Welcome, Park Managers!

This surprise bug-fix patch for Update 16 aims to address some of the most commonly reported balancing problems related to the animal disease system, while resolving numerous stability issues, such as memory leaks and crashes. In addition, this update introduces new vivarium animal animations - most notably full aquatic support for Titanoboa, which can now be housed in the Amphibious Vivarium.

Please enjoy the improved experience while we continue to work on Update 17, which will be introducing new animal species, animal combat, overhauled management systems, and many additional optimizations!

Recommended Experience

The latest disease balance changes are best experienced in a NEW GAME of Challenge Mode! On average, it takes around 1 year of in-game time before diseases start to become more common.

The immunity of an animal is now also modulated by its current age, with players making use of supplements and era-appropriate plants (for herbivores) to improve their animal's overall immunity. Selecting an animal and hovering over its immunity stat will provide a detailed readout of all the factors currently impacting it.

Existing Saves Warning

If you load an existing save, your animals may already host a variety of incubating diseases from the original Update 16 release, leading to an inaccurate gameplay experience. Animals with old age are also much more susceptible to death, so players may see a mass-dying as a result.

For the full list of changes, please read the patch notes below.

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

1. Right click Prehistoric Kingdom in your Steam Library

2. Go to Properties

3. Betas

4. Select 'ptb_public_testing'

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

Please send feedback and bug reports to our Discord server's[discord.com] appropriate channel.

• As a result of FSR, humans can appear smeared in motion. Turning off FSR will resolve this issue.

• Sometimes when going to refill a vivarium, staff will run in a straight line through EVERYTHING.

• Keepers will sometimes walk on the spot when trying to clean poo. It's important that they get their steps in.

• NOTE: The animation preview dropdown in the Nursery does not yet function for vivarium species.

• NOTE: Due to the sheer workload of animations, the majority of animal knockdowns are missing audio.

• NOTE: Vet-related animations do not have audio yet.

• Animals

  • Titanoboa can now be housed in the Amphibious Vivarium

  • Added new idle and locomotion animations to:

    • Titanoboa

    • Diplocaulus

    • Tiktaalik

    • Simosuchus

    • Diictodon

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Water volumes for Amphibious Vivariums can now be switched between Clear and Tannin through the customization tab of the Vivarium widget

• Audio

  • Added missing Nigel lines for Sahonachelys

• UI/UX

  • Added percent status labels to various places within the GUI that should better report at which stage of treatment various animal afflictions are in

• Animals

  • Slightly lowered feed consumption for Vivarium animals across the board

  • In an effort to improve readability and flow for the animal disease system, we took many balancing measures:

    • Reduced overall spawn rates for all afflictions across the board

    • Added a 'Max Immunity' read-out to the Nursery Menu animal preview

    • Animals with Slow and Realistic growth speeds now share the same starting immunity

    • Massively decreased treatment times for all affliction types

    • Increased symptom severity for all illnesses, which should hopefully better telegraph current issues with an animal's health

    • Individual animal's immunity now has a deeper impact on disease progression and health drain, with the immunity scaling more biologically accurately to an animal's age: mature animals have higher immunity than younger individuals, which themselves have higher immunity than elderly individuals. Among other things, this should result in older animals having a much harder time recovering from illness

    • Updated descriptions for most illnesses in an attempt to give out more accurate information that would be better tied to the various gameplay systems

    • It is now easier for feeders and troughs to contract diseases from infected animals. Healthy animals that eat and drink will also now lower the cleanliness of these modules, modulated by the current dirtiness of a habitat

• Staff

  • Vets will now not survey animals that are in quarantine or dead

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Modules such as feeders and water troughs can now be contaminated by transmissible pathogens without having to be dirty. Previously they required 10% dirtiness, which practically made it so these modules could never actually be contaminated

  • Feeders, enrichment feeders and water troughs lose a little bit of cleanliness when used by animals

• UI/UX

  • The Animal Info Menu now displays recovery progress for each present affliction

  • Overhauled state icon readability - they are now overall smaller on screen, display screen-space angular stability and are sorted by distance

  • After some reported player confusion, we disabled session persistence for the 'Vivarium' filtering option in the Nursery Menu

• Audio

  • When the camera is above ground-level, animal sounds become less attenuated to better serve the top-down gameplay (excludes sauropod calls)

• Critical

  • Patched a few AI navigation locks that could result in crashing

  • Improved general stability around undo/redo

  • Fixed a Vivarium loading bug which would affect Terrestrial Vivariums with a burrow-substrate and would cause plants to reset and the enrichment items to desync

  • Fixed a Vivarium loading bug which could cause saved enrichment items to persist within the structure, even if toggled away through the GUI

• Animals

  • Fixed many issues resulting in animals often failing to drink from painted water bodies

  • Fixed a few instabilities in the animal animation systems which could cause certain animation states to be stuck

