Horses & Stables is here.

This is the biggest update since launch, and one of the things in it is a horse. Here is all of it, starting with the horse.

Horses & Stables

A new $0.99 add-on, in a new Activities tab in the store. If you bought the Full Game + DLC Pack bundle, you already own it: it unlocks on your next launch, with a thank-you card, because you backed this thing early. The Horses & Stables page has the pictures; this is the list.

The horse

• The first animal you can ride, and the first domestic one. Lofted body, jointed legs, eight coats, a slightly cartoon look, and the right size next to a Hikee.
• Barns come in three sizes, with two, four or six stalls. A barn is just room: each horse is a $26 purchase from the barn's card, capped by your total stalls.
• Every horse has a name, picked per stall. Tap a horse for its card and rename it. The name survives saving, undo and barn upgrades.

Riding

• In the ride along, walk up to a horse and mount it. Walk, trot, canter and gallop, with stamina and hold-to-jump.
• It refuses slopes that are too steep and water that is too deep. A rare buck-off can throw you.
• Trail rides for visitors. They are paid, and led by a Guide riding their own horse ahead of the visitor. The Guide saddles the visitor's horse at the saddle rack.
• Riders go out to a hitching post and come home another way. A tied horse's reins are actually looped to the rail.

Care

• Hunger, thirst and restlessness, served by troughs and feeders that the Guide refills.
• Horses get muddy and need brushing. Filthy horses put visitors off and attract flies.
• Dung is litter. It stinks, and visitors can step in it.
• After dusk each horse walks to a free stall, the door shuts, and it stands at the half-door, stands back or lies down in the straw.

Behaviour

• Fidgeting, pawing, stomping, rolling, rearing, bucking, dancing, dozing and mutual grooming. Ears move on their own. Happy horses squint, and galloping raises dust.
• Visitors walk up to pat a horse, feed it a carrot, cuddle it or lean over the fence. After a carrot, the horse follows them. Passers-by stop to watch a horse rear or roll.

The Guide, paddocks and the kit

• The Wrangler is now the Guide, the park's one activity employee: placeable, dressed for the job, and living at the barn.
• Paddocks. Draw a fenced area as a rectangle, a circle or a lasso. Gates appear wherever a trail crosses the fence, and horses from your barns are turned out into them. (Paddocks no longer create free horses.)
• New pieces: three barns, a trough, a feeder, a hitching post, a saddle rack, hay bales, a farrier's forge and the arena obstacles — show jump, cavaletti, log jump, brush jump, weave poles and a barrel pattern.
• Tack: three saddle styles with reins, plus rider gear for Hikees — helmet, body protector, stock and riding boots.
• Horse audio: deeper, softer hoof clops, and whinnies and snorts, each with several takes.
• Horses live in a new Activity category in the dock, and in the main-menu scenes.

Two new parks

• Rimrock Ranch. A basalt canyon rim with columnar rimrock, Horsetail Falls and several places to ride to.
• Tahoma Foothills. A horse camp under Mount Rainier, with the Patriarchs old-growth grove.

Both have their own Horses & Stables section in the park picker.

Everything from here down is free, for everyone.

The sky

• One sky. Clouds and rain come from a single drifting field, so every shower falls from a cloud you can see, fronts arrive, and rain is local.
• The sky has a day: clearings, arrivals, afternoon build-up and sun breaks.
• Rainbows, with real optics: double rainbows against dark storms, moonbows and fog bows. Visitors notice and remember them, the camera turns to show you, and there are two hidden achievements.
• God rays follow the sun's actual gaps in the cloud, new beams shine through holes in the deck, and cloud shadows come from the same field.
• Sunrise and sunset glow stays on the sun's side of the horizon.
• Fog rolls in and out, and sometimes fills the forest.
• Wind ribbons: white streaks that whip and loop through the air when the breeze is up.
• Blown dust is now brief puffs rather than a permanent haze.
• A Halloween pumpkin moon.
• About thirty buildings, lanterns and stoves light up at dusk and cast real light.

