Prehistoric Kingdom - Update 17 Fix Patch (1.17.120)

Welcome, Park Managers!

The final support patch for Update 17 is here, bringing new partner combat animations for several species, major improvements to animal behaviour and mutation visuals, important optimizations, and many exciting QoL improvements.

Behind the scenes, we’ve also tackled a wide range of crashes, construction issues, performance bottlenecks, and save/load problems to make building and managing your prehistoric park smoother, faster, and more stable than ever.

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

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

• Due to engine and navigation limitations, animals spend too much time in the water, as they are not able to properly distinguish land tiles from water tiles. This is something we're addressing in the next major update

• 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 with the next Major Update

Full Patch Notes

Additions

• Animals

• Added new partner combat animations for:

• Mammuthus

• Nasutoceratops

• Pachycephalosaurus

• Panthera

• Smilodon

• Styracosaurus

• Velociraptor

• UI/UX

• Selected animals will now display a selection outline overlay when not tracked by the camera

• Enclosures can now be renamed through the header of the Enclosure Infomenu

• Added an ‘Objects’ tab to the Enclosure Infomenu, allowing players to view the modules currently present in their exhibits and to control their supplements at the enclosure level

• Added a 'Go to Nearest Loading Bay' button to the logistics management view which will now select the closest loading bay to the camera

• Audio

• Added species combat vocalizations to:

• Acrocanthosaurus

Changes

• Critical

• Undo / Redo operations are now blocked when they overlap with other construction or destruction operations, removing a whole class of bugs from the park construction experience. A warning banner will be displayed when an operation is blocked.

• Animals

• Completely re-worked animal mutation visuals for naturally born animals affected by mutagens, in an effort to reign in overly bright and saturated mutations that would look completely unnatural

• Reduced the hue drifting for all species, and especially for mammals, which should not get pink, purple, green or blue. Natural mutations are overall much more subtle

• Animals featuring mutations such as leucism, melanism and albinism are now properly clamped to the tuned visual values for those conditions

• Made balances to animal aggression behaviors:

• Adjusted sauropod defense behaviors, letting them ignore threats that aren't their direct predators, as they don't engage in infant protection. This should make the meanest sauropods ignore smaller and medium predators in their vicinity

• Dedicated family protection has been adjusted - now named Pro-Active Family Protection, this behavior filters out social group members from the target pool, with the activation range now being brought way down (x10 factor), making  pro-active defense based more heavily on immediate proximity

• When attacking, animals will now have a chance to shrug off staggering hit effects the closer they are to completing their attack

• Higher level afflictions can no longer happen to newborn animals, and can only occur past a certain age

• Vivariums will now display any leftover food in them which is waiting to be removed after changing the feed type

• Animals who witness the death of family or social group members will now react in a few different ways, with social group members being more likely to flee and parents of killed offspring being more likely to stand their ground

• When placed in quarantine, animals should now recover hitpoints at an accelerated rate

• When sparring, animals with higher social hierarchy positions get a conviction bonus making them less likely to back down

• Staff

• When using the Call Staff button, this will now force the assignment to be delegated immediately, even if that means pulling an already assigned staff member off their current assignment.

This may incur some loss of staff efficiency due to being pulled away from an assignment that may have been nearly complete at the time of reassignment, especially in the case of logistics resource transportation.

To alleviate this, a staff member who is moving resources and is forced onto a different resource transportation assignment can seamlessly transition to the new assignment without having to perform the pickup at the new storage location first, if either of these two criteria are met: the resource is of the same type as the previous assignment, or coming from the same storage location as the previous assignment

• When sedating animals, vets now have a small chance to miss their target, mitigated by the True Aim perk

• Environment

• Water Quality Overhaul

• Quality scaling has been implemented, lower water settings now adjust the visual quality to deliver significant performance improvements

• Ultra/Cinematic water has been improved and optimized

• Use of surface tessellation has been substantially optimized

• Underwater volumetric lighting is no longer grainy

• UI/UX

• Overhauled the Animal Infomenu:

• Added several information breakdowns and textual descriptions for Immunity, Fertility and Fecundity, making their purpose and function clearer

• Merged rating and milestones within the same menu

• Moved the breeding information into a new Breeding tab

• Overhauled the Options Menu:

• The options menu has been rebuilt from the ground up, with settings reorganised into five tabs (Gameplay, Graphics, Audio, Controls, Interface) and tooltips added throughout. 

• Apply now only activates when you've actually changed something, and unapplied changes are discarded when you switch tabs or back out. 

