Hello!

This guide will hopefully help you gain more appeal.

Dinosaur level caps at 51, the higher the level the higher the appeal and baby dinosaurs have decreased appeal until they reach maturity. AFAIK the higher the appeal the higher the donations, so here's a tips! guide I'm secretly only making for selfish easy reference of minmaxing data.

Table of contents

1. A ranking of dinosaurs based on their appeal

2. A table with dino exhibit size formation

3. Guest satisfaction

4. Resting Areas

5. Financial tips

6. Biome requirements

This guide is going to get more content added on later, specifically data on guest management.
Recently, new patches and updates have started coming in. It will take a bit to gather all the new data. If you have information or tips about new gameplay features, feel free to suggest them for this guide!

These stats are based on (Super) Happy dinosaurs at level 51, so these are the maximum numbers.
These are the groups based on appeal, followed by their required minimum exhibit size and their appeal divided by exhibit size (the higher the number the better the ratio, I will call this number the Appeal Ratio Index Number)

5490:
Ornithomimus 490 11.2
Spinosaurus 490 "
Animantarx 490 "
Tyrannosaurus Rex 700 7.84
Mamenchisaurus 700 "

3050:
Oviraptor 350 8.71
Gigantspinosaurus 350 "
Minmi 490 6.22
Achelousaurus 490 "
Lambeosaurus 490 "
Apatosaurus 700 4.36

1830;
Albertosaurus 490 3.73
Shantungosaurus 490 "
Kentrosaurus 490 "
Styracosaurus 490 "
Brachiosaurus 700 2.61

1220;
Velociraptors 350 3.49
Wuerhosaurus 420 2.9
Triceratops 420 "
Stegosaurus 420 "
Ankylosaurus 490 2.49
Parasaurolophus 490 "
Seismosaurus 700 1.74

So based on the information above, you could construct a 4910ft exhibit and host 10 Animantarx for a whopping 54,900 appeal! Or a 7010ft exhibit for (giant) Seimosaurs for a depressing 12,200 appeal. The best dinosaurs to use for appeal are Animantarx, Ornithomimus and Spinosaurs. All require 10K worth of gems and Spinosaurs need 10 skulls and footprints per egg while the other two only need 8 skulls and footprints. Also Ornithomimus looks and walks kind of goofy so Animantarx really is the best bet here.

Here's a list of info about minimum requirements to use for preplanning your exhibits. To be socially content every dinosaur requires a second opposing-gender dinosaur of the same species and often another third-wheel dinosaur (whose gender does not matter). Every exhibit requires 10 extra square foot on top of the tally of the minimum size of the dinos inside it for it to be large enough for them.


Forest


Rainforest


Taiga



Desert


Savannah


Grassland



Swamp



Tundra


Alpine



*ARIN stands for Appeal Ratio Index Number, the bigger the better
**DEBSRM stands for Diverse Exhibit Biotope Space Requirement Minimum, it's how large an exhibit needs to be to host the miminum amount of dinosaurs for 1 full happy biotope set of dinosaurs + the 10 square foot needed for it to count as being large enough.


The current map is 255 by 254, minus 66 tiles for the entrance. That's 64,704 square foot. You'll need about 30k square foot for the minimum space for exhibits housing every type of dinosaur. This leaves you with a 34k of decoration and other buildings (Don't worry about filling the map with exhibits and then not being able to afford food. Food with a max zoo comes down to around 8k in costs per day, while you make around 40k in donations). Pay attention to how large the viewing areas for your guests are and build around that, they should at least be 10 tiles long.

Here's some info on keeping your visitors satisfied. The more satisfied the visitors, the higher your park's rating!


Visitors have a few parameters that decide what they'll do: Happiness, Fun, Decoration, Hunger, Toilet, Energy, Temperament, Favorite Dino, and Ready to learn. They're also affected by the dirtiness of your Park, the lighting at night and whether or not they can find donation boxes.

• Happiness:

An overall summary of the other stats of the guests. The more you satisfy the other parameters the happier they'll be. Presumably, this stat affects their ratings of your park. So far, I haven't been able to get a Star Rating higher than 4, and often it oscillates between 2 and 3 for a fully expanded park. As far as I know, guests decide their review when they leave/donate and it's based on their highlight of the day. Regardless, you'll want to give guests a nice peak in their satisfaction right when they enter the park by placing a Fancy Arch at the entrance. When a guests gets drunk at TikiBar they'll be more likely to give a beergoggle review of your park.

• Fun:

Can be increased through dinosaurs in exhibits and certain buildings like Hat Stand and some food and drink buildings. Your dinosaurs alone will provide your guests with a lot of fun.

