Tek trough is utterly useless

[McTayTay]

4 hours ago, St1ckyBandit said:

Thread would be more accurate if trough was removed from the title

Nice one!

[ciabattaroll]

10 hours ago, ducttapefixeseverything said:

I know cooked meat lasts longer. But, you have to cook it. Which means even more time wasted waiting on it to cook and transferring. Even if you are doing base related stuff, e.g. narcoberry farming and filling berry troughs and inventory management, it still takes time away. Efficiency is important. For 75 percent of players who will never even see a tek trough outside of solo play, viable options are needed. No power required, no need to beat the monkey, no need for farming bosses endlessly for element...just kill lots of mantas and sharks and load up troughs. Most people make some sort of effort to imprint their dinos. It is a simple take all from three or four troughs, then transfer to other troughs to top off during the imprint. Adds two minutes to the imprint process, adds a large reduction in spoilage until next imprint. It also makes the troughs without meat instantly visible for filling when you have more time than a ten minute hop on to imprint. Seeing as how it takes 35 minutes to cook enough meat to fill ONE trough with one industrial grill. Two, 17.5 minutes. Four grills reduce it to eight minutes 45 seconds per trough. Very time consuming to fill troughs with cooked meat.

Meat run in the water. Ten minutes to weight cap player with 450 weight and slot cap inventory of mosa. Transfer directly to eight troughs. Repeat. One hour to fill 40 troughs, that feed five mosas or gigas for a very long time. Again, restacking meat to reset time during imprint. I use gigas and mosas as example, because they eat a lot, and take the longest to raise. Squids too, but mosas eat the fastest out of the apex predators, at one stack of 20 raw meat every six minutes, reduced by 10 percent of consumption every day.

Even meat farming with a bred and imprinted therizino on a quetz ramp pre theri nerf leveled in melee and power with two beavers to transfer meat to on the quetz is slower due to the speed of the quetz.

With the massive timesink the game has become, efficiency and multitasking is key.

Will I get some eventually? For sure. Is it going to be worth it? Math says no. One hour of meat farming by a single person to feed five apex predator babies for a day is pretty good.

You're talking about efficiency, but then go on about having to farm meat one hour each day and constantly taking and transferring meat to top off troughs to reduce spoilage. With the tek trough guess what? You don't have to farm meat for one hour each day. And you definitely don't have to top off slop troughs to avoid spoilage nearly as often. How is that counter to what I've been saying that the difference between a regular trough and a tek one is that the regular trough makes use of a lower initial investment for a higher upkeep while the tek trough requires a heavier initial investment for a lower upkeep?

[AlphaCarno]

However you guys want to sum the tek trough up as, no matter what scenario you think of this is an item that will help tons of people. As Sup3riorArs3nal said, you can fill troughs and leave. All you need to do is like 1 easy brood round a week to keep it running. And even then you won't be using it 24/7. I agree, most of tek is useless and mainly just pvp tribes fighting each other with upgraded stuff. But this one singular item, it makes breeding easier. With the reduced feeding rates i bet 1 trough could last giga almost till adolescent. Not to mention their adding this engram to the manticore. A solo'able boss. And the generator along with the trough are on beta ape, another solo'able boss. Farm easy brood, another solo'able boss. The second they fix the tribute requirements I know i'll be stocking up on these. Simply put a single person can unlock the engrams and sustain the upkeep. I don't see how its not worth. In fact I hope to use em as much as possible before the devs realize this and make it harder .

[EchoingTime]

Don't know why the tek trough has to be tek if it isn't much of a improvement. Perhaps level 75 refrigerated trough?

[Zed38]

23 hours ago, McTayTay said:

So I was experimenting with the new Tek Trough to see how much more efficent it is compared to its old counter part and I was severly unsatisfied. It can only hold 40 more slots compared to the regular feeding trough and just refridgerates it. Sounds good right? Not so much considering you need a tek generator and spare element to run it. Better yet, you can't even put wyvern milk in it! It's easier to make a bunch of feeding trough and cook the meat, rather than bothering to make a tek trough. Really big dissapointment with it, hopefully it'll get some touch ups to make it worth while to make.

