PTB: Update 17 Begins Testing!

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.

1. Right click Prehistoric Kingdom in your Steam Library

2. Go to Properties

3. Betas

4. 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

• Stegosaurus is still being implemented so additional sounds and visual polish will arrive later

• Due to the on-going controller support development, we switched the game's input over to Unity's new Input System. This means that some niche inputs, such as mouse right-click camera panning are currently disabled, and the action/cancel click flow might be altered. We're gonna keep working on improving controls and keybind settings all the way up to 1.0

• There is an occasional water loading issue which can cause old 'muddy' water to load with incorrect visuals. This can easily be fixed by forcing a water update, either through painting more water or replacing the water bodies with a different water type

• Staff can be a bit unwieldy when using the breakrooms; please bear with us while we teach them how to take breaks!

Full Patch Notes

Features

• NEW ANIMAL: Stegosaurus stenops

• NEW ANIMAL: Stegosaurus ungulatus

• AddedNEW FEATUREStaff Workzones Staff can now be assigned to editable Workzones , either manually or automatically. Assigned staff will only complete tasks within their designated area, while unassigned staff can still work anywhere in the park. Workzones can be created and managed from the new Staff Workzones tab in Management View .

• NEW CHANGE: Staff Promotion & Morale Staff progression has been rebalanced with three promotion levels for every staff type, each unlocking a Base Skill and a Veteran Skill. Staff now gain a small amount of XP after every shift, can train for promotion at Staff Centers, and require both manageable workloads and a Staff Breakroom to maintain morale.

• AdjustedNEW CHANGEStreamlined Logistics Park Logistics has been updated to improve readability and make resource management more hands-on. Loading Bay orders are now placed manually, with available order capacity based on the number of trucks stationed at the bay, and can be set to repeat automatically over multiple months. Compost has also been reworked and is now required for feed production at Produce Stations , while the new Logistics View makes it easier to track stockpiles and transfers across the park.
• AdjustedNEW CHANGEImproved Guest Satisfaction Park-wide visitor satisfaction is now based on accessibility and distance, meaning the player’s performance in that area is now closely tied to park layout and design, instead of an average of all current needs like hunger, which constantly drain regardless of player action.
• AdjustedNEW CHANGEImproved Water Rendering & Water Painting Water rendering has received a major visual upgrade, adding improved surface detail, high fidelity underwater rendering, and caustics, all while improving performance. The update also introduces a more flexible water-painting workflow, with multiple water styles and the ability to instantly update existing water bodies by painting over them with a new brush.

Additions

• Gameplay

  • 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

• Buildings & Scenery

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

• 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

    • Spinosaurus

    • Ursus

  • Added Paleopedia descriptions to the following excavation sites:

    • Kem Kem Beds

    • Liushu Formation

    • Yamal Peninsula

• Audio

  • 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

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

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

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

• Animals

  • 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

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

  • Made many responsiveness Improvements to animal locomotion

  • Slowed down large theropod nest digging animations

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

  • Animals now take much less time to dry out visually

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

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

  • Animals should now get closer to the 4m square and 4m trough style feeders

• Construction

  • 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

• Landscaping

  • Water types 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

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Added a LOD level to the Loading Bay

• Paths

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

• Environment

  • 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

• Foliage

  • Improved texture quality for palms and small tropical ground plants

• UI/UX

  • 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

• 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

  • Glass rendering has been massively overhauled, improving reflection fidelity and adding specular highlights

• Audio

  • 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

Bug Fixes

• Critical

  • 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

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

  • Fixed a memory leak in navmesh generation

• Animals

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

  • 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

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

  • Animals fleeing now properly consumes stamina

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

• Staff

  • 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

• Construction

  • 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

• 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

• UI/UX

  • 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)

• 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

• 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