• Decoration:

A decoration viewer has been added to the game and now you can see what tiles are 'covered' by surrounding decoration. Red tiles have no decoration, green tiles have tier 1 decoration and glowing gold tiles have tier 2 decoration. Tier 2 buildings: Triceratops Arch (5x11), Stone Arch Torches (5x9), Moss Arch (5x11), Moss Arch Torches (5x11), Fancy Wooden Arch (3x15), Fancy Concrete Arch (3x13), Campfire (3x3), Wishing Well (5x5), Velociraptor Fountain (9x9), Wooden Bridge (5x13), Double Wooden Bridge (13x13), Clock Tower (7x7). Campfires on the side of paths and the occasional Clock Tower and Moss Arches and Fountain/Wishing Well will ensure your guests will remain impressed for the duration of their visit.

• Hunger:

Affected by food and drink buildings. Certain buildings are more effective than others, and some buildings sell products (Martinis) that cause visitors to want to get other products (Funnel cakes). This can be exploited to increase your income from food and drinks, however you can earn much more from donations and you'll be better off setting your prices to 'free' so visitors can get whatever they want and they'll be happier and donate more to dinosaurs. Be careful though, and don't place every food and drink building together. Guests will want variety, but they can get caught up in a vicious loop of buying food and drink, then getting affected by traits and wanting more food and drink, essentially wasting time in the park walking from building to building, eating and throwing away trash.

When you 'select' a certain variety of food (like smiley cut fries) that will give you info on what that food type does, but it doesn't do anything else. Guests can always pick whatever product they want, so if a building has negative traits with some products and positive ones with others, you'll never control which the guests gets.

Don't forget to place picnic tables nearby!

• Toilet:

Just place a Bathroom every now and then. They don't fill up too quickly, Janitors can easily clean them in combination with disposing garbage and picking up trash.

• Energy:

For visitors to stay in the park longer, they'll need to rest now and then. To remedy this you can place (pergola) benches, picnic tables, gazebos, shades, domes. Your guests will automatically use these buildings as they want to rest.
The pavilion looks like it might act like a gazebo but it just provides Decoration.

• Temperament:

Guests can either be Enthusiastic, Relaxed, Quiet, Fearful. So far it's unclear how this affects them apart from activity preferences.

• Favorite Dino:

Guests will either like Ankylosaura, Stegosaurs, Ceratopsia, Sauropoda, Theropoda, Ornithopoda. Represent those categories in your Park and they'll become even happier.

• Ready to learn:

This indicates whether or not the visitor will become happier from a nearby Science Presentation building. Place Science Presentation buildings at every busy viewing area for the most benefit.



For disposing garbage, the most upgraded garbage bin (with a sparkling 2 Decoration!) obviously serves the best purpose. Guests will complain about garbage on the floor, Janitors are essential and pretty cheap. Set your Janitors to do all tasks, and 'Station' 1 or 2 of them at crucial areas. Make sure their radius covers all the area that could need cleaning up. The reason for setting your Janitors to Station and not Wander of Waypoints is because with Waypoints they'll spend a lot of time making sure they've walked to their waypoints, wasting time they could spend walking to trash. Wander makes your Janitors cycle through tasks on a random basis regardless of distance, meaning they'll often have to walk halfway across the park to clean up a banana peel. Useless and bad for your reviews.

At nighttime, the park becomes difficult to see in and to counter this you'll need to place lanterns and lightbulb chains around the paths and guest areas. Should be easy enough as everyone can walk through lanterns so you can just place them on the path.

It's impossible at the moment to really find out when and how a guest gets annoyed by the sun but Shade buildings should help guests rest from the sun while they're walking the giant distances of your park. For some reason the ugly Butterfly Shade is the best one for this.

For donating, there's three ways of donating. One is the donation box, the other is when a guest leaves the park or when nighttime hits, the last when a guest is done chilling. When nighttime hits a guest's 'would-be' donation will be collected and the guest will leave the park promptly. A similar thing can happen when a guest leaves the park before it closes. Place donation boxes near every viewing and chilling area.

In between your exhibit viewing areas, you'll want like a 'resting area' for your guests. To save them time on walking from place to place after looking at your dinosaurs, you can build areas with buildings and decorations to keep your guests content. However, you'll need to build a lot of these areas and sometimes you'll be in a tight spot for space. You'll want something small that still ticks all the boxes alongside your grander Food Courts.

Example of a small but effective guest area. It's 10x10 tiles big.

[Bathroom x5][Falafel Takeaway x5]
[Bathroom x5][Falafel Takeaway x5]
[Bathroom x5][Falafel Takeaway x5]
[Path x10]
[Bench x3][Path x1][Clock Tower x3][Path[ x3]
[Path x4][Clock Tower x3][Path x3]
[Lantern x1][Path x3][Clock Tower x3][Path x3]
[Path x7][Hat Stand x3]
[Path x7][Hat Stand x3]
[Garbage can x3][Donation Box x1][Path x 3][Hat Stand x3]

It takes care of all the DHEFT meters.

