Welcome, Park Managers!

This patch for Update 14 fixes various issues and adds a new screenspace global illumination effect under the 'Indirect Lighting' quality setting.

We expect that this will likely be the last support patch before the team moves onto full production for Update 15 with its expected release in July. We're aiming for the first PTB to start in late June. Please check out future Dev Diaries for more updates!

• Rendering
  • Added Screen Space Global Illumination to the game, helping to light shaded areas more realistically. Its quality can be set in the ‘Indirect Lighting’ setting in the Options Menu

• Animals
  • Animals will now only engage in the Play Chase behavior when near the group destination, so they don’t get distracted when the group is moving
• Staff
  • Reduced max staff count to 2048
• UI/UX
  • The ‘Social’ group tab is now disabled for baby animals, since they can’t form social groups. Instead, the ‘Family’ tab is selected by default for them
    
  • Upgraded the save/load menu to use the same layout and visual style as the rest of the game’s GUI
• Environment
  • Updated wetland grass texture to feature a mix of soil and grass
• Foliage
  • Adjusted Field Elm coloration
    
  • Adjusted Marula coloration

• Crashes
  • Fixed animals caching references to animals which had been sold or otherwise invalidated, which could have caused crashes
• Animals
  • Fixed animals getting stuck on corners, and reduced false negatives in nav adherence checks that were contributing to animal teleports
    
  • Fixed baby animals filling their nutrition and hydration bars at super speed
    
  • Fixed a logical error that was preventing animals from validating their roam destinations relative to the group destination, causing animals to roam far and wide regardless of the group
• Staff
  • Staff gates will now keep better track of who is walking through them, including the first person character controller, and should not remain open anymore
• UI/UX
  • Fixed the Nursery animal preview animations being stuck on a glitchy loop - animals should be back to playing their fidget animations, with babies having a chance of playing their specific baby animation too
    
  • Fixed a small oversight causing animal exhibit preference bars to not produce a tooltip on hover

• Fixed memory leaks in vegetation tracking
  
• Environmental reflections are now baked for each time of day and weather combo, reducing the stutter and potential performance degradation from the real time probe used previously

[www.patreon.com]Welcome to the April Development Update!

In case you missed it, Update 14 is now available! This enormous update adds baby animals, seamless growth, herding, first person and a number of other exciting changes. We’re currently 30% off on Steam until May 2nd so if you’re interested in trying the game, now’s a great time!

We’re also very proud to announce that our adorable mascot, Crowny, now has her very own YouTooz plushie![youtooz.com] Once she’s gone, she’s gone for good, so be sure to get your orders in on time.

Wow, what a month. Since the update launched, we saw our player count peak at 702 concurrent users, the highest it’s been since launching into Early Access. It may not sound insanely high compared to bigger games but it tells us that things are going in the right direction.

In terms of supporting Update 14, we’ll be delivering another patch in the next few days to address some of the remaining issues. Problems like animal teleportation are proving difficult to determine, but we will continue looking into it. We’ve also (hopefully) resolved problems with the Epic Games service, so the update should be going live there soon.

Looking ahead to Update 15, the plan is to release a Public Test Branch version in late June, with the full update coming in July. Since we’ve only just entered full production on this update, all the imagery below will be done with mockups.

Our primary goal for U15 is to expand our animal behaviors, building upon the herding and social groups that were just introduced. The first of these goals will be to make animals look at each other with head IK, greatly improving the sense of realism in shared spaces.

Next, we often see feedback wishing that PK’s animals would interact with each other. Currently, all species coexist in complete harmony, which has never been our long term goal.

For this next update, we’d like to build upon U14’s animal awareness systems and support the foundation of combat with two important behaviors: fleeing and threatening.

Fleeing, as you might imagine, forces an animal to run away when they’re scared. Threatening, however, uses a new animation to show an animal firmly standing their ground. Combined with the angry vocalizations from U14, we hope to get quite a bit of dynamism out of animal encounters.

Now, beyond scaring away potential predators, threaten animations will be especially useful for socially competitive animals like Triceratops, giving them a way to challenge the herd leader and influence their own social hierarchy. Less competitive animals like Dryosaurus, however, will passively establish their hierarchy in the background, opting for whoever is the largest.

Paleoflora is a new gameplay mechanic that aims to reward players for using foliage from the correct geological era. Typically, this boils down to using Cenozoic plants for mammals and our brand new Mesozoic plants for dinosaurs.

At the start of a Challenge game, players will only have access to modern day Cenozoic plants - all the essentials you’ve come to know and love. This is great news for all the mammals in your park, but not so much for the dinosaurs!

Luckily for them, the Excavations menu is going to include paleoflora sites from all over the world. Players will need to send out Science Teams and recover enough material to unlock 35 different species of extinct plants across all 8 biomes.

Once unlocked, players will be able to find their newly discovered plants in both the modular building menu and the revised landscaping menu coming in Update 15. There are a lot of variants coming with these new species, so creative players will have planty to work with.

Inside an animal’s info menu, you’ll find the Paleoflora bar. As you might guess, this bar fills up by using plants from the correct era, depending on when an animal lived.

Unlike other requirements like the forest or water needs, Paleoflora has no minimum value. Think of it more like a bonus to get the most out of your enclosures. Getting it wrong won’t make your animals upset, but you’ll be missing out on the key benefits that come with a high level of Paleoflora:

• Ecology Bonus Points
  Increase the rating of your animal with an ecology bonus by getting its Paleoflora bar over 50%
  
• Browsing Enrichment
  Herbivores gain additional enrichment when browsing from foliage in habitats with high Paleoflora
  
• Wellness Increase
  Once disease is added in a later update, high levels of Paleoflora will reduce how susceptible animals are to environmental diseases

Browsing is a new enrichment behavior coming in Update 15 that will allow herbivores to gain stimulation from grazing on bushes and trees. The more era-appropriate the foliage in their habitat is, the more enrichment they’ll receive.

Since browsing is not a substitute for feeders in Challenge Mode, we plan to include a Sandbox option that allows herbivores to gain food while browsing, making them self-sustaining as long as they’ve got plants. This has been a highly requested feature from the community, so we’re excited to finally work on it!

As one of the last notes for this Dev Diary, we’ve got some dietary changes coming in U15. First up: if an animal eats multiple diets, they’re going to need them in the habitat to be happy. This change is meant to stimulate the logistics economy by making lesser-used diets like fruit, fish or insects more of a requirement than a suggestion in Challenge mode.

Exactly how many of the diets an animal wants in a habitat will be determined per species, with some being pickier than others.

To help ease players into this new approach, we’re going to be introducing a couple new feeders! The team is aiming to include small food trays, faux meat/fish carcasses and faux logs with fruits and insects to make your habitat planning more engaging. We hope to show how these look in a Dev Diary closer to release!

Finally, if your first look at Paleoflora gameplay wasn’t enough, we’ve got a few more plants for you. Below are two new species coming to the Temperate biome, offering a variety of shapes and sizes. We suspect the addition of a plane tree is going to get a lot of use from builders!

And last but not least, here’s a look at our first Tropical plant, a fossil cycad. The variations on this one are particularly diverse. It almost looks like a palm tree!

Created by ASSASSINSPINO

Created by Francoo192

Created by Ovenator

Thank you for reading April’s dev diary!

We will be back next month to report on Update 15’s progress. Thank you to everyone who has checked out or played Update 14, we’re incredibly happy with the feedback so far. As mentioned the team are working on another support patch that we hope to get out soon, but beyond that, we hope you have a lovely May.

- The PK Team

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• Twitter
  
• Discord[discord.com]
  
• Reddit
  
• YouTube

Welcome, Park Managers!

This hotfix resolves some of the immediate issues reported by the community, though we're still looking out for crash reports and more information about teleporting animals. If you have reliable steps to reproduce teleports, please let us know!

• Issue: modular lighting is not recolorable during the day, but does work at night
  
• Issue: animal avoidance is currently broken, so animals can end up walking through each other
  
• Issue: animal animations in the Animal Nursery are currently broken due to the addition of babies, we will be fixing this
  
• Note: additive animations can trigger during one shots or right before animals go to eat/drink/rest. We would like to stop this from happening to prevent jank
  
• Note: we will be updating Paleopedia and Info Sign screenshots for animals that have received visual updates in a later patch

• Balance
  • Changed refund logic for modular structures:
    • Facilities/pieces now refund the entire placement cost
      
    • Vegetation items don't refund anything, but instead have a demolition cost
  • Any modular items with a demolition cost now can't be demolished if the park balance is negative
• Animals
  • Reduced osteoderm detail strength on baby Ankylosaurus
    
  • Adjusted face shine for all Psittacosaurus
    
  • Animals with a social group size of 0-0 will have their socialization need regularly set to full
    
  • Socialization need will no longer drain while resting, sleeping, eating, or drinking
• UI/UX
  • The park balance text at the bottom of the screen now turns red when the park balance is negative

• Crashes
  • Potentially fixed a crash related to viewing animals in the nursery. We would appreciate continued reports if this persists!
• Critical
  • Fixed month progress not loading correctly for saved games
    
  • Fixed an undo/redo issue causing the balance to not restore correctly when undoing modular object placement
    
  • Fixed a save/load issue that could cause legacy settings (such as Animal Aging) to be reset upon loading a save
• Gameplay
  • Fixed animal exhibit preference calculations using the wrong crowding math, resolving an issue where the exhibit bar was stuck at 72%
• Animals
  • Animals will now load in with the correct locomotion state for their maturity
• Staff
  • Fixed staff walking straight towards their destination through obstacles if their path was interrupted by construction
• Construction
  • Fixed another instance of grid desync when splitting grid-bound pieces from modular groups
    
  • Fixed instability in Gates that could have created strange behavior
• UI/UX
  • Fixed missing social bars for solitary animals in the Animal Info menu
    
  • Fixed outline colors being reset to white
    
  • Fixed path outlines not appearing on highlighted paths during demolition
    
  • Fixed wrong portrait icon being assigned to Lambeosaurus
• Rendering
  • Fixed modular piece glitchy rendering when the camera is close

• CPU Optimizations

Welcome, Park Managers, to Update 14!

This monumental release adds the highly anticipated ontogeny system to Prehistoric Kingdom, unleashing seamless growth for over 50 species. Get up close and personal with the all new first person mode, or watch your animals create families and social bonds from a distance.

If you'd like to support us, the game is currently 30% off AND we've just launched a YouTooz plush! The plushie will be available from 3PM EST while stocks last, so be sure to order quick![youtooz.com]

[youtooz.com]As a genre-breaking first, Prehistoric Kingdom now features seamless ontogeny, allowing players to watch their animals grow from baby to adult without model swaps or immersion-breaking size jumps.

These aren't just scaled down adults, however! Every species changes its physical proportions, skin, sounds and body features over the course of our realtime maturity simulation. This was an enormous task, but the team is extremely proud of what we were able to pull off despite our size.

Ontogeny is available for every species in the game apart from terrarium species like Archaeopteryx and Microraptor. And remember, this is just the beginning! We look forward to adding more baby animations and sounds in future updates.