The feeding trough, like all tek items is designed for more established and older tribes that can afford to run it for special breeding events. Having 15 of them powered full of cooked meat means that over the course of a multi-giga breed session you would be filling them all significantly less than the old newbie troughs.

it is completely understandable that some of you may say its "useless". It isnt intended for your level of progression. Once you get to mass breeding and pushing dinos to 100% imprint you will change your tone - or not - in which case, enjoy the spoil.

[TR-8R]

It is a tek item , i don't think in the long run it gonna beat the normal trough .... 

Think , you have to beat the boss just to get the item to run it while the normal trough cost nothing . 

You can argue that the trough can keep the food for a long time but i don't think the baby gonna eat all the food in the trough and inside its inventory when i get back from work , berry and meat are easy to gather en masses . 

 

In short , tek tier suck , especially when you have to gather artifact , item and beat the boss all over again for such small number of elements and then everyone who helped you demand you to share it to them....

[Zed38]

2 minutes ago, TR-8R said:

It is a tek item , i don't think in the long run it gonna beat the normal trough .... 

Think , you have to beat the boss just to get the item to run it while the normal trough cost nothing . 

You can argue that the trough can keep the food for a long time but i don't think the baby gonna eat all the food in the trough and inside its inventory when i get back from work , berry and meat are easy to gather en masses . 

 

In short , tek tier suck , especially when you have to gather artifact , item and beat the boss all over again for such small number of elements and then everyone who helped you demand you to share it to them....

its not intended for low capacity breeding. how we use it is for mass breeding (all at one time), and we dont do that every week, maybe once a month. The generator isnt on unless there is a breeding session going on - and for this, the tek trough is invaluable. step up your game, mate.

[Bain]

6 minutes ago, TR-8R said:

It is a tek item , i don't think in the long run it gonna beat the normal trough .... 

Think , you have to beat the boss just to get the item to run it while the normal trough cost nothing . 

You can argue that the trough can keep the food for a long time but i don't think the baby gonna eat all the food in the trough and inside its inventory when i get back from work , berry and meat are easy to gather en masses . 

 

In short , tek tier suck , especially when you have to gather artifact , item and beat the boss all over again for such small number of elements and then everyone who helped you demand you to share it to them....

its intended for people with bosses on farm, not people  who havent touched a boss yet.

[Zed38]

its actually important to note that when you do mass breeding, you're going to have tribemates coming and going fairly frequently to: imprint, farm meat/berry to refill fridges, ??

at the latest, you're going to see people coming on every 3-4 hours to ensure 100% imprint. in this case, the tek trough isnt as wonderful because players WILL be there to handle refilling. If however you arent looking for high imprint (or any imprint in some cases), you can find HUGE benefit from tek troughs. It's like they are rewarding the mid-tier players who kinda dont put much effort into what they do... a tad annoying tbh. but still, less meat runs IS less meat runs. over the course of a giga thats about 2 full gigas worth of meat every day, multiplied by the number of baby gigas during the first half of juvi.

[Flickdatbean]

The tek trough shouldn't be tek it should be running off gasoline and a generator. Most of the tek stuff is way too expensive and for most people with a job/family it's not achievable unless they don't sleep at night. The Tek trough should be renamed refrigerated trough which h would make sense as the trough has jumped 2 tiers (I know there is no such thing as tiers in this game but that's how it should be) for building stuff. Should be something in each tier for nearly everything. Example forge/industrial forge/tek forge and so on. Make element easier to Obtain and most people will make their way through the tiers. All imo of course. 

[Zed38]

16 minutes ago, Flickdatbean said:

The tek trough shouldn't be tek it should be running off gasoline and a generator. Most of the tek stuff is way too expensive and for most people with a job/family it's not achievable unless they don't sleep at night. The Tek trough should be renamed refrigerated trough which h would make sense as the trough has jumped 2 tiers (I know there is no such thing as tiers in this game but that's how it should be) for building stuff. Should be something in each tier for nearly everything. Example forge/industrial forge/tek forge and so on. Make element easier to Obtain and most people will make their way through the tiers. All imo of course. 

thats what Gamma is for.

an electrical version of trough would be nice as a mid tier for the newbies, yah. it should provide eg: 1/2 spoil over normal trough. That would be nice. definitely make tek trough far superior to it tho. gotta dangle that carrot in front of the youts so they have something to strive for.

