Dev Diary: July 2026
Welcome to the July Development Diary!
A week ago we put out a survey to gather feedback and see how the community felt about various parts of the game. To our surprise, we received a staggering 4,000 responses within the first 24 hours! You absolutely destroyed our measly target of 1,000.
Looking over the results, community sentiment for the core game seems to greatly align with our internal plans and the direction we were already heading in. For the more hypothetical questions like what extra management features you’d like to see, the winners were also inline with what we expected - though it’s clear you really want to see temperature come into play!
The team will continue to collect your results and discuss how we can honor some of the most important parts of your feedback by full release. We may end up doing another survey after Update 18, so stay tuned and thank you for your responses!
A new patch is coming soon! Update 17.1 will bring a host of changes, bug fixes and stability improvements to address various player reported issues in relation to animal behavior, disabled ‘call staff’ buttons and more. We’ve also added enclosure renaming and an outline that appears when an animal has been selected (but not tracked by the camera).
To thank you for your amazing support surrounding Update 17, we’re bringing even more partner animations to the game with some of our favorites being a Velociraptor scuffle, a cat fight and two extra headbutting duels for Pachycephalosaurus! Please look forward to the release of U17.1 in August.
Update 18
In case you haven’t been keeping up with our roadmap, U18 is going to be our last major update before Prehistoric Kingdom leaves Early Access next year. While even more content will arrive at full release, U18 will be focused on adding the final gameplay pieces like security, engineers and breakouts to Challenge Mode.
Since the team is currently focused on wrapping up U17.1, we’ll be discussing some of U18’s other aspects until production on the next update begins properly.
Expanded Management View
As a management game, there are a lot of things the player needs to be aware of and keep up with. To help with this and better support some new features coming to the game, we’ll be expanding the management view with extra overlay options - including some requested by you in the survey!
For example, to help see how your animals are doing around the park, we’ll be adding new views to check on their needs and even keep track of where you’ve placed nests, which ones have been claimed and which animals are pregnant.
In addition to new management overlays, we’ll be refreshing some of the current ones, too. For example, the navigable areas for animals, guests and staff will be kept under one button rather than spread across three separate places.
Expanded Nature Requirements
With many animals coming to the game from specialized environments like deserts, sweeping plains and swampy wetlands, we’ve found ourselves longing for more depth when it comes to the nature requirements in Challenge Mode.
Right now, the only factors you really need to consider is the total foliage and water percent of an enclosure. While simple, it does mean there’s very little “challenge” to overcome when designing your habitats. These factors also don’t do a great job at describing an animal’strue environment, leaving things very open ended for players who aren’t familiar with a given species.
To expand upon this, Update 18 will introduce 4 nature types that must be balanced depending on the animal. These requirements are forest, shrubs, plains, and barren.
Mockup, not final stats.
Nature Coverage
As you paint terrain textures and different foliage, your nature coverage will begin to change. For example, a basic enclosure consisting of grass will be considered 100% Plains. If we add a couple of bushes, it’s now 25% Shrubs and 75% Plains.
However, if we add trees in an empty area, the Plains value continues to decrease and we instead gain Forest.
If we were to paint trees over our existing Shrubs, those too would become Forest! Think of it like a priority system with bigger foliage overriding whatever sits beneath.
To make part of our enclosure Barren, we’ll want to remove any foliage in the area and only use terrain paint such as dirt, sand, rock or snow! Alternatively, we can create Plains by painting grass textures or adding ferns, dandelions and other grass-like plants on top of our bare terrain.
With these new rules, we can deliver much more guidance for what an ideal environment should look like. Grazing animals like the Bison or Elasmotherium would favor open plains, whilst Allosaurus anax might prefer a barren enclosure with a slight tolerance for shrubs and forest.
Water Area
Unlike nature coverage, Water in U18 will only require a minimum area (meters squared) rather than being a percentage of the enclosure. This ensures that as you build bigger habitats, the minimum water requirement will not scale with it.
Aquascape
For semi-aquatic or wetland animals like Baryonyx and Spinosaurus, they have one last requirement: Aquascape.
To increase the Aquascape in an enclosure, the player will need to paint aquatic plants such as lilypads, hyacinth or eel grass into bodies of water. Specific vegetation like mangroves or the bald cypress will also raise the aquascape of an enclosure, so long as they’re (you guessed it) placed in water.
This change makes designing wetlands into a proper mechanic and gives us more of a reason to add things like underwater plants or other hydrophytes beyond the simple fact that they’re pretty!
Wetland Biome
To accompany some of the new Wetland animals like Baryonyx in U18, we’ll be expanding the biome’s variety with over 40 new plants including updated and brand new foliage! With these changes, you’ll be able to create some stunning swamps, forests and underwater environments.
If you’ve got keen eyes, you might’ve noticed a brand new ground texture, too! This is because in Update 18 we’ll be replacing the Wetland Sand with a dedicated Groundwater texture, making it super easy to create wet marshes or add a splash of water to any enclosure you might want. It’s almost a little too fun to play with!
Community Survey Reward
Thanks to your obliteration of our survey response goal, we’re proud to unveil the first skin for everyone's favorite groundsloth, the mighty Megatherium! This particular species lived in the pampas of South America, dwelling in grasslands with occasional woodland nearby.
When this animal arrives at full release, each skin will feature a different fur length (with this one being the shortest). Once again, thank you for your survey responses!
Created by W3
Created by ASSASSINSPINO
Created by inspectoir_art
We love how this artist drew their species requests! - The PK Team
Thank you for reading July’s dev diary!
The road to Update 18 will be an interesting challenge to tackle but we’re excited to get going. Until then, we hope you enjoy Update 17.1 once it releases and we’ll see you next month for the August dev diary!
- The PK Team
