Welcome, Park Testers!

This early version of Update 15 includes breeding, paleobotany, improved landscaping, new feeders and a variety of other changes. We are expecting to launch this update on August 25. While the update remains a work in progress, we are looking for feedback in these areas:

• Challenge Mode balance

  • Financial difficulty

  • Research tree experience

  • Animal poop frequency and compost conversion

• Breeding frequency and reliability

As mentioned there have been a lot of changes since the last update, so be sure to read the full patch notes below to see everything that's new!

PTB Features

The headlining feature for this update is breeding! Throughout the year, animals experience a breeding season that allows them to partake in courtship, reproduce and maintain a nest or birthing bed built by the player.

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

Gallimimus also hits the PTB with all three skins and its ontogeny ready to go! Players can excavate this animal from the Nemegt Formation or grab it immediately in Sandbox Mode.

Paleobotany is a big inclusion for Update 15, adding over 200 plant variations across 30+ species of Mesozoic flora. In Challenge Mode, players can unlock paleobotany via the Fossil Depot, excavating them just like animals.

In terms of gameplay, a new Mesozoic or Cenozoic flora bar has been added to the animal habitat and enrichment panels. This bar will fill up as era-appropriate foliage is added to their enclosure, providing additional animal points. We plan to add more benefits later down the line!

Note that providing era-appropriate foliage is not a hard requirement and simply a reward for players who want to go the extra mile!

Landscaping has seen massive updates with a new interface, terrain brushes, new grass masking rules, reworked foliage densities and auto-slope painting.

The new UI can be vertically scaled to show more or less depending on what the player wants, while new options such as a water mask when painting plants has been added too.

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

Shifting back to animals, the reworked Animal Nursery menu provides a more intuitive layout with a myriad of settings to organise your animal list exactly how you want.

Selecting an animal reveals basic information as well as new options for randomization and skin customization. The preview itself is now entirely accurate to the individual specimen you're about to create, too!

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

Finally, a variety of new feeder sizes (1m, 4m trough, 6m) and a new plastic style have been added to the basic food trays. Additional enrichment feeders such as hay piles, hay bales and faux fish carcasses have been included too. Finally, your tiny animals don't need to eat from massive trays!

We hope to get a couple more of these in by the full release of Update 15.

PTB Changes

CHALLENGE MODE: PROFIT TAX

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

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

CHALLENGE MODE: EXCAVATION EVENTS

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

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

CHALLENGE MODE: RESEARCH ADJUSTMENTS

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

ENCLOSURE ANIMAL LIST

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

What is NOT included in this PTB?

As usual, we are still working to add the remaining features, audio and other components that'll be there when the update fully releases. While the game is playable, you can expect to run into bugs, crashes or general oddities. Please send your feedback and bug reports to our Discord server's appropriate channel.

Here are the major outstanding things not present in the PTB:

• Threaten system

• Animal Head IK

• Animals browsing from foliage

• Animal feeder diversity need

• Expanded tutorials and adjustments to make them more detailed

• Oviraptor

Though we are on track for most of this to make it into the final release, we are likely going to have to follow up with an Update 15.1 to truly flesh it out.

Head IK has taken much longer than we anticipated to come online, leaving the planned threaten behaviors less developed than what we’d like.

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

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

• Animals socialization needs frequency balancing, and currently the socialization need can remain low for a long time,

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

• Some players may experience severe FPS drops when opening the Animal Management Menu, we're actively working on a fix for this

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

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

Full Patch Notes

Features

• NEW ANIMAL: Gallimimus bullatus

• NEW FEATURE: Animal Courtship & Breeding
  During the breeding season, male animals will attempt to court females and create their next generation. After successful courtship, females will try to look for a nest or birthing bed built by the player in order to build, manage and guard it.

  Following a pregnancy period, animals will either lay eggs or give birth at their respective modules. The behavior seen throughout the breeding process is variable depending on the species, leading to parents that may abandon their nest or species where parents work together to maintain it.

  If parents wander too far away to find food or water, they have a greater chance of losing their offspring.

• NEW FEATURE: Paleobotany
  An array of Mesozoic paleobotany can be excavated around the world by dig teams. Placing era-appropriate foliage into habitats will reward animals with enrichment and additional Animal Points, making them worth more.

