My bad then
Planet Zoo in 2024: How would König do it eddition
- Thread starter KönigDerKaffeebohnen
- Start date
There are a couple of subspecies of Plains zebra that show brownish shadow stripes, though. Chapman's zebra is the best example, I think.
Summer 2024:
Now the reason why i wanted to do this pack in the first place, an island animal pack for summer. Now that the oceania pack and the tropical pack took 3 of the very predictable choices out of the way, this pack has way more potential to be interesting now! Just like for the mountains, im gonna tell you where the animals are from first and so you can maybe even guess who im choosing for the pack, so we got 1 from New guinnea, 1 from Madagascar, 1 from Bali, 1 from Sulawesi, 1 from Hispaniola, 1 from the Shetland Isles, 1 from New Zealand and 1 from Hawaii so literally every continent has atleast one island coverd.
Now then starting on New Guinnea, we have the first difficult choice of the pack. Matschie or Goodfellow? To keep it short, i am a biased man and i find matchies cuter so the species kept in North America wins, hurray for the AZA enjoyer.
The Matschies or Huon Treekangaroo is native to the Huon Peninsula of north eastern new guinea, a rugged mountain range filled with a dense tropical mountain rain and decidious forest and one of the most biodiverse spots on oceanias most biodiverse island, which the Matschies treekangaroo being perhaps the most iconic animal of the region.
Compared to other tree kangaroos it has a few unique traits. For one, its able to stand bipedally du to their very flexible and rotateable limps and are the most muscular of the tree kangaroos, making the best vertical climbers. They are also very adept at hopping and can leap up to 9 meter far.
Tree kangaroos have a very distinct way to climb, as they grab onto the tree and hop either forward or do an akward backwards shuffle, which is hard to explain so i got a video here for you where theres just 2 mins of one climbing around, enjoy!
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E27v1CNLhKA
This also means that to bring them into the game, they will eat up alot of the ressources of this pack, but its a payoff worth taking atleast in my opinion.
As very shy animals, tending to stick to themself in solidarity or only living with their mate and joey, being very nervous around humans when they arnt used to them.
In the game theyd not only complete oceania for most people, theyd also add a very unique new macropod and climber, unlike anything else in the game.
Sadly this rigg is also more or less one use, as the only other somewhat present in zoos treekangaroo is the before mentioned goodfellows, which is kept in europe and australia, but wouldnt add that much to the game when we allready have a tree kangaroo.
So all in all this would be a very visually appealling, extremly unique climber that would be truly unique in the game and would defenetly spice up every tropical house or oceanian section.
Moving over to Madagascar and its neighboring islands of Reunion and Mauritus, we are immediatly faced with the costs of the Treekangaroo, but that doesnt have to be a bad thing.
Originally, this was where i wanted to put the Alaotra Bamboo Lemure here, a very unique herbivorous lemure that is endemic to the reeds of Madagascars largest lake Alaotra, but instead we will explore a different, allmost opposite angle with the radiated tortoise. Instead of representing the mountainous lake we explore the dry south and its dry woodland, savanna and thorn forests. They are one of the areas main grazers, eventhough they also love snacking on cactus and succulent plants.
They are much smaller then the tortoises in game with a carapace lenght of 40 cm, roughly 10 cm longer then a meerkats body.
Its dark, bumpy shell with light stripes reminding of stars are very beautiful, often being seen as one of if not the most beautiful tortoise in the world, a status that became to their detriment as many of them got captured for the pettrade, leaving them as critically endangerd. Ironically though this made it also quite easy for zoos to obtain then and combined with their very long life time (the oldest documented individual, a female named Tu'i Malila, lived to be 188 years old after being given as a present to the Togan royal family by James Cook. The same tortoise also met Queen Elisabeth II and died in 1966) and readily breeding in captivity there are now 108 EAZA zoos keeping them, making it the 6. most common tortoise in the EAZA. (Nr 1-5 are African Spurred Tortoise, Herrmanns Tortoise, Red Footed Tortoise, Leopard Tortoise and Greek tortoise for those interested).
Theyd be a wonderfull adition for madagascan areas, as theyd be both be a good roommate for the lemures, while also easily serving as standalone exhibits.
They also will be included in a special new functionality discussed in the update post, can you guess what it will be?
Overall while not the exciting new addition on its own, its great to finally have another tortoise and a smaller one makes it even better
Talking about small, our representative from bali is also quite the tiny fellow. As the only endemic vertebrate of the island and the face of a very big zoo founded conservation campaign there was no way that i could have made this pack without the bali mynah. Found in 138 zoos they are the face of the Asian Song Bird Conservaiton front, also known as the Silent Forest Initiative. Song Birds in SEA are suffering greatly due to not just the destruction of the enviroment and clearing of forests, but also them being captured in large numbers for the pettrade. Thousands of Songbirds are stuffed in tiny Cages, seen as a sign of beauty and good luck and praised for their beautiful song, while in reality they are only suffering, lonely and isolated in a place they cant even stretch their tiny wings and the balimynah, known for its stainless white feathers, beautiful chirps and supreme rarity. This bird has been in a limbo of being allmost extinct in the wild for 30 years now, with them regulary being released in the wild only for the poachers to snatch them up again in a very sad cycle. Thankfully they are not only the most effected but also the most stubbornly bred, with multiple different breeding systems, from local breeders to both the EAZA and AZA and 3 different large breeding centers akin to the one most people might know for sumatran rhinos. There are over 1000 captive mynahs distributed over these different systems and a very strict eye is put on any legal transaction with them evolved to allways keep track of them, but sadly there are suppousedly more then twice as much as part of the illegal pettrade. They truly are one of the most dire yet hopefull and stubborn reintroduction storys and deserve to be honored in the game.
As a starling they would be our first songbird of the game, commonly found bouth in aviarys and free flying in tropical halls. They would be a little more restricted in movement compared to the macaw, not being able to climb or hang theyd still could perch, hop around on the ground and ofcourse fly through the air.
Once their beautiful song has made it into the game, no tropical house will sound the same no more, never having to be a silent forest again.
But the Mynah isnt the only addition to SEA, as it will not only finally obtain a bird but also a new monkey in the celebes crested macaque, a true master of the goofy face expressions. As a very unusual primate, they have reddish eyes, only making their face even more special.
One of the smaller macaques with an rather apelike appearance as it lacks a tail stump, its one of six macaque species living on sulawesi. There they live mostly grounddwelling in societys of 5 to 25 individuals, even reaching up to 80 or even 100, mostly feeding on fruits but also not saying no to eggs, invertebrates, funghi and other small animals it gets its hands on like frogs or lizards. Females typically outnumber males by a ratio of 4:1, with male baechlor groups being quite common.
Compared to other macaques, the crested ones are very social and especally social tollerant. They spend alot of time socialising, even with non related members of the same sex, and conflicts are usually solved with threats or even reconciliation without drawing blood.
In the wild, the crested macaque is critically endangerd and the rarest of sulawesis primates. They are hunted as pests that steal crops or for bushmeat which is seen as a delicacy by locals and only protected in the Tangkoko reserve, with no penalties for killing them elsewhere.
But there is one very good news for these little guys, because while there are only 4,000-6,000 macaques left on sulawesi, they also have been introduced to the nearby island of Bacan, where there are over 100,000 individuals that are not counted as they are invasive, which while good for the survival of the species is also quite ironic.
They are rather well studied as one of the main subjects in the german primate center and spreading throught the EAZA, so hopefully their efforts will help to keep the species alive in their native range.
In game their main function would be as a tropical small to medium size monkey, filling the same role the japanese macaque is filling for northern asia and a far smaller terrestrial tropical monkey then the allmost twice as large mandrill for the game in general. They will be a great filler species for asian areas, tropical houses, primate houses or even dedicated Indonesian or Sulawesi areas and could greatly enhance the babirusas presence in the game.
To round out all islands in this area, we have our new zealand animal and one you might not have expected to have a great conservation story behind it, the kune kune pig.
These hairy barrel shape fellows are amongst the friendliest breeds of pigs, very chill and easy going and allways down for a scratch, but this breed once kept by the Maori people allmost died out, with only 50 specimen being left in the 1980s but 2 wildlife parkowners took it to them to breed them back, with them being declared to not be threatend anymore in 2010 and being by far the most common domestic pig in UK zoos with 63 holdings. Now they are spread across europe with them being found in 102 Facilitys and many more in America. As a little funfact, allmost the entire north american population can be traced back to a pair that was send there from the UK in 1993, which is quite the impressive feat for those two ancestors.
But thats not the only special thing about these foundly named Pigs, with Kunekune meaning fat and round in Maori, they are also apparantly pig geniuses, having shown remarkable social learning and a great memory in studies.
Not just smart but also colorfull they have a very varried appearance, having both long and short, straight and curly and all colors from white over cream, reddish brown, gold to black, most of the time with those characteristic black spots, giving us a lot of different colormorphs to play around with.
They would add a nice piece of Maori culture and one of the few successfully saved breeds thats not super rare in zoos with an international presence. It might not be the newzealand people are holding their breath for, but its certanly a neat one that would look great next to the kiwi and the little blue penguin and finally give us a domestic pig for the game and our petting zoos. An absolute win if you ask me.
Moving up to the shetland islands north of scotland, we meet our second domestic animal of the pack, the shetland pony.
These sturdy tiny horses are one of the oldest recorded breeds, tracing their origins back to bronze age. The cold climate, harsh winds and hostile winters have turned them into hardy animals that dont need much while being extremly strong for their size, a double edged sword as they made the perfect pit pony once the industrial revolution fueled the worlds need for coal. Today, being a pitpony thankfully is a thing of the past, but now they use their strenght for something else, mostly carrying children on their back without any effort. Being imported for coal, once using them as pit ponys they made their way around the world, but once those practices where outclassed they became popular petting zoo animals, with them being found in 631 EAZA zoos, being the 12. most common Animal overall.
Coming in all different colors and with soft and thick fur, they come in all color varietys known from horses, the only exception being spotted, making them just as diverse in possible color morph options as the pig. Together with it and the Lama, we got a strong petting zoo core sufficient enough to spare all the domestics haters from a petting zoo pack, so keep that in mind before thrashing these two in the comments. They are easily some of the most iconic animals associated with islands and a breed of pony everybody knows and if your still unsure about them, lets just say that they will introduce an entirely new mechanic to the game that im sure everybody will like, but more about that in the update post.
We allmost made it to the end of the pack, but what would an island hoping adventure be without a trip to hawaii?
As you can see, what we search for isnt somewhere over but under the rainbow, as our goal turns out to be the Nene, also known as Hawaiian goose.
The official state bird of Hawaii is not just beautiful and common in Zoos with 126 EAZA holdings, they sadly are also the subject of a long conservation story as so many endemic island creatures, but thankfully this one had an happy end.
After evolving from Canada Geese that arrived on the islands approximatly 500,000 years ago, life was not smooth sailing for the Nene. All was good, till as so many storys humans arrived on hawaii. Once as James Cook (no i also did not think id be mentioning the guy twice) first stepped foot on Hawaii, they have been very common with approximatly 25,000 Geese, but after hunting and the introduction of invasive species like cats, pigs and mongoose their numbers dwindled till there were only 30 Birds left by 1952.
But againas with the Kunekune Pigs individuals were brought back to the UK and conservationst started breeding, both in Zoos and in the nature reserve Slimbridge in the UK and in 2004 the population was ready to be reintroduced. By now they have been successfully reintroduced to 5 different hawaiian islands with stable populations and an even largen backup population in Zoos so eventhough there are less then 4,000 Geese alive, the rarest goose has been upgraded to just Near threatend.
For the nene itself, it has a few interesting features. Its among the larger Goose, but also the most terrestrial one with allmost no webbing on their feet. The reason for that is their very specialised habitat, as they live on hangs of vulcanos in landscapes of coldend Lava Stones and allmost no standing Water. Here they function as grazers, not needing to drink any water as they take all their moisture from the lush grasses growing on the fertile lava rock.
As waterfowl without water requirements they would instantly stand out amongst them and with their beautiful markings for sure be a popular bird to have freeroam in zoos.
They are still often kept with other waterfowl on ponds and lakes, but as they dont need it theyd be an interesting alternative if frontier decides to give us more then one waterfowl.
But even if not, as the perfect middle ground between duck and swan and the carrier of a beautiful conservation story, the nene truly deserves to be the first waterfowl to grace us in planet zoo
Now to the last animal of the pack we travel all the way to the carribeans to the island of hispaniola where we meet the Flagship of this pack, one of the largest iguanas known by its horns and crest, the Rhinoceros Iguana. Endemic to the Island of Hispaniola and a few scatterd islands around it, they are mostly found in dry forests, scrublands and the islands rocky coasts. Even though they might look large and intimidating with their up to 1,3 m in length, they are very docile and well behaved creatures, going so far that they are seen to be among the most docile and human tolerant reptiles, even being able to share deep bonds with humans and demand attention and pets like a dog or cat would.
They also tend for moodswings though, as iguanas are highly sensetive in their surroundings and even something like different air pressure can throw of their mood for the day.
While they mostly tend to run away, their big size is not for nothing and they can dish out heavy tail slams, strong bites and nasty scratches with their long claw, which is enough to keep up with everything that nativly lives in their range, but sadly even then they struggle to take on the packs of feral dogs roaming their islands.
As the largest herbivore in their ecosystem they have an important role as seed dispersers, even going so far that seeds that have been digested by an iguana germinate earlier, giving them a huge advantage.
Eventhough they are sadly endangerd due to habitat destruction, invasive animals and illegal poaching for their meat, they also have a large captive population, both in zoos and in the pettrade, with 80 EAZA zoos and over 20 AZA zoos keeping these gentle giants, giving a hopefull future for these gentle giants from the carribeans.
In game theyd be the first new habitat reptile taxon ever, finally adding a habitat iguana to the game, aswell as our first animal endemic to the carribeans, which would be great as this adds both north and south american representation at the same time. It also stands out among the other island dwellers as most have come from either lush or atleast grassy places, but together with the radiated tortoise and the ring tailed lemure they are the closest we got to some dry islands representation.
Theyd also fill the role of a now crocodile or tortoise new world reptile, as they so far do not have a single lizard. Together with the fact how common it is and its size, i see no reason why we shouldnt see these docile dragons in the game.
And thats it for now, 8 new Animals from 8 different Islands, but what are your thoughts?
Would this satisfy your need for an island pack? Not gonna lie, even without the really strong hitters of fossa, tassie and kiwi this is still a pack id buy in a heart beat, which might not be surprising as i made it but still!
But i hope it does not satisfy just me but also you guys and we will see us again with the update post later once i get around to it, see ya!
Now the reason why i wanted to do this pack in the first place, an island animal pack for summer. Now that the oceania pack and the tropical pack took 3 of the very predictable choices out of the way, this pack has way more potential to be interesting now! Just like for the mountains, im gonna tell you where the animals are from first and so you can maybe even guess who im choosing for the pack, so we got 1 from New guinnea, 1 from Madagascar, 1 from Bali, 1 from Sulawesi, 1 from Hispaniola, 1 from the Shetland Isles, 1 from New Zealand and 1 from Hawaii so literally every continent has atleast one island coverd.
Now then starting on New Guinnea, we have the first difficult choice of the pack. Matschie or Goodfellow? To keep it short, i am a biased man and i find matchies cuter so the species kept in North America wins, hurray for the AZA enjoyer.
The Matschies or Huon Treekangaroo is native to the Huon Peninsula of north eastern new guinea, a rugged mountain range filled with a dense tropical mountain rain and decidious forest and one of the most biodiverse spots on oceanias most biodiverse island, which the Matschies treekangaroo being perhaps the most iconic animal of the region.
Compared to other tree kangaroos it has a few unique traits. For one, its able to stand bipedally du to their very flexible and rotateable limps and are the most muscular of the tree kangaroos, making the best vertical climbers. They are also very adept at hopping and can leap up to 9 meter far.
Tree kangaroos have a very distinct way to climb, as they grab onto the tree and hop either forward or do an akward backwards shuffle, which is hard to explain so i got a video here for you where theres just 2 mins of one climbing around, enjoy!
This also means that to bring them into the game, they will eat up alot of the ressources of this pack, but its a payoff worth taking atleast in my opinion.
As very shy animals, tending to stick to themself in solidarity or only living with their mate and joey, being very nervous around humans when they arnt used to them.
In the game theyd not only complete oceania for most people, theyd also add a very unique new macropod and climber, unlike anything else in the game.
Sadly this rigg is also more or less one use, as the only other somewhat present in zoos treekangaroo is the before mentioned goodfellows, which is kept in europe and australia, but wouldnt add that much to the game when we allready have a tree kangaroo.
So all in all this would be a very visually appealling, extremly unique climber that would be truly unique in the game and would defenetly spice up every tropical house or oceanian section.
Moving over to Madagascar and its neighboring islands of Reunion and Mauritus, we are immediatly faced with the costs of the Treekangaroo, but that doesnt have to be a bad thing.
