Large Habitats - Unsustainable

[Haloy1]

I have quite a large zoo with many habitats and animals. I am facing problems with my large African habitat which houses buffaloes, giraffes, wildebeest, springboks, ostriches and antelopes. I have 5 keepers assigned to this habitat alone and 3 of which handle feeding only and my animals are still starving. The keepers are so in-efficient it's almost laughable. I have a large staff room and a large keeper hut right next door. The keepers assigned to feeding complain that they have no work to do and yet will not fill the food troughs. One of the three will randomly fill a few enrichment items which is not enough to feed all the animals, while the other two will sulk and walk around the park aimlessly doing absolutely nothing.

My smaller habitats with one animal species (and one keeper) are sustainable.

This needs to be fixed. Keepers are very in-efficient when it comes to feeding.

 

[MummyMoose91]

It might not be the case, but in Beta I had a lot of trouble with my multi animal African exhibit. The keepers were putting in food, but not the correct type for the animals present? Not sure about the animals you mentioned, but do they all eat the same food or do they need different diets? If you click the food bowls when they have food in it will tell you what eats it.

Just an idea.. but I do agree that the keepers are very inefficient for the large exhibits.

 

[ASalton1]

I had the same problem with my Giraffe, Ostrich, and Buffalo exhibit. I had the exhibit and 5 keepers, 3 mechanics, a workshop, large keeper hut, and large staff building in a work zone right behind the exhibit, right next to the habitat door. I put all the feeders for the different animals next to the habitat door and they still couldn’t keep the animals fed. I ended up selling the ostriches and the problem was fixed. I think there is a feeding bug with a mixed exhibit with more than 2 species.

 

[Wolfen75]

One of my first habitats was wilderbeests, warthogs and sprinboks.
Its a little busy but working fine if i don't let the numbers go out of hand.
I have 3 keepers taking care of that habitat and one with african wild dogs.
But feeding can be a weird thing at times indeed.

 

[Agathorn]

Sadly just adding more keepers often doesn't help for the reason I posted about here:

Staff need "shifts"

As I grow my staff pool I'm finding that managing them is a real mess. The biggest problem I have is the way they work. They don't coordinate at all, they just plow through work until tired then go rest. The end result is that basically all my keepers for example tend to be workign at the...

forums.frontier.co.uk

Without the ability to organize staff in shifts, then eventually all just end up taking breaks at the same time.

 

[Skjoldur]

I noticed the same thing over the weekend. Even adding more keepers did not change a thing, so there might be a problem with multiple keepers working in the same, large habitat.

I have also seen that post from a developer, I think it was on Steam(?), regarding the food enrichments being one of the reasons why animals are not being properly fed implying that was a mistake made by the player. In my opinion this is a bug, because primarily the food bowls and stuff should be filled and the toy stuff and enrichment come second.

 

[Snufkin]

Do you think only one keeper will enter a habitat at a time? At least I haven't yet seen two in a habitat together and would be interested to know if other people have experienced the same. If so, there's really no point in having more than two keepers assigned to one habitat, and you are limited to habitats that are small enough to be maintained by one keeper.

 

[Skjoldur]

Do you think only one keeper will enter a habitat at a time? At least I haven't yet seen two in a habitat together and would be interested to know if other people have experienced the same. If so, there's really no point in having more than two keepers assigned to one habitat, and you are limited to habitats that are small enough to be maintained by one keeper.

I have seen 2, maybe even 3 keepers in a habitat cleaning and feeding at the same time. I am not sure if multiple keepers could perform the same task at the same time though, because then it would properly scale and food bowls and stuff would always be filled with more keepers, but this is not the case.

 

[NoukuNouku]

i experience the problem, that many keepers for a big habitat got stuck in the entrance. like 5 keepers wanted to join 1 habitat, and yes several keepers in one habitat are possible. however the solution could be multiple gates to one habitat.

 

[NL_Mutso]

Large exhibits were an issue in beta as well..

