[2023] Prehistoric Kingdom - Update 8 (EA 1.1.532)

Welcome, Park Managers!

Update 8 is now available to all players! This update brings a huge amount of important changes to the game, including completely rewritten animal locomotion and AI, as well as a brand new species. The team has also addressed a number of technical issues, bugs and stability fixes that we hope will improve the experience for players.

This has been a massive undertaking and while there are still improvements and polish to be made to the animals, we cannot understate how important this process has been for the future of the game. As the team works towards future updates, we have even more optimizations coming that will further polish what has been introduced in Update 8.

We are aiming to deliver Update 9 during the upcoming Holiday season as our final release of the year.

Thank you!
The PK Team

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The remainder of this post includes an Update 8 recap in addition to the full changelog further down the page. To get a full sense of the update, we highly recommend reading it all!

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Update 8 Features
New Species Meet the park's newest arrival, Velociraptor! This small, carnivorous dinosaur boasts an impressive coat of feathers, decorating its body with elegant wings, a tail fan and a particularly eye catching mohawk.

Velociraptor can be found as a two star animal in Challenge Mode, making it the perfect candidate for an upcoming park.


Animal Rewrite Animals have had their locomotion and AI rewritten from the ground up, giving them new ways to move around, create decisions more organically and introduce some much needed optimizations.

This new foundation has been designed to be as technically modular as possible and will allow the team to more easily support sophisticated AI behaviors like herding, hunting and combat in the future. Through upcoming patches, we will continue improving the quality of our animals.

Genetic Mutations & Improved Variation In this update, creatures bred from the Animal Nursery now have a chance to be born as an albino, melanistic or leucistic mutation. These mutations are procedurally generated, allowing any skin to mutate and retain their underlying design.

Animals with genetic mutations are rated higher than those that aren't, giving exhibits a nice bump in score if mutations are present.



On top of genetic mutations, all skins now have enhanced individual variation, offering subtle or drastic variation depending on the animal. We hope players will grow an even bigger attachment to the animals in their park with this change!


Guest Queuing & Improved Decision Making When waiting to ineract with a module, guests will now form small queues to reduce crowding issues in the park.



We've managed to resolve a number of underlying issues with guests that should greatly improve their decision making and how they choose to get around the park. As a result, guest flow and traffic should resolve better and promote a healthier economy.

Park Beauty Park Beauty is a new gameplay factor that helps influence the park rating. Modules such as power generators, animal nurseries and even dirty habitats create a negative area of influence, lowering the Park Beauty if they overlap with guest visibility.

To combat this, players can block guest sightlines using fences or modular pieces; occluding the area of influence.


Park Beauty can be increased by building gardens, decorated buildings and constructing high scoring habitats that are visible to guests.


Update 8 Content
Tropical Biome Overhaul The Tropical biome has been overhauled with 34 foliage items, including a mix of new plants as well as updates to previous species.



New Biome Presets & Seasonal Arrowwood For this SPOOKY holiday season, we've added two seasonal presets to the Temperate biome! Players can finally paint seasonal variants for the birch, field elm and holm oak in their habitats.

To make the forests really come alive, we also added seasonal variants for the arrowwood bushes, offering a crimson counterpart to the original green versions. We can't wait to see how players decide to use these plants!


Water Troughs In Update 8, players can now build small or large water troughs for animals to drink from. For all the thirsty animals out there, this one's for you!



Updated Materials The modern stone brick wall style has had a major revision in Update 8. The new material is higher fidelity and sports a more geometrically consistent look to fit with the modern theme.


The modular rock pieces have also received a texture and material upgrade to make them appear more grounded with grit and edgewear that was missing from the previous iterations. We can't wait to see how great your environments will look!


Update 8 Quality of Life
Automatic Foliage Removal Modular and path placement actions will automatically remove terrain-bound vegetation from underneath them, making it much easier to expand the park.


Cinematic Camera A cinematic camera tracking mode is available for non-mini exhibit animals, toggleable through the animal info panel at anytime.

When selecting a newly bred species, the cinematic camera is automatically enabled to coincide with Nigel’s voice lines. Players can disable this functionality in the options menu (per save).

Nigel's Hints If your animals or habitats have been neglected, Nigel will occasionally chime in to point out issues that need to be addressed. There are 76 new contextual lines across a variety of possible triggers.