Originally, this was where i wanted to put the Alaotra Bamboo Lemure here, a very unique herbivorous lemure that is endemic to the reeds of Madagascars largest lake Alaotra, but instead we will explore a different, allmost opposite angle with the radiated tortoise. Instead of representing the mountainous lake we explore the dry south and its dry woodland, savanna and thorn forests. They are one of the areas main grazers, eventhough they also love snacking on cactus and succulent plants.
They are much smaller then the tortoises in game with a carapace lenght of 40 cm, roughly 10 cm longer then a meerkats body.
Its dark, bumpy shell with light stripes reminding of stars are very beautiful, often being seen as one of if not the most beautiful tortoise in the world, a status that became to their detriment as many of them got captured for the pettrade, leaving them as critically endangerd. Ironically though this made it also quite easy for zoos to obtain then and combined with their very long life time (the oldest documented individual, a female named Tu'i Malila, lived to be 188 years old after being given as a present to the Togan royal family by James Cook. The same tortoise also met Queen Elisabeth II and died in 1966) and readily breeding in captivity there are now 108 EAZA zoos keeping them, making it the 6. most common tortoise in the EAZA. (Nr 1-5 are African Spurred Tortoise, Herrmanns Tortoise, Red Footed Tortoise, Leopard Tortoise and Greek tortoise for those interested).
Theyd be a wonderfull adition for madagascan areas, as theyd be both be a good roommate for the lemures, while also easily serving as standalone exhibits.
They also will be included in a special new functionality discussed in the update post, can you guess what it will be?
Overall while not the exciting new addition on its own, its great to finally have another tortoise and a smaller one makes it even better
Talking about small, our representative from bali is also quite the tiny fellow. As the only endemic vertebrate of the island and the face of a very big zoo founded conservation campaign there was no way that i could have made this pack without the bali mynah. Found in 138 zoos they are the face of the Asian Song Bird Conservaiton front, also known as the Silent Forest Initiative. Song Birds in SEA are suffering greatly due to not just the destruction of the enviroment and clearing of forests, but also them being captured in large numbers for the pettrade. Thousands of Songbirds are stuffed in tiny Cages, seen as a sign of beauty and good luck and praised for their beautiful song, while in reality they are only suffering, lonely and isolated in a place they cant even stretch their tiny wings and the balimynah, known for its stainless white feathers, beautiful chirps and supreme rarity. This bird has been in a limbo of being allmost extinct in the wild for 30 years now, with them regulary being released in the wild only for the poachers to snatch them up again in a very sad cycle. Thankfully they are not only the most effected but also the most stubbornly bred, with multiple different breeding systems, from local breeders to both the EAZA and AZA and 3 different large breeding centers akin to the one most people might know for sumatran rhinos. There are over 1000 captive mynahs distributed over these different systems and a very strict eye is put on any legal transaction with them evolved to allways keep track of them, but sadly there are suppousedly more then twice as much as part of the illegal pettrade. They truly are one of the most dire yet hopefull and stubborn reintroduction storys and deserve to be honored in the game.
As a starling they would be our first songbird of the game, commonly found bouth in aviarys and free flying in tropical halls. They would be a little more restricted in movement compared to the macaw, not being able to climb or hang theyd still could perch, hop around on the ground and ofcourse fly through the air.
Once their beautiful song has made it into the game, no tropical house will sound the same no more, never having to be a silent forest again.
But the Mynah isnt the only addition to SEA, as it will not only finally obtain a bird but also a new monkey in the celebes crested macaque, a true master of the goofy face expressions. As a very unusual primate, they have reddish eyes, only making their face even more special.
One of the smaller macaques with an rather apelike appearance as it lacks a tail stump, its one of six macaque species living on sulawesi. There they live mostly grounddwelling in societys of 5 to 25 individuals, even reaching up to 80 or even 100, mostly feeding on fruits but also not saying no to eggs, invertebrates, funghi and other small animals it gets its hands on like frogs or lizards. Females typically outnumber males by a ratio of 4:1, with male baechlor groups being quite common.
Compared to other macaques, the crested ones are very social and especally social tollerant. They spend alot of time socialising, even with non related members of the same sex, and conflicts are usually solved with threats or even reconciliation without drawing blood.
In the wild, the crested macaque is critically endangerd and the rarest of sulawesis primates. They are hunted as pests that steal crops or for bushmeat which is seen as a delicacy by locals and only protected in the Tangkoko reserve, with no penalties for killing them elsewhere.
But there is one very good news for these little guys, because while there are only 4,000-6,000 macaques left on sulawesi, they also have been introduced to the nearby island of Bacan, where there are over 100,000 individuals that are not counted as they are invasive, which while good for the survival of the species is also quite ironic.
They are rather well studied as one of the main subjects in the german primate center and spreading throught the EAZA, so hopefully their efforts will help to keep the species alive in their native range.
In game their main function would be as a tropical small to medium size monkey, filling the same role the japanese macaque is filling for northern asia and a far smaller terrestrial tropical monkey then the allmost twice as large mandrill for the game in general. They will be a great filler species for asian areas, tropical houses, primate houses or even dedicated Indonesian or Sulawesi areas and could greatly enhance the babirusas presence in the game.
To round out all islands in this area, we have our new zealand animal and one you might not have expected to have a great conservation story behind it, the kune kune pig.
These hairy barrel shape fellows are amongst the friendliest breeds of pigs, very chill and easy going and allways down for a scratch, but this breed once kept by the Maori people allmost died out, with only 50 specimen being left in the 1980s but 2 wildlife parkowners took it to them to breed them back, with them being declared to not be threatend anymore in 2010 and being by far the most common domestic pig in UK zoos with 63 holdings. Now they are spread across europe with them being found in 102 Facilitys and many more in America. As a little funfact, allmost the entire north american population can be traced back to a pair that was send there from the UK in 1993, which is quite the impressive feat for those two ancestors.
But thats not the only special thing about these foundly named Pigs, with Kunekune meaning fat and round in Maori, they are also apparantly pig geniuses, having shown remarkable social learning and a great memory in studies.
Not just smart but also colorfull they have a very varried appearance, having both long and short, straight and curly and all colors from white over cream, reddish brown, gold to black, most of the time with those characteristic black spots, giving us a lot of different colormorphs to play around with.
They would add a nice piece of Maori culture and one of the few successfully saved breeds thats not super rare in zoos with an international presence. It might not be the newzealand people are holding their breath for, but its certanly a neat one that would look great next to the kiwi and the little blue penguin and finally give us a domestic pig for the game and our petting zoos. An absolute win if you ask me.
Moving up to the shetland islands north of scotland, we meet our second domestic animal of the pack, the shetland pony.
These sturdy tiny horses are one of the oldest recorded breeds, tracing their origins back to bronze age. The cold climate, harsh winds and hostile winters have turned them into hardy animals that dont need much while being extremly strong for their size, a double edged sword as they made the perfect pit pony once the industrial revolution fueled the worlds need for coal. Today, being a pitpony thankfully is a thing of the past, but now they use their strenght for something else, mostly carrying children on their back without any effort. Being imported for coal, once using them as pit ponys they made their way around the world, but once those practices where outclassed they became popular petting zoo animals, with them being found in 631 EAZA zoos, being the 12. most common Animal overall.
Coming in all different colors and with soft and thick fur, they come in all color varietys known from horses, the only exception being spotted, making them just as diverse in possible color morph options as the pig. Together with it and the Lama, we got a strong petting zoo core sufficient enough to spare all the domestics haters from a petting zoo pack, so keep that in mind before thrashing these two in the comments. They are easily some of the most iconic animals associated with islands and a breed of pony everybody knows and if your still unsure about them, lets just say that they will introduce an entirely new mechanic to the game that im sure everybody will like, but more about that in the update post.
We allmost made it to the end of the pack, but what would an island hoping adventure be without a trip to hawaii?
As you can see, what we search for isnt somewhere over but under the rainbow, as our goal turns out to be the Nene, also known as Hawaiian goose.
The official state bird of Hawaii is not just beautiful and common in Zoos with 126 EAZA holdings, they sadly are also the subject of a long conservation story as so many endemic island creatures, but thankfully this one had an happy end.
After evolving from Canada Geese that arrived on the islands approximatly 500,000 years ago, life was not smooth sailing for the Nene. All was good, till as so many storys humans arrived on hawaii. Once as James Cook (no i also did not think id be mentioning the guy twice) first stepped foot on Hawaii, they have been very common with approximatly 25,000 Geese, but after hunting and the introduction of invasive species like cats, pigs and mongoose their numbers dwindled till there were only 30 Birds left by 1952.
But againas with the Kunekune Pigs individuals were brought back to the UK and conservationst started breeding, both in Zoos and in the nature reserve Slimbridge in the UK and in 2004 the population was ready to be reintroduced. By now they have been successfully reintroduced to 5 different hawaiian islands with stable populations and an even largen backup population in Zoos so eventhough there are less then 4,000 Geese alive, the rarest goose has been upgraded to just Near threatend.
For the nene itself, it has a few interesting features. Its among the larger Goose, but also the most terrestrial one with allmost no webbing on their feet. The reason for that is their very specialised habitat, as they live on hangs of vulcanos in landscapes of coldend Lava Stones and allmost no standing Water. Here they function as grazers, not needing to drink any water as they take all their moisture from the lush grasses growing on the fertile lava rock.
As waterfowl without water requirements they would instantly stand out amongst them and with their beautiful markings for sure be a popular bird to have freeroam in zoos.
They are still often kept with other waterfowl on ponds and lakes, but as they dont need it theyd be an interesting alternative if frontier decides to give us more then one waterfowl.
But even if not, as the perfect middle ground between duck and swan and the carrier of a beautiful conservation story, the nene truly deserves to be the first waterfowl to grace us in planet zoo
Now to the last animal of the pack we travel all the way to the carribeans to the island of hispaniola where we meet the Flagship of this pack, one of the largest iguanas known by its horns and crest, the Rhinoceros Iguana. Endemic to the Island of Hispaniola and a few scatterd islands around it, they are mostly found in dry forests, scrublands and the islands rocky coasts. Even though they might look large and intimidating with their up to 1,3 m in length, they are very docile and well behaved creatures, going so far that they are seen to be among the most docile and human tolerant reptiles, even being able to share deep bonds with humans and demand attention and pets like a dog or cat would.
They also tend for moodswings though, as iguanas are highly sensetive in their surroundings and even something like different air pressure can throw of their mood for the day.
While they mostly tend to run away, their big size is not for nothing and they can dish out heavy tail slams, strong bites and nasty scratches with their long claw, which is enough to keep up with everything that nativly lives in their range, but sadly even then they struggle to take on the packs of feral dogs roaming their islands.
As the largest herbivore in their ecosystem they have an important role as seed dispersers, even going so far that seeds that have been digested by an iguana germinate earlier, giving them a huge advantage.
Eventhough they are sadly endangerd due to habitat destruction, invasive animals and illegal poaching for their meat, they also have a large captive population, both in zoos and in the pettrade, with 80 EAZA zoos and over 20 AZA zoos keeping these gentle giants, giving a hopefull future for these gentle giants from the carribeans.
In game theyd be the first new habitat reptile taxon ever, finally adding a habitat iguana to the game, aswell as our first animal endemic to the carribeans, which would be great as this adds both north and south american representation at the same time. It also stands out among the other island dwellers as most have come from either lush or atleast grassy places, but together with the radiated tortoise and the ring tailed lemure they are the closest we got to some dry islands representation.
Theyd also fill the role of a now crocodile or tortoise new world reptile, as they so far do not have a single lizard. Together with the fact how common it is and its size, i see no reason why we shouldnt see these docile dragons in the game.
And thats it for now, 8 new Animals from 8 different Islands, but what are your thoughts?
Would this satisfy your need for an island pack? Not gonna lie, even without the really strong hitters of fossa, tassie and kiwi this is still a pack id buy in a heart beat, which might not be surprising as i made it but still!
But i hope it does not satisfy just me but also you guys and we will see us again with the update post later once i get around to it, see ya!
Ah Konig, reading your pack is a treat, I enjoy seeing your reasoning behind each animal. 2 reptiles, 2 birds and a pony? I would be sold.... Pony rides in the update right?
Lets say you figured me outAh Konig, reading your pack is a treat, I enjoy seeing your reasoning behind each animal. 2 reptiles, 2 birds and a pony? I would be sold.... Pony rides in the update right?
Also glad to see that you enjoy them so much! Makes me now the time i put into researching and writing them isnt completly wasted when i know i sold someone on a cool animal i like
I like the nene because the word nene in Spanish means baby, as in baby baby.
Che, que hacen los nenes? Hey, what're the kids doing?
Che, que hacen los nenes? Hey, what're the kids doing?
I love how well thought out your packs are. I wasn't sold on the Shetland Pony and Kunekune Pig before, but now I am, and the Macaque and Nene are standout additions too! But what shall I say, any Pack with a Tree Kangaroo will be an instant favorite of mine. They could come in a 4+1 pack with Sumatran Rhino, Japanese Raccoon Dog and another Tiger and it would still be a favorite pack of mine, that's how much I want the Tree Kangaroo
Also, if Frontier wouldn't give us a habitat Iguana, I think the Cuban Crocodile would also be a solid addition for this pack and a crocodilian actually worth including (critically endangered, unique terrestrial movements + highly terrestrial in general, Caribbean rep).
Also, if Frontier wouldn't give us a habitat Iguana, I think the Cuban Crocodile would also be a solid addition for this pack and a crocodilian actually worth including (critically endangered, unique terrestrial movements + highly terrestrial in general, Caribbean rep).
Surprised you did Islands without Victoria Crowned Pigeon
Honestly same, allmost did it but i really wanted to not double dip and cutting the tree kangaroo wasnt an option.
I might prefer the pidgeon, but im no fool i know that the treekangaroos cuteness would be alot more enticing for most people.
Pack is daring enough as is with 2 reptiles, 2 domestics, 2 birds and no carnivorans, i dont want to completly loose credibility here.
Now to the paired summer update we are truly gonna overwork frontiers poor staff and the first reason is a small exhibit update!
As you might know, im a big fan of #FreeTheIguanas, as im obviously the one that started it and i also introduced a new iguana rig, so yeah the iguanas are freed with glory as two new basegame south america habitat animals by overlapping their allready existing models with the new iguana rig and animations for only rather little extra cost, sweet!
But does that mean that they are now only habitat animals? Ofcourse not, that would be wasted content that some people actually like so instead we are gonna do something smart.
There will be now green and antillean iguanas both in the exhibit in the habitat market, with whereever you buy them determening if they are a habitat or exhibit animal. A little clunky? Maybe but it would be the easiest solution instead of overhauling the fact that exhibit and habitat animals are on different markets and storage, so just splitting them seems the easiest.
But thats not all, as a third animal will be introduced for this system, the new and fresh radiated tortoise, which will use the scarab beetles exhibit layout, finally giving it a second use and madagascar a new exhibit animal. Nice!
For the simple region that making new rigs is much more expensive then making new exhibits, only exhibits which allready have fitting riggs in the game will be freed from the boxes in the future, while a few more habitat animals will be made compatible when fitting exhibits are available.
The second part of the update is a new animal rides feature. Animal rides will have customers ride on ponys, camels or dromedarys and increase their fun, the new guest need introduced in the last update, by a large margain. This will both give the animals a neat extra use and integrate the newly introduced system more into the game.
The system works similar to the educator tours, starting from a new shop table which can be freely decorated. There the guests can wait in line and pay for the ride. The shop will be able to be used by up to 5 zoo keeper or educators at a time, with educators that have nothing to do automatically filling the station, while zoo keepers only do so if they have no other current job to do and its in their work zone.
The animals used for the ride will be taken from a choosen habitat, which should be rather near by to lower the travel time between their resting space and their work space.
The keeper or educator goes into the habitat up to an animal and leash it with a new animation, before leading it to the station. From there a visitor, all kinds for the camel and dromedary and only children for the pony, will be sat on the animals back with a few new animation for them riding and looking around and being happy planet coastians while the keepr or educator leads the animal along a previously choosen path along the paths of the zoo, also able to go through walkthrough exhibit gates.
While riding the happyness of the guest will rise decently quick while also slowly raising the stress of the animal with a modifier depending on the number of rides after another, with 0,25 for the first 0,5 for the second, 1 for the third, 2 for the fourth, 4 for the fifth, you see the patern, meaning you need to make sure your animal workers also get a break.
In the shop ui you can not only change the price, but also how many animals can be ridden at the same time, how many times an animal can be ridden in a row (both min and max) aswell as toggle which individual animals from the connected habitat are available to be ridden.
This means that if you only got a small number of animals, lets say 3 ponys, it would be the most benefitial to only let one be ridden at once, so that the other 2 can relax together, destress and frequently get swapped, but if you have lets say 10 ponys you can go all out and have 5 at the same time without harm to the animals happyness.
We also would finally have an actual time investment for educators beteen talks and tours, as even with them apparantly wandering around for an education bonus, being able to have them also raise the guests fun would make them more versatile.
The third but imo most important part of the update would be a general optimisation patch. I dont know how much could be done, but having the game run smoother for everyone on all devices hurts literally no one and is more then worthy of its own update slot. Be it optimising the lighting, shaders, code, whatever makes the game run better and with less lag is one of the best changes it could make, as currently the game desperatly wants you to build large zoos with lots of pieces, but at the same time the actualy space of those maps we can use is very limited not by our fantasy (eventhough im sure it would take extremly long to fill) but by the performance of the game.
Not everyone has the money to buy a better pc just for planet zoo and while it would defenetly help those that allready can handle a large piece count with decent pc, im sure those who can only play on an old laptop will defenetly appreciate to atleast have the option to not run the game on the lowest settings to have any kind of bareable performance.
Lastly, something i forgot to mention in the other 2 updates are new enritchmentitem compatebilitys, with the dall sheep getting access to the ibex rock in mountains, the warthog to the large burrow in central america and now orangutans getting access to the sunbears foraging wall in this update. Im sure theres more that can be added, but i wanna mention them more for the general gesture of old animals getting updated to newer enritchment.
And for the actual last point, the new color morphs!
Starting of, the Iguanas get some new paint, starting with an orange grey one for the green iguana aswell as a second thats bluish in color.
The orange color is far more comon among the northern populations in central america and mexico and the blue one in the southern parts of their range like peru.
This will give them some nice. Also did you know that the green iguana is the largest iguana?
How silly that they are excluded to the boxes when they can reach 1,7 meters in lenght.
For the lesser Antillean Iguana, they will be introduced to new dimorphism. Did you know that the young and females of the LAI are bright green and only the males and sometimes females turn grey over time as they age? Why not introduce that to the game by having the babies and femeales green and beautiful
As the one non iguana colormorph, the Japanese Macaque gets a new common one thats more blonde in color.
And thats it for this update, some big changes that also leave lots of room for the future, be it by introducing new ways to spice up animals with the new exhibit habitat overlap or by literally making the larger and more detailed zoos we build up overtime run better, meaning we can build even more in them till performance forces us to stop.
After a week of exams, im back with another pack. This time the
Autum 2024:
This time i got a treat. Everybody loves the idear of a children zoo pack, but nobody actually likes the name cause its just a vage nothing.
Good thing that i got an even vaguer one with the Education Scenery Pack. This pack will have a focus on scenery with educational purposes, both interactable or not, so lets begin with the animals this time.
Starting of we got the west african dwarf goat, also known as the most common zoo animal in the world, kept in 1146 EAZA facilitys with only the blue peafowl also being kept in more then 1000.
This breed of goat is quite special, as its not actually one breed of goat but is actually a number of similar breeds all put under the same umbrella term. Their origin range is found in north west africa, from the coast of senegal up till the congo baisin, one of africas few rather underrepresented areas. While they got exported to europe for the use as lab animals and for our purposes as zoo animals, in their origin range they are still a very important and valued lifestock and corner stone of the rural economy.
These goats are the original dwarf goats, with allmost all other dwarf goats like the pigmy having them as their ancestors, which have a genetic disorder called Achondroplasia, which also is was seperates this group of goat breeds from others, as the requirement is this disorder. Thankfully the disorder does not cause them any harm, as its most prominent impact is the shortening of their legs. The trait has evolved naturally and not for aesthethic purposes, with the leading theories being that its an adaption to the humid forests that they are regulary kept in and also plays a role in their resistance to many different illnesses, most notably the sleeping sickness.
Colorwise they come in pretty much all colors a goat can come in, with the coloring in the chosen picture being one of the most common ones, with mixed colors and patches also being a common sight.
The breed is also known for their very calm and docile nature, making them together with their cheap price and small size the perfect inclusion to any petting zoo, which also led to their sheer domination in them.
In regards to the theme of the pack, the west african dwarf goat represents the concept of domestication. With it comes a new topic for the education signs, aswell as 2 new signs about domestication, one featuring a Bezoar Ibex and our Goat and a second sign features the guanaco and the lama. Guests that look at those signs will recieve an education bonus and an even greater one of they see the animals on the sign. Sadly the Guanaco and Bezoar Ibex arnt in game, but atleast for the goat we could also make it work with the alpine ibex.
Next in our living exhibiton, we have the cotton top tamarin, the most common tamarin and second most common new world monkey after the common marmoset with 275 EAZA holdings.
These critical endangerd monkeys live in tropical and secondary forests in north western columbia, with only 5% of their natural habitat remaining.
The most impressive thing about the cotton top tamarin is our knowledge about them. They are among the most well studied non domestic animals on the planet with most of the interesting facts laying in their social behaviour and language. Yes you heard that right, language. The cotton top tamarin has a known reportoire of 38 different sounds, most of them being bird like chirps and whistles, which they use and order similary to have we use letters that they use in fast succession to communicate. And not only that, they seem to be using a simple grammar aswell as using phonetic and lexial syntax. Scientist have actually figured out alot allready, with many calls being assigned a letter and a use, for example the c calls seem to be associated with finding food while the d calls are with eating. They are even quite sure that they talk about deeper things then just simple survival relating stuff, with some calls being associated with different emotions, with a hypothesis that they actually talk about their emotions, intensions and thought processes.
So yes, its a scientifically proven fact that atleast these monkeys talk about their emotions with each other, take that for your fun fact reportoire.
Its even studied how the young acquire the language and its seemingly quite close to us humans where babys understand what something means before correctly applying it.
Broadly speaking, they understand first, but when trying to communicate it takes a while till its anything but gibberish.
Theres much more about their communication to be learned and if this interests any of you id highly recommend to give atleast their wikipedia page a good read.
But who to communicate to when your alone? Dont worry, as the cotton top tamarin likes it social enviroment, typically found in groups of 2 till up to 13 members.
Every group is lead by a monogamous couple that keep up a strict social hierachy, with only them breeding. These groups arnt limited to family though and also unrelated tamarins are welcome, eventhough they also have to respect the leading couples authority. Cotton Top Tamarins groups take care of cooperative breeding, meaning that the entire group takes care of and raises the two young the dominant female births. Males typically act as the main care takers, carrying them around whereever they go with the paternal male being on near constant duty, often loosing up to 10% of its weight due to its extra burdens and limited food intake, while the other males of the group swap carrying duty.
The mother is mostly absent during child care, only nursing the young but leaving the carrying to the males of the group.
In general cotton top tamarins engage in pro social behaviour, meaning altruistic acts to the benefit of the group, eventhough it is suspected that this might be driven by selfish reasons. Besides the cooperative child care, this is predominantly featured in alarm calls which put them themself at risk of being spotted, aswell as the charing of food.
They also seemingly forge bonds with each other, which grow over time and through care, but also can be swiftly broken by betrayal, for example not charing food, which is also a reason why its suspected that their altruism is less because they are good hearted and more because the consquence of the social fallout is to severe.
And yes, not only is it scientifically proven that they speak about their emotions, but also that they can be quite the spitefull petty demons, especally towards other individuals of the same sex, specifally in females. They also tend to punish uncooperative monkeys, going from refusing to cooperate with them to exil. Fun.
But now you might ask, why do we know so much about these monkeys in particular?
Well, now coming to the theme of education, their education item is a cotton top themed interactable sound station for all the reasons mentioned above, while the other is the new education board topic of Lab Animals. The reason why they are so common in zoos and have for a long time on the list of the 25 most endangerd primates is the fact that we exported up to 40,000 of them until 976, when they were put in the highest level of protection and internationally illegal in monetary trade. And what did we export them for?
Biomedical research. A lot of the medication we use today has been tested on these small monkeys, to the benefit of us humans and the near extinction of these beautiful primates.
I dont want to kick of an discussion about the ethics of lab animals, but i do believe these monkeys deserve people to know what we have done to them and why they are at the brink of extinction. Currently zoos and 3 different nature reserves are trying their best to keep the species alive, but even if its not in the top 25 its still one of the most endangerd primate species on the planet and even after over 50 years from them being declared in the highest priority of conservation, there are still just about 2000 adult individuals in the wild across a few fragmented parts of columbia, holding out after their home was allmost entirely logged and their species allmost completly slaughterd for the sake of scientific advancement. They are the second most common new world primate in zoos but allmost noone knows them and even fewer know their story, a story deserving to be heard.
After that downer of the section, i need something to make me smile.
How about a duck?
The mallard duck is one of the farthest ranging species of the planet, naturally being found across north america, eurasia and northern africa and invasive in many places around the world. They are quite frankly the perfect invader. They are extremly addaptable "wetlands" birds, with a definition for wetlands of a puddle in literally any location. They can thrive both in rural and urban settings, can produce fertile hybrid offspring with 63(!) different duck species and are also the ancestor of the domestic duck. They are among the most adaptable species of waterfall, being able to live in fresh and saltwater, in moving and standing bodys of water, at literal ocean coasts, in the freezing tundra all the way up to the hot subtropics. This species is rediculously adaptable not just surviving but thriving in allmost any envireoment.
So the mallard must also be quite resilient in day to day life right? No! Absolutly not.
In north america alone its frequently hunted by 15 different species of birds of prey and over a douzen mammalian predators, while also being predated on by other waterbirds like herons and gulls, aswell as even fish with the wels catfish in particular being fond of snacking ducks.
So why are they so successfull? Quite simply, its one of the most successfull Hemerophiles, which means species that benefit from the changes humans make to their surroundings. Humans like ducks. We think they are cute and pretty, like them swimming in our ponds, some even love to hunt them. We tolerate if not encourage or even release ducks into out urban areas, which are also generally hostile to most indigenous waterfowl and more importantly the mallards many natural predators. Its much easier minding your own ducking buissness when theres way less predators around afterall.
Mallard ducks are a big problem outside of their range, one thats hard to controll, even being illegal to be kept in florida due to concerns of them hybdridising with the native mottled duck.
So why do we want them in a zoo game exactly? Well remember what we established 2 sentences prior? Humans like ducks, we think they are pretty and we like them in our ponds, we like them so much that we introduced them across the world afterall, so this deep human urge of seeing ducks ducking around on any body of water they an find should be in the game, but with an emphasis of the problems they can cause.
Theyd also come with a common white color morph and a piebald variant, to show not only their domestic form (and giving us practically an extra animal) but to also show a reasult of how hybdrisation can look like.
In the theme of education this means 3 new education sign topics, being hybridisation, invasiveness and Hemerophilie, aswell as a new interactable education station of a wood board with different animal foot prints, featuring the mallard, the red fox, a generic deer, a wold and a bear. I specifically didnt add animals like the cougar or the wild boar to keep this general in use for both europe, northern asia and north america, as these kinds of education stations are very common in wildparks and native areas alike.
For the last habitat animal we have the patagonian mara, a fan favorite, endemic to the shrublands and deserts of argentina south america.
With 338 holdings, they also are very common in Zoos, being the 46. most common animal in the EAZA.
These little rabbit deer are Caviids, making them related to the Capybara or the guinea pig, but as the nickname allready hinted at their morphology is far closer to the cross of a hare and an ungulate with long ears and limbs, with muscular hind limbs like a rabbit and hoof like compressed feet.
Adapted to a live in open grassland, they are good runners with great perception, detecting their predators early and running away faster then they could follow, often compared to antelopes. Their diet is allmost interly herbiverous, mostly persisting of grasses and scrubs, filling the niche that ungulates fill elsewhere.
Maras are known for 3 distinct styles of movement, a slow trot, a faster bunny like hop and jumping with all 4 legs, accellerating them up to 45 km/h, often fast enough to escape the foxes and felids that hunt them, most notably the cougar.
Typically Diurnal, they spend up to 46% of their awake time grazing, females more then males who often keep guard. At night they sleep in dense vegitation or in repurposed burrows of other animals.
Maras social structure is weird, unique even as far we know. They mate in monogamous pairs, with just like the cotton top tamarin the female in charge, but these pairs then live and breed in small warren societys of up to 29 pairs, all sharing a network of dens and burrows. After birth, all the young of this colony are grouped together with one pair at a time watching them in the den and nursing, while the other adults flock around the warrens. The mothers might not activly coperate in raising each others young, but it isnt unheard of that a females nurses a young that isnt hers. While they can communicate with whistles and chirps, most of their interspecies communication is done via scentmarkings with multiple different and specific interactions, most of them including spraying bodyily fluids on each other. Yummy.
Their link to the education theme is their convergent evolution, featured as a new education topic and a sign comparing them to a hare and a deer, aswell as a second, interactable one, featuring a long jump lane where visitors can compare themself to different animals, with a number of customisable options that put the markers differently for the up to 5 animals selected, with the default being the patagonian mara, siberian tiger, red deer, red kangaroo and a flea cause i think the flea would be so cute. The flea also gets a cool animal sign cause we like him here in the style of the bug signs of the conservation pack.
Lastly we have our exhibit animal and second exhibit flagship, the budgie.
The budgerigar, also known as the common parakeet, is the only species of the Melopsittacini tribe and found as nomads all over the drier parts of australia.
Their natural color is green with yellow and black stripes, but as a the worlds 3. most common pet they have been radiated into many different colors like blue, white, violett and grey aswell many different color mixes between these 7 colors.
In the wild they tend to be smaller then their domestic cousins, moving with their flock as the enviroments shift. They inhabit a variety of habitats, most notably scrublands, dry, open forests and grasslands, but droughts can also push them closer to the coasts and more humid woodlands. Their migration patterns are mostly determend by the availabilty of seeds and freshwater, as they need open water sources to drink and cant get their humidity intake from the seeds alone.
This reliance on fresh water and seeds makes them opportunistic breeders, usally breeding in responce to rainfall. Like all parrots they dont build typical nests but instead use holes in trees as nest sides, where they lay their clutch and protect it for around 20 days before they hatch and take another month before the youngs are fledging.
Interestingly budgerigar males are part of the few species with consistently seen same sex courtship thats also studied enough to determine that these parrots are not just training for courtship but are actually courting each other, often not breeding with females.
Budgerigars are quite affectionate with their flock mates in general, often feeding each other as a way to deepen their bonds or playing with each other.
As social and intelligent animals they need a lot of stimulation, especally in captivity. Budgies love to gnaw on everything they can get their beak on, sharpenign it for their hard seedy diet. They are known to love many different toys, aswell as playing with bonded partners, which can include humans. Males have been documented to bond far easier and more readily then females and also tend to be more willing to learn words or tricks. Most females quickly loose interest in learning vocabulary, meanwhile budgie males are well documented to be avid learners, being able to learn over hundred words and many different tricks.
In game they would act like a mix of the macaws and the mynah, being able to climb around like the macaw but also being a faster and more energetic flyer like the mynah.
Unlike the mynah they would be able to be part of exhibit keeper talks, where they sit on the educators finger.
The budgies link to our topic of education are its migrations, unlocking a new education sign topic and a new sign, showing a map of australia and the budgies migration routes.
It would also have a sign comparing its wild and domestic versions regarding the topic of domestication.
Now that we have the animals coverd, lets talk scenery.
This pack is focused on three things, education props, signage and interesting and rare plants.
Starting of with the last, instead of a specific region this pack will feature plants that can be linked back into our topic of education, starting with a set of venus flytraps and 2 signs regarding carniverous plants, one for the bromeliad of the tropical pack and one for the venus flytrap. Next up, we have the ginkgo tree a living fossil from china that traces back to the jurrassic, coming with a new education sign themed around it and the topic of living fossils. Joining the ginko tree as a living fossil, we find the Wollemia pine, endemic to australia. Joining for the topic of domestication, we have corn and rice plants. Lastly, we got Pionier species with the eurasian rowan and Lyme Grass, a coastal plant setteling the sand dunes of the north western atlantic coast of europe. This mix also consciously gives us many different kinds of plants, with a small specalised one, 2 domestics with one of them being aquatic, 3 trees, one also acting as a scrub and a grass to make sure all plant types are coverd.
For Signage, the pack will feature a mix of the new consistent "wetlands" style signs for 20 base game and deluxe animals:
- Indian Elephant
- Indian Peafowl
- Indian Rhino
- Thomsons Gazelle
- Cheetah
- Pigmy Hippo
- Komodo Dragon
- Timber Wolf
- Grizzly Bear
- American Bison
- Bactrian Camel
- Lion
- Siberian Tiger
- Saltwater Crocodile
- Japanese Macaque
- Gorilla
- Chimpanzee
- Orangutan
- Bairds Tapir
- Galapagos Tortoise
Aswell as Head Signs both large and Small for 11 more:
- Red Kangaroo
- The Macaws
- The Dwarf Goat
- Lama
- Sun Bear
- Prez Wildhorse
- American Bison
- Red Deer
- Siamang
- Snow Leopard
The Heads have been choosen as "Headliner" animals for their zoo parts, as they are great use for signage and flags, so i tried to make sure every continent and major region got some.
