True flooded forests

[VNDragonV2]

So to test out Serpyderpy's new freshwater mod and tank terrain change trick, as well as various freshwater fish mods, I made some ambitious flooded forest tanks yesterday. It was well received on Discord and inspired some other builds, so I thought why not share it here too?

My dlupdate folder is a mess right now since aside from these attempts, I'm playing without user-made items for the PANDA contest. The map is barebone and just full of tanks for testing various MM animals.

 

1. Amazon basin
 

 

This was V1 before the game crashed prematurely (still unsure of the cause). I salvaged a bit of it from an earlier save and then built a V2 below with some extra land for the tapirs, capybaras, otters, crocodilians, and anaconda.

 

 

V2 is still my most ambitious tank so far with a very dense number of Hawkkeye's cichlids and piranhas - in fact, I cannot load the save file again without cutting down on the number of animals in this tank. I lost count but I would not be surprised if the total animal count surpasses 100. At this number of animal exhibit compatibility is nigh impossible, but if you cut down to ~10 species it should be achievable. Vegetation also started out very dense - and I love that, but I reduced it eventually to view the animals more easily.

And honestly, they look even better in videos when you can see all the critters buzzing around.

 

 

 

 

2. Mekong delta

 

I am more mindful of vegetation this time around - no Amazonian giant water lillies, no swamp cypress, etc. There are also fewer fishes from this region available ingame compared to the Amazon, so I managed to keep most of them happy. There is no land portion like V2 Amazonia tank, but I recognize that this region has a loaded stack of tankable Zoo Tycoon animals (tapirs, Asian elephant, tigers, saltwater crocodile, etc) that can work should I ever do a land segment.

 

 

 

The next flooded forest I want to make will be the North American Everglades. I also have an idea of making Jane's neutral rainforest foliage to be tank-placeable in future iterations (unless someone here knows of an underwater rainforest mod). If you think there are specific foliage, rocks, or tank-placeable scenery items that I should throw in, feel free to share them here.

 

 

[Goosifer]

These would make great animated wallpapers.

[VNDragonV2]

12 minutes ago, Goosifer said:

These would make great animated wallpapers.

Catfish marching in a tank ASMR, coming soon at Wallpaper Engine.

[Fern]

I think pixigger might have done tank work too. He did do a mud terrain hack.

But I did find this one.

Spiritwolf also did tank work years ago.

This is a program that allows the user to edit the tanks.cfg file. You can set your tank depth, if it's levelled when you create a tank and much more. Please view the included readme file to learn how to use this program.

[Truly_happy]

That looks so beautiful and realistic! I love the biodiversity of both plants and animals.

[VNDragonV2]

10 minutes ago, Fern said:

I think pixigger might have done tank work too. He did do a mud terrain hack.

But I did find this one.

Spiritwolf also did tank work years ago.

This is a program that allows the user to edit the tanks.cfg file. You can set your tank depth, if it's levelled when you create a tank and much more. Please view the included readme file to learn how to use this program.

It makes sense to me that other have found the terrain trick in the past. The process was pretty straightforward, just finicky when you want multiple tank terrains in a single zoo.

[(Admin)Savannahjan]

Woah, these look amazing!  This is a game changer to me.  I always hated building in tanks; they look like a big aquarium, and not happy ones.  These look like real habitats.

[Fern]

Do you want that level tank hack to see how it works. I really must get around to doing rock tank walls at some point

[VNDragonV2]

19 minutes ago, Fern said:

Do you want that level tank hack to see how it works. I really must get around to doing rock tank walls at some point

 

Sure thing! I love playing around with obscure mods. Were these hosted anywhere at some point?

 

33 minutes ago, Savannahjan said:

Woah, these look amazing!  This is a game changer to me.  I always hated building in tanks; they look like a big aquarium, and not happy ones.  These look like real habitats.

 

And aside from the water, most items are already available at Tek. I hope this will inspire more tank builds in the future.

[Fern]

The mud hack is at ZA in the hacks area.

The other used to be there but isn't any more.

I would be very careful with the tank file as it is an exe. Normally I would get Jay to extract the files because these old exe files often changed other things as well and then the game would have problems. Let me know once you have them so I can remove them.

Removed mudterrain.zip 45.39 kB · 2 downloads Tanks[1][1].cfgEditor.zip 1.68 MB · 1 download