Wild Americas - Introduction

Wild Americas is a 14 acre British zoo themed around wildlife of the Americas, located in Carlisle, England.

I built this zoo to fulfil a long term ambition to create a realistic tropical house-based zoo, a type of zoo which is common in the UK. Tropical Oasis was my first attempt on Zoo Tycoon 2 and this is my first (and probably not last) attempt on Planet Zoo!

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Wild Americas features a large tropical house with three distinct biomes (swamp, rainforest and desert), as well as outdoor enclosures for a variety of species from across the Americas, including jaguars, giant otters and beavers.

As with all my zoos, realism was the aim and I think this zoo might be my most realistic yet. It's only a small zoo because I started working on it before I started a new job and I didn't expect to have much time to work on it. Whilst it lacks in size, I've tried my best to compensate for it with detail.

The zoo's motto "A wild New World awaits you" is a reference to the zoo's dedication to the Americas, also known as the New World.

The zoo is the work of my own imagination and it wasn't based on any specific real world zoos. However, the idea behind it was loosely inspired by Tropical World (a fond favourite and probably the source of my obsession with tropical houses), Amazon World, Tropiquaria Zoo, the Tropical Butterfly House, Amazonia and the Amazona Zoo.

Another aim for this zoo was to keep things compact to convey the "small zoo" feel. As a small zoo, I also wanted it to appear in the middle of the budget scale, somewhere between a small, local zoo and a larger mainstream one. I wanted it to look like a modest, upstanding zoo which was well in control of its own resources, so whilst it may lack world-class, state-of-the-art exhibits, it still has strong animal welfare standards.

Species list: American alligator, spectacled caiman, Cuvier's dwarf caiman, axolotl, yellow anaconda, diamondback terrapin, Amazonian giant centipede, red-eyed tree frog, green iguana, Galapagos giant tortoise, Colombian white-faced capuchin monkey, golden poison frog, goliath birdeater, boa constrictor, giant desert hairy scorpion, gila monster, eastern diamondback rattlesnake, Mexican red-knee tarantula, black-tailed prairie dog, llama, capybara, cougar, giant otter, giant anteater, jaguar, North American beaver. The 2023 expansion also added maned wolf, reindeer, striped skunk, raccoon, nine-banded armadillo and butterflies.

For the first time, I also put together some supporting media for this zoo to add to immersion, seen below:

YouTuber ZHSplays also toured the zoo on his channel and you can see it below:

And here's my guest point-of-view tour without commentary or music for extra immersion: