Saturn's Comprehensive Guide to Planet Zoo

My guide to starting off well in Franchise mode in Planet Zoo! Guide will discuss base game tips as well as tips for those with specific DLCs that also help to make more profit in-game! Ultimately the guide is just based on my own knowledge and understanding of the game and it's economy to help you not stumble over the same mistakes that I have and end up $30k in the negative. Meant to be beginner friendly, I just yap a LOT!

Work-in-progress! Will continue to add to this guide with more information over time.

Guide currently covers:
- Money earning
- Breeding
- Some DLC discussion
- Zoo design
- Financial recovery

Starting Zoo Layout

To begin with, this guide assumes that you are aiming to spend as little money as possible, while mostly ignoring aesthetics. This is for the sake of trying to start off with as much profit as possible, so that you can then spend more on the looks of things later on. You want to put a habitat as close to the entrance as possible (will be briefly elaborated on, also will be discussing recommended starter animals in next section). Additionally, you want to put easy-to-access staff facilities nearby. For me, this means with starting out a zoo, I'll usually slap a small habitat to the left, and a staff facilities section to the immediate right.
Make sure to place:

• A small trading facility
  
• A small quarantine
  
• A small veterinary surgery clinic
  
• A small staff room
  
• A small research center
  
• A small workshop

Additionally, your zoo cannot function without staff. To begin with, make sure you hire:

• A keeper
  
• A vet
  
• A caretaker
  
• A mechanic

Security guards, vendors, and educators will be worries for later.

Make sure your staff buildings are placed far enough away from any habitats and the entrance that they do not have a significant negative impact on guests. This can be checked by clicking the radar on the bottom left corner of your screen and the seventh button on the list, which shows things that have a negative image on guests in levels of severity and the range of this impact.

Indian Peafowls: Cheap Baby-Makers

To start off with, you're going to need, obviously, animals. I learned the hard way that you need to make sure your first habitat or exhibit isn't too far away from the zoo entrance. Even if you place benches, visitors will get bored and leave. So when you first start your save file, throw aesthetics entirely out the window, and slap down a habitat as close to the entrance as possible.

For the sake of the guide, I created a flat terrain, easy-mode Temperate zoo. Temperate biomes are heavily recommended for your first run through since there's less concerns about temperature for most animals. Anyway, screenshots will be from this save as a point of reference. From my experience, the best started animals to have have been Indian Peafowls. They're relatively cheap, have large litters, and their habitats can be interactive ones, garnering more attention.
The fencing can be made with hedges, which only cost $0.80, they don't require plant coverage, they're low stress/comfortable with people, do well in most temperatures in a temperate zoo, live for a long time, have many offspring. A singular mirror mobile and a slow feeder will provide the only enrichment you need when first starting. They also require relatively little space- honestly, less than I provided for the Peafowls here! This means, because of land taxes, Indian Peafowls are extremely cheap not just to buy, but to maintain.

When purchasing your peafowl, pay close attention to the cost as well as the stats. The big ones here you're going to be looking for are fertility and immunity. You want relatively cheap peafowl, but you want good stats as well. Ultimately you won't be able to have any with exceptionally high stats or any perfect fours until you are able to build up your conservation credits. Most higher-stat animals are going to be sold by other players, which means the market prices will fluctuate with what people think others will be willing to buy for, and listings will only be up for so long. Just starting out, aim for some with a mix of green and yellow. Chances are you won't have many CC to work with, so your goal here is mainly to buy animals with only cash (not CC like I did with the breeding pair I purchased), with the best stats possible for the lowest price. Sometimes you will have reds, but reds are to be ideally avoided.

One must not underestimate the power of the DONATION BIN when building your habitat! Put donation bins all around the path. Do not put them tightly close together, it'll look ugly and very few will actually be utilized, but do make sure you have multiple along the paths for habitat viewing, so guests at any place have a nearby bin to toss money in. A large portion of your zoo's income will be from donation bins. Happy guests + healthy animals = money! Your largest issue with Indian Peafowls will be space and maturation. The smaller the habitat, the less adult males that will be tolerated without fighting. However, the goal here is to make a consistent profit so you can really kick off your zoo, so once your offspring age up, I suggest selling them or releasing them to build up CC now that you have a money flow from donations.

