let's build a zoo research guide

Let’s Build a Zoo: Technology Guide (All Tech Tree)

A guide for the technology tree in Let’s Build a Zoo

This guide is basic information complete, but I will edit later for better formatting and to add more information on specific techs.

• Part 1  [Full Tree] Shows images of the full tree with highlights based on specific types of tech
• Format: The number of the tech going from left to right – [Research cost] Name – description and requirements (if applicable)
• Naming Convention: 1-8d, 1-8u. D means down. U means up. Starting from the first two lines you have access to when starting the game.

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5. Let's Build a Zoo Research Information

There's way too much information to share about the research grid in the same page as one of the two playthroughs, so you can find it all here instead. The research hub is unlocked very early on into your game and you can very easily plan things out in a short amount of time.

Note: If you have just started playing, locate the Desert Enclosure tile (one of the starting four tiles). from there, unlock three tiles south from it to gain access to the Researcher +1 tile. This will essentially double your research speed and is one of the most important tiles in the whole grid purely because it affects how early you can get the other tiles.

Research 20 things.

Research 233 things.

There are two types of research tiles in this set. First, the light grayish tiles unlock new types of enclosure (desert, savannah, arctic, etc.). The yellow tiles unlock new enrichment items for your animal enclosures. The benefit of unlocking these tiles is that enrichment items will become more effective. This increase is pretty substantial and will noticeably reduce the amount of enrichment items you need to make your animals happy.

There are two orange enclosure tiles. These add new types of water basins you can place down. The new ones work just the same as the previous, but all your basins will increase in functionality by +25% for each orange tile you unlock. That means you'd be placing fewer basins in enclosures and will have more room to put other things down!

Pretty self-explanatory. Unlocking shops will allow you to place them in your zoo for more profit. The bonuses provided by these are a little complicated to specifically seek out since seemingly random stores will have other bonuses than the standard ones. First, unlocking enough of certain groups of stores will allow you to employ two shopkeepers there for faster (and hypothetically more) profits. Most stores contribute to increasing the speed at which customers are served, which is also related to profits of course. There are two blue tiles that will automate drink shops, which will serve customers 10% faster.

One purple tile in the north will add a credit card option to vending machines, which means they'll be able to spend more money than just what they're carrying. The same goes for the ATM, which for some reason has its own category in the research menu. There are also three gift shops you can unlock that serve the same purpose, just applied to gift shops instead. Finally, one light green tile in the southeast contributes to food shop speed, but it's not actually a shop - instead, this tile converts your sold meat to lab-grown meat, which is better for the environment.

People need to rest at benches to recover their energy. It is VERY important to have benches in your zoo; otherwise, your visitors will leave much faster. Unlocking bench tiles will give you more types of benches to put down and the speed at which people regenerate energy will also increase. It is possible for benches to have a queue of people waiting to sit down at it, so make sure you place lots of benches down!

The four restroom tiles add new variations to place down, similar to decorations and most enrichment item tiles. Two of these tiles speed up visitors' bathroom time by 40%, which is a huge deal. The other two tiles, when both are obtained, increase toilet capacity to 2. Both of these are very important sets of tiles to have.

Most bin tiles will increase the range of bins by an amount of tiles, meaning you won't need as many bins in your zoo to stay clean. Three of these tiles are a slightly darker shade of red when highlighted and increases the amount of trash a bin can hold by a LOT. One non-bin tile is bin-related and is located in the northeast. This tile is in the Energy (Good) group and converts every type of bin to a recycling bin - this means you can use the other variations of bins around your zoo without having to worry about specifically placing down recycling bins.

All of these tiles unlock new types of lamppost to place down. With each tile you unlock, your zoo gets to stay open one hour longer than it currently is. This is a grand total of eight hours! That's almost a 24-hour zoo!

Lampposts are extremely important to have around if you actually want guests to stay after the sun sets. You can view each plot of land's light coverage - the higher this is, the more people will be okay with walking around. One lamppost (regardless of using the same type or not) will increase your light coverage by 10%. You can theoretically place 10 lampposts in a chunk of your land but that won't be aesthetically pleasing to anyone you show your zoo to. Light coverage can exceed 100% but that probably doesn't do anything.

All signpost tiles unlock signposts. Unlocking more of these tiles increase their effectiveness up to 25% if you have all eight tiles. Signs help people behave and keep visitors going where they're trying to go. Additionally, signs increase your publicity, which in turn increases your park rating. These should be an important piece of your overall decor.

There is one ATM tile. It's directly north of Signboard Pack - Navigational (which is one of the four starting tiles) and it allows people to regain money after they've already spent some.

There are a few groups of decoration tiles that give their own benefits. Obviously, all of the tiles unlock more decoration items, but most of them adhere towards gaining some money back when you demolish things. Some tiles like air dancers or zoo signs will increase the perceived value of zoo tickets by 15% once you have all of them. Four rock item tiles increase the decoration score of rocks the more you've gotten, archway tiles increase visitors' happiness by 15% if you have them all, and some tiles decrease the cost of purchasing decorations by a similar percentage.

By checking the heat maps, you can view a decoration score and efficiency for every plot of land you own. Try to keep this number near 100% so your visitors actually enjoy using their eyes when they're at the zoo.

Plants/Tree

These tiles unlock plants and trees. There are only two groups of tiles - some increase the decoration score of trees, and some increase the decoration score of plants. Both groups are obviously super important to unlock considering that they help a lot with CO2, so having them double as more decor-efficient would be great.

Shelters increase decoration by a fair amount and can also be used to regenerate visitors' energy. Make sure you place these down!

There aren't many of these tiles around. Three of them - the darker colored ones if you're highlighting the transport tiles - unlock new types of bus for your bus routes. If you collect all of these tiles, buses will cost 10% less. That's a $9,000 price reduction on double deckers! The rest of these tiles unlock new subway entrances and will reduce the cost of building them by a good amount. It would be wise to unlock at least three of these tiles before you actually start using subways.

Farming is a system for those with good morality.

Most farm tiles unlock new crops for you to grow. A select few increase vegetable processing speed for their bonus bar. This latter category includes unlocking goat dairy and cow dairy, a wool farm, etc. This also includes the tile that unlocks farming and the farm processor, among other things. Farming is supposed to be used to reduce your food costs but can also be used to make fat stacks of cash on the side. It could theoretically be possible to start a new game and just make money off farming, but that remains to be seen.

Energy (Good)

These tiles are usable by people with a certain amount of good morality.

This set is awesome. The least important in the early game are two tiles that increase the efficiency of recycling centers (up to 50%). This is excellent, but you won't be in a rush to get these. You should unlock the recycling center, though, as this will reduce trash output if combined with the unlockable recycling bin. Pivotal to the early game with good morality are the water tower and wind turbine, both of which produce green resources and reduce the costs of running the zoo if you build enough of them.

A bit northeast of the center is a water pump upgrade tile. This will allow you to select any water pump and upgrade it for $700 so it can absorb methane, causing even fewer pollutants from your zoo to escape. Another crucial tile is the All Bins Recycle tile, which does as it says and lets you recycle trash from any bin, not just the recycling bin item specifically.

Energy (Evil)

These tiles are usable by people with a certain amount of evil morality.

Early into the chart from the center are the evil versions of energy efficiency. The elecricity siphon steals electricity from the government so you don't have to pay for as much of it, and the sewage recirculator just northwest of it reduces your water costs by reusing the same water all over the zoo. These two, in tandem with the furnace below the center, will cause your buses to go up to 30% faster by using illegal fuel mixtures. The furnace burns your trash into CO2 and removing the need to pay for trash collection. The other two tiles increase the speed at which the furnace burns trash.

To sum this category up, these factories are used to turn animals into animal products like handbags, glue, and meat, but are also related to treating animals poorly while collecting milk, eggs, wool, etc. Basically, these tiles are the tiles you'd want if you would like to be as capitalist as possible.

In this category, there are four yellow tiles and two green tiles. One near the center unlocks mascots, who receive donations from visitors as they do their thing around the park. The other green tile lets you hire from an agency for a small price, but you won't have to wait for applicants. The other tiles let you hire more people per structure. One example of this is the farmhouse - if you get the Extra Farmers tile, you can hire up to 10 Junior Farmers per farmhouse built. This is a massive increase in what you'll be able to do while farming.

Breeding is very important for growing your zoo and mapping the genomes of animals. There are 10 varieties of an animal per species. Some of the pairs of them, if they breed, can produce a new variety of that species. Having a new variety born in your zoo (or purchased and delivered to it) will add its information to your genome-mapping progress. You can also clone any variety you've previously owned, so it's ideal to get new varities from the world map just so you can have access to them later.

The tile below the starting tiles reduces pregnancy time down to just one day. The first tile to the east unlocks the nursery, where breeding takes place, and two tiles east of that is the ultrasound. The ultrasound is used to predict the variety of offspring before it's born, allowing you to make more educated decisions about aborting unwanted fetuses. The lonesome breeding tile way to the northwest unlocks two more breeding rooms to the nurseries you've built for a total of four possible pairs breeding at once.

Advertising

There are only two advertising tiles. One of them increases visitors' money by 25% and the other increases the amount of visitors by 5%. The only downside to these tiles is that they're pretty far away from the center, so you're going to take a while getting to just one of them.

There are loads of facility buildings in this game. The nearest ones are the furnace, which gets rid of animal corpses; the vet office to check on animal health; the processor, which converts dead animals into useful resources (for evil people only); and the release hub, which lets you send back animals into the wild. Lots of other facilities exist and every single one is important enough to hunt down as soon as possible.

There are five fountain tiles that unlock new types of fountains. These are another type of decoration. The more of these tiles you have, the farther range your water pumps will have for filling water basins. That's about all there is to these ones.

Lakes were added to the game later in its lifetime, hence why all the lake tiles are on the border of the research grid. Most of these tiles unlock lake decorations. Fortunately, the tile that unlocks lake features is revealed no matter what and is located at the northern border of the grid. Lakes can drastically increase enrichment in enclosures, so it's definitely worth unlocking.

Staff Entrances

Another later feature to the game. Staff entrances can only be passed through by zoo staff. Each tile unlocks new styles of these entrances. These things are super handy - if you have built a subway leading to some facilities or famland and don't want visitors walking around looking for animals in areas like that, you can build a staff entrance gate slightly in front of a subway. You'll have to block it off just a little bit more before absolutely zero visitors go through these subways, making truly-blocked-off areas inaccessible to visitors.

Attractions

There are currently two attractions: Sleepy Sloth and a bathhouse. By unlocking both, visitors will be more willing to spend money at these places. Guests can simply relax at these two places.

Exhibit Control

When you finally fill out the entire research grid, you'll be able to unlock the exhibit control building. This building detects your total amount of enclosures and allows you to precisely select the animals you want in a pen, down to the species, variant, and sex. No longer will you have to tediously manage every little pen as you can now hire multiple employees per exhibit control building to do the work for you (as long as you set the specifications). This is a critically important building and will make your life a breeze. Just make sure you're putting one of each variant in an enclosure that can fit 10 of that species, turn contraceptives on for that pen, and sit back!

Research Hub

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Description [ ]

" Researchers use this building to discover new upgrades for your zoo. You can only have one of each type of Research Hub in your zoo."

Function [ ]

Required in order to unlock research .

Related Research Nodes [ ]

Research Pack - Researcher +1

• Let's Build a Zoo Achievements
• Let's Build a Zoo News
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3. Let's Build a Zoo Part 1: Good Morality & Progression

Our first section of our playthrough will be the longest, where we'll focus the most on earning achievements here and there as well as learning the game. We will follow the morality system in the good direction and we'll go with the opposite in the second portion of our base game runtime. When you start your game, pick an avatar and name your zoo. Your avatar doesn't matter at all.

