Taming/Breeding questions (+Ark Smart Breeding)

[teamravegreen]

Hi there!

My first post here, although I've been lurking a while and am always gathering info from the forums (found out about Ark Smart Breeding tool from here). Unfortunately I can't seem to find the answer to some taming/breeding questions I have.

Using Ark Smart Breeding tool I've got a couple of Direbears that produce the 'best possible bear' - per the tool. I'm pretty impressed with their offspring and they seem to do everything I need, but I'm curious and I assume that there is 'better', statistically.

When I tamed the first two bears, I only looked for the highest possible bear, I paid no attention to stats (HP, Attack, etc). I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this, but I haven't seen it written anywhere...

Is it possible, regardless of starting stats, to eventually breed a perfect bear, dino, whatever?

I'm thinking that when I click on the breeding planner and the tool tells me that I've already got a bear with the best possible stats (or something to that effect) it is talking about the bears that I currently have. I am assuming that I could still find a 'better' bear or breeding pair and get a statistically superior 'best possible' bear - if that makes sense?

Next, through my breeding, I've had some pretty cool looking bears, but after breeding out to the 'best possible' I seem to only be getting this one color (plain brown). Does anyone know if it is possible to get a different color by breeding this pair any further (outside of mutations)? Unfortunately my breeding pair were born twins (triplets actually) and both the plain brown, so I'm thinking I would need to introduce another male/female of a different color to get any variance?

Lastly, is there a tool you can use to find the best animals for breeding? How do you do this? How would I know, other than keeping some sort of log of all the animals I've tranquilized, what a 'good' stat is? Take my bears for instance, if I wanted to add a new partner or two for breeding and went out to look for some with high HP or Attack, how would I know what a good HP or Attack number is? Are there max/mins posted someplace? Dododex? Something else?

That's it for now. Thanks for reading and I look forward to some conversation on this topic!

[Aushegun]

My understanding is that your best chance at a color mutation is using parents with as similar colors as possible. 

However, if your parents already have 20/20 mutations on both sides, they won't produce a new mutation.

So check your breeders, and see what they have.  If they are under 20/20 mutations, then you just need to keep breeding and hope for a color mutation.  I've found that the color mutations show up in spurts. But you need to be patient.  When I first starting breeding Thylas for mutations, I don't think I got my first color mutation until well after my 50th baby was born.

 

[Drinkinthepink]

To answer your last question of "how do I know what are good stats?"

i use Dododex and where you can put in stats it will tell you how many points each stat is.... any Dino that gives 40 or more points to a stat is good, and 50+ points is great...35 is average.

[GuiterRocker1]

So, I'll try not to get too long winded with this .

To answer your first question the tool is only using the bears you currently have. If you were to mutate them and get a higher stat then it will get you to breed that new stat onto another bear until you have a male and female with all your highest stats. It's also possible to change this by taming a new bear with a higher stat roll than what you currently have. For example, let's say you have 2 bears (a male and female obviously  ) with 45 points in health, 41 in stam, 39 in weight, and 46 in melee. Smart breeding will tell you that these two are the best possible pair. Then if you tame a new bear that ends up with 43 points in weight the tool will then tell you to breed the new tame with one of the others until you get that new weight along with the health, stam, and melee onto a new male and female bear. This will then be considered your best possible pair.

To answer your next question, you would have to introduce a new bear into the line if you want different colours. Since you're breeding twins with identical colours the offspring will always get those colours, unless you get a colour mutation, but that's a whole other topic that would take a long time to get into so I'll post a link at the end of this post for you.

Basically, how colours work is that say momma bear has light brown in region 0 and papa bear has the same brown on region 0 then the baby bear with have that brown every time (short of a mutation), but if papa bear was black in region 0 then baby bear could come out with either the brown or black. I'm not too sure what the % is though unfortunately. Also something to keep in mind when you start getting into colour mutations is that they can lay dormant. What I mean by that is say momma bear was bred from twins with brown in region 0 and got a blue mutation on that region and then you bred her with a bear that had black on region 0. The baby bear could pull either the blue, the brown, or the black. This is where what Aushegun mentioned comes into play. If you want to transfer that blue onto the next generation, you'd want to breed with a bear that has the brown in region 0 so that the only options for the offspring become brown and blue.