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

• NEW CHANGE: Overhauled Global Grid The global construction grid has been given many visual and mechanical improvements! Any modular group can now be fully fitted to the global grid, allowing players to perfectly align facilities across the park. This feature also applied to fence placement, which can now stick to the grid tiles’ outer edges

• NEW CHANGE: Landscaping Menu

• NEW CHANGE: Animal Nursery Menu The animal nursery has a new layout for easier navigation! Sort by unlocked, alphabetical, price, rating, type and clade to find an animal at a glance. Adjust the new filtering options to get a granular look at specific animals in your collection. The animal preview is now accurate to what will be created, featuring the new randomize buttons, overridable mutations and adjust variation for skins and sizes!

Additions

• Gameplay

  • Added 22 paleobotany excavation sites: 

    • North America:

      • Colorado Flats

      • Eagle Sandstone

      • Edmonton Shale

      • Kansas Rocks

      • Montana Hills

    • South America:

      • Araripe Basin

      • Chubut Conglomerate

      • Deseado Massif

      • San Luis Siltstone

    • Europe:

      • Bavarian Lithic Reef

      • Bohemian Massif

      • Lusitanian Rift

    • Asia:

      • Bartala Hill

      • Gobi Badlands

      • Henan Deposits

      • Honshu Group

      • Korean Shale

      • Wuyun Clays

      • Yanliao Sediments

    • Africa

      • Cape Sandstones

      • Maghrebian Desert Beds

    • Antarctica

      • Antarctic Highlands

• Added new Research progression items:

  • Biology

    • Chromatic Phenotype Selection Enables picking specific skins for animals in the Nursery

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

    • Somatic Growth Modulation Enables size editing for animals in the Nursery

    • High-Capacity Low Feeders Unlocks feeders suitable for feeding larger animals

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

  • New Research Tree: Management

    • Higher Education Speeds up Staff skill learning in the Staff Center

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Emotional Engagement Boosts guest donations by 25%

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

  • Security
    Reorganized the fence research items into the following:

    • Wood Fences - Medium Strength Provides Medium Strength wood fences

    • Stone Fences - Medium Strength Provides Medium Strength stone fences

    • Stone Fences - High Strength Provides High Strength stone fences

    • Metal Fences - Medium Strength Provides Medium Strength metal fences

    • Metal Fences - High Strength Provides High Strength metal fences

    • Metal Fences - Extreme Strength Provides Extreme Strength metal fences

• Animals

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

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

  • Added baby idle animation to:

    • Acrocanthosaurus

    • Ankylosaurus

    • Apatosaurus

    • Argentinosaurus

    • Brachiosaurus

    • Brontosaurus

    • Camarasaurus

    • Carcharodontosaurus

    • Charonosaurus

    • Coelophysis

    • Dilophosaurus

    • Dryosaurus

    • Edmontosaurus

    • Iguanodon

    • Lambeosaurus

    • Leaellynasaura

    • Parasaurolophus

    • Paraceratherium

    • Protoceratops

    • Psittacosaurus

    • Scelidosaurus

    • Smilodon

    • Velociraptor

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Added animal reproduction modules:

    • Birthing Bed Large

    • Birthing Bed Small

    • Nest Large

    • Nest Medium

    • Nest Small

  • Added new animal feeders (includes all diets + new plastic style):

    • Feeder Dish 1m

    • Flat Tray 4m

    • Feeder Dish 6m

  • Added new animal enrichment Feeders:

    • Faux Fish Carcass Small

    • Faux Fish Carcass Large

    • Hay Clump Small

    • Hay Clump Large

    • Hay Bale Small

    • Hay Bale Large

  • Added new silhouette pieces:

    • Silhouette Animal Gallimimus

    • Silhouette Animal Oviraptor

    • Silhouette Foliage Araucaria

    • Silhouette Foliage Cinnamon Fern

    • Silhouette Foliage Cycadeoidea

    • Silhouette Foliage Equisetites

    • Silhouette Foliage Metasequoia

    • Silhouette Foliage Nilssonia

    • Silhouette Foliage Todites

    • Silhouette Foliage Zamites

    • Silhouette Foliage Weichselia

• Environment

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

• Foliage

  • Added Cypress Knees (3) to the Gardening tab

  • Added Tropical Sparse Forest and Tropical Bananas preset

  • Added boreal paleobotany and presets:

    • Aculea (6)

    • Athrotaxites(10)

  • Added coastal paleobotany and presets:

    • Coniopteris (3)

    • Elatides (7)

    • Eobowenia (4)

    • Ginkgo yimeansis (6)

