Prehistoric Kingdom news & patch notes

Attention park managers, we want YOUR feedback! 📣

If our community survey surpasses 1,000 submissions before the 10th of August, we'll be unveiling brand new concept art for one of our 1.0 launch animals. Let your opinion be heard! 🦖

💭 Survey: bit.ly/4bBGNPM

Hello, Park Managers!

This patch fixes critical bugs relating to guests and modular building, while improving animal aggression and behavior stability.

Additionally, our playable tutorials have been given some much-needed attention, receiving many fixes and improvements which aim to make the game more accessible to new players.

Known Issues & Additional Notes

Please send feedback and bug reports to our Discord server's appropriate channel.

Animal combat and hunting are still not 100% finished - some planned features are still missing, while some others require further tuning and balancing. The idea is that we'll continue to expand upon these systems as we get ever closer to our 1.0 release.

For now, we are aware of the following issues, which we hope to tackle soon:

• While it's been improved over PTB, there's still clipping involved with combat interactions. Due to the nature of completely dynamic encounters, this will never be truly gone, but we are excited to explore new ways to improve it in upcoming patches

• Iguanodon's partner combat animation has occasional trouble with starting. We've already fixed a problem related to this, and we'll be rolling it out in an upcoming hotfix patch

• Several animals are still missing their full combat capabilities, currently being unable to attack and fight back. These animals are Psittacosaurus, Dryosaurus and Leaellynasaura

• Animals love to spend way too much time in the water. We plan to improve this soon

• Some of the young animals' combat locomotion is still a little faster than we would like. We'll keep improving this

Miscellaneous issues:

• Some recent data misalignment has caused some animals' swimming capabilities to regress, causing surface positioning to be offset, often pushing individuals under water. We'll be fixing this soon

Full Patch Notes

Additions

• Animals

  • Added a new baby design for the Wildberry Nasutoceratops skin

  • Added a new baby design for the Hibernal Leaellynasaura skin

  • Most animals will now pant when their stamina is below 50%

• UI/UX

  • Added several new Help articles:

    • Vets

    • Workzones

    • Park Issue - Animal Affliction

    • Park Issue - Animal Combat

    • Park Issue - Animal Death

    • Park Issue - Animal Dying

    • Park Issue - Animal Escaped

Changes

• Balance

  • Only one Vivarium animal can be generated in the starting animal selection for new games

  • The Quarantine Bay’s additional monthly upkeep during ‘Auto-Quarantine’ has been reduced to 500$, from 5,000$

  • Many of the resource ordering costs at the Loading Bay have been uniformized, being slightly more expensive on average

  • Decreased infectivity and spawning chances for Pemphigus

• Animals

  • Made several improvements to aggression behaviors:

    • Carnivores' group defense behaviors have been changed so that they don't attempt to defend social group members if the incoming threat is higher

    • Group defense now actively requires an animal to have a social group before it can trigger

    • The Territorial Aggression behavior now excludes babies as valid aggression targets

    • Carcass eating selection for carnivores now respects cannibalism values

    • Lowered initiation chances for desperate predation, which should make predators think twice before engaging a stronger opponent while hunting

    • More passive herd animals should not initiate their family defense behaviors against higher threats now

    • Reduced the initiation chances of the Opportunistic Bully aggression behavior

  • Baby animals will more promptly recognize threats while with their parents, and will now attempt to hide behind them

  • Animals will now stand on nests rather than on the terrain beneath them, though collision will not be 100% accurate due to their dynamic nature

  • Animals should now be able to regain stamina while unconscious

  • Player-Issued medical care commands (ex. manual sedation or quarantine) now have a timeout of 20 minutes, preventing stale commands from persisting long past their intended time. This should improve Vet behavior and responsiveness

• Tutorials

  • Added GUI highlights to certain elements in the tutorials, better guiding the player around the HUD

  • Made many fixes and improvements to the ‘Creating Animals’ tutorial:

    • The selected animal is now guaranteed to be a full enclosure animal, ensuring the tutorial’s completion

    • Any failure during the animal holder selection / placement objectives will now force the tutorial to walk players back to the Incubation step, handling at least a few cases of tutorial hard-locking

  • Made several integrations to the ‘Basic Staff’ tutorial to align the learning experience to the updated gameplay:

    • Cleaned up relayed information and added a ‘Vets’ info step

    • Added more information steps around Staff Conditions and Training, giving a quick overview of the new mechanics

    • Added a Promotion goal to the tutorial, walking users changing the Desired Promotion of a staff member

    • Added a Breakroom building goal to the tutorial, teaching users about Staff Breakrooms

  • Completely restructured the 'Preparing the Park' tutorial to account for the changes in Park Logistics and Loading Bay ordering

• UI/UX

  • Lowered undo system memory limit for better sustainability on low-memory systems

  • Lowered default intensity for terraforming sculpt actions. Raise/lower should feel a bit more precise and deliberate now

  • Cleaned up UX behavior for the building menu:

    • Entering modular edit mode won't open the building menu anymore

    • Minimization for the building menu will now only occur during a user action, if the pin function is disabled

    • Improved stability of cursor-based minimization/maximization, removing flickering

  • Guest welfare needs park issues shouldn't show up if guest welfare is turned off

• Post Processing

  • Improved Global Illumination

Bug Fixes

• Crashes

  • Fixed multiple bugs in animal awareness that led to multiple similar crashes (the most common crashes we’re aware of)

• Critical

  • Fixed the source of a critical bug which could prevent guests from entering the park in new games

  • Fixed general instability related to starting prefabs when loading new games

  • Fixed a modular action regression that would check against the entire group’s area footprint, instead of the pieces currently being edited, fixing a problem with the action incorrectly reporting ‘Outside Playable Bounds’

  • Updated the rocky outcrop configuration in the Canadian Rockies map, which could cause the starting entrance prefab to be obstructed by rock pieces. This could cascade into guests being unable to enter the park or reach interaction points

  • Fixed critical nursery crack that would completely misalign animal references throughout gameplay systems, when multiple animals would be incubated

  • Removed defunct quick-save/quick-load hotkeys which were not working anyway

  • Tightened save abort logic around bad naming and other failure cases, so the save system can no longer continue anyway in certain cases

  • Removed old save timeout of 5 seconds that technically could allow repeat saving while the system was already saving

  • Save replacement is much more careful, creating a _PREVIOUS backup of the save that is being replaced, only removing that backup after the new save is finalized properly

  • Fixed issues around zipped save loading

  • Load menu will no longer read _TEMPSAVE saves as loadable and will ignore and quarantine them

  • Main menu continue will not pick up tempsaves

• Gameplay

  • Loading bay truck count should now correctly respect the research item status

  • Turning off Auto-Quarantine for any Quarantine Bay should now properly refresh its monthly upkeep costs

• Animals

  • Fixed a bug that caused animal hearing to not function properly

  • Disabled animal texture mip streaming, which should resolve animal textures being blurred. This should not have a dramatic VRAM impact for saves with a limited amount of animal species in them

  • Fixed Vivarium Animals having their starting age match the age of the park

  • Fixed Mammoths being unable to go through with their courtship

  • Fixed missing courtship for Camarasaurus

  • Fixed animals clipping through the floor of the Quarantine Bay when held there

  • Fixed animals falling down in combat due to exhaustion and never being able to get back up

  • Minimum height requirements for plants have been eliminated for grazing animals, which should prevent awkward cases where animals didn't seem to want to eat from plants that were of the correct biome

  • Anger, as it relates to vocalizations and aggression behavior, will now only happen when Animal Welfare is not disabled in sandbox settings

  • Hunting behavior is no longer allowed when combat is disabled in sandbox. This was causing animals to get into infinite hunting loops

  • During hunting, animals should no longer be compelled to defend their family or nest at a distance

  • The animal group leader behavior of staying in one spot so that the rest of the herd can eat/drink/sleep should now be more intelligent, only causing the group leader to hold in place when its own needs have already been fulfilled. The general duration has also been reduced

  • Fixed fur tesselation being far higher than it should be on some animals, which could cause crashes and performance degradation

  • Fixed a bad assertion in affliction dispatch, which could have been stalling out the affliction distribution system

  • Fixed an error that was preventing combat encounters from merging together properly

  • Fixed errors and edge cases around nesting site selection when the player picks up and moves, or deletes a nest

  • Fixed an error in Tall Feeder filling when multiple staff members are trying to fill it at the same time

• Guests

  • Fixed a frequent error in ride disembarking

  • Fixed an error with human animation that could cause significant AI bugs

• Construction

  • Fixed Object Stacking not functioning outside of group editing

  • Fix for terraforming strokes not being properly ended when the mouse went over the GUI

• UI/UX

  • Fixed missing localization for the IncorrectVivariumConfiguration placement validity error

  • Made several fixes to the Call Staff buttons throughout the HUD, which should properly select staff and correctly refresh their visuals to reflect what is going on in the park

  • Like the other settings in the Options Menu, gameplay settings will now serialize for a save even if that session hasn't been saved yet

Performance

• Fixed error logging spam that would severely degrade CPU performance when moving modular pieces outside of the playable bounds

• Optimized human AI calculation

• Unused memory cleanup is run frequently for short bursts across loading to try to minimize peak memory pressure. This should prevent some crashes when loading the game

• Cut animation driver processing time by 30-40%

• Significantly optimized SSGI

• Significantly reduced stutters during combat

Welcome to the June Development Update!

This month we released Update 17 - a massive update introducing 3 new genera, dynamic combat and a wealth of other changes. It took a lot of hard work and a lot of long hours, but we’re happy to finally have the basis of combat in your hands.

As you might expect, this post is going to be a bit of a shorter one but we wanted to touch base and keep the community in the loop. To start, let’s reflect on U17. 

Incoming Hotfix

With the main update out of the way, the team’s currently working on a hotfix. In addition to the usual stability improvements and bug fixes, this upcoming patch will correct the management tutorials and sneak in a couple of other changes.

As a bonus, there’ll be new baby skins coming for the wildberry Nasutoceratops and hiburnal Leaellynasaura! While each animal typically has 1 baby skin, we occasionally design extras to make the transition from baby to adult more pleasing if a species has highly varied skins.

Future Improvements

As we continue to develop combat, we’ll be working to reduce extreme cases where bodies clip inside each other. However, due to the nature of dynamic combat, clipping is generally not something that can be eliminated entirely.

Shortly, the team will also begin work on a new combat feature for large predators: prey grabbing! Originally seen way back in our 2017 demo, this behavior allows creatures like a T. rex to pick up and swallow small animals when hunting. Since then, we’d like to expand the feature by letting carnivores hold and occasionally shake their prey before ultimately digesting them.

Thank You!

Created by Francoo192

Created by MysteryDryo

Created by Arden

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Welcome to Update 17, Park Managers!

This update has been a long time coming. Animal combat and hunting are finally making their way into your parks, alongside a collection of management improvements, visual upgrades, new iconic species, and countless fixes and optimizations.

Nearly every part of the simulation has received attention in one form or another, making this the largest update we've released so far as we are near the game's release, next year.

Update 17 Features

Three New Dinosaur Genera

Update 17 introduces three new dinosaur genera and eight new species to the roster. Allosaurus joins the game with four species - A. anax, A. europaeus, A. fragilis, and A. jimmadseni - bringing one of the Jurassic's most iconic predators to your parks.

Stegosaurus arrives with S. stenops and S. ungulatus, complete with their bony plates and formidable thagomizers.

Finally, Pachycephalosaurus spinifer and wyomingensis round out the lineup with their distinctive dome-shaped heads and temperamental dispositions.

Animal Combat

Animals can now fight one another through a fully dynamic combat system. Each species has a combat profile that determines how it behaves when confronted by rivals, predators, or prey.

Animals assess threats and opportunities in real time, choosing whether to stand their ground, intimidate an opponent, pursue a target, or retreat from danger. These decisions are driven by situational awareness, with creatures weighing factors such as confidence, opponent strength, and the risks of continuing a fight.

When tensions escalate, encounters can develop into full combat events involving multiple participants. Animals may circle opponents, threaten, bluff charge, lunge, bite, kick, tail swipe, and utilize other species-specific attacks against their targets. 

Battles have meaningful consequences! Successful attacks inflict injuries, with the damage determined by the attacker’s strength and lethality, as well as the defender’s resilience. Particularly powerful blows may even knock an animal to the ground. Similarly, fleeing animals also have a small chance to stumble, based on their overall wellness and fatigue.

Animal Hunting

Animals can now hunt to satisfy their hunger, either alone or as part of a coordinated group. When members of a social or family group become hungry, the group's leader may initiate a hunt, rallying nearby members into a dedicated hunting party. Particularly hungry group members can even encourage the leader to begin a hunt, even though only the leader can organize and lead the hunting party. Solitary species, meanwhile, will independently search for prey.

Predators evaluate potential targets based on factors such as age, health, and overall threat level, often preferring young, sick, or otherwise vulnerable animals.

After selecting a target, hunters enter a stalking phase lasting a short while, as they carefully approach their prey. If the prey or members of its social group detect the hunters, the stalking phase immediately ends and the encounter escalates into an active chase or combat event.

Injuries & Scarring

If an animal survives its injuries, wounds will gradually heal over time, leaving behind unique scars that persist on an individual basis.

The system’s effects extend beyond the battlefield. Victories and defeats can influence herd hierarchies, leadership roles, and ultimately an animal’s chances of survival, helping create unpredictable and emergent wildlife interactions across your parks.

Improved Animal Locomotion

Animal movement has received a substantial overhaul, making locomotion feel more natural, responsive and believable across a wide range of situations. Animals now preserve momentum more effectively while turning, directly leaning into their turns if they are tight enough.

Animation blending and movement control have been significantly improved, allowing animals to transition more naturally between behavioral states while reducing sudden directional changes. The results are especially evident in larger species, which now exhibit a more convincing sense of mass, momentum, and stability during movement.

Animal Carcasses and Decomposition

Dead animals now count as carcasses and can provide nourishment for carnivores, having maximum feeding capacity. Dead animals can also act as vectors for disease, with certain afflictions spreading more effectively through scavenging behavior.

Carcasses will decay over time, featuring a decomposition visual overlay, before eventually disappearing entirely.

Staff Workzones

Staff can now be assigned to editable Workzones, either manually or automatically. Workzones are specific areas of the park that staff are allowed to access and work in. Assigned staff will only complete tasks within their assigned Workzone, while unassigned staff can complete tasks anywhere in the park.

Players can manage Workzones from the new Staff Workzones tab in Management View. They can be created using either a brush-painting tool or a cursor-dragged square selection tool. They can also be viewed, selected, edited, and removed.

New Scrubland Vegetation

Scrubland foliage has been expanded with a wide range of new plants, variants, and biome presets, helping these environments feel denser, more varied, and more true to life. With additions such as cistus, juniper, lavender, and roman pines, players can create scrubland habitats that look more natural, layered, and realistic than before.

Improved Water Rendering

Water rendering has received a major visual upgrade. By integrating KWS into the game’s existing water system, we’ve introduced a range of new features, including improved surface tessellation, volumetric underwater rendering, and caustics. Most importantly, the new system delivers significantly better baseline performance than the previous version, allowing submerged objects to remain fully visible even when viewed from above the waterline.

These visual improvements also opened the door for a more flexible and intuitive water painting workflow. Players can now choose from 6 water styles: Natural, River, Lagoon, Swell, Distrophic and Muddy.

Simply click on an existing body of water with a different brush selected, and its material will instantly update—making it easier than ever to experiment with and apply new water looks.

New Official Prefabs

An entire array of new official prefabs have been added! With community member Sticky's invaluable help, over 70 new Park Logistics and Animal Shelter prefabs have been added across all themes. Additionally, we've prepared themed Staff Breakroom facilities to help you quickly iterate on your park's visuals, without needing to master modular building.

Update 17 Changes

Staff Promotion & Morale

Staff progression has been rebalanced to give every role a clearer and more rewarding growth path. Each staff type now has three promotion levels, with every level unlocking a Base Skill and a Veteran Skill that can be upgraded by the player. After every shift, staff earn a small amount of XP, allowing them to steadily work toward their next promotion. Once they reach the required XP threshold, they can visit Staff Centers to train for their next rank, which also comes with a salary increase.

Staff Morale has also been improved. Staff now need a manageable workload and a proper place to relax during breaks. To support this, we’ve added the Staff Breakroom, a new module designed to help staff recharge and enjoy their downtime.

Streamlined Logistics

Park Logistics has received a major readability pass, with several changes aimed at making the system easier to understand and use. To make core logistics gameplay more proactive, Loading Bay orders must now be placed manually. Up to four resources can be ordered at once, with total capacity determined by the number of trucks currently stationed at the bay. Orders arrive at the park at the end of the month in which they were placed, and each order can be repeated for up to 12 months.

The Compost resource has also been reworked. Compost is now essential for feed production at Produce Stations, with each kilogram of animal dung producing one kilogram of compost. This should make compost output feel more balanced and meaningful.

At the same time, keepers no longer need Compost Heaps to clean exhibits. If no heap is present, animal dung can now be cleaned directly; otherwise, it will be transported to the heap as before.

A new Logistics View now allows players to visualize and track the current status of resources in the park, as well as any ongoing transfers.