• Frame limiting is now a simple on/off toggle with a target FPS instead of a fraction of your refresh rate, with your existing setting carrying over automatically

• Keybinds are grouped into filterable sections with a reset-all option, and Escape now cancels a rebind instead of closing the menu. The whole menu also updates properly when you change language

• Structure attribute widgets will now show up on Modular Prefabs too

• Module Logistics Unfulfilled park issue now has a delay of 180 seconds, and should now show additional diagnostic information

• Clicking a Checklist park issue now takes you through to the construction button for the required module

• Post Processing

• Screen-Space Reflections Overhaul

• At higher quality settings, reflections now apply to many metallic surfaces properly

• All settings below Cinematic are significantly more optimized

• Graininess of SSR was significantly reduced

• Key optimizations were introduced

• Vegetation is no longer incorrectly affected by SSR

Bug Fixes

• Crashes

• Fixed a number of subtle resource disposal ordering bugs which could lead to crashes/freezes when exiting to the menu or quitting the game

• Fixed a number of system intersections that could act without waiting for other systems properly, leading to potential memory corruption and crashes

• Critical

• Substantial improvements to the correctness and stability of the save/load systems

• Fixed mouse orbit input drifting away from the game window when the window is smaller than the game screen

• Fixed a bug where restyling or recoloring multiple modular pieces at once could apply the wrong style to some pieces, or cause pieces to snap to an incorrect color on Undo/Redo

• Fixed the ‘Upload to Workshop’ button not working in the save menu

• Fixed dead animals prematurely stopping enclosure analysis

• Fixed asymmetric navmesh generation that would allow agents to pass through open areas from one direction but not the other

• Fixed a memory problem where interactable types were reading more bytes than allowed, potentially leading to unknown instability

• Fixed a problem leading Park Beauty to not correctly refresh its waste data after dung was being disposed (either naturally or by being cleaned by a Keeper)

• Fixed an error in the OnQuit handling that could break the dialog

• More stability improvements to the Animal Awareness (sight and hearing) system

• Fixed memory compression logic that was writing beyond the correct memory area, leading to potential memory corruption

• Fixed a few memory leaks

• Steam Workshop Stability Improvements

• Steam Workshop should now be more reliable when browsing, downloading, updating, refreshing, or removing content. This update addresses a number of issues that could lead to downloads failing or getting stuck in a loop, outdated or mismatched Workshop data, missing updates, or incomplete refreshes. It also fixes a rare case where local saves or prefabs could be lost after a failed upload. The game must still be closed or restarted when changing subscriptions in the workshop, all changes should be reconciled on game startup.

• Substantially reduced unload time (when quitting or returning to main menu) for parks that have many modular pieces

• Degenerate enclosures (bugged or corrupted) are carefully skipped during loading, while maintaining other enclosures

• Overhauled navigation data invalidation and synchronization so animals, visitors, staff and cached paths cannot continue using stale navigation information after rapid construction, terrain or navmesh changes

• Fixed a rare navmesh update deadlock caused by degenerate triangles

• Fixed a navigation bug that could corrupt local area data in parks containing very large numbers of navigation areas

• Fixed additional cases where degenerate navigation geometry could be accepted by downstream systems, improving navigation stability

• Fixed several Addressable asset tracking and cleanup issues that could leave stale references after failed or cancelled loads

• Gameplay

• Fixed visitor spawning treating parks containing only carcasses as having live animals

• Fixed invalid feeders being counted during enclosure analysis

• Fixed enclosure updates not fully refreshing the area previously occupied by an enclosure after its bounds changed

• Animals

• Fixed a crack in the animal aging system that would disregard the realistic growth speed for certain cases

• Fixed a bug that was causing the ‘Call to Check up’ and ‘Call to Tranquilize’ buttons always being disabled for healthy animals

• Fixed loaded juvenile and adolescent carcasses using incorrect bone proportions

• Picking up an animal in the middle of a partner attack animation should now correctly interrupt combat and inform the other animal to stop

• Fixed a few cases where higher level afflictions could occur much earlier into a new park than should have been allowed

• Fixed a bug where two animals were able to claim the same nest at the same time

• Fixed a bug where new family groups might not formulate properly based on conflicting parental and mating system settings, leading to inattentive parents

• Fix for animals loading in with incorrect maturity values during critical initialization steps, causing inaccurate state after loading finished

• Fixed an issue where embryos that were ready to hatch but hadn’t yet would load in not knowing that they needed to hatch

• Death during combat should more effectively inform carnivorous participants who might need to stop fighting and start eating

• Infant animals hiding behind parents should now be a bit more evenly distributed

• When the player moves a nest, animals should be more robust about either remembering or forgetting the moved nest, depending on context

• Fixed a bug where Vivarium Animals could not be moved directly or through the menu if they were not currently visible

• Fixed a bug where moved Vivarium Animals could not be LOD’d out unless the player moved the camera near them and away again

• Fixed a bug in the Animal AI that could cause strange behaviour when an animal stops chasing another animal

• Fixed a bug where animals gaining nutrition from browsing could still be enabled in challenge parks

• Fixed the timeout for animals searching for a reproduction module but being unable to find one

• Tightened up logic around predators killing for food, should prevent them from going into a frenzy and killing everything in sight

• Fixed an exception when all animals in a move operation were filtered out

• Fixed dead animals remaining standing when their animator was culled

• Fixed the Cinematic Camera activating for carcasses

• Fixed animal and Vivarium loading issues that could leave assets or LOD state partially initialized

• Fixed Vivarium animals not restoring enabled and LOD-dependent features correctly

• Fixed partial animal assets loading before all required assets were ready

• Fixed texture loading leaks when cancelling animal placement before loading finished

• Fixed an issue where an animal’s sedation reaction state would not end correctly

• Staff

• Fixed staff not having their perks applied properly. This affects multiple perks across multiple staff types which previously had no effect

• Perks which are related to future planned gameplay were supposed to be unselectable in the staff zone UI. This has been fixed

• Fixed staff surveys continuing to target dead animals

• Fix for logistics solving retaining information from previous attempted solutions, leading to poor solution results

• Fixed a minor bug in staff logistics solving that was incorrectly applying perk-modified feet speeds to staff who didn't have the perk, resulting in erroneous conclusions about which staff member could most effectively perform a specific logistics assignment

• Fixed a timing bug in vet shooting that was causing unsafe animal AI state manipulation

• Fixed a bug when multiple keepers were trying to fill the same tall feeder at the same time, causing desync

• Fixed a number of bugs in ‘prop’ (wheelbarrows, cheeseburgers, etc) handling and rendering, improving stability and reducing glitchy cases

• Fixed vets immediately performing medical operations on an animal until after combat ends. Player requested operations remain immediate

• Guests

• Improved visitor spawning reliability:

• Failed spawns are retried correctly

• Spawning waits for navigation to be ready

• Queued visitors are included in spawn limits

• Visitors are distributed evenly among valid open entrances

• Fixed entrances leaving stale navigation data after being changed or removed

• Fixed visitors being reset twice after failing to find nearby navigation

• Buildings & Scenery

• Fix for nests being ignored because their interactable could be unregistered after placement

• Loading bays spawned in with starting prefabs should now have correct configuration, no disabled stocks, and the player starts with some decent resource amounts. Also fixed the UI a bit, correctly hiding any stock line items that have nothing on hand and no pending delivery

• Fixed Vivarium Info Signs not updating correctly after animal stock changes

• Fixed stale Vivarium Info Sign dropdowns selecting incorrect values

• Fixed errors when demolishing a Loading Bay with an active order

• Foliage

• Cancelled vegetation strokes now roll back completely

• Fixed vegetation removal reducing park funds below zero

• Fixed incorrect vegetation tooltips for costs and insufficient funds

• Construction

• Fixed at least one verifiable case of modular grid positioning desync when splitting pieces from an existing group

• Terrain Flattening, Foliage Removal, and Terrain Edit Masking for modular and paths has been overhauled for stability

• Terrain flattening to modular building foundations can now flatten to each modular group’s foundation height independently

• Using undo/redo while placing a fence or path arc will now cancel placement, preventing certain state desynchronizations

• Fixed certain modular demolition cases not properly clearing selection visuals

• Closed a number of invalid modular operations that could be done under specific circumstances

• Fixed a bug that could rarely cause certain pieces not to load properly

• Fixed fences not being able to snap, have gates, or be replaced on the far edges of the map

• Fixed quick modular demolition leaving stale selections

• Fixed Fence and Modular Undo/Redo cost issues, including a funds exploit

• Fixed Vivarium cosmetic groups interacting incorrectly with Modular Undo/Redo

• Prevented multiple Vivariums from being flattened into one modular group

• Fixed the Raise/Lower terrain brush exceeding its limits in certain cases

• Fixed a number of Terraforming cancellation and Undo/Redo issues

• Fixed terrain paint alpha map update issues

• Fixed water painting connecting separate bodies across small gaps

• Improved navigation refreshes after large construction edits and edits near navmesh tile corners