I think I saw 2 at the same time.. 1 feeding and 1 cleaning..

How large (m2) is your exhibit ? Just to get an idea about 'large'..

 

[Firestar97]

My Siberian Tiger Enclosure has two Keepers assigned to it and they where both in there at the same Time. I think assigning them to a Enclosure makes this possible

 

[[VR] Deggial]

A question:
According to Chante's post, different jobs can be assigned to keepers. I wasn't aware of this previously.
Did you try to separate cleaning and feeding tasks so that the single keepers are not overworked due to the large habitat size?

(Disclaimer: I didn't build such huge enclousures so far. Therefore it's indeed a genuine question and not a recommendation.)

 

[Dae]

I tried to assign jobs to keepers (not to large habitats but the idea is the same) but as long as there is no possibility of setting shifts it's just as unsustainable because you can't set up just one keeper per task because that keeper will have to rest sometimes, so, what? 2? but if they work and rest at the same time...? 3? And what of the salary costs because your staff is underworking because you separate tasks too much?

I quickly stopped separating because it doesn't assure me that things will go better and I'm pretty sure it can get worse.

And since the assignments are only visible in the individual panel, when you want to manage your staff and reorganize things it's just hellish because you don't know who does what (except if you rename your staff to reflect zones and assignments... talk about immersion...) and it's simpler to remove all assignments. Zones are useful, assignments not as long as you can't set shifts.

 

[Amrah]

I have the same problem with my large african habitat. (Ostriches, Thomson Gazelles and Giraffes)

I have four keepers asssigned to the habitat, they have their own staff room and large keeper hut. But only one of the keepers seems to work at a time.
The others just 'wander' and are bored. They are not even tired/taking breaks - they simply do nothing at all - despite there being plenty of work to do.

And if the one working keeper decides to clean instead of feeding, my animals starve.

They also simply just put in too little food.... If the keeper goes and feeds the ostriches they all come running and the feeding bowl is empty within seconds. The keeper then proceeds to filling the Gazelles bowl and so on... and by the time he has filled the last bowl, the ostriches are starving again

I also do not understand why you can't assign a keeper to specific species, like it would be in a real zoo. So the Ostrich keeper would focus on keeping just the ostriches happy and well fed, while the Giraffe keeper takes care of them.

 

[LN]

I've seen plenty of Zoo documentaries to understand normally keepers are linked with an habitat/exhibit instead of a specific animal.

 

[Amrah]

I've seen plenty of Zoo documentaries to understand normally keepers are linked with an habitat/exhibit instead of a specific animal.

Okay - then never mind that. Might be just different for different zoos. But as a matter of fact, assigning several keepers to one large habitat doesn't work as it is supposed.

 

[Skjoldur]

Okay - then never mind that. Might be just different for different zoos. But as a matter of fact, assigning several keepers to one large habitat doesn't work as it is supposed.

Exactly. Right now, adding keepers just doesn't properly scale.If one keeper can keep up with 10 animals I would expect 4 keepers to sustain 40 animals or at least near that ( the values are examples and probably differ from species to species). Not the case.

 

[Agathorn]

From what I saw in beta and have seen so far in release, you can never have two keepers in one habitat performing the SAME job. So at most you can have two keepers working at once in a large habitat. One keeper feeding and One keeper cleaning. And generally this will only happen if you assign the keepers the specific job, in otherwords change their settings so one does only feeding and one does only cleaning.

The other problem though like I said is shifts. The way staff work right now, including keepers, is they just work until they are tired then rest. What ends up happening is they get to the point where they are all working at the same time then all tired at the same time. So you end up with huge gaps in your schedule when ALL your keepers are taking a break.

 

[Robbierotten]

Yup, learned this the hard way today. Tried making a big African Safari ride that went through a mega-exhibit with a bunch of different African species. Was a complete disaster.

 

[TheGaijin87]

didnt read every post but it seems to me that every animal needs his own enrichment food item. so in case you got 40 animals in there you gotta need 40 food items