Planet Zoo Beta live NOW!

Paul_Crowther

Senior Community Manager
Frontier
Hello Zookeepers!

Our Planet Zoo Beta is now live for you to enjoy!

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The Planet Zoo Beta is available to everyone who has pre-ordered the Planet Zoo Deluxe Edition and runs from 24 September until 5PM BST on 8 October! If you haven't bought the Deluxe Edition just yet; don't worry, you can still pre-order here and join before it ends!


What's available?

Our Beta is not the full Planet Zoo experience, but rather a focused selection of game content to let you have a taste of what's to come! If you'd like to know exactly what will and what will not be available during the Planet Zoo Beta, please read our post here. Additionally, your dedicated Community Team is around to answer any other questions you might have!


Bug Reports

You may encounter the odd bug or issue from time to time, as this is not the final game build of Planet Zoo. If you experience any problems, please report via our Issue Tracker so that our teams can investigate as soon as possible! We're also really interested in your gameplay experiences and feedback, so please share any thoughts via our brand new, dedicated Beta Feedback forum. You'll be helping us a lot by leaving us your constructive comments, as we aim to bring you the most fun, final experience on 5 November!


Known Issues

The build you are about to enjoy is a Beta game build, so it’s not the final version of the game that you will be playing on 5 November. This means there may be a few issues or bugs you encounter which we’d like you to report to us via the Issue Tracker here.

We are also aware of some potential framerate issues you might encounter. Our developers are working incredibly hard to optimise the game’s performance, but you may experience some issues at the start of the Beta. Please know that we are working on this and we’ll keep you updated on further improvements. Again, this is not indicative of the final build in November.

As you will be playing the Beta build of the game, there are a few Known Issues you may run in to. You don't need to highlight these to us as we're already on the case!

General
  • Frame rate improvements are ongoing
  • A delay when saving a zoo can make it appear that it isn’t saving when it is, please be patient!
  • Several crashes we are aware of:
  • Crash when deleting a workshop that is in use by staff
  • Crash when selecting the traversal heat map on a boxed animal
  • Crash when comparing Warthogs after Scenario 1 objective to adopt them
  • Rare crash seen when deleting a habitat
  • Crash when double clicking Steam Train camera
Scenario/Career Mode
  • You can block your progress completing the scenario by releasing animals to the wild too early
  • Occasionally hippos get stuck swimming in the water.
  • Moving them to the trade centre and placing them back into the hippo habitat will resolve the issue
  • There is no hint pop-up for the heat maps in the bottom left corner
  • Juvenile Warthogs in pre-built habitat can be seen as escaped if interacting with the mud bath
Franchise Mode
  • Avatars don’t currently visit Franchises.
  • Unable to close a zoo under a Franchise.
  • Animal history does not update when starting a new Franchise, so you can get duplicates from previous Franchises
  • Franchise management tab work in progress
Animals
  • Animal disease is turned off for Beta
  • Occasionally Animals can fall through the ground and are then boxed; you will need to unbox them
  • Sometimes animals can be boxed, but the option to unbox is unavailable. You can get round this by moving the animal to storage and placing back in a habitat.
  • Animals sometimes jump through barriers
  • Animals will not be able to interact with feeding stations placed close to the habitat gate (including enrichment feeders)
  • Animal Animation issues when displaying certain behaviours like stretched muzzle on walking animation or floating enrichment grab animation.
  • Big cat jumping animations are being refined
  • Climbing animations are being refined
  • Navigation on slopes as well as general navigation is being refined
People
  • If Staff or Guests get stuck walking, moving them manually will solve that.
  • Some Staff or Guest reactions to management issues are ongoing, for example upset at ticket pricing.
Building
  • Inconsistent costs when raising barrier height
UI related
  • Path and Terrain UI will not open if you have opened them twice in a row beforehand. If you open other UI and try again this fixes the issue.
  • Several outstanding issues in the Animal Market
  • Shop finances appear green even if they are losing money
  • Cannot change ticket price from the zoo management menu
  • Various Help Buttons aren’t connected to their help
  • Guest UI's "Group Finances" spending categories are inaccurate
You are free to stream and share content of your Planet Zoo Beta experience, and we look forward to seeing the magnificent zoos you create! Be sure to keep checking our forums and social pages for some exciting Beta activities you can participate in - there's some great prizes to win as well!

We hope you enjoy it,

the Planet Zoo team.
 

TheWetDolphin

TheWetDolphin
Oh dear, I've already got a pretty big issue. I can't seem to load into the first Career mission, my game crashes within 2 seconds of loading :(
 

Robert Maynard

Volunteer Moderator
Robert Maynard
Downloading - once I remembered to claim my Steam key from the store (having purchased on the store).

.... and although I was meant to be mining tonight to boost funds for my Carrier, I'll not be doing that tonight...
 

ChicagoZohan

C
Hey all, so an issue I'm seeing, and that I'm seeing reported by streamers, on Reddit, etc, seems pretty bad... In Franchise Mode, you can build a trade center and bring in Exhibit Animals, but the large Habitat Animals aren't showing up at all. The screen is totally blank. I filed a bug report but since it seems universal I wanted to see if this was a known issue, or if we're all missing something.
 

Maxxond

M
Hello, I'm playing on ultra settings but the textures are low. Is there any high texture resolution pack or am I missing something?
 

NZFanatic

NZFanatic
I, too, seem to be experiencing the crash when trying to load Career Mode. I have submitted the problem on the issue tracker twice so hopefully it will be fixed soon - haven't yet attempted Franchise Mode.

I did wonder if it could have been because my laptop is so full of junk. I uninstalled a bunch of games I no longer play (including The Sims 4, by far the biggest lot) to try and resolve the issue but to no avail. Hopefully Franchise Mode will work for me so I can at least play something.

I'll be devastated if this is an issue with my computer and not the game itself. I've been looking forward to this game desperately since it was announced.

Edit: Franchise Mode loaded but very slow and choppy even on lowest graphics settings (this may be due to my computer of course - I'm just glad it loaded). Oh, I also can't seem to actually exit the game because the save fails and there's no option to not save and just exit (I haven't actually done anything worth saving). Rather than exiting without saving it just won't let me exit.
 
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Joren91

J
Pretty rough when it comes to performance and frame rate, but since that's been announced as something that the team is working on, I'm not panicking yet. To me it does seem more like a real beta (testing phase) than with Planet Coaster.

I do notice a dinstinctive lag on the animation on certain animals, like they move through some sort of waze (so far the tiger, lion and lemurs). I'll use the Issue Tracker once I've really noticed some problems.

Thanks for the work so far Frontier, looking forward to discovering more in the next few weeks!
 
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