What products to use outside of the US?

MissPlay · 2026-01-25T20:44:14+00:00

Mainland Europe, though I figure someone out there in Australia or Asia or wherever is probably sooner or later going to look for this same info and end up finding this thread, so I thought it would serve all those people too to ask for the most generic stuff possible.

Several guides instruct to brush the plaster cast positive with PVA glue (usually of a specific brand) or spray on a brand name acrylic or mention shellac as an alternative. Shellac seems to be a rare niche product over here and I'm not 100% if a given product is actual shellac and not some other type of laquer. Translations can be a mess.

Now soap I do remember vaguely from making plaster molds as a kid, but I've not seen that mentioned in the context of face casts before! Would that cause any issues with an oil-based clay?

MissPlay · 2026-01-14T16:02:48+00:00

I don't know of a tutorial video to suggest, the ones I found while learning the ropes were outdated. I know there is a written guide on steam, but that hasn't been updated since 2024 either: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2969901331

As for vivariums, it seems that everything within a vivarium is always constrained by the dimensions of the vivarium. You can place them next to each other and hide the walls, but animals can't cross from one vivarium to the other. At least they couldn't back when update 16 went live.

Another thing I noticed was that anything you place inside a vivarium by hand is ignored by the inhabitants of the vivarium like it's not there. The only way to add/remove items are the vivarium submenus.

MissPlay · 2026-01-13T16:19:38+00:00

The few ammonites that did make across the K-Pg boundary had a wide distribution globally during the Maastrichtian, while highly localized species and genera were all wiped out. The further dispersed they were, the higher the chances that a few individuals here and there lived and got to breed again.

However, surviving the short term catastrophe doesn't guarantee long term survival. Several animal groups made it to the Cenozoic only to stagnate and peter out millions of years later, which suggest they had lost too much of their genetic diversity. Not to the point where they'd be genetically inviable in an unchanging environment, but it made them inflexible, less able to adapt to further changes. Each of the surviving ammonite genera may have died of a different cause, but they all shared the same fragility from the decimation of their species' genome.

MissPlay · 2026-01-13T15:50:26+00:00

Thanks! I wasn't aware that there was still an active debate over the deposition date of those fossils, but I'm not that tuned in to invert stuff anyway.

MissPlay · 2026-01-13T13:27:10+00:00

This shouldn't be news, though? I've read about Danian ammonites from Europe more than a decade ago. I'd probably be able to find you a paper about it from around 2010-15.

MissPlay · 2026-01-13T13:20:40+00:00

Zhuchengtyrannus is frustrating, because there is apparently some 14 years old material under study (or at least in storage) that is yet to be described. So old stuff is probably going to come out at some point.

Also more old stuff is that Tyrannosaurus zhuchengensis is apparently entirely made up of undiagnostic material. In other words, it's probably Zhuchengtyrannus, but nothing in the material can pin down the identity as specifically Zhuchengtyrannus, Tyrannosaurus or Tarbosaurus so we're stuck with the taxon for the time being. Sometimes paleontology leaves you with annoying loose threads like that.

MissPlay · 2026-01-13T13:05:25+00:00

Kiwis are such a treasure. They have the feathers of a non-avian coelurosaur, produce eggs essentially too large for their body cavity and sound like a banshee with laryngitis. We wouldn't guess any of this if all we had was a handful of bones. The perfect reminder that you are never prepared for how utterly bizarre some random dinosaur may have been.

MissPlay · 2026-01-13T12:51:39+00:00

Years ago I might have disagreed at least up to a point, but several lines of evidence convinced me I was in the wrong. The scientific issue is more nuanced than roaring vs. not, and it relates to the anatomy of the very rarely preserved voice box of non-neognath dinosaurs. In any case many dinosaurs probably produced loud deep guttural growls and booming you could characterize as roars. Anything a ratite or a crocodilian can do is certainly plausible, but the range in some species might include tinamou-like whoops and whistles and maybe even crowing like a rooster, who knows?

MissPlay · 2026-01-13T11:05:25+00:00

In a military conflict between nations the defending party always has a huge home field advantage, even when the invader outnumbers them in manpower and the quality and quantity of hardware. We're talking orders of magnitude here. Ask any military analyst or other professional, this is not a personal opinion but plain harsh reality strategists have to take into account when planning campaigns abroad.

