Planet Zoo 2's animal list by region: 130 species, 12 regions, and three regions that hold exactly one animal

Planet Zoo 2 shipped on 13 October 2026 with 130 species. The question I keep seeing is the simplest one possible: "can I just get the list?"

In game you cannot. The Zoopedia is one page per animal — biome, enclosure type, barrier grade, conservation status — and there is no index view that answers "what animals are in this game, and where are they from". So we exported the payload behind it and built the list ourselves. It is public and CC BY 4.0:

• The list: pz2tools.wiki/animals — 130 species, 13 fields each
• The same 130, grouped by region: pz2tools.wiki/regions

This post is about the second one, because grouping by region turns out to expose a few things the roster page cannot.

What the 13 fields are

Every species carries: common name, scientific classification (class / order / family / genus), biome list, region list, enclosure type, Deluxe-vs-base flag, weight (male and female), barrier grade, minimum barrier height, and two barrier flags — climb-proof and allow-water.

That is the whole vocabulary the game uses to decide whether two animals can live together. Keep that in mind, because it explains the trap below.

130 species, 12 regions, 204 assignments

The game has twelve regions: seven on land (Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Australasia, Arctic) and five oceans (Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, Southern).

Because a species can belong to more than one region, the counts do not add up to 130:

204 assignments across 130 species. 82 species list exactly one region; 48 list two or more. The extremes are worth a line each:

• Hawksbill Turtle is the only species that appears in nine regions — and the only one that straddles land and ocean at the same time (Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Australasia + four oceans).
• Moon Jelly covers all five oceans, which is why two of the three "single animal" regions contain the same jellyfish.
• Mountain Hare is the only land animal listed for the Arctic. One species. That is the entire Arctic roster for a zoo whose theme is "Arctic".

Which leads to the thing most people get wrong.

Region is where an animal is from. Biome is where it can live

This is the single most expensive misunderstanding in the game right now. Region is flavour and roster-planning. The two fields that decide whether a habitat is accepted are biome and enclosure type.

Two species from the Amazon and the Congo can share an enclosure if both accept Rainforest and both use a Habitat. Two species from the same continent cannot, if one is a fish and the other is a bird. Region never enters the check.

So the region list is a planning tool, not a rulebook: pick a coherent-looking roster ("East Asia house", "reef wing"), then verify the actual housing with the co-habitation chart and the biome hub, both derived from Frontier's own text rather than from community guesswork.

The data gotcha, if you are scraping this too

The region field arrives as a single pipe-delimited string, not an array:

{ "common_name": "Hawksbill Turtle", "continents": "Africa|Asia|AtlanticOcean|Australasia|Europe|IndianOcean|NorthAmerica|PacificOcean|SouthAmerica" } 

Everything else in the payload that is multi-valued is an array — biomes, enclosure_types — so this one field breaks the assumption you will have written by the second record. Split on |, then de-duplicate, because some records repeat a token.

Two more traps in the same payload, both of which cost me time:

1. Empty strings, not nulls, for aquatic species. Fish and exhibit animals have barrier_grade: "", barrier_min_height_m: "", barrier_climb_proof: "". Coerce to null before averaging anything, or your "median barrier height" quietly includes zeros.
2. content_pack is the Deluxe flag. Six species — Axolotl, Golden Eagle, Golden Lion Tamarin, Longfin Batfish, Blue and Gold Fusilier, Great Hammerhead — are Deluxe. Filter them out if you want the "base game only" roster, because the Steam page does not separate them either.

What the region cut is actually good for

Three practical uses, in the order I use them:

1. Deluxe budgeting per theme. The Pacific and Indian Ocean lists hold three Deluxe species each; every land region holds one or two except Australasia, which holds none. If you are building a reef wing without buying Deluxe, the Australasia + Atlantic combination is the cheap path.

2. Knowing when a theme is a dead end. The Arctic has one animal, so an "Arctic zone" is a Mountain Hare plus borrowed Taiga species (Eurasian Brown Bear, Eurasian Lynx and friends accept Taiga/Tundra). It works, but it is not a zone — it is one habitat wearing a costume.

3. Reading biome overlap instead of guessing. Asia's 44 species lean Rainforest (20 of 44); Africa's 43 lean Savannah (14). Those two numbers tell you which biome hub to open first when you start a continent-themed zoo, and they also tell you why a "Savannah Asia" build is thin: the species exist, the climate does not.

The honest caveat

This is derived data, not datamined code. The export came from the official Zoopedia payload on 1 October 2026, twelve days before launch, and the game has already patched once since. Region assignments are stable so far; the co-habitation verdicts were the ones that moved, and those changes are logged on the updates page.

Every row links back to the Frontier sentence it came from, and the rule set is published at pz2tools.wiki/editorial-policy. If a verdict looks wrong, you can point at the sentence instead of at me.

Raw CSV and JSON for all of it: pz2tools.wiki/animals (CC BY 4.0), mirrored on GitHub and archived with a DOI at 10.5281/zenodo.23263612.