Are you sometimes trying to recreate a specific biome from a specific geographical area? Or maybe are you just interested about some plant species? Then you will find the problem that the only info the game is giving you about the plants is a common name and very broad tags for climate and continent. For example for both the King Protea and the Nitraria Retusa the game just tell you "Desert" and "Africa", so you may think they belong to the same ecoregion and the game lets you use both for a fennec enclosure, but in fact each of them comes from opposite sides of the African continent, very far away.
I like to be very realistic when designing some zoos and I was getting tired of having to search reliable data about lots of plants every now and again. To make it even more tedious, there is a couple of errors in my Spanish language version of the name that confused me a lot when I looked info about those species.
So I decided to gather in a folder the main data that I needed: the common name of a plant in the game (English and Spanish versions, even when they are 'wrong'), its scientific name, and the most complete distribution map I could find. I tried to follow the model of the range maps from the ingame Zoopedia, you can see an example below:
As you can see, it's just a bunch of .png maps inside a .zip folder, but there is a decent time of research behind. It's a very easy project just for quick use while playing, but I'm sure some people could find it as useful as me, so I'm sharing it.
My main sources were the wonderful sites of the Kew Gardens in London and the IUCN Red List, apart from Wikipedia when those didn't have what I wanted.
I chose not to include Fungi (mushroom) species as their distribution data is way more difficult to find (they aren't plants so you can't count on the Kew Gardens), and neither domestic crops like maize as they are everywhere nowadays.
Anyway the distribution of plant species is a very difficult topic, so I understand why maybe Frontier chose not to include this kind of maps. The main problem is how easy it has been from ancient times for us humans to introduce plants from one part of the world to others, so much that some plants have an obscure undefined area of origin. If you see purple colour in the Kew Gardens maps, it means they are pretty sure that part of a species range is not natural.
PS: This is my first ever thing I share in the workshop and the garden is obviously just a placeholder for the important thing that is the .zip file. So please be kind with me! Constructive criticism is always appreciated!
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I like to be very realistic when designing some zoos and I was getting tired of having to search reliable data about lots of plants every now and again. To make it even more tedious, there is a couple of errors in my Spanish language version of the name that confused me a lot when I looked info about those species.
So I decided to gather in a folder the main data that I needed: the common name of a plant in the game (English and Spanish versions, even when they are 'wrong'), its scientific name, and the most complete distribution map I could find. I tried to follow the model of the range maps from the ingame Zoopedia, you can see an example below:
As you can see, it's just a bunch of .png maps inside a .zip folder, but there is a decent time of research behind. It's a very easy project just for quick use while playing, but I'm sure some people could find it as useful as me, so I'm sharing it.
My main sources were the wonderful sites of the Kew Gardens in London and the IUCN Red List, apart from Wikipedia when those didn't have what I wanted.
I chose not to include Fungi (mushroom) species as their distribution data is way more difficult to find (they aren't plants so you can't count on the Kew Gardens), and neither domestic crops like maize as they are everywhere nowadays.
Anyway the distribution of plant species is a very difficult topic, so I understand why maybe Frontier chose not to include this kind of maps. The main problem is how easy it has been from ancient times for us humans to introduce plants from one part of the world to others, so much that some plants have an obscure undefined area of origin. If you see purple colour in the Kew Gardens maps, it means they are pretty sure that part of a species range is not natural.
PS: This is my first ever thing I share in the workshop and the garden is obviously just a placeholder for the important thing that is the .zip file. So please be kind with me!
Constructive criticism is always appreciated!