Heeey kids!
After I failed the Asian Animal scenario twice (the one where you have to get four Asian animals in a year), I decided to simply change the variable that decides how often an animal shows up in the lottery (For those of you who don't know, in challenge games when you can only get animals randomly, it's called the 'animal lottery'). After changing the Giant Panda, Red Panda, and Snow Leopard to show up as often as Camels and Gazelle (The Peafowl counted as my fourth Asian animal) I decided that I ought to write a short guide for other people, in case they wanted to change the ammount an animal apears on their lottery as well.
This is useful if you NEVER get a certian animal, like the African Elephant, even if you've had a five star zoo for three years, or if you simply HATE a certian animal and don't want it to show up (but don't want to risk deleting the animal).
First of all, you need WinRAR or another archiving program. You can download WinRAR by simply searching for it in Google or another engine.
I use Windows XP, so file locations may be different if you are using another version of Windows or operating system. Also, I'm going step-by-step for people new to game file editing. If you already know how to get to the animal ai in the entities folder, skip down until you see more blue.
So, what you need to do is open up this file in My Computer:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Zoo Tycoon 2
Then click on the file named entities.z2f. If a little message comes up saying that Windows cannot open this file, choose to select a program on the list, and open it with WinRAR (or whatever program you use).
Now, inside the entities folder there will be five folders (not counting the readme).
Click on the files in this order:
Units > Animals > Ai
This is the part where you actually learn how to change the probability of an animal appearing.
Click on any animal's MAIN file. Each animal has around seven files. For example, if you are changing the Grizzly Bear, you want to click on the file that says BearGrizzly.xml, not BearGrizzly_Young_M.xml, or any other Grizzly file.
Now, the hardest part of this whole thing is finding the little line that gives you the probablility of an animal showing up. It will be near the top, in a large block of scary-looking text. This is the bit you want:
f_adoptRarity=??"
The question marks will be replaced by a number between 1 and 100. The Grizzly Bear has a rarity number of 70, so his code looks like this:
f_adoptRarity="70"
All you need to do is replace that number with one higher or lower, [COLOR="Red]BETWEEN 1 and 100![/COLOR] If it is outside of that then something bad will happen.
That's all. Just save the file and load up your game.
I do not sugest you mess with anything else in this file unless you know what you are doing. It is always a good idea to create backup files of any entities file you edit. You may also want to take note of the true rarity level of an animal before you change it, so that you can change it back if you want.
Some examples of rarity levels:
Camel, Moose, Gazelle, Peafowl: 1
Penguin: 20
Ostrich, Okapi: 40
Lion: 50
Black Rhino: 60
Grizzly Bear: 70
Mountain Gorilla: 80
Giant Panda: 100
PM me with any questions.
PLEASE NOTE: THESE GUIDES INVOLVE EDITIING YOUR GAME FILES. IF YOU DECIDE TO DO THIS MAKE SURE YOU BACK UP THE ORIGINAL GAME FILES. WE ARE NOT HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY PROBLEMS YOU MAY ENOUCONTER FROM FOLLOWING THESE GUIDES. RND - FORUMS ADMIN
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