There are a few biomes missing from the game, which causes an inability to create zoos in their corresponding real life biome, and makes some animals' biome placement incorrect. I did the research, and here are the main biomes missing according to it:
- Scrub - scrublands, a semi-arid landscape defined by mid-high tempreatures and shrubland with a few trees, is a biome that is found around the mediterranean, in the Sahel in africa, southern australia, south africa and parts of the US and Mexico in NA. In the game it is replaced by desert/grassland (which is way too hot and lacks trees and bushes to represent real scrubland) or temperate (which is way too cold and green, real scrublands don't experience snow).
- Wetlands - the current aquatic biome should be split to wetlands and coastal. Currently wetlands animals have relatively few plants, and the aquatic biome is inconsistent with animals that live in wetlands but are not actually aquatic, like the Proboscis monkey
- Coastal - The coastal animals of the game havffe some weird biome combinations (like desert+aquatic for the african penguin), which means we lack both terrestrial coastal shrubs and coastal seaweed and water plants
- Grassland - the grassland in the game is very clearly an african savannah, which really doesn't fit for Europe, NA and Asia, both in ground textures and tempratures. This does not require a new biome, but rather new grassland maps for these contienents.
For some animals these should be their "primary" biomes, which is not currently reflected in the game.
Here are the roster animals with missing biomes:
Biome | Animals missing a primary biome | Animals missing a secondrary biome | Biome image |
---|
Scrub |
- Aardvark
- Black Wildebeest
- Springbok
- Gemsbok
- Southern White Rhino
|
- African Wild Dog
- Common Warthog
- Dingo
- Fennec Fox
- Red Kangaroo
- Ring-tailed Lemur
- Spotted Hyena
- Pronghorn
| View attachment 249874 |
Wetlands |
- Cuvier's Dwarf Caiman
- Hippopotamus
- Proboscis Monkey
- Giant Otter
- Gharial
- Nile Monitor
|
- African Buffalo
- Babirusa
- Baird's Tapir
- Indian Elephant
- Jaguar
- Malayan Tapir
- Proboscis Monkey
- Pygmy Hippo
- Southern Cassowary
| View attachment 249876 |
Coastal |
- African Penguin
- Grey Seal
- King Penguin
- Saltwater Crocodile
|
- Komodo Dragon
- Southern Cassowary
| View attachment 249878 |
In my opinion, this is one of the main things missing from the game, and I wanted to put it up for discussion and for the devs to potentially see.
Easy changes:
Even without creating new maps, as
@Bearcat9948 said, it would be easy to create icons and tags for these 3 biomes, and then apply them to the animals in table above.
I'm tagging the community managers so they could see the list, and various suggestions in the post and comments:
@Tim Smith @Eltanin Casciani @Francesca Falcini @Jens Erik