The Zoo

Or just tell the bot#

turn on zoo
make the safari drops go to #drops
dispresso open my zoo
dispresso hatch my egg
dispresso feed my animals
dispresso battle @Dom
dispresso move my chimeras to storage
dispresso put 2 lions in my zoo

The first two are the admin side. Everything after is the zoo said out loud in a server: the same command, run as you. Moving animals counts how many of that species stand in your zoo and moves them all, so you never look up a code. Start with dispresso or mention it. It asks for anything it still needs, writes the same settings the dashboard writes, and the whole list of sentences is on Talk to Dispresso.

Playing it#

/zoo home opens the board and everything below is reachable from it. Each also has a chat command, if you would rather type than press, and a slash path beside it. Every chat word starts with zoo, so the one you want is !zoobuy and never !buy, which in a shared server belongs to whichever bot the members were using before we arrived. The zoo plays in the bot's DMs too, both spellings.

!zoostart <name>       /zoo start             open your first zoo
!zoodaily              /zoo daily             the free daily claim, sometimes an egg outright
!zoopack               /zoo pack              the season's starter pack, once per account
!zooconveyor           /zoo egg conveyor      the belt eggs arrive on
!zoobuy <position>     /zoo egg buy           take the egg standing there
!zooupgrade            /zoo upgrade           raise the belt's tier
!zooeggs               /zoo egg list          the eggs you are holding
!zoohatch <egg> <zoo> <square>   /zoo egg hatch
!zooopen <square>      /zoo animal open       open it once the timer is done
!zooanimals            /zoo animal list       what you own, each with a four character code
!showani <code>        /zoo animal show       one animal drawn large, with its whole sheet
!zoomanage / !zooplacein / !zoounplace     /zoo animal manage, placein, unplace, storage
!zoofeed               /zoo animal feed       every animal in a zoo, and how long it stays full
!zoofeedall [food]     /zoo animal feedall    feed everything hungry at once (Plus and Pro)
!zoofeedone 1 A5 apple 2         /zoo animal feedone   one square, one food
!zoocollect / !zoocredits                    /zoo collect, /zoo credits
!zoobank / !zoodeposit / !zooshop            /zoo bank withdraw, deposit, shop
!zooplot / !zooslot                          /zoo plot, /zoo animal slot
!zoolb / !zoopass / !zooguide                /zoo lb, /zoo pass, /zoo guide

The belt is the part worth understanding first. Eggs arrive at one end, travel across, and fall off the other, so a position you walk away from is a position you lose. Upgrading the belt both speeds it up and changes the mix: your own tier is the commonest thing on it and each tier below arrives less often. Nothing you have unlocked ever stops appearing. The zoo board has a Conveyor button on it, which opens the belt with a picker for the positions, Take all I can afford, Upgrade tier and Refresh, so it is not a command you have to know to find.

Opening an egg#

!zooopen plays out on screen: one message, edited a few times, from a whole shell to a crack to the animal itself. The hatch has already happened before the first frame is drawn, so what you are watching is a replay rather than a draw. If the animation stalls halfway you still own the animal, and !zoo shows it standing in the square the egg was in.

Rearranging, and a second zoo#

Skip the typed square codes if you can. Press Place / Move on your zoo board, or run !zoomanage (same as /zoo animal manage). Pick Place, Take out, or Move. Menus list what is in storage and which squares are free. No chessboard typing.

!zoomanage             /zoo animal manage     place, take out, move with buttons
!zoomove b1 f4         /zoo animal move       typed move; if F4 is taken the two swap
!zooeggmove a1 c3      /zoo egg move          the same, for an egg that is still hatching
!zoostoreegg a5        /zoo egg store         take a hatching egg back into storage
!zooname Reptile House /zoo name              rename the zoo you are working in
!zoos                  /zoo switch            every zoo you own, and which is the active one
!zooswitch 2           /zoo switch 2          make zoo #2 the one everything else acts on
!zooplot [name]        /zoo plot              buy another zoo, up to three

The typed commands still work if you like them. Storing a hatching egg holds its clock rather than restarting it. A second and third zoo are bought with Zoo Credits and you land in the one you just bought, so every other command acts on that active zoo until you switch. Renaming takes the zoo number first when you mean a different plot: !zooname 2 Reptile House.