Improved Guest Satisfaction

Guest needs have been rebalanced to play a more significant role in overall park rating, as unmet needs can now drop further than before. To support this change, the Guest Needs Management View has also been updated for clarity: its visuals are now spatially mapped across the park, making it easier to see where each need is being well served, and where guests are being left unsatisfied.

Rock Pieces Overhaul

Many of the game's rock assets have been completely overhauled graphically, maintaining their current proportions and footprint, but featuring improved model topology, better LODs, and higher fidelity textures. This sweep of visual changes affects the various scenery rock sets, as well as a few of the rock-based construction materials for walls and roofs.

Additionally, a selection of new rock pieces has been added to expand the available shape variety, providing builders with greater flexibility when creating natural landscapes and custom rock formations.

PSA: We have adjusted the LOD and culling distances for all modular objects, increasing the maximum distances at which pieces disappear when far away. If you are experiencing worse graphical performance compared to the previous update, we recommend adjusting Geometry Quality in the game settings.

Known Issues & Additional Notes

Please send feedback and bug reports to our Discord server's appropriate channel.

Animal combat and hunting are still not 100% finished - some planned features are still missing, while some others require further tuning and balancing. The idea is that we'll continue to expand upon these systems as we get ever closer to our 1.0 release.

For now, we are aware of the following issues, which we hope to tackle soon:

• While it's been improved over PTB, there's still clipping involved with combat interactions. Due to the nature of completely dynamic encounters, this will never be truly gone, but we are excited to explore new ways to improve it in upcoming patches

• Chasing during combat is currently slightly lethargic - our programmers are already cooking up improvements for this

• Iguanodon's partner combat animation has occasional trouble with starting. We've already fixed a problem related to this, and we'll be rolling it out in an upcoming hotfix patch

• Several animals are still missing their full combat capabilities, currently being unable to attack and fight back. These animals are Psittacosaurus, Dryosaurus and Leaellynasaura

• Animals love to spend way too much time in the water. We plan to improve this soon

• Due to recent changes in texture streaming management, some of the animal's textures might be loaded at a lower mip-map resolution for players with lower VRAM. Until this is improved, we recommend freeing as much VRAM as you can by closing other GPU-intensive applications

• Some of the young animals' combat locomotion is still a little faster than we would like. We'll keep improving this

Miscellaneous issues:

• Some recent data misalignment has caused some animals' swimming capabilities to regress, causing surface positioning to be offset, often pushing individuals under water. We'll be fixing this soon

Full Patch Notes

Additions

• Animals

  • Added 4 new research items to the Management section of the Research menu:

    • Workforce Education - Reduces total staff training times by 25%

    • Professional Certification - Reduces total staff training times by 50%

    • Delivery Fleet Expansion - Unlocks an additional truck for all Loading Bays, increasing the total order capacity

    • Delivery Fleet Completion - Unlocks the final truck for all Loading Bays, maxing out the total order capacity

  • Added a new Sandbox gameplay option - Animal Browsing Fills Nutrition, allowing animals to gain Nutrition from browsing plants in the environment

  • The following animals will now sneeze when sick:

    • Acrocanthosaurus

    • Brontosaurus/Apatosaurus

    • Carcharodontosaurus

    • Coelophysis

    • Dilophosaurus

    • Nasutoceratops

    • Pachyrhinosaurus

    • Protoceratops

    • Spinosaurus

    • Torvosaurus

    • Triceratops

    • Tyrannosaurus

  • Animals will now actively update their locomotion style based on their current stamina, which will result in tired animals not being able to run

  • Animal carcasses can now act as food sources, decompose, and transmit diseases

  • Animals will now lose Safety need when they perceive danger or are engaged in combat

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Added the Staff Breakroom facility, a unique module that allows staff to lounge during their breaks and regain morale

  • Added new Official Facility Prefabs:

    • Staff Breakroom Prefabs

      • Arid

      • Basic

      • Modern

      • Rustic

      • Stone Age

      • Tropical

    • Research Station Basic

    • Loading Bay Basic

    • Storage Goods Large Basic

    • Storage Goods Small Basic

    • Storage Produce Large

    • Storage Produce Small

    • Produce Station Fish Basic

    • Produce Station Fruit Basic

    • Produce Station Insects Basic

    • Produce Station Meat Basic

    • Produce Station Mixed Basic

    • Produce Station Plants Basic

    • Staff Center Basic

    • 8 Animal Shelter Arid

    • 3 Animal Shelter Basic Cave

    • 2 Animal Shelter Basic Igloo

    • 4 Animal Shelter Basic

    • 2 Animal Shelter Basic Tent

    • 3 Animal Shelter Modern Gazebo

    • 7 Animal Shelter Modern

    • 8 Animal Shelter Rustic

    • 8 Animal Shelter Stone Age

    • 9 Animal Shelter Tropical

  • Added new modular items to the Rock Igneous set:

    • Rock Igneous Boulder 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9

    • Rock Igneous 4, 5, 6

    • Rock Igneous Cluster 2, 3 and 4

  • Added new modular items to the RockBasalt set:

    • Rock Basalt Pillar 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6

  • Added new modular items to the Rock Stonehenge set:

    • Rock Stonehenge 4, 5, and 6

  • Added new Monolith stone pieces:

    • Monolith Brick 1, 2, 3

    • Beam Monolith Pillar 2, 4

    • Beam Monolith Pillar Sloped 1, 2

    • Beam Monolith Pillar Cap

  • Added new animal silhouette pieces:

    • Allosaurus

    • Stegosaurus

    • Pachycephalosaurus

    • Compsognathus

    • Diictodon

    • Diplocaulus

    • Mononykus

    • Peltephilus

    • Sahonachelis

    • Simosuchus

    • Tiktaalik

    • Titanoboa

    • Yi

  • Added new stylized animal signs

    • Allosaurus

    • Stegosaurus

    • Pachycephalosaurus

    • Carcharodontosaurus

    • Coelophysis

    • Gallimimus

    • Oviraptor

    • Panthera

    • Paraceratherium

    • Plateosaurus

    • Styracosaurus

    • Archaeopteryx

    • Compsognathus

    • Diictodon

    • Diplocaulus

    • Mononykus

    • Peltephilus

    • Sahonachelis

    • Simosuchus

    • Tiktaalik

    • Titanoboa

    • Yi

• Foliage

  • Added new Scrubland plants

    • 9 Cistus

    • 6 False Esparto Grass

    • 6 Juniper Bush

    • 7 Lavender

    • 6 Roman Pine

  • Added new Scrubland plant variants

    • 2 Italian Strawflower

    • 7 Sabal Palmetto

  • Added new Scrubland biome presets and updated old ones

    • Mediterranean Maquis Forest

    • Palmetto Scrub

    • Conifer Scrub

    • Mediterranean Maquis Scrub

    • Rocky Garrigue

• UI/UX

  • Made many additions to the Management View Menu:

    • Added a Staff Assignments tab to the Staff View, allowing players to get a quick glance at the current tasks of a specific type of staff

    • Added a Logistics View menu, which can switch between:

      • Resource Demand - the park-wide resource storage and demand status

      • Quarterly Resource Usage - a run-down of all the producers and consumers of a certain resource type

    • Added a Workzones View menu, through which Staff Workzones can be painted, removed, and selected

  • Added a Workzone Infomenu panel, giving players the tools and information required to assign staff to a workzone

  • Implemented QoL changes to the Staff Management Menu, which now has the ability to sort staff by their name, morale, and skill level. Additionally, specific staff can be searched through a Search Input field at the top of the menu

  • Implemented QoL changes to the Animals Management Menu, which now has the ability to sort animals by their species or given name. Additionally, specific animals can be searched through a Search Input field at the top of the menu.

  • Added a ‘Move Animals’ button to the Animals Management Menu, allowing players to move multiple animals at once, depending on selection

  • Added a new ‘Notification Settings’ tab to the Notification Menu, which can be accessed by clicking on the cog wheel at the top of the menu. This new sub*menu allows users to completely toggle off specific types of notifications, and the settings will persist across parks and play sessions

  • Added a ‘Swim’ option to the Preview Animation dropdown of the Animal Nursery Menu, enabled for those animals that feature a swimming animation

  • Vivarium animals now have switchable animation support in the Animal Nursery Menu

  • Added a ‘Dead Animal’ park issue

  • Added Paleopedia descriptions to the following taxa:

    • Carcharodontosaurus

    • Elasmotherium

    • Sinotherium

    • Stegosaurus ungulatus

    • Spinosaurus

    • Tarbosaurus

    • Ursus

  • Added Paleopedia descriptions to the following excavation sites:

    • Nemegt Formation

    • Kem Kem Beds

    • Liushu Formation

    • Yamal Peninsula

  • Added a new error tooltip when placing a Vivarium animal in an incompatible vivarium: Incompatible Vivarium Configuration!

  • Added a Stamina bar to the Animal Info Menu

  • The Animal Info Menu will now report more carcass-specific data for dead animals, such as decomposition state and meat quantity

  • Added Paleopedia information for animal Confidence, Temperament, and Niche. This can be found in the Social tab

• Rendering

  • Added a Motion Blur feature to the game’s screen effects. This is disabled by default and can be enabled under the ‘Screen Effects’ section in the Options Menu

  • The map edges now have a visual boundary overlay, which is highlighted and grows in intensity during placement actions. This should better allow users to understand where the bounds of the editable map lay, and will allow us to create custom bounds in the future

• Audio

  • Added additional angry vocal variations to Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus

  • Added an alternate notification sound for when an animal dies

  • Added missing sound events to:

    • Baby hadrosaur one shots

    • Baby sauropod one shots

    • Baby Juxia/Paraceratherium one shots

    • Ouranosaurus courtship

    • Smilodon and Panthera rest/sleep transitions

  • Added Nigel dialogue for Ugrunaaluk

  • Added generic yawns for large theropods

• Music

  • Added a new Vivarium track for Arboreal animals: First Flight (1:36)

Changes

• Balance

  • Staff Base Shift Duration has been increased from 15 minutes to 25 minutes

  • Staff Base Break Duration has been increased from 2 minutes to 5 minutes

  • The relationship between Dung, Compost, and Feed has been rebalanced with the goal of making it simpler in the early game and more important in the mid-game, creating a sustainable feed production loop:

    • Animals now deposit dung proportional to ~1/3rd the mass of food eaten

    • Compost Heap now consumes 1kg Dung to produce 2kg Compost

    • Produce Station now consumes 2kg Compost to produce 4kg feed

    • Compost heaps are no longer required for staff to clean dung, but are still the only reliable source of Compost

    • Each Produce Station now requires Compost to produce any of its animal feed resources

    • Removed the obsolete ‘Industrial Paleo-Fertilizer’ research item

  • Lowered Science Team return time from 20s to 7s

  • Gave game progression a balancing pass:

    • In an effort to make the early game more forgiving, starting funds were increased as follows:

  • Easy: 100,000->150,000

  • Medium: 75,000->100,000

  • Hard: 50,000->60,000

  • In an attempt to slow down progression in the mid game slightly, several balancing measures were taken:

    • Profit Tax has been raised for the mid-high tax brackets

    • High security fencing upkeep costs have been increased

    • Animal Points rating targets have been drastically increased across the board, basing the values on more accurate estimates of required species points

• Animals

  • Afflictions/Disease system

    • Afflictions are now surveyed independently, as opposed to an animal/module being entirely “Under Observation”. This means afflictions that were previously discovered won’t be “discovered” again, and also increases simulation fidelity, as newly acquired afflictions can still be undiagnosed even when the animal/module has other diagnosed afflictions

      • Decreased spawn rates for the following animal afflictions:

      • Pemphigus

      • Bird Flu

      • Cataract

    • Derived afflictions (those which advance from other afflictions) should now be more common

    • Animal wellness can now continue to drain if left completely unchecked, even for simple diseases

    • Animals will now contaminate feeders, troughs, and beds a small constant amount regardless of their current cleanliness

    • Animal age now factors directly into Immunity calculation

  • Gameplay

    • Animals can now no longer be moved if they are dead or engaged in combat. This limit is removed in Sandbox mode

  • AI

    • Animals who are occupied, such as held by the player, in quarantine, or in combat, are now considered to be unavailable to social and family group behavior. The next highest member will be able to step in as the interim leader to coordinate herd movements

    • Adjusted vision ranges for all animals, bringing most smaller animals up, while slightly reducing the range of the largest animals

    • Play/Chasing behaviour is more refined and consistent

  • Animal Info & Data

    • Re-tuned Marginocephalian weights and size measurements

    • Corrected oversizing mistakes in both Triceratops species and Pachyrhinosaurus canadensis

    • Adjusted weights, points and prices for all ceratopsians, thyreophorans and ornithopods

  • Navigation & Locomotion

    • Moved both Paraceratherium species to the Large animal navmesh, making their navigation more environmentally accurate

    • Made many responsiveness Improvements to animal locomotion

    • Animals should now position more accurately for interaction with modules using exact animation position data instead of vague estimates

    • Made significant improvements to animal<->animal avoidance, with pathing being much more aware and responsive to other individuals. This should reduce some instances of animals walking through each other

    • Updated sprinting speeds for Tyrannosaurus and all hadrosaurs

  • Animation

    • Slowed down large theropod nest digging animations

  • Needs

    • Argentinosaurus, Apatosaurus, Brachiosaurus and Brontosaurus will take 20 minutes for their hunger and thirst to fully drain

    • Animal dung mass is now a function of their stomach capacity

    • Main animal welfare now takes Hitpoints and Wellness into account

    • Stamina drain for animals is now driven by exact moment-to-moment locomotion speed, not the desired speed. Animals should become exhausted less quickly during specific actions

    • Animals “Anger” behavior is now driven by environmental and emotional needs, not including hunger or thirst

    • Actions like eating and drinking can now be quickly interrupted by aggression and danger

    • Adjusted drinking intakes for all infant animals, lowering their drinking duration times across the board

    • Dead animals will now not count towards enclosure welfare analysis

    • Nutrition and Hydration drain at half speed when in danger, Stimulation and Socialization do not drain at all

    • Reworked AI Drink logic to fix a number of instabilities that could stop animals from drinking properly, especially terrain water

    • Eating state now controls browsing and carcass consumption behavior directly

  • Visuals

    • Animals now take much less time to dry out visually

• Characters

  • Nigel’s animal voice lines won’t be triggering anymore for animals that are currently in combat, or dead

• Guests

  • Fixed a number of rare bugs in human AI and navigation that could cause humans to skip important steps and sometimes result in floating people who walk through everything

• Construction

  • Reduced input jitter across all actions

  • Action input while the cursor is overlapping the GUI has been overhauled, with any of the actions snapping the placement cursor to the middle of the screen when players are interacting with the game’s UI. This should improve visual feedback for elements which have not been placed yet

  • Gave modular construction a fresh batch of improvements and features aimed at generally improving the quality of life of the building experience:

    • Vertical shifting has been re-worked to better support aligning. When stacking and aligning are enabled, holding LeftShift will now activate the vertical offset along the hit-aligned direction of the current piece, instead of simply going up-down. This should ultimately facilitate sinking pieces into each other, or raising them along specific directions

    • The piece rotation snap hotkey was changed over to LeftControl from LeftShift so it would not collide with the vertical shifting feature. Holding LeftControl while pressing either of the rotation keys will now snap the piece 45 degrees along its up axis

    • Turning off object aligning will now reset the piece’s rotation

    • Hovered pieces within modular editing will now be highlighted

  • Improved fence placement and modular interaction with fences

    • Curved sections that are started off of existing posts or barriers will now more smartly switch their starting vectors based on the players’ input

    • Adjusted fence snapping logic for modular pieces that snap to fences, so that invalid fence slopes would be given appropriate feedback

    • Improved visual and audio feedback around fence replacement

  • Changing the style for grid-bound wall pieces will now adjust their positioning to meet grid edges

  • Made improvements to vertical grid placement for modular groups

• Environment

  • Made Tropical lighting slightly more consistent with temperate

  • Temperate and cooler maps now have more neutral lighting

  • Warm maps now have a warmer color grading tint whilst retaining neutral lighting

  • Overhauled sunrise/sunset transition with better colors and light fading

  • Corrected cloud colors during sunrise/sunset to better fit the environment

  • Stabilized shadows by reducing general dithering and flickering

• Landscaping

  • Water bodies can now be replaced by painting a different water type within them

  • Foliage painting for 1m brush has been improved - dragging the brush over terrain will result in a string of vegetation, while single stationary brush strokes only produce one item

  • Increased foliage painting density for shrubs when the brush is larger than 25m

• Paths

  • Improved the slope limit algorithm so that it’s easier to place paths on hills and standard slopes

• Foliage

  • Removed shine from distant foliage impostors for a smoother appearance

• UI/UX

  • Overhauled the Paleopedia Menu, featuring a more condensed and practical layout. The information in the Animal Paleopedia screen, specifically, has been re-arranged and re-grouped under the following categories: Info, Exhibit, Enrichment, Social, Ecology, Disease and Thoughts

  • Color-corrected new animal hero renders in the Animal Nursery

  • Changed exhibit welfare UI to not turn red if Animal Habitat Welfare is off

  • Improved camera orbiting accuracy, basing the dynamic adapting logic on modular and terrain sampling, rather than terrain sampling alone. This change should improve controls around structures that are farther away from the ground

