Hello. I am, for now, Kill7X and in this document I will be sharing as much advanced knowledge of the game as I have acquired and can recall from over 100 hours of play. It will be updated as I learn or remember additional information, assuming I can be bothered.

I will not be covering basic game mechanics here. Go do what I did and play the main campaign's first 6 levels, plus the first 2-4 from the deluxe DLCs. This guide is intended for people who have learned the basics and want to get deeper into the game's mechanics and push themselves in terms of how wild a setup they can do with their aquarium. We will be discussing content from the base game, all DLCs, and some mod content.

I am making this guide because I, personally, had great difficulty in finding information on the game's mechanics beyond the basics and so just figured it out on alone after playing most of the campaign missions. Now I am going to create that advanced information for you, if you will read it.



That picture from the guide's thumbnail? Level 13 aquarium with a half a million dollars, over 80 different species healthy, approximately 400 guests, and <20 negative prestige a day. It started as a rank 1 sandbox aquarium on hard difficulty. The contents of this guide are intended to help you surpass me, if you want to.

Unspoken Rule of Feeding
All feeding tasks must be completed by close of business, 1700. It does not matter if a given task is completed at 0910 or 1650, so long as it is prior to 1700. Failure will cause the starved animals to lose health until they are fed properly or die. I had to figure this out on my own.

Types of Feeding

I assess there to be four types of feeding in the game which you need to understand.

Type 0: Scavengers. These need to be 'fed' once a day by eating the scraps of another animal's food. Important to know as this means that scavengers cannot be in a tank by themselves. It also means that if put in a tank with species which only eat once every two days or less frequently, then you will need to add those species in a staggered fashion such that a normal feeding happens each day. Supplements and observation do not contribute to this requirement.

Type 1: Food. Broken into 2 sub categories. Every animal which is not a Type 0 Scavenger requires one of these.

Type 1A: Regular boxed food. Restocked after closing hours. Feed and forget with no additional overhead. Every example of Type 1A food box I have encountered has a standard capacity of 200 units per day.

Type 1B: True live food (some mods add "live" food which is in reality Type 1A food). The actual feeding of your animals is the same, but with added complications. Type 1B requires that the live food cultures be fed themselves every day, with every example I've played with, including from mods, needing zoo plankton (a Type 1A food). This means that every single instance of Type 1B container you add to your aquarium will add additional feeding labor that you will have to factor into your overall labor plan. Furthermore, Type 1B containers all have far smaller capacities than Type 1A. It seems to vary, but I recall seeing a max capacity of 36 in the example aquarium pictured at title. What this means is that if you have a large number of Type 1B diet animals in a tank, you may need to construct many of the correct container for them. Lastly, I've noticed that sometimes the Type 1B restocking can be a bit wonky, so I recommend building one extra container in the vicinity of tanks which require them beyond what you calculate the livestock to require.

Type 2: Supplements. Required by certain animals in addition to their Type 1 or even Type 0 diet, particularly by exotic ones. Reliably more labor intensive than Type 1. Each animal which requires Type 2 only needs one, and every example of Type 2 feeding I have encountered requires them every three days. This means that when it is time to administer the supplements it could end up being a labor bottleneck day and cause you to break that 1650 time requirement if you have not planned your labor load properly. Furthermore, close observation of staff conducting the Supplement job shows that while a staff member can normally carry up to 50 of either Type 1 foods, they can only carry up to five supplements. The backpack may extend this to 10 but I have yet to test this.

Type 3: Observation. A special extra feeding job which some animals from Deep Freeze and now some mods require. Requires either a clipboard or Dictaphone. The days in between observation varies so be sure to check when planning a tank and its feeding zone's labor load. Each animal requires just one job's worth of Observation, so even if an animal requires Very High Skill for its observation it may not break your labor load past the 1650 critical time if there are only one or two animals needing it. More on that later.

Feeding Zoning and Labor Load
I mentioned my concept of Labor Load (LL) above without explaining it. It simply refers to how many tasks can come up simultaneously and still be completed in a timely fashion. It is absolutely critical to master this concept in the realm of feeding. Besides gift shops and special Power Tool users, to be covered later, I have not found it necessary or worth my real time to go in depth with zoning in order to satisfy the LL of the other jobs. I just add another cleaner or fixer to the staff until the problems cease. This approach will not work for feeding as you progress to high volumes of Type 1-3 feeding tasks which require Skill, High Skill, or Very High Skill.