[d1nk]

17 hours ago, Sup3riorArs3nal said:

And? It's an investment. For MUCH easier use in the long run. After the Tek is made you can do a full giga with 10 meat runs ahead of time then never have to do a meat run for it for the nearly 2 weeks of raising. Never even have to touch the troughs even, though recombining the meat daily would save you a little in the long run. To last 1 day with a fresh juvenile giga, you'll need 5 regular troughs of cooked meat, so 300 total stacks, or 9,000 total meat. That's ~3 meat runs then you have to spend 8.4 hours cooking the meat with 25 grills. That buys you 1 day. Alternatively you could just use raw, but to get 12 hours you'd need 180 stacks of raw meat, one solid meat run, but you'd have to do it twice daily for 5-6 days, then once daily for another 4-5 days. ~14-17 meat runs but all spaced out at opposite ends of the day. You could store it all with fridges ahead of time but you'd still have to manage/distribute the meat every 12 hours or so. All compared to 10 meat runs ahead of time and literally worry free. Immune to updates/ddos/life/forgetful tribemates etc preventing you from feeding it when needed.

Alternatively you could just have 4, still capable of doing a Quetz or anything quicker effortlessly. And with a giga on 4 Tek troughs that's 1 meat run every ~2 days

Even just 2 troughs and that's 1 meat run per day as a fresh juvenile with an "If full guaranteed 24hrs+ of assured time."

With zero thought you could get 16 troughs on one generator at the lowest setting, and if you wanted sheer overkill with proper planning you could get ~240 troughs on one generator on the lowest setting. Reported single player numbers are 25hrs per element, so given the recent patch notes that should be 100 hours per element on the lowest range on official servers. 1 easy Broodmother kill would fuel 41.67 days of raising time. Even at 25 hours per that's still 20.83 days of power for 1 gamma Broodmother kill, which takes hardly any artifacts/parts to summon and is easily beaten by 4 people with 4 good Rexes and can be done over and over repeatedly (did 8 in one night once, you get more than enough meat from spiders to force heal after every run, and the chitin you get is crazy). Alternatively 1 or 2 people with 20 good Rexes who know what they are doing can take on the beta Megapithicus easily with zero Rex casualties, or alpha with a potential for a few Rex casualties. Or 7-10 people with 7-10 good Rexes can take on the beta/alpha dragon easily. Beta/Alpha Megapithicus run + a few beta/alpha dragon runs and you'll have the element to make it all, and then a gamma Broodmother run every 2 weeks and you can maintain their power with zero issue. If you've got the people you can just do the gamma Broodmother for meat runs, as that pretty much inventory maxes 4-5 Rexes on meat+chitin per run (about 10 minutes) + the 10 element all for a low summon cost.

 

TL;DR:

Tek trough is hardly useless. Might have a slightly pricy entry cost but if you can craft them they save a lot of effort and worry in the long run.

You sir have swayed me on the trough. I do wish the element cost was cheaper or they implemented other ways to get it

[McTayTay]

5 hours ago, Zed38 said:

The feeding trough, like all tek items is designed for more established and older tribes that can afford to run it for special breeding events. Having 15 of them powered full of cooked meat means that over the course of a multi-giga breed session you would be filling them all significantly less than the old newbie troughs.

it is completely understandable that some of you may say its "useless". It isnt intended for your level of progression. Once you get to mass breeding and pushing dinos to 100% imprint you will change your tone - or not - in which case, enjoy the spoil.

Tek trough shouldn't be "tek". If anything it should be "industrial" and it only has 40 more slots. A giga with high melee and weight with 10+ grills can fill a large group of fridges and troughs, easier than wasting pearls and element on it. Especially if your in a very active tribe that does consistent runs 24/7 and does imprinting and even then the cooked meat spoils, so I mass produce jerky and always have 1 trough filled with it. I personally feel that wildcard made the tek trough to make up for the floating patch and also seems like the trough is for the lazy who dont wanna fill a trough up every now and then.which in fact takes no less than 15 to a max of 30 mins to do a meat run, cook it  fill up fridges and troughs. Only use I see a tek trough for is as another "fridge" for eggs or for berries.

[strawberrybot]

Wow that is really disappointing.  Sounds way too expensive for what it actually saves you

[MrDynamicMan]

5 hours ago, Zed38 said:

thats what Gamma is for.

an electrical version of trough would be nice as a mid tier for the newbies, yah. it should provide eg: 1/2 spoil over normal trough. That would be nice. definitely make tek trough far superior to it tho. gotta dangle that carrot in front of the youts so they have something to strive for.

