Dev Diary: April 2025
Welcome to the April Development Diary!
In case you missed it, Update 14 is now available! This enormous update adds baby animals, seamless growth, herding, first person and a number of other exciting changes. We’re currently 30% off on Steam until May 2nd so if you’re interested in trying the game, now’s a great time!
We’re also very proud to announce that our adorable mascot, Crowny, now has her very own YouTooz plushie! Once she’s gone, she’s gone for good, so be sure to get your orders in on time.
Wow, what a month. Since the update launched, we saw our player count peak at 702 concurrent users, the highest it’s been since launching into Early Access. It may not sound insanely high compared to bigger games but it tells us that things are going in the right direction.
In terms of supporting Update 14, we’ll be delivering another patch in the next few days to address some of the remaining issues. Problems like animal teleportation are proving difficult to determine, but we will continue looking into it. We’ve also (hopefully) resolved problems with the Epic Games service, so the update should be going live there soon.
Update 15
Looking ahead to Update 15, the plan is to release a Public Test Branch version in late June, with the full update coming in July. Since we’ve only just entered full production on this update, all the imagery below will be done with mockups.
Animal Behavior
Our primary goal for U15 is to expand our animal behaviors, building upon the herding and social groups that were just introduced. The first of these goals will be to make animals look at each other with head IK, greatly improving the sense of realism in shared spaces.
Next, we often see feedback wishing that PK’s animals would interact with each other. Currently, all species coexist in complete harmony, which has never been our long term goal.
For this next update, we’d like to build upon U14’s animal awareness systems and support the foundation of combat with two important behaviors: fleeing and threatening.
Fleeing, as you might imagine, forces an animal to run away when they’re scared. Threatening, however, uses a new animation to show an animal firmly standing their ground. Combined with the angry vocalizations from U14, we hope to get quite a bit of dynamism out of animal encounters.
Now, beyond scaring away potential predators, threaten animations will be especially useful for socially competitive animals like Triceratops, giving them a way to challenge the herd leader and influence their own social hierarchy. Less competitive animals like Dryosaurus, however, will passively establish their hierarchy in the background, opting for whoever is the largest.
Paleoflora
Paleoflora is a new gameplay mechanic that aims to reward players for using foliage from the correct geological era. Typically, this boils down to using Cenozoic plants for mammals and our brand new Mesozoic plants for dinosaurs.
Unlocking the Past
At the start of a Challenge game, players will only have access to modern day Cenozoic plants - all the essentials you’ve come to know and love. This is great news for all the mammals in your park, but not so much for the dinosaurs!
Luckily for them, the Excavations menu is going to include paleoflora sites from all over the world. Players will need to send out Science Teams and recover enough material to unlock 35 different species of extinct plants across all 8 biomes.
Once unlocked, players will be able to find their newly discovered plants in both the modular building menu and the revised landscaping menu coming in Update 15. There are a lot of variants coming with these new species, so creative players will have planty to work with.
Adding Paleoflora
Inside an animal’s info menu, you’ll find the Paleoflora bar. As you might guess, this bar fills up by using plants from the correct era, depending on when an animal lived.
Unlike other requirements like the forest or water needs, Paleoflora has no minimum value. Think of it more like a bonus to get the most out of your enclosures. Getting it wrong won’t make your animals upset, but you’ll be missing out on the key benefits that come with a high level of Paleoflora:
Ecology Bonus Points
Increase the rating of your animal with an ecology bonus by getting its Paleoflora bar over 50%Browsing Enrichment
Herbivores gain additional enrichment when browsing from foliage in habitats with high PaleofloraWellness Increase
Once disease is added in a later update, high levels of Paleoflora will reduce how susceptible animals are to environmental diseases
Browsing Behavior
Browsing is a new enrichment behavior coming in Update 15 that will allow herbivores to gain stimulation from grazing on bushes and trees. The more era-appropriate the foliage in their habitat is, the more enrichment they’ll receive.
Since browsing is not a substitute for feeders in Challenge Mode, we plan to include a Sandbox option that allows herbivores to gain food while browsing, making them self-sustaining as long as they’ve got plants. This has been a highly requested feature from the community, so we’re excited to finally work on it!
Dietary Requirements & New Feeders
As one of the last notes for this Dev Diary, we’ve got some dietary changes coming in U15. First up: if an animal eats multiple diets, they’re going to need them in the habitat to be happy. This change is meant to stimulate the logistics economy by making lesser-used diets like fruit, fish or insects more of a requirement than a suggestion in Challenge mode.
Exactly how many of the diets an animal wants in a habitat will be determined per species, with some being pickier than others.
To help ease players into this new approach, we’re going to be introducing a couple new feeders! The team is aiming to include small food trays, faux meat/fish carcasses and faux logs with fruits and insects to make your habitat planning more engaging. We hope to show how these look in a Dev Diary closer to release!
Paleobotany
Finally, if your first look at Paleoflora gameplay wasn’t enough, we’ve got a few more plants for you. Below are two new species coming to the Temperate biome, offering a variety of shapes and sizes. We suspect the addition of a plane tree is going to get a lot of use from builders!
And last but not least, here’s a look at our first Tropical plant, a fossil cycad. The variations on this one are particularly diverse. It almost looks like a palm tree!
Created by ASSASSINSPINO
Created by Francoo192
Created by Ovenator
Thank you for reading April’s dev diary!
We will be back next month to report on Update 15’s progress. Thank you to everyone who has checked out or played Update 14, we’re incredibly happy with the feedback so far. As mentioned the team are working on another support patch that we hope to get out soon, but beyond that, we hope you have a lovely May.
Until next time,
- The PK Team