PSA: Exhibit & Navigation Changes

Exhibit Size Requirements The minimum exhibit size requirement has been removed from the game. This means animals will no longer need an arbitrary exhibit size to make them happy. Instead, animals only care about exhibit crowding.

Exhibit crowding compares the physical size of animals against the rest of their habitat. As additional creatures are added, the crowding level will increase. Small animals take up less space, while large animals take up more.

We hope this change makes habitat construction more intuitive and less restrictive!

Exhibit Water Requirements Due to the addition of the water troughs, the minimum painted water requirement has been removed or reduced for the following animals:

• Brachiosaurus
  
• Camarasaurus
  
• Coelodonta
  
• Coelophysis
  
• Dilophosaurus
  
• Dryosaurus
  
• Edmontosaurus kuukpikensis
  
• Juxia
  
• Mammuthus
  
• Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum
  
• Paraceratherium
  
• Protoceratops
  
• Psittacosaurus
  
• Smilodon
  
• Tarbosaurus

Animals with no minimum painted water requirement do not need lakes in their habitat to be happy.

Navmesh Regeneration Due to navigation changes introduced in Update 8, players will have to regenerate their navmesh upon loading old saves. This will increase the time it takes to initially load an old save, but resaving your park will prevent the navmesh from being regenerated again.

Known Issues & Additional Notes

• Argentinosaurus is prone to locking up/freezing. We will be addressing this in a hotfix asap!
  
• Animal grazing has been disabled while we develop a more dynamic solution that can work in tandem with the new locomotion system
  
• Animals do not animate while in the Nursery
  
• Animals do not have footstep sounds
  
• Animal IKs are a work in progress and will be improved in future updates
  
• Some animal interactables can be scaled freely, which may impact their usability or give unnatural results
  
• There are some issues with desynched data between modular objects and foliage, most commonly experienced when performing undo/redo actions. We are working on a fix for this!
  
• There is a chance for prefabs containing utility or feeder modules to be split in two after performing a specific series of actions. We are actively investigating this issue!

Full Patch Notes
Features

• NEW ANIMAL: Velociraptor
  • Added Velociraptor mongoliensis, found in the Djadochta Formation! Thanks to its small size, this speedy thief can be one of your starting animals in Challenge Mode.
• NEW: Animal Locomotion Fully Rewritten
  • Animals can now walk in any direction as needed and will seamlessly speed up or down as required. This is our foundation to support more sophisticated AI behaviors and will continue to receive further polish improvements in upcoming patches
• NEW: Animal AI & Decision Making Fully Rewritten
  • Completely overhauled the technical AI backend for animals. This will allow us to more easily expand upon AI-related animal behaviors in the future!
• NEW: Animal Genetic Mutations
  • Players can now randomly breed albino, melanistic and leucistic animals with the improved variation system
• NEW: Guest Queuing and Decision Making Improvements
  • Guests will now create small queues when waiting to use various facilities. Pathfinding and decision making should also be improved
• NEW: Park Beauty
  • Improve beauty around the park to help raise your rating, blocking guest line of sight to infrastructure and dirty habitats with fences or modular pieces. Park beauty can be significantly raised by building gardens and decorated structures!
• NEW: Nigel's Hints
  • Nigel will now chime in to point out animal related management issues. There are 76 new contextual lines across a variety of possible triggers.

Additions

• Gameplay
  • Modular and path placement actions now automatically remove wild vegetation from underneath them
    
  • Added a cinematic camera tracking mode to all animals, toggleable through the animal info panel, and automatically triggered when first selecting a newly bred species, coinciding with Nigel’s voice lines. This feature can be disabled in the Options Menu
• Animals
  • Added multiple new one-shot behaviors to animals previously missing them:
    • Nasutoceratops
      
    • Pachyrhinosaurus
      
    • Styracosaurus
      
    • Triceratops
      
    • Protoceratops
      
    • Coelodonta
      
    • Paraceratherium
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Added Large & Small Water Dish, new drinking interaction points for animals
    
  • Added Velociraptor Silhouette piece
• Foliage
  • Added Temperate Seasonal Forest and Seasonal Birch Forest presets
    
  • Added Arrowwood Seasonal 1, 2 and 3
    
  • Added Kapok 2,3 and 4
    
  • Added Banana 2, 3 and 4
    
  • Added Fan Palm 2 and 3
    
  • Added Elephant Ear 2 and 3
    
  • Added Ladyfinger Palm 1 and 2
    
  • Added Jungle Cover 1 and 2
    
  • Added Monstera 2 and included the species into the tropical brush
    
  • Added Palm Grass 2 and included the species into the tropical brush
• Audio
  • Added broadcast and social response calls to the following animals:
    • Argentinosaurus
      
    • Brachiosaurus
      
    • Camarasaurus
      
    • Dryosaurus
      
    • Psittacosaurus
      
    • Smilodon
  • Added broadcast variations to Triceratops
    
  • Added social variations to Deinocheirus
    
  • Added missing sound when Psittacosaurus yawns to sleep
    
  • Added missing sounds to Mammoth behavioral animations
    
  • Entities that are steeply above or below the camera are now muffled, focusing the soundscape on animals that are within view
• GUI
  • Added a brand new animal info panel that will be part of a game-wide UI revamp
    
  • Added options to either change auto-save frequency or disable it entirely, which can be found in the Gameplay Settings

Changes

• Balance
  • Reduced drain rates for animal needs, introduced a short delay after satisfying a need before that need can continue to drain
    
  • Land Value has been made more forgiving across the board, as achieving a 5-star rating was nearly impossible
• Gameplay
  • Removed minimum exhibit size requirements from all animals as the crowding need made it redundant
    
  • Removed or reduced minimum water requirement for the following animals:
    • Brachiosaurus
      
    • Camarasaurus
      
    • Coelodonta
      
    • Coelophysis
      
    • Dilophosaurus
      
    • Dryosaurus
      
    • Edmontosaurus kuukpikensis
      
    • Juxia
      
    • Mammuthus
      
    • Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum
      
    • Paraceratherium
      
    • Protoceratops
      
    • Psittacosaurus
      
    • Smilodon
      
    • Tarbosaurus
  • Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai now tolerates Coastal
    
  • Close-up animal orbiting will now more closely focus an animal’s eyes instead of its jaw/throat
    
  • Instant animal incubation will now work even during paused time
• Animals
  • Updated Smilodon's basic 'Dauntless' skin
    
  • Improved fidelity on Smilodon’s eye texture
    
  • Improved fuzziness for several animals’ fur and feather coats
    
  • Lowered specularity on Dryosaurus eyes
• Guests
  • Reduced saturation of base skin tone and random variation
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Metallic animal statues will no longer glow at night
    
  • Topiaries now cannot be navigated through
    
  • Transparent glass panels no longer cast shadows
    
  • Replaced Modern Stone Brick Wall texture, being higher fidelity & more appropriate for the Modern theme
    
  • Updated all Igneous rock’s textures for higher visual fidelity
    
  • Updated Igneous rock snow overlay texture to be closer to the terrain snow
    
  • Updated LOD distance and material reflection on all bone/skull props
    
  • All bone/skull props can now be properly recolored
    
  • Adjusted and optimized colliders on all igneous rocks to be more accurate to their shape
    
  • Adjusted transparent glass material to improve visibility and blur environmental reflections when on ‘Ultra’ reflections quality
• Environment
  • Overhauled Tropical map (old saves not affected)
    
  • Overhauled Scrubland map (old saves not affected)
    
  • Overhauled lighting across all maps
    
  • Replaced Tropical Dirt with a new leaf litter texture
    
  • Adjusted Tropical Sand to appear more granular and less saturated
    
  • Adjusted Tropical Grass to better match the new foliage
    
  • Adjusted Desert Sand to appear less saturated
    
  • Adjusted Scrubland dirt color to be more neutral
    
  • Slightly lowered sun intensity on the Scrubland map
• Foliage
  • Improved vegetation painting generation for granular plant selection, with better density rules
    
  • Adjusted all plant colors for a more consistent look
    
  • Adjusted wind simulation settings for almost all foliage to add more ambient sway
    
  • Replaced the previous Kapok, Coconut Palm, Fan Palm, Elephant Ear, Banana Tree and Monstera
    
  • Removed Samanea from the Tropical biome and moved it to Gardening Trees
    
  • Moved seasonal trees from Gardening Trees to the Temperate biome as paintable entities
    
  • Removed shadows from foliage impostors to reduce shadow casters in the scene and smooth out transitions
    
  • Foliage impostors look significantly better on low graphic settings
    
  • Drastically optimized tropical kapok, coconut palms, lady finger palms, monstera and palm grass
    
  • Drastically optimized temperate holm oak
    
  • Optimized and updated colliders for Water Lilies as well as Amazonian Water Lilies
    
  • Optimized decorative ivy rendering
    
  • Optimized rendering and improved impostors across the desert, tropical wetland, temperate, coastal and boreal biomes
    
  • Updated temperate biome wind settings
• Audio
  • Animals
    • All animal sounds are now attached to bones, preventing cases where sounds could previously be “left behind” by animals walking away
      
    • Retooled animal breathing audio to dynamically respond to an animal’s speed, exhaustion and more without relying on animation states
      
    • Various adjustments to distance attenuation including reduced distance falloff on animal sounds for better clarity during top-down gameplay
      
    • Set hard limits on animal voices to hopefully reduce audio threads crashing when the camera is near hundreds of animals
  • Ambient Soundscape
    • Smoothed out a number of transitions across the ambient soundscape
      
    • Ambient soundscape aesthetic now changes depending on the time of day, with night sounding less bright than day
      
    • Improved weather frequency balance across different camera heights
      
    • Improved random wildlife spawning as well as their audible presence in the world
      
    • Adjusted responsiveness and speed sensitivity of underwater entry sounds
  • Mix
    • Various adjustments to the volume of some animal sounds and UI elements
      
    • Various adjustments to the stereo spread and spatialization of placement and terraforming sounds
    Reverb
    • All reverb now remains active even when time is paused (provides a less flat experience when placing objects or listening to ambience)
      
    • Field reverb no longer reflects low frequencies and creates more realistic early reflections
      
    • Distant reverb now takes prominent effect further away and can be passively activated by loud sounds over a certain threshold (noticeable on animal broadcasts or mammoth trumpets)
• Visuals
  • CTAA implementation has been fixed, resulting in substantially better anti-aliasing
    
  • Improved graphical fidelity of mist atmospherics
    
  • Drastically improved overcast and storm visuals
    
  • Reduced large scale ambient occlusion intensity
    
  • Reduced ambient reflections during midday and day/night transitions for a more natural look
    
  • Glass graphics now display ambient reflections and render properly during atmospherics conditions
• GUI
  • Structure items and prefabs are now always displayed in the GUI, even if their theme hasn’t been unlocked yet. Instead, they will show up with a ‘lock’ overlay and a tooltip pointing you to their respective research item
    
  • The ‘Remove Vegetation’ toggle in the Landscaping menu can now be toggled off, switching the plant action back to add mode
    
  • Improved Notification Popup behavior, with pop-ups now being bundled into broader categories, minimizing the amount of repeating notifications
    
  • Animal Nav Visualization now fills the entire navigable area
    
  • Improved Depth of Field controls in Screenshot Mode in order to increase viability for longer distance shots
  Post-Processing
  • Slightly increased bloom threshold so that the environment and sky affects bloom less
    
  • Slightly lowered saturation and contrast on the tropical map
• Tutorial
  • A pop-up indicator will now more promptly alert the player of existing objectives

Bug Fixes

• Critical
  • Drastically improved user action stability - on the event of a faulty action, the game will more safely shut down the action, preventing players from getting hardlocked into action states
    
  • Fixed multiple minor memory leaks
    
  • Fixed another research unlock initialization edge case
    
  • Fixed an issue in the Waste system that could cause loading hangs
    
  • Water Remove Brush previously didn’t refresh the terrain water drinking system
    
  • Fixed a number of small bugs that could break loading
    
  • Drastically reduced a long hang when leaving large levels that had been open for a long time
    
  • Fixed an issue where visitor entrances could show ‘off nav’ and potentially cause other modules to lose connection
    
  • Fixed an initialization left over setting that would cause unusually high memory load during start up - new parks shouldn’t crash as often on machines with lower memory
    
  • Fixed a crash caused by starting the game on Steam in offline mode
    
  • Fixed a few parallel scheduling errors that could stall various game systems
    
  • Fixed an issue causing research items not detracting park balance on unlock
    
  • Fixed multiple memory leaks
    
  • Fixed a crash caused by moving certain modules
    
  • Fixed multiple rare crashes around shutting the game down
    
  • Fixed a GUI issue preventing correct behavior of the animal info signs
    
  • Fixed a critical modular issue caused by aligning whole groups to surfaces, in turn creating many other downstream bugs, such as a glitched modular grid overlay
    
  • Fixed an instance of animal animations locking up
• Gameplay
  • Fixed a land value heatmap issue causing value to lower over exhibits with bonus score
• Animals
  • Potentially fixed an old issue causing certain animal skins to display exploding fur/feather coats
    
  • Fixed a number of incorrect idle positions across animal animations
    
  • Improved navmesh check during animal placement
    
  • Drastically improved natural drinking point generation stability
    
  • Animal dung will respect sim settings
    
  • Fixed and improved several animation issues in all animals
    
  • Fixed animals hitting time limits on their active states, which forced them to give up constantly and never achieve anything
    
  • Fixed animals recovering to roofs and clifftops when they fall off nav
    
  • Many fixes and improvements for how animals find painted water to drink (this should help somewhat with the AI stalling)
    
  • Fixed an IK bug where animals would still try to plant their feet while resting and sleeping
• Guests
  • Fixed visitors teleporting to park entrance whenever they stepped up to be served in a queue line
    
  • Fixed a math error that could cause visitors to be reset erroneously
• Buildings & Scenery
  • Fixed bathroom modules’ hole in geometry
    
  • Fixed Termite Mound flying towards the camera if surface alignment was enabled
    
  • Fixed Land Value contribution for steel railings to not provide themed prop bonuses, slightly reduced bonus for other railing types
    
  • Fixed Bunting pieces collision
• Foliage
  • Fixed animals walking over gardening plants and Swamp Beech 1
    
  • Fixed excessive floating branches on Scots Pine 1
    
  • Fixed minor floating elements on Swamp Beech 1
    
  • Fixed Joshua Tree continents being mislabeled as Asia and Africa
• Construction
  • Modular scaling with left-alt will now respect modular data settings
    
  • Dung Beetle Nests will work correctly after loading a save game
    
  • Dung Beetle Nests will no longer be removed by the foliage removal brush
    
  • Fixed a bug that prevented terrain modification in locations occupied by modular, even after the modular pieces had been removed
• UI/UX
  • Stopped stutters from spinning the camera view
    
  • Fixed the camera stutter during animal tracking mode
    
  • Fixed an issue causing the weather transitions to be timescale independent
    
  • Fixed an issue with the red and green power indicator arrows being turned on at the same time in the power management view, indicating conflicting results
    
  • Fixed issue causing Screenshot mode to not initialize properly when started while a management menu is open
    
  • Fixed a minor button collision issue in the main menu
    
  • Fixed a text label issue with modular styles
    
  • Fixed a header text issue in the save/load menu
    
  • Fixed mouse scrolling not working in the vegetation preset menu
    
  • Fixed save menu header text not accurately displaying the current open layout
• Audio
  • Fixed camera height audio parameter not using its full range
    
  • Fixed issue that prevented wildlife sounds from playing on the Tropical map
    
  • Fixed large skin loop foley from playing on small animals
    
  • Fixed an issue that prevented field reverb from creating a stereo image (all entity sounds should now appear wider)
    
  • Fixed incorrect audio cues being used when animals ate food
    
  • Fixed some animal audio ending abruptly
• Misc.
  • Fixed navmesh rebaking for new games started on Costa Rica

Performance

• Animal IKs rewritten to be fully multi-threaded (more optimizations coming here!)
  
• Animal AI rewrite computes the AI across all CPU threads now
  
• Visitor AI now uses CPU threads more effectively
  
• Optimized animal audio processing
  
• Optimized distant tree rendering
  
• Optimized foliage colliders
  
• Optimized foliage texture resolution
  
• A number of minor systems also use multi-threading now
  
• Guest Quality settings now work, guest fidelity can now be scaled back significantly if need be, while Cinematic retains a decent draw distance and high visual fidelity
  
• Minor Improvements to CPU Performance
  
• Improved how background processing is handled, including fixing a minor issue where animals would wait little longer than necessary for stuff they didn’t need
  
• Minor Improvements to loading
  
• Improvements to tropical biome rendering
  
• Improved loading time on the tutorial level
  
• Drastically optimized animal dung processing, saving and loading
  
• Massively improved modular processing speed on the CPU, especially noticeable in larger parks