Planet Zoo: Casualia Park - Chapter 5 (Finale)

Ladies! Gentlemen! Wombats of all ages!

Welcome once more to Casualia Parks!

As the title suggests, yes, this is indeed going to be our final chapter of the series. We shall go into why further down below.

But before that, let's have one more big, proper delve into Planet Zoo and finish strong with this chapter!

So, last time, we left off after setting up a new visitor area by the seal habitat, and our park looked like so:

Well, we were about to add to it quite substantially!

Beginning with....

An area of raised land, to prepare for another elevated viewing area. And also, we constructed these:

Those black (and currently very ugly) blocks are the base for walkthrough exhibits, you see. They look quite different once you put animals in them.

Walkthrough exhibits work similarly to normal exhibits in Planet Zoo, in that the animals you can put in them are a bit more simple, with less of a simulation aspect to them. But of course, unlike normal exhibits, walkthrough exhibits have a path going through them, and a lot more space for the animals to move around in.

And what animals did we end up going for, you ask?

Well, there's 2 rows there, including 2 exhibits each. And each of them is themed, you see. In one of them, we have....

The Egyptian Fruit Bat!

In learning about these little guys, we've learned that the word "Frugivore" is apparently a thing. Very curious indeed.🤔

And teamed up with them, we have....

The Spectacled Flying Fox!

An endangered and very interesting-looking kind of bat from southeast Asia/Australia.

So, the way these walkthrough exhibits work is that the animals can fly around, do their hanging upside-down trick and interact with various pre-determined objects in the exhibit.

We added most of the vegetation ourselves, by the way. These exhibits are awfully barren by default. Also, in the bat exhibit in particular, we disabled the walls between them, so that the two effectively become one large exhibit!

And, if bats aren't your thing, in the other exhibit, we have....

The Monarch Butterfly, an American specimen!

And indeed, right next to them, there's....

The Malabar Rose, a different butterfly, hailing from Africa!

So, with that, we have a cool new addition to the park, and they no longer look like big black boxes, either:

You might notice: We made the walls of the bat exhibit a mesh material for them to hang off of, while the walls of the butterfly exhibit are glass, to prevent escapes. They probably wouldn't escape in terms of game mechanics, since you can even turn the walls off altogether, but hey, attention to detail.😉

Also, in each exhibit, we placed one of these fancy information/education stands we designed:

They've got a speaker in the back too, so we're bombarding the guests with info!😜

Now, there's a little fun fact we wanted to share about these exhibits:

They have a sort of PVC-Curtain for entrances and exits, which are modeled as physics objects. And yes, the way guests interact with these is a real joy:

.... they just headbutt their way straight through 'em.😜

Also, while we were setting all that up, the Capybara population exploded and we had to take a bunch of 'em out of their habitat because it got a bit silly..... again.

But yeah, moving on from that, you might already have spotted it: We did have another project going already.

A new habitat, in fact! But, somehow, we managed to completely forget about taking a proper picture while we were setting it up, so this will have to do:

It's a rather large habitat, with three viewing windows on that raised area we set up at the start of the chapter.

Having laid out the shape, we got to work setting it up for the new inhabitants. For shelter, we decided not to go with the usual stone-cave, this time. Instead, behold:

Instead, we just built them a house. Or well, barn, i suppose.

And as you can see, the environment is generally quite jungle-y, specifically an African rainforest sort of setting.

So, who's gonna inhabit this new, enormous habitat? Well, please welcome with us.....

The Red River Hog!

It's an african pig. But with lots of style points, look!

This habitat does indeed have a pseudo-river running through the middle of it, and yes, these little piggies spend a surprising amount of their time in the water.

But well, they're not the only inhabitants of this habitat. Nonono, it's far too big for just them.

The other inhabitant is..... rather a bit more high-ticket, if you will. Please welcome with us, coming all the way from the U.K., the invention of Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, having just recently released their new album...

The Gorillaz!

Oh. That ain't 2-D. The hair's not blue enough.

Nevermind that, then. It's the Western Lowland Gorilla!