Learning the Ropes

Next, go to the world map using your shortcuts and accept the two gift rabbits from the Australian zoo. Once they've been delivered, don't open your zoo just yet! First, return to the build menu and look for the fifth tab, where you can find unlocked pathway types. Place a simple pathway around the enclosure and connect it to the entrance's path. Most paths increase movement speed and reduce the energy it takes for visitors to walk. Next, go right three tabs and place a zoo map down somewhere. Signs help people from getting lost and keep their behavior in check. They also directly increase your park rating as seen at the top of the screen. This number affects how many people want to see your zoo every day, so it's good to get that number up and up!

We'll want to build just a few more things before we open the zoo. A few tabs further to the right are two small benches - build three of them somewhere near the pathway you built (or extend the path to them after building them), then check the second tab from the left and place down two vending machines. These machines do not require extra employees and will still be capable of making some income. Just a few things left! In the third tab is the store room; you can only have one of these, which is no problem at all. This building is where you'll be able to store allllllllll your animals' food. Put it down anywhere for now, then hire whichever employee the game gives you by default. This is your first animal keeper and they'll take care of the two rabbits you've got. Go right once more and put down a restroom somewhere. Next, put a trash bin down near the zoo entrance. You can move the water pump by the management office so it covers more of the enclosure area.

Back out and choose the Add Objects square in the bottom left of your screen, while still selecting the enclosure. Place a water basin so the rabbits have something to drink. Water basins are automatically filled, but only if they're in range of a water pump. Lastly, put down a few small balls so the rabbits aren't bored stiff while in captivity.

Note: You're going to get lots of tasks really quickly in the first few hours of gameplay. Please do not feel pressured to complete them at all; you need to learn the basics before you get too invested in tasks.

Let the zoo visitors come in and watch what they do - some might use the bathroom immediately, some might get cola, some will only see the rabbits, and so on, and it's important that these people aren't prevented from doing what they want to do. On your first day, someone should ask you to build a research hub before the day ends. Accept this and build the hub somewhere on your property. When it's built, you will now slowly generate research points (shown in the upper right) that can be used to unlock new features and bonuses. There is a page in the walkthrough that gives a broader description of all the research available - make sure you read it as you go along!

The absolute best move is to research the desert enclosure, then continue researching downwards until you research popcorn stalls. After that, the most important item is available to the right of it; this allows you to hire two researchers total , doubling research point production speed and making things fly way faster.

• Nursery: 1 tile east of Desert Enclosure
• Reduce Pregnancy Time: 2 tiles west of Popcorn Stall
• Water Tower: 1 tile east of Research Pack - Researcher +1
• Incinerator: 1 tile north of Water Tower
• Zoo Bus Upgrade - Red Bus: 1 tile east of Water Tower
• Energy Pack - Wind Turbine: 3 tiles north of Desert Enclosure
• Release Hub: 4 tiles west and 1 tile north of Desert Enclosure

Try to research everything over time. There are two achievements shown on the research page for researching most of everything. The rest of the tiles you'll be missing by the time you get both achievements will still be of great benefit.

Note: To save hassle later, do not buy any plots of land when given the chance until you earn the Decorator achievement. More on that later down the page.

Hiring Employees and an Introduction to Morality

Your zoo will get two new tasks: Have 25 visitors over time, then build a store room. You should have done the latter, so you'll then get a task to hire a janitor. Use the ticket office at the zoo entrance (or select it from the shortcut wheel) and select the blue magnifying glass next to the janitor icon. Check recruit to set up a marketing campaign for the position - if you want faster wait times, post the opening on social media and/or job portals. You have already gotten a few employees out of necessity because the game gave them to you; in the future, make sure you only hire people with a high work ethic. These will be the best employees you can get. The other stats, politeness and job satisfaction, can be increased by paying your employees bonuses in their pay (and by increasing their overall general pay). Later on, when things are more manageable, you'll be able to afford firing employees with low work ethic and hiring new ones.

On your third day or so, your investor will mention that a dog has been lost. You must make a decision in this type of situation: You can either dress it up like a lion for 5 evil morality points, or you can spend $50 to find its owner for 5 good morality points. Morality is bimodal, which means if you gain 5 evil points followed by 6 good points, you'll end in a position of 1 good point total. Choose the good morality choice for the entirety of your time on this page of the walkthrough.

Note: Until later specified, please save all your money until another box like this says that it's okay to spend freely. There are three exceptions to this:

• When you are asked to donate $1000 to save some animals that survived a forest fire, say yes. These will be two capybara - simply select them and scroll down to the bottom of their info bar to a yellow donation icon and donate both capybaras. You can get these back later.
• When you are asked to choose between two options from a CRISPR researcher, choose the left option .
• When the walkthrough suggests setting up a hot dog stand and a gift shop, do so.

Note: A guy named Paul W might ask you for help. Help him all four times (even if you have to take out massive loans to do so). He will give you a choice of either accepting three rhinos (lame) or gaining a permanent 5% profit bonus from crops sold from your zoo. The latter is much more useful, as you can get rhinos later using other means.

Another type of employee is the mascot, who will receive donations by dancing around on the property. You can zone them to dance in a certain area. Try to hire a Gonky mascot at some point after you unlock the ability to hire such employees.

Employ a Gonky mascot.

Fire someone at some point. Hire someone you don't need so you can immediately fire them just for a little achievement.

Fire an employee.

Variations and the World Map

Head back to the world map. Sooner or later, you will receive a brown rabbit. There is about a 60% chance that two white rabbits will produce another white rabbit and a 40% chance they will produce a brown one. Each animal has a total of 10 variations, white and brown being two of them, and one of our goals to own at least one of each variation of each animal. We don't have to own them all at once, but we do need to own them eventually to map their genome sequence. If you check the animal shelter in Florida (that extending state in the southeast United States), you may find some new rabbit variations for sale. The shelter will occasionally have new animals for sale every once in a while, so make sure to check in for new stuff for easy variation ownership.

Additionally, other zoos will offer to trade animals with you. For example, the London zoo would like a brown rabbit for two geese - you can complete this trade now, but this trade will be here until you complete it, so there's no rush to do so. In fact, it'd be better if we prioritize rabbits first, so let's just ignore the other animal types for now. Just know that whenever you're ready, you can work on a trade to get new species. You can do this literally whenever, so the walkthrough won't force you to do trades at certain times.

