1. Planet Zoo
  2. News

Planet Zoo News

Planet Zoo - Update 1.0.2.1

Hayo zookeepers!

Thanks for your feedback and making us aware of your feelings regarding the change to the rocks counting towards terrain requirements.

We completely agreed with your feedback as it, unintentionally, affected a lot of previous work; so we want to let you know it has been reverted back to what how it worked previously.

That is: rocks will no longer impact the terrain requirement for your animals. You are once again free to use however many rocks you would like!

This revert has not impacted Update 1.0.2.

Thank you for all of your support. You all rock! 💚:D

Planet Zoo - Update 1.0.2

Hayo zookeepers!

Thank you for all of your wonderfully useful feedback regarding Planet Zoo so far! Thanks to all the reports our community have made, we've been able to implement a wide variety of fixes. We hope that Update 1.0.2 improves your Planet Zoo experience, but please continue to talk to us on the forums and file reports in the Issue Tracker if you feel you're experiencing an issue that has not been addressed.

Here's the Update Notes:

Animals
  • Fixed a number of cases where animals might ignore food placed in their habitat.
  • Fix for animal shake behaviour which could lead to them temporarily getting stuck.
  • Fixed issue where going from water to climbing frames could get animals stuck in a loop.
  • Fix for boxed animals reporting that they are escaped incorrectly.
  • Fix for animals walking on water when using climbing frames in water.
  • Fix for animals jumping incorrectly, which could lead to them becoming stuck on shelter roofs.
  • Animals group together more often to encourage herding.
  • Improvements to animals boxing unexpectedly.
  • Increased population and sex limits of Timber Wolf and African Wild Dog allowing for larger, relatively peaceful packs that still Alpha fight infrequently.
  • Fix for some animals being pushed through the floor when being tranquilised.
  • Fixed discrepancy in how exhibit animal welfare was being reported.
Staff
  • Fix for Staff getting stuck when navigating.
  • Fix for Vet getting stuck when Vet and Caretaker were both sent to do the same job.
  • Fix for Mechanics navigating to vandalised objects they shouldn't be able to reach.
  • Fix for Mechanic sliding whilst repairing objects.
  • Vendors will now leave newly placed shops if they are unpowered.
Guests
  • Fix for guests getting stuck when navigating.
  • Guest thoughts about ticket prices should now update more quickly.
  • Reduced loss of guest happiness from bad education sources.
  • Fix for guest thoughts reporting animal visibility incorrectly; guests will report good views!
Sandbox Mode
  • Added option to limit guest numbers; you can find this setting under Settings - Game - Current Save Settings (as a tick box).
Stability
  • Multiple crash and stability fixes.
Franchise Mode
  • Better notifications for failed connections.
  • Fix for guest avatars showing no name.
  • Seriously injured animals can't now be traded.
  • Locked the entrance gates so they can't accidentally be deleted.
  • Fixed issue with friend list sometimes populating incorrectly.
  • Added an icon to the Animal Exchange which will mark animals with albinism/leucism.
  • Optimisations on server load.
Career Mode
  • Stars should now show correctly on Career Mode saves.
  • Fixed an issue causing the 'raise barrier height' objective in Scenario 1 to not complete when multi-selecting barriers.
  • Added hint for Scenario 3 to locate workshop objective.
  • Fixed Scenario 3 objective logic to include Giant Pandas that have already been sent to Quarantine.
  • Stopped Scenario 3 Giant Pandas being able to be released to the wild.
  • Changed Scenario 5 bronze education objective to use star rating.
  • Updated time of day in scenario 8.
  • Fixed issue with tutorial hint tips disappearing.
Building and Editing
  • Fixed case where pressing X would stop toggling between rotate and movement in advanced movement mode.
  • Fix for placement options not showing for duplicated objects
  • Enable setting flexicolour for multiple items in group edit mode.
  • Copy and pasting education objects now retains the assigned education topic.
  • Fixed issue where deleting and undoing deletion of facilities and power sources could cause the facilities to be incorrectly unpowered.
UI
  • The Trade Centre should now report animals' correct 'source' information.
  • Fixed some errors in the Zoopedia regarding age of maturity.
  • Y axis on finance graph now reports figures above £100,000 correctly.
  • Fix for sorting exhibit animals by species.
  • Fixed issue when saving a blueprint with quotation marks in the name would cause them not to show up in game.
  • Added bar to transport ride UI to show wear and tear.
  • Fixed unresponsive UI elements when clicking off Zoopedia.
  • When locating an animal in the animal management menu it will now open the animal's information panel.
  • Animal information panel enrichment bar now shows correct value.
  • Switched the position of Staff thoughts and Staff needs in their info panel.
  • Notifications for Staff not being able to find Staff Centre or Keeper Huts are now red and pop out.
  • Fix for animal information panel not updating to dead animal information panel.
  • Added alerts for inaccessible Power and Water Treatment Facilities.
  • Fixed discrepancy in loan repayments being reported incorrectly.
Barriers
  • Animals can now escape via climbable chain link fences.
  • Fix for animals pouncing through walls.
Feeders
  • Increased the capacity of the Forage Pool Enrichment Feeder to help with feeding issues.
Scenery & Foliage
  • We solved the case of the mysterious missing D alphabet letter!
  • Adjusted which branches can be climbed on the large pines.
Achievements
  • The 'Welcome to Planet Zoo' achievement should now unlock correctly for people who played the Beta.
Audio
  • Fix for audio occasionally briefly cutting out.
Localisation