This is because as the quantity of food, supplements, or observation for a single job increase, the time needed by that one staff member to do the job increases with it. Multiple staff cannot work on the same job type in a single tank. So if you have a big tank needing 300 Orange Pellets a day, just one person has to be able to deliver those 300 pellets before 1700. This is how LL breaking bottlenecks are made with species which you have many specimens of and need skill in addition to Type 2 and 3 feeding tasks.

From here I will describe the setup process which each room in the title picture aquarium uses to get all feeding tasks done on time every day.

Step 1: Create and label your zone. I find it most expedient to label the zones by the theme of the room it is used for. "PACIFIC." "TROPICO" for Tropical Beach. Use what you enjoy and can easily recall where and what that zone is.

Step 2: Zone all your tanks in the room.

Step 3: Zone all live feeding dispensers built for the tanks in that room.

Step 4: Assess whether Type 2 and/or 3 feeding is required.
Step 4A: If yes, progress to Step 5.
Step 4B: If no, skip to step 6.

Step 5: Identify and setup Type 2 and/or 3 feeder specialists. These should be the staff with the highest skill among the zone, although if Skill is required for type 1 feeding within the zone it may be necessary to go with lower skilled staff to ensure that your sharks' 200 High Skill herring is delivered on time. To setup these specialists, ensure that they and only they have either supplements or clipboards enabled and nobody else who is assigned to feed in that zone. Assign them appropriate accessories if they are unlocked.

Step 6: Assign staff whose job it will be to conduct Type 1 feeding jobs, including restocking Type 1B dispensers. Depending on the skill needed and volume of food to be delivered, you may need to transfer experienced staff from a less demanding zone to this one. Replacements can be hired to tend your low skill zones and cover the transfers just fine. This step ultimately comes down to experience and a sort of game sense, but I will eliminate the uncertainly inherent with the next step.
Step 6A: Optionally label your staff. For example, for the first member of my tropical beach zone's feeder team, TB F1. The first set of characters denotes the zone, the second the job type and numerical call sign.

Step 7: Stress test your zone's feeder team. From start of business from the first day after you unpaused the game to 1700, closely monitor the zone to ensure nothing starves and no Type 1B dispensers to go unfilled. If The zone is complex enough to require skilled feeding on animals which eat just once every two days or if Type 2 or 3 feeding is involved, then you will not have a true stress test completed until you observe the zone on the day where the most feeding, supplementing, and observation is conducted.

Step 8: Assess the zone's team upon completion of a stress test.
Step 8A: Your team passed and completed all feeding tasks by 1600, or at the absolute latest 1630. You are done here and turn your attention to something else in the aquarium.
Step 8B: They failed, either letting animals starve or completing their tasks after 1630 but before 1700. I promise you from experience that if your stress test feeding was done by 1640 or 1650, something stupid will happen with the staff pathing such that they will run out of time in the future. Go back to previous steps and add more staff to the zone (new hires or veteran transfers), verify that your specialists are setup properly, etc. and conduct steps 7-8 again.

Great, now your feeding zones are setup such that nothing in your aquarium will starve. Nothing dies, you get no bad prestige from stressed animals, and you get no negative base prestige.

Talents and Feeding
Briefly on Talents as it relates to feeding. We will cover talents in greater detail in the staff section, but for now know that similar to zoning being far less important for fixing and cleaning, talents are far more important for feeding. The -2 debuff from Precision 2 your newly hired Skill 1 feeder has will hamper his future out to Skill 10 more so than you may expect.

Stair Trick
I have confirmed that while staff cannot feed from "Up Stairs" they can feed just fine from "Down Stairs". This has a niche use in that, if you are pressed for space and have one tall tank next to another, slightly less tall one, then you can access the feeding spot via a downward stair segment from the taller tank's feeding platform.

Feeding Accessories

I will close my discussion of the feeding job by going into detail with the feeding accessories instead of doing so in the accessories section, since I assess these to be the most important accessories by far.

