My Franchise Zoo is Ruined

[KaoRu]

I have a fairly small Franchise Zoo, but one that I spent days creating. The main feature right now is a Riverwalk, which is a continuous walking trail where the guests enter the habitats of the peacocks, flamingos, aardvarks, pangolins, okapi, springbok, gazelle & antelope. There is a continuous river that flows through every habitat. I have had this setup for a long time, at least 50 in-game years and it's worked well until today.

Today, I spent about 3 hours in Sandbox mode creating a building for my spiders. Then I came back into Franchise Mode and started placing the building, creating the paths etc. The building had a solar panel upstairs (with a hole in the roof for it to function). This is when the bug tsunami started. First, the mechanics refused to recognize the solar panel. So, I lowered it to ground level, still inside the building and still functional. Didn't help, they couldn't recognize it, so had to destroy it. As I'm dealing with this, I started to get tons of notifications about animals in the aforementioned Riverwalk that are "dying of thirst". what, they literally live on the river. I hustled over there & tried to get as many as I could into Quarantine, but I lost a few of my best Gold tier flamingos, and a couple of antelopes. I decided to address the antelope problem, since that enclosure was now empty, so I went to the trade center to see what I had, and would need to purchase either a male or female. I open my Trade Center...what! I have 72 animals in storage? This can't be right. I decide to filter by Thomson's Gazelle & get rid of some of those...try to sell the first one, and there's no sell option. Why? Because he's 0.0 years old. How in the world did that happen? So I filter my Trade Center by age and discover there are over 20 animals in there that are all 0.0 years old. This definitely wasn't something that I did. So I move all of the babies into their respective habitats to clear room in the Trade Center. I unpause the game to allow them time to get cleared out, then I start getting warnings for every single habitat along the Riverwalk saying that it's dirty. That can't be right, like I said, I've had this thing running smooth for at least 5 decades. The water suddenly looks brown. So, I use the water heat map, all looks fine, except the river is filthy. I click on the water pump that manages the river, and it says "bodies of water managed - 0". Hmm, maybe the water pump is bugged, so I'll plop down a new one. Same result...no water pumps recognize the river anymore. So, I'm frustrated and seemingly out of options. Running the game will eventually kill every animal in the Riverwalk. So, I click "Save & Quit" and CTD. Perfect.

View attachment 150870

I noticed my Komodo Dragon babies were getting sent to the Trade Centre without me knowing. Only happens to them. But also a tip for if you want to exit the game without saving, either press ALT + F4 which will force the game to close. Or instead just go in settings and change it to window mode and click the X on the game window. They really need to add a "Quit" button without the saving. Something could go horribly wrong but you can't exit the game and retry (unless you do what I suggested) bcuz it forces you to save when you exit.

 

[holliday50]

I wanted to give an update on the Riverwalk. I ended up spending about 4-5 hours boxing and moving about 50 animals, draining the river, deleting paths, barriers and resculpting parts of the river. I then replaced the paths, rebuilt the barriers, put all the animals back in & filled the river. At first, I had a major bug with the flamingos thinking they only had 175 Sq meters of water, even though their enclosure was unchanged. A restart of the game fixed that, so they recognized that they have about 10x that much water. As for the water treatment issue, I discovered that since the river was so large, a 2nd water treatment facility was touching the edge and counting the river among it's treated bodies of water. I can only assume then that the reason it wasn't being cleaned is the "poop in the water" bug. Amazing that I was able to play for 50 years before this happened in a continuous river system that runs through 8 habitats. I have played for many hours since the fix and have done pretty well. A couple of days ago, I was afraid I'd have to scrap the whole thing, so I'll take it.

I still sometimes get babies sent to the Trade Center and I have no idea what that's all about. They could be being duplicated, or maybe I send them after they reach adulthood and they revert back to 0.0 months. I haven't been able to catch it as it happens to be able to tell for sure.

As a workaround for the dying of thirst bug, I placed the automated water pans in the enclosures, despite already having a river. I made a strange observation doing this for flamingos and gorillas. In my Gorilla habitat (the primate habitat blueprint by Frontier) all my gorillas were dying of thirst despite the massive lake in the center of the habitat. When I placed down the dripping water pan, they all rushed to drink, but they didn't come all the way over to the pan...they rushed to drink out of the lake that was already there. Same thing happened with the flamingos. Something about having that in the habitat triggers them to drink the natural water.

 

[NatisZoos]

...

I still sometimes get babies sent to the Trade Center and I have no idea what that's all about. They could be being duplicated, or maybe I send them after they reach adulthood and they revert back to 0.0 months. I haven't been able to catch it as it happens to be able to tell for sure.

...

Oh my god I thought I was going crazy
I had no idea that this happens to other people as well. I see no reason that there are suddenly babies in the trading center. Either it were former grown ups that I put there and that became babies again or is just a bug that sends random babies there. I don't know why it is like that.
Because I have 4 albino peacocks there and I REALLY thought they were grown up, but maybe I was wrong...

 

[Annageckos]

As a workaround for the dying of thirst bug, I placed the automated water pans in the enclosures, despite already having a river. I made a strange observation doing this for flamingos and gorillas. In my Gorilla habitat (the primate habitat blueprint by Frontier) all my gorillas were dying of thirst despite the massive lake in the center of the habitat. When I placed down the dripping water pan, they all rushed to drink, but they didn't come all the way over to the pan...they rushed to drink out of the lake that was already there. Same thing happened with the flamingos. Something about having that in the habitat triggers them to drink the natural water.

I had this same thing happen, but with peafowl. As soon as I placed the water pipe water they rushed to the pond to drink.

 

[Wolfen75]

So it wasn't me with those 0.0 years cups all the time.
On my huge zoo (R.I.P. The Rising Sun ) i had those from time to time, but had so many
species that i was never sure where they came from.
And i was able to support them without too much problems.
Well, before the animal food problem killed me.

I will only tinker around with small at the most 10 habitat zoos, if i don't give it up completly for
the nearby future.
At least in franchise mode its not possible to keep a big zoo stable.

 

[holliday50]

Well, bad news. Now, my river gets dirty all the time because of poo in the water. It's so bad that I spend more time fixing it than playing, so I can not unpause the game. Today, when the issue first happened, I had to drain the river, move around 40-45 animals to the trade center, send keepers in to clean the habitats, then send those 40-45 animals back to their enclosures. All this took quite a while...probably around 20 minutes or so. When I got them all in, I was only able to play for about 10 minutes before the river was mud-brown again. So yeah, the zoo is pretty much unplayable until they patch the damn poo in the water, which I'm guessing will be Thursday at the absolute earliest.

I really wanted to finish up the Gorilla event, but I definitely can't do it in this zoo. Might have to box them all up and start a brand new zoo with just gorillas in it to get it done tomorrow.