Best Aberration thatch collector?

[EmberStar]

4 minutes ago, xXGunzaHavokXx said:

If you tame a karkinos u can go to the surface and mine oil nodes with a pick. If no crab take a ravager and ziplines. I have taken ankies but picks are oddly more effective, and less of a loss if something goes wrong. If you need oil and lots of it the surface is definitely the pace to go. Wait for a 10 90 night and bring your mates. There will be reaper kings to slay. My tribe uses mate boosted crabs and rock drakes. 

I'm in single player, so it's just me.  From what I've seen of the surface in Slipgater and Dahl's videos, trying to bring more pets is just more targets for Reapers.  And more delays as they get hung up on rocks in an area where you *really* don't want to waste time fighting with the derpy AI to get them loose and keep them moving.  So any surface run would be just me and one pet strong enough to potentially survive at all, without mate boosting.  And until I get more oil, I can't make a fabricator or hazard suit anyway. 

If a grinder can manufacture thatch, then it looks like my first priority is to get one running so I can secure my current location.  Until I do, I'm at risk of losing a lot of progress if a random basilisk spawns and chases something close enough to decide it would rather snack on my critters instead.  Their poison spit is brutal, and most of my current tames are more in the range of "this is the best I could find" than "this is the most powerful critter ever."  My best doedic started out at about level 80, I think.  Most of my carnivores were a lot lower than that.

Once I can make stone structures as fast as I need them, I can think about trying to build a taming pen by the river somewhere and getting a crab.  And once I have a tame that can carry wild animals, I can try to be more selective with new pets, since I can (I hope) grab a decent one out of a fight and run away.  The few times I've seen decently high level raptors or ravagers, they've been too busy attacking everything in sight until they die to try to tame.

[Gunzor]

YOU CAN SOLO HARVEST 

Put  2 doedexs in each claw of the crab on 'attacking target' and empty them into the crab occasionally.  Works for Stone, Crystal, Gems and THATCH.

A Ravanger will let you ride it and equip a hatchet for wood or a Pick for Thatch, they also have a lot of carry weight and reduced weight for a lot of resources

If the Anky would auto swing it would be amazing with the crab, unfortunately we need a team mate in to swing. Still it will get you to the trees and metal nodes quick.  Only the metal will wiegh less in the anky so take the thatch etc out and put in the crab (or a ravenger for storage in the other claw)

 

[EmberStar]

On 1/9/2018 at 7:58 PM, Gunzor said:

YOU CAN SOLO HARVEST 

Put  2 doedexs in each claw of the crab on 'attacking target' and empty them into the crab occasionally.  Works for Stone, Crystal, Gems and THATCH.

A Ravanger will let you ride it and equip a hatchet for wood or a Pick for Thatch, they also have a lot of carry weight and reduced weight for a lot of resources

If the Anky would auto swing it would be amazing with the crab, unfortunately we need a team mate in to swing. Still it will get you to the trees and metal nodes quick.  Only the metal will wiegh less in the anky so take the thatch etc out and put in the crab (or a ravenger for storage in the other claw)

 

I'm aware I can solo harvest.  I'm trying to find a way to do it efficiently, because I want to spend my gaming time building and exploring.  Not petting random shrubbery and hoping fiber falls out.

I have tried the Patrol mod.  I've run into a few difficulties though.  First, as I leave and return to my fort it seems to screw with the nodes.  I set it up as a single path, rather than a recurring loop.  And as I was cleaning the harvesters out to send them out again, noticed that several were missing.  After going along the route and looking around, it seems that several of them just detached from the patrol and were wandering around aimlessly.  And three of the raptors had gotten stuck.  One had been pinned between two of the small minable rocks with weirdly impassable collision boxes, and the other two had gotten hung up on the metal pillars around the edge of the portal room.  (I'm in single player.  I guess in multiplayer, most of that room is not a buildable area.)

The second, and more annoying difficulty is that my moschops have stopped autoharvesting most of the plants.  They'll still happily collect mushrooms, and knock down a tree if they get close to one and chew it into thatch.  But they seem to completely ignore all of the ferns and greenery and I don't know why.

It's also kind of annoying that roll rats apparently aren't interested in auto harvesting wood.  They will collect mushrooms and berries, but seem to ignore the trees.  This means I still have to spend a lot of time gathering each kind of resource manually.  I don't have the option for sickles because I haven't found a blueprint, and I've run out of Engram points before I could unlock them.  And since my moschops have quietly gone on strike, I have to collect it by hand until I can get enough oil and crystal to build a grinder.  (Apparently grinders can crunch wood into thatch and thatch into fiber?)

Crystal is annoying to get as well.  The few pure crystal nodes seem to drop almost nothing, and the green crystal patches produce hundreds of gems for every handful of crystal.  I end up having to throw away most of the gems so that my collection pack of lowish level ravagers don't end up encumbered.

