Experiencing Lag Only With Guests
I've seen people be able to completely fill their franchise zoos with buildings, exhibits, enclosures, animals, guest areas, etc. I have ~ 100 hours in the game and have been, in the past couple of weeks, trying to get better at creating zoos, keeping guests happy, keeping animals happy, breeding, creating beautiful areas, etc., etc. Typical Planet Zoo things!
I play on PC and have, admittedly, quite a good PC. It's a desktop, it has 64GB of RAM at 7000, 7800 XT with a 7700X. I'm probably 25-35% complete with the space I have in my zoo, with tons of animals and decor and whatnot. I have around 7,000 (a bit less) guests in my zoo typically. I don't lag whatsoever except when I am looking near my primary/original zoo entrance, where guests congregate in huge clumps. They have multiple different ways they can go, but the primary entranceway is where they all seem to clump up and get completely stuck.
Attempting to combat that, I have two additional zoo entrances that I've purchased and placed away from the original one. Not sure if it matters, but I'm in North America on Temperate, completely flat.
Any recommendations/suggestions/help? I'm in the process of building a new PC (9800X3D with either a 5080 or 5090, depending on cost and performance), but I'm probably still a year or so out from that. Would even a PC of that capacity be able to handle (I'd assume so & really hope so lol). TIA!!
11 Replies
I have intense lag at around 3000 guests ðŸ˜
I’m so sorry!
It has nothing to do with your PC but with the game's performance. There comes a point where ANY PC can't handle those crowds of visitors. And if it's franchise or the other mode where there's economy, it's impossible to limit the visitors because your economy goes down the drain. So it's a problem that's impossible to solve in the long run.
The only way to play without fear of that problem is in SandBox mode by setting the minimum limit of visitors (this has been the only way to build zoos all over the map without lag for me), but in franchise, I've never managed to exceed 7-8k visitors without suffering a major performance drop.
Okay, thank you so much! This is so helpful and informative. It's the only time I lag so I figured it was just them, but wasn't sure if a beefier computer would handle it better.
tatinis received a thank you carrot!
U could play in franchise with a limit of 500 guests. Make within the franchise zoo's that are species/continent/biome specific. Gives the oppertunity to make habitats for max size groups of animals. U can play franchise wihtout any fear not just sandbox.
Economy is affected by this, you can't at some point
Capping it at 500 guests doesn't really make sense in my case considering my computer runs the 7,000 guests just fine, except when they're all clumped up into one main area
You can cap at 3-5k guests and make plenty of money still, my active franchise zoos are sitting at over $2mil and I'm never going to spend that much lol.
One suggestion would be to redo your zoo entrance and spread your ticket booth things farther apart with pathing and maybe that will break the guests clumping up there a little bit.
In the meantime, I've been working on a different zoo within the same franchise and I made the paths bigger & didn't put a habitat immediately when you walk in, which I think is partially where I went wrong. Once I hit 1-2k guests, I should've moved the first habitat I think
In franchise cash shouldnt be an issue
Depending on dlc's butterfly's do well on autosell, eastern brown snake / puff adder do excellent aswell selling manually. I have a screenshot somewhere of an exhibit area with 38 exhibits, 2 zookeepers and a maintenance worker to keep it all going. In a way its self sufficient, 2 male 3 female snakes ( eastern brown / puff adder ) per exhibit. The have loads of offspring. Lowest of age go to the storage. If all goes to plan the exhibits should always have a pair of snakes in them. Only have to sell them manually as that gives way more cash then the autosell option per year. A franchise Zoo doesnt need guest, guest just bring extra cashflow to the zoo's.