Planet Zoo: Casualia Parks - Chapter 1

 Grrrreetings, dear readers! Welcome to our new project!

Casualia Parks!

That's right! We were looking for some inspiration to write about, and Steam threw us an animal-themed sale, which obviously included all the DLC for Planet Zoo!

We didn't have all of them yet, and we still don't, but we bought a few more. And indeed, got the idea to start a fresh new game in franchise mode, taking you, our dear readers, along for the ride!

Just for some quick info: Planet Zoo is, unsurprisingly, a Zoo-builder game. Very much a modern take on classics like Zoo Tycoon or Wildlife Park. In fact, it's made by Frontier, the devs behind Planet Coaster, which did the same thing for fans of Rollercoaster Tycoon!

So, we'll be starting a new game in franchise mode. Here are our settings for this little adventure:

Our (first?) Zoo is going to be right were we live, in central Europe. The game difficulty is gonna be set to "hard", because Planet Zoo is, by in large, a really forgiving game, and while the game is largely about creativity, we enjoy it with a side dish of management, too.😉

There might be more franchise Zoos in the future if this series becomes really long term, but for now, we'll be diving into the European HQ:

And here she is. Empty. Untouched. Flat. (You can get the game to generate hilly, rough terrain for you, but to be honest, it tends to make things a bit messy. Maybe for a future Zoo?)

For now, let's get buildin'. And we've had an unconventional idea to start out with:

A raised platform! The idea is that we can have our first few animal habitats on ground level, and the guests can get a good view from above!

Also on the ground floor, we started building the first staff area:

Going for a single, large building to house a number of staff facilities like the workshop, a small keeper's hut for food preparation, a quarantine facility, research centre and the animal trade centre, where the animals actually come from after you buy them.

Of course, this being Planet Zoo, we're not just plonking down a prefab building. Nonono, we get decorating!

Adding some walls and some roofing...

Some lovely trimmings to make it look all nice. Or well, as nice as it can, for the time being. We don't have many building parts unlocked, yet, so we're just working with game-start assets.

We might have forgotten that things need power, so we modified it a bit, adding a power transformer to the back of the building in order to.... well, have electricity available in our zoo.

And maybe you've already spotted it above: We built another, smaller building next door: The staff room, where our employees can take breaks from their ever-so-busy schedules.🐌

But now, with some basics in place, it was time to turn this into a proper Zoo, by adding some animals.

This is a big step, of course. What would our first animal be? This is a foundational decision. Something that will define the Zoo's very identity forever! 😮

We present to you....

The mighty Wombat!

A small-ish (kinda medium dog-sized) herbivorous australian marsupial, and lucky winner of the "Best animal name"-prize!

(Fun fact, we called the actual habitat "Digital Wombat Simulator")

We've got two of these little furballs. A male and a female, who'll hopefully get along quite well, if you catch our drift.😉

.... no but seriously though, animal breeding is important, both in this game and in actual Zoos. See, they provide a kind of safe haven for animals to multiply, which in turn helps conservation of endangered or threatened species. And in gameplay terms in Planet Zoo, you can release Animals or put them up for adoption by other players' Zoos, for which you earn conservation credits, which you can then use to adopt animals yourself. It's a whole marketplace!

So yes, first animal, which is quite neat. Though, having brought them in, we quickly had to get one of the vets we hired onto some species-specific research, because we could only feed them..... let's call it "adequate" food and we had zero access to any kind of habitat enrichment, like toys or special feeders, for the animals.

But first, a bit of panic. Because we had no idea how much everything else would cost (We hadn't played PZ in a while), we didn't really know if we had enough money to hold us over. So, we plopped down a few basic shops and unpaused the game, opening the floodgates for guests (And their money) to come in.

Unfortunately, because of the money-worries, we didn't get around to decorating the shops just yet, so it all looks a bit... bare. Definitely need to change that!

But thankfully, having guests in the Zoo solved the immediate worry: We quickly started making some money.

And to make sure the guests had more than one animal to look at, we added our first exhibit animal: The Giant Forest Scorpion.

We should clarify: In Planet Zoo, there's 2 categories of animals: Habitat animals and exhibit animals.

Now habitat animals are like our Wombats. They're fully animated animals that roam around their enclosures and do stuff to satisfy their needs. Exhibit animals are more limited, in that they're much smaller creatures that are displayed in a terrarium. They're way less animated, but they provide a nice addition to busy visitor-areas, giving them some smaller animals to gawk at in-between visits to the bigger animal habitats.

So, things were going decently, at this point. We had guests in the park. They had some animals to look at, and our money panic turned out to be unfounded.

We even finished our first level of Wombat research and got them a barrel feeder! It's a food enrichment item where they basically have to punt the barrel in order to make food drop out.

The raised-platform concept worked quite well, with the guests happily looking down into the enclosure. Also, to the left, you can see we had to build a surgery centre for our vets in case any animals got sick, and didn't get around to decorating it yet, because well, even further left, you can see we're already working on another enclosure!

This is how the Wombats sleep, by the way. We dug them a burrow, and the game helpfully provides a burrow-cam so you can see inside.

So, with things going smoothly, it was time to add a second habitat animal. The second big attraction, if you will.

This time, we decided to go for....

The Giant Anteater!

A south american quadruped that eats..... well, you figure out it's diet.
Anyway, it has a super-bushy tail, incredibly long tongue and a comically tiny mouth at the tip of it's very long snout.

A strange creature, but we like strange here at Casualia Parks, so they're another welcome addition!

Once again, we have a male and a female, in the hopes that they'll get together and.... do scandalous things together. Yes.🐼

These two don't have a burrow like the Wombats. Instead, we built them two rocky caves, so they can go and hide if the staring eyes from the guests above become a little too much.

And yet again, we had to get a vet onto doing research very quickly, because we only know so much about caring for Giant Anteaters. But that'll be sorted in due time. So, yet again, things were good.

The guests were learning about the animals through these infoboards we put up. The design is actually an old one we made and saved years back. Decided to use it again here, because well, it's nice. It also has an educational speaker in the back for bonus learning!🐯

The Wombats are doing well, just kinda hanging out. Still wanna get more research done so we can give them some enrichment items and thus, some more stuff to interact with.

But then, we had just put a second staff room near the entrance of the Zoo and were prettying up the are with some trees when it happened:

Winter has come.

..... we hadn't really thought about that. Playing on a temperate european map would indeed mean that you get snow in winter, huh?

Whelp, better install some heaters in the animal enclosures, otherwise they'll get..... rather a little unhappy!

Heaters and coolers in Planet Zoo work in a 3D sphere around them, where you can set a target temperature and they'll regulate it accordingly.

We like to try and make them look somewhat integrated into things like rocks or buildings. Theoretically you can simply hide them just under the ground surface and they'll work just fine, but i dunno, it always felt a bit cheesy to us.

Speaking of placing things, for those of you who didn't know, Planet Zoo, much like Planet Coaster is VERY freeform with it's building system. You can move and rotate things with pixel-precision, and really use the game as a creative sandbox. It's almost as much of a design tool as it is a game.

Okay. Animals not freezing. The guests still are, but that's going to be part of our next Chapter.

One of our mechanics is working on unlocking more scenery objects. Soon(ish), we shall have more building options, and more ways to make this central area look less bare:

The same also goes for our vet surgery, which thankfully didn't need to be used, yet. But yeah, it also needs a good touch-up. This is meant to be a creative game where you make things look good, so let's get around to that in the next chapter.😉

In general now that we have some animals and a reasonable flow of quests and money, we'll have to do some management, making sure things are set up properly before we expand further.

We did take one last action to make the park more appealing:

We added a bunch of benches and bins. Something that we had somehow managed to completely forget about!

They might be freezing, but at least they no longer have to litter. And if they don't mind the snow, they can sit down, too.😜

But yeah, that'll be chapter one (And coincidentally, the first year of the zoo's operations) done. We've had good fun so far. Feels nice to be playing Planet Zoo again, and having a blog series to write about what we're doing adds a bit of extra purpose to it all.

So let's see how this project goes, together. We look forward to adding to the park, and chronicling our progress in chapter 2. Until then, we hope you enjoyed this first entry, and have a good one!🐵