Dev Blog - October 2026

Hey, everyone! Welcome to another Dev Blog summarizing what we’ve worked on in the latest development cycle with previews of what is coming up. We recently released the Stegosaurus TLC with a new ability kit, model, skins, emotes, and updated audio, and now, we’ll have a look into the Dino AI progress, balance plans, and improvements to UI and dino audio.

We have also been taking a look at some of the most requested player features recently, and we’ve implemented some of them!

One highly requested feature we have heard from the community has been the ability to carry other friendly players around, a bit like clamp, but without all the….mess. We definitely agree that this would be a super handy mechanic so we have gone ahead and made it a reality!

To carry a friend, first you must invite them to your group. Then, you can press the interact button to pick them up, assuming they aren't too heavy! When carrying your friend, you won't suffer any stamina drain or penalties like you would with clamp, so you can carry them to your heart's content. If for any reason the carried player wants to be dropped, they can simply press the jump button to break free with no hassle. If both players are part of the same family, they can also be carried without the need to be in a group together, too.

This will be essential for transporting hatchlings around safely, or bringing friends up to new areas, so we hope you enjoy it!

Another highly requested feature from the community has been the ability to move nests, which we have also implemented as a new feature!

Currently the player is not able to move a built nest or save it for later, and often once it's used for hatching another player it is left abandoned and eventually destroyed. To help resolve this, players will soon be able to store their nest, and place it down somewhere else in the world. Once your nest is constructed, you’ll be able to interact with the nest menu and select "Store Nest". Storing your nest will preserve its health, construction progress, and any eggs that are ready to be used. It will not however preserve any stashed food or water. A stored nest also preserves the layout of your placed nest decorations, and will automatically re-place them down in the same position when the nest is restored. This should make it easier for players to decorate without the fear of losing all their hard work.

And as a small added improvement, you can now also visually see the eggs in your nest! We hope you like this new feature!

Our current emote wheel has a few issues, such as the limited number of emotes on a wheel, and the lack of customization options. We have shown some of our work on improving the emote wheel in the past, but we have it nearly finished now!

With the new Emote Wheel, players will be able to place their most used emotes wherever they find most useful in the wheel for easy accessibility. It will also come with pages, allowing players to flip between custom sets of emotes. For example, if you want to be friendly, place your friendly set of emotes on one page and all your aggressive calls on another, for when things get a little heated. It will also now display the emotes’ names making them easier to identify and understand what they do.

This also paves the way for us to add plenty of new emotes as we continue development. For now, the Albertaceratops serves as a proof-of-concept, now featuring 14 total emotes, with room for many more in the future.

This update to the Emote Wheel should make them easier to understand, organize, and use, while allowing you to more quickly and effectively communicate with others.

We’ve been working on improving the UI/UX by adding a few menu settings you can tweak to get your gameplay just right.

We’ll be adding new Crosshairs as an accessibility setting so you can have an on screen indicator of what you are targeting. Choose between a cross, circle, or dot. This will be off by default, but if you would like to try out these markers you can find them in the Gameplay Settings.

We’ll also be adding in an audio accessibility improvement allowing you to set the Audio Direction. This will include both the default Stereo, and the new Mono which can be used to disable sound spatialization, so full audio plays in both speakers.

We hope these additional settings allow you to dial in your gameplay for your specific needs and better enjoy the game the way you want it.

We're polishing up AI’s base implementation of running away while working on something a little bit more complex - how Dino AI fights. We're developing a system where dino AI will choose what ability they're going to use on the player, taking into account all of the abilities and the context of an encounter and selecting an ability that makes sense. For example, if a Dino AI is fighting a group of enemies and it has an AOE attack available, it should attempt to move to a position where its AOE will hit multiple targets and use it. As with most things, we're developing this system in a way to make it as friendly to modders as possible so custom behaviors associated with custom abilities can also be added.

This will bring AI one step closer to behaving like other players and intelligently know when to use abilities efficiently.

We don't often highlight bug fixes unless they're interesting or big enough to warrant mentioning, and this one is definitely both, at least to us! So bear with us for a little context...

As your Dino grows up it's vocalizations transition from baby versions to adult, and this was always intended to be a smooth crossfade over the entire growth range of your Dino. However this never functioned correctly with little change happening from Hatchling to Juvenile and then an abrupt switch from Baby to full Adult occurring somewhere around the Adolescent stage. Until now this didn't actually break anything, it was just a mistake that never caused enough trouble to warrant digging into....until the Stego TLC introduced Dino movement audio. This audio was not intended to be audible until the Sub-Adult stage, but a few users were reporting the audio being overly loud and annoying, something that was confusing to us until we remembered this back-burnered bug. Thanks to a few helpful folks on our Discord that confirmed their Stego's growth stage, and thus this audio becoming fully audible much too early, we decided to squash this annoying issue and get the whole system working correctly once and for all.

What this means for players will vary so we wanted to give you a heads up. If you're at or close to either end of the growth spectrum, you won't notice any changes. In the middle will be quite different however as there will be a much larger range of "mixed" baby and adult vocalizations designed to better simulate your Dino growing up. Anyone around or slightly above the Adolescent stage will notice their Dino no longer sounding (incorrectly) like a full adult...sorry we had to take this from you! Keep growing and you'll be right back there in no time!

With every new dino and TLC, we keep a close eye on how dinosaurs are performing. With the last 2 updates a few issues stood out to us and we’ve already begun implementing plans to correct them.

Area of Effect Attacks We are looking to update some of our area of effect attacks and how they function for dinosaurs like Spinosaurus, Barsboldia, and Hatzegopteryx. We aim to split up their damage hitboxes, similar to how Anodontosaurus functions, to improve aiming these attacks. The goal is to reward players trying to aim these attacks and make certain combat interactions less frustrating to deal with.

Dinosaur Stat Tweaks The design team is continuously updating dinosaurs to try and improve the flow of their ability kits and how they function in game. There are small reworks planned for Tyrannotitan and Iguanodon and how some of their abilities function. Key examples include Iguanodon suffering from its ability-selection being too polarizing and Tyrannotitan's feast applying on tail hits as too exploitable. We aim to address these issues with the planned changes ahead.

Bleed Adjustments We are also looking to speed up both how bleed deals its damage and how it heals to decrease the lulls in combat with bleeders. Our goal is to keep the combat fast-paced during encounters with bleeders to more closely resemble battles with non-bleed-damage dinosaurs rather than drawn out fights waiting for bleed to deal its damage and heal before attacking again.

Tylosaurus The team is seeking to bring Tylo's kill to death ratio closer to normal, as Tylosaurus is a massive outlier in how many players it is killing throughout normal gameplay. Currently it is over double that of apexes like Tyrannotitan, Tyrannosaurus, and nearly double that of even dedicated ambush predators like Sarcosuchus. We have adjusted Tylosaurus's abilities to give it less constant crowd control and will be monitoring its general performance to see if it lands where expected.

With measured changes to the dino roster like these we will be able to get them to their expected place in the ecosystem and within their intended playstyle.

And that’s all we have to share for this Dev Blog! We can’t wait to show you what’s coming up, so please stay tuned until then. We would also like to remind you the Shark Skin Pack is on sale now. These sales help support the games development and updates like these. Thank you for watching, and we’ll see you soon!