Welcome, Park Managers!

Update 15 is now available! This major releases adds two new species, breeding and paleobotany. Alongside these features are new feeders and enrichment, updated landscape tools, an improved global grid, reworked Animal Nursery and new animal milestones. To top it all off, herbivores can also now browse on foliage!

If you're yet to try the game, we're currently 30% off! It's a great time to start building your kingdom's next generation.

Unlock two fast and feathery dinosaurs - Oviraptor and Gallimimus! Like the other animals, these Cretaceous chickens feature seamless growth and adorable (or scrungly) babies.

Throughout the year, animals experience a breeding season that allows them to partake in courtship, reproduce and maintain a nest or birthing bed built by the player.

To maximise the amount of offspring an animal can have, players can create animals with high fertility from the Animal Nursery. Creating creatures from a young maturity at slower growth speeds yields the best result once they reach sexual maturity.

Once the breeding season hits, males will attempt to court females to varying degrees of success. If they get rejected, they will be out until next season.

If courtship is successful, the female will fall pregnant as long as they have a compatible nest or birthing bed in their habitat.

Animals will guard and manage their nests - attempting to both scare off any threats and maintain healthy embryos. If they have to wander too far for food and water, it's even possible for their offspring to die early.

Once animals are born, they'll randomly take on the traits of their parents. If you're really determined, you can even selectively breed animals to make them larger or smaller than the expected variation range of their species. Have fun!

From the Excavations menu, players can discover over 30 species of Mesozoic plants to make their dinosaurs feel right at home.

Placing plants from the appropriate era (Mesozoic for dinosaurs, Cenozoic for mammals) will reward animals with additional points to increase their popularity with guests. It is not a hard requirement!

Herbivores can now browse from foliage to increase their enrichment levels! If their hunger is above 70%, they'll occasionally seek out plants from a compatible biome to munch on.

They do not gain any food from this behavior to keep Challenge Mode fair, though we'd like to add that as a sandbox option in a later update.

Update 15 introduces new options for the game's standard feeders. With this release, we've added a small 1m dish, a wide 4m trough and an absolutely massive 6m dish. These all come with updated visuals for both the food and containers themselves, finally adding much-requested support for recoloring your feeders. Oh, and there's a new plastic style, too!

Moving onto the enrichment feed, there's quite a lot here! To start, herbivores now have a variety of hay pieces that they can eat. Both hay piles and bales have been provided for players whose paddock either falls into a zoo-vibe or a farm-vibe.

In addition to these, a bunch of faux feeders have been added, too. These are artificial containers designed to look like natural elements, providing your animals with a safe but enriching experience.

There are faux fish, animal carcasses, logs and stumps. The latter in particular can provide plants, fruit or insects!

The Animal Nursery menu has been redesigned for better usability and organisation, providing new sorting methods such as alphabetical, unlocked and by price. There's also a filtering menu to really narrow down your results!

After selecting an animal, you'll now see a 1:1 recreation of what your animal will look like once it's in the park. From here, players can now randomize the skin, sex or maturity values of their animals.

Clicking on the new settings button will allow players to customize their animals further - overriding their mutation or color/size variation. If you've always wanted to make the biggest leucistic T. rex in just a few clicks, now you can!

Animal Milestones are a new mechanic that allow animals to grow with you. As they spend time in the park, they can achieve various goals, rewarding them with more Animal Points.

Milestones can range from being born in the park to getting rejected too many times!

The Landscaping menu has been overhauled with a new vertically scaling design! This adds a bunch of quality of life improvements like being able to see all the plants or terrain textures at once.

Players also have access to a variety of brush types when painting ground textures or sculpting terrain, making it easier than ever to create realistic landscapes when combined with the new auto-slope painting features.

You'll note that we've added new grass textures and added other settings like a water mask that stops foliage from being painted in water. For aquatic plants like the Mesozoic nelumbo, they'll even paint directly to the water surface.

The global building grid has been reworked to make it easier than ever to construct organised parks like zoo-sim games of the past. This feature has been expanded to fences, too!