(Or scientifically, Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla. Heh.)

This subspecies of gorilla is critically endangered, and apparently that's partly down to them being hunted for bushmeat.

So, okay, with us writing a blog series about Planet Zoo, you can imagine our opinion on overhunting in general, but.... really? Great apes? Isn't that kind of..... psychotic? They're some of our closest relatives.😐

Well in any case, Casualia Park has gorillas, now.

That's when you know a yoo's made it.😜

We put these two species together because much like the animals in the South American habitat, the gorillas and river hogs have an interspecies interaction bonus. They get along well, basically.

Our next project was to properly tie this new expansion of the park in from the guest's side of things, too.

That meant that for one, on the raised viewing area, we set up another visitor centre. Though a little less fancy this time, no plaza and picnic benches for this one:

Though as you can see, we very much stuck with the park's theme of bamboo and roof gardening!

The final product looks like so:

There's a restroom, a hat shop, information booth and food and drink stalls. The whole shebang, really.

Alongside that, we looked at all the new paths we built for the new viewing area and walkthrough exhibits and made sure to place down benches, bins and donation boxes for the guests.

Now, something a little special happened. Nothing good, unfortunately, but....

Alkina the Wombat, the very first animal to come into the park, has passed on.

She died of old age, at 21.7 years old.

As planned, Lilardia, Alkina's daughter and the first animal born in the park, will take over and live in the habitat with a new mate we found for her.

Meanwhile, we've put up a little memorial plaque for Alkina: 

There's a certain poetry to the first animal of the park dying in the final chapter. But we won't dwell on it further.

Because!

We kept moving on and began construction on -yet another- habitat!

Another fairly large one, adjacent to the enormous Gorilla/Hog area. After preparing it for it's new inhabitants, the finished habitat looks like this:

So, what might live in this new, fairly large habitat? Well...

The Platypus!

One of the weirdest creatures on the planet! They have beaver tails and a duck bill, the latter is actually a sort of radar dish (or an electroreceptor, to be exact), they lay eggs despite being classified as a mammal, and they also have a venomous spur, because yeah, Australia, innit?

However.

..... they're a lot smaller than we thought.

So yeah uh, we expected them to be like, 2-3 times that size. Similar to a capybara. But nope, turns out they're tiny, and their habitat now seems comically large. Ah well, what can ya do?

.... build another habitat, of course!😛

But folks, this one is special.

It's not too big, as you can see, but well, for one, this is the final habitat we're setting up in this series, and for the other, we're finishing with an animal that we've always wanted in the park, even from the first chapter.

Dear readers, please welcome with us the final inhabitants to join Casualia Park....

The North Island Brown Kiwi!

Yep, that's right. We're finishing with the funny New Zealand land borb. They're small and kind of silly, but they have so much character!😃

Odd, plucky little egg-shaped creatures with two legs and a long nose. Or beak? Snout? Anyway, it's impossible to dislike these little guys!

Glad to finally have them in the park. They're curious, active and interesting to watch. Oh, and they make cute chirping noises, too!

But yeah, with that said.... that's it.

That's our gameplay for Planet Zoo completed.

The park, in it's final version, looks like so:

We were of course planning on something much bigger, but actually, looking at it like that, it feels like our original plan was a bit silly. We feel we've actually reached a fairly respectable size, here!😊

We also spruced it up a bit by putting trees and rocks all around to make it look a bit more busy and lively!

Also also, we've made a big, final flythrough video of the park to show it off more closely:

You can also find the final version of the park as a sandbox save, along with various blueprints we've created throughout the series, on our Steam Workshop page!

So now, we'll just get into the reasons for why the series is coming to an end, and just so we end on a positive note, we've got a fun little idea saved up for after that, so stick around!😉

So, as for why this series is coming to a close at this point.

Well, we don't wanna sound too "complain-y", but to be frank, Planet Zoo is actually a rather flawed game.

See, it makes for a great sandbox building kind of game, which is why 90% of this series has been about building stuff and expanding the park in some way. Because you see, that's most of the gameplay. Put the park on pause and build.