So, how does it work? From the Animal Nursery, there are now two sliders: ontogeny and neoteny. Ontogeny determines the maturity than an animal starts at, while neoteny is the maximum maturity it will grow to. This allows players to keep their babies as babies forever, or even stunt growth to simulate animals not in the game like Nanotyrannus.

Players can also set their desired growth speed for newly bred animals: fast, normal, slow or realistic. We think realistic is pretty fun, as beyond being more accurate, we've found ourselves getting even more attached to animals as they grow.

You can find new tooltips in the Paleopedia that tell you how long it'll take for an animal to reach adulthood depending on your desired growth speed.

In Update 14, animals will now form social groups! Depending on the species, they’ll follow their group leader and synchronize behavior (eating, drinking, resting, etc.) to varying degrees. Some animals like Dryosaurus are super tight knit, while an Acrocanthosaurus is completely solitary.

If a social group is incomplete and needs more animals to be happy, the group leader will broadcast, making it clear they're looking for friends.

Animals will now properly socialise, too, driven by their new awareness system. This means that if they can hear or see each other without objects or solid fences in the way, they'll initiate a call and response to improve their social welfare. Typically this is more common for animals within the same social group, but there's a small chance for socialisation to occur across multiple species.

As an extension of this, animals that are suffering from poor welfare conditions will use sad and angry calls to make it clear that they're unhappy!

Excitingly, babies have some extra behaviors as well. Infants can be adopted by adult animals, though they won’t contribute to a social group until reaching adolescence. If infants cannot find an adult, however, they’ll stick together regardless depending on the species.

Babies also have a high chance of performing the play chase behavior, making two animals chase each other around a circular area. This behavior can also be observed in a few adult species, such as Coelophysis, Dryosaurus, Juxia, Leaellynasaura, Nasutoceratops, Ouranosaurus, Protoceratops, Psittacosaurus (all), Scelidosaurus, Ugrunaaluk and Velociraptor.

Be sure to check the Paleopedia to see what animals form social groups or families!

Get ready to meet and greet your animals in First Person Mode! Accessible from the bottom right of the main HUD, this mode allows you to jump down to ground level as a human. Players are able to run, jump, crouch and even interact with specific modules such as binoculars, gates and benches.

We've also included a few settings in the options menu like FOV and disabling first person music filtering.

Animal incubation is now asynchronous, meaning creation will no longer be queued. In Challenge Mode, players will need to research additional slots to breed more animals simultaneously. Similarly, the cost of animal incubation has greatly increased due to the addition of ontogeny. Adult animals are now extremely expensive without the required research to bring them down.

Stats like the base rating and cost of an animal is now based on an animal's mass instead of vibes, creating a more organic and honest economy.

We've fixed an oversight pertaining to animal crowding, so habitats that previously housed lots of animals should more accurately report their fullness.

Tall animals such as sauropods and the Paraceratherium can now eat from ground feeders, though will prefer to use tall feeders. This change was made to accomodate baby animals which cannot reach tall feeders.

From the animal management menu in Park Services, players can now sell multiple animals at once. Selling an animal from anywhere in the game will also display a confirmation prompt with the potential income.

Species such as Edmontosaurus and various mammals can now be found in multiple dig sites. Increasing the funding for a dig site will also now improve the yield, making it quicker to get species with more money. As a side note, science teams are now unlocked automatically with each park rating.

Guests will now spawn and use only one contiguous park area, whichever is largest. Players can still put down multiple entrances/guest spawners, but only those which are connected to the largest area will be valid.

Previously it was possible to create multiple disconnected sections of a park, and guests would become confused trying to navigate to attractions in another area. This change affects module accessibility, the visitor navmesh preview, and the visitor areas used for Park Beauty calculation.

Want to see what animals are thinking? Or maybe you want to report an animal issue? Look no further than the animal debug tool, accessible by pressing Shift + B when an animal has been selected. We plan to keep this is in for a while to help players communicate any problems they've encountered.

• Issue: modular lighting is not recolorable during the day, but does work at night
  
• Issue: animal avoidance is currently broken, so animals can end up walking through each other
  
• Issue: animal animations in the Animal Nursery are currently broken due to the addition of babies, we will be fixing this
  
• Note: additive animations can trigger during one shots or right before animals go to eat/drink/rest. We would like to stop this from happening to prevent jank
  
• Note: we will be updating Paleopedia and Info Sign screenshots for animals that have received visual updates in a later patch

• NEW FEATURE: SEAMLESS ANIMAL ONTOGENY
  Animals can now be incubated in the Animal Nursery at any point in their ontogeny (growth cycle), and seamlessly grow into adulthood. Incubation gameplay has been re-balanced to make adult animals less economically viable in the early game.
  
  Throughout their growth, animals change in real time:
  
  • Proportions - younger animals are usually lankier, sporting larger extremities and facial features in rapport to the body
    
  • Skin & Coloration - all the baby animals have different patterning and colorations when young, gradually transitioning those into their adult colors. Some babies, like most theropods, are feathered even if the adults aren’t!
    
  • Animations - young animals move around differently, using their own bespoke locomotion animations. Most species even have specific play actions
    
  • SFX - animal sound scales with maturity, with infants sounding chirpier and higher pitched than their adult counterparts
    
  • Behavior - as babies, animals form clutches and follow their adopted family around the park
  Through the Animal Nursery and various game settings, players are now able to control:
  
  • Animal Neoteny
    
  • Animal Growth Speed
• NEW FEATURE: Animal Herding and Social Groups
  Animals now form social groups! Depending on the species, they’ll follow their group leader and synchronize behavior (eating, drinking, resting, etc.) to varying degrees. Infants can also be adopted by adult animals, though they won’t contribute to a social group until reaching adolescence. If infants cannot find an adult, they’ll stick together regardless, depending on the species.
  
  If a group leader is missing herd members (e.g. not enough males/females) they will broadcast across the park, making their presence known.
  
• NEW FEATURE: First Person Mode
  A first person mode has been added to the game, accessible from the camera menu (bottom right of the main HUD). This new game mode allows for two alternative play styles:
  
  • GUI ON: toggleable by having the game GUI on screen. This allows for the full creativity suite while in first person
    
  • Full interaction: normal Prehistoric Kingdom gameplay is disabled, while new interaction is unlocked: the player can interact with fence gates, seating, binoculars, and more!
• NEW CHANGE: Animal Locomotion v3
  Animal locomotion has been improved once more with the intent to tidy up and polish the movement introduced in Update 9. The following have been changed/added:
  • All animals now have trot animations
    
  • All animals now have baby animations
    
  • Animals will now move between walk, trot and run more discretely, preventing animation blending from happening for too long
    
  • Animals will now generally transition between all animations more seamlessly
    
  • Animals will now have a chance for zoomies, causing them to run around their paddock. This is more likely as a baby and varies per species
    
  • Animals are less prone to slowing down while moving forward
• NEW CHANGE: Animal Socialization and Awareness
  Animals of the same species will now talk to each other, issuing a call and response. This cannot happen if animals are unable to see one another. If their welfare is too low, animals will play a sad call. If their welfare is extremely low, they’ll play an angry call.
  
• NEW CHANGE: Improved Animal Sexual Dimorphism
  Many species such as Triceratops, Styracosaurus and the Mammoth now feature physical sexual dimorphism, giving females shorter tusks, horns and a more gracile appearance
  
• NEW CHANGE: Improved Animal Alt Species
  Updated the models and proportions for the following animals to make them more distinct:
  
  • Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus
    
  • Charonosaurus, Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus and walkeri
    
  • Juxia, Paraceratherium bugtiense and transouralicum
    
  • Psittacosaurus sp, sibiricus and mongoliensis
    
  • Smilodon fatalis and populator
    
  • Camarasaurus grandis, lentus and supremus
    
  • Pachyrhinosaurus canadensis, lakustai and perotorum
    
  • Elasmotherium and Sinotherium
    
  • Plateosaurus trossingensis and gracilis
• NEW BEHAVIOR: Animal Play Chase
  When an animal wants to socialise, there is a small chance to initiate play with another animal, chasing them in a circular area. This behavior is common in most babies, though can be observed infrequently on the following adults: Coelophysis, Dryosaurus, Juxia, Leaellynasaura, Nasutoceratops, Ouranosaurus, Protoceratops, Psittacosaurus (all), Scelidosaurus, Ugrunaaluk, Velociraptor

• Gameplay
  • With the addition of animal ontogeny, we restructured the Biology research tree to account for various new animal features. The following research items were added:
    • Accelerated Ontogenic Synthesis - improves pricing and timing requirements for breeding full adult animals
      
    • Induced Androgenesis - ability to breed male animals in the Animal Nursery
      
    • Rapid Genetic Replication - multiplies the breeding speed of animals in the Animal Nursery by 100%
      
    • Hyper Genetic Replication - multiplies the breeding speed of animals in the Animal Nursery by 200%
      
    • Suppressed Ontogeny - enables stopping an animal’s growth at a chosen moment in its growth cycle
      
    • Ontogenic Regulation - enables modifying an animal’s growth cycle speed
      
    • Capacity Protocol #1 - Increases the Animal Nursery capacity to 10 slots
      
    • Capacity Protocol #2 - Increases the Animal Nursery capacity to 15 slots
      
    • Dynamic Replication Allocation - Increases the Animal Nursery capacity to 60 slots
  • Added new Park Issue for staff not being able to access an enclosure
    
  • Added new Park Issue for animals not having enough room to grow
    
  • Added new Park Issue for shops not having a cashier present
    
  • Added new Park Issue for not having a Compost Heap in the park
    
  • Checklist Park Issues now have click-through behavior to quickly place the required module
• Animals
  • Animals will now consider their vertical reach when deciding which feeders they can use (primarily affecting the Tall Feeder). This is influenced by their current size, so infant sauropods will need ground food to start out with. Animals which can access high food sources will prefer them
    
  • Added an idle shake and additive head throw animation to Megaloceros
• UI/UX
  • Added new report tooltips to the Park Rating and Visitor Satisfaction buttons on the bottom left of the main HUD, giving players information about their parks at a glance
    
  • Added activity description text to the animal tooltip and the animal item rects in the Animals Management Menu
    
  • Added an Enrichment tab to the animal Info Menu. Animal enrichment currently consists of Stimulation, provided by enrichment items, and Social Interaction, given by herd group members. At this moment, Stimulation is always maxed out until we can implement more enrichment items in Update 15
    
  • Added a Social tab to the animal paleopedia, detailing animal grouping information and family behavior
    
  • Added confirmation dialog before loading a game while in a save, notifying the player that any unsaved progress will be lost
    
  • Animals now use separate hero renders for the Animal Nursery
    
  • Animals now have dedicated skin thumbnails for the Animal Nursery
    
  • Animal portrait icons now better reflect the animal’s current visual state, with distinct icons for each skin, sex, age, and genetic skin mutation. This is applied throughout the entire GUI
    
  • Added a Biology panel to the Animal Info Menu, reporting current animal statistics such as age, maturity, length, mass, etc.
    