CHALLENGE MODE: PROFIT TAX

To address the economy bloat reported by Challenge Mode players during the mid-late game, we’ve introduced profit tax.

At the start of each month, players can earn up to $10,000 tax free. After this, a tax percentage is automatically deducted from their income, scaling with higher earnings. Your profit tax resets each month and can be seen in the Finances menu under the quarterly profit. A tooltip reveals more information about the various tax brackets.

CHALLENGE MODE: EXCAVATION EVENTS

Positive Excavation events now last for two months, allowing players to better take advantage of their benefits. The amount of negative events per month have also been decreased.

This coincides with a general rebalancing of excavations as well as the inclusion of paleobotany sites.

CHALLENGE MODE: RESEARCH ADJUSTMENTS

A number of research items have been added, changed or removed to improve the game’s progression.

ENCLOSURE ANIMAL LIST

An animal list has been added to the enclosure menu, allowing players to quickly see all the contained animals and filter by species.

Although this is not how we planned to ship Update 15, unfortunate circumstances over the last few weeks have meant that we have elected to prioritise the wellbeing of our team members and focus on the core breeding mechanics.

These: features will be arriving in a second update coming in September:

• Animal Head IK

• Interspecies threat displays and fleeing (however this CAN occur during courtship right now!)

We apologise and hope you can respect our decision on this. The team currently expects Update 15.1 to arrive before the end of September - only a few weeks away.

• Some dig and threaten animations are currently missing audio

• We want to adapt the starting facilities in new games to fit the new global grid in a future update

• Undo/redo for terrain sculpting with automatic slope painting attached isn't fully hooked up yet

Gameplay

• Added 22 paleobotany excavation sites: 

  • North America:

    • Colorado Flats

    • Eagle Sandstone

    • Edmonton Shale

    • Kansas Rocks

    • Montana Hills

  • South America:

    • Araripe Basin

    • Chubut Conglomerate

    • Deseado Massif

    • San Luis Siltstone

  • Europe:

    • Bavarian Lithic Reef

    • Bohemian Massif

    • Lusitanian Rift

  • Asia:

    • Bartala Hill

    • Gobi Badlands

    • Henan Deposits

    • Honshu Group

    • Korean Shale

    • Wuyun Clays

    • Yanliao Sediments

  • Africa

    • Cape Sandstones

    • Maghrebian Desert Beds

  • Antarctica

    • Antarctic Highlands

• Added new Research progression items:

  • Biology

    • Chromatic Phenotype SelectionEnables picking specific skins for animals in the Nursery

    • Chromatic Expression ModulationEnables editing an animal’s mutations and coloration in the Nursery

    • Somatic Growth ModulationEnables size editing for animals in the Nursery

    • High-Capacity Low FeedersUnlocks feeders suitable for feeding larger animals

    • High-Capacity Tall Feeders
      Unlocks feeders suitable for feeding large or tall animals

  • New Research Tree: Management

    • Higher EducationSpeeds up Staff skill learning in the Staff Center

    • Produce Station PlantsUnlocks the Produce Station Plants, allowing for the local production of herbivore feed

    • Produce Station FruitUnlocks the Produce Station Fruit, allowing for the local production of frugivore feed

    • Produce Station MeatUnlocks the Produce Station Meat, allowing for the local production of carnivore feed

    • Produce Station FishUnlocks the Produce Station Fish, allowing for the local production of piscivore feed

    • Produce Station InsectsUnlocks the Produce Station Insects, allowing for the local production of insectivore feed

    • Produce Station MixedUnlocks the Produce Station Mixed, allowing for the local production of all types of animal feed. Requires all the Produce Station researches to be unlocked before being researchable

    • Storage Produce LargeUnlocks the Storage Produce Large facility, increasing storage space for animal feed

    • Storage Goods LargeUnlocks the Storage Goods Large facility, increasing storage space for imported goods

    • Industrial Paleo-FertilizerEnables the selling of extra compost produced by the Compost Heap

