and how they should be set up then you are going to struggle as your zoo expands.

If you get a profitable zoo then SAVE SOME MONEY - if you get a zoo that is working and making a profit, then let it run for a bit and get some money in the bank BEFORE you expand. Expanding too quickly or bringing in expensive animals can cause any zoo to tank financially (like the guy who complained about the 'feeding bug' because his 15 pandas were costing too much)

Contraception - Someone has already touched on this but I see a lot of people complaining about micro management. Contraception is in the game for a reason, you do NOT have to breed all of your animals all of the time. Only breed animals you need to breed.

Learn the AI - One thing I suggest ALL players do, particularly early game when there is little to do, watch your guests, switch heatmaps and see how they move around your zoo. Look for chokepoints where guests get stuck, look for the education they read and the area they bypass. Look for parts of your zoo with high thirst and hunger. Watch your keepers and understand how they work, how far they are travelling

Fix routing issues - one of the biggest causes of bugs in this game is the AI routing / pathing, I have fixed the majority of issue with feeding etc by flattening terrain, replacing paths which werent connecting properly etc. The more complex the habitat terrain, the more the chance of these issues

Just because it is not working for you, does not mean it is a bug - this game is a lot more complex and unforgiving than some people expect, 90% of the 'bugs' I have helped people with are actually user error.
 

stridecolossus

stridecolossus
Strategically place donation boxes - As a couple of other posters have noted guests stand in the oddest places to look at your habitats, and sometimes not where you initially placed your donation buckets, so move them to where the crowds gather and watch the cash roll in.

Guest heat map - This is a tool I originally totally ignored but now use all the time. It can be used to determine whether your guests are hungry or thirsty (more shops), tired (more benches and maybe transport), etc. Certainly easier than looking at individual guest comments to work out whether your zoo is working or not.

Special effects - If you've watched any videos you've almost certainly seen lots of waterfalls! However there are lots of other particle effects that can add atmosphere, some I've used: mist looks really cool in a rainforest glasshouse, adding blossom to a tree or a copse of trees is lovely, water effects can be used to simulate rapids or a small, thin gorge-like stream without having to use water at all, I'm sure there are plenty of others.

Train your staff - I see a lot of people responding to lots of litter by simply recruiting more caretakers for example, this is ok but don't forget that your staff can (and should) be trained making them better at their jobs. It's also something you can be doing once your zoo is up-and-running and you're basically waiting for the cash to build up.
 

Jileha

J
Urufu1997 said:
It isn't useful but if your Guests have Balloons, you can click on them to let them burst😉🎈🎈🎈
Click to expand...

But doing so will tick them off and you get a red face. Not sure if this makes any difference in their overall happiness, but if somebody is already upset, bursting their ballon might send them on a vandalism spree. So burst them at your own risk! :)
 

Urufu1997

Urufu1997
Jileha said:
But doing so will tick them off and you get a red face. Not sure if this makes any difference in their overall happiness, but if somebody is already upset, bursting their ballon might send them on a vandalism spree. So burst them at your own risk! :)
Click to expand...
😅 Thanks, didn't knew this. Sounds logical
 

Dr4gon

Dr4gon
For animals with lots of offspring like warthogs, is 0 fertility not a negative. They will still get young, but at least not fill the habitat with one litter :)
 

MrTux

MrTux
Magenpie said:
Early Gameplay - Start SLOWLY. Don't overspend or aim for the more exciting animals too soon - really good starter animals are Timber Wolves, Bison, Pronghorn and Grizzly Bears. They're easy to get, and the good offspring sell pretty well on Animal Trading. And the wolfies in partic are nice to watch.
Click to expand...
This so much! Exhibits also seem like a great start. I started a franchise zoo with only 3 exhibits and it could easily sustain itself while I built the actual habitats
Guitarmike47 said:
For some of the lower-level species like lemurs, the difference between the price you'll get for an average animal in the market and the price you'll get by just releasing them to the wild is minimal
Click to expand...
To add to that, the prices on the animal market in Franchise mode are super volatile and sometimes change to the extremes. I sold a few lemurs for 5 to 10k CC🍃 each a few days ago!
 

Jaggid Edje

Jaggid Edje
On the topic of releasing vs. trading, anyone else have it that if they release an animal when it matures directly from the habitat, instead of sending it to the trade center first, gets you significantly more cp for release? With a litter of lions that matured I noticed I would get like 2x more cp for the release if I released it and never sent it to the trade center. Or was I just imagining things? ( I had cancelled a release and then sent it to the trade center and I swear to God that the amount of cp it had offered me originally was way more than what it showed once in the trade center).
 

Monsarona

Monsarona
Jaggid Edje said:
On the topic of releasing vs. trading, anyone else have it that if they release an animal when it matures directly from the habitat, instead of sending it to the trade center first, gets you significantly more cp for release? With a litter of lions that matured I noticed I would get like 2x more cp for the release if I released it and never sent it to the trade center. Or was I just imagining things? ( I had cancelled a release and then sent it to the trade center and I swear to God that the amount of cp it had offered me originally was way more than what it showed once in the trade center).
Click to expand...

You aren't going crazy. Not sure if its by design or not. But if you send an animal to the trade center first their release CC will be significantly less. Its been almost half the original release price some times.
 

NL_Mutso

NL_Mutso
Jaggid Edje said:
On the topic of releasing vs. trading, anyone else have it that if they release an animal when it matures directly from the habitat, instead of sending it to the trade center first, gets you significantly more cp for release? With a litter of lions that matured I noticed I would get like 2x more cp for the release if I released it and never sent it to the trade center. Or was I just imagining things? ( I had cancelled a release and then sent it to the trade center and I swear to God that the amount of cp it had offered me originally was way more than what it showed once in the trade center).
Click to expand...

You aren't going crazy... Saw that one from the beginning as well.. They lose a level in medal (not gold for me)

https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/9476
 
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