Firstly, I gotta stress that the in-game help menu is really good. It can be accessed with the question mark icon in the toolbar to the left of the screen, or by pressing f1. It has not just info on mechanics, but hotkeys and shortcuts to place relevant modules with as well.

Movement is pretty straightforward. By default, you use WASD to move on one plane, and Q & E to move up- or downward. The higher the camera floats above terrain, the faster it will move. Rotating the camera/looking around is done by holding the middle mouse button.

The game doesn’t yet offer a true first-person mode, but you can press T (by default) to switch from an “orbit” type of camera rotation to a first-person one. Handy to know if you want to get a guest’s view of what you’ve created.
By the way, you can speed up or slow down camera panning movement by holding shift or ctrl, respectively.

In the dark of night, it might be useful to toggle the flashlight with L.

Prefabs are grouped collection of decorative objects, called modular pieces, and/or functional modules, like the animal nursery building. They can all placed from their own menu in the taskbar below, but you’ll also find prefabs in the other menus according to their category. You'll find controls on-screen for rotating prefabs, moving them up or down, or duplicating them once you have an existing one selected. Also, in the bottom right corner, you’re able to tab between the so-called Modular and Styling toolboxes. In the Modular one, you’ll find options for whether you want the prefab to flatten terrain and whether you want it to align to surfaces in height/rotation. Want more exact control over the placement? That’s what advanced placement is for. Press v to get three axes to translate it along at your leisure. Make sure every prefab containing a guest amenity is on the ground and connected via path or modular floor piece to the entrance, or you’ll get an “inaccessible” popup.

Now, double click on a prefab and a whole new world opens up. You’ve entered “edit group” mode. Here, the components that make up the prefab, that is, functional modules and modular pieces, are individually selectable. You can select bunches of them with box selection or by clicking them individually while holding shift. To select all components within the group, press ctrl+A.
Now, you can start moving these selected components with your mouse, just like if you were placing them for the first time, by pressing m by default. You can go straight into advanced placement with these as well, again with v. In fact, press v multiple times and you’ll discover you can cycle between translation, rotation and scaling modes!


Placing a module or modular piece for the first time automatically opens “edit group” mode. This first placement also decides the alignment of a grid. Press g by default to use this grid for subsequent components. There’s some options for this functionality in the Modular Toolbox, again in the bottom right corner of the screen. Handy for simple builds.
It’s good to learn to keep an eye on when you’re in “edit group” mode and when not, to keep your groups separate. There’s plenty of stories of people building one thing, then building another, deciding they don’t like it and accidentally deleting both because they were in one group.

Lastly, know that you can save any group as a prefab (see top right corner) for later re-use.

These are the pillars of a succesful park:
• Happy animals.
• Happy guests.
• Efficient logistics.
• Beautiful surroundings.
• Robust power generation.
• Proper monetisation.

In the following sections, we’ll take a look at all of them.

Animals are created from a nursery building. You don’t start out with one of these so place a small nursery close to your park entrance now. It can be found under “Park Infrastructure” in the taskbar below. You’re now able to acces the nursery UI by pressing f3 or clicking on Park Services (the icon with the three hexagons) in the taskbar below.

When starting out, you have access to the genetic material for a couple of species, so let’s get to building an exhibit for one of those. You’ll need to enclose some land, of course, but it’s probably best to open the animal’s page in the Paleopedia first. In the third tab, you’ll find a handy calculator that will tell you how large the exhibit should be, and what sort of fence strength you’ll need (though that probably isn’t anything to worry about with a starter animal).

Once you know what you want, pick a fence from the Enclosures menu down below in the taskbar, and click somewhere to start it. Once you’ve made a closed shape, an exhibit is born, and info about it can be accessed by clicking somewhere on the fence with an empty cursor. Guests will want to view the habitat so connect it to your park entrance with a path. Also place a staff gate into the fence.

There’s currently three main aspects to an animal’s needs:
1) They need suitable foliage and water.
2) They need a properly stocked feeder.
3) They need their poop removed to keep a clean environment.
You can also place enrichment and shelter but these aren’t hard requirements while the game is in this state. There will also be social needs and disease to worry about in the future.

The first need is for you to take care of while constructing the habitat. Check the Paleopedia to see what biomes your animal likes. They’ll want the habitat’s forest cover to be within a certain range as well. Foliage is placed with a brush via the terraforming menu, or piece-by-piece via the modular pieces menu. Animals also actively dislike foliage from biomes other than their favourites.
These preferences only apply to foliage; as for terrain paint, you are free to do whatever.


Water coverage is similar, though most animals don’t need any to be happy. They will still need to drink, of course, so if you choose to forego painting down a water body, place a water trough from the Animal Care menu instead.

A keeper takes care of needs 2 and 3. They bring feed from where it is stored to the animal feeder (also found in the animal needs menu), and dispose of poop. That means your park will need the following modules to start out with:
1) a staff center, from which to hire your keeper. Once it’s placed, the Staff menu inside Park Services becomes available.
2) a compost heap, to where poop is brought.
3) a loading bay, which is how goods enter your park.
4) a feed storage unit, which… well, you get it.
These are all found in the Park Infrastructure menu, across the two tabs

But this is where the second type of staff comes in: the labourer. They will take feed from the loading bay to storage, so be sure to hire one of them as well.

Labourers are equally essential for the guest-facing front of your park as well. Guests have needs which will have to be met with, among other things, stores and kiosks, and the shelves will need stocking. It’s the same principle: goods are brought in via the loading bay, and your labourers will take them where they are needed.

There are six types of guests’ needs, but at the start, two of them will need to be dealt with: Bathroom and Nutrition. So place a restroom and a food kiosk from the Guest Facilities menu, somewhere along a path. The kiosk is staffed by a cashier, who is hired automatically (as long as you have your staff center). Once they’ve reached the counter and the module is stocked, they can start serving guests. You’ll notice that more cashiers are automatically hired than there are kiosks: that’s because staff members take breaks!

Then there’s the third need, namely Shopping. It’s basically very similar to Nutrition, but you can probably wait to build a shopping kiosk until you have a few different animals.
Guests will fullfill their Entertainment need by viewing animals: it’s what they’re here for, after all. You can help them along by placing down binoculars near the fences – those are found in Guest Facilities > Attractions. Education is fulfilled using animal information signs, which can be placed from the same menu. They start out blank, though: you’ll need to click on them once placed and select a species from a nearby exhibit using a drop-down in the top-right UI that appears.

The last need is Accomodation, but it’s not implemented yet so you can ignore it.
By the way, you can get an idea for how your guests are faring by opening the “Park Management” view with the button in the bottom-left corner. The second tab will visualise the needs fulfillment of every single guest, and show you a park-wide percentage.

Once you have one or two animals thriving in the park, you’ll wonder how to get access to more. What you’ll want to place is a fossil depot. When this building is placed, you’ll unlock the excavation menu and a dig team will automatically be hired. Using the menu, you can send these guys to a formation of your choosing and have them start unlocking genetic material. This is a process that can take some time and will cost money all the while. Excavations happen in phases: at the end of each phase, you get a part of the genome of one of the formation’s species. Once you’ve got a full genome, the animal can be created in the nursery.

The genomes of more popular species will generally be more expensive to unlock, but you might wonder what’s stopping you from unlocking them anyway in a zoo that’s yet to make a name for itself. The answer is that these animals are simply harder to care for: they eat more food, poop more and require stronger, taller fences. Be sure to check in the Paleopedia whether or not you can provide for them before spending your money.

As your park grows, new technologies will come in handy. To start, place a research station. Now you can use the Research menu to get your lab guys working on unlocking new modules, stronger fences, faster incubation times, different cosmetic building themes…
Prefabs that need something you haven’t researched yet will appear with a lock icon on their thumbnails. Hover over them to find out what you still need.

By this time, your keepers will have been taking poop to compost heaps for a while. Your labourers will now be able to take the created compost to Produce Stations, which are found in Park Infrastructure > Logistics. These offer a more circular alternative to ordering food via the loading bay, but since starter animals are so small, they don't provide enough compost to make them worthwile at the start. Once you get some big boys into your park, you can start making your own food.

Modules like nurseries, food kiosks and info signs, as well as lights (which are a category of modular piece) all draw electricity.
After a while, the couple of diesel generators near your park entrance will stop being enough to power your expanding zoo. You can place more, but these generators have a tendency to break down and need repair. You can place backup batteries for the event of a power outage, but they won’t last long. Thankfully through research, you’ll get access to less accident-prone but more variable-output solar panels and wind turbines. These do also come with higher monthly maintenance costs, which I think is entirely backwards compared to real life but hey, gameplay. The eventual holy grail is the geothermal power plant, a power module that is both reliable and with stable output.
If you ever wonder how much power you're generating or where problems might arise, check out the power tab in Management View.

Currently, there’s no cables, power extenders or pylons of any sort. Power modules simply have circular radii within which they provide electricity, so be sure to decentralise your power generation across the whole park.

Park beauty is a system that influences your popularity rating. Its local variation is summed up into a global, star-based park beauty score. It can be visualised with the “Park Management” view.
Areas become “ugly” via the presence of backstage infrastructure: stuff like power modules, loading bays, compost heaps… Beautiful areas are created by using modular pieces.

The biggest beauty contributions come from the following sources:
1) Statues, effects like waterfalls and gardening items.
2) Themed objects as opposed to basic ones. An ornate arid pillar will be more "beautiful" than a metal T-beam, for example.
3) Combinations of objects from different classes. Say, some props and some branches will separately not contribute to beauty, but they will when paired.
4) Foliage. People like plants.

Note that beauty and ugliness only matter if the guests can see them (their sightlines around paths and other traversible areas can also be visualised with the “Park Management” view). So summing up, the negative impact from infrastructure can be mitigated by placing them further from visible areas, by hiding them with walls or rock cliffs, or by decorating them.

So how does a park make money?

Some very straightforward sources of income for your park are the sales of tickets, food and souvenirs. So provide in the needs of your guests well, which you do by placing plenty of amenities spread out well across your park. Guests love spending their money, so use amenities kind of like lures to get people to come over to the corners of your park where you want them.

And where you want them is near your most popular animals, because there’s also donations. Guests will be more inclined to donate when viewing habitats with a higher exhibit score, a metric that you can view by clicking somewhere on the habitat’s fence.
What goes into an exhibit score? Well, it’s the amount, popularity and happiness of the animals that are inside. Also, some very powerful bonuses are dealt out when multiple species of animal from the same formation share one exhibit! Also also, when you make an animal, it has a small chance to be albinistic, melanistic or leucistic, all of which will increase the base rating. But this is random and unlikely, so not exactly a business strategy.

Guests will need somewhere to deposit their donations, which is why every enclosure should have a donation box (found in Guest Facilities > Economy) near it.

Finally, from the Finances menu, you can take a loan. These actually aren’t a bad option. If you can use the money to get some popular animal that you otherwise couldn't afford, and in that way make your park more profitable, the monthly repayments afterwards will be easy. You lose some money in the long run by taking a loan, but just having that capital earlier on than otherwise is worth it if you invest it well.

Super nice. You open this by pressing f2, or by clicking on the camera icon like a chump. You get to choose some filters/effects, time of day, field of view and all that, plus there’s a handy link to the folder into which your screenshots would land. You can press tab to hide the screenshot UI – though you don't have to, it won't show up on the screenshot.

When plants from a biome which an animal doesn’t like are present in its exhibit, the offending biome will light up red in the needs menu. The easiest way to remove these without touching other plants is probably this: go to the Terraforming menu, to foliage, to individual plant selection and click on the removal brush. Now select all plants from the offending biome (there’s a “select all” button); unless your selection is empty, you'll only ever remove plants of selected types.

These special exhibits for Microraptor & Archaeopteryx can be found next to the fencing, in Enclosures>Exhibits. Within them, these smaller animals are on animation loops and have no needs (so far), but guests will view them all the same. They come with quite a few options for customisation. Firstly, in the styling toolbox, you can get rid of the aviary’s shell so you can build a custom one. Then, if you select the aviary (as a module, not the group it is in), you’ll get an “Overview” tab for putting in the birbs and a “Habitat” tab for adding quick ‘n dirty foliage if you don’t want to place that yourself, an avian house and a feeding tower.

These are a special type of fencing. They cost nothing, block nothing, and for all intents and purposes don’t exist except to close fence loops so that habitats can be designated as such. When you use a habitat marker, it’s because something else you’ve built like a rock wall or a fence made from modular pieces is already blocking the animals’ path.