    • High Productivity Paleo-CompostAllows for Produce Station to more efficiently produce feed with compost, requiring less Animal Dung overall

    • Improved Cost ManagementReduces the construction cost of all Infrastructure by 10%

    • Advanced Budget AllocationReduces the upkeep cost of all facilities by 15%

    • Improved Credit ScoreUnlocks access to lower interest rates across all loan providers by 1-2%

    • Non-Profit StatusReduces profit tax by 10% when guest and animal welfare are both over 90%

    • Emotional Engagement
      Boosts guest donations by 25%

    • Deep Pockets
      Increases all Donation Box max capacity by 50%

  • Security
    Reorganized the fence research items into the following:

    • Wood Fences - Medium Strength
      Provides Medium Strength wood fences

    • Stone Fences - Medium Strength
      Provides Medium Strength stone fences

    • Stone Fences - High Strength
      Provides High Strength stone fences

    • Metal Fences - Medium Strength
      Provides Medium Strength metal fences

    • Metal Fences - High Strength
      Provides High Strength metal fences

    • Metal Fences - Extreme Strength
      Provides Extreme Strength metal fences

Animals

• Added digging animations to all animals. These animations will be utilized in nest preparation

• Added courtship animations to all animals, to be used to impress potential mates during breeding seasons. Some animals have unique, bespoke dances, while others have more subdued idle actions

• Herbivorous animals can now browse on vegetation from their acceptable biomes

• Added baby idle animation to:

  • Acrocanthosaurus

  • Ankylosaurus

  • Apatosaurus

  • Argentinosaurus

  • Brachiosaurus

  • Brontosaurus

  • Camarasaurus

  • Carcharodontosaurus

  • Charonosaurus

  • Coelophysis

  • Dilophosaurus

  • Dryosaurus

  • Edmontosaurus

  • Iguanodon

  • Lambeosaurus

  • Leaellynasaura

  • Parasaurolophus

  • Paraceratherium

  • Protoceratops

  • Psittacosaurus

  • Scelidosaurus

  • Smilodon

  • Velociraptor

Buildings & Scenery

• Added animal reproduction modules:

  • Birthing Bed Large

  • Birthing Bed Small

  • Nest Large

  • Nest Medium

  • Nest Small

• Added new Animal Feeders (includes all diets + new plastic style):

  • Feeder Dish 1m

  • Flat Tray 4m

  • Feeder Dish 6m

• Added new Animal Enrichment Feeders:

  • Faux Fish Carcass Small

  • Faux Fish Carcass Large

  • Faux Log Fruit

  • Faux Log Insects

  • Faux Log Plants

  • Faux Log Stump Fruit

  • Faux Log Stump Insects

  • Faux Log Stump Plants

  • Faux Ribcage Large

  • Faux Ribcage Small

  • Hay Clump Small

  • Hay Clump Large

  • Hay Bale Small

  • Hay Bale Large

• Added new sandstone rocks

  • Rock Sandstone Boulder 1-3

  • Rock Sandstone Cliff 1-2

  • Rock Sandstone Cliff Arch

  • Rock Sandstone Pillar 1-2

• Added new silhouette pieces:

  • Silhouette Animal Gallimimus

  • Silhouette Animal Oviraptor

  • Silhouette Foliage Araucaria

  • Silhouette Foliage Cinnamon Fern

  • Silhouette Foliage Cycadeoidea

  • Silhouette Foliage Equisetites

  • Silhouette Foliage Metasequoia

  • Silhouette Foliage Nilssonia

  • Silhouette Foliage Todites

  • Silhouette Foliage Zamites

  • Silhouette Foliage Weichselia

Environment

• Added unique terrain grass textures to Desert, Scrubland, Grassland, Temperate and Tropical (originals found in Coastal and Boreal)

• Foliage

  • Added Cypress Knees (3) to the Gardening tab

  • Added Tropical Sparse Forest and Tropical Bananas preset

  • Added boreal paleobotany and presets:

    • Aculea (6)

    • Athrotaxites(10)

  • Added coastal paleobotany and presets:

    • Coniopteris (3)

    • Elatides (7)

    • Eobowenia (4)

    • Ginkgo yimeansis (6)

    • Ginkgo yimeansis Seasonal (3)

    • Nilssonia (7)

    • Todite Fern (7)

  • Added desert paleobotany and presets:

    • Ephedra (5)

    • Welwitschiophyllum (6)

  • Added grassland paleobotany and presets:

    • Ctenis (4)

    • Ruffordia (5)

    • Schizaeopsis (6)

  • Added scrubland paleobotany and presets:

    • Araucaria delevoryassi (8)

    • Cycadeoidea (9)

    • Gleichenia (4)

    • Watsoniocladus (6)

    • Zamites (7)

  • Added temperate paleobotany and presets:

    • Cinnamon Fern (4)

    • Ginkgo adiantoides (6)

    • Ginkgo adiantoides Seasonal (4)

    • Platanites (7)

    • Trochodendroides (5)

  • Added tropical paleobotany and presets: 

    • Agathis (9)

    • Archaeanthus (8)

    • Chloranthoid (6)

    • Laurales (10)

    • Pseudoctenis (6)

  • Added wetland paleobotany and presets:

    • Cobbania (3)

    • Equisetites (3)

    • Hydropteris (3)

    • Marsilea (4)

    • Metasequoia (5)

    • Metasequoia Seasonal (3)

    • Nelumbo (5)

    • Quereuxia (3)

    • Weichselia (5)

Tutorials

• Added new tutorial: ‘Building Enclosures’, walking new players through learning the basic of the game’s fence tools

• Reworked tutorial: ‘Creating Animals’ to more carefully represent information around using the Animal Nursery and incubating new animals. Its landscaping and animal management goals have been removed and will be re-introduced in new dedicated tutorials in the near future!

UI/UX

• Added a paleobotany section to the Paleopedia

• Added staff cycling buttons in the Staff Info menu, allowing to quickly select different staff members

• Added new diet needs analysis in the Animal Info menu

• Added a mating season indicator graphic in the Animal Info menu and the Animal Paleopedia

• Added a ‘Compatible Bedding & Nests’ category to the enrichment tab in the animal paleopedia page

• Added an animal list tab to the Enclosure Info menu, listing out all of the animals in the enclosure. This tab also has a filter option

• Added a ‘Fence Upkeep’ read-out in the ‘Exhibit Score’ section of the Enclosure Info menu

• Enabled the ‘Animal Milestones’ tab in the Animal Info menu, giving players a quick overview of an animal’s current unlocked milestones

• Added a crown icon next to an animal's name in the Animal Info Menu, denoting whether an animal is the leader of its group

• Added crown icon to the Animal Tooltip header

• Added an excavations menu filter dropdown to the Excavation Menu worldmap, allowing players to display digsites by ‘All’, ‘Mesozoic Only’, ‘Cenozoic Only’, and ‘Paleoflora Only’

Audio

• Added missing angry and sad vocalization sounds to Spinosaurus

• Added foley to baby animations

• Added foley to ceratopsian animations

• Added foley to low eating animations (Argentinosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Camarasaurus, Paraceratherium)

• Added additional sound variants to mammoth drinking

• Gate snapping to fences now play a snapping sound relative to the fence’s type

Music

• Added a variety of hatching jingles for when babies are born in the park

  • If the player is not selecting a newborn animal, there will be a short ambient jingle (1:55 of variations)

  • If the player selects a newborn animal while the jingle is playing, it will eventually transition into a short track (3:50 of variations)

  • A hatching jingle cannot play if music is already playing, nor can it trigger back to back (~15 second cooldown)

Balance

• Progression:

  • Rebalanced animal points and attraction points rating goals

  • Adjusted fossil DNA yield during excavations, so that higher rated animals take longer to fully excavate

  • Excavation events are now reset when an excavation site becomes fully researched

  • Positive excavation events now have a minimum duration period of 2 months, making for a longer lasting reward