Sure, dangle the carrot, but make the carrot worthwhile. 

The temptation trough replaces Meat runs with cave and BM runs,which is, imo, pretty stupid. 

[TR-8R]

21 hours ago, Bain said:

its intended for people with bosses on farm, not people  who havent touched a boss yet.

And i already beat all 3 bosses to begin with , so i am quite confidence to say that it is better to invest in normal trough than  a fancy little tek trough that require many many elements which required huge time just for collecting all the needed stuffs and raise battle rexes .

[sal]

well you can talk all day about it but the fact that it is a Tek-Tier structure makes it impossible to use for 90% of the player base.

Defeating bosses on official is no easy task, most tribes wont be able to do it.

And this thing is basically just a pimped fridge ...

[Kallor]

They gave us an industrial level item and charged Tek prices.  Poor effort but about what I expected from Wildcard.

[McTayTay]

2 hours ago, TR-8R said:

And i already beat all 3 bosses to begin with , so i am quite confidence to say that it is better to invest in normal trough than  a fancy little tek trough that require many many elements which required huge time just for collecting all the needed stuffs and raise battle rexes .

Lets not forget about the rework they did with bosses and their summoning requirements now. Also take into consideration for console players to, we almost get half as much element from a boss fight compared to PC. On hard broodmother, you get 74 element while console players get 30. Making it even more costly on console since farming element is just a BIT more harder.

[ducttapefixeseverything]

18 hours ago, ciabattaroll said:

You're talking about efficiency, but then go on about having to farm meat one hour each day and constantly taking and transferring meat to top off troughs to reduce spoilage. With the tek trough guess what? You don't have to farm meat for one hour each day. And you definitely don't have to top off slop troughs to avoid spoilage nearly as often. How is that counter to what I've been saying that the difference between a regular trough and a tek one is that the regular trough makes use of a lower initial investment for a higher upkeep while the tek trough requires a heavier initial investment for a lower upkeep?

I think you missed the part about 75 percent of Ark players will never even see a tek trough outside of solo play, and conveniently ignored the whole part about topping it off during imprints. Which, in case you also did not notice, never line up exactly with the scheduled time. It may say, Next imprint in 3 hours and 15 minutes, but if you come back at that time, it will be off by several minutes. It is perfect for restacking meat in the three or five minutes that the timer is off.

And yes, you do have to farm meat for at least an hour a day when raising apex predators five or six at a time. Cause, uh, yeah, they fixed floating babies and destroyed stasis and then the Schrodinger's meat. Perhaps our raising styles are different. I don't hatch compys.

Higher initial investment for tek trough. Yup. You gotta breed the rexes for the boss fight first somehow. By the time you can afford to go to the boss fight, the tek trough will be rather a disappointment once you do get one. And then, you are going to have to make at least ten of them for them to be even worth using.

Does it sound like I am complaining? I'm not. Just disgusted that WC reskinned Tarvan's Trough and made it tek.

This tek trough should have been in the electrical phase of the engram tree.

And a tek trough should have had triple the slots and held food in stasis. Was the original idea.

 

[TriTallion]

We were um-ing and ah-ing about the tek trough and whether it was worth it or not, but this thread has just confirmed it isn't. So thanks for the heads up!

[Currahee]

19 hours ago, EchoingTime said:

Don't know why the tek trough has to be tek if it isn't much of a improvement. Perhaps level 75 refrigerated trough?

Yes, the technology to refrigerate a trough is acquired far before Tek. This shouldn't be Tek.

$0.02

[Sup3riorArs3nal]

13 hours ago, McTayTay said:

Tek trough shouldn't be "tek". If anything it should be "industrial" and it only has 40 more slots. A giga with high melee and weight with 10+ grills can fill a large group of fridges and troughs, easier than wasting pearls and element on it. Especially if your in a very active tribe that does consistent runs 24/7 and does imprinting and even then the cooked meat spoils, so I mass produce jerky and always have 1 trough filled with it. I personally feel that wildcard made the tek trough to make up for the floating patch and also seems like the trough is for the lazy who dont wanna fill a trough up every now and then.which in fact takes no less than 15 to a max of 30 mins to do a meat run, cook it  fill up fridges and troughs. Only use I see a tek trough for is as another "fridge" for eggs or for berries.

