Planet Zoo – Better In-Game Performance Improvement Settings

If you’ve been playing Planet Zoo for a while you’ll notice that performance will start to deteriorate gradually. In this guide, I will cover a few steps and methods you can apply to improve performance on Planet Zoo. I’ve personally experienced and measured the impact of everything I’m covering in this guide. I will cover what worked for me.

For reference, I’m using an I7 7700K CPU with a GTX 1080.

State of the Game

Planet Zoo is roughly three years old right now and is running the Cobra Game Engine which they made specifically for the game Planet Zoo (and also their other title: “Planet Coaster”).

Since the initial release Planet Zoo has received regular performance improvements and/or patches and said improvements are still expected to roll out in the next couple of years.

Planet Zoo is running on DirectX11, which isn’t necessarily bad but will show it’s downside once you’re running bigger projects.

Planet Zoo is much more CPU heavy than GPU intensive. The longer and more you play, the slower a zoo will eventually get as more and more needs to be calculated.

Graphics Settings

performance. What’s important is:

The Resolution you play at
It’s best to play at your native resolution if you’re playing at 1920×1080. If you’re running 2K or 4K it’s recommended to scale down although this will affect visual quality.

The Anti-Aliasing setting
Where Temporal Anti-Aliasing is heavier/better than FXAA and FXAA better than none where none is the best performance-wise setting.

Shadow Quality
Shadows are quite intensive while not immediately noticeable. I personally recommend setting this setting at medium or lower. Try it out for yourself and see where you wish to draw the line. Lower is always better.

Water Reflections
Although it’s very nice and neat, it places a decent hit on the system performance. I recommend disabling it if you don’t immediately notice its effect yourself.

Screen Space Reflections
Just like water reflections, it’s nice to have but isn’t a light feature.

Terrain Geometry
It’s playing a role in performance while not being too noticeable if you scale it down.

Game Settings

The following options will impact the CPU and game’s engine.

Maximum Amount of Guest. I personally found the ideal amount of guests to be around: 3000 guests.
I recommend setting the guest limiter to 3000 or lower.

Path Congestion Guests getting stuck on paths or bulking together actually has a hit on the game’s performance.
Check your park for small or narrow paths and see if you can widen them.

Turn Off Guest Needs (Sandbox Only)
There are various needs you can disable which makes the game stop calculating the specific need and thus save some resources which could in turn be used for something else and/or to improve performance.

By turning off “Guest Energy” you already disable quite a calculation for the game’s engine.
You could also turn off things like hunger, thirst, education, etc/

Turn Off Animal Needs (Sandbox Only)
Animals are running constant calculations. If you turn off some of their needs you will save resources the same way it works for guest needs.

Turn Off Staff Needs (Sandbox Only)
Similar to guests and animals, staff members also have a bunch of calculations running.

Less AnimalsThe more animals you have the more the game needs to calculate. Fewer animals equal better performance. Having smaller habitats also seems to improve performance.

Out of Game

Background Processes
Shut down unnecessary background processes which consume CPU.

Install the game on an SSD Drive.

Consider an overclock
Overclocking could make a significant improvement if you’re limited by your hardware.

Adjust your NVIDIA/AMD Settings Set the performance mode for Planet Zoo to performance and turn off power saving options while playing.

Other Tips

Pause The Game
If you’re building, pause the game. This pauses all calculations and gives you a smoother building experience.

Keep A Small Zoo
Keep your Zoo small if you’re not on sandbox mode.

Play On Sandbox Mode
You’ll have more options to adjust and optimize to squeeze out more performance.

Pressure Frontier Developments
Pressure the creator of the game to work on more optimizations.