The Backpack
Doubles the amount of food which staff can carry. Possibly affects supplements though I have not tested this. Absolutely should be standard issue for non-specialized feeders of any skill level. Notably, I have observed staff in a zone with multiple tanks needing the same food type pickup one large load of, say, green pellets, take it to the nearest green pellet tank, feed everything there and then move on to a second tank needing the same food without making a second stop by the green pellet dispenser. Great time saver, contributing to your LL.

Feeding Stick
Adds a flat 30 skill bonus to feeding, but only when the task requires skill and possibly only with Type 1 feeding tasks. Usually a poor choice in my assessment. If it was +30 for all Type 1 feeding it could compete with the backpack in utility, but with how high skill feeding plays out it usually loses to it. With good talents, a high skill feeder who you need to handle high-volumes of skilled Type 1 food is better off equipped with a backpack, considering that they will easily have around 200 total skill in feeding. I have found it useful in pushing mid-skill feeders to the level that they can handle truly difficult feeding tasks, however.

Supplement Manual
Flatly boosts feeding skill by a massive 60 when delivering supplements. I use it standard issue on my supplement specialists and recommend you do the same. The bonus is so large that even very high skilled staff will see an appreciable bonus when delivering many supplements in a zone.

Dictaphone
Counts as a clipboard and increases feeding skill by 25% during Observation, including talent buffs. Therefore you will see the most use on staff with the highest skills. Also, this item's real strength is saving your staff a trip to the clipboard dispenser, positively impacting your LL significantly and allowing your Observation specialist to spend more time helping with Type 1 feeding. A setup which uses Dictaphones exclusively for Observation also removes the need to build any clipboard dispensers. A solid choice for Observation specialists.

Lab Coat (Mod, I cannot remember which one)
Provides the same skill buff as the Dictaphone but does not count as a clipboard. In exchange, it generates prestige when your guests see staff wearing it. I confess to not having used it, so I do not know how much prestige it generates upon a sighting. However, I believe that feeding tasks are essential, come before prestige generation, and if the LL is managed well then you can add more prestigious fish successfully to a given zone anyway. Furthermore, feeders tend to spend little time around guests, even when they go to the guest areas to Observe. Try it if you like.

This is covered in the campaign, but it is easy to miss or forget. With no manual for the game, I have seen other players be confused as to why stacking hundreds of units of protein skimming has not solved their water quality problem. I am going to explain how to get above 95% water quality even on your full capacity, max sized mega tank.

Water quality (WQ) is tied to the ratio of the four different contributors, these being Filtration, Protein Skimming (saltwater only), Nitrate Reacting, and UV Sterilization.

To give a simple but illustrative example, a large tank or large pump network of tanks with 300 units of each type of cleaning agent will get better WQ than a setup with 900 of one type and 100 each of the other three types.

I will go over pump networking as well, as it and its intricacies may not be as obvious to you as they were to me.

Pumps larger than the basic one can be used to tie an infinite number of tanks together, causing them to share WQ, temperature, Salt or Fresh Status, and Acidity, but NOT abyssal status. So your tank of arctic char or whatever can be connected to your Pacific viper fish tank. But a tank of cold saltwater fish cannot be connected to a cold freshwater tank, nor can that latter tank be connected to another cold freshwater tank if they have opposite Acidity requirements.

Lastly, why would you not want to connect all of your tanks together like one big happy family? WQ. For example, if you have six warm saltwater tanks and one requires 80% WQ while the other five need only 60% or less, then it is probably best to leave the high WQ tank on its own. That way you do not need to buy and maintain a much larger amount of purifiers for six tanks when you are really only trying to hit that high WQ target for the one tank.

Fundamental Elements of Deep Understanding

Because you almost always get back the amount you paid to buy something when you sell it, there are very few ways to really lose money in this game. Too few and negligible to bother listing them. What this means, though, is that if you decide that your aquarium needs major renovations then you can comfortably sell almost everything with no real loss to yourself. Notably, selling full sized animals will complicate things because you cannot but buy replacements at their minimum starting size. I recommend simply moving tanks around to sidestep this.

The Fourth Source of Income

Besides the obvious income of admission, food/drink, and gifts, there is a hidden additional source of income. That being breeding animals. For example, setting up a max size lagoon tank and filling it completely with guppies and lily pads is an easy way to get an ample supply of fry which you can sell as soon as they are born. Enough to significantly contribute to your income, especially out to the mid game. Note that this will be micro management intensive, requiring you to select the tank, then press x and click on every Chiclet of fry, possibly every game day.