For the last part, there will be lots of museums pieces, including bones, animal skeletons of an Aurochs, Wolly Mammoth, Tiger, Brown Bear, with multiple stages and mounting platforms, aswell as many different kinds of feathers, head crests, antlers, teeth, skulls, tortoise shells, reptile skins, you know the deal.
And thats it, hope you liked my spin on the children zoo pack, see you next time when i post the corresponding update ^^
Autum 2024:
This time i got a treat. Everybody loves the idear of a children zoo pack, but nobody actually likes the name cause its just a vage nothing.
Good thing that i got an even vaguer one with the Education Scenery Pack. This pack will have a focus on scenery with educational purposes, both interactable or not, so lets begin with the animals this time.
Starting of we got the west african dwarf goat, also known as the most common zoo animal in the world, kept in 1146 EAZA facilitys with only the blue peafowl also being kept in more then 1000.
This breed of goat is quite special, as its not actually one breed of goat but is actually a number of similar breeds all put under the same umbrella term. Their origin range is found in north west africa, from the coast of senegal up till the congo baisin, one of africas few rather underrepresented areas. While they got exported to europe for the use as lab animals and for our purposes as zoo animals, in their origin range they are still a very important and valued lifestock and corner stone of the rural economy.
These goats are the original dwarf goats, with allmost all other dwarf goats like the pigmy having them as their ancestors, which have a genetic disorder called Achondroplasia, which also is was seperates this group of goat breeds from others, as the requirement is this disorder. Thankfully the disorder does not cause them any harm, as its most prominent impact is the shortening of their legs. The trait has evolved naturally and not for aesthethic purposes, with the leading theories being that its an adaption to the humid forests that they are regulary kept in and also plays a role in their resistance to many different illnesses, most notably the sleeping sickness.
Colorwise they come in pretty much all colors a goat can come in, with the coloring in the chosen picture being one of the most common ones, with mixed colors and patches also being a common sight.
The breed is also known for their very calm and docile nature, making them together with their cheap price and small size the perfect inclusion to any petting zoo, which also led to their sheer domination in them.
In regards to the theme of the pack, the west african dwarf goat represents the concept of domestication. With it comes a new topic for the education signs, aswell as 2 new signs about domestication, one featuring a Bezoar Ibex and our Goat and a second sign features the guanaco and the lama. Guests that look at those signs will recieve an education bonus and an even greater one of they see the animals on the sign. Sadly the Guanaco and Bezoar Ibex arnt in game, but atleast for the goat we could also make it work with the alpine ibex.
Next in our living exhibiton, we have the cotton top tamarin, the most common tamarin and second most common new world monkey after the common marmoset with 275 EAZA holdings.
These critical endangerd monkeys live in tropical and secondary forests in north western columbia, with only 5% of their natural habitat remaining.
The most impressive thing about the cotton top tamarin is our knowledge about them. They are among the most well studied non domestic animals on the planet with most of the interesting facts laying in their social behaviour and language. Yes you heard that right, language. The cotton top tamarin has a known reportoire of 38 different sounds, most of them being bird like chirps and whistles, which they use and order similary to have we use letters that they use in fast succession to communicate. And not only that, they seem to be using a simple grammar aswell as using phonetic and lexial syntax. Scientist have actually figured out alot allready, with many calls being assigned a letter and a use, for example the c calls seem to be associated with finding food while the d calls are with eating. They are even quite sure that they talk about deeper things then just simple survival relating stuff, with some calls being associated with different emotions, with a hypothesis that they actually talk about their emotions, intensions and thought processes.
So yes, its a scientifically proven fact that atleast these monkeys talk about their emotions with each other, take that for your fun fact reportoire.
Its even studied how the young acquire the language and its seemingly quite close to us humans where babys understand what something means before correctly applying it.
Broadly speaking, they understand first, but when trying to communicate it takes a while till its anything but gibberish.
Theres much more about their communication to be learned and if this interests any of you id highly recommend to give atleast their wikipedia page a good read.
But who to communicate to when your alone? Dont worry, as the cotton top tamarin likes it social enviroment, typically found in groups of 2 till up to 13 members.
Every group is lead by a monogamous couple that keep up a strict social hierachy, with only them breeding. These groups arnt limited to family though and also unrelated tamarins are welcome, eventhough they also have to respect the leading couples authority. Cotton Top Tamarins groups take care of cooperative breeding, meaning that the entire group takes care of and raises the two young the dominant female births. Males typically act as the main care takers, carrying them around whereever they go with the paternal male being on near constant duty, often loosing up to 10% of its weight due to its extra burdens and limited food intake, while the other males of the group swap carrying duty.
The mother is mostly absent during child care, only nursing the young but leaving the carrying to the males of the group.
In general cotton top tamarins engage in pro social behaviour, meaning altruistic acts to the benefit of the group, eventhough it is suspected that this might be driven by selfish reasons. Besides the cooperative child care, this is predominantly featured in alarm calls which put them themself at risk of being spotted, aswell as the charing of food.
They also seemingly forge bonds with each other, which grow over time and through care, but also can be swiftly broken by betrayal, for example not charing food, which is also a reason why its suspected that their altruism is less because they are good hearted and more because the consquence of the social fallout is to severe.
And yes, not only is it scientifically proven that they speak about their emotions, but also that they can be quite the spitefull petty demons, especally towards other individuals of the same sex, specifally in females. They also tend to punish uncooperative monkeys, going from refusing to cooperate with them to exil. Fun.
But now you might ask, why do we know so much about these monkeys in particular?
Well, now coming to the theme of education, their education item is a cotton top themed interactable sound station for all the reasons mentioned above, while the other is the new education board topic of Lab Animals. The reason why they are so common in zoos and have for a long time on the list of the 25 most endangerd primates is the fact that we exported up to 40,000 of them until 976, when they were put in the highest level of protection and internationally illegal in monetary trade. And what did we export them for?
Biomedical research. A lot of the medication we use today has been tested on these small monkeys, to the benefit of us humans and the near extinction of these beautiful primates.
I dont want to kick of an discussion about the ethics of lab animals, but i do believe these monkeys deserve people to know what we have done to them and why they are at the brink of extinction. Currently zoos and 3 different nature reserves are trying their best to keep the species alive, but even if its not in the top 25 its still one of the most endangerd primate species on the planet and even after over 50 years from them being declared in the highest priority of conservation, there are still just about 2000 adult individuals in the wild across a few fragmented parts of columbia, holding out after their home was allmost entirely logged and their species allmost completly slaughterd for the sake of scientific advancement. They are the second most common new world primate in zoos but allmost noone knows them and even fewer know their story, a story deserving to be heard.
After that downer of the section, i need something to make me smile.
How about a duck?
The mallard duck is one of the farthest ranging species of the planet, naturally being found across north america, eurasia and northern africa and invasive in many places around the world. They are quite frankly the perfect invader. They are extremly addaptable "wetlands" birds, with a definition for wetlands of a puddle in literally any location. They can thrive both in rural and urban settings, can produce fertile hybrid offspring with 63(!) different duck species and are also the ancestor of the domestic duck. They are among the most adaptable species of waterfall, being able to live in fresh and saltwater, in moving and standing bodys of water, at literal ocean coasts, in the freezing tundra all the way up to the hot subtropics. This species is rediculously adaptable not just surviving but thriving in allmost any envireoment.
So the mallard must also be quite resilient in day to day life right? No! Absolutly not.
In north america alone its frequently hunted by 15 different species of birds of prey and over a douzen mammalian predators, while also being predated on by other waterbirds like herons and gulls, aswell as even fish with the wels catfish in particular being fond of snacking ducks.
So why are they so successfull? Quite simply, its one of the most successfull Hemerophiles, which means species that benefit from the changes humans make to their surroundings. Humans like ducks. We think they are cute and pretty, like them swimming in our ponds, some even love to hunt them. We tolerate if not encourage or even release ducks into out urban areas, which are also generally hostile to most indigenous waterfowl and more importantly the mallards many natural predators. Its much easier minding your own ducking buissness when theres way less predators around afterall.
Mallard ducks are a big problem outside of their range, one thats hard to controll, even being illegal to be kept in florida due to concerns of them hybdridising with the native mottled duck.
So why do we want them in a zoo game exactly? Well remember what we established 2 sentences prior? Humans like ducks, we think they are pretty and we like them in our ponds, we like them so much that we introduced them across the world afterall, so this deep human urge of seeing ducks ducking around on any body of water they an find should be in the game, but with an emphasis of the problems they can cause.
Theyd also come with a common white color morph and a piebald variant, to show not only their domestic form (and giving us practically an extra animal) but to also show a reasult of how hybdrisation can look like.
In the theme of education this means 3 new education sign topics, being hybridisation, invasiveness and Hemerophilie, aswell as a new interactable education station of a wood board with different animal foot prints, featuring the mallard, the red fox, a generic deer, a wold and a bear. I specifically didnt add animals like the cougar or the wild boar to keep this general in use for both europe, northern asia and north america, as these kinds of education stations are very common in wildparks and native areas alike.
For the last habitat animal we have the patagonian mara, a fan favorite, endemic to the shrublands and deserts of argentina south america.
With 338 holdings, they also are very common in Zoos, being the 46. most common animal in the EAZA.
These little rabbit deer are Caviids, making them related to the Capybara or the guinea pig, but as the nickname allready hinted at their morphology is far closer to the cross of a hare and an ungulate with long ears and limbs, with muscular hind limbs like a rabbit and hoof like compressed feet.
Adapted to a live in open grassland, they are good runners with great perception, detecting their predators early and running away faster then they could follow, often compared to antelopes. Their diet is allmost interly herbiverous, mostly persisting of grasses and scrubs, filling the niche that ungulates fill elsewhere.
Maras are known for 3 distinct styles of movement, a slow trot, a faster bunny like hop and jumping with all 4 legs, accellerating them up to 45 km/h, often fast enough to escape the foxes and felids that hunt them, most notably the cougar.
Typically Diurnal, they spend up to 46% of their awake time grazing, females more then males who often keep guard. At night they sleep in dense vegitation or in repurposed burrows of other animals.
Maras social structure is weird, unique even as far we know. They mate in monogamous pairs, with just like the cotton top tamarin the female in charge, but these pairs then live and breed in small warren societys of up to 29 pairs, all sharing a network of dens and burrows. After birth, all the young of this colony are grouped together with one pair at a time watching them in the den and nursing, while the other adults flock around the warrens. The mothers might not activly coperate in raising each others young, but it isnt unheard of that a females nurses a young that isnt hers. While they can communicate with whistles and chirps, most of their interspecies communication is done via scentmarkings with multiple different and specific interactions, most of them including spraying bodyily fluids on each other. Yummy.
Their link to the education theme is their convergent evolution, featured as a new education topic and a sign comparing them to a hare and a deer, aswell as a second, interactable one, featuring a long jump lane where visitors can compare themself to different animals, with a number of customisable options that put the markers differently for the up to 5 animals selected, with the default being the patagonian mara, siberian tiger, red deer, red kangaroo and a flea cause i think the flea would be so cute. The flea also gets a cool animal sign cause we like him here in the style of the bug signs of the conservation pack.
Lastly we have our exhibit animal and second exhibit flagship, the budgie.
The budgerigar, also known as the common parakeet, is the only species of the Melopsittacini tribe and found as nomads all over the drier parts of australia.
Their natural color is green with yellow and black stripes, but as a the worlds 3. most common pet they have been radiated into many different colors like blue, white, violett and grey aswell many different color mixes between these 7 colors.
In the wild they tend to be smaller then their domestic cousins, moving with their flock as the enviroments shift. They inhabit a variety of habitats, most notably scrublands, dry, open forests and grasslands, but droughts can also push them closer to the coasts and more humid woodlands. Their migration patterns are mostly determend by the availabilty of seeds and freshwater, as they need open water sources to drink and cant get their humidity intake from the seeds alone.
This reliance on fresh water and seeds makes them opportunistic breeders, usally breeding in responce to rainfall. Like all parrots they dont build typical nests but instead use holes in trees as nest sides, where they lay their clutch and protect it for around 20 days before they hatch and take another month before the youngs are fledging.
Interestingly budgerigar males are part of the few species with consistently seen same sex courtship thats also studied enough to determine that these parrots are not just training for courtship but are actually courting each other, often not breeding with females.
Budgerigars are quite affectionate with their flock mates in general, often feeding each other as a way to deepen their bonds or playing with each other.
As social and intelligent animals they need a lot of stimulation, especally in captivity. Budgies love to gnaw on everything they can get their beak on, sharpenign it for their hard seedy diet. They are known to love many different toys, aswell as playing with bonded partners, which can include humans. Males have been documented to bond far easier and more readily then females and also tend to be more willing to learn words or tricks. Most females quickly loose interest in learning vocabulary, meanwhile budgie males are well documented to be avid learners, being able to learn over hundred words and many different tricks.
In game they would act like a mix of the macaws and the mynah, being able to climb around like the macaw but also being a faster and more energetic flyer like the mynah.
Unlike the mynah they would be able to be part of exhibit keeper talks, where they sit on the educators finger.
The budgies link to our topic of education are its migrations, unlocking a new education sign topic and a new sign, showing a map of australia and the budgies migration routes.
It would also have a sign comparing its wild and domestic versions regarding the topic of domestication.
Now that we have the animals coverd, lets talk scenery.
This pack is focused on three things, education props, signage and interesting and rare plants.
Starting of with the last, instead of a specific region this pack will feature plants that can be linked back into our topic of education, starting with a set of venus flytraps and 2 signs regarding carniverous plants, one for the bromeliad of the tropical pack and one for the venus flytrap. Next up, we have the ginkgo tree a living fossil from china that traces back to the jurrassic, coming with a new education sign themed around it and the topic of living fossils. Joining the ginko tree as a living fossil, we find the Wollemia pine, endemic to australia. Joining for the topic of domestication, we have corn and rice plants. Lastly, we got Pionier species with the eurasian rowan and Lyme Grass, a coastal plant setteling the sand dunes of the north western atlantic coast of europe. This mix also consciously gives us many different kinds of plants, with a small specalised one, 2 domestics with one of them being aquatic, 3 trees, one also acting as a scrub and a grass to make sure all plant types are coverd.
For Signage, the pack will feature a mix of the new consistent "wetlands" style signs for 20 base game and deluxe animals:
- Indian Elephant
- Indian Peafowl
- Indian Rhino
- Thomsons Gazelle
- Cheetah
- Pigmy Hippo
- Komodo Dragon
- Timber Wolf
- Grizzly Bear
- American Bison
- Bactrian Camel
- Lion
- Siberian Tiger
- Saltwater Crocodile
- Japanese Macaque
- Gorilla
- Chimpanzee
- Orangutan
- Bairds Tapir
- Galapagos Tortoise
Aswell as Head Signs both large and Small for 11 more:
- Red Kangaroo
- The Macaws
- The Dwarf Goat
- Lama
- Sun Bear
- Prez Wildhorse
- American Bison
- Red Deer
- Siamang
- Snow Leopard
The Heads have been choosen as "Headliner" animals for their zoo parts, as they are great use for signage and flags, so i tried to make sure every continent and major region got some.
For the last part, there will be lots of museums pieces, including bones, animal skeletons of an Aurochs, Wolly Mammoth, Tiger, Brown Bear, with multiple stages and mounting platforms, aswell as many different kinds of feathers, head crests, antlers, teeth, skulls, tortoise shells, reptile skins, you know the deal.
And thats it, hope you liked my spin on the children zoo pack, see you next time when i post the corresponding update ^^
So what kind of update will go with the "children zoo" education pack?
Guest interaction?
Correct but not the one your propaply hoping for.
This update is themed around the same thing as the pack, education, both in game and for the player.
Starting of we have a zoopedia overhaul.
Sounds more drastic then it is, we are simply going to add a few new categorys to the natural habitat tab.
There will be a number of new information to be found here, starting with the natural habitat, there will be a few new categorys under the habitat requirements, covering the animals preferred diet, a list of ingame animals it shares its habitat with, a list of ingame plants it shares its habitat with and the animals natural predators and/or prey.
The map will also now feature a striped historical range aswell as arrows indicating migration routes if the animal partakes in them.
For example for the african buffallo we have tall grasses as its preffered food, a list of yk the plants and animals it coexists with like the zebra and for predators it has the african lion, marked with a little shiny outline to signify it as its main predator, while the lion would have both the zebra and the buffalo as prey items but the buffalo in an outline as its main predator, marking a significant predator prey relatshionship, going into 3 tiers, bronze for regular but not special prey, silver for a clearly prefered prey species and in this case gold as many prides of lions have specialised in hunting buffalo. As another example, red foxes are seen as the main predator of the mallard duck in most of its range, making it gold for the duck, but the duck is just another prey item on a long list of small animals for the red fox.
Now what does this mean in game?
Simply, if a guest watches an animal while also seeing animals or plants on these list, it gives a small education bonus, growing larger if its a predator prey relatshionship with the higher grades of silver and gold giving more education.
