I was surprised to see that there were virtually no resources available for this game online, so I set my mind to putting at least something down about it. I first played this game when it came out in 2003 and have sunk hundreds of hours into playing it. It’s one of my favorite games, mostly for nostalgia reasons, and I hope I'll be able to help others understand and enjoy the game more. Here are a few things I’ve learned about it through the years.

One of the keys to being succesful in this game is to build effective enclosures. An enclosure is an animal exhibit, most often surrounded on all sides by wall though other options are also available. The purpose of an animal enclosure is to provide an environment where the animal can have all of its needs met, be visible to the park visitors, and hopefully reproduce. Because selling animal babies is one of the most effective way to make money in Wildlife Park, there is no reason not to make every animal at your zoo as happy as possible.


There are several different types of walls you can build, and it is important to keep the animal you want to house in mind when choosing the material. I recommend High Pallisade because it is a good mixture of durability and price. Be careful when using low wall because animals that can jump will just jump right over it (found that one out the hard way).


You can also use water features and terraforming to separate animals, but they can be a bit trickier to get right and are only suitable for some animals. Animals which cannot climb can be contained by terraformed walls that are at least two high. Just make sure they aren't too close to park visitors or animals they are afraid of because they will not register the two high wall as a wall and will think that the scary thing is inside their enclosure. I often use this method to separate animals like Thompson's Gazelles and Burchell's Zebras, who need a lot of space, the same plants, but different terrain. Creating a water barrier works the same way but with creatures that can't swim. I often use a mixture of walls, terraformed walls, and water to get enclosures to look how I want. Make sure your animal cannot swim, jump or climb out of your enclosure. I once made a monkey island using a trench that was too shallow, and that became chaos in 0.2 seconds.

Making the animals happy is not wildly difficult in principle. If you are uncertain about what a particular animal species needs, click on the button with an i near the animal or animal house's picture. But all possible animal needs are:

Food: All animals need at least one kind of food, about half need two kinds of food. You can provide this by putting plants in their enclosure that provide the right types of food, or by setting up food dispensers to be staffed by animal keepers. Meat and fish can only be given by dispenser. There are two different dispensers for fish, one that's designed to go on land, and one that you have to set up on land facing water that can be used to feed animals like orcas and sharks. Make sure that animals that eat meat or fish get access to it immediately because not having it makes them violent and they will break out of their enclosures.

Drinking Water: All animals need drinking water except animals that live in water full time. You can provide water with a drinking trough or a water feature.

Terrain: Each animal has their favorite dirt. Some of the grasses can be difficult to tell apart but terraforming is cheap and it's worth it to make sure your animals are comfy. You only need to set up the animal’s preferred ground around the places where it will hang out (around its food, climbing places, swimming pool). Anywhere in the enclosure the animal won‘t be actively standing you can ignore. Animals will also need a certain amount of hilly ground vs. flat ground vs. water, which you can find info about on their species page. It usually takes a bit of trial and error to get the perfect cage set up.

Plants: This can be a tricky ratio to get right, especially with Gorillas and Koalas. Check what sort of plant they like best and add a few, experimenting until there is no longer the "needs more plants..." or "needs more plain ground..." message. Aquatic animals and Flamingoes don't need plants. Animals will usually accept plants with the same color background as their favorite plant, but I'm not sure if this is true for all animals all of the time. When in doubt, stick to favorite plant, or double check the enclosure for any offending plants.

Temperature: Depending on which map your playing, each map has its own temperature cycle. Most animals do fine on most maps, but if you're trying to put a Dromedary in Alaska or a Polar Bear in India, you will need to make use of either the heater or the snow thrower to make their enclosure the right temperature.

Excercise: Jump, Climb, Swim, and Scratch are needs animals meet by interacting with things in their environment. Animals that need to climb can only climb two terraforming units high, and animals that need to jump can only jump down two. You can also satisfy jump with a parallel bar. Animals that need to scratch need a large plant or an appropriately sized scratching post.

Behavioral: Tussle, and Groom are needs met by animals interacting with others of their species. "Tussle" just means play and can be satisfied automatically if you have more than one animal, or with a punching bag. Groom functions the same way but can't be satisfied using an item.