So onto your last question, how to check for good stats. As drinkinthepink mentioned Dododex can help, but only for wild levels. So if you tranq a 140 ptera, go ahead and pop those stats into Dododex and it'll give you the breakdown on how it's stats were allotted. However, this doesn't work for any tamed dinos or for the levels gained from your taming effectiveness because they are calculated differently and so Dododex will give you results that are pretty askew. Also something to keep in mind is that the levels you get when you tame a Dino can drastically change how good it is for breeding. I've tranqed some with great stats that have tamed out with very mediocre end stats and vice versa. It's all up to the ARK gods on that front so I can't really give you any hard and fast rules on it. However, my method is to tame anything 135+. I've found that anything under that just doesn't get enough bonus levels to make much of a difference and while 135's often don't end up taming out very well either I've had on rare occasion a good one come out of it. This is my personal opinion, but I find anything with 25+ wild levels in a stat to be decent and anything 30+ to be great. Once they're tamed though I'm looking for stats above 40. Those are really good stats. I've only ever seen 2 dinos tame out with 50 points on a single stat. I picked up a theri egg on a raid that had 50 points in health without any mutations and I saw a guy on the forums a while back with a Rex that had 50 in food. If you find one of those that's pretty awesome.

Alright, so I hope that answers some of your questions. Beyond getting really lucky with taming dinos you'll need to start working on mutations to get your stats up to super Dino status. This Reddit topic is an excellent guide for breeding mutations:

https://www.reddit.com/r/playark/comments/66n962/mutations_and_you_a_guide_on_breeding_mutations/

[Shbear]

2 hours ago, teamravegreen said:

 

Is it possible, regardless of starting stats, to eventually breed a perfect bear, dino, whatever?

 

Yes, if you get stat mutations, for example, my rex's got damage and HP mutation. so they were born higher than "best possible" (best possible is based on current parent's stats)

but note it's totally random chance, so it could be state or colour mutation. or both ... etc.

 

2 hours ago, teamravegreen said:

Next, through my breeding, I've had some pretty cool looking bears, but after breeding out to the 'best possible' I seem to only be getting this one color (plain brown). Does anyone know if it is possible to get a different color by breeding this pair any further (outside of mutations)? 

2

colours are a 50% chance per parent, meaning if both parents share the same colour, then you will get that 100%. in some cases you get mixed colours of the parents. so yes you need a different partner to one of your bears to get another colour. (note: you may struggle to pass the desired colour AND the stats to the offspring, as it's totally separated chance).

 

2 hours ago, teamravegreen said:

Lastly, is there a tool you can use to find the best animals for breeding?

you could still use the smart breeder app for that. personally i use dododex before taming.

so, let's say you are looking for a 50 points in HP, knocked down a bear and placed the stats in dododex and you see the HP is 16 points, then it's not worth the taming. leave it or kill it and move on to the next. that way you save up time and kibbles on a tame that will not get near to your desired target points.

if you are lucky, then you might find a super rare stats on a wild one. one of the rex's i used for breeding had 419% damage right after tame which is insane. so you can farm the bears for that super state, but note, depending on your luck, it could take ages before you find that said stats.

 

 

Finally, good luck with the breeding, it's really fun to do when you have the time and efforts for it!

not sure if you already know this, but this is for everyone else as well: do not waste your time and make the breeding hard by imprinting if you are doing it for stats and mutations, as this could make it way harder than needed and the stats you get after imprinting won't be passed/counted for the next offsprings. so imprint only on those you planing to use.

[Shadex]

Just curious what everyone does with all the countless dinos they bed that aren't worth breeding again? 

[Roadblock2480]

I tend to either sell or give them away to smaller tribes.

[Ulta]

5 hours ago, teamravegreen said:

Is it possible, regardless of starting stats, to eventually breed a perfect bear, dino, whatever?

Sorta yes and sorta no. The definition of 'perfect bear' is subjective. If your goal is to breed a 'war bear', then your idea of a 'perfect' bear would be one that ends up having a ton of melee and HP, with some Stam. So for example, if a war bear was your goal, then taming up some wild bears that have insanely good rolls in food or oxygen would actually be terrible, even if conceptually, finding anything with really good above average rolls is rare. Keep in mind, there's a hard dino level of 450. So really you want those 450 levels/points put into things that matter. Before the hard 450 lvl cap, I use to try breeding EVERY good stat I managed to get my hands on into one breeding pair of dino's, mostly to bloat their level since obviously those 40 points in Oxy were pretty useless when you want to actually USE the dino. But with no cap, I could do that indefinitely. But now that there's a cap, a breeder has to try and breed in the stats that animal benefits most from...while trying their best to keep the unwanted stats on the low side.

So basically? There is no such thing as a 'perfect dino' in ARK...best you can aim for is breeding up a line all the way to the baby hatching at lvl 379, who's hatching stats are insanely good for that breed, with the remaining 71 levels clear for whatever the owner feels like pumping onto them through leveling. Bears can be bred to be good combat mounts, or good harvesters. If you want combat, go HP/melee/some stam. If you want harvest, then Melee/weight, and stam. But it's up to you what you want. Can always make a well-rounded one.
 

5 hours ago, teamravegreen said:

Next, through my breeding, I've had some pretty cool looking bears, but after breeding out to the 'best possible' I seem to only be getting this one color (plain brown). Does anyone know if it is possible to get a different color by breeding this pair any further (outside of mutations)?

