Planet Zoo

Planet Zoo tasks players with building a zoo, with 76 animal species in the base game and 132 new species available through 20 separate downloadable content packs and the Deluxe Edition. Animals, controlled by artificial intelligence, behave similarly to their real-life counterparts. For instance, wolves adopt a pack mentality and animals of the African plains (such as giraffes, zebras, wildebeest, and buffalo) can live together in a single mixed-species habitat. Each species has its own requirements and needs that players must satisfy through creation of a suitable exhibit environment and adequate behavioral enrichment. Predators can attack and kill other animals, but unlike in Zoo Tycoon, cannot attack guests.^[1] Each animal has their own genome within the game's breeding system, which reflect its life expectancy, size, health, and fertility and can be passed down through offspring. As such, elements such as inbreeding may have negative consequences on progeny.^[2]

In addition to ensuring animal welfare, the player must deal with managing the park as an institution. This includes hiring staff, constructing guest amenities and staff facilities, performing research, and working towards the conservation of threatened and endangered species. Like Planet Coaster, Planet Zoo provides over a thousand building pieces such as seats, lighting, bushes, trees, and items such as individual planks of wood, glass, rocks, and roof tiles. By allowing these items to phase-into and/or lock with each other, the creative player can create elaborate buildings, landscaping, and natural structures such as waterfalls and cave systems from scratch. Custom structures can be uploaded as "blueprints" for other players to download for free and place in their own zoos via the Steam Workshop. Safari, boat, train, monorail, and gondola lift rides can also be constructed throughout the zoo for transportation and to offer guests additional ways of viewing animals. The game features a dynamic day/night cycle, weather patterns, and animal poop physics.^[3]

The game features four modes: sandbox, career, challenge, and the online franchise mode.^[4] In career mode, the player character works at a zoo company until his boss goes missing and the company is bought out by Dominic Myers. Myers fires the player character, who begins working for his boss's daughter establishing zoos and exposing Myers' criminal behavior. The franchise mode allows the player to build multiple franchise zoos with a shared economy and animals. Animals can be purchased and traded with other players' zoos through an online marketplace. Regular cooperative online community challenges focused on conservation (such as breeding and releasing as many giant pandas to the wild within a certain timeframe) allow players to receive "conservation credits," which can be redeemed for new animals instead of regular in-game currency. The base game features eleven critically endangered animal species and subspecies: the black-and-white ruffed lemur, Bornean orangutan, Chinese pangolin, gharial, Himalayan brown bear, Lehmann's poison frog, Lesser Antillean iguana, red ruffed lemur, West African lion, western chimpanzee, and western lowland gorilla. Increasing the zoo's conservation rating through the display and release of endangered animals, informational signs, and educational talks is an important gameplay goal.^[5]

The game was announced on 24 April 2019 and released on 5 November 2019.^[6][7][8] Its release was highly anticipated by many fans of the original Zoo Tycoon series who were disappointed by the significant changes to the 2013 reboot.^[9][10] Planet Zoo was made using Frontier's Cobra game engine.^[11]

Frontier has continued to support the game through free updates to the base game. In addition to patching and bug fixes, these free updates have included new content such as scenery items including foliage and building pieces, new menus for food quality and park rides, and new in-game mechanics like hereditable colour variation, vending machines, educator animal talks, first person camera mode and animal underwater diving. Frontier commemorates the game's yearly anniversary through "Anniversary Updates", commonly adding more animals to the game. So far, the anniversary animals added have been the black-and-white ruffed lemur,^[12] red deer,^[13] collared peccary,^[14] and African leopard.^[15] A version for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, Planet Zoo: Console Edition, was released on 26 March 2024.^[16] Several downloadable content packs have been released for the game, adding new animals, items, and scenarios.