Jurassic World Evolution’s Challenge Mode is Live on Xbox One, PC

Frontier Developments (of Elite Dangerous fame) has done well with Jurassic World Evolution, a management title which focuses on dinosaur and park upkeep. It’s sold 1 million copies since launching in June 2018, and the developer continues to support it with free updates. The latest update 1.4 is now live for Xbox One and PC, introducing the new Challenge Mode for dedicated players.

Challenge Mode, as the name indicates, will result in a harder story campaign. You get limited money and various challenges, like reputation decay, crop up. On top of this, there’s a new Jurassic difficulty, which should also make things significantly harder. The update also brings a number of new features, like new lighting options, new Contracts, a variety of sandbox options (like difficulty settings for dinosaur variety, dinosaur rating, and guest count), and more.

Update 1.4 has been delayed for the PS4 version of the game due to the “last minute discovery of a graphical bug during our internal checks”, as per the developer. On the official forums, community manager Paul Crowther said, “We believe the graphical problem would greatly affect the quality of the update and your enjoyment of the new content, and felt it was important to make this difficult decision. We are working hard to get this fixed as soon as possible and will provide you with a time frame very shortly.”

In the meantime, you can check some of the patch notes below. Full patch notes can be seen here.

New Content/Features

Added a new Challenge Mode

• Added difficulty settings – including Jurassic difficulty
• Island rating based unlock flow
• Set on Isla Nublar
• Contract difficulty guided by island rating
• Disease selection is based on the availability of research for cures
• Added Hammond Foundation fees
• Added contract cancellation penalties
• Added reputation decay (to Challenge mode only)
• Added skins for completion for first time and add 5 star completion
• Add Personal Best completion times
• Added lighting preset options
• Show a warning message if a player with no saves of any type tries to start Challenge mode. We suggest that they play Campaign mode first
• Added a separate challenge mode autosave
• Increased the cost of ranger teams in challenge mode
• Added ‘par’ times for each difficulty level
• Added research completion time scaling for difficulty levels
• Updated front end menu

Added new Sandbox options

• Dinosaurs dying of old age toggle
• Toggle for contracts being active – does not affect reputation
• Can now set cash levels for sandbox (Low, Medium, High, Unlimited)
• Difficulty settings for: Dinosaur variety difficulty, Dinosaur rating difficulty, Guest count difficulty and Economic difficulty (ticket price and lawsuits).
• Toggle if feeders need resupplying
• Unlimited power toggle added

Added new contract types

• Have a dinosaur of a specified species beat another dinosaur of a specific species
• Improve Guest Shelter Coverage to at least X%
• Improve Dinosaur Visibility to at least X%
• Dinosaur rating to at least X%
• Profit/Income per minute for X attraction
• Reach overall attraction profit/income

Dinosaur updates

• Resizing: Spinosaurus, Giganotosaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex, Carnotaurus.
• Carnivores will now hunt according to their food need (except hybrids who will still engage any available foe) so they do not constantly hunt
• Added dinosaur bio information to the Genome Library
• Animation tweaks to tidy up issues from resizing various dinosaurs
• Audio tweaks to match resized dinosaurs

Added new localisation

• Italian
• Korean