  • Additional Loading Bays now start out as empty of stock when placed, duplicated, or split

• Economy & Logistics:

  • Doubled the cost for research and excavations

  • All fencing now has upkeep costs that are paid at the end of each game month

  • Introduced Profit Tax, a bracket system that taxes park income based on current monthly profit. The profit tax read out is accessible by hovering over the profit header in the Finances Summary

  • Landscaping operations now cost money based on the actions’ weight. Park balance is now actively affected by terraforming costs

  • Rebalanced max donation amounts for all Donation Boxes

  • Increased purchase and upkeep costs for Loading Bay trucks

  • Shortened Loading Bay import times

  • Decreased Loading Bay import amount

  • Decreased loan pay back times across the board

  • High-rated loans are now inaccessible if park rating falls down below their respective threshold

• Animals:

  • Different animal growth speeds now impact incubation costs for all animals, the slower the growth speed, the higher the incubation cost, and viceversaIncreased facility upkeep costs across the board

• Guests:

  • Slowed down guest need draining considerably, allowing their AI to prioritize exploration and animal viewing over constant need fulfillment

Gameplay

• Research progression gameplay:

  • Re-arranged certain research items to fit the newly added trees

  • Removed obsolete research items

• Landscaping gameplay:

  • Terrain sculpting and terrain painting now feature brush selection, allowing players to pick from individual libraries of brushes for each action. This drastically expands sculpting and painting options, leading to more natural looking custom environments

  • Water-floating plants will now automatically stick to the water’s surface when painted using the foliage brush, retaining their relative position to the water with any terrain change. If no water volume is readily available at their position, these plant items will stick to the terrain like normal

  • By default, fully aquatic plants will paint on water bodies only, while fully terrestrial plants will be masked out by water. This effect can be turned off through the ‘Respect Water Mask’ toggle in the new Landscaping GUI

  • The foliage brush has been majorly overhauled, with new internal density rules allowing for much more naturalistic environments at any brush size or intensity

  • The Landscaping Brush intensity/size can now be changed by holding Ctrl/Shift and using the mouse scroll wheel

• Grid fence placement is now ignored during Fence Replacement Mode

• Modular grid placement is now ignored when a gate snaps to a fence

• Fence placement now picks up the starting angle more intuitively when attaching a new fence to a previously built segment

Construction

• The global construction grid has been completely overhauled, with new visuals and improved support for modular group snapping

• Fences can now be placed using the global grid, allowing for precise barrier construction

Animals

• Updated animal diets

  • Piscivore diet added to Coelophysis, Velociraptor

  • Insectivore diet added to Deinocheirus, Dryosaurus, Leaellynasaura, Velociraptor

  • Frugivore diet added to Ankylosaurus

• Updated animal biome preferences:

  • Boreal preference added to Leaellynasaura

  • Coastal preference added to Deinocheirus

  • Scrubland preference added to Deinocheirus

• Slowed down animal maturing speed across the board

Buildings & Scenery

• Increased visual fidelity for all Igneous Rocks

• Updated colliders for natural branches and logs to fix long-standing error spam

• Dung Beetle Nest is now an insect food enrichment

• Scaling constraints for Animal Information Screen have been fixed

• Dung Beetle Nest is now an insect food enrichment

Environment

• 3D grass has been improved, featuring shadow casting and better height rules for various substrate transitions

• Changed temperate leaf litter texture to match a stone age path

• Changed wetland sand texture to be lighter and more red

• Changed wetland dirt texture to be darker and more red

• Changed how temperate dirt blends against grass

• All rock textures now appear grittier to blend better with modular rocks

• Boreal Rock texture is now dark

• Moved standard grass texture to Coastal

• Moved dry grass texture to Boreal

• Adjusted UK map midday lighting to be slightly less blue on the equator

Foliage

• Updated impostors for redwoods, sequoias and coconut palms

• Updated foliage contents for desert presets

• Improved surface adherence for ground foliage

UI/UX

• Animal selection now has precedence over any other overlapping items, making selecting animals much easier