Stationing a janitor at every Resting Area is a good idea for making sure everything stays clean.

Here's some economic success guidelines. I'll be covering

• Managing space
  
• Digging
  
• Pricing
  
• Appeal

uhm


You know what's a good way to make money? Archaeological excursions through time! At least, it used to be. Now I'm not so sure.

You can bring 4 employees with you on expeditions. You always have a single-tile digging ability you can use 25 times. Your Sciensts have varying digging abilities they can use 5 times, the other employees have the single-tile ability. The best one Scientists have is 3x3. You'll want to hire a bunch of Scientists and keep the ones that have this 3x3 ability as it makes digging much easier.

The developers have updated the mechanics and now there's a few options you can toggle before opening the portal. You can select:

• The type of dinosaur fossil you're after
  
• How deep you'll dig
  
• Whether you'll dig automatically

Digging deeper gives a chance at better rewards. Here's a summary:


Automatic digging costs 1000 dollars. You don't find money that often when digging, so it depends on whether or not you want special hats.

For Sauropoda and Stegosaura, the Uncommon Hat can be found at the Deep level instead of the Common Hat. At Very Deep you'll find both at the same rate so this doesn't matter much.

Here's the result of 20 automated Stegosaurus Mantle digs:
135 Stego footprints
136 Stego Skulls
4x 500 Science
10x 500 Gold
6x 1000 Gold
1x 5 Hearts
1x Common Hat
3x Uncommon Hat
4x Rare Hat
1x Legendary Hat
2x 10 Hearts

Here's the result of 20 manual Stegosaurus Mantle digs:
162 Stego footprints
187 Stego skulls
4x 500 Gold
1x 500 Science
1x 1000 Gold
1x 1000 Science
2x 5 Hearts
1x 10 Hearts
1x Common Hat
2x Uncommon Hat
3x Legendary Hat

Do what you want, personally I think automatic digging saves a lot of time.

Common Hats include: Umbrella Hat, Viking Hat
Uncommon Hats include: Fez, Roman Hat, Knight Helmet
Rare Hats include: Roman Hat, Knight Helmet
Legendary Hats include: Knight Helmet, Roman Hat, Fez

• Entry fee

When you first start out, you'll want to lower the entry fee for your Park to draw more visitors. Just don't forget to charge an entry fee once your park picks up. Guests usually bring <400 dollars with them to the park. You can see how much money a guest carries on their info screen. Every day about 100 guests visit your park, except of course if your dinos break free and kill some people, then it'll dip to around 80 or maybe even 70 per day. I just had a day with 140 guests, which is the highest I've seen so far. Since you won't make more than a few thousand dollars on tickets (140x30=4200) you might be better off opening the park for free when attendance drops low to draw in new guests, although the guests don't really seem to mind the difference between free entry and a 30 dollar entry free.

• Product prices

If you want to rake in some more money you might want to charge nice fees for food and drink and merch buildings, since these purchases will fleece that last bit of money off of your guests. However, a real pimpin' exhibit will get you a steady revenue of thousands of dollars compared to the hundreds you get from catering and merchandise. Exhibit donations will total into the tens of thousands of dollars, and you want guests to stay as happy as possible to make sure they feel like donating a lot. Setting your prices to 'free' or selling at zero profit may be more beneficial however this is not because guests don't really seem to care about prices, it's because guests with only 5 dollars left might still want a free cocktail before they leave and why squeeze on that when you're already receiving hundreds of dollars from most of them?

I set all my prices to max for a day. Food and drink earned under 1000, less than the entry fee.


OUTDATED BECAUSE THERE'S NOW A LIMIT ON HOWMANY DINOSAURS A VISITOR CAN SEE IN ONE GO BASED ON THEIR ENERGY

When a guests is looking at dinosaurs in an exhibit, they'll look at every dinosaur they can spot in that exhibit, sometimes at ridiculously long range and at other times including dinosaurs from other exhibits. The way their donation 'mindset' is regulated is they'll think of more money to donate with every dinosaur they see and the higher that dinosaur's Appeal the higher the amount of money. This means that if a guest looks at a small exhibit with one meagre 1000 Appeal dinosaur, they'll only think of paying a little compared to a huge exhibit with 10+ 5000 Appeal dinosaurs. There's a catch to building titanic 100k+ Appeal exhibits, though. Even though you can 'inspire' a guest to donate over 1500 dollars by maxing an exhibit, they'll always donate no more than they have with them and they'll usually pocket between 5 and 100 dollars just in case. This is the reason I described the guests as 'thinking up' the money. They'll set their minds on donating over a thousand dollars and when they arrive at the donation box they'll spend 325 of their 400 dollars. Greedy scum.

Here's a breakdown of what you need for a perfect biome. You also need to unlock and add tier 2 trees and plants, always a lower amount than the total number of trees and plants you need to plant. This is going to be a long segment