  • Added a Social panel to the Animal Info Menu, displaying information about the animal’s current social and family groups, if relevant
    
  • Added an icon to the Animal Info Menu header to indicate the animal’s sex
    
  • Added selection cycling buttons to the Animal Info Menu header, allowing players to quickly switch between animals of the same species if the animal isn’t contained, or animals of its exhibit if the animal is contained
    
  • Added a confirmation window that appears when selling animals, notifying the player of the refund sale price
    
  • Animal Management Menu: added the ability to select multiple animals and sell them with a single click
    
  • Animal Management Menu: added a ‘Most Popular Animal’ widget on the left sidebar, displaying brief information about your park’s most popular animal and focusing it on click
    
  • Animal Management Menu: the ‘Locate’ button on the habitat headers now actually selects and focuses the relevant enclosure/habitat
    
  • Added new keybind: ‘Toggle First Person Mode’ set by default to LeftControl+T
    
  • Added new keybind: ‘Switch Item Next’ set by default to RightBracket
    
  • Added new keybind: ‘Switch Item Previous’ set by default to LeftBracket
    
  • Added onto and improved the Options Menu
    • Changed the visual style for the menu and re-ordered settings categories, based on immediate relevance
      
    • Added new first person setting in Audio - First Person Radio Effect, which can toggle a radio filter to the game’s music when using First Person Mode
      
    • Added new first person setting in Camera - First Person FOV
      
    • Added new first person setting in Camera - First Person Sprint Toggle, switching the control scheme for sprinting to use either a key hold, or a key press
      
    • Added new first person setting in Camera - First Person CrouchToggle, switching the control scheme for crouching to use either a key hold, or a key press
      
    • Added new first person setting in Camera - Hide Crosshair
      
    • Added new GUI setting in Interface - Temperature, switching the game’s temperature labels between Celsius, Fahrenheit and Kelvin
      
    • Added new GUI setting in Interface - Distance, switching the game’s measuring labels between metric and imperial
  • Paleopedia articles:
    • Added Ankylosaurus description
      
    • Added Apatosaurus description
      
    • Added Brontosaurus description
• Audio
  • Added a number of new UI sounds to various buttons and sliders to improve the user experience, replacing many of the old sounds
    
  • Added ambient building sounds to the Fossil Depot, Research Station and Staff Center modules
    
  • Added growls to T. rex eat
• Music
  • Added dynamic variants to many tracks, changing the musical fullness/arrangement depending on the time of day, park rating, weather or building activity
    
  • Added dynamic and semi-procedural pause music (around 25 minutes of material that plays randomly and adjusts layers depending on player input and location)
    
  • Added 2 new Ambient tracks:
    • It’s Yours (2:52)
      
    • Night Life (3:56)
  • Added 2 new Building tracks:
    • Evolution (1:55)
      
    • World’s Greatest Potential (3:43)
  • Added piano variants to 2 Ambient tracks:
    • The New World (1:42)
      
    • Perniciem (2:10)
  • Entering first person mode will cause music to sound radio-like and filtered. This can be turned off in the game options

• Balance
  • Animals have received a substantial round of rebalancing:
    • All animal costs have been re-tuned, with a higher overall cost ceiling. Animal pricing is now fully automated, with costs being mathematically based on the animal’s mass and perceived popularity
      
    • Animal pricing is now plastic, changing in real-time over the animal’s age and taking into account the animal’s appeal. High appeal animals are now worth more in-game money, which is reflected when selling individuals
      
    • Rebalanced animal base appeal points to be mathematically based on the animal’s mass and perceived popularity
      
    • Animal base appeal now slightly varies for each individual, based on their current mass
      
    • Increased animal starvation and dehydration time by 2x and 1.5x respectively, making animals eat/drink less frequently
  • Base price for science projects (excavations, research items) is about x2 higher
    
  • Additional funding levels in the Excavations Menu now have a higher cost, but also a higher fossil yield
    
  • Demolishing modular structures now refunds you with half the original cost
• Gameplay
  • Excavation system: animals can now be found in multiple excavation sites. When a species is unlocked in a specific site, that will update in all the other sites that species is present in. This currently extends to:
    • Kökşetau Fm. has been replaced with Kozhamzhar Fm. where Elasmotherium and Mammuthus can be found.
      
    • Psittacosaurus mongoliensis is now found in Dushihin Fm. and Jiufotang Fm.
      
    • Edmontosaurus regalis is now found in Prince Creek Fm. and Horseshoe Canyon Fm.
      
    • Vilyuy River has been re-added to the game, containing Coelodonta
      
    • Yamal Peninsula has been re-added to the game, containing Mammuthus and Elasmotherium
      
    • Science Teams are now automatically acquired once their specific unlock rating is reached
  • Animal creation: each animal instance now progresses asynchronously in the Nursery Holder
    
  • Added the ‘Animal Aging’ gameplay setting: this can completely disable animal aging in Sandbox Mode
    
  • Added the ‘Animal Ontogeny Speed Multiplier’ gameplay setting: this is a global value that affects all
  • animal growth speeds in Sandbox Mode, as long as their growth speed isn’t set to ‘Realistic’
• Animals
  • Updated Torvosaurus - changed body morphology, skeletal proportion and animations. The new Torvosaurus should be more anatomically accurate and in line with the quality of the other animals in the game
    
  • Animal AI now has a more advanced planning and execution model, allowing them to “think” about new things while still performing their current state, which prevents them from constantly being interrupted by thoughts they can’t currently execute on anyway
    
  • Animals will perform animation one shots at the end of their pathfinding, rather than stopping randomly
    
  • Animal locomotion speeds more accurately reflect their raw animations, leading to overall faster and more alive feeling animals
    
  • Updated social needs for all animals
    
  • Adjusted the water affinity for many species, generally making them less water inclined
    
  • Edmontosaurus now opens its mouth wider when calling
    
  • Animals will now remain in a single move animation (Walk, Trot, Run) rather than sitting at an awkward blend between two
    
  • Updated neck posture for Megaloceros eating and grazing animations
    
  • Updated various locomotion animations for:
    • Coelodonta
      
    • Dilophosaurus
      
    • Coelophysis
      
    • Dryosaurus
      
    • Psittacosaurus
      
    • Edmontosaurus
      
    • Lambeosaurus
      
    • Iguanodon
      
    • Parasaurolophus
      
    • Nasutoceratops
      
    • Pachyrhinosaurus
      
    • Styracosaurus
      
    • Triceratops
      
    • Tyrannosaurus/Tarbosaurus
      
    • Acrocanthosaurus
      
    • Carcharodontosaurus
      
    • Torvosaurus
      
    • Deinocheirus
      
    • Paraceratherium/Juxia
  • Improved model weight painting quality for most animals
    
  • Improved estimated data for animal mass
    
  • Improved navmesh margins to reduce animals getting stuck on tight corners
    
  • Animal selection input is now far more accurate
    
  • Improved genetic color variance across all species, with more accurate albinism and melanism, and several new leucism coloration types
    
  • Increased maximum scaling for Tyrannosaurus
    
  • Increased maximum scaling for Edmontosaurus annectens
    
  • Edmontosaurus regalis now supports the temperate biome
• Staff
  • Staff move 1.75x faster when transporting goods
    
  • Humans generally move a bit faster
• Guests
  • Guests will now spawn and use only one contiguous park area, whichever is largest. Multiple spawners are still valid, but only those which are connected to this largest area. Previously it was possible to create multiple disconnected sections of a park, and guests would become confused trying to navigate to attractions in another area. This affects module accessibility, the visitor navmesh preview, and the visitor areas used for Park Beauty calculation
    
  • Guest paths are now visible
• Construction
  • Significant changes to modular construction: unless expressly blocked by gameplay logic, groups can be freely rotated and scaled, with the transformation being applied in perpetuity. This means that groups will now retain their local transformation axes upon being edited. This also means that group scaling and rotation is now registered in Undo/Redo
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Reduced the opacity of Habitat Markers, though we’d like to make them even less visible at night in the future
    Moved interact points for standard Kiosk modules back by 0.1 meters, addressing temperamental nav connectivity when walls and scenery were placed along the front side of the kiosk
• Environment
  • Improved distant terrain rendering quality by accounting for texture bump in the resampling mechanism: this means more distant ground textures will appear more detailed
    
  • Improved terrain texture fidelity, lowering the scale of most textures to look better next to babies and small animals. This may result in more tiling in specific circumstances, but we feel this is a worthy sacrifice
    
  • Desaturated wetland sand texture and adjusted the wetness of mud
    
  • Decreased visual clutter of snow particles
    
  • Reverted lighting clamping during the early morning and late evening
    
  • Night is now less overwhelmingly blue with better visibility in moonlight and while looking top down
    
  • All maps should now have a more consistent fog starting distance
• Foliage
  • Updated kapok and coconut palm impostors
    
  • Reduced alpha cutoff for distant coconut palms and tree ferns, allowing them to maintain their silhouette and better cast shadows
    
  • Slightly increased wind simulation intensity
    
  • Slightly adjusted Beech Tree 5 collision
• UI/UX
  • Reduced minimum brush size for terrain painting to 2, from 5
    
  • UI Transparency now can’t be accessed while the Management Menu is open
    
  • Improved sun lighting transition when going into the Management Menu
    
  • Issue state icons now have 1:1 parity with park issue notifications
    
  • Staff and Visitor inaccessibility park issues will not show up if there are no staff centers or visitor spawners
    
  • The Loading bay and Storage buildings will no longer generate Module Logistics Unfulfilled park issues
    
  • Increased minimum issue time for Needs Refill from 20 seconds to 180 seconds
    
  • Notification popups can now show over the management menu
    
  • Overview popup audio now only triggers the first time a new popup is created
    
  • Modular gimbal GUI: clamped at the edges of the screen
    
  • Modular gimbal GUI: further offset positioning so that the buttons don’t overlap with the gimbal editing axes
    
  • While placing or manipulating an object, it will now have an orange outline to help maintain visibility and better communicate that an action is taking place
    
  • Improved modular gizmo movement - massively reduced jitter, and reworked distance increment math to be based on the current translation axis
    
  • Adjusted the size and colors of the modular gizmo to make it stand out more from the environment.
  • There is also now a small dot in the middle of advanced rotation to indicate an object’s pivot point
    Improved modular gizmo visuals by removing unselected axes from view while dragging
    
  • The ‘Align to Slope’ toggle is now on by default, requiring fewer clicks for stacking/aligning behavior, which seems to be prevalent
    
  • Habitat Markers are now visible when selecting a habitat
    
  • Animal Paleopedia: the ‘Thoughts’ page now preview character voice lines
    
  • Animal Paleopedia: fixed enclosure size calculator, previously male/female inputs were flipped leading to inconsistency
    
  • Changed behavior of the bottom-left park stats buttons to open/close their relevant menus based on current context
    
  • Clearing all notifications in the Notification Menu now automatically closes the panel
    
  • Re-introduced Excavations Menu worldmap clamping, which was previously removed due to a math glitch that has now been fixed
    
  • Aviary animal breeding buttons are now greyed out if the relevant animal hasn’t been unlocked
• Post-Processing
  • Reduced SSR roughness, resulting in less-green foliage during rain
• Audio
  • Adjusted entire audio mix, resulting in an overall louder and more cohesive experience
    
  • Adjusted Nasutoceratops social response calls to better fit the animation
    
  • Drag sounds for fences, paths and modular objects are now more responsive
    
  • Park Services ambience is now ducked when assigning Science Teams to excavations/research or hiring staff
• Music
  • Extended 1 Ambient track:
    • The New World (1:53 > 2:23)
  • Updated the mix and arrangements of several tracks to match the styling of Volume 1’s soundtrack release. Most current in-game music will receive similar updates!
    • 4 Ambient tracks: All For Them, A Walk In The Park, Dawn Chorus, The New World, Perniciem
      
    • 3 Building tracks: Visitors On Main, Ingenuity, Build Sleep Repeat
  • Changed gameplay music algorithm to be entirely based within FMOD
    
  • Music now sounds more distant, echo-y and lacks low frequencies at nighttime
    
  • Music will not stop playing when entering the Park Services dashboard and will instead sound distant
    
  • Music will lower in volume when at ground level if the player is not building
    
  • Intro music will now fade in at a lower volume when starting or loading a game

• Critical
  • Fixed loading of the navmesh when the file is corrupt, now it handles this safely and regenerates the navmesh (may resolve crazy teleporting animal bugs and others)
    
  • Fixed a rare bug in path following logic that could mess up animal positions
    
  • Fixed a number of potential stability issues when creating certain animals in the nursery
    
  • Fixed a dangerous bug in the animal AI that could potentially allow animals to walk off the navmesh
    
  • Blocked placement of animals while the navmesh is recalculating
    
  • Animal placement is no longer allowed for animals that are still loading
    
  • Animal placement will also ensure the animal is actually placed at the proper position when you click
    
  • Fixed ambient audio duplicating itself upon specific circumstances, potentially crashing audio or the game
    
  • Fixed a critical GUI exception causing the staff management menu to not properly populate itself with staff entries, when certain staff members have null assignments
    
  • Fixed an issue causing the park name text in the Management View menu to default to “Prehistoric Kingdom” upon loading a save, instead of the saved park name
    
  • Fixed Path Planning not using accessible areas when validating path start and end points, causing animals and humans to be unable to navigate at all under certain circumstances
• Gameplay
  • Fixed staff placement rotation input not working if time is paused
    
  • Fixed certain Park Issues not correctly responding to sandbox settings such as disabling Logistics or Dung
    
  • Fixed a bug which would prevent a visitor spawner from being usable if it was placed on its own, even after being connected to path
    
  • Fixed an issue where unloaded animals in the Nursery would overlap with other animals
• Animals
  • Fixed an animal shader issue that could cause certain skins to wrongfully display iridescence
    
  • Fixed certain animals such as sauropods being unable to reach their max speed
    
  • Fixed Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus neck snap on its rearing animation
    
  • Fixed sauropod rolling animations extending longer than intended
    
  • Fixed Psittacosaurus eat exit animation
    
  • Fixed Pachyrhinosaurus snapping resting animations
    
  • Reduced wiggling animation inaccuracies on various animations
    
  • Fixed animals using high browsing eat animations when taking from ground feeders
    
  • Fixed animals not always being able to drink from shallow water
    
  • Fixed animals getting their needs drained significantly on first placement if you had previously sold other animals in the park
    
  • Fixed swims for certain dinosaur species transitioning awkwardly
    
  • Fixed Psittacosaurus and Coelophysis swimming in very shallow water
    
  • Fixed Ecology Bonus only using the first excavation for each species, eliminating otherwise legitimate ecology bonuses
• Staff
  • Deep rework of Staff Dispatch, which now keeps track of all “Job Sites” such as feeders, shops, enclosures etc. and continuously validates that the correct assignments are being sent out to staff. Should prevent the dreaded lazy staff behavior that has plagued them since their release
    
  • Fixed a logical error that allowed laborers to fill feeders if that was one stop in a multi-stop transport assignment
• Guests
  • Fixed guests getting stuck in a Donation Task if it wasn’t completable on the first try
    
  • The planned feature of visitors running to the bathroom, which never functioned, has been fixed
• Audio
  • Fixed guests getting stuck in a Donation Task if it wasn’t completable on the first try
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Fixed selection collision for Research Station
• Construction
  • Fixed ‘Random Scale’ not taking newly placed objects into account
    
  • Fixed an undo bug that would cause grids to not be properly aligned to modular groups, when reversing group merging
    
  • Improved modular grid generation logic behind group splitting
    
  • Fixed Enclosure loading being too restrictive when trying to match the saved bounds to an existing fence polygon
• UI/UX
  • Fixed a collision problem on the coastal map causing the camera’s behavior to be unpredictable at certain positions and angles
    
  • Fixed camera jitter during zoom in/out while tracking a moving object
    
  • Fixed a timing issue causing certain GUI tooltips to stick on screen
    
  • Fixed a minor issue causing the modular style panel from not disappearing when opening the management menu from within modular selection
    
  • Fixed tooltip still being open in screenshots
    
  • Fixed tooltip text for the animal water preference bar reporting the incorrect preferred values
    
  • Fixed timesliced processing on animal breeding within the Nursery Holder, leading to more accurate animal creation timing
    
  • Fixed Shara Murun Formation being named Sharamuran Formation
    
  • Fixed Landscaping Menu issue causing the selected biome preset to not paint the correct foliage when the menu would be opened for the first time in a session
    
  • Fixed a weather menu bug causing the ‘Cycle Weather’ toggle to be auto-selected upon closing the menu
    
  • Modular gimbal GUI: fixed first-frame-glitch effect when entering modular edit mode
    
  • Modular gimbal gizmo: fixed washed out graphics, restored full colors
    
  • Fixed layout refreshing in the options menu, when changing sandbox settings
    
  • Fixed slider handles in the options menu
    
  • Fixed slider handles in the screenshot menu
    
  • Fixed slider handles in the landscaping menu
    
  • Fixed Module Inaccessible park issues from showing up when a feeder or shop is simply empty
    
  • Fixed an instance of layout glitching for overview pop-ups
    
  • The Management Menu is now automatically closed when starting any user action, which should prevent some nasty GUI overlay
• Audio
  • Fixed numerous UI buttons with incorrect sound events
    
  • Fixed Carcharodontosaurus broadcast being inaudible beyond 64 meters
    
  • Fixed missing audio events for a few Triceratops, Velociraptor and Paraceratherium animations
    
  • Fixed offset audio events for Coelophysis
    
  • Fixed potential issue where multiple skin layers could repeat over themselves
    
  • Fixed an issue causing the modular ‘moving’ sound to be stuck on during grid placement
• Music
  • Corrected overly aggressive file compression for brass in The Miracle of Life, eliminating a ringing sound

• Decreased spikes to GUI rendering when accessing UI transparency and screenshot mode
  
• Improved physics engine performance related to animal selection
  
• Slightly improved modular processing CPU performance
  
• Made significant improvements to the Animals Management and Staff Management menus performance, with list creation being deferred over multiple frames
  
• Reduced a lot of unnecessary logging
  
• Slightly improved loading times for saves with many modular groups
  
• Staff Dispatch has been moved off the main thread, giving better frame performance when heavy planning is required

• Animals
  • Added ontogeny to Brachiosaurus
    
  • Added ontogeny to Argentinosaurus
    
  • Added ontogeny to Iguanodon
    
  • Added ontogeny to Muttaburrasaurus
    
  • Added ontogeny to Torvosaurus gurneyi and tanneri
    
  • Added ontogeny to Styracosaurus
    
  • Added baby one shot animation to Elasmotherium, Torvosaurus
    
  • Tarbosaurus chicks now have distinct visuals
    
  • Smilodon populator cubs now have distinct visuals
• UI/UX
  • Added activity description text to the animal tooltip and the animal item rects in the Animals Management Menu
    
  • Added GUI tooltips to the social tab of the Animal Info Menu
    
  • Added help articles for No Food, No Water and Growth Restricted
    
  • Paleopedia articles:
    • Added Ankylosaurus description
      
    • Added Apatosaurus description
      
    • Added Brontosaurus description

• Balance
  • Demolishing modular structures now refunds you with half the original cost
• Animals
  • Adjusted the water affinity for many species, generally making them less water inclined
    
  • Animals will now leave a group if they can’t navigate to the leader within 8 attempts
    
  • If a species defines a Leader Type (matriarch or patriarch) group formation will promote the first member of the appropriate sex to the leader position
    
  • Group State Cohesion (0 -1) can no longer drop below 0.33 based on needs, up from 0
    
  • Eat, Drink, and Rest will now search for interactables in a much tighter radius around the group as long as their needs aren’t desperate
    
  • During Play/Chase, the trailing animal will now slow down if it gets too close to the lead animal
    
  • Edmontosaurus regalis now supports the temperate biome
    
  • The following adult animals are now capable of play chasing: Coelophysis, Dryosaurus, Juxia, Leaellynasaura, Nasutoceratops, Ouranosaurus, Protoceratops, Psittacosaurus (all), Scelidosaurus, Ugrunaaluk, Velociraptor
• Staff
  • Staff move 1.75x faster when transporting goods
    
  • Humans generally move a bit faster
• Guests
  • Guest paths are now visible
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Moved interact points for standard Kiosk modules back by 0.1 meters, addressing temperamental nav connectivity when walls and scenery were placed along the front side of the kiosk
• Environment
  • Made nighttime brighter to improve visibility without lights
    
  • All maps should now have a more consistent fog starting distance
• UI/UX
  • Increased minimum issue time for Needs Refill from 20 seconds to 180 seconds
    
  • Aviary animal breeding buttons are now greyed out if the relevant animal hasn’t been unlocked

• • Fixed a bug introduced with the last PTB patch, causing research projects to be completely un-researchable if a Fossil Depot wasn’t present in the park
    
  • Sitting during First Person Mode should now display a correct height relative to the seating item
• Animals
  • Fixed animals not being able to select beds when they needed to sleep
    
  • Fixed Ecology Bonus only using the first excavation for each species, eliminating otherwise legitimate ecology bonuses
• Staff
  • Fixed Clean Dung assignments ending immediately when the last mound disappeared, leading to no dung arriving at Compost Heaps
    
  • Fixed Shops not generating cashier or restock assignments when their sales tally was 0
    
  • Fixed staff dispatch trying to send the same staff member onto two different assignments within the same validation period
    
  • Fixed shops not submitting cashier assignments when uncompletable logistics assignments were also present
    
  • Fixed Staff Dispatch being able to select the same staff member for multiple assignments simultaneously
• Guests
  • Fixed visitors not using their own position as the center for nearby amenity searching
    
  • Fixed visitors not exiting move state early, causing them to clump at the interaction point for amenities before going to the end of an existing queue line
    
  • The planned feature of visitors running to the bathroom, which never functioned, has been fixed
• Construction
  • Fixed an undo bug that would cause grids to not be properly aligned to modular groups, when reversing group merging
    
  • Improved modular grid generation logic behind group splitting
    
  • Fixed Enclosure loading being too restrictive when trying to match the saved bounds to an existing fence polygon
• UI/UX
  • Fixed 9999 animal groups in the social groups calculator in the Paleopedia
    
  • The Management Menu is now automatically closed when starting any user action, which should prevent some nasty GUI overlay
• Rendering
  • Fixed binocular vignette effects sticking on screen after exiting first person binocular view through the screenshot GUI

• Optimized animal growth updating to run once a second for each animal
  
• Staff Dispatch has been moved off the main thread, giving better frame performance when heavy planning is required

Welcome, Park Testers!

This PTB release adds an updated Torvosaurus model, a new social tab to the paleopedia, smooths out animal locomotion and updates the social needs for all animals! We've also deployed fixes for issues pertaining to herding. Joining a herd will now interrupt an animal's current state, reducing the "scattering" effect reported by players. They will also no longer space themselves equally around the leader, congregating in a wider space instead.

A new behavior has also been added: play chasing! When an animal wants to socialise, there is a small chance to initiate play with another animal, chasing them in a circular area. This behavior is more common in babies than adult animals and only applies to more social or active species.

First Person Mode is also now accessed through a button next to the camera settings, making it easier to jump in and out. Of course, players can still use Control + T as a shortcut. Various fixes have also been deployed, so please give the full patch notes a read!

The Public Testing Branch (PTB) is a version of Prehistoric Kingdom that can be opted-into on Steam, containing experimental and potentially breaking changes. With the help of the community, we're able to hunt down various issues and gather feedback before pushing a an update to the public version of Prehistoric Kingdom.

1. Right click Prehistoric Kingdom in your Steam Library
   
2. Go to Properties
   
3. Betas
   
4. Select 'ptb_public_testing'

Please note that it is not recommended to play Public Testing Branch parks on earlier versions of the game. Please send feedback and bug reports to our Discord server's[discord.com] appropriate channel.

• Critical: modular lighting is not recolorable
  
• Issue: animal avoidance is currently broken, so animals can end up walking through each other
  
• Issue: additive animations can trigger during one shots or right before animals go to eat/drink/rest. We would like to stop this from happening to prevent jank
  
• Issue: animal animations in the Animal Nursery are currently broken due to the addition of babies, we will be fixing this

• NEW BEHAVIOR: Animal Play Chase
  When an animal wants to socialise, there is a small chance to initiate play with another animal, chasing them in a circular area. This behavior is more common in babies than adult animals and only applies to more social or active animals.

• Animals
  • Added baby and trot locomotion animations to Ankylosaurus
    
  • Added baby and trot locomotion animations to Dilophosaurus
    
  • Added baby and trot locomotion animations to Smilodon
  UI/UX
  • Added an Enrichment tab to the animal Info Menu. Animal enrichment currently consists of Stimulation, provided by enrichment items, and Social Interaction, given by herd group members. At this moment, Stimulation is always maxed out until we can implement more enrichment items in Update 15
    
  • Added a Social tab to the animal paleopedia, detailing animal grouping information and family behavior
    
  • Animals now use separate hero renders for the Animal Nursery
    
  • Animals now have dedicated skin thumbnails for the Animal Nursery
    
  • Added onto and improved the Options Menu:
    • Changed the visual style for the menu and re-ordered settings categories, based on immediate relevance
      
    • Added new first person setting in Audio - First Person Radio Effect, which can toggle a radio filter to the game’s music when using First Person Mode
      
    • Added new first person setting in Camera - First Person FOV
      
    • Added new first person setting in Camera - First Person Sprint Toggle, switching the control scheme for sprinting to use either a key hold, or a key press
      
    • Added new first person setting in Camera - First Person CrouchToggle, switching the control scheme for crouching to use either a key hold, or a key press
      
    • Added new first person setting in Camera - Hide Crosshair
      
    • Added new GUI setting in Interface - Temperature, switching the game’s temperature labels between Celsius, Fahrenheit and Kelvin
      
    • Added new GUI setting in Interface - Distance, switching the game’s measuring labels between metric and imperial
  • Added new notifications for various events in the park:
    • Starting Welcome message directing players towards the playable tutorials
      
    • Notifications for animals reaching adolescence and adulthood
      
    • Negative park balance message
      
    • Insufficient funds for science projects (excavations or researches)
      
    • Park Rating star gain
• Audio
  • Added baby calls to Juxia, Paraceratherium, Smilodon, Acrocanthosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus, Dilophosaurus, Deinocheirus, Plateosaurus, Velociraptor and Spinosaurus (includes the occasional crocodile chirp from the trailer) Baby appropriate growls will be added closer to U14's release

• Gameplay
  • First Person Mode: movement controls are now tied to the general movement keybinds
    
  • Park Issues should now be able to resolve while the game is paused
    
  • Science Teams are now automatically acquired once their specific unlock rating is reached
• Animals
  • Updated Torvosaurus - changed body morphology, skeletal proportion and animations. The new Torvosaurus should be more anatomically accurate and in line with the quality of the other animals in the game
    
  • Improved fluidity of animal locomotion generally
    
  • Animal groups will no longer try to space themselves equally around the leader, instead they will congregate in the widest navigable space within range of the leader
    
  • Animals will now interrupt their current state when joining a group, so they shouldn’t scatter so much when first placed together
    
  • Reduced frequency of Velociraptor calls and their wing flap + jump animation
    
  • Reduced zoomies frequency for Triceratops adults
    
  • Updated social needs values for all animals
    
  • Increased maximum communication interval for medium-large species, leading to less frequent calling
    
  • Edmontosaurus now opens its mouth wider when calling
• Buildings & Scenery
  • All decorative door pieces will no longer cut the nav mesh, allowing both animals and guests to walk straight through them. This does not apply to staff gates!
• Construction
  • Made advanced modular tool gizmos slightly thicker
    
  • Significant changes to modular construction: unless expressly blocked by gameplay logic, groups can be freely rotated and scaled, with the transformation being applied in perpetuity. This means that groups will now retain their local transformation axes upon being edited. This also means that group scaling and rotation is now registered in Undo/Redo
• UI/UX
  • Moved the ‘First Person Mode’ access button outside of the Camera Menu, to the bottom right of the main HUD
    
  • Input system change: any mouse orbit input will now cancel out any mouse panning input
    
  • Re-introduced Excavations Menu worldmap clamping, which was previously removed due to a math glitch that has now been fixed
• Audio
  • Gate sounds should no longer be muted when time is paused

• Critical
  • Fixed a dangerous bug in the animal AI that could potentially allow animals to walk off the navmesh
    
  • Blocked placement of animals while the navmesh is recalculating
    
  • Animal placement is no longer allowed for animals that are still loading
    
  • Animal placement will also ensure the animal is actually placed at the proper position when you click
    
  • Fixed human animation system call after a human instance was removed
• Gameplay
  • Fixed module accessibility not being respected by enclosures, causing certain park issues like No Accessible Food to get out of sync with the state of the world
    
  • Animal dung will no longer load in sandbox parks where dung is disabled
    
  • Fixed a bug in navmesh baking that was preventing open areas from being navigable under very specific circumstances
• Animals
  • Fixed an error in the animal AI that could potentially disable individual animal AIs’
    
  • Animal social groups should have an easier time forming outside of exhibits
    
  • Animal groups can no longer consist of less than two individuals
    
  • Fixed a bug causing animals to not sleep on haybeds
    
  • Fixed Nasutoceratops walk cycle arm snapping
    
  • Fixed various adult animals being able to play baby calls
• Guests
  • Fixed visitors searching for amenities near the map origin instead of their destination position
    
  • Fixed visitors clumping at shop interaction points when approaching from a distance
    
  • Fixed bug which was preventing visitors from running to the bathroom when their need is great
• Staff
  • Fixed staff trying to navigate on top of the Staff Center if there were no Visitor Spawners in the park
    
  • Fixed a staff dispatch error that could have been causing feeders and other logistics jobs to be ignored
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Fixed strawbeds not prompting an enclosure module recalculation
• Foliage
  • Fixed a bug which prevented plants being removed from the ground-attached list when they were destroyed
• Construction
  • Fixed a bug introduced with the last patch, causing incorrect axis locking for the modular tool gizmo, leading to free rotation of items that shouldn’t allow it
• UI/UX
  • Interacting with gates in first person mode while the game is paused will now play the open/close animation
    
  • Fixed Animal Nursery grid appearing through the Keeper model

• Reduced a lot of unnecessary logging
  
• Fixed a source of performance deprecation over session time
  
• Slightly improved loading times for saves with many modular groups

Welcome, Park Managers!

To celebrate Update 14 releasing on April 24, we've partnered with Youtooz[youtooz.com] to release our very own plushie! Meet Crowny, the adorable crowned sauropod from our logo.

We absolutely love how she turned out and hope you're just as excited to take a little piece of our kingdom home with you. We'll be posting more info as we get closer to launch, so stay tuned and be sure to follow our socials!

- The PK Team

Welcome, Park Testers!

This PTB release adds ontogeny for Acrocanthosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus and Scelidosaurus while making adjustments to animal weight calculation, research and includes potential crash and animal teleportation fixes.

We have also been making improvements to the modular building system, improving the feel of our advanced tools with smoother precision and enhanced visuals. This includes adding a yellow outline to maintain visibility, hiding any unavailable axis and adjusting some behaviors such as Stack Objects to not reset your height. You can also now hold control to greatly slow the sensitivity of advanced tools. We want to know if these changes feel better or worse for you!

For this PTB we are looking for feedback in these specific areas:

• Growth speeds have been adjusted in the Animal Nursery. 'Normal' growth has been slowed by 20% and 'Fast' growth has been increased by 30%
  
• The modular system has received quite a few tweaks. Please read the full patch notes below, play the game and let us know if construction feels better or worse

Over the next few weeks, we will continue to add new baby animals, implement all of the ontogeny audio and improve reliability for herding. Thank you for all your feedback so far!


The Public Testing Branch (PTB) is a version of Prehistoric Kingdom that can be opted-into on Steam, containing experimental and potentially breaking changes. With the help of the community, we're able to hunt down various issues and gather feedback before pushing a an update to the public version of Prehistoric Kingdom.

1. Right click Prehistoric Kingdom in your Steam Library
   
2. Go to Properties
   
3. Betas
   
4. Select 'ptb_public_testing'

Please note that it is not recommended to play Public Testing Branch parks on earlier versions of the game. Please send feedback and bug reports to our Discord server's[discord.com] appropriate channel.

• Note: social group formation works best for animals that are contained within a habitat
  
• Critical: modular lighting is not recolorable
  
• Issue: herding cohesion is currently broken, so animals can end up standing too close together
  
• Issue: animal avoidance is currently broken, so animals can end up walking through each other
  
• Issue: animals in a herd can get stuck constantly getting up/down if they don't need to rest but their herd leader wants to. This should resolve itself eventually, however
  
• Issue: additive animations can trigger during one shots or right before animals go to eat/drink/rest. We would like to stop this from happening to prevent jank
  
• Issue: many species may have bad color variation or ugly mutations. We are currently going through them one by one using a new method which looks better
  
• Issue: animal animations in the Animal Nursery are currently broken due to the addition of babies, we will be fixing this
  
• Issue: the game may freeze every so often, we are currently investigating the cause of this issue

• Animals
  • Added Acrocanthosaurus ontogeny
    
  • Added Carcharodontosaurus ontogeny
    
  • Added Scelidosaurus ontogeny
    
  • Added baby animations to Ankylosaurus
    
  • Added baby and trot locomotion animations to Plateosaurus
    
  • Added baby and trot locomotion animations to Ouranosaurus
• UI/UX
  • Added confirmation dialog before loading a game while in a save, notifying the player that any unsaved progress will be lost
• Construction
  • Holding left control while dragging a modular gizmo now slows down movement for finer control
• Audio
  • Added baby calls to Leaellynasaura, Psittacosaurus and Ouranosaurus (still using adult growls for now)

• Balance
  • Changed starting Nursery capacity from 5 to 10
    
  • Buffed Capacity Protocol #1 and Capacity Protocol #2 research items to reward a higher Nursery Capacity cap
• Animals
  • Adjusted Nursery growth speeds so that ‘Normal’ growth is 20% slower, while ‘Fast’ growth 30% faster
    
  • Updated colorations for both Apatosaurus skins
    
  • Increased maximum scaling for Tyrannosaurus
    
  • Increased maximum scaling for Edmontosaurus annectens
    
  • Rebalanced animal mass estimation algorithm, generating more accurate animal weights
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Reduced the opacity of Habitat Markers, though we’d like to make them even less visible at night in the future
    
  • Slightly adjusted Beech Tree 5 collision
• Construction
  • While placing or manipulating an object, it will now have an orange outline to help maintain visibility and better communicate that an action is taking place
    
  • Improved modular gizmo movement - massively reduced jitter, and reworked distance increment math to be based on the current translation axis
    
  • Adjusted the size and colors of the modular gizmo to make it stand out more from the environment. There is also now a small dot in the middle of advanced rotation to indicate an object’s pivot point
    
  • Improved modular gizmo visuals by removing unselected axes from view while dragging
    
  • The modular height gizmo only appears if the player has manually adjusted an object’s height
    
  • The ‘Stack Objects’ toggle no longer resets manual height adjustments if ‘Align to Slope’ is off
    
  • The ‘Align to Slope’ toggle is now on by default, requiring fewer clicks for stacking/aligning behavior, which seems to be prevalent
• UI/UX
  • The modular grid visuals are now completely white and feature depth blending at their borders
    
  • Habitat Markers are now visible when selecting a habitat

• Crashes
  • Potentially fixed crashes related to viewing animals with no available ontogeny in the Animal Nursery
• Critical
  • Fixed loading of the navmesh when the file is corrupt, now it handles this safely and regenerates the navmesh (may resolve crazy teleporting animal bugs and others)
    
  • Fixed a rare bug in path following logic that could mess up animal positions
    
  • Fixed a number of potential stability issues when creating certain animals in the nursery
• Gameplay
  • Fixed an initialization bug related to research loading, which could cause certain research items to not completely unlock in older saves
• Animals
  • Fixed animal locomotion transitions happening suddenly
    
  • Fixed swims for certain dinosaur species transitioning awkwardly
    
  • Fixed Psittacosaurus and Coelophysis swimming in very shallow water
  Construction
  • Fixed ‘Random Scale’ not taking newly placed objects into account
• UI/UX
  • Fixed animal list not updating when animals are put in different enclosures
    
  • Fixed baby animals not showing up in the animal social group menu
    
  • Fixed keybind texts in building action tooltips and the Camera Menu
    
  • Fixed several cases of selection outlines conflicting, especially during management overlay views
    
  • Fixed overlapping text in Science Team Assignment items, if there are insufficient funds

Welcome, Park Testers, to this very special public testing update!

This early version of Update 14 includes baby animals, seamless growth, animal herding and first person mode. We are expecting to launch this update on April 24, so there'll be a lot of time for bug fixing and adding all the missing animations and sounds.

While this is all still very work in progress, we are looking for feedback in these areas:

• Animal growth speeds (too fast/slow?)
  
• Animal food intake (do babies eat too frequently/not enough?)
  
• Staff reliability (are staff doing their jobs?)

There's quite a lot that's changed, so be sure to read the full patch notes below to see everything that's new!

Up first, baby animals and seamless growth! This feature is available for 49 out 58 species with all of them at varying stages of completion.

Players can choose to breed animals at any age or even stunt their growth early, preventing them from maturing into adults. Various growth speed options further allow you to tweak just how long it takes for babies to grow up!

Animals are also now capable of creating herds and family units, moving together and following the group leader's actions. Until reaching adolescence, baby animals can be adopted by an older individual, following them until they're ready to join a social group.

This is especially enjoyable to watch with our work in progress locomotion V3, an enhanced movement system that aims to smooth out transitions and give every species a trot animation. Herding and locomotion are areas that we'll continue to work on until full release, so expect to see some oddities.

You can also get up close and personal with the brand new First Person Mode! Open gates, sit on benches and look through binoculars as you rediscover your park from a new perspective.

As of this release, the following animals do not have their ontogeny enabled. They will be added as their baby skins are finalized:

• Acrocanthosaurus
  
• Carcharodontosaurus
  
• Torvosaurus tanneri & gurneyi
  
• Brachiosaurus
  
• Argentinosaurus
  
• Muttaburrasaurus
  
• Iguanodon
  
• Styracosaurus
  
• Scelidosaurus

When it comes to audio, we will be working to give every animal unique baby calls and add their various chirps throughout the PTB. Adolescent animals have not been given much attention yet, so expect them to sound much like adults for now. Unique baby animations are also missing audio.

Broadly, here's a list of the various things that we want to add or change for the final Update 14 release:

• Retake Paleopedia/Animal Info Sign screenshots for alt species that have been updated
  
• Updating animal thumbnails to include babies, male/female skins and genetic mutations
  
• Updating genetic variation and mutations to look better
  
• Updating tutorials to include information about ontogeny
  
• Fix Nursery idle animations
  
• Fix swim animation speeds being overly fast for all species
  
• Add help articles for no food, no water and restricted growth park issues
  
• Add more detailed information about social needs and behavior in the Paleopedia

The Public Testing Branch (PTB) is a version of Prehistoric Kingdom that can be opted-into on Steam, containing experimental and potentially breaking changes. With the help of the community, we're able to hunt down various issues and gather feedback before pushing a an update to the public version of Prehistoric Kingdom.

1. Right click Prehistoric Kingdom in your Steam Library
   
2. Go to Properties
   
3. Betas
   
4. Select 'ptb_public_testing'

Please note that it is not recommended to play Public Testing Branch parks on earlier versions of the game. Please send feedback and bug reports to our Discord server's[discord.com] appropriate channel.

• Note: social group formation works best for animals that are contained within a habitat
  
• Critical: modular lighting is not recolorable
  
• Critical: animals are teleporting quite a lot according to early testers, please let us know if you can find steps to reproduce this reliably
  
• Issue: herding cohesion is currently broken, so animals can end up standing too close together
  
• Issue: animal avoidance is currently broken, so animals can end up walking through each other
  
• Issue: animals in a herd can get stuck constantly getting up/down if they don't need to rest but their herd leader wants to. This should resolve itself eventually, however
  
• Issue: animals can sometimes snap into their walk cycle or other animations instead of doing so organically
  
• Issue: additive animations can trigger during one shots or right before animals go to eat/drink/rest. We would like to stop this from happening to prevent jank
  
• Issue: many species may have bad color variation or ugly mutations. We are currently going through them one by one using a new method which looks better
  
• Issue: animal animations in the Animal Nursery are currently broken due to the addition of babies, we will be fixing this
  
• Issue: the game may freeze every so often, we are currently investigating the cause of this issue

• NEW FEATURE: SEAMLESS ANIMAL ONTOGENY
  Animals can now be incubated in the Animal Nursery at any point in their ontogeny (growth cycle), and seamlessly grow into adulthood. Incubation gameplay has been re-balanced to make adult animals less economically viable in the early game.
  
  Throughout their growth, animals change in real time:
  
  • Proportions - younger animals are usually lankier, sporting larger extremities and facial features in rapport to the body
    
  • Skin & Coloration - all the baby animals have different patterning and colorations when young, gradually transitioning those into their adult colors. Some babies, like most theropods, are feathered even if the adults aren’t!
    
  • Animations - young animals move around differently, using their own bespoke locomotion animations. Most species even have specific play actions
    
  • SFX - animal sound scales with maturity, with infants sounding chirpier and higher pitched than their adult counterparts
    
  • Behavior - as babies, animals form clutches and follow their adopted family around the park
  Through the Animal Nursery and various game settings, players are now able to control:
  
  • Animal Neoteny
    
  • Animal Growth Speed
• NEW FEATURE: Animal Herding and Social Groups
  Animals now form social groups! Depending on the species, they’ll follow their group leader and synchronize behavior (eating, drinking, resting, etc.) to varying degrees. Infants can also be adopted by adult animals, though they won’t contribute to a social group until reaching adolescence. If infants cannot find an adult, they’ll stick together regardless.
  
• NEW FEATURE: First Person Mode
  A first person mode has been added to the game, accessible from the camera menu (bottom right of the main HUD). This new game mode allows for two alternative play styles:
  
  • GUI ON: toggleable by having the game GUI on screen. This allows for the full creativity suite while in first person
    
  • Full interaction: normal Prehistoric Kingdom gameplay is disabled, while new interaction is unlocked: the player can interact with fence gates, seating, binoculars, and more!
• NEW CHANGE: Animal Locomotion v3
  Animal locomotion has been improved once more with the intent to tidy up and polish the movement introduced in Update 9. The following have been changed/added:
  • All animals now have trot animations
    
  • All animals now have baby animations
    
  • Animals will now move between walk, trot and run more discretely, preventing animation blending from happening for too long
    
  • Animals will now generally transition between all animations more seamlessly
    
  • Animals will now have a chance for zoomies, causing them to run around their paddock. This is more likely as a baby and varies per species
    
  • Animals are less prone to slowing down while moving forward
• NEW CHANGE: Animal Socialization and Awareness
  Animals of the same species will now talk to each other, issuing a call and response. This cannot happen if animals are unable to see one another. If their welfare is too low, animals will play a sad call. If their welfare is extremely low, they’ll play an angry call.
  
• NEW CHANGE: Improved Animal Sexual Dimorphism
  Many species such as Triceratops, Styracosaurus and the Mammoth now feature physical sexual dimorphism, giving females shorter tusks, horns and a more gracile appearance
  
• NEW CHANGE: Improved Animal Alt Species
  Updated the models and proportions for the following animals to make them more distinct:
  
  • Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus
    
  • Charonosaurus, Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus and walkeri
    
  • Juxia, Paraceratherium bugtiense and transouralicum
    
  • Psittacosaurus sp, sibiricus and mongoliensis
    
  • Smilodon fatalis and populator
    
  • Camarasaurus grandis, lentus and supremus
    
  • Pachyrhinosaurus canadensis, lakustai and perotorum
    
  • Elasmotherium and Sinotherium
    
  • Plateosaurus trossingensis and gracilis

• Gameplay
  • With the addition of animal ontogeny, we restructured the Biology research tree to account for various new animal features. The following research items were added:
    • Accelerated Ontogenic Synthesis - improves pricing and timing requirements for breeding full adult animals
      
    • Induced Androgenesis - ability to breed male animals in the Animal Nursery
      
    • Rapid Genetic Replication - multiplies the breeding speed of animals in the Animal Nursery by 100%
      
    • Hyper Genetic Replication - multiplies the breeding speed of animals in the Animal Nursery by 200%
      
    • Suppressed Ontogeny - enables stopping an animal’s growth at a chosen moment in its growth cycle
      
    • Ontogenic Regulation - enables modifying an animal’s growth cycle speed
      
    • Capacity Protocol #1 - Increases the Animal Nursery capacity to 10 slots
      
    • Capacity Protocol #2 - Increases the Animal Nursery capacity to 15 slots
      
    • Dynamic Replication Allocation - Increases the Animal Nursery capacity to 60 slots
  • Added new Park Issue for staff not being able to access an enclosure
    
  • Added new Park Issue for animals not having enough room to grow
    
  • Added new Park Issue for shops not having a cashier present
    
  • Added new Park Issue for not having a Compost Heap in the park
    
  • Checklist Park Issues now have click-through behavior to quickly place the required module
• Animals
  • Animals will now consider their vertical reach when deciding which feeders they can use (primarily affecting the Tall Feeder). This is influenced by their current size, so infant sauropods will need ground food to start out with. Animals which can access high food sources will prefer them
    
  • Added an idle shake and additive head throw animation to Megaloceros
• UI/UX
  • Animal portrait icons now better reflect the animal’s current visual state, with distinct icons for each skin, sex, age, and genetic skin mutation. This is applied throughout the entire GUI
    
  • Added a Biology panel to the Animal Info Menu, reporting current animal statistics such as age, maturity, length, mass, etc.
    
  • Added a Social panel to the Animal Info Menu, displaying information about the animal’s current social and family groups, if relevant
    
  • Added an icon to the Animal Info Menu header to indicate the animal’s sex
    
  • Added selection cycling buttons to the Animal Info Menu header, allowing players to quickly switch between animals of the same species if the animal isn’t contained, or animals of its exhibit if the animal is contained
    
  • Added a confirmation window that appears when selling animals, notifying the player of the refund sale price
    
  • Animal Management Menu: added the ability to select multiple animals and sell them with a single click
    
  • Animal Management Menu: added a ‘Most Popular Animal’ widget on the left sidebar, displaying brief information about your park’s most popular animal and focusing it on click
    
  • Animal Management Menu: the ‘Locate’ button on the habitat headers now actually selects and focuses the relevant enclosure/habitat
    
  • Added new keybind: ‘Toggle First Person Mode’ set by default to LeftControl+T
    
  • Added new keybind: ‘Switch Item Next’ set by default to RightBracket
    
  • Added new keybind: ‘Switch Item Previous’ set by default to LeftBracket
• Audio
  • Added a number of new UI sounds to various buttons and sliders to improve the user experience, replacing many of the old sounds
    
  • Added ambient building sounds to the Fossil Depot, Research Station and Staff Center modules
    
  • Added growls to T. rex eat
• Music
  • Added dynamic variants to many tracks, changing the musical fullness/arrangement depending on the time of day, park rating, weather or building activity
    
  • Added dynamic and semi-procedural pause music (around 25 minutes of material that plays randomly and adjusts layers depending on player input and location)
    
  • Added 2 new Ambient tracks:
    • It’s Yours (2:52)
      
    • Night Life (3:56)
  • Added 2 new Building tracks:
    • Evolution (1:55)
      
    • World’s Greatest Potential (3:43)
  • Added piano variants to 2 Ambient tracks:
    • The New World (1:42)
      
    • Perniciem (2:10)
  • Entering first person mode will cause music to sound radio-like and filtered. This can be turned off in the game options

• Balance
  • Animals have received a substantial round of rebalancing:
    • All animal costs have been re-tuned, with a higher overall cost ceiling. Animal pricing is now fully automated, with costs being mathematically based on the animal’s mass and perceived popularity
      
    • Animal pricing is now plastic, changing in real-time over the animal’s age and taking into account the animal’s appeal. High appeal animals are now worth more in-game money, which is reflected when selling individuals
      
    • Rebalanced animal base appeal points to be mathematically based on the animal’s mass and perceived popularity
      
    • Animal base appeal now slightly varies for each individual, based on their current mass
      
    • Increased animal starvation and dehydration time by 2x and 1.5x respectively, making animals eat/drink less frequently
  • Base price for science projects (excavations, research items) is about x2 higher
    
  • Additional funding levels in the Excavations Menu now have a higher cost, but also a higher fossil yield
• Gameplay
  • Excavation system: animals can now be found in multiple excavation sites. When a species is unlocked in a specific site, that will update in all the other sites that species is present in. This currently extends to:
    • Kökşetau Fm. has been replaced with Kozhamzhar Fm. where Elasmotherium and Mammuthus can be found.
      
    • Psittacosaurus mongoliensis is now found in Dushihin Fm. and Jiufotang Fm.
      
    • Edmontosaurus regalis is now found in Prince Creek Fm. and Horseshoe Canyon Fm.
      
    • Vilyuy River has been re-added to the game, containing Coelodonta
      
    • Yamal Peninsula has been re-added to the game, containing Mammuthus and Elasmotherium
  • Animal creation: each animal instance now progresses asynchronously in the Nursery Holder
    
  • Added the ‘Animal Aging’ gameplay setting: this can completely disable animal aging in Sandbox Mode
    
  • Added the ‘Animal Ontogeny Speed Multiplier’ gameplay setting: this is a global value that affects all
  • animal growth speeds in Sandbox Mode, as long as their growth speed isn’t set to ‘Realistic’
• Animals
  • Animal AI now has a more advanced planning and execution model, allowing them to “think” about new things while still performing their current state, which prevents them from constantly being interrupted by thoughts they can’t currently execute on anyway
    
  • Animals will perform animation one shots at the end of their pathfinding, rather than stopping randomly
    
  • Animal locomotion speeds more accurately reflect their raw animations, leading to overall faster and more alive feeling animals
    
  • Animals will now remain in a single move animation (Walk, Trot, Run) rather than sitting at an awkward blend between two
    
  • Updated neck posture for Megaloceros eating and grazing animations
    
  • Updated various locomotion animations for:
    • Coelodonta
      
    • Dilophosaurus
      
    • Coelophysis
      
    • Dryosaurus
      
    • Psittacosaurus
      
    • Edmontosaurus
      
    • Lambeosaurus
      
    • Iguanodon
      
    • Parasaurolophus
      
    • Nasutoceratops
      
    • Pachyrhinosaurus
      
    • Styracosaurus
      
    • Triceratops
      
    • Tyrannosaurus/Tarbosaurus
      
    • Acrocanthosaurus
      
    • Carcharodontosaurus
      
    • Torvosaurus
      
    • Deinocheirus
      
    • Paraceratherium/Juxia
  • Improved model weight painting quality for most animals
    
  • Improved estimated data for animal mass
    
  • Improved navmesh margins to reduce animals getting stuck on tight corners
    
  • Animal selection input is now far more accurate
    
  • Improved genetic color variance across all species, with more accurate albinism and melanism, and several new leucism coloration types
• Guests
  • Guests will now spawn and use only one contiguous park area, whichever is largest. Multiple spawners are still valid, but only those which are connected to this largest area. Previously it was possible to create multiple disconnected sections of a park, and guests would become confused trying to navigate to attractions in another area. This affects module accessibility, the visitor navmesh preview, and the visitor areas used for Park Beauty calculation
• Environment
  • Improved distant terrain rendering quality by accounting for texture bump in the resampling mechanism: this means more distant ground textures will appear more detailed
    
  • Improved terrain texture fidelity, lowering the scale of most textures to look better next to babies and small animals. This may result in more tiling in specific circumstances, but we feel this is a worthy sacrifice
    
  • Desaturated wetland sand texture and adjusted the wetness of mud
    
  • Decreased visual clutter of snow particles
    
  • Reverted lighting clamping during the early morning and late evening
    
  • Night is now less overwhelmingly blue with better visibility in moonlight and while looking top down
• Foliage
  • Updated kapok and coconut palm impostors
    
  • Reduced alpha cutoff for distant coconut palms and tree ferns, allowing them to maintain their silhouette and better cast shadows
    
  • Slightly increased wind simulation intensity
• UI/UX
  • Reduced minimum brush size for terrain painting to 2, from 5
    
  • UI Transparency now can’t be accessed while the Management Menu is open
    
  • Improved sun lighting transition when going into the Management Menu
    
  • Issue state icons now have 1:1 parity with park issue notifications
    
  • Staff and Visitor inaccessibility park issues will not show up if there are no staff centers or visitor spawners
    
  • The Loading bay and Storage buildings will no longer generate Module Logistics Unfulfilled park issues
    
  • Notification popups can now show over the management menu
    
  • Overview popup audio now only triggers the first time a new popup is created
    
  • Modular gimbal GUI: clamped at the edges of the screen
    
  • Modular gimbal GUI: further offset positioning so that the buttons don’t overlap with the gimbal editing axes
    
  • Animal Paleopedia: the ‘Thoughts’ page now preview character voice lines
    
  • Changed behavior of the bottom-left park stats buttons to open/close their relevant menus based on current context
    
  • Clearing all notifications in the Notification Menu now automatically closes the panel
• Post-Processing
  • Reduced SSR roughness, resulting in less-green foliage during rain
• Audio
  • Adjusted entire audio mix, resulting in an overall louder and more cohesive experience
    
  • Adjusted Nasutoceratops social response calls to better fit the animation
    
  • Drag sounds for fences, paths and modular objects are now more responsive
    
  • Park Services ambience is now ducked when assigning Science Teams to excavations/research or hiring staff
• Music
  • Extended 1 Ambient track:
    • The New World (1:53 > 2:23)
  • Updated the mix and arrangements of several tracks to match the styling of Volume 1’s soundtrack release. Most current in-game music will receive similar updates!
    • 4 Ambient tracks: All For Them, A Walk In The Park, Dawn Chorus, The New World, Perniciem
      
    • 3 Building tracks: Visitors On Main, Ingenuity, Build Sleep Repeat
  • Changed gameplay music algorithm to be entirely based within FMOD
    
  • Music now sounds more distant, echo-y and lacks low frequencies at nighttime
    
  • Music will not stop playing when entering the Park Services dashboard and will instead sound distant
    
  • Music will lower in volume when at ground level if the player is not building
    
  • Intro music will now fade in at a lower volume when starting or loading a game

• Critical
  • Fixed ambient audio duplicating itself upon specific circumstances, potentially crashing audio or the game
    
  • Fixed a critical GUI exception causing the staff management menu to not properly populate itself with staff entries, when certain staff members have null assignments
    
  • Fixed an issue causing the park name text in the Management View menu to default to “Prehistoric Kingdom” upon loading a save, instead of the saved park name
• Gameplay
  • Fixed staff placement rotation input not working if time is paused
    
  • Fixed certain Park Issues not correctly responding to sandbox settings such as disabling Logistics or Dung
    
  • Fixed a bug which would prevent a visitor spawner from being usable if it was placed on its own, even after being connected to path
    
  • Fixed an issue where unloaded animals in the Nursery would overlap with other animals
• Animals
  • Fixed an animal shader issue that could cause certain skins to wrongfully display iridescence
    
  • Fixed certain animals such as sauropods being unable to reach their max speed
    
  • Fixed Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus neck snap on its rearing animation
    
  • Fixed sauropod rolling animations extending longer than intended
    
  • Fixed Psittacosaurus eat exit animation
    
  • Fixed Pachyrhinosaurus snapping resting animations
    
  • Reduced wiggling animation inaccuracies on various animations
    
  • Fixed animals using high browsing eat animations when taking from ground feeders
    
  • Fixed animals not always being able to drink from shallow water
    
  • Fixed animals getting their needs drained significantly on first placement if you had previously sold other animals in the park
• Staff
  • Deep rework of Staff Dispatch, which now keeps track of all “Job Sites” such as feeders, shops, enclosures etc. and continuously validates that the correct assignments are being sent out to staff. Should prevent the dreaded lazy staff behavior that has plagued them since their release
    
  • Fixed a logical error that allowed laborers to fill feeders if that was one stop in a multi-stop transport assignment
• Audio
  • Fixed guests getting stuck in a Donation Task if it wasn’t completable on the first try
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Fixed selection collision for Research Station
• UI/UX
  • Fixed a collision problem on the coastal map causing the camera’s behavior to be unpredictable at certain positions and angles
    
  • Fixed camera jitter during zoom in/out while tracking a moving object
    
  • Fixed a timing issue causing certain GUI tooltips to stick on screen
    
  • Fixed a minor issue causing the modular style panel from not disappearing when opening the management menu from within modular selection
    
  • Fixed tooltip still being open in screenshots
    
  • Fixed tooltip text for the animal water preference bar reporting the incorrect preferred values
    
  • Fixed timesliced processing on animal breeding within the Nursery Holder, leading to more accurate animal creation timing
    
  • Fixed Shara Murun Formation being named Sharamuran Formation
    
  • Fixed Landscaping Menu issue causing the selected biome preset to not paint the correct foliage when the menu would be opened for the first time in a session
    
  • Fixed a weather menu bug causing the ‘Cycle Weather’ toggle to be auto-selected upon closing the menu
    
  • Modular gimbal GUI: fixed first-frame-glitch effect when entering modular edit mode
    
  • Modular gimbal gizmo: fixed washed out graphics, restored full colors
    
  • Fixed layout refreshing in the options menu, when changing sandbox settings
    
  • Fixed slider handles in the options menu
    
  • Fixed slider handles in the screenshot menu
    
  • Fixed slider handles in the landscaping menu
    
  • Fixed Module Inaccessible park issues from showing up when a feeder or shop is simply empty
    
  • Fixed an instance of layout glitching for overview pop-ups
• Audio
  • Fixed numerous UI buttons with incorrect sound events
    
  • Fixed Carcharodontosaurus broadcast being inaudible beyond 64 meters
    
  • Fixed missing audio events for a few Triceratops, Velociraptor and Paraceratherium animations
    
  • Fixed offset audio events for Coelophysis
    
  • Fixed potential issue where multiple skin layers could repeat over themselves
    
  • Fixed an issue causing the modular ‘moving’ sound to be stuck on during grid placement
• Music
  • Corrected overly aggressive file compression for brass in The Miracle of Life, eliminating a ringing sound

• Decreased spikes to GUI rendering when accessing UI transparency and screenshot mode
  
• Improved physics engine performance related to animal selection
  
• Slightly improved modular processing CPU performance
  
• Made significant improvements to the Animals Management and Staff Management menus performance, with list creation being deferred over multiple frames

[www.patreon.com]Welcome to the March Development Update!

This month, we released our trailer for Update 14, showing off a variety of baby animals coming to the game. This update will be arriving April 24th, with the Public Testing Branch (PTB) version coming to Steam on April 2nd.

As always, the PTB version is intended to catch various issues and get feedback on new features. Not all animals will have ontogeny and the content itself will be in various stages of completion, lacking sounds, animations, skins and other things.

[trello.com]It’s officially 24 days until Update 14 is properly released and yet all of the features are effectively done! For the next few weeks, it’s a matter of finishing the content, polishing, bug fixing and making various tweaks to get this update exactly where we want it.

While there’s a list of changes we’ll be working on until release, one of our favorites is an expansion to our animal thumbnails, with an aim to include renders for babies, sexual dimorphism and genetic mutations. Especially with ontogeny, this is going to make it a lot easier to find specific animals! It also works for the Animal Holder, so you’ll know if you have an albino before it’s even in the park.

It’s a new month, so it must be time to show off more baby animals. Today, we’ll be sharing a bunch from our Discord[discord.com], starting with the highly requested Spinosaurus! These tiny croco-saurs lack many of the features found in the adult versions, such as their tall crests and giant sails.

Adorably, they even move around with their tails raised, demonstrating how much more nimble the young ones are.

The sauropodlets of Camarasaurus grandis, however, are what you might expect! With proportionally shorter necks and softer features, these babies sport similar coloration to the adults with banded faces and more abundant patterning.

Next, Ankylosaurus has to be one of our favorites! Despite their size, these grumbles are still miniature tanks, though that iconic tail club hasn’t grown in yet. This is also one of the few species that we’d like to create a baby-specific sculpt for, removing various wrinkles and smoothing out their osteoderms. Keep an eye out for that in the future!

Plateosaurus gracilis is another favorite of ours. With the adult having clown-like face colors, we wanted to make the juveniles equally bold. Their cookies and creme patterning evokes a similar vibe to the adult, while making us slightly hungry, too!

Finally, here’s a look at our Sinotherium! Like their modern relatives, the horn on this baby rhino is yet to grow in, leaving a small protrusion on its head.

That’s right, animal herding is coming to Update 14 - surprise!!! You thought it was the next update, but we actually snuck it in for this one.

So, how does it work? Animals that are adolescents or older will be eligible to join a social group. At random, the game will pick a group leader, allowing them to decide where the herd will go or what they’ll do. For example, if the group leader decides to rest or drink, herd members will follow and attempt to do the same thing.

This level of herd cohesion is something that we can vary per species, making animals like Dryosaurus very tight knit, while a pair of T. rex are more independent from each other.

To check if your animals are in a social group, we’ve added a new tab to the animal information panel! Here, you can find the group leader, group members and see how many babies are associated with this group.

Rather than taking up slots in a social group, baby animals are instead adopted by adults, creating a more realistic herd structure. Within these new family units, babies will follow their parents until reaching adolescence, eventually disbanding to find a proper social group. While growing up, though, they’ll do their best to stick near an adult. It’s pretty cute watching them cluster up!

Non-final thumbnail renders!

In the case that babies cannot find an adult (oh no), they’ll cleverly form their own clutch, following a leader much like a regular social group.

Finally, we’ve implemented the first version of animal awareness. In this update, animals will be able to speak to one another, offering a call and response. They’ll prioritise group members, but can occasionally call to other species or animals outside of their group. This behavior can only happen if the animals can see or hear each other.

Animals will also use sad calls when they have unmet needs, or if their welfare is really low, let out an angry bellow. For our fearsome Leaellynasaura, it’s more like an angry rat.

In the future, we want to introduce look-targets/head IK that would allows animals to look at each other, making it more obvious who they’re talking to. We also want to reuse the sad and angry calls as a way for animals to react to each other e.g. “get away from my herd!”

You probably want to see all this in action, so we’ve prepared a short video showcasing a couple of species and different scenarios. In this video you can also catch a glimpse of animal locomotion V3, an update focused on smoothing out movement and adding a trot animation for every animal! It’s still very much work in progress, so we’re hoping to improve it more by April 24.

So, since we managed to sneak herding into Update 14, what’s the plan for 15? Well, while we can’t get too specific just yet, our goal is to further enhance the animals with new behaviors and animations to make them even more lively.

Notably, this includes expanding the social and herding behaviors to feature a more dynamic social hierarchy with things like threat displays. There’s a lot that we can do, and we’re excited to finally begin exploring this side of Prehistoric Kingdom. With that said…

There’s a new species on the horizon and they’re, uh, flocking this way. It’s everyone’s favorite chicken mimic, the Gallimimus!

Although the first ornithomimid in Early Access may have been Deinocheirus, Gallimimus has had an even longer history with Prehistoric Kingdom, namely being part of our first two demos ever! It’s certainly been a while, but we’re overjoyed to see Gallimimus finally come home. We’ve missed you!

Let’s take a look at even more paleobotany arriving in Update 15! Below, you’ll find the last few foliage species coming to the Scrubland biome. This includes a relative to the modern monkey puzzle tree, araucaria!

When you combine all the Scrubland plants together, you get a pretty cool environment! All that’s missing is a Stegosaurus hiding amongst the cycads.

With Scrubland out of the way, our attention turns to a different type of land, the Wetland! For this biome, we have a lot of plants that are intended to sit in shallow waters or on top of the water’s surface.

In addition to the water-based plants above, we’re also going to have giant horsetails! This plant is quite a bit larger than its modern counterpart that’s currently in the game. Think somewhere between reeds and bamboo.

This brings us to our final plant for today and it’s a peculiar one! It’s not a palm nor a mangrove, but actually a fern. We especially love this one and hope you will, too!

To close out this Dev Diary, we have a new terrarium species to share with you! Meet the adorable Simosuchus, a tiny crocodilian from the Late Cretaceous. This armored pug is believed to have been herbivorous due to its short snout and unique teeth! We’d still suggest keeping your hands away from its mouth, though, they’re quite nippy.

Created by W3

Created by ASSASSINSPINO

Created by W3

Created by Alkhan

[www.patreon.com]Thank you for reading March’s dev diary!

To recap, Update 14’s PTB is on April 2nd while the actual update comes out April 24th. We hope you’re excited to finally play it and await your feedback!

- The PK Team

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Update 14 is coming next month on April 24!

An early version of this release will be available on the Public Testing Branch starting April 2, allowing the team to gather bug reports while we polish Update 14 and add the last few assets.

The headline features for Update 14 are the brand new baby animals and their seamless growth systems, allowing players to watch their animals morph and change in real time!

It was important to us that babies weren’t simply scaled down adults. Throughout their life, they’ll adjust their size, proportions, colors, sounds and even behavior over time. We’ve been working hard to create a new set of animations and sounds exclusively for use by the babies.

Seamless growth will be available for all of our current and future species, excluding any Mini-Exhibit or Terrarium bound creatures like the tiny Archaeopteryx and Microraptor.

• INCUBATION
  From the Animal Nursery, players can choose to incubate their animals from any age, easily allowing them to create babies, adults or anything in between.
  
  You can also pick the maximum maturity of an animal, too! This means that as an animal grows up, it can continue to look young despite its age increasing.
  
  
• BABY BEHAVIORS
  Depending on the species, babies will instinctively seek out a parent to adopt them! They’ll try to stick close to their guardian, or if unable to find one, stay with other unadopted babies as a clutch.
  
  At the end of Early Access, we would like to include breeding as a mechanic that adult animals can use to create natural offspring.

First Person Mode allows players to experience their park from a whole new perspective, dropping down to the eye level of a human.

In this mode, players can run, jump and crouch like you’d expect from any other first person game. We even added a few interactions like sitting in benches, opening/closing habitat gates and looking through binoculars to see what your guests see!

The full patch notes will be available once the update goes live.

See you soon, park managers!

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