Visitors

• Picnics. Visitors buy a blanket or a basket at a shop, lay it out on open ground and eat. Candlelit dinners for two, stargazing picnics. Animals wander over, butterflies appear, and kids run laps.
• Trailside life. Groups stop to chat or take a water break. Two groups passing say hello. Kids skip. There is a small "weee!" when someone goes over a little ledge.
• Memories and notes. Visitors remember views, animals, rainbows, goats and so on. About one in twenty leaves a note in a register box, and the notes read as a carousel of slips.
• Curios and ruins now draw visitors, get a head-turn from passers-by, and make memories.
• Visitors react to things that scare them.
• Mood is better balanced: visitors no longer leave miserable almost every time.
• Tumbles fall at half the speed and are funnier.
• Motivate: buy a worker a good day for $100 and they work at 1.5× speed.
• A volunteer assigned to build now actually builds.
• When the ranger moves a goat or a bighorn along, they do a proper shoo.

Wildlife

• Moose, a new Pacific Northwest resident.
• Bodies take up room: animals steer around trees, props, each other and Hikees, and big animals turn smoothly.
• Animals look at each other, at Hikees, and at their mothers.
• Flocks take off and land as a ripple spreading from bird to bird. Flocks and schools are looser, and coveys survive the population trim.
• Grazing animals no longer splay into the splits.
• Every animal voice has at least three takes and never repeats the last one, and distant animals sound distant.
• The coyote has been shrunk to a realistic size.

Menus and building

• Park photos in the picker: a baked three-quarter photo of each park, with a toggle back to the map.
• Manage: a new Park overview sheet as the landing page. Park open/closed moved to the Hikees sheet. The management sheets share one look, and the staff sheet has a face per worker, a delete that just deletes, and a payroll graph.
• Copy a placed prop with the ⧉ button beside Move.
• The dock: bigger thumbnails (40 → 64 px), the menu's line icons, ten families instead of thirteen, photographs for trail-surface and bridge chips, and a bar that never hides a key on iPad. Path width (1× · 2× · 3×) is back on phones, and the scramble and switchback modifiers are on the build bar.
• Switchback aims on hover and locks on the click.
• Rocks stack on top of each other, and the rolling boulder is redesigned and remembers where it stopped.
• Tutorials teach a verb once, and a finished training park can be restarted without the tour.
• Attention pins no longer try to sell you a second ranger; they send the idle one you already have.
• Pad buildings can't be placed on cliff lips.
• Park reminders, using local notifications only. Opt-in, and switchable off in Settings.
• A one-time card before your first ad explains that the ad's own ✕ brings you back to the game.
• There are cheat codes now, under Settings ▸ About. You will have to find them.
• The ride-along badge is redrawn as a real Hikee, and there is a conga line on the intro menu.
• No more low-stock, sold-out or "delivered" toasts from shops; the pins already say it.
• A prop's Repair button re-checks the prop before charging you.

The world

• Fallen logs are now real deadfall: rootwads, snapped trunks, forked ones.
• A new giant Douglas-fir, and wheat grass that no longer looks like Minecraft. Parks can have old-growth groves of big trees.
• Roads are finished: paved, aged and dirt. Trails cross them on crosswalks with signs, and roads sit on the carved ground.
• New skylines for Meadowlark and Loon Lake, and Rainier for Tahoma Foothills.
• The water surface now reaches the visible shore, and rivers no longer sometimes load with gaps.
• Smoke is rebuilt as flowing, wind-bent plumes.
• Benches are all one standard size, and chaps and chinks are redesigned.

Faster

A lot of this update is speed you will feel rather than see.

• The terrain height calculation is about 25× cheaper, and the hiker simulation got faster with it.
• Half the GPU frame was lights nobody had switched on. Unused lights are now skipped, and shadows update at half rate.
• A Hikee is drawn in 9 calls instead of 24. Furniture and the Old West street are batched — the saloon went from 700 draws to 88 — and ember sparks are a single draw.
• Every visitor shares one headlamp, and hiker reflections in water are baked, budgeted, and actually walk.
• Parks load faster: the scenery-score bake is gone from level load, and builds queue.
• Detail changes dissolve instead of popping, rain thins out under load, and the visitor cap follows your device.
• Trail placement is quicker, and a crash at a placed viewing scope is fixed.

Thank you

If you have been playing since launch, thank you. If something in here is wrong, or there is something you want next, tell me: support@swanklabsgames.com.