Is this a bug? Sudden (after loading the save game) overpopulation in most enclosures?

[KingDingbat]

I'm having a puzzling and unexpected problem and I wonder if it's a bug? I've been playing this sandbox zoo for 40+ hours. Everythings been fine. But tonight when I loaded it up, I started getting flooded with animal welfare notifications. I started to look, and it seemed like all the animals in at least many of my enclosures are suddenly "overcrowded" or "severe social issues". I looked at the populations and they were low. I'm talking about 4 alpacas in a 30,000+ sq ft enclosure and 4 chimpanzees in a very large enclosure that they're normally happy in. I'm pretty good at keeping populations controlled, and I know that these statuses were not happening when I saved my game last time. Then I just on a whim wondered if they were having trouble with enrichment / food objects interfering with their "navigable space" or whatever. So I moved the water well in the alpaca enclosure to another spot. Immediately, they all went back to happy green stats. I did the same thing in the chimp enclosure, and sure enough, it fixed it too. The only thing I did was move the water wells in both enclosures.

Here's the thing though: Both of these enclosures are .... 30+ hours old with no edits. I didn't change anything at all in them between when the animals were happy and when they were suddenly unhappy. The only thing I can think of is there's some kind of weird bug with the spacial AI triggered by reloading the save game file?

Just wondered if anyone else had experienced this.

[s_linkletter]

I had that happen in one of my enclosures yesterday. I put it down to a glitch in the matrix. I only saw it once. I suspect it was odd coding being tested, or overloading of the servers, or something.

[grampers62]

There is an issue where habitats sometimes lose data during a save/load cycle. You did the correct thing by forcing the habitat to reset. Many times we can move an object, wait a moment and then hit ctrl+z to undo the move and continue on like nothing happened. Occasionally the lapse is more stubborn and we need to to the move and undo on a barrier post. Some players will link an object in each habitat to one building group so that they might move that group and undo to effectively reset all habitats at once.

[KingDingbat]

Originally posted by grampers62:

Some players will link an object in each habitat to one building group so that they might move that group and undo to effectively reset all habitats at once.

GENUIS!

It's good to know I'm not losing my mind, but a bummer that potentially have to fix habitats frequently.

[grampers62]

Not my genius idea. to link the habitat items. Seemed to have been a joint concept by many players though...