  • Various localisation bug fixes.


We are now working on Sandbox Mode additions, and have more fixes in progress for issues which you’ve raised which we hope to release in the next Planet Zoo update. Thank you again for all of your kind support!

Planet Zoo - Update 1.0.1

Hello Zookeepers!

It's been two days since Planet Zoo's launch and your initial reaction has been phenomenal! We've been loving all of the creations, screenshots and animal details you have shared! We're so grateful for the feedback and reports you have been sending in and the team has been working hard to resolve as many issues as possible.

We've now rolled out our first update for Planet Zoo, designed to fix some of the most immediate issues which have been raised. Please don't worry if an issue you have reported isn't listed; we are still hard at work on your reports and feedback and will have more updates coming soon! Please take a look below for the full update notes:

Stability
Added several crash and stability fixes, including -
  • Crash when deleting pick up based enrichment item while an animal is using it;
  • Crash when moving staff buildings;
  • Crash when moving animals to quarantine;
  • Crash when selecting the Inspector notification;
  • Crash when signing up to newsletter;
  • Crash when deleting shops;
  • Crash when moving exhibits;
  • Crash when animals are released to wild;
  • Crash when using 'locate' button from objectives;
  • Crash when switching between fullscreen and borderless.
Scenarios
  • Fixed some objectives in Scenario 3 of Career Mode auto-completing.
Franchise Mode & Main Menu
  • The newsletter sign-up is now hidden during the welcome screen. This will prevent any issues from signing up before creating your avatar.
  • Fixed issue with profanity filter not allowing players to create franchise zoos. We have also improved messaging regarding this issue.
Staff
  • Fixed issue with multiple mechanics not repairing vandalised objects efficiently.
Animals
  • Various improvements have been made to climbing (Sorry flying bears!)
UI
  • Zoo tax is now shown on the Zoo Overview menu to give you greater information on your finances.

Guests
  • Fix for guest avatar heads disappearing.
Rendering
  • Fix rendering issues caused by ultra wide displays.
General
  • We are aware of an issue where the wrong image is displayed for the Community Challenge (it should be the tigers!). If this is the case, please restart your Steam client as it's a caching issue; do let us know if the issue persists!

As mentioned, this is only the first of our post-launch updates for Planet Zoo. We'll be sure to keep you informed regarding the next ones! Thank you again for your continued support and feedback!

Planet Zoo is OUT NOW 🦁🦓🦒

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

It feels like forever ago, but it's only been seven months since we originally announced Planet Zoo; we'd been working on the game for over two years, and at that point we finally got to share what we had in store for you.


Today, on 5 November 2019, Planet Zoo is live!


Planet Zoo is an absolute passion project for us as a studio; many of us at Frontier have grown up playing similar titles, taking care of our zoos and our animals (or you know, occasionally releasing them to chase out the guests!), so for us to have the chance to bring Planet Zoo to a whole new generation was very special.