    • Ginkgo yimeansis Seasonal (3)

    • Nilssonia (7)

    • Todite Fern (7)

  • Added desert paleobotany and presets:

    • Ephedra (5)

    • Welwitschiophyllum (6)

  • Added grassland paleobotany and presets:

    • Ctenis (4)

    • Ruffordia (5)

    • Schizaeopsis (6)

  • Added scrubland paleobotany and presets:

    • Araucaria delevoryassi (8)

    • Cycadeoidea (9)

    • Gleichenia (4)

    • Watsoniocladus (6)

    • Zamites (7)

  • Added temperate paleobotany and presets:

    • Cinnamon Fern (4)

    • Ginkgo adiantoides (6)

    • Ginkgo adiantoides Seasonal (4)

    • Platanites (7)

    • Trochodendroides (5)

  • Added tropical paleobotany and presets: 

    • Agathis (9)

    • Archaeanthus (8)

    • Chloranthoid (6)

    • Laurales (10)

    • Pseudoctenis (6)

  • Added wetland paleobotany and presets:

    • Cobbania (3)

    • Equisetites (3)

    • Hydropteris (3)

    • Marsilea (4)

    • Metasequoia (5)

    • Metasequoia Seasonal (3)

    • Nelumbo (5)

    • Quereuxia (3)

    • Weichselia (5)

• UI/UX

  • Added a paleobotany section to the Paleopedia

  • Added new diet needs analysis in the Animal Info menu

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

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

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

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

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

• Audio

  • Added foley to baby animations

  • Added foley to ceratopsian animations

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

  • Added additional sound variants to mammoth drinking

Changes

• Balance

  • Progression:

    • Rebalanced animal points and attraction points rating goals

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

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

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

  • Economy & Logistics:

    • Doubled the cost for research and excavations

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

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

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

    • Rebalanced max donation amounts for all Donation Boxes

    • Increased purchase and upkeep costs for Loading Bay trucks

    • Shortened Loading Bay import times

    • Decreased Loading Bay import amount

    • Decreased loan pay back times across the board

  • Animals:

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

  • Guests:

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

• Gameplay

  • Research progression gameplay:

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

    • Removed obsolete research items

  • Landscaping gameplay:

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

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

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

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

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

  • Construction

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

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

• Animals

  • Updated animal diets

    • Piscivore diet added to Coelophysis, Velociraptor

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

    • Frugivore diet added to Ankylosaurus

  • Updated animal biome preferences:

    • Boreal preference added to Leaellynasaura

    • Coastal preference added to Deinocheirus

    • Scrubland preference added to Deinocheirus

• Environment

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

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

  • Changed wetland sand texture to be lighter and more red

  • Changed wetland dirt texture to be darker and more red

  • Moved standard grass texture to Coastal

  • Moved dry grass texture to Boreal

• Foliage

  • Updated impostors for redwoods, sequoias and coconut palms

  • Updated foliage contents for desert presets

• UI/UX

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

  • Updated terrain texture icons

  • Improvements to the Excavation Worldmap:

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

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

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

    • Improved map movement input speed

  • Improvements to the Research Menu:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Graphics

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

  • Updated human shader, giving characters’ more expressive eyes

• Audio

  • Ambient wildlife sounds near water should be more frequent

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

• Music

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

Bug Fixes

• Crashes

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

• Critical

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

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

• Animals

  • Fixed Styracosaurus horn scratch animation length

  • Fixed Dilophosaurus eat to idle animation

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

• Environment

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

• Construction

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

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

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

• UI/UX

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

  • Fixed incorrect text label in the research item tooltip

  • Fixed landscaping brush FX visual initialization

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

  • Fixed keybind cycling for the various Management menus

• Audio

  • Fixed dialogue not considering the Master volume slider

  • Fixed certain species not playing swim sounds

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

  • Fixed small theropod eating sounds not playing from fish feeders

  • Fixed breathing and skin sounds not playing under specific circumstances

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

  • Fixed overly sensitive drag sounds for glass fences

• Music

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

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

Performance

• Potentially fixed a source of VRAM leaks

• Made many small optimizations to GUI layout processing

• Optimized redundant refresh calls on the Structures Menu

Steam Achievements

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

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

• Added the following Steam achievements:

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

  • Newborn Have an animal be naturally born in the park

  • Guardian Have an animal adopt an unrelated baby

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

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

  • Spine Lizard Release a Spinosaurus in Challenge Mode