Planet Zoo: Casualia Parks - Chapter 2

 

Welcome back, dear readers, to Casualia Parks!

We're feeding the Wombats jelly cake, now!

In this second chapter of the series, we've been looking to kind of solidify what we've built so far, get some R&D going, sort out our staff and general management stuff and most importantly, pretty up our small zoo, so things wouldn't look like this:

You know, kinda bare, with exposed insulation materials and stuff.

So, once the first winter's snow melted away, we while the zoo went about it's business and started making some money for things to come, we went and dove into the myriad management windows that Planet zoo offers.

Look at all those options on the left! And each of those comes with a few tabs along the top of the menu, too!

All in all, Planet Zoo is quite focused on the animals, their welfare, and education, both for the guests and the player themselves, but let's not forget that this -is- in fact a park management game, too!

So managing we went. First order of business: Sort out staff.

We hired a few more peeps, created a work zone for the entrance area (Which currently makes up the whole zoo) and gave everyone a first level of staff training. This raises their wages, but it also means they need to spend less time resting in staff rooms, and they overall get their tasks done more quickly. Probably a good idea.

Huh, look at that, you can even run advertising campaigns in this game.

While we were doing that, our vets and engineers were busy in their offices, researching things.

The plan: First, our vets would spend some time researching the animals we had in the zoo, giving us the means to feed and care for them better.

Unlocking new research levels also unlocks fun facts about your animals!

Then, after some of that, the vets would pivot and start researching the first level of each of the various diseases that animals can catch, to better protect the zoo against potential illness-related issues.

Yay, bird flu!

Meanwhile the engineers were busy unlocking a couple of new scenery packs, so that we could really start prettying up the zoo, without having to build everything out of breeze blocks and concrete.

The nice thing about scenery/theme packs in Planet Zoo: You only need to research the first level in order to unlock all the building pieces in the pack. The other levels simply provide pre-made building blueprints, which you may or may not want, depending on how creative you wanna be. (We're all about creativity, so we really just need the first level!)

While all that management stuff was happening though, the animals were doing quite well!

Some close quarters Wombat caught on camera!

Is -that- what the bushy tail is for? Is it a blanket? :o

We even got a new species in to fill that second exhibit terrarium we built back in chapter one. Behold, the Lesser Antillean Iguana:

Indeed, the animals were doing so well that we had a number of other additions. For one, the Giant Forest Scorpions had a few litters, so much so that we have to do population control in their terrarium, now. But also....

A baby Wombat has appeared! Such a cute little furball. She'll be living with her parents for the time being of course, but, as is natural for Wombats, once she grows up, we'll have to take her out of the habitat. She'll likely go into the animal trade centre (which, in game terms, is basically cryosleep) until there's room in the Habitat for her and a potential new mate from outside the zoo. 

And the same thing applies to:

This little fella. Yes, the Anteaters got it on, too. Though, surprisingly, their offspring looks just like the adults, just maybe ~30% smaller? Still, good news, of course!

Quite soon though, our park got a visit from an Inspector. Basically, they visit the zoo and grade it. And the result for our small park was:

Hm. Interesting. So everything is entirely perfect, except for our guest education, which is apparently the actual worst. Right.

....... so we immediately hired this guy:

He's an educator, meaning that he gives talks and tours. We've not got any guided tours set up in our small park just yet, but we've set up some spots for educational talks at both the Wombat and Anteater habitats and scheduled talks so they won't overlap.

We also put this in the Anteater habitat:

It's a camera. We were hoping we might improve the education of the habitat by showing the feed on the educational board on the walkway up above, (Works with the Wombat's burrow cam!) but as we found out, these cameras instead contribute to marketing. So basically, we've got an online livestream of the anteaters going on, now.

This is immediately superior to most other streams, simply because the Anteaters will never interrupt the stream to sing and dance when somebody donates.😛

Well, in any case, hopefully, these measures will help our guest education efforts. If we're learning fun facts about our animals through research, then so should the guests!😉

Speaking of fun facts, check out what we found:

Those are so-called "Ghost fungi", which were marked as an appropriate plant for Wombat habitation, and so we gave them a couple of those. At first we thought we accidentally placed some kind of Halloween decoration, but nope, those things are actually real, and they actually glow green in the dark like that.

So hey, that's interesting!

But finally, it was time. Time for the big operation of this chapter:

De-uglifying the guest areas of the zoo, and making sure that they provide the guests with all they need.

And this actually involved a bit more than just dressing up our buildings. Because you see, we wanna be thinking about the layout of the zoo as it grows and takes shape, right? Here our plan:

At the bottom, you can see our current, tiny park. Now, in the long term, we're thinking of working towards a rough circle design with two crossing connections in-between, which would allow guests to see most of the zoo in one big tour. It would also allow us to build a nice, circular transport ride (There's monorails, gondolas and the like) to not only ferry guests around the park, but also give them some great views of the various habitats.

Around the circle, there'll be some shops and resting areas of course, but we're thinking that right in the middle, where the connecting pathways meet, we can have a big guest hub of sorts, with perhaps a whole custom-built restaurant and gift shop!

But that's all quite far in the future. For now, we had our starting area to set up. And you might have spotted it already in the picture above:

We've redesigned the elevated path section! Gone is the square layout where nobody ever used the outside pathways. Instead, we started by setting things up in a T-shape, like so:

Much less wasted space. For now, this design funnels the guests past the shops and to the animal habitats. And it's a prelude to our future expansion plans. But before any of that, we got beautifying:

Some of this...

And some of that....

A lovely centerpiece in the middle of the T-Junction...

And some eye-candy for the people entering....

And finally, we end up wiiiith:

This!😄

But that's not quite all, because in the staff area, we also had this little eyesore going on:

Necessary, but not pretty. So we set about fixing that!

And there we are, now it looks decent from the inside and out:

 And with that, our small park is now all nicely in shape, looking good and ticking along nicely. We've got some cool ideas for chapter 3, so we'll see you for that!

But for now, here's a good look at Casualia Parks Europe HQ at the end of this chapter: