Habitat heat map: water in solid red

About this game

Developer: Frontier Developments · Publisher: Frontier Developments · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Realistic 3D · Screen type: City & Base Management

More Planet Zoo screens in the Gallery

What to study

Planet Zoo's management layer, caught in the one shot where the trailer lets the game be a tool instead of a film. The heat map flattens the whole Indian-themed habitat to pale blue-grey, architecture, planting and paths all the same icy tone, so that exactly three colours carry information: the water is filled solid red, the overlay's verdict that this area fails the check being run, with two otters swimming in it reduced to white silhouettes; outside the wall, the facility unit the player has selected, an orange cylindrical tank on a railed platform, keeps its full colour and wears a bright green selection ring; and thin yellow lines on the pavement trace its work zone to the habitat wall. Nothing is labelled and nothing needs to be: in heat-map mode the world itself is the chart, and a problem is a red pool you can see from across the zoo. The trailer shows no legend or layer picker at any timestamp, so the layer is identified here by its observable logic (red water against a desaturated habitat, a selected unit with its routing drawn in) rather than by a menu name. Frame at about 1:33 in the Planet_Zoo_Launch_Trailer (Steam), manually extracted at 93.0s: the heat-map beat lasts about 92.0-93.3s as a crossfade inside a continuous habitat shot, and the scene-change pass caught the normal-colour habitat before it (91.2s) and the protestors after it (93.5s), no frame of the overlay itself. The frame carries the trailer's small 'IN-GAME FOOTAGE' caption at bottom centre, disclosed here; it is the publisher's burn-in, not game UI.

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

data-overlay map-overlay

Components

Parts on screen.

Map

Screen inventory

• the whole Indian-themed habitat flattened to pale blue-grey by the heat map: domed towers, pavilions, walls and planting all desaturated to the same icy tone
• the habitat's water filled solid red, the overlay's problem colour, with two white otter silhouettes swimming in it rendered as plain white shapes
• at left, outside the habitat wall, a selected orange facility unit, a cylindrical tank on a railed platform, ringed by a bright green selection ellipse
• thin yellow lines drawn on the pavement from the selected unit, a work-zone trace running to the habitat wall and along the path
• small teal accents on two distant tower finials, the only other saturated colours besides the red water, the orange unit and the green ring

Top 3 colors

#7c969a 22%#92aaad 21%#7d3c45 16%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© Frontier Developments, Planet Zoo screenshot: Planet Zoo Launch Trailer (Steam), shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Frontier Developments.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-22. verified 2026-10-22: frame manually extracted at 93.0s from the pipeline-downloaded Planet_Zoo_Launch_Trailer (Steam) and inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080); real game UI (habitat heat-map overlay: pale desaturated habitat, solid-red water, two white otter silhouettes, selected orange facility unit with green selection ring, yellow work-zone lines) confirmed visible and legible; the trailer's 'IN-GAME FOOTAGE' caption at bottom centre is disclosed as publisher burn-in, not game UI

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-22); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.