Never enough animal keepers

[weoweoe]

I have no clue what I have been doing wrong, or if I have encountered some weird bug, but I cannot hire enough animal keepers for my zoo. Every zoo I have tried to build starts out okay, but once I get to around 7-10 enclosures no amount of animal keepers is enough. In one zoo, I ended up with over 200 total animal keepers to cover 7 or so modestly sized enclosures with a moderate amount of animals. I tried giving them work zones, and just ended up with over 20 useless animal keepers per enclosure. Every morning the game tells me to hire more zookeepers, my guests complain of the skeletal animals and how stinky they are, no matter how nice of food I try to feed them. My budget quickly becomes unmanageable from paying insane salaries, and the game has been unplayable beyond the very beginning. It sucks, I have really enjoyed the weird demo version of this, and would sure like to play the rest of the game I payed for.

[weoweoe]

When faced with multiple hypothesis, the best choice is to experiment, so I returned to my original question, is it me or the game?
I double checked the forums and system requirements to find my computer is fine, and no one seems to have the same issue. Next I uninstalled and reinstalled the game to open it up and try the experiment in full. I had two guesses beyond my computer being crap. 1: Simulation lag. As a long time simulation game player, I often set these games to full speed and sit back doing something else like knitting, only jumping in once I have all the funds I could want or run across an issue. Perhaps, the rate at time passed was speed up far more than the speed of my keepers. Leading them to be unable to finish their tasks in time, only worsened by adding more and more keepers with struggling AI. 2: I messed up by not dealing with work zones and thinking out my keepers routines sooner. Maybe it's 1 and 2.

So I started a new zoo. I planned out my lay out to place the shed close to the middle of the park with wide paths and small enclosures with their gates pointed closest to this shed to optimize keepers speed. After looking through the forums I discovered a normal amount of animal keepers is a very manageable 1 per enclosure. I made sure each of my enclosures had their own keeper assigned, in addition to an extra zookeeper for each four enclosures to really keep things covered. I never set my speed above 2x and tried again. After getting five enclosures set up and going, all of my animals started starving again.

More experiments are needed, though I do not believe I have the energy or time for this.

Edit to add: I keep my food shed fully stocked with each animal consuming a balanced diet of 25% of each ingredient.

[ZxAxify]

Hi! Sorry you're having trouble with the zookeepers, do you mind if I could grab your save so we can have a look? It should be in a similar folder to:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Let's Build a Zoo\Save

You'll see a bunch of ZSV files, the number at the end is what save slot the save is in, so you can just grab the relevant one!

[weoweoe]

I would be more than happy to, where can I send it to?

[Akari]

Been playing multiple mid-length and came across this same issue in one of my last games. I believe I've figured out the specific scenario similar to yours --- specifying zones for the animal keepers is the way to go indeed, BUT don't give them multiple enclosures per person.

I had initially thought that since if there's nothing to do then they will then take care of the next enclosure, however in that play through I also had fewer enclosures (1 per habitation type) but tons of (forced) cohabitation animals (like A LOT, you can imagine all the grass habitation animals with zero contraception from the start of the game, so the enclosure was almost two maps big lol) so poop cleaning took terribly too long even though every keeper was on it (I had to hire a couple dozens a well), and they kept prioritizing finishing whatever enclosure first instead of feed all then just come back for poop later, so I also started getting other enclosures consistently unfed for days.

So a fresh playthrough after, I did a one enclosure per keeper only setup and everyone's so far so good timely fed; now just a matter of more keepers per enclosure if and only if there's too many animals in certain enclosures (round maybe 1 keeper per dozen animals in one enclosure is generous) for constant poop control. Never mind the part where if one keeper is done with feeding and poop cleaning they will constantly revisit the same enclosure each round, wasting time repeating the storehouse to gate and vice versa loop of a walk if there's nothing to do --- in a sense at least they get to guarantee feeding is first of the day priority for that enclosure and re-checks for poop are always welcome. That particular playthrough had 9 enclosures going, with 2-10 animals each (but I had mostly tried to keep enclosure populations on the lower end this time).

Doing that run I also had a further added appreciation for the subway in front of storehouse and building enclosures with gates almost immediately around other subways for the shorted possible distance of keepers' patrols to and from the storehouse.

Hope this helps! :)

[Akari]

Couldn't edit but had to add this detail for just in case science: I kept the 5$ ad for keepers on since the start of the game so I could ensure every keeper I hire had green work ethic. No bonuses/added salaries. This was for both of the above playthroughs.

[ZxAxify]

Originally posted by weoweoe:

I would be more than happy to, where can I send it to?

Thank you!!! Can you upload it to dropbox or google drive or anything that's best for you and shoot me over the link? :)

[ZxAxify]

Originally posted by Akari:

Been playing multiple mid-length and came across this same issue in one of my last games. I believe I've figured out the specific scenario similar to yours --- specifying zones for the animal keepers is the way to go indeed, BUT don't give them multiple enclosures per person.

I had initially thought that since if there's nothing to do then they will then take care of the next enclosure, however in that play through I also had fewer enclosures (1 per habitation type) but tons of (forced) cohabitation animals (like A LOT, you can imagine all the grass habitation animals with zero contraception from the start of the game, so the enclosure was almost two maps big lol) so poop cleaning took terribly too long even though every keeper was on it (I had to hire a couple dozens a well), and they kept prioritizing finishing whatever enclosure first instead of feed all then just come back for poop later, so I also started getting other enclosures consistently unfed for days.

So a fresh playthrough after, I did a one enclosure per keeper only setup and everyone's so far so good timely fed; now just a matter of more keepers per enclosure if and only if there's too many animals in certain enclosures (round maybe 1 keeper per dozen animals in one enclosure is generous) for constant poop control. Never mind the part where if one keeper is done with feeding and poop cleaning they will constantly revisit the same enclosure each round, wasting time repeating the storehouse to gate and vice versa loop of a walk if there's nothing to do --- in a sense at least they get to guarantee feeding is first of the day priority for that enclosure and re-checks for poop are always welcome. That particular playthrough had 9 enclosures going, with 2-10 animals each (but I had mostly tried to keep enclosure populations on the lower end this time).

Doing that run I also had a further added appreciation for the subway in front of storehouse and building enclosures with gates almost immediately around other subways for the shorted possible distance of keepers' patrols to and from the storehouse.

Hope this helps! :)

This is some really nice detail, thank you for writing all this out! I'm glad you were able to experiment and have your zoo run way better! The subways are a great trick - having subways near the enclosures means the zookeepers can get around much faster!