This does 3 things in practice:
1. It gives the player more and easily understood information about the animal and its enviroment
2. It gives the player a non forced insentive to build themed areas and use plants and animals from the same region, because lets be honest its completly stupid that an animal gets "upset" by foliage that isnt from its continent. The game even knows it and made the punishment negible, thankfully.
3. An easy source of free education just by having a good zoo layout and theming.
In addition to that, all animals will get new educational taggs, coresponding to the education topics we got.
For example the budgie will have (if i miss some im sorry but i never actually use them in game) migrations, communication, domestication, Hemerophilie and whatever other tags aply, all of them being featured on this tab with ~1 sentence explaining why it belongs here (nomadic species, can learn to mimic human speech, date of domestication and purpose aka ~1850 and showbird in aviculture and user of open watersources on farms).
This will make the zoopedia alot more informative for the player, which is allways a good thing, but also act as a filter for the next new thing, but first we will talk about the actual big boy in the room, the new plantpedia.
The plantpedia will be structured like the zoopedia, with an icon of the notebook with a leaf instead of a paw print. It will list all species of plants in the game, showing in different taps their data with their own tags, with for example the venus flytrap being a carnivorous plant and their range + what other plants and animals live in it and who likes to snack on them, pretty much like the normal zoopedia including funfacts and all. Again this is all for more way for the player to easily educate themself in the game + as far as i know its a somewhat requested feature. Ofcourse all plants will also gain their own billboards, so have fun frontier taking all those pics.
This change is an important one for the two main new gameplay alterations, the first being an education sign overall and the new guest to piece interaction, gotcha.
Any piece or group can be assigned as an educational item, making it automatically a vistapoint without needing the pole. These educational items can relate to up to 3 animals or plants and 3 different tags, for example a custom sign for my skunk and racoon can be fitted Racoon and Skunk as animals, aswell as the topics Hemereophilie, Invasive Species and Nocturnal Life for example. Now if a guest looks at this sign, they will gain knowledge for these taggs, important for later, and the education gained will be determined by how recent they have seen animals or plants that have these taggs, in case of my sign, they just saw the racoon and skunk, with the racoon having all 3 taggs and the skunk both hemereophilie and nocturnal life, making them gain a large amount of education.
This can be done with many different things now, making for examples museums and botanical gardens possible, where the guests will now gain knowledge from for example the mammoth skeleton and the extinction sign next to it.
The signs are applied like the billboards, where you can either choose a habitat or for the new part another group/piece that will also be looked at.
I hope i did a good job at explaining it, but more or less this actually makes custom signage viable as more then just decoration and doesnt force the billboards on players if they dont want them in franchise or challange but increase education.
For the second big part, guests now have a new interest tab, where they are generated by random to have 1-3 favorite animal or to a lesser chance plant species, which will grant them not just higher education, but also fun and there for making them happier, aswell as up to 5 likes and dislikes. These are randomly chosen from the taggs in game, so for example visitor a has the jaguar as its favorite animal and likes nocturnal life, african animals and australian plants, while he dislikes snakes, primates and flowers, while b has the western chimpanzee and olive tree as favorites and likes only mammals, while disliking birds, giving us more unique visitors that want to see different things.
But thats not all, as this update also introduces animal feed, buyable at info shops if toggled or at new dispenser. They will give guest a small bag of kibble in exchange for a bit of money, which they can throw into animal enclosures to feed the animals, no restrictions besides no box exhibits.
Each habitat now has a toggle if the guests are allowed to throw kibble into it, with staff but especally security guards stopping those who throw food where they arnt suppoused to, giving them another job. Their can also be extra no feeding signs to discourages guests from throwing kibble. Feeding the animal increases the guests fun and slightly lowers the hunger of the animals that eat (i think hungers a thing? afterall starvation is) but to much of it can make animals ill, so regulations can be put on the size of the kibble backs aswell as the number sold, with different animals being part of different sensetivity tiers, which could literally just be "no issues, sometimes issues from kibble, often issues from kibble" with better names, generally being ungulates tolerate kibble, most animals not that well and birds and carnivores do not tolerate lots of kibble. Most guests will quickly use up their kibble after buying, so putting dispensers only clause to kibble tollerant animals is the winning stategy, you could even show it on a heatmap in what area most feed will land.
This feature can be used for all animals as mentioned above and while i have yet to see a zoo that lets you feed big cats this is still a game and a universal throwing animation, so i dont see why it should be artifically restricted. If someone really wants their guests to feed the polarbears, who am i to judge?
But ofcourse, the new dwarf goat will have a new guest visitor animation in walkthroughs, where they walk up to the guest and eat out of their hand while guest addults crouch down and pet their back and children just stand and are happy goofy goobers, increasing fun by alot.
These kinds of animations will be introduced over time to more animals, but for now only one other animal will receive one, that being the bactrian camel, which feeds out of the guests hand while they pat its neck. Lots of potential with just these two, but the details are for sure better in your heads then i can put into words ^^
Whats better after an education and signage overhaul and goat petting then a new animal behavior?
Tamarins will be able to carry young on their back, with a get up and get down animation with the baby just vibing while the parent moves around, with the cotton top males being far more likly to be the carrier then the female.
This feature also gets expanded to not one, but two base game animals, the chimpanzee and the bonobo, as they practically could reuse the same animations for both of them, neat!
For new colormorphs, we skip the colormorphs or atleast not entirly. Instead of just adding new colors to random animals, this patch is all about fixing things the game messed up, not full on remasters but things like rezisings, bad shader, weird color choices etc, but im honest im not the best at that, so id rather ask you guys what are the easy fixes youd like to change here? Everything from colormorph over rezising to minor model or sound design changes are fair play, so id love to hear what youd like to see ^^
Guest interaction?
Correct but not the one your propaply hoping for.
This update is themed around the same thing as the pack, education, both in game and for the player.
Starting of we have a zoopedia overhaul.
Sounds more drastic then it is, we are simply going to add a few new categorys to the natural habitat tab.
There will be a number of new information to be found here, starting with the natural habitat, there will be a few new categorys under the habitat requirements, covering the animals preferred diet, a list of ingame animals it shares its habitat with, a list of ingame plants it shares its habitat with and the animals natural predators and/or prey.
The map will also now feature a striped historical range aswell as arrows indicating migration routes if the animal partakes in them.
For example for the african buffallo we have tall grasses as its preffered food, a list of yk the plants and animals it coexists with like the zebra and for predators it has the african lion, marked with a little shiny outline to signify it as its main predator, while the lion would have both the zebra and the buffalo as prey items but the buffalo in an outline as its main predator, marking a significant predator prey relatshionship, going into 3 tiers, bronze for regular but not special prey, silver for a clearly prefered prey species and in this case gold as many prides of lions have specialised in hunting buffalo. As another example, red foxes are seen as the main predator of the mallard duck in most of its range, making it gold for the duck, but the duck is just another prey item on a long list of small animals for the red fox.
Now what does this mean in game?
Simply, if a guest watches an animal while also seeing animals or plants on these list, it gives a small education bonus, growing larger if its a predator prey relatshionship with the higher grades of silver and gold giving more education.
This does 3 things in practice:
1. It gives the player more and easily understood information about the animal and its enviroment
2. It gives the player a non forced insentive to build themed areas and use plants and animals from the same region, because lets be honest its completly stupid that an animal gets "upset" by foliage that isnt from its continent. The game even knows it and made the punishment negible, thankfully.
3. An easy source of free education just by having a good zoo layout and theming.
In addition to that, all animals will get new educational taggs, coresponding to the education topics we got.
For example the budgie will have (if i miss some im sorry but i never actually use them in game) migrations, communication, domestication, Hemerophilie and whatever other tags aply, all of them being featured on this tab with ~1 sentence explaining why it belongs here (nomadic species, can learn to mimic human speech, date of domestication and purpose aka ~1850 and showbird in aviculture and user of open watersources on farms).
This will make the zoopedia alot more informative for the player, which is allways a good thing, but also act as a filter for the next new thing, but first we will talk about the actual big boy in the room, the new plantpedia.
The plantpedia will be structured like the zoopedia, with an icon of the notebook with a leaf instead of a paw print. It will list all species of plants in the game, showing in different taps their data with their own tags, with for example the venus flytrap being a carnivorous plant and their range + what other plants and animals live in it and who likes to snack on them, pretty much like the normal zoopedia including funfacts and all. Again this is all for more way for the player to easily educate themself in the game + as far as i know its a somewhat requested feature. Ofcourse all plants will also gain their own billboards, so have fun frontier taking all those pics.
This change is an important one for the two main new gameplay alterations, the first being an education sign overall and the new guest to piece interaction, gotcha.
Any piece or group can be assigned as an educational item, making it automatically a vistapoint without needing the pole. These educational items can relate to up to 3 animals or plants and 3 different tags, for example a custom sign for my skunk and racoon can be fitted Racoon and Skunk as animals, aswell as the topics Hemereophilie, Invasive Species and Nocturnal Life for example. Now if a guest looks at this sign, they will gain knowledge for these taggs, important for later, and the education gained will be determined by how recent they have seen animals or plants that have these taggs, in case of my sign, they just saw the racoon and skunk, with the racoon having all 3 taggs and the skunk both hemereophilie and nocturnal life, making them gain a large amount of education.
This can be done with many different things now, making for examples museums and botanical gardens possible, where the guests will now gain knowledge from for example the mammoth skeleton and the extinction sign next to it.
The signs are applied like the billboards, where you can either choose a habitat or for the new part another group/piece that will also be looked at.
I hope i did a good job at explaining it, but more or less this actually makes custom signage viable as more then just decoration and doesnt force the billboards on players if they dont want them in franchise or challange but increase education.
For the second big part, guests now have a new interest tab, where they are generated by random to have 1-3 favorite animal or to a lesser chance plant species, which will grant them not just higher education, but also fun and there for making them happier, aswell as up to 5 likes and dislikes. These are randomly chosen from the taggs in game, so for example visitor a has the jaguar as its favorite animal and likes nocturnal life, african animals and australian plants, while he dislikes snakes, primates and flowers, while b has the western chimpanzee and olive tree as favorites and likes only mammals, while disliking birds, giving us more unique visitors that want to see different things.
But thats not all, as this update also introduces animal feed, buyable at info shops if toggled or at new dispenser. They will give guest a small bag of kibble in exchange for a bit of money, which they can throw into animal enclosures to feed the animals, no restrictions besides no box exhibits.
Each habitat now has a toggle if the guests are allowed to throw kibble into it, with staff but especally security guards stopping those who throw food where they arnt suppoused to, giving them another job. Their can also be extra no feeding signs to discourages guests from throwing kibble. Feeding the animal increases the guests fun and slightly lowers the hunger of the animals that eat (i think hungers a thing? afterall starvation is) but to much of it can make animals ill, so regulations can be put on the size of the kibble backs aswell as the number sold, with different animals being part of different sensetivity tiers, which could literally just be "no issues, sometimes issues from kibble, often issues from kibble" with better names, generally being ungulates tolerate kibble, most animals not that well and birds and carnivores do not tolerate lots of kibble. Most guests will quickly use up their kibble after buying, so putting dispensers only clause to kibble tollerant animals is the winning stategy, you could even show it on a heatmap in what area most feed will land.
This feature can be used for all animals as mentioned above and while i have yet to see a zoo that lets you feed big cats this is still a game and a universal throwing animation, so i dont see why it should be artifically restricted. If someone really wants their guests to feed the polarbears, who am i to judge?
But ofcourse, the new dwarf goat will have a new guest visitor animation in walkthroughs, where they walk up to the guest and eat out of their hand while guest addults crouch down and pet their back and children just stand and are happy goofy goobers, increasing fun by alot.
These kinds of animations will be introduced over time to more animals, but for now only one other animal will receive one, that being the bactrian camel, which feeds out of the guests hand while they pat its neck. Lots of potential with just these two, but the details are for sure better in your heads then i can put into words ^^
Whats better after an education and signage overhaul and goat petting then a new animal behavior?
Tamarins will be able to carry young on their back, with a get up and get down animation with the baby just vibing while the parent moves around, with the cotton top males being far more likly to be the carrier then the female.
This feature also gets expanded to not one, but two base game animals, the chimpanzee and the bonobo, as they practically could reuse the same animations for both of them, neat!
For new colormorphs, we skip the colormorphs or atleast not entirly. Instead of just adding new colors to random animals, this patch is all about fixing things the game messed up, not full on remasters but things like rezisings, bad shader, weird color choices etc, but im honest im not the best at that, so id rather ask you guys what are the easy fixes youd like to change here? Everything from colormorph over rezising to minor model or sound design changes are fair play, so id love to hear what youd like to see ^^
Now after a full year of 4 packs and 4 updates, we come to the anniversary.
As the 5. year of planet zoos release, we get a very special one this time with a little more then usual, but first of the usual part, 1 new animal.
After over 5 years, isnt this the perfect time to honor the engine that runs the game for us and is the first thing we see every time we start up the game?
As you might have allready guessed from the describition, the new animal will be the king cobra, the world longest venomous snake and funnily enough not an actual cobra but the only surviving member of the genus Ophiophagus.
With a large range across most of south east asia and indonesia, the king cobra is mostly an inhabitant of woodlands with a preference for territory near water, making it not surprising that they are also found in mangroveswamps, but also in grasslands and land used for agriculture.
An important member of many myths and legends across its range, its surprisingly a rather docile species, which tends to not be agressive and only biting when cornerd.
As an apex predator they range supreme over their prey and do mostly not have to fear other animals due to its iconic threat display, with only mungos and honey badgers preying on them, but with the former being a rather even match and the ladder not being found in most of their range, predation isnt really a risk for these magnificent snakes.
But what they are is a risk to other snakes, as the king cobra is specialised for hunting other snakes, with only large pythons being save from them.
Thats not the only thing that differentiates them from other snakes though, as the king cobra is the only snake that builds above ground nests and protects them, something very unusual for snakes.
In game, theyd use a modified version of the tropical exhibit with a water source, some logs to climb and a toggleable nest for them, aswell as a new toggleable waterfall enritchment, because thats cool and could be greatly used for future exhibits.
I chose the kobra for a few reasons, but the main ones are that its a nice nod to the engine, asia is severly underrepresented in classic exhibits and coul really use one that isnt a brown desert snake or an invertebrate and we dont want frontier to use up all of their creative juice just yet so that we can squeze a bit more into the update.
Speaking of, this update comes with not 1, not 2, not 3 but 4 animal remasters, starting with...
The timberwolf. People like to be angry over the lion or the malayan tapir, but these animals while one cartoony and the other a clone atleast look good.
This one? Oh boy, in my humble opinion it might be the ugliest animal in the game, which is a shame as wolfs are beautiful animals in real life!
The face is plain ugly, the fur looks blocky, the shader looks of, it looks very uncanny, i could go on and also, it name sucks.
So we change that. This isnt the timberwolf, a largly imaginary term used for one of the north american subspecies, but just the grey wolf or just wolf.
Thats what the species is called, fight me on it if you want.
If you ask me north american and eurasian wolfs look the same, all i want is a high quality wolf model, but if anyone wants to contest it it will conveniently transform into the eurasian wolf, while north america still has the arctic wolf, so north americans, no mackenzie wolf discussions no more.
For reference, a picture of a real eurasian wolf to remind you all that wolfs are actually beautifull and not the hideous ps2 looking things in game.
Next up a second rename and another base game stinker, the himalayan brown bear.
Long story short, frontier why? Thats so stupid, make it the european brown bear instead no one will miss it.
Also yuck potato face aged bad, also very uncany and looking more like a stuffed bear then an alive one.
Here for comparision
Together with the now eurasian brown bears face lift, the grizzly bears will be put on a diet.
I know that bears dont tend to be thin, but the grizzlys look like furry fat potatos. A little less round and some more small touch up and im sure he will be quite the handsome fellow though.
And lastly, the one youve all been waiting for, the malayan tapir will get its own modell!
I know it, you know it, this topic has been discussed to death but if not for an anniversary update i dont know what better time there would be for this to happen.
Easily one of the things the community is the most vocal about to be fixed and even if it took 4 years, it finally will be.
But thats actually not all and as a special gift, deep diving will be added to the tapirs and the nile monitor, to truly give the malayan tapir a glow up both in its looks but also the gameplay, with the bairds getting the treat aswell cause if the animations exist why not chare them, isnt that right asian water monitor and nile monitor?
Yeah the asian water monitor will be forced to chare and give up its deep diving priviliges and let the niles dive aswell.
And thats it, happy mile stone for this thread as we now came full circle on a year, i had lots of fun so far and eventhough i only intended it to be one more pack and update if people are still wanting to hear my opinions and like the thread i see no reason not to continue for another year of fanfiction.
As the 5. year of planet zoos release, we get a very special one this time with a little more then usual, but first of the usual part, 1 new animal.