• Updated terrain texture icons

• Improvements to the Excavation Worldmap:

  • Formation pin overlap has been massively reduced, with the pins pushing each other apart at maximum zoom out, while returning to their respective position the more zoomed-in the map is

  • Each formation pin’s graphics now better reflect the main excavation site’s category: theropod footprint for Mesozoic, mammal pawprint for Cenozoic, and a Gingko leaf for paleobotany sites

  • The excavation item tooltip features better screen-area clamping, improving readability and minimizing sharp position shifts

  • Improved map movement input speed

• Improvements to the Research Menu:

  • The research item tooltip now displays research dependencies for currently inaccessible items in a tree (e.g. Rapid Genetic Replication requires Accelerated Ontogenetic Synthesis)

  • Like its excavation counterpart, the research tooltip features better screen-area clamping, improving readability and minimizing sharp position shifts

  • Players can now use the movement keys to scroll the larger trees

• The Structure Menu search bar text will now default to empty upon closing the menu

• The Enclosure Info Menu is now contextual based on whether the enclosure has animals in it or not

• Removed the temperature value from the time capsule rect at the bottom of the main HUD. Clicking on this capsule will now access the Weather Menu

• Updated the animal tooltip GUI widget to be more in line with the rest of the game’s HUD

• Mouse tooltips can now update their content without requiring the element hover event to end

• Gates now automatically generate their own individual groups upon placement

• Opening the management menu now clears outstanding user actions

• Reworked logic for the main menu's 'Continue Button' behavior, which now more accurately picks the last saved game, and properly refreshes when saves are deleted

• 'Replace Fence Mode' and 'Replace Path Mode' are now automatically disabled when ending a fence or path replacement action

• Science teams can now be removed if their current project is not affordable

• Updated media and info content for a number of existing Help articles

Post Processing

• Large scale ambient occlusion on High and Ultra is more diffuse and darker, creating better indirect shadows

Graphics

• Improved up-close shading fidelity for little to no GPU cost

• Updated human shader, giving characters’ more expressive eyes

Audio

• Ambient wildlife sounds near water should be more frequent

• Ambient audio mid-frequencies are now slightly ducked when music is playing for mix clarity

Music

• Music ducking during dialogue should now retain more of its volume whilst still letting voices be clear and audible

• Placing animals no longer triggers building music

• Closing the building toolbox will cause music to lower in intensity, but can pick up again if the player opens the building toolbox soon after

Crashes

• Fixed a major crash triggered by selecting an animal in the Animal Nursery

• Fixed improper memory management that could lead to crashes around animal deletion

Critical

• Addressed potentially critical animal age processing oversight, which could have been causing inconsistent aging speeds for animal individuals

• Fixed multiple critical navigation errors resulting in animal teleportation, which should hopefully be much less common now!

• Fixed a Special Exhibit-related data desync causing in-game animal and species counter to report incorrect numbers

• Placing animals no longer triggers building music

• Closing the building toolbox will cause music to lower in intensity, but can pick up again if the player opens the building toolbox soon after

• Fixed a critical issue related to Research Unlock progression, generally consolidating the entire research system

• Fixed many discrepancies with undo/redo refund logic, which should be much more sound and less abusable now

• Fixed the new game starting prefabs registering an Undo/Redo action

• Fixed mis-timed code in human AI shutdown that could’ve led to memory corruption

• Fixed staff GUI exceptions caused by threaded code

Animals

• Fixed grounding behavior on slopes

• Improved accuracy and stability of animals positioning

• Fixed incorrect shoreline detection that could cause animals to drink from strange areas

• Fixed drink point selection being too random, animals now strongly prefer water that is closer to them

• Fixed Styracosaurus horn scratch animation length

• Fixed Dilophosaurus eat to idle animation

• Fixed certain animal species being forever locked on the wrong navmesh - this incidentally resolves some instances of animal mass data misalignment

• Fixed animal placement slope restriction being way too strict

• PlayChase behavior will now try to avoid pushing right up to nav boundaries, and will time out after 60 seconds

Environment

• Fixed the sky being extremely bright during the day, leading to a more washed out appearance

Construction

• Fixed a modular action initialization issue causing piece placement to be badly offset on the vertical axis

• Fixed the modular grid graphics’ one frame positioning delay when moving groups

• Fixed rare instances of grid-bound modular rotation snapping resetting a piece’s edited rotation

• Fixed enclosures not updating their list of constituent fences when using the fence replace tool

• Fixed enclosures not getting removed correctly under certain circumstances

UI/UX

• Fixed a layout overlap issue within the social tab of the Animal Infomenu, triggering when a young animal would exit a parental group

• Fixed incorrect text label in the research item tooltip

• Fixed landscaping brush FX visual initialization

• Fixed excavation funding cost not properly updating text when assigning/removing teams in the Excavation Assignment Menu

• Fixed keybind cycling for the various Management menus

• Fixed nursery animal preview stretching on certain screen aspect ratios

• Modular items cannot be placed from the animal Paleopedia if the item hasn’t been unlocked yet

• Modular items cannot be switched to in Interchange Sets (i.e. Produce Stations) if the item hasn’t been unlocked yet

• Staff skill level graphics in the Staff Management Menu now accurately listen for changes in the park-wide staff skill level

• Fixed management and screenshot menu collision on keybind access

• Fixed staff task icon discrepancy between the Staff Management menu and the Staff Info menu

• Fixed the 'Curved Placement Mode' toggle in the fence action GUI not updating the currently placing fence segment

• Fixed parents social interaction needs bar for infant animals in the Animal Info menu

• Fixed reported shared region bonus in the Enclosure Info menu and Animal Info menu

• Fixed Weather Menu issue causing the wrong weather button to be toggled when loading a sandbox game

• Fixed enclosure selection showing the previous polygon highlight after resizing an existing enclosure by demolishing a fence

• Fixed enclosure area read-out in the Enclosure Info menu not being informed by player-set measure system

Audio

• Fixed dialogue not considering the Master volume slider

• Fixed certain species not playing swim sounds

• Fixed dromaeosaur footsteps not accounting for ground material and water depth

• Fixed small theropod eating sounds not playing from fish feeders

• Fixed breathing and skin sounds not playing under specific circumstances

• Fixed Bear, Deinocheirus, Elephant, Rhino, small herbivore and small theropod vocalisations not pitching up for younger animals

• Fixed overly sensitive drag sounds for glass fences

Music

• Fixed an issue where music in the Park Services menu could be abruptly cut and started again

• Fixed a variant of a Park Services track that would end unmusically

• Fixed the ‘Fossil Record’ and ‘Noah’s Park’ achievements not properly unlocking due to data misalignment

• ‘Crowds o’ Plenty’ now tracks for 3,000 guests in the park, instead of 5,000

• Added the following Steam achievements:

  • Ancestor
    Have an animal become an ancestor to over 3 generations of offspring

  • Newborn
    Have an animal be naturally born in the park

  • Guardian
    Have an animal adopt an unrelated baby

  • Unrequited Lover
    Have an animal attempt courtship 3 or more times without success

  • Misfit
    Have an animal reach old age without having socialized with any animal

  • Spine Lizard
    Release a Spinosaurus in Challenge Mode

• Potentially fixed a source of VRAM leaks

• Made many small optimizations to GUI layout processing

• Optimized redundant refresh calls on the Structures Menu

• Fixed one animal texture memory leak

• Fixed an instance of performance decay related to animal texture loading logging errors in the game files

Welcome, Park Testers!

This PTB release targets a number of balance measures for animal breeding, which should now work more reliably, provide more information, and bug out less frequently. As always, general stability has been improved with a round of bug fixing.

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.