  • Added many camera improvements when switching from and to tracking mode, overall improving the camera view’s stability and reducing jumpiness

  • State icons will now disappear after about 30 seconds so that numerous issues wouldn’t clutter the screen. Opening the park issues menu will instead display all the state icons for the various issues

  • Updating tracking functionality across all Info Menus:

    • Tracking is respected by players setting tracking preferences through clicking the toggle

    • Tracking is forced on when an object is selected through a third-party UI (like notifications, or park issues). This enforces camera vision over the object

    • Tracking is also enforced when re-selecting an already selected object

    • The tracking preferences are now persistent across sessions

  • Improved GUI slider controls

  • Previewed animals within the Nursery Menu will now smoothly transition their walk animation based on current maturity

  • ‘Dying Animal’ park issues are now only generated after an animal falls below 70% wellness

  • Opening the Landscaping Menu now clears modular editing as well as modular actions

  • Due to the gameplay changes to Staff Promotion, hiring buttons now entirely skip opening the Staff Hiring Menu, and automatically hire staff from a pool of available individuals of the selected staff type

  • Camera orbiting has been improved, with the camera now choosing more appropriate distances to orbit modular objects. Switching between objects while tracking them with the camera now also behaves more smoothly

  • Made changes to the Staff Infomenu panel to match the updated staff promotion and perk gameplay

  • When operating a Quarantine Bay, Vets now show the animal name and treatment progress in their assignment information

  • Upon starting group editing, the Building Menu now only fully maximizes if the ‘Pin’ toggle is enabled

  • Clicking on a notification to visualize its contents will now clear it

  • Updated text elements in notifications in order to make game notifications more readable

  • Updated Paleopedia and Animal Infosign splash screens for the following species:

    • Camarasaurus grandis

    • Camarasaurus supremus

    • Charonosaurus

    • Coelodonta

    • Edmontosaurus annectens

    • Edmontosaurus regalis

    • Juxia

    • Mammuthus

    • Paraceratherium bugtiense

    • Torvosaurus gurneyi

    • Torvosaurus tanneri

    • Tarbosaurus

    • Sinotherium

    • Smilodon fatalis

    • Ugrunaaluk

  • Important warning dialogs are now enforced on screen so that they would always be visible when needed

• Post Processing

  • Base color grading is more saturated to make up for neutralized lighting

  • Reduced chromatic aberration intensity by half

  • Reconfigured ambient occlusion for High and Ultra, leading to a more tasteful effect whilst retaining deeper shadows

  • Adjusted UTAA effect

• Rendering

  • Targeted several image stability measures in order to reduce overall noise and muddiness:

    • Frustum shadows begin fading into the image at a much higher distance, with the shadows now relying entirely on physically-based casting at a close and medium distance. This effectively removes a layer of shadow artifacts

    • Smoothed edges of cast shadows, especially at lower visual settings. This aims to improve image clarity all while increasing fidelity for all users

  • Improved shadow culling, with shadows at the edge of the screen now being much more stable

  • Increased object rendering distances across all visual settings. Modular pieces now have much more consistent culling, which doesn't trigger quite so close to the camera anymore

  • Reduced detail ambient occlusion on Cinematic, Ultra and High for a less dirty look

  • Overhauled transparent glass rendering, improving reflection fidelity and adding specular highlights

• Audio

  • Animals dying or having diseases discovered will no longer trigger a park issue sound

  • Lowered mid-frequencies on animal hover sound

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

  • Nigel will now wait for a few seconds to notify you about park issues, and will only do so if the issue is still active

  • Slightly lowered guest crowd audio volume

• Music

  • Building tracks ‘Build, Sleep, Repeat’ and ‘Ingenuity’ can now play at a park rating of 0

Bug Fixes

• Crashes

  • Fixed a rare crash when special modular pieces check their nav connectivity

• Critical

  • Memory Leaks

    • Fixed a memory leak in navmesh generation

    • Fixed a significant number of audio event leaks that could leak to audio system instabilities and degraded performance

    • Fixed a memory leak in interactable <-> navmesh mapping

    • Fixed path system leaks that could destabilize the entire navigation system after a long period of time

    • Tightened and fixed safety issues in a number of multi-threading contexts

  • Navigation & AI

    • Fixed a major memory corruption bug in how accessible navigation areas were recorded

    • Fixed shoreline detection not running on loaded games until a world edit was made

    • Fixed a critical rare desync that could occur downstream of selling animals that likely lead to unwanted animal teleport behaviour, including incorrect animals being moved to quarantine

    • Fixed an animal enclosure registering bug which would cause moving un-enclosed animals to deregister from important data

    • Fixed Animals Fleeing or Chasing could get stuck without a valid path after an interruption

    • Lots of fixes to Animal AI State life cycle, should improve general stability

  • Save/Load

    • Fixed a long-standing oversight where save processing timeout would be sped up by in-game time, where 4x speed could give only a quarter the intended save timeout

  • Undo/Redo

    • Fixed a critical set of errors related to foliage painting and modular terrain flattening which could create massive corruption of the undo/redo stack

  • Vivariums

    • Fixed several deep system desyncs that could cause Vivarium loading to generate the incorrect enrichment configuration. Among other problems, this could cause floating vivarium animals

    • Fixed a critical logic mistake that would cause Vivarium environments to incorrectly refresh when a burrowing animal was added to a terrestrial Vivarium

    • Fixed a small issue resulting in vivariums losing their plants when the biome selection would be changed

  • Solidified Steam Workshop checks so that Workshop content would be available while playing debug builds on the Public Testing Branch

• Gameplay

  • Fixed a starting configuration issue in the ‘Rockies’ map that would cause the Visitor Spawner facility to be obstructed, preventing visitors from entering the park

  • Fixed a selection issue that could cause modular selection and group editing implicitly, even if the cursor was hovering an animal target

  • Tightened up modular refund logic. Switching modular interchange sets (such as Vivariums’ layouts) no longer triggers a refund money glitch

• Animals

  • Need Satisfaction

    • Fixed an issue that could cause animals to often fail to drink from terrain water

    • Animal AI States were incorrectly handling priority and penalty, causing the animal to stand idle when better activities are available

    • Fixed inconsistencies that could prevent animals from drinking in certain circumstances

    • When finding a place to stand for interaction, animals should now reject positions that are far too high or low

  • Affictions/Disease

    • Animal’s consideration of “sparse foliage” (relevant for contraction of silicosis) was extremely wrong, causing rampant silicosis in enclosures with abundant foliage

  • Navigation

    • Fixed a bug that prevented animals from properly avoiding each other

    • Fleeing animals no longer have to stop at midpoints along their direction of travel

    • Fixed animal locomotion getting caught on corners in some cases

  • Locomotion/Animation

    • Fixed a locomotion issue that caused animals speeds to disrespect their original animations. If you notice any major discrepancies compared to the previous version, please let us know

    • Fixed a number of animal animation oversights:

      • Fixed adult Muttaburrasaurus not using their trot animation

      • Fixed baby Panthera locomotion transition offset

      • Fixed baby Ursus not strafing left properly

      • Fixed a few instances of bad animal growth data, causing specific body parts to not play the correct animations. This could result in forelimbs clipping into the floor plane, for instance

      • Fixed idle animation transition issue for the amphibious Titanoboa

      • Fixed many instances of bad animal IK settings causing animal limbs to stretch out during certain animations

    • Fixed a bug in the grounding logic that could cause quickly turning animals to tilt dramatically in incorrect directions

  • Behavior

    • Animal group behavior should now respect when the leader is not available, such as being dead or in quarantine

    • Targeting functions are now able to correctly filter out dead or unavailable animals

    • Fixed bugs in the awareness system that could reduce the consistency of animal vision

    • Fixed nesting animals getting interrupted while they were trying to lay eggs

    • Baby animals will now consider the social group of their family leader as part of their own social group

    • Group leaders holding with group behavior is now enqueued after roaming, and re-validates group leadership authority

• Staff

  • Fixed a staff gate bug that has been allowing staff to reach rooftops

  • Fixed player requested medical care action remaining on animals after the requested care has been provided, leading to vets being idle

  • Fixed shoveling instability at high game speeds

  • Fixed a bug in human prop bookkeeping that could cause staff to use the wrong or no props

  • Staff Job Site Fulfillment was overwriting Logistics tallies with Operation tallies, causing inaccurate data shown in the Call Staff Button

  • Staff break time distribution now takes recent work into account, should better prioritize who are actively working

  • Staff can now begin their break while idle and moving, as opposed to only checking for break time at the end of their path

  • Vets should no longer try to survey dead animals or animals in quarantine

  • Fixes for staff logistics, should help prevent them from getting stuck

  • Fixed error when displaying description for Remote Medication staff assignment

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Fixed bound geometry issue that would cause foliage items to spawn incorrectly in rotated Vivariums

  • Fixed Vivarium modules not having any education/entertainment value

• Construction

  • Fixed rare race condition causing modular pieces to not restore their correct layers if placement was done too quickly. This could cause the affected pieces to not interact with entity navigation, also becoming unselectable

  • Fixed bugs in terraforming that could cause inconsistencies after edits

  • Fixed a bug that would mess up piece positioning during quick scale

  • Particles in modular pieces are now pre-warmed properly (making them visible if placing while the game is paused)

  • Fixed an issue causing small foliage brush strokes not to be registered within the Undo/Redo system

• UI/UX

  • Fixed several issues related to game view snapshot functionality:

    • Prefab previews and save snapshots should now have correct post processing

    • Auto-save previews should not be black anymore

  • Fix for a long-standing issue where the animal social GUI could report a completely wrong animal as the group's leader, even a different species

  • Fixed certain button interactions not triggering audio in the Main Menu

  • Fixed a nursery menu animal preview animation issue that could cause vivarium animals to freeze their animations after a new incubation was started

  • Fixed a one-frame lighting glitch that would occur when opening the Management Menu

  • Tightened up tooltip logic so that tooltips getting stuck on screen wouldn’t happen anymore

  • Unified animal pregnancy display logic

  • Fixed animal state description reporting an animal as ‘Dead’ when it was actually collapsed

  • Fixed a critical bug that could result in the Animal Info GUI individual switching to completely break down

  • Fixed ‘Hard Difficulty’ text spelling

  • Fixed camera orbiting jitter happening with moving targets during low framerate

  • Fixed an oversight causing the search results in the Building Menu to duplicate

  • Fixed alphabetical sorting of animal buttons in the Animal Nursery Menu

  • Fixed animal animation transitions in the Animal Nursery Menu preview

  • Fixed a threading issue that could break the animal menu lists

  • Fixed an issue causing the ‘Animal Escaped’ park issue not properly registering if Animal Welfare was disabled in the gameplay settings

  • Fixed a GUI tooltip oversight that could result in tooltips fading out of view if certain other GUI elements were being refreshed

  • Fixed selection oversight that could cause an incorrect UX flow if selecting objects that stopped existing (such as clicking on a ‘Dead Animal’ notification after the animal has been removed)

  • Fixed a long-standing time scale reset issue triggered by unpausing time after quitting Screenshot Mode

• Audio

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

  • Fixed foley sounds not playing for hadrosaur rest and sleep animations

• Misc.

  • Fixed a multi-threading bug in vivarium processing

  • Improved old animal save data conversion to load all animals that can be loaded, instead of failing to load all remaining animals

• Steam

  • We should finally have a robust fix for the ‘Exhibit A’ and ‘Exhibit B’ achievements. Enclosure building events should now properly register and increment the Steam enclosure built stat, triggering the 2 achievements at the correct times

Performance

• Patched a major performance degradation related to modular construction which could irreversibly lower framerate baseline within a session. You should now be able to play much longer at a stable FPS

• Significant animal animation performance improvements (largest CPU bottleneck for parks with many animals)

  • Core logic pass is ~25% faster

  • Animal animation controller passes are nearly twice as fast

• Texture streaming is now supported for animals, modular pieces, paths and fences!

  • This allows unneeded textures to be dynamically loaded/unloaded from memory, and should significantly improve performance on GPUs with less memory.

• Significant speedup in animal awareness calculations, removing a major CPU bottleneck for large animal counts

• Made significant improvements to the game’s runtime memory allocation:

  • Shaved off as much as 2GB from VRAM usage. This should result in a smoother gameplay with less stuttering, especially for graphic-bound players with low/mid-tier GPUs. At the same time, this optimization should reduce GPU load slightly. 

  • Introduced many optimizations for RAM usage, shrinking the total usage down by as much as ~1GB under certain conditions.This will result in fewer loading and gameplay crashes allowing for a higher level of park complexity for systems with less total available memory.

  • Packed many terrain textures together, slightly reducing memory overhead per texture

• Many backend CPU optimizations

• Removed unnecessary refresh calls made when opening the building menu

• Many processing and event optimizations in various areas of the GUI

• Improved shadow rendering performance for all game settings by balancing shadow distance

• Improved Animal AI Multi-Threading

• Made decent performance improvements during modular structure placement, especially noticeable for large groups with many pieces

• Optimized state icon processing

• Continuous animal visual updates are more efficient

Welcome, Park Testers!

This marks the final PTB release before the full launch of Update 17 on June 25th. We've continued fine-tuning animal aggression, locomotion, and combat animations to deliver the most natural and lifelike creature behaviors yet.

We've also expanded the building toolkit with new modular pieces, including animal signs and improved rock assets.

How to Access the Public Testing Branch (Experimental!)

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.

Welcome, park managers!

We’re excited to announce that Update 17 will be releasing June 25th, introducing eight new species for three iconic dinosaurs: Allosaurus, Stegosaurus and Pachycephalosaurus - but of course, that’s far from all. Prepare to fight with dynamic combat, brutal partner animations and explore new environments alongside overhauled management mechanics. 

This is another huge milestone update for the team and we couldn’t be more thrilled to continue expanding and improving upon combat up until we leave Early Access next year.

If you’d like to try combat early and own the game on Steam, you can switch over to the Public Test Branch and send us your bug reports on Discord. Please note however that Allosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus and partner animations will not be available until the update releases.

8 New Species

The long-awaited stars of this update are certainly some fan favorites! Arriving from the famous Morrison and Hell Creek formations, these dinosaurs are sure to become high-profile attractions:

• Allosaurus anax

• Allosaurus europaeus

• Allosaurus fragilis

• Allosaurus jimmadseni

• Pachycephalosaurus spinifer

• Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis

• Stegosaurus stenops

• Stegosaurus ungulatus

Each alternate species features a unique model and morphological difference to truly make them stand on their own. Pachycephalosaurus in particular has one of the most unique ontogeny transitions in the game, drastically changing its head shape and proportions.

With the introduction of combat, our team have also been able to improve your existing species with better turns, leaning and smooth locomotion when exiting their eating and drinking states. Speaking of…

Dynamic Combat

Combat is finally coming to Prehistoric Kingdom! Both herbivores and carnivores have a range of emergent conditions that allow them to engage in dynamic combat with lunges and opportunistic attacks. In response to incoming damage, animals can stumble, get knocked over or even trip while fleeing at low health.

Scared prey items aren’t exactly pushovers, either! If you carefully watch the montage below, you might notice the fleeing Edmontosaurus actually strikes the T. rex with its tail. Just a shame there was two of them…

With our system, animals freely position themselves and can try to avoid dangerous areas like the tail of a Stegosaurus. A lone T. rex may be hesitant to take on an adult Triceratops, but add a second rex and they can quickly overwhelm it.

When an animal dies, their carcass can be eaten by predators and will slowly begin to decay, potentially becoming a vector for disease. When a carcass is too decayed, only scavengers will be interested in feeding from it.

Partner Animations

In the midst of dynamic combat, certain animals can seamlessly engage in a “partner animation” - a synchronized fight between two members of the same species. While the bulk of combat relies on our dynamic systems, we felt that it was important to also deliver on key interactions like headbutting, horn locking or wrestling. Plus, we knew it’d make for a pretty sick reveal in the trailer!

In the case of Triceratops, they actually have three different partner animations of varying lengths and intensity to ensure their encounters continue to feel dynamic while exhibiting their horn locking behavior. Since each partner animation has an initiator and a reciprocator, this means that one fight sequence has double the animation workload! It’s a massive task, but our animators have knocked it out of the park so far.

Additional Notes

• Partner animations can only trigger for animals that are within a similar size range to each other. The team chooses this range per animation, but we try to be somewhat lenient to preserve fun despite occasional clipping or misalignment in extreme cases. Regardless, our system does the best it can to account for size differences.

• Due to the enormous amount of work required, a limited number of species will be able to perform partner animations in U17. So far, they have been shown for Allosaurus, Triceratops, Megaloceros, Pachycephalosaurus and Ursus. In the future, we will continue to expand the combat partner animations to other species where possible. We don’t want it to become the status quo, but instead add them where we feel a specific behavior needs to be captured depending on the creature.

• For full 1.0 release next year, we would like to include non-violent partner animations that can occur during socialisation or courtship. We can’t understate how big of a task that might be for us given our limited resources, so please stay tuned for more info in the future.

New Environments

The Scrubland biome has seen a massive improvement with a wealth of vegetation added to its roster. From the mighty roman pine to fields of lavender, over 40 new variants and updated presets have been grown just for your planting pleasure.

If that didn’t whet your appetite, perhaps a refreshment will! Water rendering has been completely overhauled with caustics, volumetric lighting and (wait for it) the ability to see pieces that are beneath the surface. Spinosaurus and builders rejoice!

New Management Features

Management related gameplay has also seen some substantial changes in U17. For an in-depth discussion on all the features mentioned below, please check out January’s Dev Diary!

• Guest needs are now based on module accessibility and distance.

• Ordering resources from the Loading Bay is now the player’s responsibility.

• Staff now gain experience and can be promoted individually for more granular control.

• Staff require breakrooms and will eventually quit if their happiness is low.

• Workzones can be painted to better manage staff assignments. Use the workzone info panel to automatically assign staff or do it manually from the staff management menu (or by selecting a staff member).

• New tabs have been added to the management view, allowing players to see their resource usage and where staff are currently moving in the park.

Thank you for reading this special Update 17 blog post!

We hope that you’re excited for the update’s release and we can’t wait to continue building upon everything that’s coming this month on June 25th.

- The PK Team

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Welcome, Park Testers!

This PTB release addresses the most critical instability issues introduced in the last PTB update. It also delivers a first tuning pass on animal aggression behavior, resulting in more natural encounters - animals should now be more selective when choosing targets and in determining how they respond to potential threats.

In addition, we have improved combat animation smoothness and overall fidelity across the board. Animal hit reactions and staggers have been fixed and re-enabled, predator finisher animations have been introduced (only for Tyrannosaurus and Tarbosaurus at the moment, with the other carnivores to follow), while throwing and stumble physics have all received additional polish.

How to Access the Public Testing Branch (Experimental!)

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.

Welcome, Park Testers!

This PTB release introduces Animal Combat, an all-new emergent gameplay system that allows your animals to react more dynamically to their environment and to one another.

While this feature is still a work in progress, we're eager to hear your feedback. In particular, we're looking for reports on animal responsiveness, aggression behaviors, and any unexpected interactions you encounter as we continue expanding combat mechanics, refining animations, and balancing behavior.

We've also made significant strides in stability and optimization. Overall CPU and rendering performance have improved since the previous update, making it easier to run and manage larger, more complex parks.

Please note that Allosaurus and Pachycephalosaurus are NOT in this game version, and will instead be released with the full, live update!

Thank you for helping us test and shape the future of the game!

PTB Features

Animal Combat

Animals can now fight one another through a fully dynamic combat system. Each species has a combat profile that determines how it behaves when confronted by rivals, predators, or prey.

Animals assess threats and opportunities in real time, choosing whether to stand their ground, intimidate an opponent, pursue a target, or retreat from danger. These decisions are driven by situational awareness, with creatures weighing factors such as confidence, opponent strength, and the risks of continuing a fight.

When tensions escalate, encounters can develop into full combat events involving multiple participants. Animals may circle opponents, threaten, bluff charge, lunge, bite, kick, tail swipe, and utilize other species-specific attacks against their targets. 

Battles have meaningful consequences! Successful attacks inflict injuries, with the damage determined by the attacker’s strength and lethality, as well as the defender’s resilience. Particularly powerful blows may even knock an animal to the ground. Similarly, fleeing animals also have a small chance to stumble, based on their overall wellness and fatigue.

If an animal survives its injuries, wounds will gradually heal over time, leaving behind unique scars that persist on an individual basis.

The system’s effects extend beyond the battlefield. Victories and defeats can influence herd hierarchies, leadership roles, and ultimately an animal’s chances of survival, helping create unpredictable and emergent wildlife interactions across your parks.

Improved Animal Locomotion

Animal movement has received a substantial overhaul, making locomotion feel more natural, responsive and believable across a wide range of situations. Animals now preserve momentum more effectively while turning, directly leaning into their turns if they are tight enough.

Animation blending and movement control have been significantly improved, allowing animals to transition more naturally between behavioral states while reducing sudden directional changes. The results are especially evident in larger species, which now exhibit a more convincing sense of mass, momentum, and stability during movement.

Animal Carcasses and Decomposition

Dead animals now count as carcasses and can provide nourishment for carnivores, having maximum feeding capacity. Dead animals can also act as vectors for disease, with certain afflictions spreading more effectively through scavenging behavior.

Carcasses will decay over time, featuring a decomposition visual overlay, before eventually disappearing entirely.

PTB Changes

Overhauled Save & Load Menus

The Save and Load menus have been overhauled with a fresh design to show your statistics and PTB saves. There are also more differences between the two menus, so you should be less likely to accidentally load instead of saving a park.

How to Access the Public Testing Branch (Experimental!)

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.

Welcome to the May Development Diary!

As usual, it’s been all hands on deck as we continue to work on the different aspects of combat coming in U17. We’ve made some great strides this month with the addition of danger zones, throwable animals and improved locomotion which we’ll talk about in more detail shortly.

Update 17

Allosaurus

Meet Allosaurus anax and europaeus, our final two Jurassic predators coming in Update 17!

Previously known by the moniker of Saurophaganax, Allosaurus anax is an enormous predator with a particularly bad temperament! Unlike its related species, anax does not form social groups and prefers an anti-social lifestyle. It’s a big, mean fighting machine.

On the other hand, Allosaurus europaeus is a vibrantly colored species from, you guessed it, Europe! Sharing its formation with Stegosaurus ungulatus and Torvosaurus gurneyi, this mid-sized predator can be found in forested habitats living together as mated pairs.

While these Allosaurus can look menacing as adults, their babies are super cute! With their light, striped bodies and a fluffy coat of feathers, these are definitely one of our favorite baby theropods.

Locomotion Improvements

On the road to finishing combat, we’ve been able to make animal movement look more natural and responsive depending on the situation. Animals can now turn faster when they want to run away, make tighter turns at high speeds and just generally turn a lot smoother. This was a particular issue for sauropods who would previously snap into their turn animation.

Combat

Let’s talk a bit more about the behavioral backbone that makes combat a reality. As you know, Prehistoric Kingdom typically strives to present these creatures in a more animalistic light. When fights or aggressive behavior occurs, there needs to be a reason for it.

• Become aggressive while feeding

• Bully other species during the mating season

• Cannibalize babies while hungry

• Cannibalize their own species while starving

• Fight due to overcrowding

• Spar during mating season

• Spar with siblings

In terms of dynamic combat itself, quite a few new elements have been integrated since last month. It’s all still very work in progress and not yet polished, but we’re quite happy with how it has come along!

• Animals now have “danger zones” to signal which side of their body an attacker should be wary of, making predators or rivals a bit more hesitant and likely to move position. In the case of something like Stegosaurus or Ankylosaurus, this means that their rear or sides would be a danger zone.

• When animals go for an attack, large weight differences or big damage can launch competitors into their knockdown state. If the animal has enough health, they’ll be able to get back up. We’re still tuning the look of this feature, but it’s awesome to see herbivores like a sauropod, mammoth or Stegosaurus toss their attackers around.

• Animals can now perform “reaction” attacks when they’re close to an opponent. This can mean swinging their tail, taking a quick bite or even slashing their claws. They’re inherently opportunistic and help make things feel more alive.

As you’ve probably noticed in the video, the more damage an animal sustains in battle, the more wounds that’ll appear on their body. If they survive, these wounds will eventually turn to scars. Each individual has its own procedural wound offset, so no two animals will have scars in the same position.

Once an animal has died, predators can eat from their corpse! While we aren’t balancing the game around the idea of a self-sustaining ecosystem, this feature combined with breeding and herbivores eating from plants in Sandbox should provide players with some level of ecosystem support. We’re very curious to see what sort of results come from this!

Improved Save & Load Menus

Created by Black_Rugops

Created by Yepetto

Created by Salem

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Welcome to the April Development Update!

This month we released the first PTB for Update 17, adding new management mechanics, updated water rendering and two species of Stegosaurus for you to discover. Though it’s yet to contain combat, we’ve had really good feedback so far! Players on Steam can switch over at anytime, so be sure to read the patch notes for all the details.

Combat has continued to see a lot of development throughout April, with animals now taking damage and even dying if they take too many hits. We’ve developed custom tooling that allows us to attach “hurt boxes” to animals while attacking, meaning that any lunge, hit or bite must be close enough to actually damage an opponent. Next month, we’re aiming to expand attack variety, support “sweeping” attack damage (e.g. tail swipes) and begin to start polishing things up as we mass-produce combat animations for all the animals.

Our custom editor for adding damage and interaction events.

Update 17

Allosaurus

At long last, the king of the Jurassic arrives in Update 17! Coming with four different alternate species, we’re proud to finally unveil the first two models for Allosaurus fragilis and jimmadseni.

For each species of Allosaurus coming to the game, we’ve tried to give them unique skulls and bodies inspired by their fossilised counterparts. For example, fragilis is much more robust compared to the sloped snout of jimmadseni. 

Being a large but slender theropod, there’s a lot of character we’re excited to put into its animations! We’re definitely trying to make this dinosaur feel particularly conniving as it stalks around its habitat.

Combat

As you can imagine, our animation team have had their hands full building out the combat library for our various rigs. With our combat system, we’re working to add a number of unique capabilities depending on the animal such as kicking or slashing if something gets too close. You can see some of this variety below on these tests for Brachiosaurus, mammoth and Dilophosaurus.

In terms of AI, a large part of this month’s development was spent on encounters and circling behaviors, ensuring that animals target the flank of their opponent and can defensively position themselves. This is best demonstrated by something like Stegosaurus which will actively turn its body and tail towards threats during battle.

Update 18

Wetland Plants

As a little tease of what’s to come, we also have new wetland plants arriving later this year in Update 18! To make the most of U17’s water rendering improvements, we’ll be adding new underwater vegetation like eelgrass and expanding the roster of surface plants with species such as hyacinth.

And of course, it wouldn’t be a biome update without revisions! U18 will add new versions of the bald cypress, mangroves, reeds and cattails to revitalise your existing marshes.

Created by acrogiga2004

Created by ASSASSINSPINO

Created by springrolla

Created by luci257

Created by ItsjustNick Thank you for reading April's dev diary! We greatly appreciate all the feedback and excitement that the Update 17 PTB has received so far. All of your screenshots have been mindblowing and are a huge motivator for the team while we continue to chip away at combat. We hope that you’ll continue to look forward to seeing more combat progress in May’s Dev Diary! - The PK Team

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Welcome, Park Testers! This PTB release is focused on quickly addressing the most commonly reported community issues - most notably input system bugs and unusable keybind controls. We hope this provides a more stable testing environment while we continue working on the remaining species for U17 and further develop animal combat.

How to Access the Public Testing Branch (Experimental!)

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.

Welcome, Park Testers!

This early version of Update 17 adds Stegosaurus, rebalances mid-game progression and overhauls many of the management features. Notable changes include manual Loading Bay orders, workzones, staff breakrooms and a new staff promotion system! Please note that this release does not include combat!

In addition to everyone's favorite plated lizard, players can also make use of our updated water rendering tech to create stunning rivers and lakes while actually seeing all the rocks and plants you've put beneath the waves.

PTB Features

Stegosaurus

This long-awaited prehistoric icon has finally arrived, with both Stegosaurus stenops and Stegosaurus ungulatus joining the park. Famous for their distinctive plated backs, powerful tail spikes, and unmistakable silhouettes, these classic herbivores make a standout addition to your growing roster.

Staff Workzones

Staff can now be assigned to editable Workzones, either manually or automatically. Workzones are specific areas of the park that staff are allowed to access and work in. Assigned staff will only complete tasks within their assigned Workzone, while unassigned staff can complete tasks anywhere in the park.

Players can manage Workzones from the new Staff Workzones tab in Management View. They can be created using either a brush-painting tool or a cursor-dragged square selection tool. They can also be viewed, selected, edited, and removed.

New Scrubland Vegetation

Scrubland foliage has been expanded with a wide range of new plants, variants, and biome presets, helping these environments feel denser, more varied, and more true to life. With additions such as cistus, juniper, lavender, and roman pines, players can create scrubland habitats that look more natural, layered, and realistic than before.

Improved Water Rendering

Water rendering has received a major visual upgrade. By integrating KWS into the game’s existing water system, we’ve introduced a range of new features, including improved surface tessellation, volumetric underwater rendering, and caustics. Most importantly, the new system delivers significantly better baseline performance than the previous version, allowing submerged objects to remain fully visible even when viewed from above the waterline.

These visual improvements also opened the door for a more flexible and intuitive water painting workflow. Players can now choose from 6 water styles: Natural, River, Lagoon, Swell, Distrophic and Muddy.

Simply click on an existing body of water with a different brush selected, and its material will instantly update—making it easier than ever to experiment with and apply new water looks.

PTB Changes

Staff Promotion & Morale

Staff progression has been rebalanced to give every role a clearer and more rewarding growth path. Each staff type now has three promotion levels, with every level unlocking a Base Skill and a Veteran Skill that can be upgraded by the player. After every shift, staff earn a small amount of XP, allowing them to steadily work toward their next promotion. Once they reach the required XP threshold, they can visit Staff Centers to train for their next rank, which also comes with a salary increase.

Staff Morale has also been improved. Staff now need a manageable workload and a proper place to relax during breaks. To support this, we’ve added the Staff Breakroom, a new module designed to help staff recharge and enjoy their downtime.

Streamlined Logistics

Park Logistics has received a major readability pass, with several changes aimed at making the system easier to understand and use. To make core logistics gameplay more proactive, Loading Bay orders must now be placed manually. Up to four resources can be ordered at once, with total capacity determined by the number of trucks currently stationed at the bay. Orders arrive at the park at the end of the month in which they were placed, and each order can be repeated for up to 12 months.

The Compost resource has also been reworked. Compost is now essential for feed production at Produce Stations, with each kilogram of animal dung producing one kilogram of compost. This should make compost output feel more balanced and meaningful.

At the same time, keepers no longer need Compost Heaps to clean exhibits. If no heap is present, animal dung can now be cleaned directly; otherwise, it will be transported to the heap as before.

A new Logistics View now allows players to visualize and track the current status of resources in the park, as well as any ongoing transfers.

Improved Guest Satisfaction

Guest needs have been rebalanced to play a more significant role in overall park rating, as unmet needs can now drop further than before. To support this change, the Guest Needs Management View has also been updated for clarity: its visuals are now spatially mapped across the park, making it easier to see where each need is being well served, and where guests are being left unsatisfied.

How to Access the Public Testing Branch (Experimental!)

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.

Welcome to the March Development Update!

Today, we’ll be talking about the status of U17 and providing insight into the current progress of combat. We’ve also got a couple of surprises in store, so let’s get into it!

In case you missed it, we put a support patch out for U16 on the Public Test Branch! This release aims to rebalance diseases across the board and make elderly animals much more likely to pass away. There are also new vivarium animations, amphibious support for Titanoboa and the ability to change a vivarium’s water into something more tannin-rich.

In April, we will also be releasing an early version of U17 to the PTB! While it will not feature combat, players will be able to access the management overhaul, updated Scrubland biome and both species of Stegosaurus. While the Stego’s implementation will be quite limited, it’ll have its basic animations and ontogeny included!

Update 17

Combat

Since handling most of the new management features in February, we’ve spent the last few weeks focusing on combat, experimenting with different ideas and refining our vision. 

Our first official screenshot of animal’s fighting on their own!

The way combat works is that animals have a core set of attacks they can perform contextually. Depending on the species, this typically involves a bite, tail swipe or headbutt that gets layered on top of locomotion if their aggressor is too close. This makes sure that almost every animal has a way to fight back in some capacity when moving around.

Exactly how an animal responds to aggression comes down to their combat profile. These databases are where we create rules like “become aggressive during mating season” or “chase threats away from your nest.” The various conditions and filters allow us to build a comprehensive set of scenarios where we might want animals to behave in a particular way.

Speaking of, you can actually bring up the animal debug menu (press Shift + B) to see what animals are trying to do! In the case of combat encounters, it’s cool to take a peak behind the curtain and see what they’re choosing to prioritise.

Scrubland Foliage

Water Update

We’re pleased to reveal that the terrain water overhaul has come EARLY! In the U17 PTB, players will be able to paint up to 6 types of water that all benefit from massive rendering improvements.

Some of the more noticable improvements include water caustics, modular piece visibility and new underwater rendering that makes watching animals like Spinosaurus feel much more immersive! In the future, we’d love to have dynamic particle effects for splashing and swimming.

On top of this, we’ve made a couple improvements to the water brush that should make it more stable than before. You’ll also be able to replace a body of water by selecting a new type and clicking within the desired area. It’s a lot easier to try out different aesthetics!

With all the new water types included in U17, the team’s had so much fun creating new wetlands, rivers and even “oceans”.

New Genus

To close out this Dev Diary, let’s reveal the last genus coming to U17! This thick-headed lizard is none other than Pachycephalosaurus, a herbivorous dinosaur from the Hell Creek Formation. Their bony-dome allows the species to engage in a unique ramming behavior, fighting off threats or competitive males during the breeding season.

This dinosaur will also be joined by an alternate species, Pachycephalosaurus spinifer! Previously known as Stygimoloch to many guests, P. spinifer features more extreme cranial horns and an extra rugose head. Please look forward to the reveal once our scientists complete its genome!

Created by OOFerBoi

Created by W3

Created by JustGoji

Thank you for reading March's dev diary!

We hope you enjoyed this look at U17’s development and are looking forward to seeing more from combat. There’s a lot more work to be done before it’s properly presentable, but we’re excited by what we’ve seen and will continue to make steady progress in April.

- The PK Team

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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!

Disease Balance PSA

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.

How to Access the Public Testing Branch (Experimental!)

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.

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. 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.

Update 17

Stegosaurus

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.

Scrubland Foliage

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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Welcome to the January Development Update!

The team hopes that you’ve all had a safe and happy holiday. As this is our first blog post of the year, we’ll primarily be talking about our plans to outline what you’ll see in 2026. There’s a looot of reading to do this time folks, so strap yourselves in!

First off, thank you for your warm reception to Update 16! We’re pleased to see how beloved the vivarium animals have become. They’re a fun way to fill out the roster and we have more on the way for full release. In the meantime, our animators have been working to add a few more animations to the current vivarium lineup.

This includes more movement locations for the Titanoboa as well as eventually making it compatible with the amphibious vivariums! We’ll have more to show on that in the future.

Speaking of updates, our final two major releases coming this year are Update 17 and Update 18. By the end of 2026, all of our major gameplay mechanics will be finished! As we’ve explained in the past, these are massive updates and will each take a number of months to complete. At this stage, we expect to release Update 17 around June if things go smoothly.

Full Release: 1.0 Launch

Looking ahead, Prehistoric Kingdom will leave Early Access next year in 2027, launching with even more animals, content and some unannounced gameplay aspects.

• Story Campaign The Story Campaign will provide players with a guided onboarding experience as they work to learn the game’s mechanics and resolve different parks-in-need with the help of Nigel and other characters. We don’t expect the story itself to be super long, but each level will be designed to let you keep playing and complete additional tasks in order to achieve its “Gold Rank”.

• Missions For more experienced players, Missions are self-contained scenarios that see the player completing objectives under different restrictions or settings (e.g. no terraforming, selective dig sites, can’t delete existing buildings, etc). One mission may ask you to build a successful park within a tiny area while another may see you rescuing a failing zoo from bankruptcy, breeding certain species and improving its infrastructure. Like the story, each mission will have an optional “Gold Rank” objective for park managers who want to go all the way!

Stay tuned for more information on scenarios and their rewards closer to launch!

Update 17: The First PTB

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Loading Bay Rework

The Loading Bay is a crucial facility in Prehistoric Kingdom, but the player never really interacts with it. Our issues with the current system can be boiled down to:

• A Lack Of Responsibility The current Loading Bay is entirely passive, infinitely bringing in resources and figuring out what the player needs on its own. Unless you delete all the Loading Bays, there is no failure point.

• A Lack Of Input Due to its automated nature, sometimes the player can be at odds with its decision making. “I want more medicine” but the game keeps importing plants, for example.

How will it work?

• will be manually set

• can’t infinitely bring in shipments

• can ship more resources at once through researching additional trucks

Logistics Managment View

The second screen shows a quarterly usage breakdown, highlighting exactly which modules generate or consume the most resources. Clicking on their icons will take you directly to their location.

Guest Needs Rework

So far, guest-related gameplay has never felt particularly clear or rewarding for three main reasons:

Hello and Happy Holidays, Park Managers!

A few of the programmers got together to look at some of the more pressing problems with Update 16, resulting in this small patch. This release should hopefully resolve most of the out-standing stability issues, among others including vivarium grouping save-load and sandbox research and animal unlocks.

Please continue to submit detailed bug reports on our Discord server with an upload of your player log!

Why won't my snake move?!

As described in previous Dev Diaries, vivarium animals have a mix of traversal points and static points that they can spawn at, switching between them when the camera moves away.

Because of how unique Titanoboa is compared to other vivarium species, it primarily uses static points (resting in place like a snake) with a chance to play the movement animation seen in the trailer when the player returns.

Because of how much work is needed to animate the snake, it currently has a single movement option. In the future, we'd love to add more traversal spots and also support the amphibious vivarium (requiring entirely separate animations to make that work).

Known Issues & Additional Notes

Please send feedback and bug reports to our Discord server's appropriate channel.

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

• The side faces of the water volumes in amphibious vivarium have glitchy visuals at this moment. This is something we're actively investigating.

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

• Moving the camera close to objects can make them shimmer, we're currently investigating this.

• 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.

• NOTE: Animal growth speeds have not been adjusted. Please let us know if they should be slower as a result of supplements.

• NOTE: Sahonachelys does not have any Nigel dialogue lines just yet.

Full Patch Notes

Changes

• Animals

  • Adjusted scaling for both Triceratops species

Bug Fixes

• Critical

  • Fixed potential crash when deleting rides with visitors on them

  • Fixed critical loading bug that would prevent the research progress from loading completely - this should resolve sandbox saves not loading with all animals unlocked, and many other downstream issues

  • Fixed a critical save/load bug that would cause groups (including groups with vivariums) to not save completely if grouped to another set of groups

• Animals

  • Stabilized Animal/Quarantine interaction to hopefully prevent either from thinking they need to teleport or control the animal when they shouldn’t

  • Vivarium animals now cannot be moved if they are completely LOD’d out as this can cause serious issues (tracking a Vivarium animal should virtually always LOD them in!)

• Staff

  • Staff should be able to clean modules again

  • Fixed animation desync when staff were depositing resources at a location

  • Fixed logistics errors that were keeping import/export assignments alive for vivariums when they should go away due to a configuration change

  • Fixed produce storages thinking they needed to stockpile all feed types if there was a vivarium near them

• Guests

  • Resolved a serious error in Visitor AI that could cause them not to process correctly in certain situations

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Fixed a loading issue causing a vivarium with all its natural elements disabled, to load back up with a default natural element list

• UI/UX

  • Fixed “No Cashiers” park issue category to be “No Operators”

  • Fixed the weather menu being initialized without any weather options, making it impossible to switch out the current weather in Sandbox Mode

  • Fixed several exceptions in both the Animals Management Menu and the Staff Management Menu

  • Fixed Diplocaulus’ Info Sign reporting the animal from the Cambrian Era instead of the Carbinoferous

  • Fixed the Arroyo Formation having an incorrect Paleopedia description

• Misc.

  • Fixed a number of exceptions in back-end systems

  • Fixed a general issue with camera tracking that could interrupt core camera logic

Hello, Park Managers!

This is a quick patch to resolve some of the more immediately reported issues with Update 16. The team will now be on break until mid-January. Please continue to submit detailed bug reports on our Discord server with an upload of your player log!

Why won't my snake move?!

As described in previous Dev Diaries, vivarium animals have a mix of traversal points and static points that they can spawn at, switching between them when the camera moves away.

Because of how unique Titanoboa is compared to other vivarium species, it primarily uses static points (resting in place like a snake) with a chance to play the movement animation seen in the trailer when the player returns.

Because of how much work is needed to animate the snake, it currently has a single movement option. In the future, we'd love to add more traversal spots and also support the amphibious vivarium (requiring entirely separate animations to make that work).

Known Issues & Additional Notes

Please send feedback and bug reports to our Discord server's appropriate channel.

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

• The side faces of the water volumes in amphibious vivarium have glitchy visuals at this moment. This is something we're actively investigating.

• When refilling feeders or vivariums, staff can become separated from their hats and wheelbarrows. We've asked them to stop and yet they persist.

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

• Moving the camera close to objects can make them shimmer, we're currently investigating this.

• 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.

• NOTE: Animal growth speeds have not been adjusted. Please let us know if they should be slower as a result of supplements.

• NOTE: Sahonachelys does not have any Nigel dialogue lines just yet.

Full Patch Notes

Additions

• UI/UX

  • Vivarium animals can now be renamed

  • Added vet counter in the Staff Management Menu

Changes

• Balance

  • All Vivarium structures should now have more appropriately balanced costs for Challenge Mode

  • Increased resistance time of the Common Cold affliction, meaning animals will be more resistant to it after being cured

• Animals

  • Updated diet for Diplocaulus

• UI/UX

  • Vivarium animal placement now refreshes the vivarium’s nature only if the substrate has changed (this is necessary in order to properly adapt the natural item’s positions to the substrate)

  • Removed social group GUI element from vivarium animal previews within the Nursery Menu, since these species don't have social requirements yet

Bug Fixes

• Critical

  • Potentially fixed critical exceptions in GUI refreshing

  • Fixed one source of positional desync between water volumes and their parent pieces (in this case, Amphibious vivariums), when undoing positions

• Animals

  • Fixed an animal scale value cache using a wrong index, resulting in massively inflated weights and score reporting

  • Fixed terrestrial vivarium animals floating when placed in the Large Terrestrial Vivarium

• UI/UX

  • Fixed vivariums reporting ‘Incorrect Feed’ if not stocked by any animal when their feed is not set to plants

  • The vivarium type header text now updates with the selection of a main layout (Terrestrial, Arboreal or Amphibious)

Welcome, Park Managers to the final update of the year!

This release introduces major new mechanics such as vets, disease, death, rides and a reworked vivarium system with 10 new species. If you're yet to try the game, we're currently 30% off during the Steam Winter Sale!

WHAT'S COMING IN 2026?

Before getting into the patch notes, we quickly wanted to talk about next year. If you haven't kept up with our monthly Dev Diaries or Trello Roadmap, 2026 will finally bring hunting, combat, breakouts and a slew of management changes to keep making the game better and better. We will also continue to improve performance across the next year.

With around 11 core members working on PK in a variety of roles, your continued support as a community has been especially appreciated throughout 2025. For now, however, we will be enjoying our holiday break. See you next year!

- The PK Team

Update 16 Features

10 New Species & Vivariums

Discover 10 unique species of terrestrial, arboreal and amphibious variety. These stunning critters are housed in our overhauled vivarium modules - specialized facilities that allow them to swim, fly, explore burrows and jump onto logs.

These species include:

• Compsognathus longipes

• Diictodon feliceps

• Diplocaulus magnicornis

• Mononykus olecranus

• Peltephilus ferox

• Sahonachelys mailakavava

• Simosuchus clarki

• Tiktaalik roseae

• Titanoboa cerrejonensis

• Yi qi

But what makes a vivarium species? For us, it's any animal that features highly unique locomotion or that would be too small to include with ontogeny (e.g. tiny babies). Vivariums give us a great opportunity to include species that otherwise would never have been included in Prehistoric Kingdom.

This update also comes with model revamps for Archaeopteryx and Microraptor, giving them a fresh coat of paint alongside their newest friends.

Vivariums can be customized with a variety of interior, environmental and enrichment settings to give your animals a beautiful home. You can even build totally custom exteriors by making the walls invisible or sink it into the ground for a more natural look.

It's important to note that this is not the end of vivarium development, either. There are some things we'd like to expand such as adding social, environmental and enrichment needs to the animals, but we're very happy with how they've turned out so far.

In addition to the above, the team are also looking to:

• Make Titanoboa compatible with amphibious vivariums

• Add arboreal climbing to Archaeopteryx, Microraptor and Yi

• Add support for simple vivarium breeding (no baby models)

• Add feeding points

• Add more animations to the current roster to make them even more lively

We're also excited to share that at the end of Early Access, a few more fan-favorite species will be coming to the vivariums! Which ones? You'll have to wait and see.

Vets, Diseases & Death

As time passes, animals can encounter over 25 diseases of varying severities caused by weather, habitat conditions and infected modules such as bedding and food troughs. To counter this, players will need to enlist the help of vets and research a variety of treatments.

Vets will visit your habitat and automatically survey all the animals and facilities inside, alerting the player to any issues that arise. Without a vet to survey in Challenge Mode, players won't receive disease notifications.

Some diseases may display visual symptoms such as sneezing, lethargy and skin irritation. If spotted, players can manually call a vet to diagnose their animal.

While many basic ailments can be cured in the field via dart gun, some procedures require the construction of a Quarantine Bay. Players can pickup and move their sick animals directly into quarantine, scheduling sedation! Once the procedure has finished, animals will be moved back to their original position.

Players can also research 3 stages of Auto-Quarantine - automatically moving sick animals within a progressively larger radius in exchange for upkeep costs.

To keep your animals healthy, players will want to create animals with a high immunity (either through the Nursery or selective breeding). To give them a helping hand, a variety of supplements can be researched for your feeders, increasing an animal's immunity, growth speed and more.

If an animal is not able to be treated in time, they will sadly pass away. Death can also occur if animals are starved or dehydrate. It's more important than ever to properly maintain your zoo!

Flat Rides

New attractions are finally here! Operated by cashiers, the brand new Ferris Wheel and Panoramic Tower provide amazing vistas for your guests while also contributing to the park's attraction points.

Jump into first person mode and ride them yourself to view your park from a new perspective!

These attractions are currently not recolorable due to a technical limitation, but we will be looking into it next year. They will also eventually have their own modular widget to change their minimum visitor load and ride length. We look forward to adding new attraction types in a future update!

Update 16 Changes

• Merge Into Target Group All groups highlighted in white are merged into the blue group's building grid.

• Parent Target Group All groups highlighted in white become children to the blue group, retaining their original grids. Moving the parent group will also move all child groups. Saving the parent group as a prefab will also include child groups. The arrows in the top right of the group UI can be used to navigate the various grouping levels.

• Group All All groups become part of a collection, retaining their original grids. The arrows in the top right of the group UI can be used to navigate the various grouping levels.

While FSR can introduce ghosting on humans and some landscaping tools, enabling it may help improve your performance when GPU-limited. Prehistoric Kingdom is a CPU-intensive game, so performance gains will be variable!

Known Issues & Additional Notes

Please send feedback and bug reports to our Discord server's appropriate channel.

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

• The side faces of the water volumes in amphibious vivarium have glitchy visuals at this moment. This is something we're actively investigating.

• Though we think we fixed it, there is a potentially low chance that a random texture may be overlayed faintly across the screen when loading into a game. If this happens, please file a bug report or get in touch with us.

• When refilling feeders or vivariums, staff can become separated from their hats and wheelbarrows. We've asked them to stop and yet they persist.

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

• Moving the camera close to objects can make them shimmer, we're currently investigating this.

• NOTE: We forgot to add vets to the staff counter in the Staff Management menu. We are sorry.

• 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.

• NOTE: Animal growth speeds have not been adjusted. Please let us know if they should be slower as a result of supplements.

• NOTE: Sahonachelys does not have any dialogue lines just yet.

Full Patch Notes

Features

• NEW FEATURE: Vivariums

  Vivariums are brand-new habitat modules designed for compact exhibit displays. Place Terrestrial, Arboreal, and Amphibious vivarium modules in multiple sizes, then decorate them with new props and scenery to create detailed exhibits for smaller animals.

• NEW FEATURE: Animal Health, Disease & Treatment Animals can now contract diseases with distinct symptoms and progression stages. Some illnesses are contagious and can spread through transmission vectors like animal contact, airborne spread, and contaminated food, or bedding.

  To properly identify illness, animals and modules must be Surveyed by a Vet—detected targets become Under Observation, revealing current (and newly acquired) afflictions. Treatments can be delivered in the field, or in the most severe cases, in Quarantine Bays. To be moved to Quarantine, an animal must first be sedated by Staff.

• NEW FEATURE: Vets

  A new Vet Staff role has been added to handle animal medical care. Vets can survey animals and enclosure modules to detect afflictions, keep sick animals Under Observation, and administer treatment. When hands-on care is needed, Vets can also sedate animals for procedures, preparing them for quarantine transport. Vets can also deliver supplements to feeders, providing improvements to animal welfare and maintenance.

• NEW FEATURE: Animal Death

  Health outcomes now have real consequences. Untreated diseases and worsening conditions can become fatal, making early detection, enclosure hygiene, and timely treatment more important than ever. Additionally, animals can succumb due to the health implications of old age and unmet needs.

• NEW FEATURE: Flat Rides

  Two new guest rides have been added: the Ferris Wheel and Panoramic Tower. Operated by Cashier Staff, guests will queue up, board, take the ride, then disembark—earning these attractions a high Attraction Points value.

• NEW FEATURE: Expanded Modular Merging

  Modular merging has been expanded to allow for the quick collection of multiple Groups, each being now able to have a parent and a set of children. Select your preferred merging options through the Modular Group Infomenu.

• NEW FEATURE: FSR 3.1 Upscaling

  From the settings menu, players with modern GPUs can now choose several levels of FSR upscaling to improve their rendering performance. This also includes a new ‘Native AA’ mode which offers smooth, anti-aliased visuals via FSR. Players with older GPUs can still take advantage of FSR 1 to improve their framerate. Please note that Prehistoric Kingdom is a CPU-heavy game, so performance gains greatly depend on your park!

Additions

• Gameplay

  • Added the following excavation sites to the game:

    • Fram Formation, Canada

    • Arroyo Formation, USA

    • Cerrejon Formation, Colombia

    • Collon Cura Formation, Argentina

    • Abrahamskaal Formation, South Africa

    • Maevarano Formation, Madagascar

    • Tiaojishan Formation, China

  • Added a new Research category to the Research Menu - Pathology - containing unlockable research items that enable the treatment of most of the animal afflictions, as well as treatment facility upgrades.

  • Added new research items to the Biology research tree:

    • Medium Vivariums Unlocks medium-sized Vivariums, housing larger species.

