PTB: Update 17 Combat Preview

Steam post imageSteam post imageWelcome, 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.

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

• Some of the newly-added AI complexity has exposed new cracks in animal AI states execution. That is to say, we're aware of potential issues causing animals to get soft-locked into their current state. Whenever this occurs, please report the issue, attaching a screenshot of the animal's AI brain (accessible by pressing Shift+B during selection)

• Several combat states are currently under various degrees of completion, with polishing expected to be occurring all throughout the PTB period:

  • Hunting is currently in the middle of being implemented, so you may find unexpected hunting behavior. Prey targeting is not incredibly selective at the moment, and predation behavior overwhelms predators' feeding choices. This will be tuned as we continue to work for the update's live release.

  • Some animals can move faster than we would like during combat encounters, especially younger individuals

  • Animal circle states and some attacks result in more or less clipping - we are going to do our best to reduce this as much as possible, though the dynamic nature of the combat system entails it will never be resolved in all capacities

  • Significant amounts of animal combat can seriously degrade AI performance. This is an area we are currently optimizing

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

• Much of the audio implementation for combat audio events, as well as combat music is currently unfinished, and actively being worked on. We expect the audio library for animal attacks and reactions to be expanded as PTB continues

• 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

  • The following animals will now sneeze when sick:

    • Nasutoceratops

    • Pachyrhinosaurus

    • Protoceratops

    • Triceratops

    • Brontosaurus/Apatosaurus

    • 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

• UI/UX

  • Added Paleopedia descriptions to the following taxa:

    • Stegosaurus ungulatus

    • Tarbosaurus

  • Added Paleopedia descriptions to the following excavation sites:

    • Nemegt Formation

  • 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

Changes

• Balance

  • Added Stegosaurus ungulatus to the Lourinha Formation

• Animals

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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Animal carcasses now disappear after a duration proportional to their size classification

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

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

  • For aggression targeting, animals are now considered to share a social group if their current family group leader shares the social group

  • Dead animals will now not count towards enclosure welfare analysis

  • Corrected oversizing mistakes in both Triceratops species and Pachyrhinosaurus canadensis

  • Play/Chasing behaviour is more refined and consistent

  • Updated sprinting speeds for Tyrannosaurus and all hadrosaurs

  • Animals can now trip when fleeing, with a greater chance depending on health and fatigue

• 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

• Environment

  • Made Tropical lighting slightly more consistent with temperate

• Foliage

  • Removed shine from distant foliage impostors for a smoother appearance

• UI/UX

  • 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

• 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

  • Slightly increased object rendering distances across all visual settings

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

• Audio

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

  • Lowered mid-frequencies on animal hover sound

Bug Fixes

• Crashes

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

• Critical

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

  • 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

  • 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 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

• 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

  • General improvements to Animal AI stability

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

  • 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

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

  • Animals now use animation-derived data to better position themselves when eating, drinking, and interacting with objects

  • Fixed animal locomotion getting caught on corners in some cases

  • 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

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

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

• Staff

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

  • Fixed shoveling instability at high game speeds

• Buildings & Scenery

  • Fixed animal info sign loading

• 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

• 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

  • Resolved flickering in the Animals Management Menu list

  • The ‘Allow unassigned staff’ toggle in the workzone info menu settings should now persist correctly

  • 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 notification system threading error that caused certain notifications not to trigger anymore (such as the animal pregnancy notification)

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

  • Fixed ‘Hard Difficulty’ text spelling

• Rendering

  • Improved water rendering visuals

Performance

• Patched a major performance degradation issue 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

• 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