Hello! I have had several times the situation where a non aquatic animal, like the reindeer, gets very low welfare because it is too hot for them because of the water. As you can see on the pic, all the habitat is filled with coolers, but there's a very small pond. As soon as the animals get in the water, they get very low welfare, even if it only takes the animal 3 seconds to traverse the pond. I don't want to have to put a water temperature regulator for each habitat, since they have a big impact on the visitors. Besides, for non aquatic animals, getting in the water should lower their temperature, not raise it. The transition should be much more slow, or if the water is too hot, they shouldn't get into it. How do you cope with this issue? It has happenned to me with other animals too.
Non aquatic animals and water temperature
- Thread starter Aramar
- Start date
This really shouldn't be a Problem in the Game. I think too they should do something about it. I don't think Water that is just outside in a relatively big Pond shouldn't get warm enough naturally to make a Reindeer uncomfortable. At least not that fast.
A big Problem is that it doesn't seem to work correctly anymore that Animals go to cold Areas when it gets too hot. I'm always experiencing my Himalayan Brown Bears just lying in the Sun and getting cooked. They never go into their Cave that is partially cooled down and when they go into the Water that I've extra cooled down for them, it's just a lucky Coincidence. The weird Thing is that it still seems to work normally for Animals from warm Climates to go inside when it starts to snow
A big Problem is that it doesn't seem to work correctly anymore that Animals go to cold Areas when it gets too hot. I'm always experiencing my Himalayan Brown Bears just lying in the Sun and getting cooked. They never go into their Cave that is partially cooled down and when they go into the Water that I've extra cooled down for them, it's just a lucky Coincidence. The weird Thing is that it still seems to work normally for Animals from warm Climates to go inside when it starts to snow
I know this isn't the answer you're looking for, but my solution has been to always place a water cleaner and water temperature regulator together, since the water has to be cleaned anyway, and their guest negative impact radius is about the same. The only problem I've had is in places where I have colder animals and warmer animals close to each other in the same water cleaning radius. In those cases, I sometimes have to find an alternate location for at least one of the temp regulators, so that one can be hot and another cold.
I've had this issue with reindeer and also with wolves when there is a "heat wave" and they are in the water. This was a real issue for my polar bears too, before the water temp regulators became available. They would overheat while swimming in water, even though I had coolers in their habitat. Of course, in real life, animals might use a water pool to cool down when it gets hot, because it takes a while for water to increase in temperature.
One thing that's not super realistic is that the water temp seems to equilibrate very quickly with the air temp in game, even with very large bodies of water. Water absorbs a lot more heat to warm up than soil or air, and it takes longer to cool down too (in scientific terms, it has a high specific heat/heat capacity compared to many compounds). This is why swimming pools (in summer) are almost always cooler than air temp during the day and warmer than air temp at night, unless you live somewhere where it's consistently hot for weeks at a time, night and day. And it takes days, even weeks, of warm weather in general before an un-heated pool becomes appreciably warmer in spring. I remember being a kid and jumping in a frigid swimming pool during the first heat wave of the season!
I've begun to use the water temp regulators in game, even for non aquatic animals if they are species that like to hop into their pools. Like iloveyourzoos, putting the temp regulator in a group with the water cleaner works pretty well, as they seem to have a similar range and have a similar negative impact.
And yes, if there's a way to have two adjacent habitats hooked up to separate water temp regulators, I haven't figured it out yet. Makes it hard to have the penguins next to the gharials or something.
One thing that's not super realistic is that the water temp seems to equilibrate very quickly with the air temp in game, even with very large bodies of water. Water absorbs a lot more heat to warm up than soil or air, and it takes longer to cool down too (in scientific terms, it has a high specific heat/heat capacity compared to many compounds). This is why swimming pools (in summer) are almost always cooler than air temp during the day and warmer than air temp at night, unless you live somewhere where it's consistently hot for weeks at a time, night and day. And it takes days, even weeks, of warm weather in general before an un-heated pool becomes appreciably warmer in spring. I remember being a kid and jumping in a frigid swimming pool during the first heat wave of the season!
I've begun to use the water temp regulators in game, even for non aquatic animals if they are species that like to hop into their pools. Like iloveyourzoos, putting the temp regulator in a group with the water cleaner works pretty well, as they seem to have a similar range and have a similar negative impact.
And yes, if there's a way to have two adjacent habitats hooked up to separate water temp regulators, I haven't figured it out yet. Makes it hard to have the penguins next to the gharials or something.
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You can set both the temperature and the range of the water temperature regulators, similar to how you can set the range of an education speaker. As long as each body of water is separate, and only in the range of one regulator, you could have hot and cold water pools side by side.... just have the two regulators set away from each other and with a range so that each only touches the one pool that it is controlling.