Building guest areas

Building exhibits

Caring for animals

Moving around your zoo

Taking great photos

Playing challenge games

Building guest areas

• Make paths at least 2-3 tiles wide to give your guests plenty of room to walk.
• When you place a guest service building along a path, build on the second tile (or farther) from the path. A tile of space between the building and the path allows a few guests to line up without disrupting the traffic.
• Build food court hubs in central areas among several exhibits. Guests can easily fulfill their needs and the animals are within easy walking distance.
• Accessibility is important! Always place donation boxes, trash cans, and other amenities in high traffic areas to make it easy for guests to drop off their donations (or their trash).
• Place an educator podium and an educator near your most popular exhibits (especially multi-species exhibits) for maximum educational effect.
• Assess building locations. If buildings aren’t earning enough money, move or bulldoze/recycle them.
• Gift carts (and later gift shops) turn a nice profit and also make guests happy. Guests like souvenirs of their visit to your zoo. As soon as they become available (at 1 star of zoo fame), place a gift cart in front of every exhibit. Place gift carts near low-fame exhibits and gift shops near rare animal exhibits.

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Building exhibits

• Check out the Biome Squares map (available in both challenge and freeform games). It’s a great example of the inventive zoo-design solutions possible with the free-of-charge terrain-modification tools.
• Use the zoo walls as part of the animal exhibit fencing to save money.
• Share fences and walls between exhibits to save money. Remember to add a staff gate between the exhibits for easy access for your staff and yourself when you’re in Zoo Guest mode.
• U-shaped or “dented” exhibits allow guests to see farther into an exhibit to get a better view of your animals. Place paths into the area where the exhibit will be located, and then place the fence around the path in a U-shape.
• Place animal food, water, and enrichment items near guest viewing areas so they can enjoy interesting animal behaviors.
• Remember that all animals have privacy needs, but not all species can use a shelter. For sunken exhibits that guests view from a higher elevation where they can see everything, you may need to use natural barriers, such as hills, rows of trees, or solid fencing such as brick wall fence to impede guests’ line of sight and give your animals the privacy they need.
• Locate exhibits with similar biomes in the same area. Animals are sensitive to the conditions around their exhibits, so it makes them feel more at home. Avoid placing exhibits with conflicting biomes near each other. The cold tundra and hot savannah biomes simply don’t mesh well in the same area.
• Provide animals that can swim with deep water in their exhibits. This lets them satisfy both privacy and exercise needs.
• Plan for the future! If you want to breed animals or care for them until you can release them to the wild, be sure to plan for exhibit expansion. Some animals need extra space or they challenge and fight each other.
• Consider building a multi-species exhibit. Guests love it (and donate more money) when you recreate the African Savannah. But it’ll be tough for your staff to keep up with all those animals, so you may need to go into Zoo Guest mode and get your own hands dirty scooping up some poop yourself.
• Animals prefer to relieve themselves on a patch of dirt or a rock if there is no dirt in the exhibit. Provide a suitably private dirt or rock patch within reasonable distance of the food-and-water area.
• Terrain changes stop at fences to make it easy to “draw inside the lines.” Press and hold the Shift key while changing terrain near fences and the terrain will go through the fence.

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Caring for animals

• Animals can drink water placed by the biome brush, which saves you some cash and doesn’t require refills. But be careful—some animals can’t swim, even in shallow water, so keep an eye on them when they take a sip.
• Place some native foliage in with your hungry herbivores. Some animals can eat the plants in their exhibit, which saves you money and the hassle of refilling food dishes.
• If you adopt a pair of animals and treat them well, you’ll soon have a baby animal or two. This not only grows your zoo but fulfills the animals’ social needs.
• If you have fame problems, release an older animal or two into the wild. It gives your zoo an instant fame boost.

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Moving around your zoo

• Staff gates are very, very handy. When taking care of your animals in Zoo Guest mode, note any areas you’d like to pass through and then place a staff gate there. This works especially well when several exhibits share fences.
• Want to jump to each exhibit easily? Assign one zookeeper to all of the exhibits. Then you can select that zookeeper to open his or her information panel and jump to each assignment flag post effortlessly.
• When in Zoo Guest mode, press and hold the Shift key to walk faster.

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Taking great photos

• When in Photo Safari mode, press and hold the X key to crouch lower to the ground. You can get some fancy perspectives using this technique!

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Playing challenge games

• When you’re offered a challenge game, compare the amount of money you have with the requirements of the challenge. If it simply costs too much to set up your zoo for a particular challenge, feel free to decline it. Once you commit to a non-photo challenge, you must complete it or fail it before you can move on to another non-photo challenge.

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