Killer Penguin
October-February, Year One and Two.Last push toward getting that penguin. We've reached two stars and earned more unlocks.
New buildings:
Family restroom
Insect house
Octopus house
Animal photo booth
More food stands, including the ice cream cart.
New scenery:
Beluga splash fountain/arch
Lamp posts(In normal, gothic, tundra, savanna, and jungle themes.)
Crashed UFO
Statue(Polar bear, jungle, savanna, gothic, tundra, and littoral themes.)
Music rock(Normal, jungle, savanna, tundra, gothic, and marine themes.)
Hippo bouncy ride
Gorilla climbing bars
Geyser($1,200)
Bat cave($1,000)
Along with the boost to fame, we now have an upgraded zoo gate. We'll get a new gate for every full star, and if we ever get a million dollars.
Our collection of animal butts has been replaced by a more appropriate, albeit less funny, goodbye.
Since we now have the ice cream cart, I've replaced our popcorn cart with Mr. Cobblepot's Confectionaries. A mechanical monkey points a hose of snow at visitors.
We completed a quick challenge to boost our fame by taking pictures of guests drinking soda and sitting on a bench for a PR flyer.
The Animal Hygiene Association is back, offering us money for keeping our animals clean.
Our first-generation African buffaloes have died, so we bought a new one to keep the bloodline of their young going.
We've upgraded our restrooms with our new family-sized models. It should be a long time before we have any more complaints on that.
Just wanted to give credit to the Crocodylia modders here. Even though it's a small modpack, and the animals themselves are so tiny you can barely see them without the camera's zoom feature, they took the time to give baby dwarf crocodiles a unique model.
Our guests are enjoying the Gardens!
Going into the end of our first year, we won the challenge and earned the $4,550 prize. With that and the money we had recently accumulated, we were now over $11,000. Our profit has skyrocketed in the past couple months.
With that, we were finally able to afford our Extinct Research lab. No reason to give our guests access, so we built out at the far end of the swamp.
Our killer penguin will be acquired by deliberately failing the prehistoric animal creation process, so I think this is a good time to show the minigame.
With the lab, we can now enter a fossil-hunting mode. This gives us a metal detector-esque gun that finds fossils underground.
Each fossil is in several pieces, and sometimes we get a joke item instead of a fossil. The block of ice had apples in it, so we gave it to the bongos as a treat.
After we gather all the bones for a particular species, we assemble it in a quick jigsaw puzzle.
Then there's a quick time event in the genetics lab, where we have to hit arrow keys and clicks in the right pattern. Later on more and more of the prompts are blacked out, turning it into a memory challenge.
When we fail, one of several joke animals are created. Usually they're squirrels, jerboas, giant frogs, or giant butterflies. Unfortunately only the killer penguin counts as a real animal in its own right. I'll release the others into the swamp. Our first creation was a giant butterfly.
I'm sure the ecosystem will be ok with a few dozen of these roaming around.
I'll admit I made a mistake here. During the attempts to make a killer penguin, I got distracted, forgot what I was doing, and absentmindedly made this bluebuck correctly. I didn't want to get rid of her, so now we have bluebucks. I made another shortly thereafter to keep her company.
Adding the bluebuck resulted in us gaining another 1/2 star, raising us to the halfway mark.
New buildings:
Compost building
Touch pool
New scenery:
Pirate shipwreck ($1,200)
Pirate mast
Umbrella table (Normal, jungle, savanna, littoral, tundra, and gothic themes.)
Wooden arch
While we were working on that, we were offered a new chance at the donation matching challenge.
We hired an educator to help encourage donations and hopefully reach the goal.
Our bongos bred again and decided they were overcrowded. To make room, we released their first, now adult, child into the wild for a permanent minor bonus to fame.
Unfortunately, we narrowly failed the donation challenge.
We'll try and make it up with a repeat of the stress reduction challenge.
Finally, after way more time and effort than I expected it to take, we created a killer penguin egg. While we wait for it to hatch, we built a whole Penguin area just to the side of our entrance. Cobblepot's Confectioneries was moved into the area, along with a new table for the guests to eat their ice cream.
Glad we should be done with the penguin shortly, aside from any danger it causes. That took a while, but I'll circle back and deal with the requests we had to put on the back burner for its sake next time.
A giant frog, created by the unnatural science of the Gardens.
Zoo fame:2-1/2 stars