Food costs

[ONE MAN ARMY]

Why do birds seem to cost so much to feed? My zoo runs fine until I add flamingos or peacocks then my food cost spikes more then if I added another charnivore exhibit.

[MrHappy]

Is it because you researched better food for the birds and that is more expensive? Might work to control the breeding and numbers a bit more. Use the contraceptives on all birds but 1 Male and 2 females.

[ONE MAN ARMY]

I have 2 flamingos and 1 peacock all female. I have like 8 pandas and they never cost that much to feed. Does the the food auto upgrade as you research?

[Moving Target]

Originally posted by ONE MAN ARMY:

I have 2 flamingos and 1 peacock all female. I have like 8 pandas and they never cost that much to feed. Does the the food auto upgrade as you research?

No, and I can't believe it costs more to feed 2 Flamingos and a Peafowl rather than 8 pandas, on quantity of animals alone the pandas would cost more!
Are you checking the costs from the habitat menu?
Carnivores cost WAY more to feed than herbivores!

[XrystalBelle]

Animal quantity, size and food source and quality affects the pricing for food.

Peafowl and flamingo start low due to the small number of animals. But once they start breeding those babies start eating all the food within seconds increasing the number of times the zoo keeper has to place food that year.

As to your zoo, I wouldn't be surprised to find that the Pandas are the source of your prices costs.

Look at each habitats cost and see what happens with those numbers near the end of the year. And watch it for a few years. You will probably find that your birds are consistently low and your pandas have low/high biannual spikes due to sporadic feeding due to the different rates the animals are getting hungry.

[MrHappy]

I got to admit it sounded really strange to me as well but I thought I was missing something. Moving Target and Xrystalbelle seem to have similar feelings to me. It sounds to me like overall running costs rather than just food. Or its a bug reporting the wrong food costs, but I've never heard of that bug or seen it reported. In my mind I feel as though there is something going on with overall running costs.

Once researched you can upgrade the food type for each animal by clicking on it's habitat and choosing the animal paw button.

[ONE MAN ARMY]

Yeah I checked and food is all at the lowest cost. Just seems odd my zoo runs fine until I added another exhibit with a standard animal and my zoos finances go out of wack. I've heard people say it happens when you add higher ticket animals but I've noticed it with regular 1s. Its so wierd because cost are stable for a while then keep fluctuating up and down without any changes. Like I'll make 1,000 1 year n be -5000 the next. I think I've stabilized it now but its so odd. I've had to close zoos because the running costs fluctuated out of control until I couldn't get out of dept. my current zoo that happened but I saved it and now it started again. seems like if its not a bug the running cost system needs to be adjusted.

[XrystalBelle]

Originally posted by ONE MAN ARMY:

Yeah I checked and food is all at the lowest cost. Just seems odd my zoo runs fine until I added another exhibit with a standard animal and my zoos finances go out of wack. I've heard people say it happens when you add higher ticket animals but I've noticed it with regular 1s. Its so wierd because cost are stable for a while then keep fluctuating up and down without any changes. Like I'll make 1,000 1 year n be -5000 the next. I think I've stabilized it now but its so odd. I've had to close zoos because the running costs fluctuated out of control until I couldn't get out of dept. my current zoo that happened but I saved it and now it started again. seems like if its not a bug the running cost system needs to be adjusted.

Yep, sounds like the biannual feeding cost cycle. You probably have a 6k additional food cost on those years that went negative. If your overall balance is balanced now it might be that you are starting to bring in additional money to help offset those additional costs. Having a look at your finance breakdown and see what the difference between the food costs and income on each year . It may be that the income doesn't rise at the same rate the food costs start climbing, giving you that one or two years where you may go in the red as it balances out. If it doesn't after a few years, maybe it's time to increase income makers to balance things out further - I haven't tried this myself but just thought of it.

[ONE MAN ARMY]

Yeah my income dips a little every other year but not by much. Usually guest count and ticket sales go down slightly but then recovers the next year. I was holding a steady at +2500 guests but then it dipped to 2200 n now bounces between 2100 n 2300. Just doesn't seem vary stable that that little bit can cause you to go from gaining 1000-5000 to loosing 5000 - 20000 a year at 1 point. If food costs are bi anual that might be why the costs spike and it just happens to hit on a low year. I don't see why it can't just be anual or monthly. Its hard to budget Otherwise.

[XrystalBelle]

Originally posted by ONE MAN ARMY:

Yeah my income dips a little every other year but not by much. Usually guest count and ticket sales go down slightly but then recovers the next year. I was holding a steady at +2500 guests but then it dipped to 2200 n now bounces between 2100 n 2300. Just doesn't seem vary stable that that little bit can cause you to go from gaining 1000-5000 to loosing 5000 - 20000 a year at 1 point. If food costs are bi anual that might be why the costs spike and it just happens to hit on a low year. I don't see why it can't just be anual or monthly. Its hard to budget Otherwise.

Yeah, I only noticed it during this elephant task as I had a zoo with just elephants in and a few exhibits. And I could see a very noticeable difference each year. Not sure if we can force them to feed each year using the right animal ratio. And of course it may have been a change introduced to minimise the cash flow problem people were having one of those stability fixes they add in each patch rofl.

[ONE MAN ARMY]

Sounds about right. Fix stability with instability.

[XrystalBelle]

Originally posted by ONE MAN ARMY:

Sounds about right. Fix stability with instability.

Well maybe that was the unintended result to a fix to lower costs , if that is what happened of course rofl.

[ONE MAN ARMY]

Knowing that its billed every 2 years helps with budgeting. It was starting to stablize before but now I'm back to earning a profit. Just wierd how the costs spike like that and when you make adjustments and can't see results for 2 years makes it difficult to stablize again.

[ONE MAN ARMY]

Yeah stabilized for like 5 years n now back to loosing 20k makes no sense

[XrystalBelle]

During those years did you add anything ? Or had an increase in animals or staff ? How old and big is the zoo now ?

If those 5 years had no fundamental changes it may be worth logging it as a potential bug pointing to the lack of change over the 5 year range but the change in profit/loss. If it is a bug they have something to look into and if it isn't maybe they will let people know why it spikes like that.

[ONE MAN ARMY]

No if anything 1 panda died and I replaced it.