Now if you wanna unpause and -play- the game, as it were, it depends.

In a small park, with maybe 2-3 enclosures, unpausing gives you a pleasing fishbowl-effect sort of game, where you can just watch what happens and enjoy what you've built.

The problem is, the bigger your zoo gets, the less of that you get. Time moves very fast in this game, even without fast forwarding. Years fly by, animals breed, age and mature. With larger zoos, the moment you unpause, you're flooded with:

• Animals growing from juvenile into mature and becoming outcasts in their social group.

• Animals overbreeding, meaning you have to either micromanage contraceptives or regularly "clear out" habitats.

• An animal being "stressed", which is a completely useless warning you can do nothing about as the animal will just go into shelter and hide away for a bit.

• Warnings that two animals are about to inbreed (yes, really), which you could only stop by immediately zipping over there and ticking the contraceptives box on one of them.

So as you can see, the bigger your Zoo gets, the more the game will ask you to micromanage the animals, and it gets teeeedious.

Frankly, it saps all the fun out of unpausing the game and trying to enjoy the park you've built. This game desperately needed some automation features for the animal population.

It could even have been a type of staff you hire, or perhaps a feature that only unlocks once you reach the highest research level for a species or something like that. But the point is, it would have been a needed feature, and it's simply not there.

...... except for exhibits. Those little terrariums? Yeah, those do in fact have automated population controls. Huh.

Another thing the game could have done with is some teeth in regards to management.

There's lots of features like marketing, loans, price adjustments in shops and so on that we barely bothered with, if at all.

Because frankly, even though Casualia Park is on "hard" difficulty, we barely ever had to think about our zoo as a business.

This is a game where you can very much just slap stuff down and you'll make money. No thought or challenge involved. And again, that's on """hard""" difficulty.

So overall: Planet Zoo is a beautiful creative canvas. That's the whole basis on which we started this series. A creative game we could play and show off what we're building. And in that regard, we feel this series has succeeded quite nicely.

But to be blunt: The business management turned out to be boring, and the animal management rather tedious. And the latter would only get worse and worse as the park grows. So that's why we've grown a bit weary of drawing the series out, and have decided to finish up before it really becomes a slog.

But!

We didn't want to end by complaining about the game, so we've had an idea!

Perhaps you remember us mentioning that as you research animals, you unlock little fun facts about them? Well, as it happens, before we decided to call it, we did in fact fully complete the research on every single animal species in the park. So we figured we'd give each one a brief look, see what we thought of the animal itself and see what our favourite fun fact is.

A bit of learning together, if you will!😉

So then, to start with, there was of course the wombat:

These guys were pretty pleasant. They didn't do anything to give us a hard time and sorta just hung out. Our favourite fact.... hmm, we're quite surprised about #1. They don't exactly have an aura of speed about them.😜

Next up, there was the giant anteater!

Frankly, with the introduction of the tapirs and capybaras into the habitat, the Anteaters more or less faded into the background. Always in the minority in the South American habitat, and like the wombats, they didn't really draw much attention to themselves. Our favourite fact is #1, simply because 30000 ants a day is a ludicrous number. These guys are actually an absolute terror!😶

Then, we've got two exhibit species. First, there's the giant forest scorpion:

Not much to talk about, here. Exhibit species are pretty simple and passive in Planet Zoo.

However, fun fact #2 taught us that this is a thing:

o_O

Well, moving on from that, we've got the lesser antilean iguana:

.... which ties in with the scorpion, because as #4 teaches us, they can see in ultraviolet. So if an iguana meets a scorpion, it must look kinda like a FLIR image to them. Huh, who knew!

Next up, we've got the cheetah:

Now the cheetahs were pretty nice to have around. They did occasionally require a bit of management when it came to births, maturation etc, but all in all, they were always fun to watch, both for us and the guests.

Our favourite fun fact is #5, simply because the idea of the tail being sort of like an aircraft control surface amuses us.😛

After the cheetahs, we built that little visitor area, and in it, there's the terrapin exhibit:

Our favourite fact here is #3, because "excreting salt" is something we've never heard of!

The next animal we got in were the capybara and the tapir:

Out favourite tapir fact is #3, because that just makes no sense at all. A masterclass in arbitrariness!😜

Also, the tapirs weren't that nice to have around. They're apparently rather shy animals who basically lived in a constant cycle of getting stressed, running off into a shelter, coming out and living normally for a bit, then getting stressed again. And we'd get notifications about them being stressed and having low welfare every time.

Now with the capybaras, it almost feels criminal to say, what with them being such a charming and well-liked animal, but.... they were the most annoying animal in the Park. There, we said it.

They were constantly overbreeding, inbreeding, overpopulating the entire habitat, and so on and so on. These guys gave us a good few headaches.

Our favourite fact is that we no longer have to try and micromanage capybara populations. >:(

Onto more pleasant things. The african penguin!

We've got a fun fact of our own, in this case: These guys are -by far- the most populous animal in Casualia Park. Last count was 105 penguins. And unlike the Capybaras, their population wasn't a constant mess to try and manage. They do perfectly well by themselves!

Our favourite fact on the list though, is #4, because it implies that they build their nests out of their own...... yeah, let's not go there.

Of course, we followed the penguins up with another aquatic animal: The grey seal!

Now these guys were probably our favourite animal overall. They were fairly low-maintenance. They bred a fair bit, but actually like having their kids around, much like the penguins.

And...... they're seals! The dog of the sea! Some of the most lovable creatures out there!

Our favourite fact is #5, because tripling in body weight within two weeks is..... well, it's quite the thing, isn't it? 

So we move to the walkthrough exhibits with the bats and butterflies!

So, monarch butterfly!

Our favourite here is #1, because with how aimless butterflies normally seem, who knew they actually undertake multi-generational long-distance trips?

Then, there's the malabor rose:

Our favourite with this one would be #4. Quite interesting that they remain toxic even into adulthood!

Next, the egyptian fruit bat!

Favourite here is #1, because we find it rather curious that a creature can do that and still.... you know, fly!

And then there's the spectacled flying fox!

Our favourite fun fact here is actually #4.

#1 might seem more impressive, but frankly, with bats being known for either poor eyesight or straight-up blindness, a bat with good eyesight is super unusual!

So, that brings us back to habitat animals, starting with the red river hog!

Quite active breeders, these, but not too much micromanagement needed. And yeah, it's been kinda nice just having a really good-looking kind of pig around.😛

Our favourite fun fact is #4. Smart little buggers!

Then, there's their roommates, the western lowland gorillas:

With them being primates and generally quite "humanlike", they were one of the most interesting animals to watch, and they didn't make trouble, so yeah, gorilla good.

Our favourite fact about them is #3, because it's seriously curious. Nests? And they build a new one every day! Yes, even when staying in the same area, we looked it up.

Then, we get to the motherlode of fun facts that is the platypus!

Honestly, they weren't as interesting to watch in their habitat as you might think. They mostly just walk or swim around.

However, when it comes to fun facts...... well, that's a pretty rich selection! We'll go with #4 as our favourite, because reading that utter weirdness genuinely made us laugh out loud.😂

And finally, there's our last species. The north island brown kiwi.

Really pleasant little things. Like we said, we always wanted some in the park, and we're quite happy to finish with them. They're interesting to watch, and such charming little featherballs!

Our favourite fun fact would be #3. Because we had no idea there were little wing stubs under that feather coat.

And that, dear readers, really is that.

We do hope you enjoyed the series, even if it turned out to be a fair bit shorter than originally planned.

Also, if you're still reading this part, thank you for sticking with this post! Must be the longest we've written, at least if you include all the pictures!

So yeah, we've got a couple of other games in mind that might turn into a series in the future (Games where we know they'll still be enjoyable and/or challenging after playing for a while), but for now, our gaming-related blogging shall go back to a more review/essay style format, and certainly our next few posts should be about shorter, less sandbox-y games.

Also, just writing one post per game should give us some extra space to write about other stuff again, too!

Hoping that you stick around for it. And until then, dear readers, have a good one!