After over 5 years, isnt this the perfect time to honor the engine that runs the game for us and is the first thing we see every time we start up the game?
As you might have allready guessed from the describition, the new animal will be the king cobra, the world longest venomous snake and funnily enough not an actual cobra but the only surviving member of the genus Ophiophagus.
With a large range across most of south east asia and indonesia, the king cobra is mostly an inhabitant of woodlands with a preference for territory near water, making it not surprising that they are also found in mangroveswamps, but also in grasslands and land used for agriculture.
An important member of many myths and legends across its range, its surprisingly a rather docile species, which tends to not be agressive and only biting when cornerd.
As an apex predator they range supreme over their prey and do mostly not have to fear other animals due to its iconic threat display, with only mungos and honey badgers preying on them, but with the former being a rather even match and the ladder not being found in most of their range, predation isnt really a risk for these magnificent snakes.
But what they are is a risk to other snakes, as the king cobra is specialised for hunting other snakes, with only large pythons being save from them.
Thats not the only thing that differentiates them from other snakes though, as the king cobra is the only snake that builds above ground nests and protects them, something very unusual for snakes.
In game, theyd use a modified version of the tropical exhibit with a water source, some logs to climb and a toggleable nest for them, aswell as a new toggleable waterfall enritchment, because thats cool and could be greatly used for future exhibits.
I chose the kobra for a few reasons, but the main ones are that its a nice nod to the engine, asia is severly underrepresented in classic exhibits and coul really use one that isnt a brown desert snake or an invertebrate and we dont want frontier to use up all of their creative juice just yet so that we can squeze a bit more into the update.
Speaking of, this update comes with not 1, not 2, not 3 but 4 animal remasters, starting with...
The timberwolf. People like to be angry over the lion or the malayan tapir, but these animals while one cartoony and the other a clone atleast look good.
This one? Oh boy, in my humble opinion it might be the ugliest animal in the game, which is a shame as wolfs are beautiful animals in real life!
The face is plain ugly, the fur looks blocky, the shader looks of, it looks very uncanny, i could go on and also, it name sucks.
So we change that. This isnt the timberwolf, a largly imaginary term used for one of the north american subspecies, but just the grey wolf or just wolf.
Thats what the species is called, fight me on it if you want.
If you ask me north american and eurasian wolfs look the same, all i want is a high quality wolf model, but if anyone wants to contest it it will conveniently transform into the eurasian wolf, while north america still has the arctic wolf, so north americans, no mackenzie wolf discussions no more.
For reference, a picture of a real eurasian wolf to remind you all that wolfs are actually beautifull and not the hideous ps2 looking things in game.
Next up a second rename and another base game stinker, the himalayan brown bear.
Long story short, frontier why? Thats so stupid, make it the european brown bear instead no one will miss it.
Also yuck potato face aged bad, also very uncany and looking more like a stuffed bear then an alive one.
Here for comparision
Together with the now eurasian brown bears face lift, the grizzly bears will be put on a diet.
I know that bears dont tend to be thin, but the grizzlys look like furry fat potatos. A little less round and some more small touch up and im sure he will be quite the handsome fellow though.
And lastly, the one youve all been waiting for, the malayan tapir will get its own modell!
I know it, you know it, this topic has been discussed to death but if not for an anniversary update i dont know what better time there would be for this to happen.
Easily one of the things the community is the most vocal about to be fixed and even if it took 4 years, it finally will be.
But thats actually not all and as a special gift, deep diving will be added to the tapirs and the nile monitor, to truly give the malayan tapir a glow up both in its looks but also the gameplay, with the bairds getting the treat aswell cause if the animations exist why not chare them, isnt that right asian water monitor and nile monitor?
Yeah the asian water monitor will be forced to chare and give up its deep diving priviliges and let the niles dive aswell.
And thats it, happy mile stone for this thread as we now came full circle on a year, i had lots of fun so far and eventhough i only intended it to be one more pack and update if people are still wanting to hear my opinions and like the thread i see no reason not to continue for another year of fanfiction.
About the colormorph thing mentioned at the end, I think colormorphs are tge absolute best way to do subspecies. Actual subspecies are pretty much just hereditary colormorphs of the base animal. If they made it so that certain colormorphs were hereditary in game that'd be awesome.
Back to the fanfiction
Winter 2024:
I decided to do something i originally did not like. A mixed woodlands animal pack. Why did i not like it?
Usually it was just 6-7 tropical animals + the wolverine and maybe wild boar, which then just asks the question why not to make it a tropical animal pack while keeping the good temperate choices for its own pack.
Why am i now making one myself though?
Welp we allready have a tropical pack and i got a grabback of animals left i want to add, that suspiciously make for a great 4/5 split, which would satisfy me for both biomes sufficently.
Now then, what we cooking?
Our first stop is in South America, where a Man with a Plan has his first animal ready, the south american Coati, the fourth most common South American Animal and 29. most common in general in the EAZA, so kind of a big deal.
Ranging across pretty much of all of tropical and sub tropical southamerica east of the Andes, they are very common generalist species. Unlike other Procyonidae like the racoon or kinkajou they are mostly diurnal, which means that they are most active during the day. During that time they scavange on the ground for food, with the females and young moving in large mobs of 4-20 individuals, while the males typically live in solitude and defend their loose territorys against other male intruders. Because of this stark contrast of the social behaviour of the sexes they were originally seen as two different species, the social coatis and the solitary coatimundi, which is why today when they have been aligned back into one species again both names are used, while technically only coati is scientifically correct. While we mostly think of the treetops when picturing the forests of south america, the coati is actually a mostly terrestrial animal, wandering through the bush, digging up food, turning rocks and scooping their long noses in many places, all while they have an upright tail, used to signalise the rest of the group their position even when in the underbush.
As a true all terrain vehicle, the coati is also not only able to climb, where it uses its long tail for keeping its ballance, its also an excellent swimmer, even catching fish from time to time. They eat litterally everything they can get their grabby claws on, be it fish, small animals, insects, eggs, fruit or whatever else edible they find.
Sadly there is one big caveat with the south american coati. They are on the black list of the European Union, also very politly named the List of undesireable Species.
This list consists of potentially invasive species that could create significant pressures on the local enviroment or economy, with some other examples being the sacred ibis or the racoon. All animals on the list are illegal to import, breed or release into the wild and while racoons are also on that list, their is a stable wild population where captured animals are put into zoos, but as only mallorca has something that can be considerd even a population for coatis, they wont face that luxuary and will be gone from our zoological facilities once the current last generation has died of in around 10 years.
But that will not be the end for coatis in european Zoos, as white nosed coatis which are considerd as a lesser enviromential threat are phased in for them instead, but for now the south american coati dominates not just in europe still but in zoos all around the world, so it felt only right to give them one last hurrah and chance to join before they wont be a zoo animal in europe anymore.
Ingame they would fill the important niche as the third major generalist from south america, aswell as being able to fit in many different types of habitats and areas.
Savannah? Coati! Swampy watery habitat? Coati! An Aboreal Area? Coati! Theyd fit perfectly into every single corner or habitat type you could dream of both for south american areas but also as a general filler animal for high and low budget zoos alike.
The coati is thankfully not the only animal from south america though, as from the south western tip the southern pudu joins our ranks, representing the Valvidian Temperate forest, a unique wet and cold biosphere west of the southern andes and south of the chilean deserts that features many endemics, with the only up to 8kg heavy pudu being one of the largest. The only other animal we have in the game currently that frequents this region is the cougar, so some endemic representation for one of the most unique temperate forests in the world sounds just right.They might just be found in 23 EAZA zoos, but with an upward trend with 5 zoos aquiring them in the last years. The second smallest deer in the world , with only the incredibly illusive northern pudu being estimated to be lighter on average, they fit well in many different displays, both alone or as a coinhabitant for a larger species.
A good examples for that would be the zoo wuppertal, where the southern pudu is found in 6 different enclosures, two just for them, 1 with collared peccarys, 1 with bairds tapir and lesser mara, 1 being a walkthrough aviary and one with red crowned cranes. It should be noted though that this abundance of pudu also comes from the fact, that the zoo wuppertal is the most successfull pudu breeder outside of south america, with more then 150 pudus being born their up to 2009.
In the wild, the pudu is endangerd due to the fragmentation of its habitat, illegal hunting, feral pets, introduction of other deer species and habitat destruction, but there are also many good news. Besides the fact that they are easy to breed in captivity with a far larger European population then 23 zoos make you estimate, they have a very stable and only ever growing captive population, they are also a headliner animal for conservation with both scientific studies aswell as the establishing of protected areas for them, also benefiting the many other endemics of their very unique ecosystem.
For the game, the pudu would add multiple new charakteristics, for one it would be our new smallest ungulate as the worlds second smallest deer and our first south american temperate animal that doesnt also span the rest of the americas. Theyd be a great addition to many habitats, mangling well with many other animals and adding a nice additional layer to those enclosures. Its also just really cute and has some great forest puppy vibes for mass appeal.
Whats not to love?
Traveling across the pacific, we meet our first featherd friend of the pack in new guinea, the victorian crowned pigeon, the largest and most common in captivity of the 3 crowned pigeon species.
With a lenght of of around 75 cm and a weight of 3,5 kg on average its the largest surviving pigeon and compareable in size to a large chicken and also generally behaves similar to one as a largely teresstrial birds, mostly only using its wings to escape predators or to fly up to a resting spot in a tree, making a loud clapping sound when ever it takes of.
Most of their time is spend walking along the ground in the search of fallen fruit, flocking together in pairs or small partys as they wander around. Fruit make up a large part of their diet with invertebrates and seeds only occasionally being consumed. They also seem to be very fond of figs in captivity.
While completly capeable to live together peacefully, males regulary engage in aggressive displays against each other, puffing out their chest, raising their wings ready to strike and dash at each other, but only rarely make contact. These non violent displays are used to establish dominance but as they do not actually hurt each other its not to disperse one of them but just to establish the pecking order, with the males often being quite peacefull with each other afterwards.
In the wild they live in the swampy forests of northern new guinea and a few of the surrounding islands, but also can be freaquently found in sago palm forests.
Sadly due to their habitat being threatend due to logging, the victoria crowned pidgeon is estimated to be the rarest and most endangerd crowned pidgeon in the wild.
In zoos meanwhile they are very common and popular as free roaming animals in tropical houses, due to their large size, beautiful desplay and majestic slow walk making them easy to spot and fun to watch, while they also can become tolerant of humans enough to not be stressed out by their presence, even if they tend to be shier then the other crowned pidgeons.
They would add a third very distinct fowl like animal and the one best suited to roam freely in tropical houses due to their smaller yet still large size. Being a great supplement to new guinea and indonesia aswell as all kinds of tropical houses, im sure that theyd be a bird that most people can find lots of use in, be it aviarys, free roaming, tropical houses, new guinea sections or just the desire for another pretty bird in their zoo.
Hopping across the Islands of Indonesia, we meet our next member of the pack, the delightfully colord yellow throated marten, the potentially most versatile animal for this theme as its found across indonesia, south east asia, china, the southern slopes of the himalaya and even up to the freezing valleys of the amur river as the only animal in this pack that frequents both tropical and boreal forests, aswell as everything in between.
As the largest and second most far ranging marten of the old world, its an omnivore that eats everything from fruit and nectar in south east asia to roe deer in siberia. Thanks to it muscular build, agile arboreal superiority and a very unpleasent odor, it only has to fear very few predators, allowing it to be as colorfull as it is and also being quite courageous and docile, being known for their curiosity and the ease of winning their trust. While very similar to the beech marten, in both its size and a few anatomically features its actually quite different from many other martens, being thought of as the most ancient marten still alive, originating from the pilocene.
In some way if we had two martens, theyd be the giant otter to the asian small clawed, as the largest and most distinct member of its group that plays a key role in its enviroments, while a pine or beech marten would be much more applyable as the garden variety marten, but unlike the giant otter due to the lucky fact of being very pretty the yellow throated marten will be for sure be able to satisfy the desire for a marten for most people.
Its a diurnal animal that mainly hunts on the ground in pairs or small packs, eating everything from small prey items like mice and frogs up to smaller ungulates like chitals, roe deer and muntjacs or even panda cubs. In areas where larger predators like tigers are around they also trail them and scavange the carrion they leave behind.
As mentioned before due to being very agile, strong and stinky it is only rarely predated, but both siberian tigers and asiatic black bears have been reported to successfully hunt them on occasion.
Lastly the main thing i want to focus on is there range. It large range of biomes and just area coverage allows it to play many different roles in a zoo, be it filling one of the last open niches of a not broken agile climbing animal for SEA, giving us another animal to feature in himalayan displays, a great and very different addition to multiple island focused areas like taiwan, borneo, java and sumatra, an amur valley themed area or just general east asia, im sure they would be very very usefull.
Moving further north we find the aviary animal of the pack, an animal of many names, known as Phantom of the North, Spectral, Spruce, Lapland, Bearded or most commonly the Great grey Owl.
The world largest owl is here for many reasons, but one of the most significant is its range. Its the only member of the genus Strix that is found in both the eastern and western hemisphere and ranges across the coniferous taiga forests of both north america and northern eurasia. There they tend to live near open meadows or bogs, where they hunt for their prey of choice, small mammals. Due to their facial disk, the largest among any raptor, they can focus sound and with the help of their unsymetrical ears they have a great sense of hearing thats allmost unmatched even by other owls and can precisly track even the slightest of sounds.
This can be seen by their special hunting technique, where they listen for sound below the snow, being able to detect movement of atleast up to a layer of up to 60 cm of snow to precisly snow-plunge for their prey, in most cases lemmings, where they crash through the snow cover to precisly grab their prey, up to a depth of their size, which is typically between 60-80 cm in lenght. This feat requires very precise hearing, especally as most of the time they detect their prey from a low perching ground like a tree stump.
In regions without lemmings they tend to snack on voles primarly and a range of other small mammals, but a population in drier parts of california has also been observed to primarly feed on pocket gophers.
Something very special about them is that while among the largest species of owl, they are also among the stealthiest. Not only do they have a very unassuming camoflaging feather pattern, but they are also unusually silent. Unlike most other top predator they are not territorial in the slightest, only protecting their immediate nest and young.
This makes them especally hard to spot as they mostly keep to themself, not attacking other predators, not calling out to threaten intruders or anything of the like, instead they just prefer to stay put where ever they are, watching in silence, making the Name "Phantom of the North" quite fitting.
Another reason that makes them a great contender is how common they are in captivity. The european grey great owl is the third most common owl kept in the EAZA with 275 holdings and the 73. most common species, only outclassed by the european eagle owl and the snowy owl, one of those not fitting the criteria of woodlands and the other not being choosen so that not just eurasia but also north america can profit from a native aviary bird, leaving only africa without one after recieving 4 aviary birds over this year.
For the aviarys they are a great choice, as their calm and very tollerant nature makes them very appliceable to walkthroughs and multispecies habitats, as they leave birds of all kind generally alone due to being highly specialised rodent hunters. I Have personally been in multiple walkthrough aviarys with them, my favorite being a mix with snowy owls and 2 more owl species in Zoo berlin and they are an impressive and very open joy to watch, with the individual there happily posing on a log for a photographer seemingly enjoying the attention.
In game they would be the most lethargic of the 4 bird species so far, moving the least. But they would bring one new interaction with them, that being bathing in shallow water, something these owls love to do to take care of their feathers, even if it leaves them unable to fly till dry. Third animal that recieving the bathing behavior is an owl, you heard it hear first. They would be able to do that both in shallow water pools in the enviroment, but also a new bird bath enritchment item that comes in 4 shapes, one on the ground and one elevated in both a natural and classic fit.
Otherwise theyd be able to perch, sit on the ground and fly from one perch spot to the next like the lazy fluffy bird they are.
Moving further west towards europe, theres one thing missing from this pack and thats an animal thats larger then 1 meter.
Conveniently theres a very requested eurasian ungulate that could fill that gap.
The wild boar is one of the most widespread mammals on the planet and for good reason.
They are the largest suid and can grow to different sizes due to enviromental factors, with the males of the meditaraenean population for example averaging around 50 kg and 60 cm shoulder height, while the central european and most common in captivity goes up to 100 kg and 80 cm and in the far east of siberia they can even reach massive sizes of up to 270 kg and 120 cm height. In game, id approve the wild boar to be modeld after the central european boar, as its not only the most common but also the most average of its subspecies, with the size gene going as low as the 60 cm of the mediteranean and up to atleast one meter of the east european boars, making them quite a bit larger on average as the current pigs in game, which all go to a max shoulder height of 80 cm.
Talking about the subspecies, there are 16 recognised from all over eurasia and north africa, with the central european as the nominal one. They all differentiate from each other in mane and tusk lenght, the size of their lacrimal bone and general size and coloration.
This abundance of subspecies does not only come from its far range but also the fact that the wild boar is a very adaptable animal, able to adapt and shape its surroundings to its needs, making it not only a very dangerous invasive species, but the main reason for the lack of diversity in suids in its range, as it has likly outcompeted all of them, only being stopped by the african sahara and the indonesian islands.
