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So what did you do in ARK today?


Anarki
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Logged onto our Valguero server - activated the valentines event (with ActiveEvent=vday and not my presumed "LoveEvolved"), killed all wild and tamed the first thing I seen in event colours - a red and white stripe 145 Baryonx girl which have named Candy Kane - obviously.

Checkin her stats and seems to be a good unplanned tame - obviously not as good as our breeding aberrent line but adding 3 points to HP and 5 to Melee over our current regular Baryonx on that map.

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Beginning the rebuild off stream (I did record it for YouTube) this time following my Gamma Dragon failure.

Bred up roughly 10 Theri's and managed to get an ascendant Theri saddle BP which should help so much!

I found a Rare Sighting Yuty for the team as well.

I built a boss dino storage area next to the obelisk where they can safely regain health following battles as per a recommendation on Reddit.

Next steps:

I'll need to hatch a few more Theri and find a high level Daedon.

Once the team is set, I'll make up a bunch of cakes and try the dragon again.

 

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Raised my 18/19 Theri's ready to fight bosses, just waiting for their exp to tick whilst in their pods.

Still undecided whether to include a Daedon or just rely on cakes

Made up a ton of cakes and stored them in a refrigerator at the boss dino storage by the obelisk

Scouted The Island for Rare Sightings and managed to find an ascendant pump shotgun which will also come in useful!

Also ran some caves to stock up on artifacts.

I think by Saturday's stream, i'll be ready to try Gamma Dragon again

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Beat Alpha dragon for the first time. Only tried alpha once before and lost badly with 45k health rexes. Went with 17 theris this time, + yuty and 2 pigs. 25k health and 1135 melee on the theris. Got our revenge. only lost 1 their because it fell over the side. most had more than half health and the end. 5 cakes each plus the 2 pigs did the trick. Left the arena and realised that 2 of the theris hadn't travelled with us, so we'd done it with 15. Prepping for the alpha tek cave now. Hopefully get that done before genesis drops.

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Been awhile but I spent a solid weekend on the Ark. Not on the server, though. One of my main issues with joining boosted PVE servers is that progression is just too fast. By the time I joined the tribe they had a tek base already, having bought massively overpowered boss rexes and blasted through all the Valguero content in just one month. So I ended up doing one boss fight with them and then we all split off onto different maps to build up because this cluster has different transfer rules for each map, making it incredibly difficult to operate without full bases everywhere. Kind of annoying. I've been playing solo on Extinction, building up from nothing because the rule for that map is character transfer in only, no items or tames.

But it's a little dull doing all that solo on a boosted server, not just the rates but the stat multipliers are imo too high. So I've been kind of uninterested despite wanting to play with M again. Who, coincidentally, hasn't been around either.

So I logged back in to SP, which I haven't been on in quite some time. There are problems here too and it took a bit to reorient on where I left off. Last time I played I was cleaning up after defeating gamma dragon and preparing my third generation of boss rexes. Honestly the grind is starting to wear on me, I've spent so, so much time prepping and building up and I'm still stuck on The Island. I'm so eager to move on to the next map, but too stubborn to violate the rules of the "Ultimate Ark" challenge. The Christmas visit to Valguero for deinonychus eggs was a much needed break, as was time away from SP and Ark itself.

But with the Valentine's event in full swing and no weekend plans I jumped right in to take advantage of the boosted rates.

Spent almost the entire time in base cycling rex eggs since it's really the best way to level up my boss rexes (using PVP settings so I can kill them for exp). Made quite a bit of progress on the rex line, now up to 17 HP and 16 melee muts, hatching out with 17.6k HP and 527 melee before imprint. This is actually significant even over my third gen rexes, with 13 and 12 muts, respectively.

The nice thing about my base being set up where it is, I have fish spawning in the little pool just outside the walls. So I did some fishing between rounds of eggs and got a bunch of chibis. Nothing rare sadly but it's a nice distraction. Honestly I wish they would just go ahead and add them to drops or bosses or something so you can collect them outside of holidays.

I also took some breaks to work on some side projects. Did some deinonychus breeding just for colors, put together a couple of really solid color morphs from my small but surprisingly diverse pool.

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Probably the best morph I could produce out of my available colors, the "Alpha Deinonychus" is a blend of natural and Christmas colors, although it does look like a Valentine's spawn.

Did make it out and about for some taming and got my best non-bird rolls ever-a mammoth stood up with an astonishing 48 points in melee. Amazing. Mammoths are a side project, mainly for post-storyline play. I just prefer them to beavers and want to breed a super strong line. This will be a huge boost to my base bloodline.

And of course the ever present problem of what to do with the constant flow of breeding stock and outdated tames. Did a fairly large cull and barely feel like I made a dent, but I also moved a lot of animals around to make it easier. My biggest question at this point is honestly what to do with my older boss rexes. I don't really want to cull them necessarily, but I don't have much use for them anymore. My G1 rexes have no mutations at all and my G2 rexes have half the mutations of the current line. Honestly it's been really rewarding comparing the stats between all of them and seeing how far we've come. But it also reveals how comparatively weak the old ones are. I've been slowly uncryoing them as their replacements become ready and just positioning them outside my walls to keep them out of the way.

