Planet Zoo 1.6 Update

Hey Zookeepers!

Are you ready to hear about the latest exciting update to Planet Zoo? What kind of question is that – of course you are!

In patch 1.6, we’ve worked hard to bring you a bevy of improvements that will make your zoo management experience even better. We’re talking new animal behaviours, fresh gameplay options, a new webcam so you can keep tabs on inhabitants, and even a brand new timed scenario.

We really think you’re going to love it. Ahead of patch 1.6’s release on 22 June, here’s a breakdown of what you can expect.

Free Timed Scenario

We’re giving you a fresh challenge for this testing scenario. Here you’ll take over an animal reserve and provide forever homes to diverse species rescued from Guatemala. As a fun twist, there are no animals in the trade centre for you to purchase. Instead, rescued animals are gifted to you on a timer. New animals will continue to be delivered throughout the scenario, which adds an increasing level of difficulty as you adapt to provide the best conditions possible.
Your main focus is animal welfare, so try and build suitable habitats to meet their needs. Achieving that much-wanted gold time depends on how efficiently you can research and maintain animal conditions throughout all of your deliveries!

Deep Swimming Bears

Bears can swim down to deeper depths in patch 1.6. Download the patch to see your Polar Bears, Grizzly Bears, Formosan Black Bears, and Sun Bears take advantage of new swimming animations and play not only on the water’s surface, but far below it. Just like in real life, bears are excellent swimmers, using their strong limbs and streamlined bodies to cut through the water in search of food. In Planet Zoo, we’ve well and truly captured their penchant for paddling.

New-look Sandbox

The sandbox is one of Planet Zoo’s most-loved modes, letting you remove all restrictions and build the zoo of your dreams. In patch 1.6, we’ve improved sandbox mode by giving you a stronger set of defaults. For example, many social welfare options are disabled when you start the mode, so you won’t have to spend time disabling the likes of overcrowding, animal stress, fights, fear, and predation. They’re all off by default!

Also off by default are water grime build-up, so you needn’t send in keepers to clean pools, food going stale, animal escapes, and even negative guest happiness. Of course, if you want to customise your experience, you can toggle one or all of these options on. But in sandbox, we understand you’re after that unique sense of freeform play that removes the concepts of time, death and negative welfare. These refinements to sandbox mode let you jump straight in with less reading, and less fiddling around with settings.

New Webcam

In patch 1.6, you’ll be able to add the brand new webcam item to your habitats. Found under Habitat Webcams, you can set up these up and see what they see whenever you want. Each webcam can move 80 degrees, so don’t worry about animals potentially escaping their cones of vision. You can also upgrade them with night vision – that’s handy for monitoring nocturnal animals. In addition, they come equipped with the same useful on-screen elements as security cameras (in-game date, time, and camera name), so you can quickly identify which camera is which. Just press the left and right arrow keys to cycle through your cameras.
Webcams do require power to function, whether that comes via the habitat’s power, or its own individual power source if located out of a habitat, but there is another benefit making webcams worthwhile: a small marketing boost to the zoo whenever you install one.

Vista Points

If you want to give your guests a stunning sight, try using the new Vista Points asset. Here’s how they work: place one down on a path and link it to either a building, scenery, enrichment item or habitat to give guests a point to move to, stand, and view the selected area. This lets you manage congestion and more easily guide guests throughout your zoo. Guests also receive a happiness boost based on the scenery rating of the vista they’re looking at. With the ability to set your own custom focal points, you’ve got more management over your zoo’s traffic than ever.

Quality-of-Life Features

We’ll end with a roundup of some helpful quality-of-life features that will make it easier than ever to build and manage your ideal zoo. We have:

• Increased all animal storage locations from 50 to 200
• Unlocked trade centre animal restrictions on standard scenarios when gold is achieved
• Adjusted Polar Bear space requirements
• Added a search function to animal management, animal market, animal storage, exhibit market, and exhibit storage
• Added the ability to set precise prices by number rather than a slider
• Add a genetics tooltip when hovering over the animal portrait icon in the animal management panel
• Players can see which animals are currently put up for trade
• The ability to filter search by more than one stat at a time (and search filters are not reset when changing zoos)
• And best of all, additional loading silhouettes representing new animals! Load up Planet Zoo and see which species you can identify…

As you can see, we’ve got so much exciting content coming in this latest free patch! Thanks to you, beloved member of our brilliant PlanZo Fam, for supporting our game. We can’t wait to share more of what we’re working on very soon!