Prehistoric Kingdom - Update 17 Hotfix (1.17.106)

Hello, Park Managers!

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

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

Known Issues & Additional Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miscellaneous issues:

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

Full Patch Notes

Additions

• Animals

  • Added a new baby design for the Wildberry Nasutoceratops skin

  • Added a new baby design for the Hibernal Leaellynasaura skin

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

• UI/UX

  • Added several new Help articles:

    • Vets

    • Workzones

    • Park Issue - Animal Affliction

    • Park Issue - Animal Combat

    • Park Issue - Animal Death

    • Park Issue - Animal Dying

    • Park Issue - Animal Escaped

Changes

• Balance

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

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

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

  • Decreased infectivity and spawning chances for Pemphigus

• Animals

  • Made several improvements to aggression behaviors:

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

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

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

    • Carcass eating selection for carnivores now respects cannibalism values

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

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

    • Reduced the initiation chances of the Opportunistic Bully aggression behavior

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

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

  • Animals should now be able to regain stamina while unconscious

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

• Tutorials

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• UI/UX

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

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

  • Cleaned up UX behavior for the building menu:

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

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

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

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

• Post Processing

  • Improved Global Illumination

Bug Fixes

• Crashes

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

• Critical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Fixed issues around zipped save loading

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

  • Main menu continue will not pick up tempsaves

• Gameplay

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

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

• Animals

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

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

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

  • Fixed Mammoths being unable to go through with their courtship

  • Fixed missing courtship for Camarasaurus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Guests

  • Fixed a frequent error in ride disembarking

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

• Construction

  • Fixed Object Stacking not functioning outside of group editing

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

• UI/UX

  • Fixed missing localization for the IncorrectVivariumConfiguration placement validity error

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

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

Performance

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

• Optimized human AI calculation

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

• Cut animation driver processing time by 30-40%

• Significantly optimized SSGI

• Significantly reduced stutters during combat