Welcome, park managers!
This update has taken longer than we initially expected. We wanted to make sure we could reasonably polish new game mechanics while working on Early Access release features, and marketing in parallel. We apologise for the delay and hope you all enjoy the new update.
Features
- NEW: Challenge & Sandbox Mode
- Challenge and Sandbox are now separately available through the ‘New Game’ button within the main menu. Players are also able to create and set completely custom Sandbox games. A map selection screen has been added under the ‘New Game’ menu.
- NEW: Animal Welfare
- Animals will now poop after eating, lowering the Cleanliness of the habitat.
- Animals now require ideal paddock size and crowding, water, forest, biomes and cleanliness.
- NEW: Exhibit Score, Donations & Science Points
- Improve the state of your habitat by watching out for animal welfare and working to maximize its potential Exhibit Score, increasing donations and science points production. To find an exhibit’s score, simply select the perimeter fence of a habitat.
- Science points are used to unlock new dig sites and animals. You can collect them passively over time. Improve your habitats to improve science points production.
- NEW: Habitat Maintenance
- Place a Dung Beetle Nest (found in Animal Care > Enrichment) to automatically clean paddocks.
- Manually clean habitats by selecting the perimeter fence of an exhibit and pressing the clean action at the bottom of the menu.
Additions
- Animals
- NEW ANIMAL: Iguanodon
- NEW ANIMAL: Brachiosaurus
- Added new additive animations to all the existing rigs
- Brought back sleeping, grazing, broadcasting and running behaviors for all animals
- Levels
- Added a new playable temperate map set in the UK
- Buildings & Scenery
- Added a new wooden fence: Tropical Bamboo
- Added 1x1, 1x2 and 1x4 wall pieces
- Added pillar wall pieces
- New Prefab: Large Planter Modern 1 - found in Modular Pieces > Gardening
- New Prefab: Large Planter Natural 1 - found in Modular Pieces > Gardening
- New Prefab: Large Planter Natural 2 - found in Modular Pieces > Gardening
- New Prefab: Large Planter Tropical 1 - found in Modular Pieces > Gardening
- New Prefab: Animal House Backstage - found in Animal Care > Housing
- New Prefab: Large Animal Stables - found in Animal Care > Housing
- Foliage
- Arrowwood (x1)
- Field Elm (x2)
- Oak (x2)
- Paper Birch (x4)
- Construction
- Added the Path replacement feature
- UI/UX
- Added state icons tied to various gameplay elements (e.g. lack of power in the park, animal placement, etc.)
- Added ability to set the park name through the Management Menu, in the Overview section
- Clicking on a biome icon in the animal habitat menu or enclosure habitat menu will automatically open the Landscaping Menu with the right biome settings
- Audio
- Added night and dawn chorus ambience to the Scrubland map
- Added Elephant family sounds to Mammoth
- Additional vocal sfx and foley for Sauropods
- Additional vocal sfx variation for Protoceratops
- Additional modular sfx variation for wood materials
- Music
- Added dynamic layering to certain music tracks; layers will come in or out based on the time of day, construction frequency, and animal proximity.
- Options
- Added Anti-Alias Options: Off, FXAA, SMAA, TAA and CTAA
- Added a ‘Controls’ section to the options menu, allowing users to set custom key bindings for the game’s controls
Changes
- Animals
- Reduced vitality needs drain speeds for most species
- Buildings & Scenery
- Adjusted vegetation color for plant feeders
- Adjusted Concrete Path coloration
- Adjusted emissive sign brightness
- Foliage
- Painted foliage now adapts to terraforming changes, aligning to the underlying terrain
- Every click or brush stroke will now place at least 1 foliage element
- Adjusted amazonian and water lily colors
- Adjusted kapok colors
- Adjusted translucency of birch, sabal palmetto, coconut palm, kapok and samanea trees
UI/UX
- Overhauled game economy - decreased structure build and upkeep costs where applicable, while tying in exhibit donations and amenity income to the overall park balance. Hopefully these changes are going to make running a Challenge mode park a much more enjoyable experience
- Players can now carry terraforming operations while having items selected
- Improved animal navmesh visuals
- Improved background visibility for the Options Menu
- Slowed item scrolling speed in the building toolbox
- Added a smoothing effect to the start of item rotation, allowing for finer degrees rotations
- Canceling a spline (fence/path) action while building a segment doesn’t completely disable the action, but instead will start a new action for a smoother experience
- Removed ability to select modular pieces from separate groups while editing a group - only the pieces within the edited group are now selectable
- Saved games can now load the correct month progress, which was previously overwritten
