How to Get Animals?
How to Breed?
Another important aspect of running a zoo is to consider the ecological impact your collection of animals might have on the environment. Throughout the course of a Planet Zoo campaign, you’ll find yourself tasked with overseeing several endangered species. In many cases, you can release such animals back into the wild in an effort to rejuvenate the world’s population.
Part of this process is breeding animals, a feature that Planet Zoo doesn’t necessarily explain in depth. In this guide, we’ll run through the steps you’ll need to take in order to achieve prime breeding conditions. There are a number of variables to consider when setting an animal up for breeding. Most of them revolve around the creature’s happiness levels. There are some more obscure conditions to be aware of, though, like an animal’s enrichment and social satisfaction. Below, we’ve outlined the steps to building the perfect breeding conditions in Planet Zoo.
Make Sure Your Animals Are Happy
The most basic element to preparing an animal for breeding to make sure all its needs are being met. Each animal has a welfare level that’s broken down into four main subcategories: nutrition, social, habitat, and enrichment. The first step in breeding an animal is to make sure all of the gauges representing these needs are in the green. Planet Zoo’s tutorial scenarios do a pretty good job of explaining how to do this, but here are some additional tips for each category.
Nutrition
There isn’t much in the way of specialized food in Planet Zoo. In most cases, nutrition needs can be met with with the standard feeding troughs in the habitat menu. You will want to make sure you’re feeding your animals grade three food, though, which can be done by clicking on the habitat gate or barrier and tabbing on over to the “Animals” section. From here, you can change the grade of food your keepers feed the animals via the drop-down menu.
Social
This is probably the most complex parameter that contributes to an animal’s overall welfare. We’ll cover this more in-depth a bit further down in the guide. Just know you can see the ideal conditions for a species’ social group, habitat size, and stress reduction inside the in-game Zoopedia. In fact, we recommend that you check the Zoopedia entry for every animal in your zoo just in case you missed some vital information.
Habitat
You need to craft each animal’s habitat to fit its specific needs. When deciding what plants and terrain type to add, refer to the “Environment” tab of the animal info panel. Here, you can see what continents and biomes you should filter when buying plants from the nature menu. Do the same for the terrain conditions to make sure your animals’ environmental preferences are being met.
Enrichment
Animals need to be enriched with both food and toys. Luckily, you can search for specific species in the habitat menu to display a list of appropriate enrichment items. In general, the filtering feature makes it a lot easier to find the stuff you’re looking for. You’ll also likely have to assign a vet to do research on an animal in order to unlock some of the better enrichment options. This can be done either in the Zoopedia or in the staff management menu.
Pick the Right Animals to Breed
Not all animals are capable of breeding in Planet Zoo, so it takes a bit of searching to find the right ones. In order to find compatible animals, head once again into the Zoopedia entry for the animal and check out the “Species Data” tab. Here, you’ll find a ton of important information regarding the conditions you need to meet in order to breed, as well as how to increase an animal’s social happiness.
In the “Group” section, you can find the ideal number of animals for a single habitat, as well as the best ratio of males to females. There’s also a section that reveals the age of sexual maturity and sterility. In addition, you can glean the difficulty of breeding the species by looking at the “reproduction in captivity” stat. With these numbers in mind, head on over to the animal market and buy yourself some animals that meet your needs.
Once you have the proper animals, you can view the likelihood that they will produce an offspring by clicking on an animal, tabbing over to the genetics section, and choosing the “compare mates” option. Here, you can select a mate for the chosen animal. Doing so gives you a percentage chance of the two breeding and producing an offspring.
Now Wait
Once you’ve managed to achieve prime breeding conditions, all that’s left to do is wait! Provided you’ve got compatible animals living in the same habitat, and they’re happy, nature will eventually take its course. You can learn which animals are pregnant by clicking on the notification timeline in the upper left hand corner of the screen. This is where you can find your animals’ pregnancies. If breeding was successful, the new baby animal or animals will appear in the habitat, and let me tell you, it’s cute as hell.