Herd Size: Every animal species has a herd size, which is the minimum number of animals you need to have in an enclosure for them to be perfectly happy. This number is displayed in their animal house and you'll get an angry message if you try and buy more animals than the herd size per animal house.

Medical: The only time I've ever seen an animal be sick is if its temperature is wrong for a long time or its been attacked by another animal. Build a veterinarian and they'll fix it. Once the animal is better and the environment is fixed, sell the veterinarian to save on upkeep costs.

Hygiene: This is a strange one. I think the developers were working on a feature where animals would defecate in their enclosure over time and animal cleaners would have to clean it up. I think its talked about in the difficulty settings somewhere. The only place its implemented is with African Elephants on hard mode. Apparently no other animals poop, ever. But don't worry, African Elephants make up for it big time. Its super unbalanced, and I've never been able to consistently keep their enclosure clean, even with six dedicated Animal Keepers. Simple solution: don't keep African Elephants on hard.

• If you're playing on hard it is possible for animals to die. They will die once they reach a certain age or are killed by another animal. One of your animal keepers should come by eventually and bury the animal, leaving a gravestone. Their age continues to update after they are dead, but after that they just take up space. If tombstones are taking up all your space, you can sell or delete them.
  
• If you are unsure about what terrain to put in your animal’s enclosure, place their house and then click on the terrain under their house. In free play, when you place an animal house the ground underneath it automatically becomes their preferred ground type. (This is not true in the campaign however)
  
• If you are breeding carnivores, make sure there are many meat and fish dispensers. It is possible for their to be too many animals for all of them to get access to food. This makes them turn aggressive and break out. I often have this problem with raccoons.

Park guests in Wildlife Park are very similar to the animals in that they also have physical and environmental needs. You can check them much like you can can check an animal's needs. I haven't figured out how to make guests 100% happy all the time, but fortunately you don't need to do that for your zoo to be successful. 70-80% satisfaction is ideal in my opinion, lower satisfaction than that isn't too detrimental and anything above it is just icing on the cake.

• Make sure to have a bathroom, a refreshments stand, a drink stand, benches, garbage cans, a cash machine, and information signs in your park. Offer more drinks stands on hot maps.
  
• Plants fill up the plant meter for guests when they are close to them, and plants rated as more attractive are more effective, though also more expensive. I believe plants inside animal enclosures that are near the guest path count towards their plant meter.
  
• Guests often complain about path design, though I am not sure how to optimise this just yet. Putting up statues seems to make them feel a little better.

Sometimes a fence will wear down, or an animal will break out because you didn't have enough animal keepers to keep it fed. The animal then goes berserk and attacks zoo guests. This is not a doomsday scenario. Just build a first aid tent near the fallen guest and a paramedic will come help. I don't believe there is any time limit, as I have definitely forgotten about injured guests for extended periods of time and had nothing bad happen. Have an animal trapper catch the animal, or sell it and buy a new one if the scenario allows it and you have the money. The scared guests wil run out to be replaced by a new crop of oblivious ones.

If you take poor care of your animals on hard, an annoying zoo guest called a protester will show up. They like to go around breaking down fences, and then trapping themselves in animal enclosures when your handyman fixes the broken fence. You can build a security staff member who will convince protesters to leave within their area of influence. This can sometime take a while if the protester has locked themselves in somewhere weird. Sometimes you have to wall them off or use terraforming to get them out of your enclosures and out of your zoo.

Sometimes a guest will wander far off the path and won't stop talking about how they're lost, can't find a bathroom, and want to leave. Unless they're inside one of your exhibits, ignore the sad fool. They can't die and it's generally not worth the effort to free them. They'll either wander back out eventually or linger in hell forever. There's usually one in each extended playthrough and I assign each one an unpleasant name.

How do I make the water deeper?

Wildlife Park is not like Zoo Tycoon when it comes to water. The water in Wildlife Park only comes in one depth, so when animals are telling you that the water area is not big enough, what they really mean is that it doesn’t cover enough land. Make your tank wider.

How do I give my dolphins/orcas/sharks fish?

Animals that eat fish but only live in water have to be given fish in a special fish dispenser. The dispenser looks like a grey box with a hose coming off of it and you place it on the side of the water area, much like the sea animal houses. Animals that eat fish and can go on both water and land (like penguins or crocodiles) can eat out of this dispenser as well as the land based one.

Why won’t my chimpanzees/pandas mate?

These two animals require the sex education item in order to mate. Some animals that grow up in captivity just do not understand how to reproduce without intervention, and this item is supposed to simulate this.

Mission 12: Save the Panda

This mission's only listed objective is to breed to Pandas, but this requirement is deceptive. The game sets you up with an empty enclosure with a panda house in it, leading players to believe that they should start breeding pandas right away. But you are only started with 100,000 dollars, which isn't enough to outfit a panda cage. If you buy two pandas and go through all the trouble of setting up their cage and the park around it, you'll be completely out of money and you'll also find that the pandas won't reproduce. This is because animals will only reproduce if they are 100% happy, and one of the factors governing this is herd size. The panda's minimum herd size is three, so you actually need three pandas to breed two pandas. If you try to breed pandas immediately you'll find yourself with a sub-par park that slowly runs out of money until you're past the point of no return.

Fortunately, this mission lets you buy a handful of animal species besides pandas: blue peafowl, arabian oryxes, pere david's deer, bengal tigers, and orangutans. I recommend setting up your park to have peafowl, oryxes, and deer in it at first and make sure they're all perfectly happy. Having breeding populations of animals is the easiest way to make steady income, even if you can't get many visitors. Use the last of your starting budget to set up the essentials for guests and then start letting people in.

When a baby is born, wait for it to fill up it's needs bar because it will sell for more money. If you can afford it, you might build extra houses in your enclosures so that when a baby is born it doesn't give the "house is overcrowded" message to all the other animals, making them not perfectly happy and thus not able to reproduce any more until you build more houses or sell the baby. Selling surplus animals lets you build up money to be able to afford the more expensive animals, until you can eventually afford pandas.

I usually set up the pandas in the upper part of the map and make them a long enclosure using a lot of the perimeter fence. Remember to set up a sex-ed item, as pandas need it in their enclosure to breed. And set up their food on the end of the enclosure near people, with lots of telescopes pointing at them because guests will go nuts!

• You can name everyone in this game. Your animals, your staff, even zoo visitors. Just double click on their name and type a new name. I highly recommend you do this because it can make the experience a lot funnier. (Note that zoo guests will leave and never return, so only name them if they glitch out)
  
• You do not need a large or exotic zoo for it to be financially successful. Build about five animal enclosures around a looping path. Make sure there are no points in the path where visitors aren’t near an enclosure. Then build a restroom, a drink stand, a refreshment stand, and a souvenir stand and you should be golden.
  
• This game is very slow paced. I virtually always play it at the maximum game speed so that the animals and people actually move.
  
• Place the animal feeding stations near where visitors can see them. Zoo guests’ happiness is improved by proximity to safely contained zoo animals.
  
• Reducing all the sales stands' default prices by 1 dollar seems to stop the guests from complaining about the price, while still turning some profit.
  
• The number of guests is ruled by your park rating. The park rating increases when you place new things in the park and when visitors are satisfied. Getting your zoo rating to increase when you don’t have much money (like in the campaign) takes a billion years. Turn the time up to max once you’ve worked out all the details and just wait it out. You aren’t doing anything wrong, and soon you’ll see attendance increasing.

• Visitors will appear next to some objects and will seem to wander off the path when using them.
  
• Animals will become frightened if they are standing under a bridge that has zoo visitors standing on it. You can avoid this by building a fence under the bridge.
  
• Giraffes are able to glitch onto bridges sometimes if they are standing beneath them.
  
• Sometimes animals get stuck in an infinite loop if they are climbing on a tall piece of terrain or are swimming next to a plant. If you get a message saying that one of your animals is starving and you come upon a scene like that, the best thing to do is to sell the plant or use the terrain tool to “free” the animal.
  
• Sometimes if an animal becomes very distressed they will run around their cage frantically trying to escape (you see this in the one of the campaign missions). In this situation, even when you place things they want in their enclosure they ignore it and keep freaking out. The best thing to do here is set up a small box with water and food, trap the animal, and place it there. Think of it as reform school. Moving them out of their environment breaks the loop and they are able to function normally again. Put them back in the old enclosure once they’ve eaten a bit.

Please comment if this guide was useful, if you have a question or would like to see something added or change in the guide. Thank you for reading and happy zoo building!