The theme park building simulation Planet Coaster has released its first post-launch update according to a post on the game's official forums.
Starting things off, new blueprints for shops, facilities, and scenery have been added for all five themes. New coaster blueprints have been added as well. Blueprints are simply collections of the game's existing parts put together in an easy-to-place prefabricated construction. While this isn't new parts being added to the game, a greater amount of pre-fabricated blueprints should make it a bit easier to build out a park if you don't want to make everything manually yourself.
Players who were looking for a bit more adversity in their gameplay will be happy to hear that a Harder difficulty has been added to Challenge mode. While the game does offer a free-building Sandbox mode and campaign, Challenge mode is the best way to build your dream park while still facing the difficulties of managing the game's finances.
A short list of bug fixes have also been applied. Some animation and pathing issues have been corrected such as guests clipping through the Restrooms or not standing at an appropriate height on footpaths. Excitement, fear, and nausea ratings are now properly shown on coaster blueprints. GPU/CPU usage has been reduced when the game is minimized. An issue with black artifacts on HD 4000 machines has been corrected.
A number of other crash fixes, optimizations, quality of life, and stability improvements have been added in the patch as well. You can read the full list on the forum post or at the related news post on the game's Steam Community page. Frontier Developments is planning on releasing a more robust free content update sometime in December.
The update follows the announcement of a contest open to all owners of Planet Coaster. Players can enter the challenge by submitting their information (including a Steam ID) to a form. Every "star" they attain in the campaign prior to the end of the contest will count as one entry. The ultimate prize is one of three high-end gaming PCs (or vouchers of equivalent value) to the winning player. The contest ends on December 7th at 10:00 AM GMT, so if you've been playing the game since launch you may want to check it out.
If you want to check out our thoughts on Planet Coaster, we have a review in the works, but our Preview for it from Early Access can be read here.
What do you think of the changes to Planet Coaster in the 1.01 Update? Are there any critical issues that you feel the update hasn't addressed? What do you hope to see added in the forthcoming December content update? Let us know in the comments below!
