Thank you for joining us again! We've got a fairly big chapter ahead of us, so get strapped in, because after finishing that little guest area at the end of chapter 3, we stayed in that area of the Zoo and began our next project right away:
First, we built a path extending from the raised platform down towards the new visitor area.
Next, we dug out a bit of a lake and started building up a bit of a cliff-side. This is part of a new habitat construction, you see!😀
Eventually, the layout ended up looking like this:
It's a cliffside lake, with a rocky cave at the far end for the new arrivals to enjoy some privacy in.
But before we got on with that, we had a bit of a detour. See, as the park has been growing, we've been starting to feel the need to really sort out the staffing, available staff facilities and the assigned work zones.
Sounds less exciting than a new habitat, but don't worry, it was also an opportunity to get creative with building designs!😉
So, to begin with, we decided that right next to our new habitat-in-the-making, we would put a large staff building, with a big hut for our animal keepers to prepare food in, as well as a large staff room for some R&R. It started out looking quite barren...
.... but with just a little bit of creativity.....
..... and lots of attention to detail....
..... we turned it into this! 🙂
Planters on the roof! And so it makes some sense, a ladder for access, so you can imagine someone actually going up there to water those plants.
We also added a slimmed down version of the building to our existing, original staff area, and extended the main building a little to make room for a large keeper hut there, as well:
And of course, in the process of all this, we hired some new staff, split the park into a few work zones to assign the various staff types to and generally made sure that things can operate smoothly.
In case you want to hear the nitty-gritty details of our work zone strategy: Keeping in mind that the park is supposed to end up roughly circular when finished, we went with the following:
For vets and educators, we simply have a single work zone covering the whole zoo. Otherwise, we'd have to build research centres for the vets all over the place, and that just seems kind of excessive.
For mechanics, vendors, security and caretakers (which are essentially janitors), we're planning to have two big zones, kinda dividing the circle in half, one half being near the entrance, the other being further from it. Currently, everything we've built is in the "near entrance" work zone.
Actually, we might put educators in these zones as well. Might make more sense. We'll see about it in chapter 5!
For keepers, the actual animal tenders, we're doing a 4-way pizza slice, so we'll have left of entrance near, left of entrance far, right of entrance near, and right of entrance far. That's because unlike the other staff, these guys don't have any kind of "roaming"-style tasks. They strictly move between habitats, staff rooms and keeper huts, so making their zones bigger just increases their travel distances.
Of course, those plans might change as things develop, but for now, that's where we stand.
So, with that task out of the way, we could get back to the part you've been waiting for: We completed that new habitat. Here's it's final form:
A tropical, rocky beach. And as for the new animal we've brought in, well, please welcome with us....
The African Penguin! A critically endangered species, which we went for specifically because we like the idea of helping them out with their population crisis. Not that doing so in a video game will help, but perhaps this'll inspire you to support some conservation efforts. Not to get preachy, but we donate regularly, you know.😉
Anyhow, sticking with the game, these little guys spend a lot of their time in the water. Not exactly surprising, they're like half-bird, half-fish!
Continuing our efforts to try and be less bad at educating our guests, we also started holding regular educational talks about them, something we're already doing for a number of species:
So, not to rush past or anything, but once the penguins were nicely settled, we went to work on another habitat right away, for we had plans!
And this time, there would be no distractions, so we went and designed the whole thing in one go. Here's how it ended up:
So, a more arctic sort of environment, and again, an aquatic one. You can even see a block of fish frozen in ice on the left. So, what kind of new inhabitant did we introduce into the park? Well....
Quite possibly our favourite animal, actually. They're just so incredibly..... likeable!
So yeah, we're pretty thrilled to have them around, actually.
Expanding the Zoo towards the left side of the entrance also required some new infrastructure to provide power and water filtration, so we took care of that as well, while using the opportunity to design some nice scenery around those facilities:
And with that in place, we turned out attention to another issue in the park: The guests.
Or rather, the amount of them.
It wasn't that mega-overcrowded everywhere, but the raised viewing platforms were basically impassable mosh pits, so action needed to be taken.
