I've been working on a big update for the game over the last few months and it was available to test on the public test realm. Now its making its debut on the default live download branch available to everyone.

New Feature - Sunstones:

🔹Sunstones are a new mechanic that multiply your accelerated growth buff by the intensity of the sunstones in the area. Sunstones also grant you extra experience points and growth while you stay in the area. More, and larger sunstones will raise the area's sunstone intensity for even better growth and experience point gains. There is one downside to this as well, the higher the area's sunstone intensity the higher the loss of accelerated growth buff counts per second. Sunstones come in a variety of colors and sizes, larger sunstones giving more intensity. You gain a higher amount of growth and experience point gains from the area's sunstone intensity while you are sitting or sleeping.

🔹Basking in the warmth of sunstones comes with its own risks. Predators will be hungry for the accelerated growth buff counts eating you will reward them with, so they can easily convert it into higher growth and experience points near the sunstones.

🔹Sunstones illuminate the darkness with their brilliant light.

🔹Playing in a multiplayer game boosts the sunstone intensity bonus by 2 times the normal value to encourage interactions and confrontations with other players.

Phase one of the Evolution Traits system has been added to the game:

🔹While performing certain actions you can gain additional points in a specific stat.
🔹Example, while running or sprinting you can evolve slightly and gain an additional speed stat point.
🔹This works with all of the stats: damage, speed, health, health regeneration, stamina, and stamina regeneration.
🔹The more a stat evolves the harder it becomes to keep evolving.
🔹You have a chance to gain speed from running/sprinting.
🔹You have a chance to gain damage from attacking creatures.
🔹You have a chance to gain health from getting attacked.
🔹You have a chance to gain health regen from regenerating health.
🔹You have a chance to gain stamina from using stamina.
🔹You have a chance to gain stamina regen from regenerating stamina.

Core:

🔹The game now uses the High Definition Rendering Pipeline (HDRP) for improved visual quality. Fine-tuning this system will be an ongoing process to keep improving visuals and performance.

🔹The game now makes use of 2d grass billboards in some places instead of just using 3d grass models, which can improve performance.

🔹Multiplayer mode has been temporarily disabled while I work out some glitches with the system and get dedicated server functionality finished.

Controls:

🔹WASD movement controls have been revised and mouse-look functions a little differently. This works for terrestrial and aquatic movement.

🔹The player can no longer move while performing certain actions such as eating, drinking, sitting, or sleeping.

🔹Removed the underwater swimming locked/unlocked state for the player. Now they can just swim up or down in the water without having to unlock/lock their dinosaur at the surface.

🔹Turning your creature is now faster for all species. There are three different speeds, one for more nimble creatures, one for bulkier creatures, and one for the Titanoboa.

Species:

🔹The stegosaurus has a new 3d model, animations, and skin textures.


🔹The sarcosuchus has a new 3d model, animations, and skin textures.


🔹The brachiosaurus has a new 3d model, animations, and skin textures.


🔹The Tylosaurus now has a new 3D model, animations, and skin textures.


🔹The Elasmosaurus now has a new 3D model, animations, and skin textures.


🔹The Ophthalmosaurus now has a new 3D model, animations, and skin textures.


🔹A new creature has been added to the game, the Skorpiovenator!


🔹A new creature has been added to the game, the Suchomimus!


🔹A new creature has been added to the game, the Diplocaulus!


🔹A new creature has been added to the game, the Edmontosaurus!


🔹A new creature has been added to the game, the Padillasaurus!


🔹The species preview images have been replaced with higher quality images.

🔹Spinosaurus' size was reduced to be closer to the size of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus.

🔹Adult brachiosaurus' height has been changed to 40 feet.

🔹Adult argentinosaurus' length has been changed to 120 feet.

🔹Adult stegosaurus' length has been changed to 23 feet.

🔹The Tylosaurus is now 52 feet long.

🔹The Elasmosaurus is now 46 feet long.

🔹The Ophthalmosaurus is now 20 feet long.

🔹The parasaurolophus has been reduced to 36 feet long.

🔹Some species' movement speed has been changed.

