I turned a game's official Nuxt payload into a 130-species dataset and a 1,221-pair co-habitation matrix

Description and use

A 130‑species Planet Zoo 2 dataset and a 1,221‑pair co‑habitation matrix were built from Nuxt payloads, published on GitHub, archived on Zenodo with a DOI, and marked with JSON‑LD for discoverability.

Problem

Planet Zoo 2 provides no public API to answer which animals ship, their needs, and which can share an enclosure before launch.

Outcome

A publicly available, CC BY 4.0 dataset of 130 Planet Zoo 2 species and a 1,221‑pair co‑habitation matrix, with clear provenance and a DOI for citation.

Workflow

• 1. Inspect the serialized payload on an animal page and note its flat array structure.
• 2. Write a 20‑line resolver in Python that dereferences integer indices, guards against booleans and cycles.
• 3. Extract every Zoopedia slug, run the resolver, and flatten each record into CSV columns.
• 4. Compile the 130‑species table, noting species, biomes, enclosure types, conservation status, etc.
• 5. Generate all 130 choose 2 pairs, filter by shared biome and enclosure type to 1,221 candidates.
• 6. Parse the Social & Reproduction prose for each species and apply rules: solitary → no, both social/mixed → likely, otherwise unverified.
• 7. Store the verdict and source sentence for each pair.
• 8. Publish the dataset as CSV/JSON on GitHub, archive on Zenodo with a DOI, and embed JSON‑LD on the site for discoverability.
• 9. Provide a browsable site with sortable tables and clear separation of extracted facts and inferred verdicts.

Evidence

The shape is roughly this (heavily abridged): ...

Source

Two gotchas worth naming, because they cost me the most time: ...

Source

Over the 1,221 pairs that gives 376 likely, 106 unverified, 739 no.

Source

The dataset is archived on Zenodo, so "how do I cite this" has an answer that is not a URL that might rot: 10.5281/zenodo.23263613.

Source