Welcome, Park Managers!
The team are now back from their holiday breaks! To celebrate the New Year, Prehistoric Kingdom is currently available for 30% off. If you'd know someone who'd be interested in trying out the game, we'd appreciate the support!
About the Patch
In this patch, we've targetted a number of reported issues such as visitors falling through tiny gaps, various bugs with the building toolbox and more. As a quick little side project, we improved the Animal Nursery preview with new lighting, idle animations, added a 3D animated human scale, and fixed the wetness effect that would appear during rain.
We've also revised different areas of the UI with new tooltips to better explain what certain values or colors mean, such as an animal's "Biome" need. If the wrong biome is present in an animal's enclosure, selecting the biome will now automatically open the removal tool in the Terraforming menu.
Thank you for all the great feedback and we'll be in touch again soon with an early January Dev Diary.
Known Issues & Additional Notes
- We're still experiencing instances of animals ignoring all navigation rules and phasing through fences, and we've made this our top fixing priority. Until we fix this, a reload should resolve the issue temporarily.
Full Patch Notes
Additions
- Animals
- Added morphological sexual and skin dimorphism to the Woolly Mammoth. This is especially noticeable in the tusk shape of the various individuals
- UI/UX
- Improved UX on animal info menu biome reporting by adding button behavior to each biome icon: hovering them with the cursor will show you the correct status of that biome in relation to the animal preferences, and clicking them will set up the relevant terraforming tools
- Added loads of relevant explanatory tooltips to animal welfare bars and animal habitat needs
- Added biome tooltips to the Paleopedia biome icons
- Added biome tooltips to the Landscaping Menu biome icons
- Added a species count to the enclosure info menu rating section
Changes
- Balance
- Changed starting Funds values for Sandbox Settings in the New Game menu - these will now reflect the updated economy more closely
- Increased Tall Feeder capacity to 1500kg
- Slowed large sauropod hunger and thirst drain rates
- Decreased Apatosaurus weight and eating amounts after discovering a data oversight
- Updated needs values for Megaloceros and Ursus
- Increased Megaloceros base score to 430
- Science Teams now properly unlock one star rating earlier
- Gameplay
- Reduced Price Appeal influence of Bathrooms and Binoculars, increased influence of Park Entry Price
- Animals
- Animal Nutrition and Hydration welfare now only starts to decrease when the animal is very hungry or thirsty, not slightly hungry or thirsty
- Guests
- Guests in queue lines will now be more capable of pushing through crowds and other people
- Buildings & Scenery
- Moved the navigation access portal for staff gates an additional 0.5 meters out, which should address a few issues where it wasn’t allowing staff through even when placed in perfectly legitimate areas
- UI/UX
- Revised fence snapping to be less aggressive at closer camera distances
- Made several improvements to the Animal Nursery preview
- Spatialized and animated the human silhouette
- Removed world lighting and world effects (like wetness) from the animal preview, making the preview visuals much more consistent
- Drastically improved fidelity of shadows and fur rendering
- Added idle and action animations to the Animal Nursery animal previews
- Removed redundant animal information from the Animal Nursery, giving the animal preview more screen space. All that information is still available in the animal’s Paleopedia entry
- Improved Excavations Team menu animal button responsiveness
- Excavations Team menu animal buttons now link to their respective Paleopedia page
- Updated sizing for the Group Editing overlay panel to improve overlapping with other menus
- Improved modular group double clicking selection functionality by only allowing the behavior to run when the first click selects the target structure
- Screenshot Mode: adapted height movement speed to take more after the orbit camera inputs, overall making more precise motions possible
- Enclosure welfare state icons (missing water, missing feed), are now disabled if Animal Welfare is disabled in the gameplay options
- Rendering
- Improved animal fur rendering during night time
Bug Fixes
- Critical
- Fixed distant foliage loading from the wrong maps when browsing the New Game menu before loading a save
- Fixed a critical modular selection bug triggered by undoing user actions
- Fixed a left mouse click input error causing terraforming brush actions to occasionally lock in even if the left mouse button wasn’t held down
- Improved saving diagnostics significantly
- Save system should no longer delete a save when it fails to overwrite the save for any reason
- Fixed a bug that caused loading to fail when saves had more than 256 gates
- Gameplay
- Loading bay overfill export requests will no longer generate Module Logistics Unfulfilled park issues
- Module Logistics Unfulfilled will now correctly be removed when a staff member takes on the assignment
- Fixed Price Value Appeal not correctly calculating
- Animals
- Animal pathfinding is more robust
- Fixed an audio bug when removing animals
- Humans
- Human pathfinding is more robust, reducing unrealistic crowding and improving their capability to find alternate routes.
- Human to human collision has been adjusted to allow people to scoot around each other more aggressively, drastically reducing most crowding scenarios.
- Fixed humans falling through tiny gaps on tall structures. They should also recover more reliably
- Guests
- Fixed guests rarely getting stuck under the map
- Buildings & Scenery
- Fixed statues not giving their listed Attraction Points
- Foliage
- Fixed new temperate grasses not aligning to the terrain
- Construction
- Fixed fence and path length snapping being twice what is listed in the UI
- Fixed vegetation being removed from far above or below a modular piece or path when it is placed with the Remove Foliage toggle enabled
- Fixed a bug that prevented an interactable from updating is registration when placed in an area with no nav access
- UI/UX
- Fixed a problem with the new Modular Styling menu, causing it to occasionally remain closed if a filter was applied
- Fixed Ecology bonus values being displayed incorrectly in the UI
- Fixed Local Prefabs showing up in the Workshop Prefabs building menu category
- Added back workshop buttons to structure buttons
- State Icons now don’t disappear when opening the Management View menus
- Fixed ‘Animals ready for release’ notification popup sometimes becoming stuck on screen after moving animals
- Fixed several instances of notification popups appearing at the wrong time
- Fixed several text elements not having the proper language localization
- Fixed the ‘Open Guest Needs’ button on the guests’ info menu opening the rating management view
- Fixed several instances of tooltips not getting opened when it was expected (for instance, during user actions)
Performance
- CPU Optimizations