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
[p align="start"]
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