- Reworked progress bar logic on the loading screen. This should more accurately display how close you are to finishing loading
- Rendering
- Generally improved ambient coloring and color grading - color grading especially is now map specific, with the default scrubland level receiving a much warmer overall coloration
- Vastly improved night and sunset rendering
- Vastly improved shadow quality at most quality settings
- Improved SSR Scaling at lower settings
- Improved water depth interpolation - dramatically reduced sharp lines on the water’s surface where it shines, and in shallow water
- Warmed up default sunlight colors
- Tweaked quality presets to improve perf/quality balance
- Increased post-processing vignette
- Increased grass brightness in shaded areas
- Improved loose rain streaks appearance when overlaying water shores
- Rolled grass graphics back to Alpha level (purely a cosmetic change, with no major impact to gameplay or performance). Grass graphics are something we’re still playing with, so expect these to change and improve over time
- Auto exposure now updates regardless of time scale, resolving over-exposed shots
- Rocks now get glossier during rainfall
- Improved glass fence reflectivity
- Audio
- General mix adjustments
- Entity sounds while in Management View are now louder with flatter dynamics
- Time speed up audio cue now fades away
- Updated sfx for small and medium plant placement
- Updated sfx for dead, medium and large tree placement
- Random bird calls on modular tree placement are now based on level biome
- Input
- Re-binded right click drag to camera panning, whereas it was previously set to camera rotation
Bug Fixes
- Critical
- Fixed a save/load bug that caused save times to always default to Year 1
- Animals
- Fixed Camarasaurus not being able to eat from the tall pole feeder
- Foliage
- Fixed selectability for Scots Pine 2 and 3
- UX/GUI
- Fixed several selection graphic events conflicting with management view
- Fixed nursery menu scrollbar defaulting to lowest available position
- Fixed main board GUI sliding animation issues
- Fixed a new game initialization issue that prevented the help menu from showing up
- Fixed a bug that caused the animals to not play their walking animation within the nursery preview
- Fixed nursery menu sort order, now displaying the nursery menu in front of any selected GUIs
- Disabled access to incomplete land value management view
- Fixed water intensity always defaulting to its max value, now the landscaping intensity slider will remember the last set amount
- Fixed Loading Menu masking issue with loading buttons
- Fixed spelling mistakes on various text elements and tooltips
- Fixed a coloring menu issue where copying a color into the hex input field would result in a slightly different color
- Fixed an indexing issue that caused the management overview menu’s labels to break after the first year
- Fixed main menu GUI scaling issues
- Fixed excavations world map jitter issues
- Audio
- Fixed sky wind audio not looping
- Fixed group placement audio not including foliage sounds
- Fixed Camarasaurus not playing walking growls
- Fixed Camarasaurus not playing foley while eating
- Fixed Deinocheirus not breathing while sleeping
- Fixed rain impact layers playing on animals not near the camera
- Fixed Edmontosaurus and Lambeosaurus Nursery audio
- Fixed action canceling sound event only triggering for modular actions
- Music
- Fixed nursery theme not playing while in the nursery menu
Performance
- Massively optimized fence rendering
- Significant GPU optimizations for prepass rendering
- Small CPU optimizations for selection rendering
- Slight CPU optimizations for general rendering
- Fixed GUI related bug that caused massive lag spikes at certain times of day while having a group selected
- Slight rendering optimization for rain particle effects
- Considerable optimization for guest AI calculations
- Optimized sunset and sunrise rendering speed
Notes
- If you are working with an OLD SAVE, please read the following:
- Due to the addition of exhibit statistics, old paddocks will need their perimeter fencing rebuilt
- A new navmesh has been added for giant animals like the Brachiosaurus. Old saves do not have this mesh which will result in giant animals walking through visually innaccessible areas
- Brachiosaurus can have issues drinking. We are looking into this.
- A number of additive animations and returning behaviours do not have audio. This will be addressed in hotfixes and the launch update
- There is a known issue that unrealistically lowers the game to 10-15 FPS. If this occurs, please restart the game.
- There is a known issue that causes prefab icons to load empty or white (this does not affect the actual prefabs!). If this occurs, please restart the game.
A hotfix patch will be arriving in a few days to address various issues.
Thumbnail screenshot from Discord user Grimnir.