The big animal#

Every zoo has room for one creature that is not hatched and not bought. You feed it, and it grows. Zoo #1's is free to unlock, the other two cost what the zoo itself cost, and it stands over the board earning a rate of its own, entirely apart from the squares.

!zoobigunlock [zoo]    /zoo big unlock        open a zoo's big animal. Zoo #1's is free
!zoobuyfood apple 10   /zoo animal buyfood    buy food with Zoo Credits
!zoobigfeed apple 5    /zoo big feed          start a feeding
!zoofood               /zoo animal food       the food you are holding
!zoobigs               /zoo big show          the rungs you have climbed
!zoocostume <animal>   /zoo big costume       wear one of your animals over it

Food does not arrive the moment you spend it. A feeding runs for a stretch of time and trickles in, and a zoo can only have one feeding going at once, so a second helping is refused until the first has finished rather than queued behind it. When enough has gone in the animal steps up a rung. There are twenty six of them, Big Chicken at the bottom and Big Peacock at the top, each one wanting more food than the last and paying more per minute for it. Weight does not come into this: unlike the animals in the squares, a big animal at a given rung is worth the same to everybody.

A costume is a picture and nothing else. !zoocostume chimera puts an animal you own over the big one, and !zoocostume on its own takes it off. It does not change the rung, the food ladder or a single coin. You can only wear something you actually have, but an animal boxed in storage counts, so you do not have to keep a creature standing in a square for the sake of the view.

Boosters#

!zooshop               /zoo bank shop         everything Zoo Credits buy, with the keys
!zoobuybooster <key>   /zoo boost buy         buy one
!zooboosters           /zoo boost list        what you own, and what is running
!zoousebooster <key>   /zoo boost use         start one

Two kinds, coins and hatch speed, at three strengths each. Buying does nothing on its own: the twenty four hours start when you press use, so a booster can sit in your inventory as long as you like waiting for a day you will actually play. Two of a kind will not stack. Starting a coin booster while another coin booster is running is refused rather than replacing it, so wait for the first to run out before you spend the second.

Fighting with your animals#

Every animal has health, damage, speed, defence and two abilities of its own, and every one of those numbers comes out of two things: how rare it is, and where its weight sits inside its own species band. A heavier rarer animal is a better fighter, and two animals of the same species differ by their weight alone.

!zoobattle @someone    /zoobattle @someone    challenge another player's animal; bare !zoobattle or /zoobattle opens the battle home
!zooqueue              /zoo battle queue      join the ranked queue; !zooqueue leave to leave
!zooalerts off         /zoo battle alerts     stop the DM when somebody is waiting; !zooalerts on brings it back
!zoobuybattle          /zoo boost buybattle   the boosters you can take in
!zoocampaign           /zoo campaign show     where you are in the hundred level campaign
!zoocampaignpick <animal>   /zoo campaign pick     choose who fights, switchable at any time
!zoocampaignfight [level]   /zoo campaign fight    fight the next level live, or replay a cleared one
!zoocampaignrewards [tier]  /zoo campaign rewards  what each tier pays, with the real odds
!zoorevive [code]      /zoo battle revive     what you have lost, and bringing one back
!zoobuyrevive          /zoo battle buyrevive  buy Revive Kits
!zooranks / !zoorecord /zoo ranks, /zoo record   the ladder, and one player's record
!zooteam <verb>        /zooteam <verb>        create, invite, accept, decline, leave, show, ranks, disband
!zooteambattle 3v3     /zooteam battle queue  put a team in a format; join, leave, status
!zooseason             /zooseason show        the season ladder, your place, the prizes

A duel is live rather than turn based. You each pick an animal and any boosters, then the arena opens and both of you press Attack, Block and your abilities against a two minute clock. Three rules decide what happens when two presses land in the same moment: an attack meeting a block is blocked, two attacks go to whoever pressed first, and an exact tie goes to the better stats. Attacks and abilities have their own cooldowns and a press inside one is refused rather than queued, so holding a button down buys nothing.