Originally native to South East Asia they took their reign over the old world, out competing and taking over the niches other suids had before them.
They are found in every biome, from boreal decidious taiga forests, to alpine mountain tops of the caucasus, temperate forests of europe, tropical grasslands in india and even the deserts of the middleeast, with tundras being the only biome accessable to them where they arnt found, with only 3 criteria for their habitat:
1. Brushed Areas to evade their predators, which means the wolf in most of their range, but also leopards taigas and komodo dragons on the island of komodo
2. Water sources to drink and bath
3. No regular snowfall
Once they managed to find a place that fullfills this rather short list, they settle down, creating themself a shelter where they bring together long grasses, shrubs and sticks to build a nest like structure, often around a tree or inside the thicket of some bushes. These are used by the entire group, eventhough males typically lay seperate from the rest.
While adult males typically live solidary, the females stick together in groups lead by the oldest female, similar to elephants. The group of sows raise the piglets together, with the piglets adopted by another sow if the mother should die.
The wild boar might look like a herbivore, but its actually a highly versatile omnivore, compareable to humans in their choice of food.
If a human could eat something, wild boar most likly can aswell and in reverse.
Their diet ranges from nuts, berrys and seeds over roots and bulbs, leafs, bark and human garbage to pretty much every living thing small enough to fit it into its mouth, be it insects, rodents, frogs, carrion or even snakes, which it even adapted to resist the poisons of.
There are even groups of wild boar recorded with a major part of fish in their diet and another that hunted atleast one adult chital deer as a pack, so really anything is fair game, even if atleast in the temperate forests of europe acorns and beech nuts make out the bulk of their diet.
For the game, theyd add not only the last european mainstay but one of the most successfull animals on the planet and the primary omnivore of most of eurasia.
They do not just survive but thrive in many different ecosystems and are quite literally the peak of suid evolution to the poin that they have driven other species extinct and are only consistently hunted as adults by tigers and komododragons. Thats quite the feat for an animal barely reaching the meter mark in height and will contribute together with its unique and bulky look to solidify its position among the other suids in the game and an animal handy for many different displays across the old world.
Moving south towards africa we find the primate of this pack, the mantled guereza, also known as the eastern black and white colobus monkey.
Its one of africas more common monkeys in captivity, with 96 holdings in the EAZA across 4 different subspecies (northern, western, eastern and kilimanjaro) and many more especally across north america, where it is one of the most common primates.
As you might have noticed, i called the species the eastern black and white colobus monkey but also listed on of its subspecies as the eastern, which is because there are actually 3 species of the familly of black and white colobus, the angolan in the south and the king in the east, while the mantled guereza is found in the center and eastern parts of africa.
It got its name from the long white fringes of hair that run down on each side of their torso which resemble a mantle but also made it a very severly hunted species, as its pelts were heavily traded, arriving in europe during the classical period and in east asia during the mideveal times, being worn as part of hats and mantles of the rich and noble.
Despite this, they are surprisingly the only colobus species that isnt threatend, only facing exctinction locally at a few places. The main reason for that is not only their large range but also their adaptablily. Unlike most other primate species they can not just survive the degradation and destruction of forests, but also thrive in these degraded forests, as many of the trees which they prefer to eat arnt demanded for their wood and often left uncut, creating room for more of their foodsource while for them unfavorable trees are removed, making them often rise in numbers in partially logged areas.
Combined with that, its the colobus species most confortable with traveling on the ground, even if they prefer to spend their time in the trees.
The mantled guereza is a folivore, which means that the bulk of their diet is made up by leafs, supplemented by bark, flowers, seeds and unripe fruit, They are able to eat such fiber heavy food thanks to a large and multichamber stomage, compareable to those of ungulates.
Similar to them they spend most of their time resting or foraging, with long pauses for digestion between most of their activitys.
Societywise, they are more confusing then most other species. While for many species this is a rather clear cut thing of how the genders mix and how their group requirements should be, but here not so much.
For starters they tend to live in groups of 3 to 15 members, most of them are females that are related to each other.
They live in close groups where they are all equal, but also arnt agressive to other groups aslong as theres enough food around typically, with aggressive disputes between groups often only being centerd around resting spots.
Now for the males. Males are all over the place. There are solitary males, baechlor groups, males that live alone with their group of females, multimale groups that are civil with each other, some where they are really not civil with each other, some where they are related, some where they are not, they are more aggressive towards other groups and males but sometimes not and i got no clue what a male limit should be because they are everything and nothing at the same time.
Messy little creatures.
In game they will also have a special feature, as they are part of the chorus behavior. Mantled Guereza Males mark their territory by "roars" in the morning and evening, with other males that hear them tuning in with their own, but why are they here?
I chose the mantled guereza to fix one major problem.
Africas monkey gap.
Currently the primates in game are mostly scatterd across three hubs, indonesia, central africa and madagascar, with me adding some extra representation to the ehtyopian highlands, central america, the border of central and southern america and indonesia with the last few packs, not just for general diversity but also to fix this centralisation of primate species. But the other problem besides this centralisation is that those centers themself arnt very complete either. Indonesia lacked both a macaque and a more normal langur, with the island pack adding that macaque, while central africa really needed a normal monkey.
This is the role that the guereza fills but not only that, but it also adds a great general monkey across multiple habitats in africa thats also very common in captivity as a baseline generalist species, with the first major benefit of overlapping in range with the gelada.
This allows any future addition to africa to be more specialised and diverge from the colobus in meaningfull ways, for example with the de brazas guenon as not only a guenon but also a semi aquatic species that lives in pair, the patas monkey as the dedicated grassland species and so on, while still leaving a general purpose species that seperates itself mostly by its look and how comparativly basic it is.
For the headliner of the pack, we have quite the unassuming little animal, the black and rufous elephant shrew, also known as trunk doggy in german.
The black and rufous elephant shrew is a small insectivore from the coastal forests of east africa.
As diurnal small predators they dash across the firest floor, running and jumping and searching for its food with its prominent proboscis in the leaflitter.
They live in monogamous pairs, but in captivity female baechlorgroups have also been quite tollerant of each other, while males not so much.
In their pairs they defend hectar sized territorys in the wild and build small nests in the leaf litter that they call their home.
They are also the only member of the genus Rhynchocyon or in german trunk puppys, generally much larger members of the elephant shrews, thats currently kept in captivity.
But why them?
They are not popular, are only found in 13 EAZA facilitys, would need a new rig and its range is limited to a tiny fragmented habitat of montane forests in the eastern arc mountains of tansania and kenya and a few islands of their coast.
Starting with how common they are in zoos, yes they are only in 13 EAZA zoos, but they are also kept in the AZA with a population hub in Cincinatti and Philadelphia and most importantly 12 of these 13 holdings are from the last 5 years. This is because of they very small and fragmented range. While they are currently listed as least concern, one large forest fire or large illegal logging event could sky rocket them into the critical endangerd tier, so to prevent that a species survival plan has been put in place.
The first indiviuals have been transpotred in the early 2000 to the US, while in 2011 the zoo Rotterdam in the netherlands was the first to recieve some in europe. In these first places the nr 1 priority was to build up a stable breeding population and now that thats the case in europe they have been radiating out to different zoos in the last 5 years, many zoos eager to get their hands on these rare and beautiful species.
Coming to their appeal, both ingame and as a headliner, they are gorgeous looking. Black and red is a beautiful color combination and their large size of 50 cm (roughly half body half tail, meerkats have a head to body lenght of 25-35 cm, making them roughly the same size) makes them easy to spot.
They look a pokemon and thats very much to their advantage. They look weird and unique, colorfull and special and defenetly not like anything we allready have in game, a common complain from especally casual players regarding many of the dlc. Combined with their recent sky rocket in zoological presence and the fact that africa not only has only little animals from east africa but also lacks small animals, especally from its forests, the elephant shrew would make a great addition.
And thats it for the woodlands pack.
As you can see i tried to introduce a little bit for everywhere, featuring tropical rainforest, swamps, coastal and mountane forests, temperate and boreal forests and especally some representation to some less well known forests with endemic life such as east african coastal forests and the valvidian temperate rainforest.
We sadly got no reptile in this pack, but im sure this mix of birds and all different kinds of mammals makes up for it.
Winter 2024:
I decided to do something i originally did not like. A mixed woodlands animal pack. Why did i not like it?
Usually it was just 6-7 tropical animals + the wolverine and maybe wild boar, which then just asks the question why not to make it a tropical animal pack while keeping the good temperate choices for its own pack.
Why am i now making one myself though?
Welp we allready have a tropical pack and i got a grabback of animals left i want to add, that suspiciously make for a great 4/5 split, which would satisfy me for both biomes sufficently.
Now then, what we cooking?
Our first stop is in South America, where a Man with a Plan has his first animal ready, the south american Coati, the fourth most common South American Animal and 29. most common in general in the EAZA, so kind of a big deal.
Ranging across pretty much of all of tropical and sub tropical southamerica east of the Andes, they are very common generalist species. Unlike other Procyonidae like the racoon or kinkajou they are mostly diurnal, which means that they are most active during the day. During that time they scavange on the ground for food, with the females and young moving in large mobs of 4-20 individuals, while the males typically live in solitude and defend their loose territorys against other male intruders. Because of this stark contrast of the social behaviour of the sexes they were originally seen as two different species, the social coatis and the solitary coatimundi, which is why today when they have been aligned back into one species again both names are used, while technically only coati is scientifically correct. While we mostly think of the treetops when picturing the forests of south america, the coati is actually a mostly terrestrial animal, wandering through the bush, digging up food, turning rocks and scooping their long noses in many places, all while they have an upright tail, used to signalise the rest of the group their position even when in the underbush.
As a true all terrain vehicle, the coati is also not only able to climb, where it uses its long tail for keeping its ballance, its also an excellent swimmer, even catching fish from time to time. They eat litterally everything they can get their grabby claws on, be it fish, small animals, insects, eggs, fruit or whatever else edible they find.
Sadly there is one big caveat with the south american coati. They are on the black list of the European Union, also very politly named the List of undesireable Species.
This list consists of potentially invasive species that could create significant pressures on the local enviroment or economy, with some other examples being the sacred ibis or the racoon. All animals on the list are illegal to import, breed or release into the wild and while racoons are also on that list, their is a stable wild population where captured animals are put into zoos, but as only mallorca has something that can be considerd even a population for coatis, they wont face that luxuary and will be gone from our zoological facilities once the current last generation has died of in around 10 years.
But that will not be the end for coatis in european Zoos, as white nosed coatis which are considerd as a lesser enviromential threat are phased in for them instead, but for now the south american coati dominates not just in europe still but in zoos all around the world, so it felt only right to give them one last hurrah and chance to join before they wont be a zoo animal in europe anymore.
Ingame they would fill the important niche as the third major generalist from south america, aswell as being able to fit in many different types of habitats and areas.
Savannah? Coati! Swampy watery habitat? Coati! An Aboreal Area? Coati! Theyd fit perfectly into every single corner or habitat type you could dream of both for south american areas but also as a general filler animal for high and low budget zoos alike.
The coati is thankfully not the only animal from south america though, as from the south western tip the southern pudu joins our ranks, representing the Valvidian Temperate forest, a unique wet and cold biosphere west of the southern andes and south of the chilean deserts that features many endemics, with the only up to 8kg heavy pudu being one of the largest. The only other animal we have in the game currently that frequents this region is the cougar, so some endemic representation for one of the most unique temperate forests in the world sounds just right.They might just be found in 23 EAZA zoos, but with an upward trend with 5 zoos aquiring them in the last years. The second smallest deer in the world , with only the incredibly illusive northern pudu being estimated to be lighter on average, they fit well in many different displays, both alone or as a coinhabitant for a larger species.
A good examples for that would be the zoo wuppertal, where the southern pudu is found in 6 different enclosures, two just for them, 1 with collared peccarys, 1 with bairds tapir and lesser mara, 1 being a walkthrough aviary and one with red crowned cranes. It should be noted though that this abundance of pudu also comes from the fact, that the zoo wuppertal is the most successfull pudu breeder outside of south america, with more then 150 pudus being born their up to 2009.
In the wild, the pudu is endangerd due to the fragmentation of its habitat, illegal hunting, feral pets, introduction of other deer species and habitat destruction, but there are also many good news. Besides the fact that they are easy to breed in captivity with a far larger European population then 23 zoos make you estimate, they have a very stable and only ever growing captive population, they are also a headliner animal for conservation with both scientific studies aswell as the establishing of protected areas for them, also benefiting the many other endemics of their very unique ecosystem.
For the game, the pudu would add multiple new charakteristics, for one it would be our new smallest ungulate as the worlds second smallest deer and our first south american temperate animal that doesnt also span the rest of the americas. Theyd be a great addition to many habitats, mangling well with many other animals and adding a nice additional layer to those enclosures. Its also just really cute and has some great forest puppy vibes for mass appeal.
Whats not to love?
Traveling across the pacific, we meet our first featherd friend of the pack in new guinea, the victorian crowned pigeon, the largest and most common in captivity of the 3 crowned pigeon species.
With a lenght of of around 75 cm and a weight of 3,5 kg on average its the largest surviving pigeon and compareable in size to a large chicken and also generally behaves similar to one as a largely teresstrial birds, mostly only using its wings to escape predators or to fly up to a resting spot in a tree, making a loud clapping sound when ever it takes of.
Most of their time is spend walking along the ground in the search of fallen fruit, flocking together in pairs or small partys as they wander around. Fruit make up a large part of their diet with invertebrates and seeds only occasionally being consumed. They also seem to be very fond of figs in captivity.
While completly capeable to live together peacefully, males regulary engage in aggressive displays against each other, puffing out their chest, raising their wings ready to strike and dash at each other, but only rarely make contact. These non violent displays are used to establish dominance but as they do not actually hurt each other its not to disperse one of them but just to establish the pecking order, with the males often being quite peacefull with each other afterwards.
In the wild they live in the swampy forests of northern new guinea and a few of the surrounding islands, but also can be freaquently found in sago palm forests.
Sadly due to their habitat being threatend due to logging, the victoria crowned pidgeon is estimated to be the rarest and most endangerd crowned pidgeon in the wild.
In zoos meanwhile they are very common and popular as free roaming animals in tropical houses, due to their large size, beautiful desplay and majestic slow walk making them easy to spot and fun to watch, while they also can become tolerant of humans enough to not be stressed out by their presence, even if they tend to be shier then the other crowned pidgeons.
They would add a third very distinct fowl like animal and the one best suited to roam freely in tropical houses due to their smaller yet still large size. Being a great supplement to new guinea and indonesia aswell as all kinds of tropical houses, im sure that theyd be a bird that most people can find lots of use in, be it aviarys, free roaming, tropical houses, new guinea sections or just the desire for another pretty bird in their zoo.
Hopping across the Islands of Indonesia, we meet our next member of the pack, the delightfully colord yellow throated marten, the potentially most versatile animal for this theme as its found across indonesia, south east asia, china, the southern slopes of the himalaya and even up to the freezing valleys of the amur river as the only animal in this pack that frequents both tropical and boreal forests, aswell as everything in between.
As the largest and second most far ranging marten of the old world, its an omnivore that eats everything from fruit and nectar in south east asia to roe deer in siberia. Thanks to it muscular build, agile arboreal superiority and a very unpleasent odor, it only has to fear very few predators, allowing it to be as colorfull as it is and also being quite courageous and docile, being known for their curiosity and the ease of winning their trust. While very similar to the beech marten, in both its size and a few anatomically features its actually quite different from many other martens, being thought of as the most ancient marten still alive, originating from the pilocene.
In some way if we had two martens, theyd be the giant otter to the asian small clawed, as the largest and most distinct member of its group that plays a key role in its enviroments, while a pine or beech marten would be much more applyable as the garden variety marten, but unlike the giant otter due to the lucky fact of being very pretty the yellow throated marten will be for sure be able to satisfy the desire for a marten for most people.
Its a diurnal animal that mainly hunts on the ground in pairs or small packs, eating everything from small prey items like mice and frogs up to smaller ungulates like chitals, roe deer and muntjacs or even panda cubs. In areas where larger predators like tigers are around they also trail them and scavange the carrion they leave behind.
As mentioned before due to being very agile, strong and stinky it is only rarely predated, but both siberian tigers and asiatic black bears have been reported to successfully hunt them on occasion.
Lastly the main thing i want to focus on is there range. It large range of biomes and just area coverage allows it to play many different roles in a zoo, be it filling one of the last open niches of a not broken agile climbing animal for SEA, giving us another animal to feature in himalayan displays, a great and very different addition to multiple island focused areas like taiwan, borneo, java and sumatra, an amur valley themed area or just general east asia, im sure they would be very very usefull.
Moving further north we find the aviary animal of the pack, an animal of many names, known as Phantom of the North, Spectral, Spruce, Lapland, Bearded or most commonly the Great grey Owl.