Max giga inventory is 6,000 raw meat, or 300 stacks. That's 5 troughs raw or 3 and a third troughs cooked with a cook time of 5.6 minutes with 25 grills. Will need to be done twice daily for about the first week on a giga, then once daily for the last few days. Miss your max trough timer by even an hour and your giga is dead. Server gets ddosed and you can't get on when it clears up? RIP. Life comes up unexpectedly and you can't reach your tribe or they aren't on? RIP. Big update passes certification ahead if schedule? RIP. Tribemate told to cover for you for a certain feeding and forgets? RIP.

With 15 Tek troughs, 1 meat run for baby stage and then 1 gamma Broodmother run and that's pretty much a fully raised giga immune to any mishaps listed above. Once it's past baby and the troughs are filled you and your tribemates could all wind up in a car crash and wake up 2 weeks later from comas, and your baby giga would have fully raised with no issue. You complain about the resource cost, but what is it really. 1 generator + 15 troughs equals a one time fee of 300 element, 15.9k ingots, 1750 crystal 795 black pearls, 3125 poly, and 750 electronics. 1 hard dragon run, 3-4 metal runs, 1 crystal run, 1 pearl run, 1 organic polymer run with a good moschops, and 8 Alpha mosa kills (Sounds like a lot, but a good Mosa can get 2-3 kills per run on the island). 1 day of grind for an experienced team, or 2 days casual. That affords you worry-free raising. You could do enough berry runs ahead of time and never touch the troughs again for 21 Brontos at the same time with that many troughs

11 hours ago, TR-8R said:

 

[St1ckyBandit]

4 minutes ago, Sup3riorArs3nal said:

Max giga inventory is 6,000 raw meat, or 300 stacks. That's 5 troughs raw or 3 and a third troughs cooked with a cook time of 5.6 minutes with 25 grills. Will need to be done twice daily for about the first week on a giga, then once daily for the last few days. Miss your max trough timer by even an hour and your giga is dead. Server gets ddosed and you can't get on when it clears up? RIP. Life comes up unexpectedly and you can't reach your tribe or they aren't on? RIP. Big update passes certification ahead if schedule? RIP. Tribemate told to cover for you for a certain feeding and forgets? RIP.

With 15 Tek troughs, 1 meat run for baby stage and then 1 gamma Broodmother run and that's pretty much a fully raised giga immune to any mishaps listed above. Once it's past baby and the troughs are filled you and your tribemates could all wind up in a car crash and wake up 2 weeks later from comas, and your baby giga would have fully raised with no issue. You complain about the resource cost, but what is it really. 1 generator + 15 troughs equals a one time fee of 300 element, 15.9k ingots, 1750 crystal 795 black pearls, 3125 poly, and 750 electronics. 1 hard dragon run, 3-4 metal runs, 1 crystal run, 1 pearl run, 1 organic polymer run with a good moschops, and 8 Alpha mosa kills (Sounds like a lot, but a good Mosa can get 2-3 kills per run on the island). 1 day of grind for an experienced team, or 2 days casual. That affords you worry-free raising. You could do enough berry runs ahead of time and never touch the troughs again for 21 Brontos at the same time with that many troughs

My head just exploded.

 

That sounds like a full time job not a video game for fun.

[Sup3riorArs3nal]

2 hours ago, St1ckyBandit said:

My head just exploded.

 

That sounds like a full time job not a video game for fun.

A few resource runs accomplished in 1 day with good tribe coordination or casually in 2 and then being capable of worry/effort free raising any single creature in the game? Compared to getting on to manage the meat twice daily without fail or your baby dies? That resource expenditure is nothing, short of the element/black pearls that much metal and polymer is commonly sunk into a handful of sets of high-tier weapons, ammo, and armor that is at a large risk of loss when actually used. People will grind out dozens of auto turrets to trade for single fertilized eggs with silly color mutations. People invest a lot more material and time on much more frivolous things than Tek troughs that ultimately net a huge QoL improvement. We're talking ~13 hours of work total for 2 people. With 6 people in your tribe that averages down to a little over 4hrs for each team of two people working together. Doable in one day, and casually so in two or more. If you don't already have solid boss Rexes then you've got a bigger task as you're not even at Tek tier period and thus probably have more important goals to work towards first.