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! 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.
Update 15
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.
Animal Behavior
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
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.
Unlocking the Past
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.
Adding Paleoflora
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 Behavior
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!
Dietary Requirements & New Feeders
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!
Paleobotany
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.
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!
Known Issues & Additional Notes
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
Full Patch Notes
Changes
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
Bug Fixes
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
Performance
CPU Optimizations
Prehistoric Kingdom - Update 14 (1.14.39)
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.
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.
Animal Herding, Socialisation Behaviors and Families
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!
First Person Mode
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.
Update 14 Changes
Animal Incubation, Costs and Mass
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.
Animal Crowding
We've fixed an oversight pertaining to animal crowding, so habitats that previously housed lots of animals should more accurately report their fullness.
Feeders and Tall Animals
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.
Selling Multiple Animals
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.
Excavations
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.
Guest Spawning
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.
Animal Debug Tool
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.
Known Issues & Additional Notes
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
Full Patch Notes
Features
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
Additions
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
Changes
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
Bug Fixes
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
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 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
Performance
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
What changed from the last PTB?
Additions
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
Changes
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
Bug Fixes
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
Performance
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
PTB: Patch (1.14.31)
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!
How to Access the Public Testing Branch (Experimental!)
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.
Right click Prehistoric Kingdom in your Steam Library
Go to Properties
Betas
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 appropriate channel.
Known Issues & Additional Notes
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
Full Patch Notes
Features
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.
Additions
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
Changes
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
Bug Fixes
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
Performance
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
Crowny Plush Available April 24!
Welcome, Park Managers!
To celebrate Update 14 releasing on April 24, we've partnered with Youtooz 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
PTB: Patch (1.14.17)
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!
How to Access the Public Testing Branch (Experimental!)
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.
Right click Prehistoric Kingdom in your Steam Library
Go to Properties
Betas
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 appropriate channel.
Known Issues & Additional Notes
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
Full Patch Notes
Additions
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)
Changes
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
Bug Fixes
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
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
PTB: Update 14 Begins Testing!
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!
PTB Features
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.
What is NOT included in this PTB?
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
How to Access the Public Testing Branch (Experimental!)
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.
Right click Prehistoric Kingdom in your Steam Library
Go to Properties
Betas
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 appropriate channel.
Known Issues & Additional Notes
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
Full Patch Notes
Features
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
Additions
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
Changes
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
Bug Fixes
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
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 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
Performance
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
Dev Diary: March 2025
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.
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.
Update 14
Baby Animals
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, 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.
Animal Herding & Social Groups
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.
Adoptive Parenting
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.
Animal Awareness & Socialization
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!”
All Together Now!
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.
Update 15 (The Next, Next Update)
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…
New Species
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!
Paleobotany
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!
Update 16 (The Next, Next… Next Update)
New Terrarium Species
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
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!
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.
Baby Animals & Seamless Growth
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
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.
It’s almost been 65 million years since the last blogpost! Or has it? Thanks to your support, we’ve been releasing mini-status reports every Wednesday over on our Patreon. These reports include exclusive baby reveals, concept art and weekly information about what we’re working on. While some of the Patreon content will be shown in this Dev Diary, there’s still a few things that we won’t be showing here.
To touch on when we last spoke about our financial situation, we wanted to take a moment and thank you for your help. Your support on Patreon has not only helped us immensely, but shown us just how important our project is to this community. If you can help spread the word or afford to offer a donation, the team would appreciate it greatly.
For now though, Prehistoric Kingdom is not going extinct. ♥
Ontogeny Progress
It’s been all hands on deck this last month preparing Ontogeny for Update 14. In terms of art, around 40 of the 58 babies are in advanced stages of completion. Most of the remaining production time will be spent on finishing their skins, animations and sounds.
On the technical side, every day presents a new challenge to overcome. Since we change the physical proportions of our animals as they grow, this has a huge impact on various animations like sitting and walking around. Our amazing programmers have been developing new tech to help support our seamless growth systems, allowing us to:
Correct limb IKs with age
Reposition the vertical offset of young animals while resting, rolling and sleeping
Reproject root motion to better sync movement speed to their new leg lengths
Swap between navmesh sizes as animals get bigger
Prevent animals from growing if a space is too small
Swap locomotion and key animations as animals age up
We’ve also improved the way we handle animal selection with an optimized set of colliders that scale and stretch based on age. This lets us keep the selection accurate regardless of an animal’s current growth stage.
Thinking about all the implications that come with seamless growth, there’s a good reason why games haven’t really done this before! It has to scale, it has to react and it’s a big technical hurdle to solve. But, we’re giving it our best shot and are proud of the results thus far.
Free Patreon Post: Ontogeny Audio
If you’d like to learn about how we’re approaching audio for ontogeny, be sure to check out a free blog post we put up on our Patreon last month! It outlines the problems, requirements and the solutions needed to keep asset development and implementation scalable.
Update 14’s Release Window
Once we’ve gotten Update 14 in a more playable state, we’ll start to push early versions to the Public Testing Branch on Steam. While we’re not quite ready to begin this yet, you can expect to hear more next month as we get closer to Update 14’s release window in late April.