Nope. Outside of random color mutations, the only colors you are gonna see are the colors on those parents. You'd have to introduce a different parent to get different colors.

5 hours ago, teamravegreen said:

Lastly, is there a tool you can use to find the best animals for breeding?

Dododex is good to use if you want to find out if a wild dino is worth taming, so it's helpful to find some dino's that got really good rolls pre-tame. But personally, I think it's useless, since the stats that matter more are the ones you see on a fresh tamed dino. Those sweet rolls might end up only getting like 5 extra levels after tame, which instantly makes it a terrible roll. If you're like me and you actually enjoy taming, then just tame a bunch of high level dino's of your choosing, and then once you've got a small herd, look through them and see which of them got some really good rolls. I don't think there's a good way to 'tell' what stats are good starting out until you become basically a vet in ARK and have tamed a bunch of dino's (=. Eventually you figure out what the average is, and what an exceptionally good starting stat is for each after a while. I do things the 'longer' way and document each stat a dino has once I tame it by screenshotting it (I'm on PC) and then keeping an ARK folder on my PC to look through when it's time to breed. It's some work, but I personally find it really fun and it's a lot easier than trying to remember if 480 stam is good on a Ptera (there's over 100 kinds of creatures in this game afterall). If screenshotting isn't worth it for you, you can make a folder in the dino's inventory and name it after each stat. That way you can just look in the dino's inventory to see what it's stat's were freshly tamed. Or just never level the dino and you'll forever know what it's breeding stats are.

Hope this helps.

[teamravegreen]

You all are awesome, thanks so much for taking the time to respond! I got useful bits of info from all the responses and I'm looking forward to getting more time in taming and breeding.

Thanks again!

(Edit) I don't see where I can like any posts or give anyone 'kudos' - is that because I'm "Early Birds", or am I missing something?

[IanHighlander]

10 hours ago, Shadex said:

Just curious what everyone does with all the countless dinos they bed that aren't worth breeding again? 

We give them to George...

 

George is a high level Thyla who we nicknamed Murdercat as his job is basically slaughtering unwanted babies we breed, unwanted adults tend to go to Scorch or Torch depending who's closest (190 egg raised Fire Wyverns) as they take a bit more oomph to dispose of 

[Williamskylord]

Ark Smart Breeding is literally the best tool for breeding, as soon as you tame something name it and extract the stats. You will have a detailed library of all your tames it also figures out how many levels went into each stat so it removes any of the guess work. Its taking notes like Ulta suggested but way better.

[DarthaNyan]

12 hours ago, Ulta said:

If screenshotting isn't worth it for you, you can make a folder in the dino's inventory and name it after each stat.

or put a note with name and stats inside "Breed stats" folder.

[Drinkinthepink]

Pro tip: if you hatch several babies, and one is a useless unwanted low stat offspring... murder it in front of the other babies with either a club a sword or a revolver pistol... this will show the other babies what happens to dinos that disappoint their master. They tend to listen to whistles a lot better, and they try harder to please master.

@Williamskylord @Antitheft2 @teamravegreen  @Ulta @Roadblock2480 @Shadex @Shbear @DarthaNyan @Aushegun @GuiterRocker1 

[teamravegreen]

12 minutes ago, DarthaNyan said:

or put a note with name and stats inside "Breed stats" folder.

One thing I have noticed with Ark Smart Breeding tool, also just mentioned by Williamskylord, is that it has been really good at figuring out the "tamed" stats and original wild level of my Dinos, even with Dinos I've had for ages and have dumped tons of points into. I can then take that data back into something like dododex to see the original point allocation. I'm really happy with the tool overall and after you all answered some of my other questions, I think I understand it a bit better now.

8 minutes ago, Drinkinthepink said:

Pro tip: if you hatch several babies, and one is a useless unwanted low stat offspring... murder it in front of the other babies with either a club a sword or a revolver pistol... this will show the other babies what happens to dinos that disappoint their master. They tend to listen to whistles a lot better, and they try harder to please master.

@Williamskylord @Antitheft2 @teamravegreen  @Ulta @Roadblock2480 @Shadex @Shbear @DarthaNyan @Aushegun @GuiterRocker1 

lol, thanks for the morning laugh! I've murdered a few in front of the others... my weapon of choice? A boring old hatchet... I'll have to try one of your suggestions to see if they shape up a bit better

[DarthaNyan]

1 minute ago, teamravegreen said:

my weapon of choice? A boring old hatchet...

Savage!

[yekrucifixion187]

5 hours ago, DarthaNyan said:

Savage!

I say bashing it's head in with a club is more savage as @Drinkinthepink likes to use. Personally I use a pick axe to harvest more prime. Nothing like feeding them their kin.