You won't get the below achievement anytime soon, but be aware that you will have to trade most of the time if you want a new species. Try to finish all the trades in the game to unlock every species of animal!

Complete 10 trades with other zoos.

VIPs, Green Energy, and Park Rating Information

On your fourth day of business, the game will suggest that you make a work zone for your animal keeper. This will ensure the keeper only focuses on one task; this is more important when you have more than one enclosure so you can assign one keeper to each enclosure for maximum efficiency. Anyways, this is the same day a VIP will appear in your zoo. Locate the VIP and click on them, then call the cops on them. Black market dealers will only sell hybrid animals, which won't really help us at all, so there's no loss in turning them in. Doing so also adds good morality.

Send a member of the black market to prison.

Sooner or later, someone named Sunny will ask you to research wind turbines. These items will increase your green energy output if placed. If you end up making a lot more power than you need, the government will give you up to $1000 in return! The water tower tile does the same thing but for water. Recycling bins, when used with a recycling center, will reduce the trash your zoo creates and lower your trash pickup cost. Prioritize green energy ASAP for very necessary money.

Build your first Wind Turbine.

As you should have seen by now, your park rating is at the top of your screen and it affects how many people want to come to your zoo. If you check the bottom area of the quick shortcuts circle, you should see a Stats and Records tab. By checking the park rating tab in the next menu, you should spot four different categories for how your park is rated. Your animal score increases the more varieties of animals you have as well as other factors. Facilities is all about the amount of shops, benches, bins, and restrooms you have, as well as their placement and optimization. Attractiveness is directly tied to your decoration score per each plot of land. Publicity has permanent increases based on quests and research, but it also increases by placing signs, having more buses, and is occasionally increased by visitor reviews. Every researched tile provides +1 permanent park rating. Below is some information on how to decorate your plots of land when you're more financially stable. You'll slowly gain more things to decorate with as you research more tiles and you'll be able to buy plots of land really soon.

Note: Try to buy all the perimeter plots first. You can see some ideas on how to move all faculty work into the top row later on this page. This will allow the other five rows of space to be purely zoo-oriented. But make sure you avoid buying plots until you get the Decorator achievement below!

Lighting : One lighting fixture creates 10% lighting coverage. This means you can literally put 10 lampposts in a rectangle in the corner of a plot to make it lit up. Not that that would look good. You can view your lighting coverage by using the heat maps and scrolling to the lighting map. Fairy light trees are unlocked in the northeast corner of the research grid and these trees act as light sources. Unfortunately, they don't seem to absorb CO2 , so you might want to consider alternating between normal trees and regular ones and using other lights. Floor lamps can be walked upon and are also light sources.

Decor : The more variety of decorative items you have, the better your decor score will be. That means you need to unlock lots of different decoration types and use a wide variety. Update the heat map by switching heat map tabs and switching back. Try to reach an efficiency of at least 40% per visitor-accessible plot since you want to be absolutely fantastic with your zoo. Don't forget that trees absorb CO2 or that enclosures use decorations too!

Throw down a ton of decor items into your starting plot until your decor rating is at 100%. Because your rating is 100% across the "entire" zoo, you'll get the below achievement.

Get a Deco Rating of 100%.

If you haven't used one in an enclosure before, place a trampoline down and you'll get a quick achievement.

Buy a trampoline for your zoo.

Sometimes, protestors will appear on your property and protest the living conditions (usually enrichment) of your animals. If you're actually meeting their requirements, you will gain morality by appeasing them and simply using that option after clicking on one. The evil option is to bribe protestors to leave. Either way, they've already taken up bus space for the day and aren't paying an entry fee.

Have a visit from a protestor.

Water Pumps : Place these down in most areas so everywhere near animal enclosures has water coverage. You don't need TOO many of these, but since they can be upgraded to absorb methane, they're kind of a big deal.

Recycling Bins : Try to make all walkable area covered by trash cans so you're dealing with a minimal amount of trash. There is a research tile in the northeast that will make every trash bin a recycling bin so you can use bins that are aesthetically pleasing.

Paths : As you research more pathway types, people will be able to walk faster and use less energy when walking on manmade paths. Definitely place these everywhere in a way that follows your aesthetic preferences.

Benches & Shelters : People need to rest! Place these objects around the zoo so they can recover their energy.

Signs : Signs increase your publicity and prevent people from wandering around aimlessly.

Employee Gates : These are unlocked on the fringes of the research grid and only allow employees to pass through them. This is extremely useful - you can set up animal keepers to move from the store room to a subway entrance, then to the appropriate enclosures they keep track of for maximum efficiency - and without anyone clogging the place down!

CRISPR Research & The Nursery

Someone from a company called CRISPR will ask you to build a CRISPR Splicer on your zoo. You must accept their offer, but accept the offer on the left for more money over time instead of $1000 all at once. This facility can clone animals, hence why it's good to just have animals and get rid of them if you don't want to deal with them right away, since you can just clone them back into existence. You can also splice two types of animals together as long as you've owned at least five variations each of the two animals you want to fuse.

Create your first hybrid animal.

Try to build a nursery (it should be near the starting tiles to the southeast) and place it in your zoo. If you're running out of space, you can buy your first new plot of land for $300. This building can be used to breed animals. As your rabbits increase in number, they will need more enrichment objects to keep them busy. It is not worth trying to entertain an infinitely growing number of rabbits. Fortunately, the nursery lets us control our populations (somewhat) and will help us identify new variants of rabbits. The best research to help with the process is going to be Reduce Pregnancy Time, which is located a few tiles west of the popcorn stall icon. In preparation for breeding, build a second grass enclosure.

Select the Breeding tab in the nursery, then select the rabbit species. You should see that there are nine combinations of rabbits that can breed in the nursery (as long as you have a male and a female). The types of potential offspring are marked with up to three different shades of blue. The pair at the top of the list is currently at 55% white and 45% brown, whereas the second pair can result in three different colors of rabbit. Breeding experience, the bar in the third column, increases by breeding from a pair. The bar is full after five successful births of that pair type as long as the pregnancy was caused in the nursery. Any spare rabbits your rabbits make in the pens do not count towards the experience. You'll definitely breed over 100 animals through the nursery over time, so the second achievement below won't be something you have to wait and grind for.