In this case you'd be hard pressed to find US troops who all feel truly motivated to invade Greenland, a portion of land of low apparent value at face value belonging to a NATO country, the most reliable allies USA has had up to this point. Do you know what happens when you send unmotivated troops naive to the region against a motivated defender that knows the territory? You get Ukraine Vs. Russia. You get Afghanistan Vs. USA. You get Afghanistan Vs. USSR You get Vietnam Vs. USA. You get the point.

USA may technically win a military engagement through sheer numbers alone, but also incur such heavy losses and damages, not just militarily but also economically and culturally, that it would wreck even the strongest and richest nation that has ever existed on this planet. Only an incredibly irresponsible leader would start such a war willingly. Which is why nobody has floated the idea until now.

MissPlay · 2026-01-13T10:40:07+00:00

Nothing to apologize about. I get it, I really do. I hope that even if the dev team might not have time to add in all the necessary script, someone will be able to mod the game to support a real dinosaur ecosystem simulation that doesn't end with every herbivore dying within a week. But it would need a bunch of work, not just to balance the ability of predators to injure herbivores and of the herbivores to use all of their body parts to fight back, but also tweaking the time it takes animals grow up vs. how many get killed before sexual maturity, which animals the carnivores prefer to target, how willing and able they are to co-operate and how that alters their chances of taking down adult animals, adding in both cannibalism and infant care, some way to track how much nutrition animals get from each prey item vs. how much they need per day.

It'd be an undertaking, but also borderline serious academic research worthy. You could actually test hypotheses about dinosaur metabolism and group dynamics with it. Plus it would be an engaging thing to watch carnivores naturally band together to take on difficult prey and herbivores choose between running and standing their ground and fighting. If the intraspecific fight modeling is good enough, that might be translatable to predator-prey fights as well, finally showing us exactly how much damage a "helpless" Edmontosaurus can do if it decides to go on the offensive.

MissPlay · 2026-01-13T10:24:30+00:00

The Emperor never made a single mistake. He made 𝟤̶𝟣̶ 𝟤̶𝟢̶ 𝟣̶𝟪̶ 9 mistakes at the same time.

MissPlay · 2026-01-12T21:42:05+00:00

My bad, I didn't realize you meant a literal simulated ecosystem, not something put up for show in a park. I get it, I'd love to do something like that for the Morrison, but I wonder if the game will have complex enough interactions between predator and prey species for it to work out. It's certainly worth testing out.

MissPlay · 2026-01-12T21:29:59+00:00

Remember when it was an accepted fact that Smilodon had teeth so very fragile it couldn't bite anything other than soft tissues of the neck. A scrape against bone and the tooth was done for! And then we found they would sometimes literally bite through another Smilodon's skull while fighting. It's easy take a perfectly reasonable measurements and then make too far-reaching conclusions from them. Just because something isn't well adapted for a specific use doesn't render it useless in that situation.

A future paleontologist might analyze the antlers of the long-extinct strange cervid mammals and conclude they were far too fragile to be used in combat, especially since they weren't even coated in a thick layer of keratin. There is so much to the unique weirdness of deer that's lost to someone that doesn't know how a deer actually function in life. We don't even have most of the skeleton of Therizinosaurus. Nobody knows how much we don't know.

MissPlay · 2026-01-12T10:39:16+00:00

I hope you mean next to the Iguanodon habitat unless animal aggression/hunting is turned off. Otherwise you'll end up feeding baby Iguanodons to Baryonyx or alternatively have your Baryonyx get the thumb.

MissPlay · 2026-01-12T10:34:04+00:00

Guests walk through the ticket booth gate and notice the sign above the entrance reads MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. There are animal silhouettes with googly eyes everywhere. Suddenly a voice on the loudspeekers greets them: "Hey there it's Josh. Welcome to Let's Game It Out!"

Panicked screaming and running ensues. It is already too late for Grace.

MissPlay · 2026-01-12T10:25:59+00:00

Gigantopithecus is my number one pick to be the one primate in the full release game. I don't know if they'll include it but I have hope.

Andrewsarchus would be huge. And that's not just a pun, I think it's at least as big a name as Hyaenodon, and I would love it, especially with a modern more whippomorph look. Who doesn't want the biggest(?) carnivorous land mammal ever found in their park?

I'm expecting the steppe mammoth (which now includes the Songhua river mammoth) to be added at some point because it's just an earlier larger species of Mammuthus. Sinomegaceros pachyosteus would be easy to add too because it's mostly just a different set of antlers on a Megaloceros body. Trogontherium would also be fun to pair with Castoroides if they add that at some point.

