Hey everyone,

Patch 1.8.2741 is live! In it, you will find several new NPC animals, the ability for both player and AI to utilize plants for hiding, a new stealth-walk for the player, flooding, slow motion aim mode, and more! In addition, many of you should see significant optimizations, as well as more control over foliage rendering distance for the sake of performance. Your old saves will likely be incompatible with the new patch, so be ready to start a new game once you’ve downloaded it.

There will also likely be new bugs, so, as always, please send us any bug reports or suggestions on either our Steam discussions page or our Discord[discord.gg]. Thank you, and enjoy!


FIXED:

• Animals now transition seamlessly into ragdolls on death
  
• Animals and players no longer instantly lose all XZ momentum when starting to fall or swim
  
• Erratic camera behavior no longer present if player dies in water
  
• Animal head IK no longer instantly snaps to starting position after bite attacks
  
• Resolution now defaults to native
  
• Controls will default after each patch, fixing any lingering RPR input errors
  
• Crash when climbing due to memory leak

CHANGED:

• Several CPU and GPU optimizations
  
• Aim mode control should now feel more responsive
  
• Spawn rates for all animals adjusted
  
• Social grouping will no longer interfere with decisions to respond to animal attacks
  
• Major refactor of AI movement processing - animals should move much more believably
  
• Significantly rebalanced AI fight/flight reaction prioritization
  
• Timing of bite attacks is now more closely aligned with their respective animals’ animations than the moment of input
  
• Rewrote several file serialization/deserialization routines, improving loading times
  
• Brief slow motion effect now occurs on player death
  
• AI head tracking should now be significantly more fluid and natural-looking
  
• Significant refactoring of physics components
  
• AI visual sensors now align directly with the positions and directions their heads are facing, leading to more realistic detection behavior
  
• Scent nodes now all have the same shape and size, thought they still have distinct colors
  
• Randomized starting month of new games
  
• Minor change to rain visual effect

ADDED:

• Flooding can now occur after and during rainfall
  
• Anatosaurus AI
  
• Ankylosaurus AI
  
• Denversaurus AI
  
• Defensive tail-whip behavior for above three animals
  
• Didelphodon AI
  
• Lepistosteus (fish) AI
  
• Hiding AI behavior
  
• Ability for player to ‘crouch’ by holding CTRL
  
• Ambient Quetzalcoatlus and Bone Butte Bird AI
  
• Physics force now applied when animals are killed by impact attacks
  
• Ocean and shoreline ambient sounds
  
• 6 new songs
  
• New hunting music queue - rather than a specific song, rhythmic cues will play on top of any currently playing daytime exploration music
  
• Toggleable slow motion effect and sound filter when in aim mode using mouse wheel
  
• Continue button that selects the latest dated save file to play
  
• Sniffing sounds when starting scent mechanic
  
• Foliage and tree distance sliders are now present in both in-game and main video options menus
  
• Encyclopedia entries for all new animals