The koala's land requirements are too large (Visual aids)

[Bearcat9948]

Hello everyone. While in the process of making my recurring meta-suggestions list, I decided to take a look at some habitat sizing issues within the game. While you'll have to wait for the list's release to get all of them, I wanted to discuss the koalas in a separate thread before release. Frontier requires the minimum land requirement for one animal be 180m^2, while the Australian Zoo and Aquarium Association require a minimum of 20m^2 per animal, with an additional 10m^2 per adult animal. The average size for a habitat ranges from 30m^2 to 100m^2. Now, scaling being what it is in PZ, I'm recommending that the requirements be shrunk from 180m^2 for one animal to 100m^2. I will show you why below:

Spoiler: Bare habitats

Here are two habitats side-by-side, with two koalas each. The one on the left is 180m^2, the one on the right is around 100m^2.

Spoiler: Guest's view, bare

Here is eye level from a guests point of view with nothing in the habitat. Not a big deal right now.

Spoiler: Overview, with foliage

Here is the overview of both habitats. I enabled foliage/coverage welfare and made sure that both habitats have close to 100% foliage coverage relative to their size.

Spoiler: Guest view with foliage

Now, you tell me which habitat you think it's going to be easier to see a koala in, if you're a guest. For an animal like a koala, climbing space is far more important than ground space. Requiring such a large area for land is just a waste of space for most zoos. Now, this doesn't matter for a sandbox player, but it definitely does matter for anyone trying to play challenge or franchise mode.

 

[FoxyDee]

I agree, part of the problem I have with the requirments of small animals are the huge hitboxes, which make it so that if you decorate the habitat with plants and rocks, you have to build it really huge, which honestly looks ridicolous for small animals such as meerkats, fennec foxes, aardvarks, caimans, koalas and so on.

 

[snoogins]

I agree, part of the problem I have with the requirments of small animals are the huge hitboxes, which make it so that if you decorate the habitat with plants and rocks, you have to build it really huge, which honestly looks ridicolous for small animals such as meerkats, fennec foxes, aardvarks, caimans, koalas and so on.

Yeah it's a total pain, I built an indoor enclosure for a nile monitor and attached rocks along the surface of the walls and it completely destroyed the navigable terrain. they really need to reel those hitboxes in.

 

[DarthQuell]

Yeah, for all small animals, like @FoxyDee and @snoogins said.

I honestly don't notice it because I tend to build too big anyway, but now that I'm trying to build more realistic, I can see this as a problem in the future, so I agree.

What other animals have our of space requirements? I think there was a thread for it

 

[Antimony96]

I agree simply because koalas spend most of their lives in the trees anyway. If we ever get a sloth that should have a very low space requirement (but a high climbing requirement).

 

[Bearcat9948]

I agree simply because koalas spend most of their lives in the trees anyway. If we ever get a sloth that should have a very low space requirement (but a high climbing requirement).

Sloth realistically needs like 2-4 trees and that's about it

 

[Leaf Productions]

I also would recommend Frontier change how much time Koalas would spend climbing/on climbing frames. They mostly sit on the ground from my experience and that's just not right lol

 

[SalamAnders]

I also would recommend Frontier change how much time Koalas would spend climbing/on climbing frames. They mostly sit on the ground from my experience and that's just not right lol

I see this often, but that isn't really my experience with them.
I only really had one longer run with koalas in the game, but in that zoo I rarely saw them on the ground. If they wasn't climbing, they would usually be sitting on a raised platform.

I made sure to make all their required stuff connected by climbable objects - food, enrichments and such. Only thing I had issues with was the water bowl, so that went on the ground.

 

[NZFanatic]

I see this often, but that isn't really my experience with them.
I only really had one longer run with koalas in the game, but in that zoo I rarely saw them on the ground. If they wasn't climbing, they would usually be sitting on a raised platform.

I made sure to make all their required stuff connected by climbable objects - food, enrichments and such. Only thing I had issues with was the water bowl, so that went on the ground.

Same here. Though, really any time spent on the ground is too much I think, but I haven't run into the same problems as others with the koalas.

 

[FoxyDee]

I noticed that if you give them alot of space, they will spend alot of time on ground. When I made the habitat just so that it meets the requirments, they immediately started to climb more.

 

[PeppyPepp]

Yeah, for all small animals, like @FoxyDee and @snoogins said.

I honestly don't notice it because I tend to build too big anyway, but now that I'm trying to build more realistic, I can see this as a problem in the future, so I agree.

What other animals have our of space requirements? I think there was a thread for it

First that come to mind are the meerkat and the fennec fox. I really like them and use them a lot, but even with the small space requirements in game (180m2 I think) they still look tiny in their enclosures. Then you have to consider the foliage and rocks and any other stuff you add into their enclosure and it becomes 3 times bigger.

Like mentioned, I think it's the game's issue with the scaling and the hitboxes. Everything in Planet games is so big.

 

[Bearcat9948]

I also would recommend Frontier change how much time Koalas would spend climbing/on climbing frames. They mostly sit on the ground from my experience and that's just not right lol

I noticed this as well. The only time they would be consistently spending most of their time in a tree, was if I put them in a 1x1 with a climbable tree, which is sort of the opposite spectrum of this issue. You should be able to make a good looking habitat with some ground foliage etc, and be able to put them in it and have them still always be climbing

 

[XT]

Sloth realistically needs like 2-4 trees and that's about it

Lifetime of adventure for a sloth! Though, my partner worked in the San Diego Wild Animal park (years ago, when it was called that) and they had a sloth ... evidently those animals are slow motion houdinis. They can pull apart anything, given time, and every morning they'd have to come in and find where the sloth had gotten (where it shouldn't) in the shared exhibit it lived in.