• Undo/redo for terrain sculpting with automatic slope painting attached isn't fully hooked up yet,

• Animal drinking points need a review, as animals can pick wildly inconsistent drinking points,

• Various sound effects for new animations have not been hooked up yet,

• There are a number of temporary or missing icons for the paleobotany paleopedia entries

Animals

• Added new additive and action animations to Gallimimus

• Added courtship animations to:

  • Argentinosaurus

  • Brachiosaurus

  • Megaloceros

  • Tyrannosaurus/Tarbosaurus

UI/UX

• Added staff cycling buttons in the Staff Info menu, allowing to quickly select different staff members

• Added a 'Breeding Space' indicator in the Animal Biology tab in the Animal Info menu, displaying whether an animal has enough space in its exhibit to breed

• Added Leader icon to the Animal Tooltip header

Audio

• Gates snapping to fences now play a snapping sound relative to the fence’s material

Gameplay

• Grid fence placement is now ignored during Fence Replacement Mode

• Modular grid placement is now ignored when a gate snaps to a fence

• Fence placement now picks up the starting angle more intuitively when attaching a new fence to a previously built segment

Animals

• Adjusting animal breeding parameters

  • Reduced sauropod clutch sizes

  • Doubled oviparous animal total incubation times

  • Animals will now require their overall welfare above a certain threshold to be interested in mating

  • Clutch sizes will now have random variation capped by the fertility of the parents

  • Increased embryo count for both Torvosaurus species

  • Increased embryo survival chances for Acrocanthosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus

• Pregnancies will terminate if animals cannot find a suitable nest within a certain number of attempts

• Enabled flee and threaten as potential mating rejection reactions

• Slowed down animal maturing speed across the board

Buildings & Scenery

• Updated colliders for natural branches and logs to fix long-standing error spam

• Scaling constraints for Animal Information Screen have been fixed

Foliage

• Improved surface adherence for ground foliage

UI/UX

• The breeding season indicator graphic in the Animal Info menu now displays whether an animal has been rejected during the current breeding season

• Gates now automatically generate their own individual groups upon placement

• Opening the management menu now clears outstanding user actions

• Reworked logic for the main menu's 'Continue Button' behavior, which now more accurately picks the last saved game, and properly refreshes when saves are deleted

• 'Replace Fence Mode' and 'Replace Path Mode' are now automatically disabled when ending a fence or path replacement action

Music

• Placing animals no longer triggers building music

• Closing the building toolbox will cause music to lower in intensity, but can pick up again if the player opens the building toolbox soon after

Critical

• Fixed animal maturing speed desync, which was applying an additional time scale multiplier. Aging speed is now consistent to the reported paleopedia values

• Population Explosion from nests should be fixed

• Fixed critical guest issues related to invalid navmeshes

• Fixed animal info signs not initializing guest interactability, which would result in info signs not registering attraction points, or not being recognized by guests as education modules

• Fixed underground ghost foliage in the Parque Nacional Arenal map

• Added various safety guards against crashes related to animals

• Fixed mis-timed code in human AI shutdown that could’ve led to memory corruption

• Fixed staff GUI exceptions caused by threaded code

Gameplay

• Fixed Loading Bays not having resources available at new game start

Animals

• Animal AI States now have a timeout, this should fix animals getting stuck vocalizing and never completing socialization need fulfillment

• Animals can no longer perform their mating display while swimming

• Fixed animals being considered “wading” when there was no water, preventing egg laying and nest management

• Animals should no longer try to mate when they have already mated for the season

Guests

• Fixed a bug that could stall the human AI

UI/UX

• Fixed nursery skin selection being interactable even if the relevant research isn’t unlocked

• Updated paleopedia animal maturity read-outs to report on animal breeding maturity, instead of total maturity

• Updated the breeding indicator graphic to include an 'Immature' label for sexually immature animals

• Fixed the 'Click to research' element in the foliage tooltip to be based on a different check than the rest of the foliage unlock gui

• Fixed staff task icon discrepancy between the Staff Management menu and the Staff Info menu

• Fixed the 'Curved Placement Mode' toggle in the fence action GUI not updating the currently placing fence segment

• Fixed parents social interaction needs bar for infant animals in the Animal Info menu

• Fixed foliage preset gui unlock events

Misc.

• Added a number of checks to help isolate bugs