Planet Coaster, the theme park creator and management game, launched around a week ago to overwhelmingly positive reviews. But rather than sit back and enjoy their success, the developers have instead decided to release a rather significant update.

The boringly named Update 1.0.1 brings with it a new and much 'harder' challenge mode, a variety of new blueprints to toy around with, and most importantly, numerous optimization and stability improvements. Given that the biggest problems currently plaguing Planet Coaster are performance and difficulty, I hope you can now understand how positively delightful it is to see this patch arrive so quickly after release!

As for the patch notes themselves, here's the full list, though keep in mind that most of the 'important' stuff is hidden in between the lines:

• New blueprints 

​- New shops/facilities blueprints for all 5 themes

- New scenery blueprints for all 5 themes

- New coaster blueprints

• ​Added a "harder" challenge mode

​• Crash fixes/stability improvements

• Optimisations

• Bug fixes 

- Loading an old park will not reset your custom music

- Fix black artefacts on HD4000 machines

- Fix mouse issues on Windows 10 Insider

- Fix heatmaps when a train falls off the track

- Fix Priority Pass attendant animation issue

- Reduced CPU/GPU usage when the game is minimized

- Excitement, fear and nausea values now appear on coaster blueprints tooltip

- Tacos icons now appear in Guest Inventories correctly

- Fixed lights on dark ride in "The Creature Awakens"

- Allow guests to stand at different heights on raised queues/paths

- Guests re-equip balloons when leaving rides

- Fix issue where control rebinding's were not being reapplied if you cancelled out of a change

- Fix harness animation on Canyon Runner

- Star Studded Career achievement fix

- Guests now enter toilets/first aid centrally rather than clipping into the building

- Guests with nothing to do leave the park rather than idling on the spot

- Improved performance when editing terrain around water bodies

• QoL improvements 

- ​Coaster auto-avoid now ignores terrain when auto-tunnelling is selected

- Clicking a notification will now rotate the camera to focus on the affected facility/exit/entrance

- Height markers now appear when building downhill more often

- Community translations now support overriding the games font, allowing support for East Asian languages where characters were previously not included.

- Escape now exits the main menu

If you harbor even a tiny bit of interest in these types of games, I would fully recommend you at least check out Planet Coaster on Steam. I've been playing it for the past week now, and while I am by no means an artistic person I have manage to have an absolute blast creating my park... even though it may look like a drunken giant sat on it, but that's a part of the charm I suppose!

As for the for the future of Planet Coaster, there is going to be a rather large free update coming at some point in December. What exactly will it bring and when will it come, that I don't know, but I'm sure we'll find out soon enough given how close December is. Until then I'll leave you with my favorite 'little' prop so far: