What exactly is the issue with the menus? If you hover your cursor over the options, a tooltip appears.

I am not aware of any mods that change the UI. But I did not do any research on it.
An internet search might give you some answers.

The game has some kind of complexity.
It just takes some time to learn it or "get good"... ;)

The UI might not be perfect but I got used to it after some time.
Beside doing the tutorial missions, watching youtube tutorials (there are many around) is what I did to get familiar with it.
It's vital to learn the keyboard shortcuts and use them as often as possible, especially when building.
This will speed up the whole process and will reduce the UI usage by a lot.
See: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/helpful-key-bindings.528654/

I totally agree with maxcry! What also helps, especially for me with bad eyesight, is that you can make the UI bigger, so you can see the images better. It has a learning curve, but honestly, once it clicks, it clicks. Youtube videos really help and just playing around with what other people build does too. :)

I would be wary of mods that would change the UI as the game could become unstable, or you might struggle with saved files moving between mods on and mods off.

As mentioned above, keyboard shortcuts can reduce a lot of frustration, but if you can give some specific examples of things that are vexing, perhaps some more experienced players can chip in ideas for resolving that issue.

The game offering lots of flexibility in building and arranging your zoos necessitate having lots of user-end controls, I would guess many mods that would claim to simplify the building and path creation would probably reduce your choices.

If you haven't already, perhaps have a go at the career mode scenarios as they have some tutorial elements built in that are structured well and you can move through them as quickly as you like. Alternatively, perhaps open up in sandbox and turn off some of the guest-compliant-type settings so you can figure out a build style that works for you (Wherever possible I always set the paths to be as wide as possible with long straight sections as guest crowding blitzes performance on my machine.

Originally posted by That_ELM:

I know most times I tried looking for options, others who have complained or asked similar questions, they were saying the nice version of "get good".

I mean... because there's all there is to it. Most people say that, bc the UI is really simple actually. You got zoo, animal exchange on the left corner, right corner is for building and the rest of the time is just watching digital animals do stuff xD
I know where you are coming from. I had this exact reaction to the Jurassic World game... but I swear after the initial setback you do get used to it in like 3 game sessions. I currently don't play Jurassic World lmao, but after coming to Planet Zoo, I see how easy Planet Zoo UI actually is. (Ofc you will be slow at first and not ultra fast like the videos, but honestly you don't have to be. Have fun just exploring and do dumb stuff in sandbox until it finally clicks)


Though I come from a background of trying to learn blender lmaooo, nothing is weirder than that damn 3D programm. I want to ask this question everytime then T_T