When guests are visiting your zoo, the last thing they want to see are hideous looking staff buildings.
Staff facilities have a spherical negative area around them when placed, usually highlighted by a red colour. If guests are able to enter this area, they will be able to see the staff facilities and won’t be impressed.
Here are the best ways to go about hiding staff facilities in Planet Zoo so that your guest’s happiness will improve…
Self Contained Staff Areas
Your staff will be trapped and never allowed to leave work. Kidding! But seriously, do Planet Zoo staff ever go home?
An easy way to ensure guests will never have to view your staff facilities is to place them in their own fenced off area.
Have these areas within the middle of habitats surrounding the facilities.
This will allow your staff to access habitats very quickly, leaving the area and returning back to access the various staff buildings before continuing their journey to a different habitat, improving staff efficiency.
Bury Or Raise Your Staff Facilities
Seems a little spooky – your staff appearing from the underground staff room like zombies.
Remember, staff facilities have a spherical negative area around them, so you will need to bury or raise your buildings enough so that the negative area of impact isn’t crossing with places the guests will be walking through.
The default way of raising and lowering objects within Planet Zoo is to hold the shift button down whilst moving the mouse or up down.
You will of course need to connect a staff only path from the facilities to the main pathway within your zoo. You should be able to do this quite easily by starting the path from the building and slowly working it back to the surface.
This may require you to toggle the “Tunnelling” path option on and off to get perfectly level with the surrounding terrain.
You may wish to add some scenery as supports for your facility should you choose to raise it, as having a floating building will look quite unrealistic.
Place A Set Of Facilities Within Each Habitat
This will be rather expensive, so you may want to use this method within sandbox mode only, but you could just build each facility within each habitat and ensure they’re hidden.
I know, a lot of work, but probably the most effective way of managing your staff and their workload.
Use scenery and ensure the facilities are placed far away from the guests if you choose to go down this route.
Use Scenery To Create A Beautiful Building
Why not use your creativity to use the wide range of scenic items within Planet Zoo to try and build around and between your facilities to create spectacular looking buildings.
There’s so many ways in which you could this this that it would require a guide of its own.
Get onto YouTube to watch how other players are building their staff facilities or perhaps checkout the Steam workshop to see what others have uploaded for you to download.
You’ll still need to keep the staff buildings away from the guest areas, however the building will look fantastic, here’s an example from a scenario map in the Sandbox game mode.
Staff Facilities Heatmap
There’s a quick and easy way in Planet Zoo to see the negative area where guests will be affected by the hideous buildings.
Go to the Heatmaps screen by selecting the Heatmaps view in the bottom left of the interface.
Now, select the “Negative Impact On Guests” heatmap icon which looks like a downward trending graph and you’ll be able to see the areas in red where guests will be upset about staff facilities showing. Ensure these areas aren’t overlapping into things like guest paths, viewing areas or any other place you may expect a guest to go to.
Conclusion
Always consider your guest’s happiness before placing any staff building into your zoo.
Planning ahead like this will really help you for when your zoo begins to expand and your space turns from plentiful to rare.
Use your heat maps wisely and don’t be afraid to get a little creative in the ways In which you hide your staff buildings with the variety of scenic items available to you.