On the Concession Upgrades

Do not be scared away from the Coffee Machines, Popcorn Machines, etc. by the added maintenance. It is negligible compared to the added income. More than enough to afford extra maintenance staff by the time you can unlock them.

Gift Shop Intricacies

What may not be obvious regarding the gift shops is that every guest can potentially buy one of every type of gift. Therefore, maximum diversity in your gift shop product range can explode your income in that sector.

Each access point to a gift shop stand can be 'locked on' by on guest at a time only, so maximizing the spot available on the balloon stand, for example, may increase your profits.

For gift shop setup, I recommend having a pair of huge areas setup to eventually accommodate at least one stand of each type, possibly two. I am digressing into aquarium layout here, but I recommend my own setup of a gift shop at your entrance and exit rooms each, with the staff area between them for the product storage. This way your gift shop staff has easy access to both gift shops.

What Are These Things?

Guests are stupid, needy, nearly blind, humanoid sheep who are remarkable for possessing an as-yet unidentified orifice, believed to be at the front of their torso, which, when properly stimulated, will excrete money, science, ecology, and even prestige.

The reliable ways of stimulating this orifice include showing them fish, letting them see an aquarium guide book on a shelf, dispensing popcorn and soda to them, etc.

Herding Your Woolless Sheep

Guests are so easily lost that I will be unfazed if I discover that they can get turned around inside the game's bathrooms. In this section I am going to discuss layout design elements which have worked for me.

One-Way Gates

These are easily your most powerful tool for keeping guests progressing through your aquarium. I recommend having them at your entrance and exit, and separating your rooms. In the example aquarium, I have the staff area walls blocking the way straight out of the entrance gate. To the guest's right is the real entrance, with a one-way gate under an archway leading to the first room. To their left is the exit, secured by another such gate leading out of the final room. If you have bridges between rooms, I recommend using these gates at both ends to prevent guests from loitering and getting lost on them.

Floor Arrows

Their function is self explanatory for the most part. I have found them useful in directing guest traffic through specific rooms such that they hopefully view all the tanks, and also for catapulting them across bridges. How exactly these are laid out depends on the tank layout of the room. Do you have tanks only integrated into the wall or do they jut into the room itself? Depending on the setup, you will have to test it out yourself.

Bridges
These can have higher utility than simple hallways between rooms by both generating extra prestige and saving space. Space under a bridge (or over a tunnel) can be used for more staff room. More pump networks, more food dispensers, etc. I absolutely do not recommend you try to use bridges as viewing platforms for, for example, mega tanks. You want guests on and off the bridge ASAP and having them loiter to look at fish is guaranteed to get them lost and then hungry, thirsty etc. and from there generating negative prestige. I recommend that you wall off the sides of the 2x3 stair area so that guests cannot generate negative prestige from viewing, e.g., filters.

Room Width

Besides the necessarily large gift shop rooms, 12 tiles wide for your standard rooms is what I recommend as a baseline. This should be plenty to to add amenities, a podium, and even have some space occupied by tanks such as the lagoon model. Length appears to be irrelevant.

Amenities Throughput

As mentioned briefly when I discussed gift shops, each interaction spot can only have one guest lock onto it at a time. Because food/drink, bathrooms etc. only have limited amounts of these spots (usually just one), simply having full 'coverage' (faded green outline around each amenity) will only get you so far. Eventually you will have so many guests in each room that you will need multiples of some or potentially all of them in each quarter. This is more important than it seems. If a guest has to go to the far side of a room to use the bathroom then they may blow past that room's tanks and then leave via a one-way gate without viewing them, losing prestige. What I have observed is that the more species of animals are in a room and the more prestigious they are, the more guests will congregate and so you will need more of this throughput there. An even balance of food, drink, rest, trash disposal, and bathrooms is a good baseline for each room. These shares can be incrementally increased in each quarter until guest needs are met in a timely fashion (prior to negative prestige generation).

I am calling it here for now. I will pickup work on this again possibly tomorrow.

To Do
Staff
At Least One Other Topic Which I Am Sure I Just Cannot Recall At The Moment