Max habitats

[DuskyDragoon]

How many habitats do you recommend until the game lags too much

[grampers62]

That depends on many factors. The most important being the power of one's computer. But the reality is the lag is directly related to the number of animals, guests and staff. Each ai controlled unit uses an amount of compute operations per cycle. The number individual habitats plays much less significance on operations per compute cycle so the count for those could be theoretically extremely high. But one would never be able to fill those habitats due to the effects of so many animals. A high end computer should be able to have more than 500 animals 200 staff an 6000 guests. actual number will vary by computer and types of hardware within them but the game itself can't really manage more than that due to limits of internal registers without having some amount of anomalies.

[Tonks]

I'm afraid there isn't a definite answer, it varies depending on your machine specs, how many guests you have and how many objects/ assets you have. Building big fancy enclosures with waterfalls and climbable objects will add to the computational load.

Typically, most people do okay when they have less than 500-ish animals in enclosures. The ones in the tanks don't slow you down much. You may have to fine-tune your own average figure.

A big drain on the game is the guest-pathing, I've had a lot of success in reducing lag by installing very wide pathways and placing plazas/squares/piazzas so the guests don't bump into each other as much. when they do, both parties have to recalculate their paths and often end up bumping into each other again etc etc.

[XrystalBelle]

I personally start slowing down if I have more than 15 species ( in their own or large mixed habitats ) as it regularly hits over 200 animals at any one time and I cap guests at 6k. My first zoo was an attempt at a world zoo but it soon became unplayable and I have slowly redistributed the animals out to new zoos and I now have an Alphabet Zoo series with around 15-20 species in each zoo and a World Zoo series with similar counts. It works for me with my reasonable set up (GTX 1070 upgrade from GTX 970 helped alot along with i5-11400F processor and 32gb of memory ). However, with this many animals in the zoo, I frequently pause to micro manage, and that helps. I then switch to another zoo and rinse and repeat before moving to the next. And then I start working on my next new zoo.

Now bear in mind that habitat space alone isn't a factor in lagging. I have a full map in the arctic circle containing just 6 or 7 habitats spread around with a bunch of stores and many guests and staff around the map. The game is having to do a lot at once.

You will need to find your limitation that lets you play the way you want to. Be it guest count, animal count, or how expansive your zoo is. I had hoped that building a spacious zoo would help distribute the guests so that things wouldn't be so bad, but alas, it didn't work as expected.

[Tonks]

Originally posted by XrystalBelle:

I personally start slowing down if I have more than 15 species ( in their own or large mixed habitats ) as it regularly hits over 200 animals at any one time and I cap guests at 6k. My first zoo was an attempt at a world zoo but it soon became unplayable and I have slowly redistributed the animals out to new zoos and I now have an Alphabet Zoo series with around 15-20 species in each zoo and a World Zoo series with similar counts. It works for me with my reasonable set up (GTX 1070 upgrade from GTX 970 helped alot along with i5-11400F processor and 32gb of memory ). However, with this many animals in the zoo, I frequently pause to micro manage, and that helps. I then switch to another zoo and rinse and repeat before moving to the next. And then I start working on my next new zoo.

Now bear in mind that habitat space alone isn't a factor in lagging. I have a full map in the arctic circle containing just 6 or 7 habitats spread around with a bunch of stores and many guests and staff around the map. The game is having to do a lot at once.

You will need to find your limitation that lets you play the way you want to. Be it guest count, animal count, or how expansive your zoo is. I had hoped that building a spacious zoo would help distribute the guests so that things wouldn't be so bad, but alas, it didn't work as expected.

I think you hit a good point with the biome - weather effects like rain and snow are computationally expensive for large areas.

[DuskyDragoon]

I think I would start to stop adding animals after 21 habitats because my laptop might start to lag a bit and I want to save some animals for other zoos instead of reusing them

[Brokkie]

Good question!
I'm trying to get every animal in my current Zoo and yes, it's lagging. But considering all above, that's not really surprising.

This Zoo contains:
- 1205 animals (welness 100%)
- 96 species
- 287 staff (satisfaction 99%) (playing in Dutch, don't know what the correct term is)
- 10.119 guests (satisfaction 94%)
- 106 facilities guests
- 51 facilities staff
- 3 rides
Riverboat 5
Gondola 9
4x4 15

Wondering if I'm gonna make it!

[Brokkie]

O, the specs of my laptop:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60GHz
16,0 GB DDR4 RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti

Settings: High.

So, nothing to fancy. Almost 5 years old.

[grampers62]

Lots of luck with that. I do hope it works out.

[Tonks]

Originally posted by Brokkie:

Good question!
I'm trying to get every animal in my current Zoo and yes, it's lagging. But considering all above, that's not really surprising.

This Zoo contains:
- 1205 animals (welness 100%)
- 96 species
- 287 staff (satisfaction 99%) (playing in Dutch, don't know what the correct term is)
- 10.119 guests (satisfaction 94%)
- 106 facilities guests
- 51 facilities staff
- 3 rides
Riverboat 5
Gondola 9
4x4 15

Wondering if I'm gonna make it!

I'm on a mission to try and fit all species in a zoo, currently got about 1400 and while it is lumpy, it is still working. All the enclosures are as plain as they can be while hitting complete happiness for the animals, so it isn't a visual feast, but it has rides to zip people from one end of the map to the other.