Here are some quick tips ive discovered while playing.

1) The basic. For each kind of habitat, you get your first animal at two connected tiles. (and more at each even number afterwards, up to a point). That means that When you can't see any tiles you can reach, the best thing to do is to explore out with one animal into the wilderness, then crucially, *connect* to the animal with a follow up, second one. The second one is "free" because placing it will refund itself, given that its connected to the first, making a two.

2) Don't allow yourself to get down to one animal. This means if you have two of an animal, don't send out one on its own into unexplored territory. Sure, you can send the one you have left to go next to it to get one back, but now you're in a bind if you don't find anything useful. Better at that point to go to tip 3.

3) So you're running out of animals with two of most of them, and maybe a massive surplus of boars or whatever, and like a smart cookie, your map is full of habitats of size two next to each other all around the map. Well now's the time to get seriously strategic. You can't easily use one animal to get two outside of connecting to uncollected wild habitats (but it can be possible, more on that later), but you can connect together your disconnected groups of two into larger habitats. See if you can find a location where there are two even sized habitats within two tiles of each other (or size 3,5 etc ones within 3 that can be expanded to be within two using a "free" animal). You can then try and use another nearby habitat to bridge the gap between the two. When they are connected, you will get the reward for a larger habitat. Remember that when you use the other animal, your aim is to spend one animal to connect the two spaces, getting a "free" one with the second placement. I often use this to convert boars or deer into more useful rarer animals like ducks or goats late game.

4) Situations where you can get more than one animal by using a single one (other than uncollected wild habitats) are rare but not impossible to find. Larger forests at some points give both a deer and a boar at the same even point, netting two for one.

It is also possible when connecting two larger habitats (both size 4 or more) to get two, because the result is skips over both the 6 and the 8 step. Note that most habitats stop giving new animals after size 8, however this is especially potent for forests, because they go all the way up to size 20! so if you need to snake a longer distance around the map to connect ducks or goats between two or more mountains or ponds, a forest is usually the way to go, given that it will keep giving rewards. Just be careful to connect up existing forests where possible rather than creating a new one because its easy to run out of deer or boars if you're not careful.


Finally, try to place your "free" animals to discover as much area as possible. Even the one tile you discover tidying up some of your size 3 habitats into size 4s way back in the map counts towards completion percentage and score.

Good luck and happy growing