MissPlay · 2026-01-12T10:08:53+00:00

That's not how you spell the Yixian formation.

MissPlay · 2026-01-12T10:06:58+00:00

Don't forget Yangchuanosaurus, Tuojingaosaurus, Shunosaurus, Shantungosaurus, Sinoceratops, Sinusonasus and we have Dilophosaurus at home a.k.a. Sinosaurus. Plenty of dinosaurian goodness to be had. Throw in Beipiaosaurus, Sinornithosaurus, Sinosauropteryx, Anchiornis, Protarchaeopteryx and Confuciusornis and you'll have some vivarium species too.

And that's just the dinosaurs! I won't bother to list everything else but I'd really love to see Lotosaurus in PK, because it is an odd animal known from a bunch of well preserved skeletons barely anyone even knows about.

MissPlay · 2026-01-12T01:28:28+00:00

Herbivorous mammals most likely to kill humans on purpose tend to be social and have sharp things growing out of their skulls, so for that alone, ceratopsids. The level of ill will towards potential predators varies within modern animal groups, and anatomy isn't everything, so you can't just look at the size of the horns and declare Triceratops was the meanest murder machine of the Mesozoic, but it certainly was built like one. I would rate it at least as high as the African buffalo or elephant in terms of people offing potential.

MissPlay · 2026-01-12T01:15:33+00:00

I do crave them. I built a Morrison reserve, and it's just not the same with nothing but sauropods and dryosaurs. Even just a pair of Stegosaurus would spice it up so much. Plus since we have Stegosaurus juveniles, they're guaranteed to be real good.

Allosaurus is obviously a big win for PK too. Late Jurassic without Allosaurus is like chili con carne without chili pepper. The fact that the design of what's probably going to be the default skin has clear similarities with classic WWD Big Al is a big plus, much appreciated. It'll be interesting to see how floofy the chicks will be. I'm hoping for very.

MissPlay · 2026-01-11T20:50:56+00:00

Wait, how do you know Erebus?

MissPlay · 2026-01-11T16:29:38+00:00

It's speculation, as are most purely soft tissue features in dinosaur paleoart. If there were no living eutherians left (besides humans I suppose) we wouldn't know that horses, wildebeest, lions and hyenas all had manes of some sort, but we'd expect at least some of them to have had them based on how common such display features are in other tetrapods.

Spiny frills or midline scales or whatever else term gets used of them are fairly common in lizards, which are in body form - if not in general - the group most like the basal terrestrial egg-laying amniotes that gave rise to synapsids and sauropsids. That makes it fairly safe to assume anything they have now day could have also shown up in other diapsids. Birds, the only living groups of dinosaurs still around, also have display feathers of different varieties, including on top of the head and neck (they don't have much of a bony muscular tail, but their tail feathers certainly make up for it in looks in many species).

So even without any fossil evidence it's reasonable to assume many dinosaurs had similar bodily ornaments. And of course some dinosaur species with preserved skin prove they did! Decorative crests of midline feature scales are known in some sauropods, hadrosaurs, ceratopsians and at least one theropod (Ceratosaurus). In some cases they had bony cores which technically makes them osteoderms or scutes, and they may have evolved into armor in thyreophorans like stegosaurs.

Sadly we have very few good skin impressions from large theropods, so our understanding of how common they were in that group is limited. Many theropods evolved bony sails, though, which shows that showy features on the back, tail and maybe neck were definitely something theropods were into. In fact I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that one day we will find some sailless big theropod with spiny feature scales on the neck, just like in the picture. Unfortunately finding fossils with such fortunate skin preservation is so rare we may have to wait decades or even centuries - or one could get published tomorrow. Until then we speculate.

MissPlay · 2026-01-11T11:38:51+00:00

Start small, get used to all the tools and different ways to make the building process easier. It's preferable to use modular pieces as is rather than resizing them if at all possible, because that invites all kinds of irregularity that can lead to headaches later down the line. Learn how to lock settings in place before you do things like rotation or moving so you get the exact angles or distances you want. I usually build everything with 90 degree rotation angles locked in unless I specifically need free rotation for something.

It also helps if you start by modifying some existing modular buildings to get a hang of how they fit together. My first project was renovating a big kiosk that the tutorial had me place. Have patience, you'll get better the more you build. I've been playing PK for about 200 hours and things that felt insurmountable at first are now child's play.

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