Survival :

🔹In preparation for a future new feature "Metabolism"... I doubled the time it takes for you to start starving, so it will take 8 hours for an elder to start starving, 4 hours for an adult, 2 hours for a sub adult, 1 hour for a juvenile, and 30 minutes for a hatchling. The time it takes to dehydrate is half of that time because its effects are felt much faster than starvation. You may starve faster due to your activity level.

🔹Creatures now get a little thirstier and hungrier while sitting or sleeping. At a rate of 75% of the base hunger and thirst rate, up from 50%.

🔹Younger creatures restore more hydration per bite of food because its usually harder for them to get to a water source and they should be able to pull enough moisture out of their food.

🔹Dehydration now causes you to lose health twice as fast as it did previously because it should be harder to dehydrate now except in the case of poor planning on getting to a water source periodically.

🔹Passive health regeneration amounts have changed. While standing, tiny creatures can regenerate to full health in 2 minutes up to huge creatures regenerating to full health in 20 minutes. Sitting or sleeping still doubles your health regeneration rate. This was done to give more value to evolving health regeneration and also boosting it with experience points and items.

Objects:

🔹The old dinosaur egg models have been replaced with a new model.

World Design:

🔹Some plants and trees are now darker or lighter in color, making for a more natural appearance for the whole Primal Mountains map.

🔹The Primal Mountains, Laurasian Woodland, and Savage Lands maps have undergone some more visual changes. Aso, the size of trees has changed. Instead of all of the trees being giant trees, now the majority of trees are closer to real life tree sizes. A smaller amount of trees remain larger to add a little visual depth.

🔹More plants are now optimized for better performance.

🔹The trees along the beaches on every map are now more densely populated and some are larger.

🔹Some ground textures have changed.

Mechanics:

🔹Edible plants are now smaller.

🔹Edible plant scents are now smaller.

🔹You can now smell while sitting or sleeping.

🔹A new set of options for you to control the maximum amount of edible fish/plants/trees that spawn on a map has been added. This can increase or decrease the amount of RAM the game uses so if you need to conserve RAM set these values lower. The values you choose applies to your singleplayer games. The values a multiplayer server host chooses will apply to their hosted games and these values cannot be changed by joining players. There can be a maximum allowed amount of each food resource on specific maps. In The Great Sands map you cannot spawn the maximum value in the game options (which is 1000) but a hard limit will be enforced by the actual map. So this value may be 500 max for trees for example. The other maps do not currently have any limits set. Default value for each resource is 250. Go into your game Options menu to change these values. You must restart the map for these changed values to take effect.

Spawning:

🔹Creatures that are swimming while they spawn will now spawn between their minimum and maximum ideal depth.

Improvements :

🔹The game can now handle 256 different ground textures on a single terrain up from 32 different textures. This is going to enable a lot more variety when building a world with multiple biomes.

🔹Adjusted the appearance of underwater rendering.

🔹Nightvision should look a little better now.

Fixes:

🔹The player should no longer be getting teleported to the bottom of the ocean/lake/etc when swimming at the surface of the water.

🔹The player should no longer be getting teleported onto the surface of the water when flying over water.

🔹The player should now be able to take off and start flying from swimming on the surface of the water.

🔹Creatures that used the SpineAnimator component no longer twitch really bad while swimming at the surface of the water. (Spinosaurus and Tyrannosaurus)

🔹Creatures that use the SpineAnimator component are no longer leaning too far upwards or downwards when going up or down a steep incline. (Spinosaurus and Tyrannosaurus)

🔹Blood Dripping effects have been disabled for now, because the old ones don't work with Unity's HDRP.

🔹Fixed a problem where sometimes the taller a creature was the less likely it was to collide with something it should have collided with.

🔹Worldmaps are now working properly. Access the word map by pressing the tab key while playing a creature.

🔹Fixed an issue where some aquatic creatures couldn't breath very easily at the water's surface.

🔹Improved the Titanoboa's movement to not look like its going under the terrain as much, that was due to its Spine Animator component needing some adjustments.

🔹Fixed an issue where creatures that spawned into the game swimming were sometimes spawning under the terrain.

And many more minor fixes, changes, and improvements.