The ranked queue is one queue for the whole platform. Join it and you are matched with whoever is within reach of your ladder rating, from any server or from the site: the search starts one tier either side of you and widens the longer you wait, and never widens because somebody else waited. The same battle is playable on the site, from the Battle chip on your zoo or the Challenge control on anybody else's, and your opponent can be on Discord while you are on the page. It is one fight either way, rated on the same ladder.

A queue nobody can see stays empty, so when somebody has been waiting a little while with nobody to fight, everybody with a zoo gets one direct message saying who is waiting and where to play. It is not sent on every join: two people who queue within a minute of each other are matched first and nobody is told. You never get one while you are queued or mid battle, one wait produces one message however long it lasts, and nobody hears this more than once every six hours.

Four ways to turn it off, and the same four to turn it back on: the Stop these button on the message, !zooalerts off in the bot's DMs, /zoo battle alerts, and the switch on the arena card at /zoo.

Once matched you have ninety seconds to lock in a fighter. Miss that and the match closes with nothing scored, and the queue is closed to you for a short while: two minutes the first time in a day, ten the second, thirty the third, an hour after that. Only the last twenty four hours count, so it never piles up across days. The player who locked in and waited loses nothing.

Team battles. A Zoo Battle Team is one roster, as many friends as you like, and you can be on up to five teams at once. !zooteam create <name> starts one, !zooteam invite @friend sends an invite with an Accept button, and the person invited answers with !zooteam accept or !zooteam decline if they would rather type than press. When you are on more than one team you say which: !zooteam invite @friend The Night Foxes, !zooteam leave The Night Foxes, or the team's number, #12, which every card shows. Whenever anybody on a team types !zooteambattle 2v2 <team> (or 3v3, 4v4) the whole roster is asked, in their DMs and on the site, and the first to press Join fill the line-up: the queuer plus one for a 2v2, plus two for a 3v3, plus three for a 4v4. You are in one line-up at a time. The queue then finds a team within reach of your team's rating in that format, and the fight runs in each player's DM with the bot or on the site: your own animal, your own Attack, Block and abilities, and a Hit button per enemy animal to switch targets. An animal knocked down dies on either side (a Revive Kit brings it back); whoever queued the line-up can surrender to spare the ones still standing. Every team has a rating on each ladder (!zooteam ranks 3v3, the 2v2, 3v3 and 4v4 tabs on the site's ladder, and their own boards on /leaderboards), and you have your own Duo, Trio and Quads score that follows you whichever team you fight for: !zooteam ranks trio for the people, and the three scores sit beside your solo rating on !zoorecord, !zooteam stats and on the site. Team battles count in the season: the top 3 teams in each format take, for every member, the same animal and egg the solo top 25 get. Team battles never move your solo rating. On the site, the Teams chip on your zoo does all of it: make a team, invite by username, queue a format, join the line-up, fight; the Battle arena has a Team battles card that opens the same drawer. The captain runs the roster from either place: !zooteam rename <name>, !zooteam kick @someone, !zooteam captain @someone and !zooteam disband in Discord, or Rename and a click on a name for Remove and Make captain on the site. Disbanding takes the roster away and leaves the record standing. !zooteam on its own lists your teams. Your team is also listed on the LFG side, under /lfg/teams, so people looking for a group can find it and apply; you still play it here, exactly as above. A teammate in the other age group stays on the team and plays, and is not listed on the LFG side, and a team whose captain has not given their date of birth is not listed there at all.