• Fixed rare Fence collider mapping failures

• Fixed Staff Zone painting not ending when crossing the UI

• UI/UX

• Fixed most instances of re-sizing delays throughout the game’s HUD. Individual menus and panels should now be a lot more stable and less glitchy when being opened and changed

• Ratio bars in the storage widgets will now handle storage overflow graciously, instead of drawing past their maximum limit

• Fixed an exception that could block the Workshop Form from working correctly in the Main Menu

• Fixed a bug causing the ‘New Clutch’ notifications click-through behavior to not correctly execute

• Fixed the ‘Open Management’ keybind not firing

• Improved information relayed in the Structure Tooltip, creating a split between structures which require further research before being available, and structures that can’t be accessed due to already existing in the park

• Made several fixes to the Building Menu:

• Fixed an issue where an extremely narrow building menu window could corrupt its structure list layout instead of just showing fewer columns

• Building menu resize refreshes no longer trigger a full menu rebuild just because another refresh was already pending, cutting out unnecessary flicker/hitching when resizing quickly

• Fixed an issue where searching or filtering with no matching results could leave empty category sections in the building menu instead of showing the "no results" message

• Fixed an issue where rapidly opening, closing, or minimizing the building menu could cause it to settle in the wrong position

• Fixed a font edge case that could cause certain text elements to not display any text when the game language is set to Chinese

• Fixed a null ref when trying to view the Flee state during combat in the Animal Brain debug viewer

• Fixed navmesh overlay views breaking when selecting a modular object

• Fixed a number of cases where delayed GUI actions would still attempt to act if the relevant GUI element was closed

• Fixed the loading bay “Place Order” button not being disabled when the park has insufficient funds to place the order

• Fixed Main Menu panels becoming visually corrupted after rapid interaction

• Fixed the Animal List not refreshing after quarantine changes

• Fixed errors in the Paleopedia Animal Screen during rapid state changes

• Fixed an issue preventing animal creation in the Nursery

• Improved box selection accuracy for unusually scaled or rotated modular pieces

• Rendering

• Fixed a one-frame flicker effect when highlighting modular objects for selection

• Fixed Light LOD issues causing lights to remain disabled, re-enable unexpectedly or inherit stale state

• Misc.

• Fixed null refs during game shutdown

• Fixed null refs in visitor ride exit behavior

• Fixed safe access violations in interactables that could have caused desync or even crashes

• Resolved Voice Over errors when exiting to the main menu

• Landed a significant number of fixes and improvements across many ‘under-the-hood’ parts of the codebase, that should improve general stability

• Fixed rare errors caused by systems assuming a gameplay camera was available at improper times

Performance

• Reworked terrain paint application logic bypasses major painting performance degradation in Unity’s terrain editing framework when texture quality was set below ‘High’

• Significantly improved water painting and terrain editing performance, reducing large spikes during and at the end of paint strokes, particularly in parks containing large amounts of water

• Heavily optimized the water meshing algorithm

• Significantly reduced the amount of memory used and transferred by terraforming work

• Overhauled Terrain Paint Undo/Redo to use dramatically less memory to track changes made by the player

• Greatly reduced grass update hitches after terrain edits and substantially reduced GPU resource overhead used by the grass system

• Reduced pathfinding and navmesh reconstruction memory pressure and CPU overhead

• Made many major CPU improvements to hot paths around the game’s HUD, having optimized spikes tied to opening large menus

• Made significant optimizations to allocations when selecting Modular Groups

• Single style pieces no longer process background refreshes

• The Modular Style Menu no longer rebuilds its contents twice per update

• Reduced CPU usage from dead animals by disabling unnecessary AI, growth, rig, solver, animation, awareness, and subsystem processing

• Major rework to the Park Issue system, making it more lightweight, able to much better handle hundreds or thousands of simultaneous issues

• Loading is more memory efficient

• Modular is slightly more memory efficient

• Modular piece removal is significantly more performant

• Substantially reduced shutdown and park unload times in parks containing large amounts of vegetation 

• Reworked selection, overlay and screen-space icon rendering to reduce processing overhead, allocations and unnecessary memory usage

• Improved memory handling of prop rendering

• Fixed a bug that caused removed human props to continue computing bone positions that were no longer needed

• Fixed stale light changes increasing lighting update costs over time