    • Large Vivariums Unlocks large-sized Vivariums, housing the largest vivarium species.

    • Vitamins Unlocks the Vitamins supplement, allowing animals to heal faster from afflictions.

    • Steroids Unlocks the Steroids supplement, allowing animals to heal faster from wounds.

    • Mutagen Unlocks the Mutagens supplement, increasing the chances and intensity of mutations from parent to offspring.

    • Mating Suppressants Unlocks the Mating Suppressant supplement, decreasing animal’s courtship during the breeding season.

    • Mating Boosters Unlocks the Mating Booster supplement, increasing animal’s courtship during the breeding season.

    • Improved Healing Supplements Increases the efficiency of Vitamins and Steroids.

    • Potent Healing Supplements Maximizes the efficiency of Vitamins and Steroids.

    • Improved Mutagens Increases the efficiency of mutagens.

    • Potent Mutagens Maximizes the efficiency of Mutagens.

    • Improved Mating Supplements Increases the efficiency of Mating Boosters and Mating Suppressants.

    • Potent Mating Supplements Maximizes the efficiency of Mating Boosters and Mating Suppressants.

  • Added 2 new research items to the Pathology category:

    • Auto-Quarantine Range 1 Increases the range of Quarantine Bay’s Auto-Quarantine mechanic.

    • Auto-Quarantine Range 2 Further increases the range of Quarantine Bay’s Auto-Quarantine mechanic.

  • Added new research items to the Construction & Design research tree:

    • Ferris Wheel Unlocks the Ferris Wheel ride

    • Panoramic Tower Unlocks the Panoramic Tower ride

• Animals

  • Animal “Fecundity” has been diversified across species, a general metric of how difficult it is to breed animals of that species. Lower fecundity animals will need more unoccupied space in order to feel comfortable enough to breed. Higher fecundity animals will breed into overpopulation if left unchecked. These base values can be modulated by supplements

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Quarantine Bay Small

  • Quarantine Bay Large

  • Added 2 brand new Flat Rides

    • Ferris Wheel

    • Panoramic Tower

  • Added Medical Props

    • Vet Lamp Large

    • Vet Lamp Small

    • Vet Computer

    • Vet Desk 1

    • Vet Desk 2

    • Vet Desk 3

    • Vet Ultrasound Machine

    • Vet Oxygen Monitor

    • Vet Oxygen Tank

    • Vet Heartrate Monitor

    • Vet Bin 1

    • Vet Bin 2

  • Added Misc Backstage Props

    • Electric Cable Thin 4m

    • Electric Cable Thin 1m

    • Electric Cable Thin Corner

    • Electric Cable Thin Junction

    • Electric Cable Thin Power Boxes

    • Metal Walkway 2m

    • Metal Walkway 4m

    • Metal Walkway Railing

    • Metal Walkway Square

    • Metal Walkway Stair 1

    • Metal Walkway Stair 2

    • Metal Walkway Stair Step

  • Vivarium Amphibious - Box, Small, Medium, Large

  • Vivarium Arboreal - Box, Small, Medium, Large

  • Vivarium Terrestrial - Box, Small, Medium, Large

  • Added Vivarium Props & Items

    • Wooden Platform Square

    • Wooden Platform Bridge 1m

    • Wooden Platform Bridge 2m

    • Beam Wooden 1m

    • Beam Wooden 2m

    • Beam Wooden 4m

    • Beam Wooden Base

    • Heating Lamp 0.5m

    • Heating Lamp 2m

    • Heating Lamp 4m

    • Heating Lamp 6m

    • Vivarium Birdhouse

    • Vivarium Box Climbing Set 

    • Vivarium Large Climbing Set

    • Vivarium Medium Climbing Set

    • Vivarium Small Climbing Set

    • Vivarium Hammock

    • Vivarium Tree Shell

    • Vivarium Faux Tree

    • Rope Thin 1m

    • Rope Thin 4m

    • Rope Thin 4m Hanging

    • Rope Thin Knot

    • Rope Thin Cap

    • Rope Thin Hook

    • Log Hollow

    • Log Hollow Short

    • Stump Driftwood Roots

    • Stump Tree 1

    • Stump Tree 2

    • Driftwood Curved Trunk

    • Driftwood Curved Trunk Rootless

    • Rock Hiding Cave

    • Rock Lounging Platform

    • Vivarium Rock Cladding Walls with 3 styling options (Wet/Forest/Dry)

      • Rock Vivarium Cladding 4x4

      • Rock Vivarium Cladding 4x8

      • Rock Vivarium Cladding 8x12

      • Rock Vivarium Cladding 12x16

      • Rock Vivarium Cladding Half 4x4

      • Rock Vivarium Cladding Half 4x8

      • Rock Vivarium Cladding Half 8x12

      • Rock Vivarium Cladding Half 12x16

• UI/UX

  • The animal paleopedia menu now has a ‘Diseases’ tab, displaying brief information about all the various diseases a species can contract

  • The animal paleopedia now contains fecundity data

  • Added supplement selection to the animal feeder menus, allowing players to feed their animals various supplements, if available

  • Added a Vivarium filter toggle to the Animal Nursery gallery panel, giving players the ability to quickly switch animal selection between all animals and vivarium animals only

  • Added a water trough selection widget menu

  • Added a bedding selection widget menu

• Audio

  • Added more sounds to the Nursery menu to make it a more polished experience

• Music

  • Added music that can sometimes play when looking at amphibious or terrestrial vivarium animals. This feature will be expanded to the rest of the roster next year!

    • Fluvial (1:10)

    • Underbrush (1:20)

Changes

• Animals

  • Completely overhauled the models, textures and animations for both Microraptor and Archaeopteryx, now featuring a completely new navigation system tuned to work within the new Vivarium framework

  • Moving animals outside of their enclosures now has a cost based on the animal size and movement distance

  • Increased time between vocalisations for all sauropods as well as Charonosaurus and Parasaurolophus

  • Balanced weights, costs and appeal points for all medium and large ceratopsians

  • Updated Nursery icon for Charonosaurus to reflect its updated crest

  • Desaturated Mammuthus tusks

• Staff

  • Re-designed the Cashier Staff outfit

  • Cashiers’ tasks now extend to Ride operations

• Environment

  • Adjusted sky and atmospheric lighting to both look more cohesive and interact better with FSR

  • Grass should appear thicker at a distance and slightly more varied in height

  • Tropical Grass color is now a little deeper and more saturated

  • Updated terrain textures for:

    • Boreal Grass

    • Temperate Dirt

    • Temperate Grass

    • Tropical Grass

    • Tropical Sand

    • Scrubland Sand

    • Scrubland Dirt

    • Scrubland Rock

  • Decreased the tiling scale of all grass textures to feel more detailed when looking at small animals

• UI/UX

  • Increased the efficacy of the camera flashlight

  • Updated various terrain texture previews

  • Logistics resources will be hidden if disabled and empty

  • The 'Call Staff' button now provides more information and can locate incoming staff members

• Rendering

  • Geometry draw distances increased: Ultra from 1.2x to 1.4x. Cinematic from 1.4x to 2.0x. You can select a high geometry quality setting by itself with any other combination of other visual settings to get longer draw distances.

• Post Processing

  • Auto-exposure is now more responsive to dark areas and no longer brightens the game when looking down

  • Bloom now responds better to bright highlights and has a lens dirt effect

  • Color grading has a bit more contrast and saturation to make the game look less drab

  • Post-processing now updates even when the game is paused

• Audio

  • Midtone ambient frequencies will now be slightly ducked by animal sounds

• Misc.

  • The base camera FOV has been made slightly tighter in order to make the player feel like they’re more “in the world” while building and managing

Bug Fixes

• Crashes

  • Fix for a potential crash

• Critical

  • Fixed multiple memory leaks that could stop core systems from functioning during long sessions

  • General improvements and stabilization to animal asset and texture loading

  • Fixed a new modular group misalignment issue in the starting levels

  • Fixed a long standing shading error causing modular selection outline to render with incorrect coloration when a selection stack contained multiple colors

  • Fixed animal animation stability issues

• Gameplay

  • Fix for a long standing logical bug that could allow for the early research of a late-game research item, if accessed directly through link buttons throughout the GUI

• Animals

  • Improved animal reliability when pathing around nav boundary corners

  • Fixed adult small theropods becoming aggressive towards babies and adolescents

• Staff

  • Improved operator saving, staff should return to their previous Cashiering/Ride Operation jobs quicker after loading a game

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Fixed coloring issues related to modular lighting, which should be much more consistent and stable now

  • Fixed some modular pieces not being see-through for the guests, including the 4x4 Glass Wall, and the chainlink pieces

  • Feeders should track their consumed food more accurately between play sessions

• Environment

  • Fixed an issue that caused the Coastal dirt to be lower resolution than intended

• UI/UX

  • Fixed a recurring bug causing the Modular Style Menu to hide away if a structure was deselected and selected back fast enough

  • Fixed fill toggle layouts overflowing outside of masked GUI elements

• Rendering

  • Light LODs have been restored (there will be more improvement coming here)

  • Fixed Light LODs culling incorrectly close to the camera

• Audio

  • Fixed a bug that caused ambient audio to “pop” loudly when exiting the Park Services menu

  • Fixed excavations menu ambience not fading in at high zoom levels

  • Fixed an oversight that could potentially cause guests to become louder than expected

• Misc.

  • Fixed a bug that could have prevented triggering the Noah’s Park achievement

Performance

• Strategically removed shadow casting from small or “whispy” plants to reduce batch and shadowcaster count. For players using high or ultra screen space shadows (recommended) the visual impact should be minor

• Made massive CPU optimization to Scroll rects containing hundreds of elements

• Significant CPU performance gains while viewing the Animal Management Menu

• Minor performance improvements to the building menu

• Optimized animal material batching

• Minor general CPU performance gains

What changed from the last PTB?

Additions

• Animals

  • Animal “Fecundity” has been diversified across species, a general metric of how difficult it is to breed animals of that species. Lower fecundity animals will need more unoccupied space in order to feel comfortable enough to breed. Higher fecundity animals will breed into overpopulation if left unchecked. These base values can be modulated by supplements.

• UI/UX

  • The animal paleopedia now contains more relevant information about each vivarium animal species

  • The animal paleopedia now contains fecundity

  • Re-integrated the old AA settings, which are now purely cosmetic and independent of the selected quality preset. The AA solutions include Off, FXAA, SMAA, UTAA, FSR1, and FSR3

• Music

  • Added music that can sometimes play when looking at amphibious or terrestrial vivarium animals. This feature will be expanded to the rest of the roster next year!

    • Fluvial (1:10)

    • Underbrush (1:20)

Changes

• Balance

  • Mating Suppressor supplement has had its effectiveness per level increased significantly to match rebalanced base fecundity levels

  • Vivarium animals now contribute towards the park’s animal welfare and animal points rating

• Animals

  • Desaturated Mammuthus tusks

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Updated forest and arid vivarium terrain textures to match the actual landscape textures

• Post Processing

  • Adjusted default UTAA

Bug Fixes

• Critical

  • Fixed a critical glitch in an overlay rendering system causing random texture to appear faintly on the screen

  • Fixed multiple critical vivarium exceptions that could have caused downstream gameplay issues

  • Fixed configuration errors which caused many feeders and the new rides to not refresh the navmesh when they were removed

• Animals

  • Potentially fixed adult small theropods becoming aggressive towards babies and adolescents

  • Fixed incorrect animal sizing

  • Fixed animal wetness visuals

  • Fixed animals social welfare bar draining when it shouldn’t

  • Fixed Animal Dying park issue when Animal Death is disabled

• Staff

  • Fixed staff jittering while running when game speed is high or framerates are low

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Fixed vehicle position error when moving and rotating a ferris wheel then cancelling the action

  • Fixed vegetation densities in Vivariums not loading back correctly

  • Corrected navmesh generation beneath ride platforms

• Foliage

  • Fixed foliage removal brush destroying rocks

• UI/UX

  • Fixed a GUI bug that would cause the New Game configuration in the main menu to become unresponsive

Welcome, Park Testers!

This PTB release addresses some of the main reported issues regarding animal health and treatment, providing some general balancing of these systems along the way.

As a QoL feature, we have added new game settings for 'Animal Disease' and 'Animal Injury' difficulty, which should change their contraction frequency. These settings are inherently tied to the game's difficulty for Challenge mode, but easily accessible in Sandbox mode through the options menu or New Game configuration.

Moreover, this new patch features First Person Mode compatibility with the newly introduced Flat Rides, so go nuts!

How to Access the Public Testing Branch (Experimental!)

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.

Update 16 is coming this month on December 23!

Care for 10 new exotic species with the brand new vivarium system! Hire vets, treat diseases and offer your guests stunning vistas with the Ferris Wheel and Panoramic Tower coming in Update 16.

A limited version of this release can be played on the Public Testing Branch RIGHT NOW! The team have been gathering your feedback and bug reports, so make sure to keep sending those through on our official Discord server.

Welcome, Park Testers!

This early version of Update 16 includes animal health, disease and death, a completely overhauled vivarium system, new flat rides and a variety of other changes. We are expecting to launch this update on December 23rd. While the update remains a work in progress, we are looking for feedback in these areas:

• Challenge Mode balance

  • Animal affliction balance

  • Animal treatment

  • Financial difficulty

  • Research tree experience

As mentioned there have been a lot of changes since the last update, so be sure to read the full patch notes below to see everything that's new!

PTB Features

Diseases, Vets & Quarantine Bays

The headlining feature for this update is Animal Health, Disease & Treatment! Animals can now contract Diseases with a wide range of symptoms and severities—expect changes like lethargy, fatigue, reduced appetite/thirst, sneezing/panting/scratching, reduced awareness, and even visible skin conditions.

Diseases progress through clear stages: Incubation → Persistence → Recovery → Resistance. Symptoms become more obvious as incubation advances, fade during recovery, and then remain dormant during resistance (preventing reinfection for a time). Some diseases won’t heal naturally and require veterinary intervention.

Certain diseases are contagious and can spread via Transmission Vectors—between animals through contact and airborne spread, and into enclosures via contaminated feeding and bedding. Many afflictions can also progress into more severe conditions if left unchecked (e.g., Common Cold → Pneumonia → Pulmonary Edema → Respiratory Failure).

Disease risk is influenced by the animal’s condition and environment—things like stress, injury/compounding illness, malnutrition/dehydration, dirtiness, contaminated feed/water/bedding, age, genetic immunity, swimming, and improper/insufficient vegetation. Animals also track an Immunity value affected by genetics, illness/injury, vegetation compatibility, and vitamins.

Enclosure modules can become contaminated over time—dirtier enclosures contaminate faster, and at 50%+ contamination you’ll see flies. Keepers will automatically clean contaminated modules, but diseased modules (marked with green particles) must be detected via Survey before a Keeper is dispatched—and any diseased food found in feeders is destroyed during cleaning.

To properly identify illness, animals and modules must be Surveyed by a Vet. If an affliction is detected, that target is marked Under Observation, revealing all current (and newly acquired) conditions. Early-stage diseases (under 50% incubation) are harder to spot unless your Vet has the Early Detection perk.

Treatments may require research to unlock, and are generally faster than natural healing—often skipping persistence and reversing incubation. Treatment is delivered via Remote Medication (dart), Field Medicine (sedation and treatment within the enclosure), or Quarantine (sedation + transport to a bay for life-saving care).

With the right research and a Quarantine Bay placed near an enclosure, Automatic Quarantine Transport can handle transfers for you (swapping one-time transport costs for monthly upkeep). Animals can also be discharged automatically by the same proximity rules—unless they’re suffering from something you haven’t unlocked treatment for yet.

Feeders can also be configured for Supplements, consuming Medicine resources and delivered by Vets: Vitamins (higher immunity), Steroids (injury resistance), Mating Boosters/Suppressors (higher/lower fecundity), and Mutagen (more genetic variety in offspring).

Vivariums

Vivariums are placeable habitat modules designed to house small or specialized animals—letting you build everything from compact reptile houses to miniature aviaries. They expand on the old Mini-Aviary concept with Terrestrial, Arboreal, and Amphibious setups, giving these species a dedicated home that better suits their scale and movement.

To help you decorate in a smaller space, Vivariums include a quick customization system with environment-based nature presets you can mix and match, and even randomize with a seed. From the same menu, enrichment items can be easily toggled on or off, adding destinations for animals to explore— logs to jump onto or frames to glide toward.

On top of that, each Vivarium wall comes with glass, mesh, facades, and cladding styles that can be switched out, fitting cleanly into your builds. Amphibious Vivariums benefit from a new water tech that can generate water volumes on demand, helping these exhibits look better and run efficiently.

Rides

The update introduces two brand-new guest rides: the Ferris Wheel and Panoramic Tower. These major attractions are designed to pull crowds and provide a big boost to your park’s appeal thanks to their high Attraction Points value.

Both rides are operated by Cashier Staff and function with a full guest flow. Visitors will form a queue on designated waiting platforms, board when space becomes available, enjoy the ride cycle, and then disembark before the next group enters.

PTB Changes

ANIMAL TRANSPORTATION

Moving animals outside of their enclosures now has a cost based on the animal size and movement distance. To move an animal into a Quarantine Bay, it will need to be sedated.

What is NOT included in this PTB?

As usual, we are still working to add the remaining features, audio and other components that'll be there when the update fully releases. All of the new Vivarium animals will be released once the full update drops.

While the game is playable, you can expect to run into bugs, crashes or general oddities. Please send your feedback and bug reports to our Discord server's appropriate channel.

Here are the major outstanding things not present in the PTB:

• The new Vivarium species

How to Access the Public Testing Branch (Experimental!)

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. Right click Prehistoric Kingdom in your Steam Library Go to Properties Betas 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 appropriate channel.

Known Issues & Additional Notes

• A little under half of all animal species are currently missing their knockdown, struggle, and death animations, which can result in janky visuals for animal sedation and demise. The animation volume for this update has been challenging, but this is something we'll keep working on and polishing until the update's release and beyond.

• Currently some of the animals models are missing vertex data critical for the rendering of visual affliction symptoms, meaning some skin conditions will not be fully functional.

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

• The side faces of the water volumes in amphibious vivarium have glitchy visuals at this moment. This is something we're actively looking to fix.

• There currently are a couple of guest art issues, relating to one of the man's outfits animations and the old cashier outfits.

Full Patch Notes

Features

• NEW FEATURE: Vivariums

  Vivariums are brand-new habitat modules designed for compact exhibit displays. Place Terrestrial, Arboreal, and Amphibious vivarium modules in multiple sizes, then decorate them with new props and scenery to create detailed exhibits for smaller animals.

• NEW FEATURE: Animal Health, Disease & Treatment Animals can now contract diseases with distinct symptoms and progression stages. Some illnesses are contagious and can spread through transmission vectors like animal contact, airborne spread, and contaminated food, or bedding.

  To properly identify illness, animals and modules must be Surveyed by a Vet—detected targets become Under Observation, revealing current (and newly acquired) afflictions. Treatments can be delivered in the field, or in the most severe cases, in Quarantine Bays. To be moved to Quarantine, an animal must first be sedated by Staff.

• NEW FEATURE: Vets

  A new Vet Staff role has been added to handle animal medical care. Vets can survey animals and enclosure modules to detect afflictions, keep sick animals Under Observation, and administer treatment. When hands-on care is needed, Vets can also sedate animals for procedures, preparing them for quarantine transport. Vets can also deliver supplements to feeders, providing improvements to animal welfare and maintenance.

• NEW FEATURE: Animal Death

  Health outcomes now have real consequences. Untreated diseases and worsening conditions can become fatal, making early detection, enclosure hygiene, and timely treatment more important than ever. Additionally, animals can succumb due to the health implications of old age and unmet needs.

• NEW FEATURE: Flat Rides

  Two new guest rides have been added: the Ferris Wheel and Panoramic Tower. Operated by Cashier Staff, guests will queue up, board, take the ride, then disembark—earning these attractions a high Attraction Points value.

• NEW FEATURE: Expanded Modular Merging

  Modular merging has been expanded to allow for the quick collection of multiple Groups, each being now able to have a parent and a set of children. Select your preferred merging options through the Modular Group Infomenu.

• NEW FEATURE: FSR 3.1 Upscaling

  From the settings menu, players with modern GPUs can now choose several levels of FSR upscaling to improve their rendering performance. This also includes a new ‘Native AA’ mode which offers smooth, anti-aliased visuals via FSR. Players with older GPUs can still take advantage of FSR 1 to improve their framerate. Please note that Prehistoric Kingdom is a CPU-heavy game, so performance gains greatly depend on your park!

Additions

• Gameplay

  • Added the following excavation sites to the game:

    • Fram Formation, Canada

    • Maevarano Formation, Madagascar

    • Tiaojishan Formation, China

  • Added a new Research category to the Research Menu - Pathology - containing unlockable research items that enable the treatment of most of the animal afflictions, as well as treatment facility upgrades.

  • Added new research items to the Biology research tree:

    • Medium Vivariums Unlocks medium-sized Vivariums, housing larger species.

    • Large Vivariums

      Unlocks large-sized Vivariums, housing the largest vivarium species.

    • Vitamins Unlocks the Vitamins supplement, allowing animals to heal faster from afflictions.

    • Steroids Unlocks the Steroids supplement, allowing animals to heal faster from wounds.

    • Mutagen Unlocks the Mutagens supplement, increasing the chances and intensity of mutations from parent to offspring.

    • Mating Suppressants Unlocks the Mating Suppressant supplement, decreasing animal’s courtship during the breeding season.

    • Mating Boosters Unlocks the Mating Booster supplement, increasing animal’s courtship during the breeding season.

    • Improved Healing Supplements Increases the efficiency of Vitamins and Steroids.

    • Potent Healing Supplements Maximizes the efficiency of Vitamins and Steroids.

    • Improved Mutagens Increases the efficiency of mutagens.

    • Potent Mutagens Maximizes the efficiency of Mutagens.

    • Improved Mating Supplements Increases the efficiency of Mating Boosters and Mating Suppressants.

    • Potent Mating Supplements Maximizes the efficiency of Mating Boosters and Mating Suppressants.

  • Added new research items to the Construction & Design research tree:

    • Ferris Wheel Unlocks the Ferris Wheel ride

    • Panoramic Tower Unlocks the Panoramic Tower ride

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Quarantine Bay Small

  • Quarantine Bay Large

  • Added 2 brand new Flat Rides

    • Ferris Wheel

    • Panoramic Tower

  • Added Medical Props

    • Vet Lamp Large

    • Vet Lamp Small

    • Vet Computer

    • Vet Desk 1

    • Vet Desk 2

    • Vet Desk 3

    • Vet Ultrasound Machine

    • Vet Oxygen Monitor

    • Vet Oxygen Tank

    • Vet Heartrate Monitor

    • Vet Bin 1

    • Vet Bin 2

  • Added Misc Backstage Props

    • Electric Cable Thin 4m

    • Electric Cable Thin 1m

    • Electric Cable Thin Corner

    • Electric Cable Thin Junction

    • Electric Cable Thin Power Boxes

    • Metal Walkway 2m

    • Metal Walkway 4m

    • Metal Walkway Railing

    • Metal Walkway Square

    • Metal Walkway Stair 1

    • Metal Walkway Stair 2

    • Metal Walkway Stair Step

  • Vivarium Amphibious - Box, Small, Medium, Large

  • Vivarium Arboreal - Box, Small, Medium, Large

  • Vivarium Terrestrial - Box, Small, Medium, Large

  • Added Vivarium Props & Items

    • Wooden Platform Square

    • Wooden Platform Bridge 1m

    • Wooden Platform Bridge 2m

    • Beam Wooden 1m

    • Beam Wooden 2m

    • Beam Wooden 4m

    • Beam Wooden Base

    • Heating Lamp 0.5m

    • Heating Lamp 2m

    • Heating Lamp 4m

    • Heating Lamp 6m

    • Vivarium Birdhouse

    • Vivarium Box Climbing Set 

    • Vivarium Large Climbing Set

    • Vivarium Medium Climbing Set

    • Vivarium Small Climbing Set

    • Vivarium Hammock

    • Vivarium Tree Shell

    • Vivarium Faux Tree

    • Rope Thin 1m

    • Rope Thin 4m

    • Rope Thin 4m Hanging

    • Rope Thin Knot

    • Rope Thin Cap

    • Rope Thin Hook

    • Log Hollow

    • Log Hollow Short

    • Stump Driftwood Roots

    • Stump Tree 1

    • Stump Tree 2

    • Driftwood Curved Trunk

    • Driftwood Curved Trunk Rootless

    • Rock Hiding Cave

    • Rock Lounging Platform

    • Vivarium Rock Cladding Walls with 3 styling options (Wet/Forest/Dry)

      • Rock Vivarium Cladding 4x4

      • Rock Vivarium Cladding 4x8

      • Rock Vivarium Cladding 8x12

      • Rock Vivarium Cladding 12x16

      • Rock Vivarium Cladding Half 4x4

      • Rock Vivarium Cladding Half 4x8

      • Rock Vivarium Cladding Half 8x12

      • Rock Vivarium Cladding Half 12x16

• UI/UX

  • The animal paleopedia menu now has a ‘Diseases’ tab, displaying brief information about all the various diseases a species can contract

  • Added supplement selection to the animal feeder menus, allowing players to feed their animals various supplements, if available

  • Added a Vivarium filter toggle to the Animal Nursery gallery panel, giving players the ability to quickly switch animal selection between all animals and vivarium animals only

  • Added a water trough selection widget menu

  • Added a bedding selection widget menu

• Audio

  • Added more sounds to the Nursery menu to make it a more polished experience

Changes

• Animals

  • Completely overhauled the models, textures and animations for both Microraptor and Archaeopteryx, now featuring a completely new navigation system tuned to work within the new Vivarium framework

  • Moving animals outside of their enclosures now has a cost based on the animal size and movement distance

  • Increased time between vocalisations for all sauropods as well as Charonosaurus and Parasaurolophus

  • Balanced weights, costs and appeal points for all medium and large ceratopsians

  • Updated Nursery icon for Charonosaurus to reflect its updated crest

• Staff

  • Re-designed the Cashier Staff outfit

  • Cashiers’ tasks now extend to Ride operations

• Environment

  • Adjusted sky and atmospheric lighting to both look more cohesive and interact better with FSR

  • Grass should appear thicker at a distance and slightly more varied in height

  • Tropical Grass color is now a little deeper and more saturated

  • Updated terrain textures for:

    • Boreal Grass

    • Temperate Dirt

    • Temperate Grass

    • Tropical Grass

    • Tropical Sand

    • Scrubland Sand

    • Scrubland Dirt

    • Scrubland Rock

  • Decreased the tiling scale of all grass textures to feel more detailed when looking at small animals

• UI/UX

  • Increased the efficacy of the camera flashlight

  • Updated various terrain texture previews

  • Logistics resources will be hidden if disabled and empty

• Rendering

  • Geometry draw distances increased: Ultra from 1.2x to 1.4x. Cinematic from 1.4x to 2.0x. You can select a high geometry quality setting by itself with any other combination of other visual settings to get longer draw distances.

• Post Processing

  • Auto-exposure is now more responsive to dark areas and no longer brightens the game when looking down

  • Bloom now responds better to bright highlights and has a lens dirt effect

  • Color grading has a bit more contrast and saturation to make the game look less drab

  • Post-processing now updates even when the game is paused

• Audio

  • Midtone ambient frequencies will now be slightly ducked by animal sounds

• Misc.

  • The base camera FOV has been made slightly tighter in order to make the player feel like they’re more “in the world” while building and managing

Bug Fixes

• Crashes

  • Fix for a potential crash

• Critical

  • Fixed multiple memory leaks that could stop core systems from functioning during long sessions

  • General improvements and stabilization to animal asset and texture loading

  • Fixed a new modular group misalignment issue in the starting levels

  • Fixed a long standing shading error causing modular selection outline to render with incorrect coloration when a selection stack contained multiple colors

  • Fixed animal animation stability issues

• Gameplay

  • Fix for a long standing logical bug that could allow for the early research of a late-game research item, if accessed directly through link buttons throughout the GUI

• Animals

  • Improved animal reliability when pathing around nav boundary corners

• Staff

  • Improved operator saving, staff should return to their previous Cashiering/Ride Operation jobs quicker after loading a game

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Fixed coloring issues related to modular lighting, which should be much more consistent and stable now

  • Fixed some modular pieces not being see-through for the guests, including the 4x4 Glass Wall, and the chainlink pieces

  • Feeders should track their consumed food more accurately between play sessions

• Environment

  • Fixed an issue that caused the Coastal dirt to be lower resolution than intended

• UI/UX

  • Fixed a recurring bug causing the Modular Style Menu to hide away if a structure was deselected and selected back fast enough

  • Fixed fill toggle layouts overflowing outside of masked GUI elements

• Rendering

  • Light LODs have been restored (there will be more improvement coming here)

  • Fixed Light LODs culling incorrectly close to the camera

• Audio

  • Fixed a bug that caused ambient audio to “pop” loudly when exiting the Park Services menu

  • Fixed excavations menu ambience not fading in at high zoom levels

  • Fixed an oversight that could potentially cause guests to become louder than expected

• Misc.

  • Fixed a bug that could have prevented triggering the Noah’s Park achievement

Performance

• Strategically removed shadow casting from small or “whispy” plants to reduce batch and shadowcaster count. For players using high or ultra screen space shadows (recommended) the visual impact should be minor

• Made massive CPU optimization to Scroll rects containing hundreds of elements

• Significant CPU performance gains while viewing the Animal Management Menu

• Minor performance improvements to the building menu

• Optimized animal material batching

• Minor general CPU performance gains

Welcome to the November Development Update!

As the team will be on their holiday break in late December, this is officially our last blog post for the year. There’s quite a lot of text to get through in this one, so let’s dig right into it.

First up, the team is trying to get Update 16 into public testing as soon as possible. While the content will be restricted and unfinished, we are aiming to start the PTB during December to gauge early feedback, fix bugs and lock down a release date. Obviously December is a busy month due to the holidays, but stay tuned for more info and we’ll do our best!

Funding Recap & Thank You

Update 16

Vivariums

New Species

This is Yi and Yi is basically a wyvern. Well, it’s really a dinosaur from China BUT instead of using feathers to glide, its wings were made from a bat-like membrane! Inside its mouth is a set of needle-like teeth that love to munch on insects, kibble and the occasional finger.

The first concept art for this fluffy fellow was drawn all the way back in 2021, with Yi originally intended to be part of the Early Access launch roster. We even had Nigel record lines for it, but due to the difficulties that came from the original Mini-Aviary, Yi was shelved until now. Revisiting the original concept was a real treat!

From a time long before the dinosaurs, Tiktaalik is one of the oldest animals coming to Prehistoric Kingdom. This fish is what’s considered to be a transitional species, a link between land and water. Using its surprisingly sturdy limbs and muscular body, guests love to watch Tiktaalik propel itself onto the shores of their vivarium. It may not be graceful but it sure is fascinating!

If it’s not on land, you’ll commonly catch Tiktaalik below the surface exploring its aquatic domain. It’s great exercise for grandpa!

Making A Home

When it comes to enrichment items, these can be toggled within the same menu. Each Vivarium comes with its own predetermined enrichment spots that add new locations for your animals to explore. For example, your Compsognathus can jump up onto logs and your Microraptors can glide to climbing frames.

All vivariums above were made using a mix of hand placement and auto-generation!

We should also mention that ALL of these enrichment items will be available as separate decorative modular pieces!

Enlightening

Vets & Diseases

• Common Cold A contagious disease potentially contracted from weather or swimming

• Silicosis Particulate caught in the lungs, caused by a lack of plants in the habitat

• Roundworms Contracted from eating contaminated feeders

• Plant Toxicosis Contracted from eating plants of the wrong era

• Mites Contracted from using dirty bedding

Vets

When a disease has been found, vets will medicate animals from a distance or sedate them and use the new ‘Medicine’ resource to treat them in the field. A sick animal cannot lose its survey status until all its issues have been cured.

Preventing Disease

Players can also add supplements to feeders by using the Medicine delivered by vets. Once ingested, animals will receive temporary buffs depending on what the player has enabled. 

• Vitamins Animals are more resistant to getting sick, increases immunity and growth speed

• Steroids Animals heal faster from light wounds, increases vitality and growth speed (will be useful for competitive species like Triceratops once combat is added)

• Mating Booster Increases courtship during the breeding season

• Mating Suppressant Decreases courtship during the breeding season

• Mutagen Increases the chance and intensity of mutations from parent to offspring (e.g. wider variation in genetic immunity, fertility and random skins for babies)

Research & Quarantine

As you can see below, all of the mid-late stage illnesses either must be researched to perform treatment in the field or entirely rely on the Quarantine Bay. To prevent the worst from happening, you’ll want your vets available, habitats spotless and this research tree completed!

Next Year

Once again, thank you so much for your support over the past 12 months. You kept PK alive and helped us create our biggest year ever. The Dev Diary will return in January with our roadmap for 2026 outlining what we hope will be an even BIGGER year filled with the things that you’ve been begging for.

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Welcome to the October Development Update!

We hope you’ve had a spOoOky month with plenty of park building to go around. In this post, we’ll be exploring more of the new content coming in Update 16 and meeting a particularly cute friend.

As we continue to march forwards, we’ve made good progress on Update 16! Six out of the nine upcoming vivarium species have had their models fully finalized, meaning it’s time to move onto their animations and sound. You might even be able to get an early look at some of them over on the Patreon!

Beyond this, the team’s developed the first functional prototypes for the Ferris Wheel and Panoramic Tower rides coming soon. We’re using placeholder art at the moment, but visitors are able to properly board the rides and disembark when finished. Without a cashier, a ride cannot operate!

Update 16

Vivariums

Simosuchus UNLEASHED!!

Coming soon to a park near you is the terrifying, massive-jawed… tiny… Simosuchus? This adorable "pug-nosed crocodile” was originally found in the late Cretaceous floodplains of Madagascar, sharing a formation with popular dinosaurs like the mighty Majungasaurus.