With how big this update is, we want to give ourselves some decent runway to ensure there aren’t any babies missing from the update. It’ll also be just in time for our Early Access anniversary!
Update 14
Baby Animals
This month, we’re pleased to unveil even more babies! These are but a handful of the animals already shown on Patreon, so if you can’t wait for Update 14, go check that out.
Up first is the massive Paraceratherium and its much smaller relative, Juxia. These little ones are almost like a baby rhino and tapir rolled into one with their prehensile lips and big ears.
Next up are the fan favourites Parasaurolophus and Charonosaurus. Each species has a unique pattern to help them transition into their adult coloration, making them quite distinct from one another. If you look close, you can even spot a tiny nub on their head!
Finally, the most scrungly one of all, Deinocheirus! We knew from the start that Deino simply had to have baby bird energy. Our artists looked at animals like juvenile pelicans, roseate spoonbills and flamingos to find the perfect level of freak. What a funky fellow!
If you’re looking for something really cute, though, we also shared the babies for the woolly rhino, Dilophosaurus, Dryosaurus and Velociraptor on our socials!
We’ve also refined the Megaloceros fawn since its reveal earlier in the month. There are some fur fixes that we stilll need to make, but it looks more like a young deer now. Thank you for your feedback!
To cap off this section, let’s take a look at some seamless growth! Please note that any stuttering is due to processing time steps since the increased speed is unrealistically fast. During normal gameplay, this effect is imperceptible.
Alt Species Changes
Thanks to recent tech advancements, we’re also taking the time to improve the visual differences of alternate species in Update 14. This means corrected proportions and more accurate shapes for many animals, such as the two Smilodon species.
Below, you can see that populator is much more robust than fatalis with its bulkier build. Fatalis is sleek with a skinnier face, limbs and reduced shoulders. We even gave it cheek ruffs from the original concept art!
We’ll be reducing the fur length on populator’s ears!
In the case of Camarasaurus, each species will have a different head shape and silhouette. From left to right, grandis is the skinniest species with a rounded head. Supremus almost resembles a Brachiosaur with a bulbous skull, short neck spines and a thick neck. Lentus maintains much of the current Camarasaurus, acting as a middleground between the three.
Of course, you can expect to see similar changes for all the other alt species like the Parasaurs, Pachyrhinosaurus and others. Some changes may be less extreme than others, but the team is excited to get these animals feeling more unique.
First Person Mode
Since we initially revealed the prototype last month, we’ve seen a lot of great comments about this feature. We’re happy to say that not only is first person mode now functionally complete, but we even had time to sneak in a few object interactions, too!
While running around the park, players will be able to sit on benches, swap between seats, look through binoculars and open/close gates to enter habitats. Any music that’s currently playing will also be given a radio-like effect!
[TAG-105]
Eventually we’d love to include some simple park management gameplay and make animals respond to the player in first person, but for Update 14 we think this is already a lovely little feature. It helps to appreciate a park from new perspectives!
Gameplay Changes
Rounding out our progress on U14, we’ve been making a few targeted gameplay adjustments now that ontogeny is coming to the game.
Animal Creation Animals are now incubated asynchronously in the Animal Nursery. This means that rather than waiting for one after the other, all incubating animals will progress at the same time. We’ll likely lengthen adult incubation times a little to compensate, but it definitely feels better to have a group of animals be ready together.
Animal Points The base appeal of an animal has been rebalanced so that it’s calculated on an animal’s current mass and perceived popularity. This will help make things a little more objective when it comes to balancing, as we previously made the numbers up based on vibe.
As a side effect, base appeal now slightly varies for each individual due to their differences in mass. A small adult T. rex will be slightly less appealing than a large one, for example.
Excavation System Widespread animals such as Edmontosaurus regalis and various mammals can now be found in multiple dig sites. Excavation progress will be carried between all the other dig sites a species is present in. We’re also looking to retune excavation costs and speeds to make them feel like more of a long term investment.
Staff Dispatch Improvements
The way staff are automatically assigned to tasks has been improved to hopefully make job completion more reliable. Back to work, slackers!
The Future
Paleobotany
To wrap up this Dev Diary, let’s take a look at some of the other paleo plants that’ve been worked on. As a reminder, don’t forget that paleobotany will be coming after Update 14!
Below, you’ll find a coastal biome conifer from throughout the Mesozoic, Elatides! This tree will come with a bunch of variations, including one that splits off into two trunks.
Next up are two scrubland plants from the Jurassic, Kimuriella and Korallipteris! We think these two go well together, giving off an arid yet somewhat alien vibe.
Finally, here’s a quick look at one of the oldest plants in the world, the cycad! This family has been around since the Permian, almost 300 million years ago. Despite this, many species can be found all over the world today.
Created by W3
Created by ASSASSINSPINO
Created by Emerson Hul (@ps_arts_official on Instagram)
Thank you for reading February's dev diary!
We’ll be back again at the end of March for our next dev diary. Each week until then though, we’ll continue posting to our Patreon to provide small status updates as work continues on Update 14.