The world largest owl is here for many reasons, but one of the most significant is its range. Its the only member of the genus Strix that is found in both the eastern and western hemisphere and ranges across the coniferous taiga forests of both north america and northern eurasia. There they tend to live near open meadows or bogs, where they hunt for their prey of choice, small mammals. Due to their facial disk, the largest among any raptor, they can focus sound and with the help of their unsymetrical ears they have a great sense of hearing thats allmost unmatched even by other owls and can precisly track even the slightest of sounds.
This can be seen by their special hunting technique, where they listen for sound below the snow, being able to detect movement of atleast up to a layer of up to 60 cm of snow to precisly snow-plunge for their prey, in most cases lemmings, where they crash through the snow cover to precisly grab their prey, up to a depth of their size, which is typically between 60-80 cm in lenght. This feat requires very precise hearing, especally as most of the time they detect their prey from a low perching ground like a tree stump.
In regions without lemmings they tend to snack on voles primarly and a range of other small mammals, but a population in drier parts of california has also been observed to primarly feed on pocket gophers.
Something very special about them is that while among the largest species of owl, they are also among the stealthiest. Not only do they have a very unassuming camoflaging feather pattern, but they are also unusually silent. Unlike most other top predator they are not territorial in the slightest, only protecting their immediate nest and young.
This makes them especally hard to spot as they mostly keep to themself, not attacking other predators, not calling out to threaten intruders or anything of the like, instead they just prefer to stay put where ever they are, watching in silence, making the Name "Phantom of the North" quite fitting.
Another reason that makes them a great contender is how common they are in captivity. The european grey great owl is the third most common owl kept in the EAZA with 275 holdings and the 73. most common species, only outclassed by the european eagle owl and the snowy owl, one of those not fitting the criteria of woodlands and the other not being choosen so that not just eurasia but also north america can profit from a native aviary bird, leaving only africa without one after recieving 4 aviary birds over this year.
For the aviarys they are a great choice, as their calm and very tollerant nature makes them very appliceable to walkthroughs and multispecies habitats, as they leave birds of all kind generally alone due to being highly specialised rodent hunters. I Have personally been in multiple walkthrough aviarys with them, my favorite being a mix with snowy owls and 2 more owl species in Zoo berlin and they are an impressive and very open joy to watch, with the individual there happily posing on a log for a photographer seemingly enjoying the attention.
In game they would be the most lethargic of the 4 bird species so far, moving the least. But they would bring one new interaction with them, that being bathing in shallow water, something these owls love to do to take care of their feathers, even if it leaves them unable to fly till dry. Third animal that recieving the bathing behavior is an owl, you heard it hear first. They would be able to do that both in shallow water pools in the enviroment, but also a new bird bath enritchment item that comes in 4 shapes, one on the ground and one elevated in both a natural and classic fit.
Otherwise theyd be able to perch, sit on the ground and fly from one perch spot to the next like the lazy fluffy bird they are.
Moving further west towards europe, theres one thing missing from this pack and thats an animal thats larger then 1 meter.
Conveniently theres a very requested eurasian ungulate that could fill that gap.
The wild boar is one of the most widespread mammals on the planet and for good reason.
They are the largest suid and can grow to different sizes due to enviromental factors, with the males of the meditaraenean population for example averaging around 50 kg and 60 cm shoulder height, while the central european and most common in captivity goes up to 100 kg and 80 cm and in the far east of siberia they can even reach massive sizes of up to 270 kg and 120 cm height. In game, id approve the wild boar to be modeld after the central european boar, as its not only the most common but also the most average of its subspecies, with the size gene going as low as the 60 cm of the mediteranean and up to atleast one meter of the east european boars, making them quite a bit larger on average as the current pigs in game, which all go to a max shoulder height of 80 cm.
Talking about the subspecies, there are 16 recognised from all over eurasia and north africa, with the central european as the nominal one. They all differentiate from each other in mane and tusk lenght, the size of their lacrimal bone and general size and coloration.
This abundance of subspecies does not only come from its far range but also the fact that the wild boar is a very adaptable animal, able to adapt and shape its surroundings to its needs, making it not only a very dangerous invasive species, but the main reason for the lack of diversity in suids in its range, as it has likly outcompeted all of them, only being stopped by the african sahara and the indonesian islands.
Originally native to South East Asia they took their reign over the old world, out competing and taking over the niches other suids had before them.
They are found in every biome, from boreal decidious taiga forests, to alpine mountain tops of the caucasus, temperate forests of europe, tropical grasslands in india and even the deserts of the middleeast, with tundras being the only biome accessable to them where they arnt found, with only 3 criteria for their habitat:
1. Brushed Areas to evade their predators, which means the wolf in most of their range, but also leopards taigas and komodo dragons on the island of komodo
2. Water sources to drink and bath
3. No regular snowfall
Once they managed to find a place that fullfills this rather short list, they settle down, creating themself a shelter where they bring together long grasses, shrubs and sticks to build a nest like structure, often around a tree or inside the thicket of some bushes. These are used by the entire group, eventhough males typically lay seperate from the rest.
While adult males typically live solidary, the females stick together in groups lead by the oldest female, similar to elephants. The group of sows raise the piglets together, with the piglets adopted by another sow if the mother should die.
The wild boar might look like a herbivore, but its actually a highly versatile omnivore, compareable to humans in their choice of food.
If a human could eat something, wild boar most likly can aswell and in reverse.
Their diet ranges from nuts, berrys and seeds over roots and bulbs, leafs, bark and human garbage to pretty much every living thing small enough to fit it into its mouth, be it insects, rodents, frogs, carrion or even snakes, which it even adapted to resist the poisons of.
There are even groups of wild boar recorded with a major part of fish in their diet and another that hunted atleast one adult chital deer as a pack, so really anything is fair game, even if atleast in the temperate forests of europe acorns and beech nuts make out the bulk of their diet.
For the game, theyd add not only the last european mainstay but one of the most successfull animals on the planet and the primary omnivore of most of eurasia.
They do not just survive but thrive in many different ecosystems and are quite literally the peak of suid evolution to the poin that they have driven other species extinct and are only consistently hunted as adults by tigers and komododragons. Thats quite the feat for an animal barely reaching the meter mark in height and will contribute together with its unique and bulky look to solidify its position among the other suids in the game and an animal handy for many different displays across the old world.
Moving south towards africa we find the primate of this pack, the mantled guereza, also known as the eastern black and white colobus monkey.
Its one of africas more common monkeys in captivity, with 96 holdings in the EAZA across 4 different subspecies (northern, western, eastern and kilimanjaro) and many more especally across north america, where it is one of the most common primates.
As you might have noticed, i called the species the eastern black and white colobus monkey but also listed on of its subspecies as the eastern, which is because there are actually 3 species of the familly of black and white colobus, the angolan in the south and the king in the east, while the mantled guereza is found in the center and eastern parts of africa.
It got its name from the long white fringes of hair that run down on each side of their torso which resemble a mantle but also made it a very severly hunted species, as its pelts were heavily traded, arriving in europe during the classical period and in east asia during the mideveal times, being worn as part of hats and mantles of the rich and noble.
Despite this, they are surprisingly the only colobus species that isnt threatend, only facing exctinction locally at a few places. The main reason for that is not only their large range but also their adaptablily. Unlike most other primate species they can not just survive the degradation and destruction of forests, but also thrive in these degraded forests, as many of the trees which they prefer to eat arnt demanded for their wood and often left uncut, creating room for more of their foodsource while for them unfavorable trees are removed, making them often rise in numbers in partially logged areas.
Combined with that, its the colobus species most confortable with traveling on the ground, even if they prefer to spend their time in the trees.
The mantled guereza is a folivore, which means that the bulk of their diet is made up by leafs, supplemented by bark, flowers, seeds and unripe fruit, They are able to eat such fiber heavy food thanks to a large and multichamber stomage, compareable to those of ungulates.
Similar to them they spend most of their time resting or foraging, with long pauses for digestion between most of their activitys.
Societywise, they are more confusing then most other species. While for many species this is a rather clear cut thing of how the genders mix and how their group requirements should be, but here not so much.
For starters they tend to live in groups of 3 to 15 members, most of them are females that are related to each other.
They live in close groups where they are all equal, but also arnt agressive to other groups aslong as theres enough food around typically, with aggressive disputes between groups often only being centerd around resting spots.
Now for the males. Males are all over the place. There are solitary males, baechlor groups, males that live alone with their group of females, multimale groups that are civil with each other, some where they are really not civil with each other, some where they are related, some where they are not, they are more aggressive towards other groups and males but sometimes not and i got no clue what a male limit should be because they are everything and nothing at the same time.
Messy little creatures.
In game they will also have a special feature, as they are part of the chorus behavior. Mantled Guereza Males mark their territory by "roars" in the morning and evening, with other males that hear them tuning in with their own, but why are they here?
I chose the mantled guereza to fix one major problem.
Africas monkey gap.
Currently the primates in game are mostly scatterd across three hubs, indonesia, central africa and madagascar, with me adding some extra representation to the ehtyopian highlands, central america, the border of central and southern america and indonesia with the last few packs, not just for general diversity but also to fix this centralisation of primate species. But the other problem besides this centralisation is that those centers themself arnt very complete either. Indonesia lacked both a macaque and a more normal langur, with the island pack adding that macaque, while central africa really needed a normal monkey.
This is the role that the guereza fills but not only that, but it also adds a great general monkey across multiple habitats in africa thats also very common in captivity as a baseline generalist species, with the first major benefit of overlapping in range with the gelada.
This allows any future addition to africa to be more specialised and diverge from the colobus in meaningfull ways, for example with the de brazas guenon as not only a guenon but also a semi aquatic species that lives in pair, the patas monkey as the dedicated grassland species and so on, while still leaving a general purpose species that seperates itself mostly by its look and how comparativly basic it is.
For the headliner of the pack, we have quite the unassuming little animal, the black and rufous elephant shrew, also known as trunk doggy in german.
The black and rufous elephant shrew is a small insectivore from the coastal forests of east africa.
As diurnal small predators they dash across the firest floor, running and jumping and searching for its food with its prominent proboscis in the leaflitter.
They live in monogamous pairs, but in captivity female baechlorgroups have also been quite tollerant of each other, while males not so much.
In their pairs they defend hectar sized territorys in the wild and build small nests in the leaf litter that they call their home.
They are also the only member of the genus Rhynchocyon or in german trunk puppys, generally much larger members of the elephant shrews, thats currently kept in captivity.
But why them?
They are not popular, are only found in 13 EAZA facilitys, would need a new rig and its range is limited to a tiny fragmented habitat of montane forests in the eastern arc mountains of tansania and kenya and a few islands of their coast.
Starting with how common they are in zoos, yes they are only in 13 EAZA zoos, but they are also kept in the AZA with a population hub in Cincinatti and Philadelphia and most importantly 12 of these 13 holdings are from the last 5 years. This is because of they very small and fragmented range. While they are currently listed as least concern, one large forest fire or large illegal logging event could sky rocket them into the critical endangerd tier, so to prevent that a species survival plan has been put in place.
The first indiviuals have been transpotred in the early 2000 to the US, while in 2011 the zoo Rotterdam in the netherlands was the first to recieve some in europe. In these first places the nr 1 priority was to build up a stable breeding population and now that thats the case in europe they have been radiating out to different zoos in the last 5 years, many zoos eager to get their hands on these rare and beautiful species.
Coming to their appeal, both ingame and as a headliner, they are gorgeous looking. Black and red is a beautiful color combination and their large size of 50 cm (roughly half body half tail, meerkats have a head to body lenght of 25-35 cm, making them roughly the same size) makes them easy to spot.
They look a pokemon and thats very much to their advantage. They look weird and unique, colorfull and special and defenetly not like anything we allready have in game, a common complain from especally casual players regarding many of the dlc. Combined with their recent sky rocket in zoological presence and the fact that africa not only has only little animals from east africa but also lacks small animals, especally from its forests, the elephant shrew would make a great addition.
And thats it for the woodlands pack.
As you can see i tried to introduce a little bit for everywhere, featuring tropical rainforest, swamps, coastal and mountane forests, temperate and boreal forests and especally some representation to some less well known forests with endemic life such as east african coastal forests and the valvidian temperate rainforest.
We sadly got no reptile in this pack, but im sure this mix of birds and all different kinds of mammals makes up for it.
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Winter Update 2024:
This update has no big new feature and instead focuses on expanding previously introduced behaviors to more animals.
We allready got a new chorus and bathing user in the pack but thats not all.
First of both the african and asian elephant finally are introduced to the bathing behavior.
When interacting with water, elephants now gain a couple of new animations.
Besides a few playing, splashing and just laying down in shallow water, they are now able to use their trunk to pump up water and spray it around, on themself, just randomly around the area, other animals, which would start running away and get a little stressed or even the guests!
This would not only make multi species habitats with them more dynamic without harming the animals it also would give us a new animal guest interaction similar to the camels spitting.
They would also recieve a new diving feature, that works a little different then other deep divers. Instead of diving freely around underwater, elephants can now dip beneath the surface if the water depth allows them to and use their trunk as a snorkel.
Not only would this encourage more water for our gray skinned friends, but also make good use of their trunk, their most unique feature besides their sheer size.
Next on the bathing behavior list are our crocodileans. For one, they will not only like resting in shallow water, but can lay down on the bottom of the water in general and rest below the surface. But not only that, they will be able to stand up with their head above the surface but their tail and hindlegs still on the ground.
In shallow water the angle is limited by the crocs lenght, but in deep water they can do this completly upright, but will do it more often when their feed can touch the ground.
For carrying, our felids get a touchup.
Felids might not be the most iconic cup carrier, but they defenetly also arnt the least.
All adult felids can "bite" the neck of a young to carry them alone, giving a little bit of extra adult young interaction.
+ the animation should be reusable, meaning we get a dozen more carrying animals, making them one of the largest categorys of users of a new behavior
And as the last behavior update, the kunekune pig will now also have a linked up animation with guests, where they crouch down, feed it and scratch it all over while the pig rolls over and enjoys the scratches.
Talking about new enritchment, this pack comes with new scratch enritchment trees, a eukalyptus for oceania, an accia for africa, a cecropia for south america and a maple tree for eurasia and north america, giving us 6 different trees to choose from instead of just 2.
For new plants, we will get a new leaflitter set with different leaf shapes and all leaf litter sets will be made flexicolor.
For the colormorphs 3 of the 4 will be for the peafowl.
They have alot of different colors but the 3 that i chose where the piebald, opal and charcoal variants.
And lastly as the grande finale the perhaps most wished for rare colormutation, the golden tabby tiger
This update has no big new feature and instead focuses on expanding previously introduced behaviors to more animals.
We allready got a new chorus and bathing user in the pack but thats not all.
First of both the african and asian elephant finally are introduced to the bathing behavior.
When interacting with water, elephants now gain a couple of new animations.
Besides a few playing, splashing and just laying down in shallow water, they are now able to use their trunk to pump up water and spray it around, on themself, just randomly around the area, other animals, which would start running away and get a little stressed or even the guests!
This would not only make multi species habitats with them more dynamic without harming the animals it also would give us a new animal guest interaction similar to the camels spitting.
They would also recieve a new diving feature, that works a little different then other deep divers. Instead of diving freely around underwater, elephants can now dip beneath the surface if the water depth allows them to and use their trunk as a snorkel.
Not only would this encourage more water for our gray skinned friends, but also make good use of their trunk, their most unique feature besides their sheer size.
Next on the bathing behavior list are our crocodileans. For one, they will not only like resting in shallow water, but can lay down on the bottom of the water in general and rest below the surface. But not only that, they will be able to stand up with their head above the surface but their tail and hindlegs still on the ground.
In shallow water the angle is limited by the crocs lenght, but in deep water they can do this completly upright, but will do it more often when their feed can touch the ground.
For carrying, our felids get a touchup.
Felids might not be the most iconic cup carrier, but they defenetly also arnt the least.
All adult felids can "bite" the neck of a young to carry them alone, giving a little bit of extra adult young interaction.
+ the animation should be reusable, meaning we get a dozen more carrying animals, making them one of the largest categorys of users of a new behavior
And as the last behavior update, the kunekune pig will now also have a linked up animation with guests, where they crouch down, feed it and scratch it all over while the pig rolls over and enjoys the scratches.
Talking about new enritchment, this pack comes with new scratch enritchment trees, a eukalyptus for oceania, an accia for africa, a cecropia for south america and a maple tree for eurasia and north america, giving us 6 different trees to choose from instead of just 2.
For new plants, we will get a new leaflitter set with different leaf shapes and all leaf litter sets will be made flexicolor.
For the colormorphs 3 of the 4 will be for the peafowl.
They have alot of different colors but the 3 that i chose where the piebald, opal and charcoal variants.
And lastly as the grande finale the perhaps most wished for rare colormutation, the golden tabby tiger
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