Either way I'm a bit more than halfway through leveling the G3 rexes. If I keep at it all week I should be able to take on Beta and maybe even Alpha Dragon next weekend. I have all the tribute items and I leveled their HP up first so it's just pumping melee up. I should be able to anyway, as it stands they all have 30k HP and 1000 or so melee.

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I introduced my beautiful girlfriend to Ark which was so awesome for her that she instantly managed to buy a ps4 and Ark. So I guess in wednesday we will Play together. 

Besides this amazing fact I was on my Solo Ragna and build my out of Base Metal location. And of course brought my anky and doedy over there. 

Cant wait for Genesis to be honest! 

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I have quit and started from scratch on Ark more times than I can count. About 2 weeks ago I got the itch to play again so I found a cluster of servers and started. I'm playing on the island (but the cluster has all the maps except the center) I prioritized getting a few yutis to get kibble early and now have more kibble than I know what do with. I started breeding a decent line of barys, sloths, rexs, and theriz. I'm still looking for a a good hp yuti. My sloths are 34 points in hp (6.9k after imprinting) 35 points in melee (~400% after imprint) Is this good enough for broodmother? What should I level health to before putting points into melee?

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Spent days looking for a max-level Thylocoleo on The Island and finally found one!  Tamed it up then went back out to go after an Argentavis I saw previously.  On the way got pounced in the air by yet another max-level Thylacoleo!  Lol!  All that searching to have one just "fall from the sky".  I did have to spend about 10 minutes searching for it after the pounce due to the annoying flee mechanic they have after pouncing.  But I got it and have bred my new super Thylacoleo and it looks like a white tiger.  His name is Tommy ;)

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Fresh from the success of the weekend, I hopped on after work to continue grinding out the levels on my rexes. Got another HP mutation, swapped out to my melee line, got a melee mutation. Then finished my second to last rex on the rest of the eggs. Couldn't have asked for a better stopping point for the night while the two new rexes grow.

One last rex to level up and I also have to replace 2 rex saddles. I thought I was only short 1, but I ran out of saddles before I ran out of rexes. Ah well, I should be able to make them both but I'll do a metal run tomorrow just to be sure. I have more than enough hide for a dozen more saddles and my theri ensures endless fiber stacks with a quick jog to the plants outside my walls.

I do believe I can probably take on Gamma Dragon on Wednesday at my current rate of progress and then save the Alpha for the weekend. If all goes well I can move on immediately to preparations for the Overseer.

Funny side note, a meg killed one of my basilos while I was semi afk between egg batches, I just saw the death message. But when I went to go after it, it was already dead. I can only assume my neutral spino couldn't reach to attack it over the back of the other whale but as soon as it went after the next one it was in range and got instantly shredded. I never did finish the ocean side of my compound. Not really the biggest deal, it killed one of my triplet stat whales, and one that was not imprinted or anything. So aside from the annoyance of losing a tame and a minor source of oil, it was barely a loss worth noting. If it had been my cave whale, that would be a much different story...

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Quite the evening on the Ark...

First, I finished leveling up my rexes and made the two saddles. Then when I cryo'd them all up I realized I did not count wrong the first time, I was only short one saddle. For some reason I hatched 20 rexes so I had an extra, and now I have an extra saddle too. Used up most of my metal too which becomes important later.

Once I had everyone podded, I flew over to the red obelisk where I have my tiny outpost set up. Unpodded them all and of course it's going to take a long time for them all to wake up. That's really the main reason why I wasn't planning on doing the Dragon tonight, because of the long wake up period.

But with the final day of the event I decided in the meantime to take some kibble and fly around just looking for anything interesting. I didn't expect too much but spending so much time in base just grinding rexes, I was going a little stir crazy.

And, well, I found something. Something big.

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Meet Heartbreaker, my 150 wild male Valentine's giga. Found him on the top of Far's Peak. Never in 65 million years would I have expected to randomly come across a 150 giga, never mind an event one. You bet I was super psyched and scrambling to get back to base and get supplies. I didn't have enough metal left for 4 gates so I made one and 20 large pillars. I was able to make a pen just big enough to hold him while also doubling up every other pillar so he couldn't get out. I also only had 5 shocking darts so it took those and about 300 tranqs from my ascendant crossbow. What a rush, I actually ended up crafting more arrows while shooting him because I didn't have enough. Thank the Ark gods my bow was fresh and not in danger of breaking. And I always have a random stash of arrows on my argent.

Once I got him down I realized one little mistake...out of narcotics...at least, I didn't have any more than what I used to craft the tranq arrows. Grabbed the wrong stack out of the box.

