It can be difficult managing your animals in Planet Zoo, and as your zoo grows and you have more animals in your park, it can often be hard to know why they are unhappy or stressed.
It’s not always so straightforward to see why animals are getting stressed in Planet Zoo. If left for too long, not only can it cause your animals harm, but it can also lead to protestors turning up at your zoo as well.
Luckily there are a few ways to identify what is causing your animals to be stressed out, and with some minor adjustments to their habitats, you can have them back to their normal selves in no time.
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Guests Causing Stress
The most common social issue in Planet Zoo is stress, which is caused by guests not giving the animals any privacy.
The solution is simple, you need to give your animals a place to hide away, without the guests causing them stress.
But the problem is, this can then cause guests to be unhappy if they cannot see the animals.
Thankfully there are a couple of ways to deal with this. Firstly by building one-way glass. This will allow the guests to see the animals, but the animals will not be aware of the guests looking at them.
Some animals, such as Aadvarks have burrows, which have cameras in them, this allows the aardvark to hide, and guests to view it via a webcam and screen.
If you’re building a habitat in Planet Zoo where you think the animals are likely to get stressed, you can combine the one-way glass approach, as well as offering more hiding places for your animals.
Gender Imbalance
Every species in Planet Zoo have their own preferences on how they like their habitats, and one of the easiest ones to get wrong is the balance of gender.
This can be especially hard with animals that breed faster than others, and ones that have larger litters, as before you know it there is the wrong mix of gender in the habitat.
When you are planning a habitat, make sure to have a look at the Zoopedia, it is filled with useful information, such as the correct bachelor group size for both male and female animals.
As you can see from the image above, Meerkats like to be in groups of 2-12 males and 2-3 females (excluding juveniles). Getting this wrong could cause social issues for your animals.
When offspring are due, you will get a notification. If the birth takes you over the limit, the best thing to do is sell an adult or two, which can also earn you some extra conservation credits.
Expanding Your Habitats
In addition to selling animals in Planet Zoo when things get too crowded, you can also expand your existing habitats.
Provided you have left enough room to expand, you can make room for more animals, allowing them further space to breathe.
If you don’t want to sell your animals, you can put some into storage to release at a later date. Either to sell or to expand a new habitat.
Use Nature to Your Advantage
While there are plenty of shelters you can use in Planet Zoo to provide hard shelter for your animals, you can also use the items in the nature tab to create more natural habitats.
Meerkats, for instance, love to burrow. You can push the terrain down to create a ditch, then cover it with rocks and layer the bottom with animal bedding to offer a nice cozy space for them.
Keep an eye on the coverage bar when you click on an animal in a habitat. Creating plenty of natural coverage through the use of trees, rocks, and other items can be a great way for your animals to find a natural escape from gazing eyes.
Place "Do Not Disturb" Signs
Placing “Do Not Disturb” signs will quieten your guests around animals, thus making them less stressed in your Planet Zoo game. They are located under “facilities” if you’re struggling to find them.
If you have a habitat that guests can enter, it’s worth placing these signs so that the guests don’t overwhelm your animals and cause them stress.
Use the heatmap and the security tab in the game to see how far the signs stretch and how much coverage they offer. You can also place the signs under the ground so they are less obtrusive to the eye, but still offer the same level of effectiveness.
Place Shurubs Around Your Path
Guest gates are one of the coolest features in Planet Zoo, but having a guest gate brings crowds into your habitat and can cause stress for your animals, especially shy ones.
Placing some bamboo, or taller plants and shrubs around the paths, will reduce the guest visibility in some parts of your habitat, but it will also help to keep the animals calm, as they will have more places to hide.
Add Ambience Speakers to Your Habitat
In some cases, you might find that keeping guests out of sight just isn’t enough, and this is one of the hardest Planet Zoo stress issues to identify.
A well-placed ambiance speaker or two can be enough to drown out the sound of guests, making the animals feel more at home and reducing their stress levels.
If this by itself doesn’t work, then try adding them in combination with some of the other options in this article.
Raise the Height of Your Walls
Having the ability to change the height of your habitat walls is a great feature, it allows guests to look into the habitat without the need of them all gatthering around one window.
But, in some cases, with shy animals, this might cause them some stress, and you might need to raise the height of the walls.
If visibility becomes an issue for guests, you can either add a one-way window, or you could lower just one section of the wall, as a viewing platform, with the rest of the barrier at full height.
There are plenty of ways to make your animals more relaxed, in some cases, it’s just a case of trial and error, what works for one species might not for another.
Keep using the tips above to alter your habitat, and before long, you will have healthy happy animals.