Butterflies: Absolutely Busted (Grassland Animals DLC)

This section is only for those who own the Grassland Animals pack. If you do not, feel free to skip over it, because none of the advice here applies to you. Anyway! To those of you who do own the pack, or are considering it, in-game money wise, this pack is a HUGE investment because of one factor: butterflies. Butterflies in Planet Zoo are busted. They require a walkthrough exhibit, which is a starting cost of $9,000, which seems steep, but is definitely worth it. Butterflies die fast, but when they're alive, they have a ton of babies, which is where the money comes in. I'd start by buying two-four females and two-four males, ignoring their stats, just buy the cheapest ones possible of your desired type of butterfly. They will breed better stats as time goes on, they require very little maintenance even in that regard. Once placed in the exhibit, raise the temperature to around 25*C. You will also notice a new button beside the maintenance button appear labeled "management." Click on it, and turn on "manage population."

You want to set males and females maximum to at least ten, or any amount over. I do ten so that more are put in my trade center at a more rapid rate. Make sure the processing is set to "store in trade center." If you want to breed for appeal, then set priority to "appeal" and "lowest first," otherwise leave it set to the default of "age" and "highest first." This will keep your high appeal butterflies breeding while weeding the low appeal butterflies out of the breeding pool. Also, make sure your walkthrough exhibit was placed near the entrance or near your first habitat, so that visitors don't have trouble walking to it.

After that, you can let the game idle for a bit, and sell groups of butterflies for literal thousands. This has to be by far the best and easiest method in the game I have found to make money. The only downside is exhibit animals cannot be traded for CC, and butterflies cannot be released to the wild. This method will help only with farming cash, and a butterfly exhibit alone can be huge for making sure that your zoo's funds do not go under.

Whether you have butterflies or not, I heavily suggest now letting your game run on 3x speed in the background for a few minutes to let profit start coming in at this point in time.

You should then be able to claim your first challenge reward:

Greater Flamingos: Cheap Birds No.2

The next recommended animal (though obviously not required, you do do, boo!) for prioritizing profit in-game is Greater Flamingos! They're another base game animal that's relatively cheap, although they have a bit more needs than Indian Peafowl: namely, water! Your breeding pair will need a minimum of 137m^2 swimming area. Like the Indian Peafowl, a mirror mobile will be all they need for toy enrichment. However, you will have to research the Greater Flamingos as well, to unlock their food enrichment item!

Example of a Greater Flamingo Habitat

This is also a good time to hire a mechanic, especially if you use glass barriers for your flamingo habitat like I did. Greater Flamingos will not breed as rapidly as Indian Peafowl, and they also need a larger social group than just a breeding pair. Keep this in mind. Reading an animal's zoopedia is always extremely helpful.

Vendors: Money, money, oh my!

It is at this point that I suggest to you to build one drink shop and one food shop. A lot of people will say not to worry at all about shops and vendors early-game, but they can be very useful for earning cash, and so long as you don't overdo it, you can get guests to buy with only a singular habitat. At this point, I would also suggest buying a security guard.

Better Zoo Design: Recycling Bins

Once you have placed vendors, guest trash will start to be an issue around your zoo. Place recycling bins every few meters away from each other so that guests do not litter on paths and inside of interactive habitats like with your Indian Peafowls. Litter can put your animals' lives at risk.

Financial Recovery

Empty Habitats and Donation Bins
A common problem encountered later on in the game as your zoo grows is money dipping into the negatives. I experienced this in one of my Challenge Mode (offline mode, really) saves recently, where each year my profit was consistently dipping to negative thousands, meaning I was losing money as time went on rather than earning. This is far more managable of a problem later on than it is early, because you'll have already built up some earnings. Immediately, you want to pause (not full hard pause game, but the pause at the bottom), and check for any empty habitats. Habitats instill an area tax. Enough empty habitats can become a severe financial issue. Even if you're like me and usually try to have a breeding pair, don't worry about that. Buy new animals that that the habitat was made for, as many as possible without running into issues (like uneven sex ratio or overcrowding), but also for as cheap as possible, and put them into the habitat. Also ensure you have a n even distribution of donation boxes around your zoo. A lack of donation box placement can mean that you aren't maximizing your earnings, so you now owe money. The majority of your profit will always be donations.

Staff
Another common problem that leads to going into debt is overstaffing. Check your staff page. You want your wordload distribution between worker types and work zones to be efficient. If it is inefficient, see if there are not enough of a certain worker type in a certain zone, or if you are overstaffed. Even if staffing seems okay, chances are you can afford to remove one or two from each category. This will save you a lot of money, as staffing will likely be one of your highest expenses, especially early-mid game. Early game overstaffing can doom a save file.

Extra Animals
Check your habitats for overcrowding. The more animals you have, the higher the feed cost. Often, especially with birds, animals will breed like CRAZY and you'll end up with an overpopulated habitat, which leads to both a high food cost and fighting. I'll often select every animal of that species in the habitat except for two females and two males, and sell them off. Some species only allow for one male in small groups though, like the American Standard Donkey. In this case I will sell most all.