I had just enough arrows left to kill a jellyfish for enough toxin to keep him down, I had a short buffer because I just shot him until he went down. Even accidentally shot him once afterward but my taming is up just high enough to still get the perfect tame.

While he's mostly a trophy tame here on The Island, he'll be the start of my breeding line for Extinction once I get there. His melee is mediocre but 40 points in HP is a good start. Yes I know melee is the only stat worth leveling.

Anyway. I call that a good day.

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On 2/17/2020 at 9:39 PM, Cymas said:

Fresh from the success of the weekend, I hopped on after work to continue grinding out the levels on my rexes. Got another HP mutation, swapped out to my melee line, got a melee mutation. Then finished my second to last rex on the rest of the eggs. Couldn't have asked for a better stopping point for the night while the two new rexes grow.

One last rex to level up and I also have to replace 2 rex saddles. I thought I was only short 1, but I ran out of saddles before I ran out of rexes. Ah well, I should be able to make them both but I'll do a metal run tomorrow just to be sure. I have more than enough hide for a dozen more saddles and my theri ensures endless fiber stacks with a quick jog to the plants outside my walls.

I do believe I can probably take on Gamma Dragon on Wednesday at my current rate of progress and then save the Alpha for the weekend. If all goes well I can move on immediately to preparations for the Overseer.

Funny side note, a meg killed one of my basilos while I was semi afk between egg batches, I just saw the death message. But when I went to go after it, it was already dead. I can only assume my neutral spino couldn't reach to attack it over the back of the other whale but as soon as it went after the next one it was in range and got instantly shredded. I never did finish the ocean side of my compound. Not really the biggest deal, it killed one of my triplet stat whales, and one that was not imprinted or anything. So aside from the annoyance of losing a tame and a minor source of oil, it was barely a loss worth noting. If it had been my cave whale, that would be a much different story...

I've been experimenting with agile water guards to avoid that. I'd had megs on guard in my water pen, but I found a 150 meg had glitched in (render bug) and was chewing on one of my basilos, and the guard megs were stuck on the other side of the basilo. 

So I tried castoroides, as they're small and agile in the water and hit as hard as a meg. I positioned 4 in the water pen, floating at the top of the water with good saddles on. 

Next time I logged on, they were all at the bottom, drowned. FYI don't use castos as water pen guards :(

But an important point is that it's a shallow-water pen. With deep water pens you can position your guards underneath and they'll be able to get around the tames to attack the intruder.

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On 2/19/2020 at 7:39 AM, Milsurp said:

I've been experimenting with agile water guards to avoid that. I'd had megs on guard in my water pen, but I found a 150 meg had glitched in (render bug) and was chewing on one of my basilos, and the guard megs were stuck on the other side of the basilo. 

So I tried castoroides, as they're small and agile in the water and hit as hard as a meg. I positioned 4 in the water pen, floating at the top of the water with good saddles on. 

Next time I logged on, they were all at the bottom, drowned. FYI don't use castos as water pen guards :(

But an important point is that it's a shallow-water pen. With deep water pens you can position your guards underneath and they'll be able to get around the tames to attack the intruder.

Have you tried a Baryonyx or two?  They are smaller and less likely to get stuck, they do not use oxygen (and thus will not drown), and they can spin stun just about anything in the water.  I use them against Alpha Sharks all the time.  That said, I have a Spino on guard in my regular water pen and the pen is deep enough for Basilos but not deep enough to drown a Spino (I hope).  I had not considered the case where the guard would go after something on the bottom and drown after the battle was over.  I also have a deeper pen where I am keeping a non-tame Leeds that I built the pen around and I guess I should take my own advice and stick a couple of Baryonyxes in with it just in case.

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20 hours ago, Stretch11 said:

Have you tried a Baryonyx or two?  They are smaller and less likely to get stuck, they do not use oxygen (and thus will not drown), and they can spin stun just about anything in the water.  I use them against Alpha Sharks all the time.  That said, I have a Spino on guard in my regular water pen and the pen is deep enough for Basilos but not deep enough to drown a Spino (I hope).  I had not considered the case where the guard would go after something on the bottom and drown after the battle was over.  I also have a deeper pen where I am keeping a non-tame Leeds that I built the pen around and I guess I should take my own advice and stick a couple of Baryonyxes in with it just in case.

No, the guards' positions in the pen were unchanged, they hadn't gone after anything. They were just dead on the bottom, right below where I had left them on top. They got Ark'd.

So an oxygen-using dino in the water will apparently drown when you come into render range, and that includes log ins. I noticed  wild sheep that were in the water, up against the wall, but at the top and unhurt, were dead when I came back for them. I flew out of  render on a wyvern and flew back in the same way, so they weren't  rendered for long either way. 

So, there's that. A bary is still pretty big, but maybe it wouldn't get hung up on the bigger dinos. And...maybe I could set up a beaver lifeguard station at the edge to add DPS. I could put ramps down and have them on follow to something out of the water so they climb out afterwards.

 

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