Prehistoric Kingdom - Update 16 (1.16.33)

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

Steam post imageSteam post image

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.

Steam post imageSteam post image

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

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.

MODULAR GROUP MERGING

When selecting more than 1 modular group, there are now multiple ways to merge them! This can drastically improve how players create prefabs. We didn't have a lot of time to polish this feature, so it'll be improved in a future patch. Regardless, here are the merge options:

• 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.

FSR 3.1 UPSCALING

From the graphics settings menu, players can now enable FSR 3.1 to improve their rendering performance! There are several quality options available with each impacting the game's image quality.

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.

• AdjustedNOTEAnimal 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