One of your animals must give birth.

Your breeding program must produce 100 babies (nursery births only).

There is an ultrasound research item two tiles east of the Nursery tile that will allow you to see the species of rabbit that your mother rabbits are pregnant with. This will allow you to make informed decisions about whether to abort the fetus or not if it's not the one you want to have.

Breeding experience is very important. For example, the fourth breeding pair can result in a brown, a cream, or a slightly black rabbit. The base odds are 37% brown, 37% cream, and 26% slightly black. The more breeding experience you have in this pair, the more these odds balance themselves out and it'll be easier to acquire the new types of rabbits through that pair. It is not necessary at all to reach full breeding experience with each pair. Set up a white + white pair and the breeder will start working on getting them going. If your female rabbit is already pregnant, you can simply abort the fetus so the female is capable of becoming pregnant again.

From the pair screen, you can change the nursing period from 2 days to 3 days for a morality boost, or none for a morality decline. 3 days is actually a pretty long time, so just keep it at 2 for now. You can also set a production target - five successful pregnancies will give you full breeding experience in a pair, so set it to five if that's what you're after. Once you're done setting up two pairs, return to your remaining rabbits and select one of them. Locate the contraception slider. Setting it to active will prevent this rabbit from causing new rabbits to appear, and it can be applied to the entire pen that rabbit is in if you check the box off. We're going to be a rabbit-only zoo for some time this way. To move a rabbit, click on it and scroll all the way down to the lower right to find the blue move icon, then select its new pen and back out of the menu entirely so you're not choosing where to move that particular rabbit anymore. You should considering hiring new animal keepers the more pens you have. Make sure you zone out their work!

Unrelated to birth, but related to death: The incinerator, a building you can research, is used to take care of animal corpses. Please make sure you have this right away or there are going to be dead bunnies on display! The only current alternative to the incinerator is to actively donate elderly animals, which takes too much work.

When someone wants you to invest $10,000 in their ark to send animals to the moon, accept the offer and donate the money. Take out a loan if you have to. This person will come back asking for another $10,000, which you should also give them. You will get a chance to receive an incredible reward if you do this twice.

When someone from No More Robots asks if they can use your zoo in a game, say yes. You will get an instant $5000 and will receive numerous tasks for giving Zayaan the 10th variety of animal for many species.

Shops, Tickets, and Transportation

When you're able to afford it, place a hot dog stand and a gift shop so you can make a little more money every day. You can click the Manage button to adjust item price and the quality of the goods you're selling; lower quality obviously means higher profit. It would be good to get this next achievement over with: Adjust your hot dogs so they're only made of eyes and tails, then sell one for the achievement. Make sure you readjust the meat quality if you don't want to be a garbage zoo owner!

Sell a Hotdog at the worst possible quality.

Sooner or later, your entry fee will be worth more than the $5 it currently costs to enter the zoo. Go to the ticket office and change the price a teeny bit upwards for a little more profit every day. Next, to unlock more transportation options, you're going to have to donate $500 to someone (it'll be a task sooner or later). You'll soon be able to buy a new yellow bus to get more people to your zoo every day. The total amount of people who want to come is tied to your park rating. Additionally, you can buy bigger and better buses after researching said buses. Unfortunately, buses generate CO2; to offset this, plant plenty of trees in the zoo to go carbon-negative.

Try to unlock the five bus routes by finishing tasks for Steve, your transport planner, for an achievement and access to all five routes of visitors to pick up.

Unlock 5 bus routes.

Try to own 10 double deckers over time; you likely won't need to use them all for a while, but you'll get an achievement for it.

Own at least 10 buses.

Notable Tasks

Three people will eventually come to your zoo with three tasks each. Finishing all the tasks for each person will give you an achievement. Captain Cola is a spokesperson from his soda corporation, and Andrew is just a goth person who introduces himself after you have owned three plots of land. You'll get these tasks done over time after many hours of play.

Captain Cola:

• Sell 50 Cola.
• Sell 50 from Cola Vendor in one day.
• Build 10 Cola Vendors.

Convince Captain Cola to run a promotion at your zoo.

Andrew the Goth:

• Build 2 Subways.
• Get 1 black snake.
• Get 1 panther.
• Open your zoo for 14 hours.

Complete the Goth quests.

Tomoyuki (Kaiju Cosplayer):

• Get 1 tortoise.
• Get 1 komodo dragon.
• Get 1 gorilla.

Complete all Kaiju Cosplay quests.

Concluding Work on a Species

Whenever you've obtained all 10 variations of the rabbit species, you are no longer pressured to breed them in the nursery (unless you feel like getting the breeding experience up for your own unnecessary perfectionist needs). You no longer have to worry about controlled rabbit births. To keep a high animal park rating, try to keep approximately one of each animal type in the rabbit pen minimum.

After you're done with rabbits, focus your efforts on another species, then another, then another. That's the main loop for genome mapping! Just remember that you need to get every animal variant in the base game for an achievement and that you'll be able to trade specific variants to get new animals.

Map your first Genome.

Poor Multi-Plot Designing

In this next section, we're going to discuss what not to do during zoo expansion in regard to land development.

This is an example of three of my plots of land specialized to do certain things. You can consider it a partial example of what not to do. Obviously you can make your zoo a lot more... natural-looking than this, but this is how I was doing at this point in the game on my first run. To explain my zoo at this point, the first plot was primarily filled with shops and subway stations that lead to other parts of the zoo. My reasoning for this is that visitors are going to want to go to either specific animal areas or the bathroom or shops, and having subway entrances early on into the zoo means they'll get to their destinations faster. This subway idea is still good.

The plot directly north from the starting plot was used for the final variation of rabbit and I had also placed my at-the-time only nursery there. I also grew some carrots there to reduce on food costs (more on that below), but it ultimately wasn't helping too much. If you loook closely, the areas with red brick flooring in this plot are restricted by gates that only employees can pass through. There's a subway entrance leading to the storage shed so all future animal keepers have a quick run over to the shed no matter where they are. Obviously, the shed and station could be closer together and there could be a lot more done with that land taken up by carrots. For instance, the decoration efficiency of that rabbit plot is 28% and that's just sad. It would be best to dedicate entire plots of land to farming so visitors have more room to appreciate plots that have other things on it. Additionally, visitors can't complain about low-decor farmland if they can't access it. Finally, a variety of different types of rabbit is better than having just one variety.

The plot of land to the left of the rabbit plot here is what I called the Bathroom Hell Chamber. I wanted it to be a cage like the two previously mentioned plots so I surrounded it with vending machines. The idea here was that anyone who had to go to the bathroom could easily reach an open one quickly (and loads of people have to use the bathroom actually). The issue is that the decoration efficiency of the Bathroom Hell Chamber was about 7%, so it was driving people out of the zoo completely. Not great. If you make a Bathroom Hell Chamber, make it pretty.

Efficient Design Examples

Obviously you can design your zoo however you want, but this walkthrough is going to provide some examples for how to use land. You should be able to rely on these layouts if you don't want to think.

Entrance : Just make the entrance plot look pretty. This is the best place for an info kiosk and you should definitely chuck a subway station in here. Your goals are simply to set the decoration and lighting scores to 100%.

Bathroom Zone : I built one plot of land for bathrooms, bathhouses, and Sleepy Sloths. There are one of each facility on both the north and south sides and the only way in here is through one of two subway tunnels. Even in the late game, you'll only need about 12 bathrooms, so you don't have to clog it all up with them. You can section the plot off with benches just so people can use them somewhere. Use any other space for decoration as long as it doesn't impede movement. I wouldn't call my example here a Bathroom Hell Chamber; it's more of just a normal Bathroom Chamber. That's a little sad, but that's the price to pay for completion.

Enclosures (2 Plot Synergy) : One way to set up enclosures is to work something in similar to the picture above. This shows four enclosures in two plots overall, built into the four corners of said area. The two lower enclosures are 25x9, using lakes for both higher enrichment and decoration usage. There are two lakes separating the lower and upper enclosures so visitors are forced to take the subway entrance, reducing stray traffic. These lakes are 5x5 in their plot and may become 5x10 if linked with another plot's lakes as you see on the right side. This means the horizontal path between the two lakes are also 5x5. These middle lakes are purely for decorative use but you can also dump some light fixtures in there to reach 100% lighting in both plots. You can otherwise use floor lights somewhere along the pathway to avoid obstructing movement.

The upper center of the two plots is split with a 3x10 grid and another 3x10 in the plot next to it for a combined 6x10 grid. This is where I'd place the population hub (as useless as it may be) and the subway entrance. You could also put small shops and other stuff here if you felt like it since you have the space. The two upper enclosures are 22x10 and usually top out the decoration score if you're still not at 100%. Bear in mind that you only have access to an entire plot's space if you have all the purchasable plots surrounding it - bear that in mind if you're a perfectionist or want to match this exact design. You can see in heat maps for decoration and lighting that purchasable plot fencing takes up one row of space. Very tragic.

At the end of this construction you should have two plots with 100% lighting, 100% decoration, four enclosures of varying type depending on your needs, and other small things should you choose to include them.

Farmland : You'll need to use farms on your good morality playthrough to raise your morality. If you have enough farming going on, you should also get a hefty profit as well. Below is one of four farming plots I used. I placed these starting at the northeast corner moving west. You will have plenty of space to double or even quadruple the amount of land you're using for crops if you want to, but you really only need about four with this setup. The two upper crop spaces are 11x7 with a four-tile space between them. In this space go the subway, a staff gate, and some extra tiles. The middle crops here are 11x8 and the large lower crop is 25x8. With four plots of land like this, you can grow 15 different crops.

The best use of your space is to just not plant grass or wheat since those are largely unprofitable and useless. This should leave 21 crops left over, so decide to cut carrots or cabbage (or just build another plot for these three plants). Make sure you're growing beetroot and hops on two of the large fields as you can create improbable meat and beer with them. Put some pathing down so you know where the staff are going, then clog the rest of the unused tiles south of the subway with decorations to raise the decoration score on these plots. This land technically affects the overall decoration score and therefore your park rating. Don't bother with lighting as your employees don't need them.

Some Free Space : If you want to continue copying me, you will see here that all of my staff buildings are jammed into the northwest corner. All of 'em. Keeping them all out of the way and far from visitors' view by using staff gates will prevent you from having to worry about a decoration score or lighting score directly affecting the guests. Below those plots is one plot where I kept all the stores, which I recommend you set up as two plots of land just so it's less crowded. Remember to care about lighting and decor for those!

Everything else here is just a mess because it didn't have to be neat. You can see a large pile of trees covering one plot of land, which was used to combat the CO2 emitted from my buses. If you do this, make sure to use different types of trees as you can see at the top of the plot. This is to raise the decoration score of that plot to 100% which is still beneficial even though no visitors could get to it. The other utilities plot has lots of water towers and wind turbines on it; this could have very easily been placed somewhere more out of the way, so let that be a warning to you. These were used to fight against water and electricity usage. Just remember, though, that you'll want to delete these and the farms and trees when it comes time to get maximum bad morality.

There's this big space between the staff/shops and the farms with huge enclosures and a handful of CRISPR splicers and nurseries. This is where most of my late game time was spent. I worked on about 6-8 species at a time, trying to get all their varieties before releasing all of them into the wild unless I wanted to put them in one of the enclosures to raise my park rating. I gave each species their own large plot so they could have a ton of space and I wouldn't need to suffer the consequences of overpopulation and crowding. The two concrete enclosures are just leftovers from when I was setting this space up and I didn't feel like getting rid of them or combining them.

I had about 24 plots of unused space left over. 12 used the enclosure setup, then there was the main entrance and bathroom zone, the farms and the upper left corner stuff. I'd recommend using this space for whatever you want but that might make the game lag and cause saving issues if more entities have to be loaded in.

The Sandbox Zoo

Unlock a second zoo on the world map.

