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Dig Sites
Dig Sites and Fossil Hunting are the bare-bones of building your Jurassic Park, when searching for fossils and ambers, you will need to manage which and how many teams go on each location inside a Formation. And manage which areas properly go to find the best results. A second option is going on the Fossil Market to buy whatever fossils you may need to complete a dinosaur's genome. During certain expeditions, your Paleontologists may find ores that you can use to sell and get an extra money in tough situations..
Fossil Hunting Map
Below you can see the Fossil Hunting Map that is present on the game, with 9 different Dig Sites to choose for 25 species of Dinosaurs. Click on the icons to read more about each Formation:
Chenini
Tendaguru Beds
Flaming Cliffs
Hell Creek B
Hell Creek A
Judith River B
Judith River A
Morrison
Formation B
Morrison
Formation A
Digging Time
By default, all Dig Teams take the same period of time of 240 Seconds or 4 Minutes to complete one excavation, although that can be edited in the file "FslHunt.ini", located on the Data Folder.
Dig Teams
Dig Teams or Expedition Teams are groups of Paleontologists who go on Formations in search of fossils, by default you start your campaign with one Team to use on one of the free starting Dig Sites.
The max number of Teams that you can buy is 5, each one more expensive than the other:
1st Team: Free
2nd Team: 5,000$
3rd Team: 10,000$
4th Team: 15,000$
5th Team: 20,000$
Differences in platforms
For unknown reasons, each of the game platforms [PC,PS2,XBox360] have a specific number of Dig Sites that you can go for, PC and XBOX for example, can chose 4 different Dig Sites, 5 in total counting the first free one. While in PS2 you can only have 3 Dig Sites, as mentioned, it's unclear why that decision was put in.
With that, it's also impossible to have all dinosaurs in one island, unless the player edits the .ini files and change the max value from 5 to 9.
Dig Findings
After a successful excavation, the Paleontologist Teams will send to the laboratory the findings that they got from their expeditions, there's 5 different types of minerals that can be found: Fossil, Amber, Gold, Opals and Silver.
Fossils and Amber are the ones you're looking for, they're the ones that when scanned give a % of DNA from a certain species of dinosaur, and how you get to unlock these species.
Mineral Ores such as Gold, Opals and Silver can't scan and extract any genetic material out of it, so instead you get to sell them for a certain amount of money to help on the finances of the park.
Fossils
Fossils are the basic genetic material you may find, they're separated by colors for the dinos diets, and show the dino they belong to. There's 90% of chances of finding them. Fossils can be sold for 750$.
Amber
Bingo! Dino DNA! Different from Fossils, Ambers can give you a higher % of a dinosaur, but are more uncommon and don't show which species' DNA they contain, there's 10% of chances of finding them. Amber can be sold for 1,000$.
Gold
The rarest and most valuable of the 3 Ores, there are 90 Gold ores to be found across the 9 different Dig Sites. Gold can be sold for 6,000$.
Opals
Differently from Gold, Opals have no specific limit of how many you can find during your campaign, but they aren't that common neither. Opals can be sold for 4,000$.
Silver
Just like Opals, Silver has no limits of Ores to be found, they're also the cheapest of the three and most common to be found. Silver can be sold for 2,500$.
Dig Sites Use Limit
Dig Sites don't last forever, after a certain number of usages a specific excavation area will start to get less and less fossils and ambers for the player, until it becomes empty and you must move the teams to another excavation area or another formation.
Dig Sites have 6 stages: Rich, Good, Average, Mediocre, Poor and Exhausted [Empty].
All Dig Sites start with either Rich or Good condition, until after certain usage they start to go to the lesser stages until they become empty. The number of uses for each stage are:
18 uses until it goes from Rich to Good
15 uses until it goes from Good to Average, Mediocre, then Poor
5 uses until it goes from Poor to Exhausted/Empty
Excavation Areas
Despite not having major differences, the Dig Sites give you 3 different excavation areas to choose for when hunting for fossils, some allow more Dig Teams than others, differing from 2 to 4. These three excavation areas are:
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Plains are perhaps the most common Excavation Area, appearing 12 times across 8 different Dig Sites.
Rivers are the rarest of the Excavation Areas, appearing only 4 times across 4 different Dig Sites.
Mountains are the second most common Excavation Areas, appearing 11 times across 8 different Dig Sites.
Fossil Market
In need of fossils since your Dig Sites are empty? Not a problem when the Fossil Market comes to give you a helping hand in getting that 100% Genome for a dinosaur. After 15 weeks that you opened your park, Dr. Grant will notify you of the opening of the Market in which you can visit anytime you want. The Max of fossils that can appear on the Market is of 20, both Fossils and Ambers from 1 to 5 stars of quality can be found with diverse prices.