Research Rework and Dino Income Rebalance

major update

Pocket Dinos · build 24748666 · published

On SteamNotes only · this build shipped before we watched the app

The first official large update is here, Research Rework!

What's New in Research?

Research used to sit inside each egg, as a per-egg upgrade. This has now been removed in favour of a dedicated Research page (next to the Shop), complete with lots of great global research upgrades to help your collection grow. Also, your Research Potions are now shown underneath your income so it's easy to keep track.

The Research page will show your branching tree of upgrades, starting from the useful Hatch Speed increase!

Earning Research Potions is the same as it was before, where every dino you own (across all habitats) is counted every 8 hours. The more dinos you own, the more Research Potions you'll receive each 8 hours. Get even more by keeping around your Legendary dinos!

It may take a while to upgrade all your research, but when you do you can wear the Ramen hat (and buy more Ramen hats from the shop!). There's also an ongoing bonus when completing all the research...but I won't spoil that for you!

Additional Changes

There has been a host of improvements in this update, including quality of life changes and back end adjustments to make games run smoother. A new addition is the ability to bulk buy dino eggs if you have the money.

Income rebalance for all dinos

When the pack pricing was updated, the remaining income was not correctly adjusted for all dinos. This included the income for Rarity, Variants and Packs. As such, the rebalance updates all dinos so that the top end dinos aren't as high earners, and middle dinos are buffed a little to balance out.

This will be noticeable with high level dinos earning a bit less, but overall it balances out the game in a much better way. Some of these changes were critical for the Research Rework as boosts and bonuses needed to be correctly balanced.

I will be monitoring this and adjusting based on feedback.

General Changes

  • Menu adjustments to Exit the game straight from the habitat

  • Wishlist button switched to Add a Review and small menu changes

Monitoring Changes

These changes are possibly game-breaking (or game-fixing) in some scenarios or setups so I will watch these closely. Thank you to for being the first official Pocket Dinos streamer and for highlighting some of these items!

  • Switched from Vulkan to DirectX 12 to potentially fix streaming/OBS issues

  • VSync disabled and removed (this occasionally impacted and potentially caused crashes when streaming)

As this is the first of many large updates for Pocket Dinos, please play and give feedback generously so I can fix or adjust any things that might not be working quite right. As always, thank you to those who take the timer to test and give feedback.

Reviews

If you're enjoying Pocket Dinos and would like to support the development, please leave a review (even a short one) as it helps solo devs like me so much! You can do that here: Pocket Dinos on Steam