The campaign is the same live fight a duel is, against the bot's own zoo: one hundred levels, one animal you can switch at any time for nothing. Pick your animal and any Battle Boosters, press Confirm ready, and then it is Attack, Block and your animal's two moves against the clock, with the bot's animal fighting back. Level one is a Chicken at its minimum weight that swings late and hardly ever guards; level one hundred is the rarest thing in the catalogue at its heaviest, guarding the moment your swing opens and using its moves the instant they recharge. The rungs between climb about 1.4 percent per level, and the bot's skill climbs with the tier, so the way up is the way through a person: wait for its swing to drop its guard, block when its attack is about to land, and bring boosters when the numbers are close. Clearing a level for the first time pays from that tier's pool, up to ten clears a day; a cleared level can be fought again for practice and pays nothing. Losing costs nothing at all: not progress, not the animal, and not the day's reward allowance, and nothing in the campaign can kill anything. !zoocampaign shows where you are and what you are up against, !zoocampaignfight opens the next level (or !zoocampaignfight 7 an old one), and the campaign drawer on the zoo page fights the same level in the site arena.

Seasons#

Zoo Battles runs in thirty day seasons. Every rated battle fought while a season is open counts for it, wherever it was fought: a server, the bot's DMs, or the site. Your season points are the rating you gained or lost in those battles, more wins break a tie and fewer losses break the next one.

!zooseason             the season ladder, and where you stand on it
!zooseason card        post the season card in this channel (Manage Server)

At the close the top of the ladder takes the prizes. First place is the Ultimate Zoo Battler: Discord Nitro for a month, Dispresso Pro for a month and a badge on the profile. The top five each get a collectible animal hatched at its record weight, which is as strong as that species can be. The top twenty five each get a strong animal and an egg. Animals and eggs land in your zoo when the season closes; Nitro is sent by Dispresso by hand within a few days. A place needs at least three battles in the season to take a prize, so one lucky win on the last day is a place on the ladder but not a prize. The season page at dispresso.co/zoo shows the same ladder, the prizes, and the starter pack a new player can claim once with !zoopack.

The zoo is a closed economy that you build up and then draw down. Animals stand on seats and produce Zoo Credits over time, and Zoo Credits buy nothing outside the zoo except through one exit, which is capped.

Two doors, and only two#

• In: eggs bought with Global Coins, and hatched into an animal from that egg's pool.
• Out: converting Zoo Credits to the global Bank.

Nothing else creates or destroys a credit. A trade or a sale between players moves animals sideways and moves Bank Coins that already existed.

What the exit pays#

Three numbers, and only their product matters: the most Global Coins a zoo can pay its owner in one day.

The cap binds long before a large zoo runs out of production, so once you are past a certain size the thing to watch is the daily rather than the animals.

Weight is the whole of an animal's value#

Every number an animal has is linear in its weight: what it produces, what it is worth to a buyer, what it is worth in a trade. Two animals of the same species are two different assets, which is why the zoo shows two tiles for two cats rather than one tile saying "2".

The zoo picks a copy for you consistently, and the rule is the same everywhere: place sends the heaviest out to work, remove returns the lightest, and anything that takes a copy off you takes the lightest. Your heaviest copy is your best earner, so it is never the one quietly taken. Naming a species gets you that rule; naming the four character code gets you the exact animal.

Seats are the real constraint#

A zoo has a fixed number of plots and each plot has a fixed number of seats. An animal only produces while it is standing on one; a loose animal in inventory earns nothing. Seats, not animals, are what you actually run out of, and that is what makes a collection trade worth doing.

Collections#

There are five sets. Each is ten animals, and finishing one lets you trade all ten in for a Collectible that nothing drops and no egg contains. In the order a player reaches them, cheapest reward first: Pink, Coffee, Neon, Celestial, Alien. !zoocollections shows which sets you are filling and how far along each is, and !zootrade collection adds what trading each one in would cost you. Both read your progress and then point you at the Collections page of /market, which is where the trade itself happens.

Celestial is the middle of the five, and the shape of all of them:

The ten earn within a narrow band of each other, so there is no single member of a set worth chasing ahead of the rest.

How a trade-in resolves#

• Which ten. One of each of the ten species, counted across both places an animal lives: loose in inventory and standing on a seat. Ten of the same species is not a collection.
• Which copy goes. The lightest of each species, wherever it stands, ties going to the loose copy. The confirm screen prints the rule and then prints the ten actual weights beside it.
• Where the Collectible lands. Loose, not on a seat, so the trade never needs a free seat before you can do it.
• Repeatable. Collecting ten more and going again works.
• Written down. Every trade-in keeps the ten it took, by name, weight and seat, and the weight the Collectible was born at.

Trading with another player#

A trade is a swap you both have to agree to, and it is the only way an animal moves between two people without money.

!zootrade offer @member      /zoo trade offer       open one
!zootrade add 12 chimera 2   /zoo trade add         put something of yours in
!zootrade remove 12 chimera  /zoo trade remove      take it back out
!zootrade view 12            /zoo trade view        what is on the table
!zootrade confirm 12         /zoo trade confirm     your half of the agreement
!zootrade cancel 12          /zoo trade cancel      call it off
!zootrade                    /zoo trade list        your open trades
!zootrade help               /zoo trade help        how it works, from nothing

A trade is stamped with the server it was opened in, so !zootrade offer and both confirmations have to happen there. That is the one part of the zoo that does not work in the bot's DMs; !zootrade view does, if you only want to read what is on the table. An offer closes itself after an hour, you can be in five at once, and each side can put up ten different things.

Nothing is held while you talk. What you have offered stays yours and stays spendable right up to the moment both sides confirm. So the same animal can sit in two open offers, and only the first one confirmed settles: the other is refused with nothing moved rather than settling for something else. If you have promised the same fox to two people, the one who confirms first gets it.

Handing something over and taking nothing back is a gift, which is !gift animal dv72 @member on the Market page. It settles the same way and counts against the same daily ceiling between the two of you, so it is not a way round anything a trade is limited by.

Drops in your channel#

A server can have wild animals and its own currency drop into one channel for members to grab. Turn it on under Drops on the Zoo page of the dashboard, pick the channel, and choose which of the two you want. Every drop is one card with a button; a settled card clears itself after about 45 seconds and one that nobody touches gets away after 90.

Wild animals appear about every 15 minutes in every server that has them on, and that is not something a server can change: a caught animal is worth the same in every zoo on the platform. An animal takes several chases to wear down, one person can chase it down alone with a short cooldown between presses, and whoever lands the last one keeps it.

Currency drops are yours to schedule, from every 5 minutes to every hour. The amount is quoted at the 15 minute schedule and scaled to whatever you pick, so an hourly server pays out the same per hour as a five minute one, just in bigger piles. The first person to press keeps the lot, or everybody who presses shares it equally, whichever you choose. So if you set the drops to hourly and still see one every quarter of an hour, those are the animals; switch Drop wild animals off if you only want the coins.

Raids, nets and defences#

A zoo can be robbed, and a zoo can be defended. Spending Shots to rob somebody is the one half, and what they can buy to stop you is the other.

What a raid can reach is narrow. It takes a share of the pot standing uncollected on one animal. Not a Zoo Credit balance, not a bank balance, not an inventory. Coins left lying in the open, never savings, which makes !zoocollect the whole defence strategy on its own: a player who has just collected has nothing worth robbing.

Nothing is created and nothing is destroyed. A successful raid advances the victim's earning clock by exactly the fraction of the pot that was taken, so the victim keeps the rest and the raider is credited the same figure the victim lost.

!zoorob @someone       /zoo defence rob       spend Shots on the pot standing on one animal
!zoonet @someone       /zoo defence net       throw a net over their zoo for one animal
!zoobuynet             /zoo defence buynet    buy a net
!zoodefence            /zoo defence show      what you can build, what you own, and the rules
!zoobuydefence <kind> <n>    /zoo defence buy
!zoobuild <kind> <square>    /zoo defence build     stand one in your active zoo
!zoounbuild <square>         /zoo defence unbuild   pack it away and free the square
!zooraids              /zoo defence raids     every raid on your zoo, and every raid you made

A defence takes a square and earns nothing, so it competes with an animal for room. Raiding is typed rather than pressed: there is no raid button on the zoo board, because robbing somebody means naming them.