Finishing Research

When you finally fill out the entire research grid, you'll be able to unlock the exhibit control building. This building detects your total amount of enclosures and allows you to precisely select the animals you want in a pen, down to the species, variant, and sex. No longer will you have to tediously manage every little pen as you can now hire multiple employees per exhibit control building to do the work for you (as long as you set the specifications). This is a critically important building and will make your life a breeze. Just make sure you're putting one of each variant in an enclosure that can fit 10 of that species, turn contraceptives on for that pen, and sit back!

End Game Goals

It's time to let you run free and conquer the rest of this playthrough on your own. Here's what you'll end up doing on the way to completion - try to complete these roughly in order while constantly working on unlocking new variants all the time and spending money on land.

Buy every plot of land : You should absolutely prioritize doing this after double decker upgrades start to cost $200,000 and up. This is going to cost an obscene amount of money but each plot of land will give you more breathing room until it seems like you have way more space than you could ever need. Upgrade your double deckers more once you've completely maxed out the zoo's size. This should be easier once you're able to sell tickets for $100 (see below). It costs $39,423,300 to buy every plot over time.

Buy every plot of land in the starting zoo.

Reach 200 good morality : Time to get this out of the way. In your shortcuts wheel, go to the stats and records section, then check your morality breakdown. There are four categories and you must max out all of them. Any "never"s in the below info will slowly be reversed over time if you mess up accidentally, so reaching max good morality is not missable.

• Animals : Donate and never euthanize them. Keep nursing time in nurseries at 3 days, release animals into the wild, and never sell to the black market.
• People : Shift your stores to sell the max quality goods/services. Always pay severance when firing employees and pay your staff well. Never bribe protesters or influencers.
• Business : Critical choices are those unskippable choices you get every once in a while. Keep choosing the good choices when this happens. Set up lots of unique crops (maybe like 15ish) and report black market sellers. Never buy from the black market.
• Pollution : Recycle all or nearly all of your trash and plant enough wind turbines and water storage to be fully sustainable. Completely absorb all of your emitted CO2 from buses using trees and never use animals for meat. Instead, plant a large amount of beetroot and use an improbable meat facility to create substitutes.

Since you'll finally have the achievement for hitting max good morality, you can now reduce nursing time in the nursery to 0 to speed up animal production. You may as well keep the other stuff you've built like the farms and trees to save/make money.

Have 200 good points.

Having farms set up like the examples higher on this page should net you over $50,000 at the end of each Friday.

Earn at least $50000 in a single day.

Complete all zoo trades : This also unlocks the base variant of every species of animal. Depending on when you're playing, there could be 63 animals in the game or even more. It's best to get the trades done so you don't have to think about them anymore and can then focus on getting more variants. There's an achievement for getting lions from Singapore, which you'll do on the way to unlocking the other animals.

Complete the trade for the Lion in Singapore.

You'll also unlock a feature for an airplane pilot to write an ad for you in the sky, but you have to give him a flamingo first. Do this and he'll occasionally offer to bring more people to the zoo for $500.

Get a flying visit!

Fully design your zoo : Once you have all the land, you should be able to finally work as you please. Either use the examples above to set up enclosures while also maintaining high lighting/decor stats or use your own ideas. The goal is to keep those two stats at or near 100% on every plot you work on while also being able to host many species in their own enclosure. Even if you're not planning on putting anything in these enclosures for some time, it'll still raise your rating. You can stop working on your zoo even if you haven't finished the whole thing as long as you're normally selling tickets for $100.

Sell a ticket for $100 : Plant a bunch of variations of each species into your zoo. You can also use unused enclosures to store hybrid animals. Your high decor/lighting scores combined with the high animal variety will increase the perceived value of your entry tickets. Make sure you change the price in the front office! This happened to me around a park rating of 3200.

Sell a ticket for at least 100 dollars.

Map all the variants : Now that you have all the species, it's time to unlock every variant in the game. If you're following the above example, you should have about two plots of land you can use to store current breeding projects. Create some enclosures (one for each animal you're working on) and use CRISPR cloning/nurseries to slowly but surely reach every variant. You can also use other nearby plots if you want to work on even more species.

When you're already working on plenty of species at a time, remember that you can pre-clone animals and leave them in the CRISPRs for later use. Preplan the animals you want to work on next and clone them before you actually need them to save some time. You might also want to work on animals that take longer to clone, like elephants. The clone speed is the same as the normal pregnancy time, which you can see in the nursery by passing over the animal chart.

Map 56 standard animal Genomes.

The good morality run is now complete! You can either keep this zoo and simply shift it towards evil morality as suggested or start a new game in a separate file if you want to keep this one intact. More details are on the next page of the walkthrough.

My favorite PS5 launch game just got a sequel — and I’m hooked

Planet Zoo is an utterly delightful management sim

When the PS5 launched in November 2020, most early adopters spent their first few weeks with the console dying endlessly in Demon’s Souls , swinging around a snow-covered NYC in Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales or platforming through PlayStation history in Astro’s Playroom. But not me. I was busy building the theme park of my dreams in Planet Coaster: Console Edition. 

Welcome! This column is part of a series in which members of the Tom's Guide staff share what they're playing and enjoying right now, with the goal of helping you find great games that you might want to play next. Be sure to check out our last entry, where we talked about how the  Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot helped a TG staffer mourn Akira Toriyama.

To this day, I still find myself regularly returning to Planet Coaster just to tinker with my meticulously designed parks or attempt one of the harder career mode levels. This criminally overlooked game has never once left my console’s hard drive even more than three years after the PS5's debut. It’s easily among my favorite games of this console generation to date. 

So, naturally, when its spiritual sequel, Planet Zoo was confirmed for a console release, via the aptly named Planet Zoo: Console Edition, I was thrilled. And now after getting hands-on with the game, I can confirm it’s as charming and engrossing as its predecessor, and it even manages to take things an extra step further.

Planet Zoo Console Edition: <a href="https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP2514-PPSA18027_00-PLANETZOOOOOOOOO" data-link-merchant="store.playstation.com"" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> $49 @ PlayStation Store From the makers of Planet Coaster and Zoo Tycoon, comes a fresh take on the wildlife park management sim, Planet Zoo. After being locked to PC for more than five years, Planet Zoo: Console Edition brings this critically acclaimed zoo-builder to PS5 and Xbox Series X with a whole safari worth of animals and modes. Plus, the controls have been fully reworked for console play. 

Let’s build a Zoo

If you’re not familiar with the “Planet” games, they’re management simulations from Frontier Developments, a British studio that previously worked on the beloved Zoo Tycoon and Roller Coaster Tycoon franchises. As the name indicates, in Planet Zoo, your job is to build and maintain an animal park keeping your guests and the animals themselves happy.

One of Planet Zoo’s biggest strengths is its variety of modes. Whatever type of experience you’re looking for, you’re almost certain to find a mode that appeals. Career mode drops you into a series of pre-made scenarios and tasks you with completing various goals that range from constructing a set number of animal habitats to getting your guest satisfaction score above a certain threshold — and trust me, Planet Zoo guests can be pretty darn demanding.

On the other end of the scale is sandbox mode, which gives you a completely blank canvas, access to every single item in the game, and unlimited funds to build your ideal zoo without any restrictions. Well, there is one restriction, the “zoo complexity meter” which limits how many objects you can place in a single zoo. But this is to keep performance consistent, and is fairly generous with how much you can place. 

Planet Zoo also offers a challenge mode which is a hybrid of career and sandbox, you still start with an empty plot of land, but you have a budget to work with, and must unlock new items by completing research tasks. Finally, there’s a franchise mode that allows you to build zoos within a shared online economy, forcing you to work towards community goals in order to succeed and earn rewards.  

I’m very much a goals-orientated player, so career mode is where I’ve spent pretty much all my time with Planet Zoo to date. An improvement I noticed straight away compared to Planet Coaster is that you can now customize your level of difficulty in each career mode level, which is an appreciated touch as it’s allowed me to make the intro stages harder, as those are otherwise a cakewalk if you're familiar with the genre. 

Perfectly crafted for console 

To be honest, management sims such as Planet Zoo are usually better when played with a keyboard and mouse. Because your interactions with the game are almost entirely tabbing through a vast network of menus and submenus, it’s easier when you can quickly click across the screen rather than having to thumb through every option first. 

But, I must give Frontier a lot of credit for the control scheme they created in Planet Coaster, which has been replicated (with a few very minor tweaks), in Planet Zoo. Navigating the game’s mesh of menus is a breeze even on a joystick, and smart decisions have been made to ensure the player experience is not hampered even when played on a console controller. Plus, Frontier avoids utilizing the dreaded on-screen cursor which is always cumbersome on a controller, so extra kudos there. 

Perhaps the one area that does suffer on console is construction. It’s definitely still possible to build intricate structures and symmetrical animal pens using a controller, but some of the precision that comes with using a mouse is lost in translation. Fortunately, Planet Zoo: Console Edition supports keyboard and mouse, so players have that option if they find that a controller just isn't getting the job done.   

Lions and tigers and bears… 

Having played dozens of hours of Planet Coaster, I’m naturally feeling a great sense of familiarity with Planet Zoo. The menus and UI are almost identical, and the visuals are too with many assists reused or repurposed. Plus, the general gameplay is roughly the same as you seek to build an impressive-looking park with all the amenities your guests could ever want — after all, happy guests spend more money! 

Of course, the key difference in Planet Zoo is that instead of designing adrenaline-raising roller coasters, you’re constructing luscious habitats for a whole herd of animals ranging from African Savannah Elephants to Asian Small-Clawed Otters. To be honest, before playing Planet Zoo myself, I wondered if caring for animals would be a little less engaging than building coasters, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how compelling I find keeping my creatures content. 

In Planet Coaster, once you’ve designed your perfect thrill ride, you open it to the public and move on to the next, but in Planet Zoo, your animals need constant care. It’s not enough to just build them a nice habitat and then forget about them. Neglect any of your animals for too long, and they will become unsettled, get ill and eventually can even die. Being required to constantly check their needs has led me to create actual bonds with these digital beasts, and want to see them thrive. 

During one of the early career mode levels, I accidentally placed two incompatible animals in the same habitat. This lead to them clashing, and one of them mauled the other to death (don’t worry, Planet Zoo is a family-friendly game, there was no blood involved). After discovering this, I wasn’t just annoyed because my in-game progress was impacted, but also because I felt that I’d failed my duty of care. That’s a feeling I never had during all my hours with Planet Coaster.  

Goodbye, spare time 

Even after just a few sessions with Planet Zoo, it’s already very clear to me that, just like it’s predecessor, it’s going to be stealing an awful lot of my free time in the weeks ahead. Much like Planet Coaster before it, I expect it’ll become a permanent fixture on my PS5’s hard drive for years to come. 

Frontier has once again done a phenomenal job bringing a game that was clearly designed for PC initially over to console with almost no hiccups. The controls are extremely intuitive, and the level of content on offer is vast, and there's even a Season Pass if you want even more animals to care for, and extra career mode levels to enjoy. However, it costs an eyewatering $69, which is more than the base game! 

Planet Zoo is a game that you can very easily lose an almost frightening amount of time playing. Just last night, I sat down to "quickly" create a habitat for a pair of Grizzly Bears, and an hour later, was still perfecting the placement of each plant, and making sure that my guests would have the best viewpoint of the bears possible. 

Planet Zoo is a very special game, and while it’s taken a little longer than I’d expected for it to make its way over to console (the game originally launched on PC in 2019), I’m thrilled that it’s finally arrived, and it’s just as brilliant as I hoped. Now, I’m off to go check on my zoo, it’s almost feeding time and the animals are getting hungry. 

Planet Zoo is available now on PS5, Xbox Series X and PC.

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Rory is an Entertainment Editor at Tom’s Guide based in the UK. He covers a wide range of topics but with a particular focus on gaming and streaming. When he’s not reviewing the latest games, searching for hidden gems on Netflix, or writing hot takes on new gaming hardware, TV shows and movies, he can be found attending music festivals and getting far too emotionally invested in his favorite football team. 

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