And well, here's the thing: So far, every now and then, the game would give us this little message:
Now, every time we got that message, we saw that as a sign that the park's value proposition had risen and guests would be willing to pay more for a ticket. So, we'd raise it by a few bucks.
However! That means that our tickets were always very much on the cheap side, meaning anyone could basically afford a daily visit, leading to massive demand and thus, huge overcrowding.
Thus, we had to manage that demand. So we went and jacked the prices up. More than double, in fact. Feels kinda dirty, especially since we're not exactly hurting for cash, but we really needed to make sure that a visit to the park was something people could afford to to -sometimes-, but not -all- the time.
And it worked, too! Our average guest "load" dropped from around 2000 guests down to around 1700. Sounds like a bad thing, but those 300 people less make a big impact on how crowded some key places are. And keeping in mind that those 1700 people are paying more than twice the ticket price as the 2000 were, it's also an incredible money printer.😛
But then, a minor disaster struck!
Snow! After the snowy winter in year one, our Zoo hasn't seen snow for a decade! And for some reason, it's happening in may!🤔
But the point is, we haven't really been putting up heaters and stuff! Some of our animals didn't mind much....
..... but then, others were feeling really quite wrong about the whole affair!
Look at him. A Capybara in the snow. Even with his arctic albino-camo he's not happy about it.
So we got busy refitting heaters all over the place, making sure that the animals would have appropriate temperatures. Oh, and the guests too, at least in key areas.😉
So that situation was soon in hand again. And the snow didn't last long of course, since it was almost summer already. It basically just dropped by as a reminder that we should be prepared for it.😉
Now, during all this, we had our share of births and maturations in the Park, and occasionally an animal had to be taken out of their habitat because it wouldn't be accepted in the social group and the like.
Like we mentioned last time, we generally won't be going into the details of the day-to-day management of those things, because each chapter would just turn into a log of births, but for this chapter, 2 things of note happened, both of them just so happen to involve the Capybaras:
First off, we had to do a bit of population control. Because frankly, this is silly:
There are 18 Capybaras just in this picture. They breed like there's prizes to win, and we had to take some of them out of the habitat just to keep the population somewhat under control. We'll likely start either releasing some of them into the wild, or trading them to other Zoos.
And the other notable thing that happened with the Capys is.... well, one of the herd contributed their own part to solving the overpopulation issue.
Blanca the Capybara, at a rather solid 9.2 years old, has become the first animal to die in our Park. And in true PlanZo fashion, she did so by ragdolling and getting stuck in a tremendously silly position. Well in any case, requiescat in pace, Blanca.
Come to think of it, Planet Zoo has a memorial feature. Perhaps for our first in-Zoo death, it'd be appropriate to set up a little something. We'll try and remember it for chapter 5.
However, moving on from the gloom, there's one more project we got into before finishing this chapter.
You see, our Park has a small problem, and it's thirst. Behold!
This is the guest thirst heatmap. Yellow and red, of course, mean thirsty. Now, we -are- planning to sprinkle some vending machines around the place, but in an effort to further draw guests away from that central walkway and reduce congestion, we decided to set up another guest area. Much like the ending of chapter 3, but on the opposite end of the park!😉
So, we began with an empty plaza and some shop stalls!
Then we got building, using bamboo again, because it's become a bit of a theme in Casualia Park.
Speaking of things that are becoming a theme: We've been putting a lot of plants on roofs, lately. So we figured that we'd take this a step further and.... well....
Straight-up roof jungle!😁
We think it looks absolutely fab. Hoping you agree! And after some more decoration and setup, here's the final result:
A lovely area for the guests to come by, eat, drink and do all that other guest stuff.😉
And with that, we've arrived at the end of chapter 4. But don't fret! We've already got some plans for chapter 5, and let us tell ya, it should be a pretty good one!
For now though, Casualia Park looks like this:
If you're so inclined, remember that we have a Steam Workshop page, where we share not only some building blueprints from this series, but also an end-of-chapter snapshot of the Zoo itself, so you can download it and check it out for yourself in the game!😉
But yeah, for the time being, we'll leave you with a few more nice images from the park. Until next time, dear readers, have a good one!👍
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