ChicagoZohan

Construction of the entry plaza monorail station is continuing at a rapid pace!

Bonus shot from the underwater viewing for Serpents of the Seaway: While this part of the zoo is far from complete, this little exhibit is a personal favorite of mine. I do want to add some outdoor feeding and enrichment for the Diabloceratops; expect that to come soon.

Tucked away down here, you may notice a classic Jurassic Park gate, its doors shut. Beyond the gate is a long access tunnel straight through the side of the hill. Eventually, this will lead to where much of the park's infrastructure will be. For now, all of that is placeholder stuff necessary for the park to function with the gameplay elements I have turned on.

We've renovated the underwater viewing of the elasmosaurus/libonnectes habitat near the entrance, as well as the surrounding plaza. The habitat will also be viewable from a stadium up above the water, although this part is far from complete.

So as I was going over the park I realized it's a little plain in many places; I need to do another pass adding light poles, decor on them, warning signs, security cameras, maintenance booths, etc.... I also need to redo most of the exhibits I've already started. The two smallest ones are probably the closest to done; the big plesiosaur tank is good but the viewing galleries are barely started; the predator habitat I am redoing as a predator and prey pair of habitats; and the aviary needs to be completely redone now that we have better terrain tools in aviaries. The aviary I'm especially excited for, I want to make a kayak tour through a deep, deep canyon with quetzalcoatls flying overhead. And I blocked out a backstage area but I haven't actually done anything with it yet. That's another major project. All that just to wrap up what I've laid out so far - I have ideas for a couple more zones beyond the Laramidian native entrance.

Ah, yes.... the drama. Fair point. It should be safe to use mods that just unlock more scaling or extreme terrain edits and such, right?

So, I was going for a scientifically accurate late Cretaceous Laramidia entrance, modeled on LA Zoo's planned California Natives zone. (California for the most part was underwater in the late Cretaceous, but the bits of it that were above water would have been part of Laramidia, the western half of what would become North America). As such, I was using specific dinos from the area with stand-ins from the game. In this case, Albertosaurus stands in for Lythronax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lythronax Lythronax means "Gore King" hence the name of the area. But... you aren't the first to point out a certain.... meaning... I have to admit that I don't really see it (and I don't know if I want to!) but I'll probably end up changing it. Especially because I ended up revamping the single species Lythronax habitat into a complex of habitats.

I am returning after a long hiatus to a park I'd been working on for quite a while when Jurassic World first came out; I was a bit burned out by some of the limits on aviaries and lagoons, but the aviary update has drawn me back in. While my park is a very long way from finished and still has many areas that are extremely rough around the edges, including a few zones I want to redo completely, I want to share what I have so far and some of my thoughts on where I am going. Welcome... To Jurassic Park: Los Angeles! The entrance (like almost every part of this park) isn't quite finished, I want to flesh out the plaza in front of it, add shade structures and queues in front of the ticket and membership booths, etc; but I am very, very happy with the bones of the structure. The entrance is very much modeled on the real world entrance of the Los Angeles zoo, and in fact the whole starting zone is in some ways modeled on the Los Angeles Zoo both as it exists today and as in its master plan. I am aiming for a high budget, highly themed Jurassic Park that might have been built near Los Angeles in place of JP San Diego in a slightly alternate timeline and never suffered any significant disasters. I will lean heavily on the JP theming with some allowances for time passing and modernization bringing us closer to the Jurassic World style. The entrance is the main thing I wanted to show off so far - the rest requires significant work. But there IS quite a bit of it that's at least got placeholders in to save space for future ideas... Maybe I will talk about some of those soon.

Super cool! I love the museum! Are you using Scary's modded statues, then? I've been a bit nervous about getting into modding in case it breaks saves, but having statues of all the species would be VERY nice for builds.

Hi everyone! I'm ChicagoZohan. I am not actually from Chicago - my screen name is a reference to Left 4 Dead, haha. I've been playing park builders forever - in first grade my best friend got me into Rollercoaster Tycoon and Age of Empires 2, and I've kept both of those interests to this day. That said, I played these games (Zoo Tycoon was by far my favorite as a kid) as strategy games first and and creative games second. I never really played RCT3 (my wife played that as a kid so when we were in college we briefly played it together, but then....) All that changed with Planet Coaster. I became a creative builder first and a strategy gamer second, at least in these sorts of games. My Planet Coaster career mostly consisted of a single crappy sandbox park - basically a Game of Thrones themed Disneyland budget park, with lands themed after the different kingdoms. It was incredibly crappy, with absolutely nonsense of scale, copy pasted square buildings everywhere and guests clipping through fake path, but it was mine. I fell in love with piece by piece building. Then Planet Zoo came out. As a Zoo Tycoon fan, I was super into it, and still am. I developed my love of small, somewhat realistic builds in this game, and found the BroNation discord where I doubled down on that style. I also played with the ZSU discord for a while, as it helped guide my builds. I made two fairly extensive builds for ZSU and a few halfhearted attempts at an LA Zoo inspired build, as well as some other half finished projects here and there. Eventually Planet Coaster 2 came out and with its new tools made Planet Zoo feel painful to play. I've been working on a single park in this game, I've had kids since Planet Zoo and so this is a theme park dedicated to my daughter. Eventually it will be a Disney style park with worlds themed after all of her favorite shows; for now, it is a Paw Patrol themed water park. But my current and so far favorite build is in Jurassic World Evolution 3. See, the JWE games never felt anything like the Planet games. I never got very creative with them. And boy, did I want to. When JWE1 was first announced 8 years ago, I thought it would be the game of my dreams: Planet Coaster with dinosaurs. I was wrong. That game didn't come out then... But it has come out now. My current build is an LA Zoo inspired Jurassic Park build. I'll start a thread to share it soon, having been summoned here by ShyGuy over in the BroNation discord.

Hi! I'll be posting my intro thread eventually 😄

The big features everyone wants for Planet Zoo 2 are fully aquatic and flying animals. That's what we got going from JWE1 to 2 so I hope we get the same thing in PZ2, although I really hope that tanks and aviaries will be a LOT more modular in PZ2 than in JWE3 (not to mention 2!)