  • Patched a couple of exceptions in the Vivarium animal animation system that could cause their animations to glitch out

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Vivarium wall claddings have fixed collision, improving selection responsiveness and entity navigability with respect to vivarium structures

• UI/UX

  • Fixed at least 2 bugs that could occur when generating the animal list in the Animal Management Menu. This should resolve some instances of the list having incorrect layout or reporting overlapping activities for certain animals

  • Fixed the 'Move' button in the quarantine bay widget not triggering the animal discharging action

  • Fixed enrichment feeders not displaying supplement controls when selected

  • Fixed a logical error that could cause certain afflictions to be labeled as 'Treatable' in the Animal Info Menu when they are in fact not treatable

  • Fixed a searching issue in the Building Menu that could cause certain items to be loaded into the results twice

  • Fixed a few instances of desync between Vivariums and Animal Info Signs, making sign species selection much more responsive to Vivarium animal stock changes

• Rendering

  • Fixed data issues causing water volumes in Amphibious Vivariums to be visually glitchy when viewed from the sides

• Audio

  • Patched some bugs in animal audio processing

  • Fixed an audio oversight that could cause vivarium animals' breathing to be heard even after they would cease existing

  • Fixed an issue that caused high elevation wind sounds to play all the time

• Took an in-depth look at memory stability, having fixed dozens of memory leaks, especially in the pathfinding and animal systems. This should hopefully reduce the amount of crashing, though GPU memory usage continues to be high. This will be addressed more in Update 17.

• Resolved memory leaks in the terraforming system - this could cause some of the reported FPS drops related to terrain actions.

• Made many small CPU optimizations to peripheral systems.

Welcome to the February Development Update!

With this being our first full month back working on PK, the team continued implementing the new management features discussed in January’s Dev Diary[www.prehistorickingdom.com]. Since we don’t want to repeat ourselves and show off the same content, this month’s post will instead only focus on the new things and be a bit shorter as a result.

Throughout February, we were able to squeeze in a number of bug fixes, optimizations and resolve the trippy-water that could be seen on the side of amphibious vivariums. This fix came just in time for our animators to add some new aquatic movement spots for the Titanoboa!

Touching on some of the management features, we’ve extended the upcoming Resource Usage view to show any active transfers in the park. After selecting a resource type from the dropdown (e.g. meat, plants), floating arrows and an icon will appear to show where staff are delivering to and how much they’re taking.

With a few of these management tasks now almost complete, the programming team’s been focused entirely on planning and preparing the codebase for animal combat over the last week or so.

Having now sorted our species into prey, predators or scavengers, we look forward to realizing the potential behaviors that stem from these niches. The next four or so months will be a long process filled with trials, errors, and a LOT of animation, but we’ll have more combat news to share with you starting in March’s Dev Diary.

The model for everyone’s favorite dino-turtle has been completed! Meet our two species of Stegosaurus: stenops and ungulatus.

When looking at each species side by side, it becomes clear that the two are quite distinct! Ungulatus is not only much larger, but it has raised hips, a sloped back, taller plates and a longer face. It’s certainly got more of a classic, 90s vibe.

To make sure our model was faithful to the current science (while still retaining its PK style), we worked with paleontologist Matt Dempsey who was able to provide us with a wealth of feedback and insight into a Stegosaur’s anatomy. Thank you for your help, Matt!

Internally, the team named the first ungulatus skin after a certain kaiju thanks to its grey body and blue “radioactive” plates on the male. Let’s hope these guys are a bit kinder to Tokyo!

After such a long absence, the team couldn’t be more thrilled to finally bring this dinosaur to the game. To celebrate its arrival, we’ve put together a short video highlighting their animations and early sound design tests.

To help flesh out the game’s Cenozoic landscaping options, we’ll be adding new plants to the Scrubland and Wetland biomes in U17 and 18 respectively. As you might guess, this first batch aims to drastically improve the variety of the Scrubland biome and actually make it into, well, a scrubland! 

This next update will bring 28 variants across 4 new species to the game, with those being lavender, cistus, false esparto grass and the juniper bush.

To sweeten the deal, we’re also revisiting the Italian strawflower and sabal palmetto to make them much more faithful to their real world counterparts. We’ve tried to capture varying levels of growth, coloration and have even included “shaggy” and clustered variants for the palmetto. There’s a lot more variety here overall, making a grand total of 46 new plant assets coming in U17!

But that’s not all, though. When the game fully releases next year, there’ll be even MORE foliage for not just Scrubland but a few other biomes, too. Notable additions will include the highly requested cherry blossom, agave, eel grass, stone pine and acuri palm! It will truly be Plant Kingdom.

Created by Hex-MSMB

Created by Incog

Created by jpsreds

Thank you for reading February's dev diary!

We hope you enjoyed a close look at Stegosaurus and are looking forward to a new roster of Scrubland plants coming in U17. We will be back next month with news on combat, Stego ontogeny and more!

- The PK Team

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