Despite its rugged appearance, Simosuchus was actually a herbivore! It had dozens of tiny, leaf-shaped teeth in its mouth that were perfect for stripping low lying vegetation. Thanks to the fossil record, this is another species our scientists were able to restore with a high degree of genetic accuracy!

Big Leaps for Little Kind

Of course, aerial species like Archaeopteryx can also leap, fly or walk around their enclosure. Just like the Compy, enabling enrichment such as climbing structures or forage boxes will give your birdies plenty of destinations. Flight as well as their pathing will be smoothed out in the final version.

A Splashing Success

This development extends to the tide pool enrichment, too! Your Spinosaur’s prey will feel much more refreshed, uh, for the moment.

In the future, we’d love to add some fountains or dedicated water pieces that can take advantage of the new tech. It’s really great to see what nice looking water does for the environment.

Vivarium Walls

Whether or not the Terrestrial Vivarium displays burrows depends on the species inside! The Arboreal Vivarium will also have a tree “shell” enrichment item that makes it look more like the current Mini-Aviary.

Afflictions, Disease & Death

Animals will be able to develop a variety of issues stemming from things like swimming, bad weather, poor habitats or even contaminated feeders. Most diseases can also evolve into something more extreme if left unchecked by vets, for example, the common cold can go from pneumonia all the way to respiratory failure or a heart attack.

No matter how morbid, we genuinely can’t wait to share more about this part of the game. Diseases tend to be an overlooked aspect of zoo-sims and our planned approach to visualising various conditions and symptoms is something we think you’ll be very interested in! Stay tuned.

Update 18

Jumping ahead to next year, U18 will be the last Early Access update before we hunker down for the full release. While it’ll offer new gameplay in the form of breakouts, security and engineers, it’s also where you’ll finally get the wetland map! 

Alongside this new level and wetland foliage improvements, we are going to replace the painted water rendering system with the one coming to Vivariums in U16. It’ll be quite a lot of work, but it should run faster, look better and finally allow us to render pieces underwater! Builders rejoice. 

This update is still quite a ways off, but we think you’ll truly love it when it arrives. Weird and a little bittersweet to think that PK’s Early Access journey is almost coming to an end! 

Created by Bilaral

Created by CarlosG72

Created by Wither

Created by blu

Thank you for reading October’s dev diary!

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Welcome, Park Managers!

This newest patch resolves a number of issues in addition to adding basic threaten/fleeing behaviors, look targets and grazing fidgets for when herbivores idle.

The team has now fully moved on to developing Update 16 which you stay up to date with by checking out our development blog at the end of every month.

Update 15.1 Features

Basic Threaten/Fleeing

Depending on the animal group, species will try to flee, chase off or threaten animals. Some highlights include herbivores becoming more defensive if they have a family, animals fleeing from predators, or large theropods threatening each other if they get too close. Some animals like adolescent and adult ceratopsians will even threaten other species when it's their breeding season!

These behaviors have been brought over from the nest defense previously included in Update 15 so keep in mind that it'll be massively improved once combat releases next year in Update 17!

Look Targets

Animals will now look at other creatures around them! Adults will prioritize immediate relatives and their own species, while babies will look at their parents and other species more commonly. They'll also now watch the head or tail of their partner during courtship.

Graze Fidgets

We've also added new idle grazing fidgets for when herbivores are standing around. As this isn't a dedicated grazing behavior, the animation can still play regardless of an animal's underlying terrain. This might be something we look at in a future update.

Additional Notes

• Look targets and threatens are relatively experimental additions to the game that will be evolved through updates

• Head IK can be a bit jittery, especially when transitioning out into an extreme animation (e.g. Gallimimus preen) - we'll be looking to improve this as much as we can in the future

• The head IK is currently enabled when animals are spawned, making them look up

• Defensive animals may get stuck in a threaten loop for a while but one should eventually emerge victorious

• When fleeing, animals can sometimes walk away instead of running, making them seem very chill!

Full Patch Notes

Features

• NEW FEATURE: Animal Look Targets Animals will now look at other creatures around them! Adults will prioritize immediate relatives and their own species, while babies will look at their parents and other species more commonly.

• NEW FEATURE: Basic Threats & Fleeing Animals will be able to threaten and run away from threats if they get too close. Highlights include some species becoming more defensive if they have a family, while others will run away from predators as much as possible. This is an area we will be overhauling for Update 17 in the future!

Additions

• Animals

  • Added idle grazing animations:

    • Ankylosaurus

    • Coelodonta

    • Dryosaurus

    • Elasmotherium

    • Gallimimus

    • Leaellynasaura

    • Mammoth

    • Muttaburrasaurus

    • Nasutoceratops

    • Ouranosaurus

    • Oviraptor

    • Pachyrhinosaurus

    • Paraceratherium

    • Protoceratops

    • Psittacosaurus

    • Scelidosaurus

    • Styracosaurus

    • Triceratops

  • Added courtship to Ouranosaurus

Changes

• Animals

  • Animals have been given new awareness parameters, like vision range and hearing distance

  • Awareness now scales with animal maturity

  • Animals “Sexual Maturity” is now based on being a certain size as well as being in the last third of their maturity

  • In Family Groups, Eat/Drink priority is now driven by the infants rather than the adults

  • Young animals should now have boosted need fulfilling gains

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Color-corrected topiary pieces so they’re less neon green

• Foliage

  • Redwood bark is now darker in the shade

Bug Fixes

• Crashes

  • Fixed some crashing related to animal nav updating

  • Fixed a rare crash that can occur when alt-tabbing in/out of the game

• Critical

  • Fixed staff skill and training research loading

  • Fixed animal excavation progress doubling up when loading games

  • Fixed user actions not deactivating completely when opening the management menu while an action was active

• Animals

  • Fixed animals slowly speeding up to normal speed when first placed in the world

  • Fixed animals using IK and grounding effects when they shouldn’t

  • Fixed animals being able to leave their navmesh if another navmesh was available above or below the point of exit

  • Fixed Mating Display state being too picky about a minimum initiation distance

  • Fixed Play Chase state to ensure line-of-sight between path nodes, which should prevent animals from getting stuck on geometry while chasing

  • “Sexual Maturity” feature fixes animals trying to mate and find nests when they are still too small to occupy the size of navmesh their preferred nest is accessible from

  • Flee State should be a bit more varied in where it chooses to end at

• UI/UX

  • Fix for the 'Open Research' button in the Staff Training menu linking to the Security tree instead of the Management tree within the Research Menu

  • Fixed staff menu summary refresh when opening the Staff Menu

• Audio

  • Fixed a spatialization issue for dromaeosaur threaten sounds

What changed from the last PTB?

Additions

• Audio

  • Added missing sounds to ceratopsian grazing and Gallimimus animations

Changes

• Animals

  • Threat displays and fleeing for herbivores will now be primarily triggered by predators that pose a larger threat to them. They can still threaten each other if it is nesting season, however, with adolescent ceratopsians also becoming spicy towards other species!

  • Sped up ceratopsian idle graze animation

  • Young animals should now have boosted need fulfilling gains

Bug Fixes

• Crashes

  • Fixed a rare crash that can occur when alt-tabbing in/out of the game

• Animals

  • Fixed Ugrunaaluk neck compression

  • Fixed an issue that caused some herbivores to not tolerate males of their own species

  • Fixed Nasutoceratops not playing its idle graze animation

  • Fixed animals improperly using IKs in the nursery screen

• UI/UX

  • Dramatically improved camera jitter when tracking moving objects

Welcome, Park Testers!

This PTB release resolves a number of issues in addition to adding basic threaten/fleeing behaviors, look targets and grazing fidgets for when herbivores idle.

Update 15.1 Features

Basic Threaten/Fleeing

Depending on the animal group, species will try to flee, chase off or threaten animals. Some highlights include looking at courtships, herbivores becoming more defensive if they have a family, animals fleeing from predators or large theropods threatening each other if they get too close.

These behaviors have been brought over from the nest defense previously included in Update 15 so keep in mind that it'll be massively improved once combat releases next year in Update 17!

Look Targets

Animals will now look at other creatures around them! Adults will prioritize immediate relatives and their own species, while babies will look at their parents and other species more commonly.

Graze Fidgets

We've also added new idle grazing fidgets for when herbivores are standing around. As this isn't a dedicated grazing behavior, the animation can still play regardless of an animal's underlying terrain. This might be something we look at in a future update.

How to Access the Public Testing Branch (Experimental!)

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.

Welcome to the September Development Update!

This month’s blog post will primarily focus on providing a work-in-progress look at the upcoming Vivarium exhibits coming in Update 16. We also have news on Update 15.1, as well as an announcement that PK is currently part of the Steam Autumn sale!

In September, the team found themselves working on two updates at once - the U15 support patch and U16. This was an interesting act to juggle since a few of us had to continually jump back and forth throughout the month depending on what other team members needed.

Update 15.1 Release

Update 16

As detailed last month, U16 will be another massive release focused on fleshing out your park and management opportunities. 

Vivariums

A New Home

Vivarium species will be found in the Animal Nursery alongside the rest of the roster. Here, players can filter specifically for vivarium animals or even make use of the customization tools to override their variation and random mutations. There’s also a handy dropdown you can use to see how many animals will fit into a certain vivarium size.

Once created, they’ll have to be dropped into their habitat from the Animal Holder. Keepers will need to stock and clean their vivarium by interacting with the hatch in the back.

Vivariums O’ Plenty

Currently, there are 4 different sizes to choose from:

• Box (4x4x4)

• Small (4x8x4)

• Medium (8x12x6)

• Large (12x16x8)

Exterior Customization

Walking With Tiny Dinosaurs

• Have more animals moving around at once

• Add or remove paths depending on what enrichment is enabled

• Develop vivarium species faster by sharing spline paths

More To Come!

Roadmap Change

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Welcome, Park Managers!

This patch aims to fix various issues from Update 15 while adding a few more animations to the animals. This includes new tall feeder animations for the hadrosaurs, also allowing them to browse from short trees. We've also cleaned up their drinking and low eat animations.

The team are still working on Update 15.1 so keep your eyes peeled for that in the next few weeks!

Full Patch Notes

Additions

Animals

• Added more additive and idle fidget animations to Gallimimus

• Added tall feeder and tree-browsing support to hadrosaurs

• Added grazing idle animation to hadrosaurs

• Added courtship animation to:

  • Camarasaurus

  • Lambeosaurus

  • Pachyrhinosaurus

• Added threaten animation to: 

  • Deinocheirus

  • Ursus

• Added various missing vocal animations to:

  • Argentinosaurus, Brachiosaurus

  • Deinocheirus

  • Nasutoceratops, Pachyrhinosaurus, Protoceratops and Triceratops

Audio

• Added unique growls to Nasutoceratops

• Added missing sounds to various animations introduced in Update 15 (some threaten sfx still absent!)

Changes

Balance

• Increased guest spawning rates across all difficulties

• Dung degradation has been rebalanced to be much faster, previous tuning was based on incorrect units, causing almost no degradation over time

• When Dung is disabled in settings, all dung in park will rapidly degrade

Animals

• Adjusted exhibit crowding sizes

  • Coelophysis: 150m² > 250m²

• Adjusted animal iridescence visuals

  • Lowered Oviraptor baseline iridescence

  • Drastically cut iridescence intensity during night time

• After successfully mating, if parent fertility would result in 0 offspring, a notification is generated

• Family Group Leaders will now observe the nutrition and hydration levels of infants and prioritize eating and drinking based on group need

• Updated hadrosaur low eat and drinking animations

UI/UX

• Camera track transitions have been improved, with the snap->bounce effect being drastically smoothed out

• Improved item rotation sensitivity

Audio

• Wooden staff gates now have a unique open/close sound

Bug Fixes

Crashes

• Fixed a crash when terraforming near the edge of the map

Critical

• Fixed an invalid memory access when enclosures were up against the far sides of the map

• Fixed another potential source of animal fuzz explosions

• Fixed errors in animal skeleton initialization that could destabilize the game

• Fixed a bug that set the animal limit at 1024 instead of the intended 4096

• Fixed nav agents being able to pass into illegitimate triangles that are inescapable.

Animals

• Strengthened ‘pregnancy’ logic checks, which should be more accurately reported in the animal GUI

• Added a potential fix to some larger animals not reaching full maturity

• Fixed clutch and breeding data for Apatosaurus

• Fixed a rigging issue that caused awkward ankle positioning across all animals when turning

• Limited the angle at which animals can adapt to the ground

• BluffCharge state will no longer disrespect line of sight nav boundaries

• Fixed Animal Groups not loading in under certain circumstances

• Fixed Flee State being appended at the wrong time causing errors in multithreaded state processing

• Fixed “Pregnancy Failed” notification missing localization assets

Environment

• Fixed grass splatmaps for the starting boreal and coastal maps

Guests

• Fixed a bug that made binoculars vision cone narrower than intended

Staff

• Staff Breaks are now centrally delegated, preventing too many staff members from going on break at the same time

Construction

• All pre-built facilities for starting saves have now been aligned to the grid

• Fixed modular quick scale resetting object height if it was currently stacking on another object

UI/UX

• Potentially fixed a GUI exception causing inability to switch feeders to a different feed type

• Fixed an issue causing undo/redo buttons on the Main HUD to not properly refresh when using Undo/Redo through the keybinds

Performance

• Minor CPU Optimizations

• GPU rendering optimization for animals that didn’t need tessellation

• Reduced unnecessary logging

• Heavily optimized the Modular Style menu

https://www.patreon.com/c/BlueMeridian

Welcome to the August Development Update!

In case you somehow missed it, Update 15 released just under a week ago! This monumental update added new behaviors for breeding and courtship alongside many new standout features like paleobotany, foliage browsing and new enrichment feeders.

This is also a great time to point out that Prehistoric Kingdom is currently 30% off until September 1st! Be sure to grab it while you can as the sale will end very soon.

Alright! Due to this update being so recent, the team are currently taking a little break so please forgive us for this Dev Diary being short! We just wanted to quickly touch base before going back to work and refresh the community on our plans for the future. So…

Having now launched U15, the team is very happy with its reception and feedback from the community. At its peak, we almost broke 1,000 concurrent players on Steam which is the highest number we’ve had since launching into Early Access.

Comparison by Discord user ASSASSINSPINO!

An Additional Patch

“Although this is not how we planned to ship Update 15, unfortunate circumstances over the last few weeks have meant that we have elected to prioritise the wellbeing of our team members and focus on the core breeding mechanics.

These features will be arriving in a second update coming in September:

• Animal Head IK

• Interspecies threat displays and fleeing (however this CAN occur during courtship right now!)

We apologise and hope you can respect our decision on this. The team currently expects Update 15.1 to arrive before the end of September - only a few weeks away.”

The Road Ahead: Update 16

After working on two major animal-related updates back-to-back, it’s safe to say our team is feeling ready to move onto something that doesn’t relate to growth or breeding! While 15.1 gets worked on, the rest of the team will be entering pre-production for U16. This will be another huge and frankly transformative update, this time focused on expanding the gameplay and park management experience.

Vivariums

(previously known as Terrariums or Mini-Exhibits)

To keep their dev cost low, these species do not have ontogeny, multiple skin designs or a true AI brain. They are an expansion to the Mini-Aviary idea currently in the game, adding new options for a terrestrial and amphibious tank alongside the usual arboreal housing for climbers and gliders. They’ll play animations at preset points around the habitat and sometimes even traverse it depending on where they spawn each time you look at a vivarium.

Creative Commons Reference Photos (with authors): Image 1, Image 2

Vets, Diseases & Death

Vets will monitor habitats, tend to nests and alert the player to any disease that they find along the way. Depending on the severity, animals can be treated in the field directly. If it’s a serious or contagious issue, players should move their animal into the upcoming Quarantine Bay module.

Flat Rides

Flat rides are a new type of attraction that can provide guests with entertainment or a better look at your animals! As mentioned in the January Dev Diary, flat rides include things like a ferris wheel, theater or a tethered balloon ride that goes straight up to provide a vantage point.

Staff Progression 2.0

To make things more cohesive, staff training and salary management will be merged into a unified system, letting players individually train staff. As the skill level of a staff member goes up, so does their salary! If they become too expensive, the player may have to demote them and lose access to their skills until promoting them again.

Since all of the remaining updates until full release are equally large, we estimate the minimum development window between releases to be around 3-4 months (basically what you’re already used to). As always, you can check out our roadmap to see what’s on the way and we’ll keep you in the loop if things change!

Update 16

New Vivarium Species

There’s something chirping in the bushes and it’s not a bird! This must be the tiny Jurassic theropod, Compsognathus. Our little finger-biter here will be one of the smallest animals in Prehistoric Kingdom, ending up a little shorter than a baby Velociraptor.

Compies and similarly-sized land critters will be housed in the terrestrial vivarium, making it easy to keep track of them. We can’t wait to show more pictures once we’ve started properly developing their habitats! They’re going to be so much fun.

And that’s all for the moment! We’ll see you again next month for September’s diary as we move deeper into working on Update 16. In the meantime, there’s quite a lot to play with in Update 15, so we hope you enjoy everything we just added.

Created by gemini98

Created by Unga

Created by SammyChan14

Created by Khaidu

Thank you for reading August's dev diary!

Don’t forget to keep your eyes peeled for U15.1 and keep posting all those gorgeous screenshots on our Discord server!

- The PK Team

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