Planet Zoo is all about running a successful zoo, in whichever way you prefer to play. In Career Mode, you are joining a cast of original characters on a journey around the world facing different challenges depending on where your zoo is located. We've taken great care to bring you a fun, engaging, and original story filled with adventure and progressively harder objectives. We've also got Franchise Mode, which is aimed at those who are keen to work together and trade animals with a global network of other players, and run multiple zoos. Franchise Mode also contains weekly Community Challenges, which are exciting objectives that run from Tuesdays to Sundays and result in an exciting new outfit for your avatar if successful! If you prefer to keep the challenge to yourself and your own zoo, we've got Challenge Mode for you - here you'll find specific Zoo Challenges on a limited budget. And finally, of course we have Sandbox Mode for all those who want to build and create without any limitations! Let your imagination truly run wild...

Animal welfare is at the heart of Planet Zoo. You are tasked with creating the perfect habitats, monitoring your animal's individual needs, and ensuring you have enough Zookeepers, Veterinarians, and other Staff to take care of all of your zoo's inhabitants. We've created the Zoopedia, an in-game hub which hosts all the information on every animal species in your zoo. You can find their preferred surroundings, foliage and temperature, their conservation status, and even which other species they could co-exist with!

A successful zoo is not just about happy and healthy animals - you also want to take care of your guests so that they give your zoo a high rating! Place Shops and other guest facilities to make sure they have spaces to eat and rest, have enough benches and bins, and hide away your Staff facility buildings from sight. Guests will want to see the animals too, so find the balance between a good view and an animal's privacy - and don't forget to place Education signs so guests can learn about the animals, as well as Donation Boxes which contribute to your cash flow and animal conservation!

And if you're simply into building the most amazing structures and habitats, we've got the Steam Workshop all set up for you. There's lots of building and scenery pieces for you to use, so anything from custom entrances to climbing structures can be shared with the entire community. We've even made it possible to add terrain to Habitat blueprints, so you can create the perfect habitat and upload it straight to the Workshop. We cannot wait to see what you're going to create!

Of course there's so much more to Planet Zoo, and we're really excited you can now finally play the full game and explore everything yourself. We will be here every step of the way with weekly livestreams, Community Challenges, developer interviews, and more! We'd like to encourage you to keep using the official forums and social channels for your feedback - we're reading everything. Let us know what you discover, which animals steal your heart (they will!), and share your creations with us.

Thank you so much for your ongoing support, your passion and enthusiasm about the game, and all of your helpful feedback and comments. Now go and create the zoo of your dreams!

❤️
The Planet Zoo team.

Planet Zoo - Launch Update Notes

Planet Zoo - Launch Update Notes

There have been many updates and bug fixes to Planet Zoo since our Beta; here are some of the more noteworthy things we'd like to call out before you jump into the game!

General
  • When launching the game after clicking PLAY in Steam, you may encounter a delay where you see a white screen prior to the game appearing.
  • If you have an existing Scenario 1 save from the Beta, please delete your save for the best play experience.
  • Blueprints from the Beta should be available on the Steam Workshop. Some asset pivot points may have changed, which means your blueprint might require moving and resaving.
  • Please create an avatar before signing up to the newsletter.


Animals
  • Further balancing to breeding rates.
  • Average animal longevity has been raised.
  • Improvements to animal boxing and unboxing.
  • Further social interaction animations added.
  • Big cats now have retractable claws (except for the Cheetah, as they are not supposed to have retractable claws).


Staff
  • Keepers will work out how much food they need to prepare for a habitat based on how many animals are in the habitat. They will then prioritise filling enrichment feeders before standard feeders. This can mean that if all of the prepared food is placed in enrichment feeders, the standard feeders won't be filled!
  • There have been many improvements to keeper feeding behaviour. Keepers can become tired and won't perform their duties if they are not rested, so make sure you let them have some time off at a Staff Centre now and again.
  • Mechanics should now fix broken facilities more reliably.


Franchise Mode & Frontend
  • The Animal Exchange can now be filtered.
  • Improved notifications when players are unable to purchase animals from the Animal Market.

Research
  • Vets now stop researching once they reach advanced research and must be manually re-assigned.
  • Mechanics will now perform continuous research until they complete the category they are assigned to.


Help, UI & Notifications
  • Planet Zoo has extensive help files; these are a great way to learn how to run your zoo smoothly.
  • Additional notifications including animal pregnancy/birth.
  • Improved setting ticket prices