So since I can’t stop myself from yapping, here’s a guide detailing how I go about making exhibits. I personally really love to put the game’s animals in enclosures as close to their natural habitats as possible. It would be more realistic to put them in the more bare, constructed habitats you usually see in zoos, but I’m not a fan of those.

This guide is part game tips, part spatial ecology lesson. I’ll begin with a walk through my process, illustrated with a patch of forest I made. It’s not supposed to represent any particular community or place, but it shows what I want to draw attention to.

For info about which plants to use and help with designing a park more generally, see these guides.

Go outside and touch grass look for nature. What patterns do you see in how plants are spaced, what sizes trees attain, where ground is bare and where it’s covered?
Scour the internet, looking not just for the most impressive landscapes, but for fairly normal forest scenes, bogs, rivers etc. Personally, I love using Pinterest for this. It’s still possible to find landscape pictures that aren’t AI… for now (I think??? ;_;).

⠀⠀⠀An example of a board I use.

Of course, let yourself be inspired by art as well. Leave it to artists to highlight what’s important and to convey clear forms. I love looking at the works of paleoartists who also give attention to environments, like Douglas Henderson, Bob Nicholls, Beth Zaiken, Joschua Knüppe, Brian Engh, ...

Then make a plan. Okay, this doesn’t need to be that involved. Just spend a few moments thinking what sort of topology you want, what plants you think you’ll use, etc. You can write things down or make a sketch, of course, but it doesn’t need to go that far.

Though of course they exist just as well, in my opinion it is much harder to make a flat landscape look good, compared to a landscape with even just a little bit of elevation. Hills and valleys are best made by going back and forth between “raise”/“lower” and “flatten” tools, followed by a smoothening pass. Landscapes with scattered barriers to erosion like trees and rocks can benefit from using the “roughen” tool, though keep it at low intensity and make sure you don’t create anything too jagged. The “erode” tool is good for making hills with pointier crests, like sand dunes.

Place bodies of water early on in the process. Paint them bigger than you actually want them: if you use terrain sculpting tools to make the actual shoreline, you’ll have better control and you can give the body of water smoother edges.

⠀Step 2: the landscape takes shape. I've cast some shadows to help you see the terrain variation.

These really elevate an exhibit. In nature, you’ll mostly find bare rock in erosive conditions, or where they have been deposited by rivers, glaciers, or cycles of frost and thaw. In Prehistoric Kingdom, you’ll probably want to be more generous with them since they’re a great barrier for animals too.

I can’t stress this next point enough: use prefabs for rocks! It’s easier to put a lot of effort into larger elements that you can reuse, rather than to start from scratch again with every habitat, and the end result looks better too. Now, I don’t mean you should make a single rock cliff prefab and spam it everywhere. There needs to be enough variation and you’ll always need to do some work to integrate your prefab into the environment (by sinking a floating rock here and there, changing colours, …). Personally, I’ve made a whole catalogue of different cliffs, boulders, pillars, scatterings of rocks for myself. If you don’t want to do that, you can of course turn to the awesome Steam Workshop.

A scattering of rocks and rock terrain textures can look more natural than an entire hill made of rocks, and be less effort too.

When it comes to rocks and cliffs, it can be helpful to ask yourself some questions: How long have they been there? Are they pristine, or crumbling? Are their surfaces jagged enough to support epilithic (‘on rock’) plantlife? Or are there places where water and soil can pool, and larger plants grow?

⠀⠀⠀Smooth vs. jagged.

Horizontally patterned vs. vertically patterned.

⠀⠀⠀Step 3 of the process.

I usually decide on a few base textures that I’ll put down at full strength. Then I go in with a smaller brush at a low intensity (10 to 20 percent) to blend edges and create more detail. The game’s engine unfortunately doesn’t allow for more than three textures to blend. If you try to add a fourth, one will eliminate another creating texture seams in the process. This has been an ugly fact of life for the game’s whole history, but listen here: do not let this fact discourage you from using a ton of textures. We’ve got access to deciduous fallen leaves, needles for under conifers, dark organic-rich soils, myriad rocks, sands and gravels, wet shiny mud, iron-rich clay, grasses dry and lush, ... There’s tons of options, so imo it’s a waste to only use one or two in an exhibit.

Some specific tips:
• Shiny wet textures go in dips in the terrain.
• Rock textures can be painted around actual rocks to bind them together; A rock cliff half-sunk into the terrain painted with rock will look very cohesive.
• Painting gravel under rocks can help to make them look old and weathered.
• Grass textures are very useful even for environments from before the evolution of grass. If you paint them at low intensities, the tufts won’t come up and you can pretend it’s moss. Sink in some of the Stone Age moss pieces from the “Gardening” tab and this will look even better.
• You can blend multiple textures of similar type and colour (e.g. different fallen leaves) in a noisy pattern to break up the monotony.

Step 4. I've chosen a base coat of Tropical leaves and varied it up with Coastal substrate and Wetland grass. Tropical grass around the mossy boulders helps to blend them into the landscape.

A healthy ecosystem is as much dead matter as it is living. I love to make and use prefabs of dead trees, scattered bunches of branches, exposed roots etc. It’s a shame that we have so few options here. If we got moss-covered trunks, piles of dead leaves, root clusters and such, I would eat that sh*t up.

⠀⠀⠀Step 5. A dead tree, some piles of sticks, some roots poking through the dirt.

Confession: I almost never brush with more than one species of plant at a time. I just find that if you use a small, low-intensity brush with one plant (but multiple models of course), you can more easily achieve something natural. Plants tend to exist in clusters, after all. They seed close to each other, and sometimes even create conditions for each other to thrive. Make it a patchwork.
This is less true for trees than it is for the undergrowth. Trees will usually be more evenly spread out because of light competition. You’ll also see plants being more spread out in arid conditions because of water competition.

So that’s how I do it: I put in one (or a few at most) plant species at a time, going from short plants to tall ones. With trees, I sometimes dare to move and scale the plants with advanced editing after I’ve brushed them down. Placing plants individually from the start is usually not worth the effort, PK’s brush tool is really awesome. But I might do that sometimes if I want detailed little spots. There’s also quite a few tree species that can grow much taller than they are in-game (the most egregious example being the redwoods), so I might place those individually so that I can scale them up.

Keep in mind that most environments have what’s called a low ‘species evenness’: a few species are very abundant, a larger number of species are somewhat abundant, and most species are rare. So at a given layer of the foliage, it’s a good idea to only select a species or two-three that will make up the majority, and then dot the landscape with rarer ones here and there. Of course, if an environment is very heterogeneous in its physical conditions, species evenness can be higher.


⠀⠀⠀Step 6. First the underbrush, then the trees.

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⠀⠀⠀Another before and after of this step, in a different exhibit.

Go back and retouch what needs retouching. You might find that a different terrain texture would be better in a certain spot, or that some plants are clipping into a rock, or even that some terrain could do with a bit of smoothing. You may even find that, now that the general landscape at large is done, it could use some interspersed points of interest which received more attention.

This step speaks for itself, really. Finish the fight.

⠀⠀⠀The finished environment.

It helps to think of your landscape as having a spot on a spectrum or two: arid vs. humid, and nutrient-poor vs. nutrient-rich. The former dichotomy obviously doesn’t need to correlate with the latter, but nutrient-poor environments don’t tend to hold moisture well so their plants will need to be somewhat adapted to drought. For that reason, use sand and dry dirt mostly in nutrient-poor and/or arid conditions.
These conditions can vary spatially on small scales. Think of a faster river depositing sand in an otherwise nutrient-rich environment, or how boulders will create more humid spots in dry landscapes by having rainwater run off of them to concentrate at their edges, and by shading the ground.

As trees grow old, die and fall over, their upturning roots move earth, creating a pit and a mound.
Over time, this compounds, so old forests have rather bumpy floors. In floodplain forests (a common habitat for the dinosaurs we’ve found), this effect is counteracted by the river’s floods. Since less intense floods are more common, lower spots in the landscape will be under water more often than higher ones, so they’ll experience more deposition of sediments carried by the river.

When a tree falls, new light hits the floor. This means that saplings of more shade-intolerant species can suddenly eke out a niche. For that reason, young trees of similar ages can often be found in small patches or cohorts.

Not every forest gets to be an old-growth forest, of course. Disturbances that can rejuvenate one include wildfires, violent floods, landslides (on slopes), groups of herbivorous dinosaurs moving through, ... If wildfires are frequent enough, not enough dead material can accumulate to sustain big fires, and larger trees can survive them. That said, regeneration can be difficult since young trees are still vulnerable. More humid patches or obstructing rocks can create habitat for less fire-tolerant flora.
Especially in less frequently disturbed forests, it’s important to include that dead material. Place down dead wood and use bare dwarf birch bushes as dead shrubs. This all provides tons of surface and substrate for moss and mushrooms.

Forests back in the Mesozoic fell victim to a lot of massive herbivores. The warmer, more humid climate meant that forests covered a truly huge amount of the land, but they usually lacked the vertical structural complexity and the density of our modern (tropical) ones. Frequent fires, storms and dinosaurs served to keep forests pretty open.

⠀⠀⠀A forest at the end of the Cretaceous.

These come in a couple of varieties. Swamps have woody plants, while marshes are dominated by herbaceous ones. There where the tides have an effect, you get mangrove swamps and salt marshes instead.
There’s also bogs and fens, which are dominated by peat mosses that accumulate when dead because of the oxygen-depleted, acidic conditions they create. These are most characteristic of temperate and boreal areas.

Wetlands are defined by being periodically or occasionally inundated by water, not necessarily by always being so. That means you can use wetland plants on dry ground as well, as long as it’s in lower parts of the landscape. In those higher places where the water never saturates the soil, you can see a fairly sudden transition to a different community of plants.

Like I’ve touched upon, wetlands can create conditions without oxygen (“anoxic” conditions) due to the lack of mixing in the water, and the amount of organisms using up oxygen. Anoxic soils can get grey to bluish hues. In contrast, there where oxygen becomes available (say in a creek flowing out of a swamp region), dissolved iron can rust, which makes it less soluble. Therefore it precipitates, leading to red soils. So don’t be afraid to use the Grassland mud texture in wetlands.

The course of a river can usually be divided into an erosive segment and a sedimentative one. As a river nears the sea, it widens, which means that it slows down and particles of sediment can no longer be carried along. The slower the water, the smaller the particles that will be allowed to settle (from sand to silt to clay).

In the erosive part, you get river rapids, waterfalls, bare rounded rocks and clear water.
It’s in the sedimentative parts that floodplains will form, through which rivers snake over time as they continuously alter their own course with sediment. Their snaky, bendy form is called meandering. There where a river etches a shortcut to skip a meander, that meander will turn into a so-called oxbow lake, where wetland plants can thrive. Where the river’s occasional floods fill lower-lying areas, backswamps will be created, and slowly filled with silts and clays.

A special type of river is the braided river, which has lots of channels spitting and rejoining to create an array of small islands. These form more in the middle of river courses, where the sediment load is high but the slope is not so gentle as to create meandering rivers. These are really cool in my opinion. Unfortunately they’re a bit hard to create in PK since the water and terrain brushes can’t go very small, so you’d need a really big exhibit.

⠀⠀⠀When this river's water level is higher, it erodes the banks.

I’m definitely not an expert on taking screenshots, but I’ll write what I know.

• Contrast is important. It’s why the dramatic lighting of a sunset is such a popular subject for photographs.

• Layering helps with that. When you’ve got recognisable foreground, midground and background (fading into the atmosphere) elements, contrast is almost a given.

• At the same time, you want to strive for distinct shapes. It’s why taking impressive pictures in forests is pretty hard in my opinion. They’re just so visually messy, especially when the sun is out. Blurring the background (it’s an option in screenshot mode) is a great help though.

• For obscuring unnecessary background details, fog is also useful. On some maps, you can set the weather to snowing, and if you pause the game you can move away from the snow particles. That gives you great foggy conditions.

• Framing is important too. I’m sure I don’t need to explain the rule of thirds, visual balance, leading lines and all that. But this stuff can be a bit difficult for true landscape pics, where individual animals are at most one element of multiple.

• Lastly, it goes without saying, but references always help.

Thank you for reading!

I feel like I still don't know a lot about how natural landscapes form and what they look like, so criticism is always welcome.