Zoo RPG Dev Log #1 — Transport Times, Shop Glow-Up & Bug Fixes

What's New

Big batch of changes today — a timezone bug fix, a complete shop overhaul, and a bunch of under-the-hood improvements.

🐛 Transport & Build Timer Fix

Animals and enclosures were completing way too fast — sometimes instantly. Turns out the server timezone (CET, UTC+1) was clashing with how timestamps were stored in the database. The tick worker was comparing apples to oranges: UTC values stored by the app vs CET values from Postgres NOW().

The fix: All raw SQL time comparisons now explicitly use UTC, so a lion's 60-minute transport actually takes 60 minutes. Novel concept.

🛒 Shop Descriptions

Every item in the shop now has a proper description instead of just raw stats:

• Animals get personality blurbs — capybaras are "the chillest rodent on the planet", lions are "the king of the zoo"
• Enclosures describe what they're good for, with capacity and build time
• Attractions explain their visitor appeal
• Supplies tell you what they do and that workers use them automatically

Transport times now show with a 🚚 emoji and human-friendly formatting ("1h" instead of "60 min"). Build times get a 🔨.

🏗️ What's Been Built So Far

Here's the full feature list for anyone just joining:

• Core gameplay: Build enclosures, buy animals, manage hunger/health/cleanliness
• Workers: Hire keepers and janitors, assign them to enclosures for automation
• Breeding: Pair compatible animals, gestation timers, trait inheritance, baby care
• Visitors & Popularity: Real scoring based on species diversity, animal health, attractions, and cleanliness
• Admin Command Center: Full dashboard with KPIs, player investigation, moderation tools, audit logs, feature flags
• Blog: You're reading it! File-based markdown with RSS and JSON feeds

🗺️ What's Next

• Quests and challenges
• Dynamic weather system
• Special events and festivals
• Animal rarity tiers
• Zoo reputation system

Stay tuned — things are moving fast. 🦁