Planet Zoo 2 shipped on October 13, 2026. Since then the question I see most often is some version of "why do these two animals fight when the game says they can share a habitat?"
Frontier answers that in exactly one place: the Social & Reproduction paragraph on each species' Zoopedia page. It is prose, not a table. So I read all 130 of them and turned every possible pairing into data.
Here is what came out — including one result I did not expect.
The rules (published, so you can argue with them)
Every verdict on the co-habitation chart comes from a three-step rule applied to Frontier's own text:
- Two species can only compete for the same enclosure if they share a biome and an enclosure type.
- If the official text describes either species as solitary → Not compatible.
- If both are described as group-living → Likely OK.
- Anything the text does not state → Unverified. I do not fill gaps with confident-looking green ticks.
The rules are public at pz2tools.wiki/editorial-policy, and every row links back to the Frontier sentence it came from — so you can disagree with Frontier instead of with me.
The numbers
130 launch species produce 1,221 pairs that even qualify (same biome + same enclosure type):
| Verdict | Pairs |
|---|---|
| Likely OK | 376 |
| Unverified | 106 |
| Not compatible | 739 |
Reading the same paragraphs for social structure gives 55 solitary · 39 social · 23 mixed · 13 "not stated" species.
Two things fall straight out of that:
- 739 of 1,221 pairs are "no". The advice "just put all the savannah animals together" is wrong roughly two thirds of the time.
- Only 59 of 130 species have a single "Likely OK" partner. The other 71 have none.
The one that surprised me: every aviary species has zero
PZ2 has 12 species that use a flying enclosure. In the matrix, all 12 have exactly 0 likely partners:
| Aviary species | What Frontier's text says | Likely partners |
|---|---|---|
| Greater Flamingo | group-living | 0 |
| Long-Tailed Parakeet | group-living | 0 |
| White-Backed Vulture | group-living | 0 |
| Great Hornbill | not stated | 0 |
| Javan Green Magpie | not stated | 0 |
| Secretarybird | not stated | 0 |
| Toco Toucan | not stated | 0 |
| White-Tailed Sea-Eagle | not stated | 0 |
| Eurasian Bittern | solitary | 0 |
| Golden Eagle | solitary | 0 |
| Long-Eared Owl | solitary | 0 |
| Shoebill | solitary | 0 |
This is not a scraping bug and it is not a rounding artefact — it is what the launch roster looks like. Three of the twelve are described as group-living birds; the other nine are solitary or not described at all. Since both sides of a pair have to be group-living for "Likely OK", the column stays empty for the whole aviary group.
The practical version: in PZ2's launch data, an aviary is a single-species enclosure. If you want a mixed one you are doing it on Unverified — which may be perfectly fine, but you should know that is what you are doing.
The leaderboard
There is a clear "everyone gets along with them" tier:
| Species | Likely OK partners |
|---|---|
| Grey Wolf | 30 |
| Asian Elephant | 27 |
| Bactrian Camel | 23 |
| African Savannah Elephant | 22 |
| Cape Buffalo | 22 |
Then a flat shelf of 16 species at exactly 20: Sable Antelope, Springbok, African Wild Dog, Thomson's Gazelle, Masai Giraffe, Reticulated Giraffe, Spotted Hyena, Lion, Meerkat, Gemsbok, Common Ostrich, African Penguin, Common Warthog, Black Wildebeest, Blue Wildebeest, Plains Zebra.
Savannah shows up in 213 of the 376 likely pairs (a pair can span two biomes, so this is not a partition). Reef is a distant second.
Territorial and aggressive are separate signals
44 species carry a territorial flag and 34 an aggressive one in the official wording. These do not change the verdict — they are shown as context pills on each row, because "these two can share a habitat" and "these two will be relaxed about it" are not the same claim.
Read this before you plan a zoo
- The export is dated 2026-10-01, i.e. before patch 1.0.4, whose notes include "Updates to animal cohabitation lists". So some verdicts may already be behind the live game. That caveat is printed on the page itself, and the updates page tracks it.
- Every verdict is derived from prose, not read out of a hidden compatibility field — the official payload contains no such field.
- Where the game is silent, the tool says unverified. That is the entire point of it.
Where to check it
- Full filterable matrix, one row per pair: pz2tools.wiki/cohabitation
- Per-species pages (habitat, barrier grade, size, weight, group size): pz2tools.wiki/animals
- Pick two animals, get the verdict and the quote: calculator
- Plan an enclosure with the numbers: planner
The dataset behind it is free and citable: GitHub · DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23263613.
Unofficial reference site, not affiliated with Frontier Developments. All animal data generated from the official Planet Zoo 2 Zoopedia payload.
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