Tips for enclosure planting/ground decorations.
**All images were from my sandbox zoo which contains habitats made purposely for this guide! Also, I’m not the best, but I wanted to make this to help other beginners!**
To make it look nice- don’t place trees/flowerings in the corner, it looks odd and animals who can climb, can climb out.
Also, make sure the biome and continents are correct before you plant everything for your wonderful animal. (You can do this by clicking the animal > environment > ideal plant range, or going into the zoopedia)
If you need a certain coverage, and it’s a pretty large amount you need, don’t just spam one plant around! Scatter it, and switch between trees/bushes/flowers to make it look natural and pretty. If vines/mosses are available, try to use those! Press ‘X’ (by default) to advancely translate and/or rotate the vine(s).
You want happy animals, don’t you? Well, of course you do! The clouded leopard looks cute and happy! That’s because the enclosure is a perfect size with perfect hides and a perfect climbing area!
*Enclosure made by Prinsass Jasmine*
When it comes to an animal that can climb, you wanna avoid adding trees around the barriers, like a mentioned earlier. But you also want to avoid them being able to climb the walls! You’re able to see if a wall is climbable by hovering over it with your mouse in the barrier section. You can make them climb proof, though! You also want the walls tall enough so they won’t escape, but still look good. I do this by avoiding anything climbable too close to the wall, always works for me!
In the zoopedia, you can see what the minimum size for an enclosure needs to be. You’ll be surprised on how big they can be, ha.
My koala enclosure is actually 882m2, which is 642m2 larger than the minimum, which if you’re too lazy to do the math, it’s 240m2. Which is pretty small for koalas, if you think about the hard shelter, food bowls ect.
When you have swimable areas, for let’s say; hippos, you sometimes [at least I do] accidentally go overboard with it and remove some ground below the barrier and past it. When that happens and the animal goes past the barrier underneath it, the animal will be marked as “escaped”. So be aware! Same thing will happen if an animal climbs on top of a tree with goes over the barrier, that happened to me.
Oh, goodie, we got an animal who is social! In the zoopedia, under species data, you can see their group size minimum and maximum. This is helpful, obviously, because they won’t get stressed out or sad and lonely. If failure to do so… that will result in the animal possibly escaping or try to escape. Also, some, not all, animals can and will get enriched by other species in their habitat. e.g. Meerkat and aardvark together in an enclosure.
Others.. well.. Will result in predation, which isn’t a good thing unless you’re like me and purposely made predation happen for fun. I recommend having not too many males and females because then they’ll breed, a lot. I usually do just females or males in a habitat, but if I really do have to, I’ll do both in a habitat.
Greater flamingos, though, can have up to 500 in a single habitat! That’s when you can usually do males and females. Unless you want to sell your animals, then breed them freely.
Only bears and such can be lonely! Sad.
Thanks to wdwmccartys for his great guide, all credit to his effort. you can also read the original guide from Steam Community. enjoy the game.