Anything that revolves around "just get a murdercrab" or "just get help from your tribe" won't work.  I don't have a crab, and I'm a ways from being ready to try to catch one.  And I only play single player offline, so my tribe is just me and my pets.  I can't see spending the resources to make a crab trap until I've gotten my base walled in and set up so that random carnivores aren't running in and committing suicide on my stego herd every half hour or so.  Stegos may be slow, but a group of them is capable of flattening most raptors.  And since their attacks seem to be AoE, so far they've always managed to take out a ravager pack before any of the die.  It's still a pain to have to go untangle them and put the bigger ones back around the perimeter.  I can't even throw down spike walls, because fiber and thatch are such a pain to collect.

[xXGunzaHavokXx]

Sounds to me like you should follow a simple taming path. 1st craft yourself a spyglass. Use said spyglass to find a decent level bulbdog. You can quickly tame one by using z seeds. Or use aggeravic shrooms. Once you have said bulbdog use it to find max level creatures. Honestly you should never waste your time taming any creature below lvl 120. It may suck at first. But in the end its the only way to do it.

Now once you have the bulbdog and spyglass craft yourself some wooden spike walls. Note that you can place walls while on the back of a tame. Use the spyglass to find a high level stego. If possible us a magnifying glass to make sure said stego has 5k health plus. Then trap the stego with the spike walls. Ko the stego using tranq arrows. It will take several hours but its very worth it. The hardest part is waiting. 

Once you have a stego thats a high level search for one thats opposite gendered. Mate boosted high level stegos will be an excellent foundation for you. 

Using the harvesting abilities of the stego farm up the resources you need to tame a high level paracer. A paracer is essential on aberration. Once you have a paracer you will get a high amount of thatch. Be sure to make a platform saddle for it and build a catapult turret on it. This you will use to tame your first crab. Then you tame a crab. Crabs are the quetzal of aberration and you literally cant afford to not have one. It is your most essential tame. With a crab gathering resources becomes waaaaay easier and safer. 

Once you have the crab most things do not aggro you whilst riding it. Soooo you find a high level wild. Snatch it up in the crabs claw, this will still keep you safe for as long as you hold said wild in claw it still does not aggro. 

Take the wild to a safe area where none of your tames are on neutral or aggressive. Get off the crab, stand under the claw and ko the wild. 

Most wilds can be ko'd easily this way. 

Get a crab dude. Its like the difference between crawling on the ground versus flying your own private jet. 

It wont be easy. But trust me when i tell you as a solo player its the best decision you will ever make. Once you have a crab you will see exactly what i mean. 

[EmberStar]

I'm in singleplayer, and have the setting enabled so that spike walls damage wild creatures.  I can't use them to trap anything that I don't want to end up dead, and especially not something I'm trying to tame.  They still have the annoying "run away" mechanic at high torpor or low health, so they'll flee right into the spike walls.  Even if they don't die, if they pass out on the spikes it'll instantly nuke the taming effectiveness.

For the moment I've had to run to the Obelisk and transfer back to The Island.  Aberration seems to be balanced around the assumption that you have both fully Ascended, and gotten access to most of the Tek gear.  I ended up having to cheat just to reach an Obelisk, because even with dino spawns turned down to 0.6 the number of Reapers on the surface was insane, and none of my ravagers are anywhere near strong enough to fight through an endless horde of them.  Outrunning them isn't possible because their tail slime slows you. 

Honestly, I don't know what having a quetzal is like, either.  I gmsummoned a level 1 for the achievement unlock, then unclaimed it and let it go.  I honestly don't think it's possible to tame one without cheating using the gear and creatures I have access to.  The simple fact is that this game is NOT balanced around singleplayer.  At all.  Aside from anything else, the Flee mechanic and the speed boost that a quetzal gets when it bolts means that I've never been able to even keep up with one since the Great Flyer Nerf.  No other flyer I've been able to tame can match a wild quetzal in "screw it I'm out" mode for speed, and trying just means I run out of stamina and have to land.  At that point I either lose track of the quetzal, or I get attacked by something *and* lose track of the quetzal.  Frankly, I got tired of getting killed and throwing away the resources trying.  Is "someone" awesome enough to tame one in singleplayer without cheating?  Yes, probably.  But I'm not that person. 

At least the crabs are something I might be able to attempt eventually, because it's possible to build a taming trap and then lure a half decent one into it.  But I don't consider getting one to be more essential than securing my existing creatures and equipment - I don't see how a crab could possibly be awesome enough to focus on getting one when *everything else I own* is still at risk of constant attacks from random raptors with a death wish.

[EmberStar]

I'm not even sure I'll be able to deal with the Ascension mechanics, so it's possible none of it will even matter.  I had the understanding that the Dragon has a cheaty fire breath attack that does a flat percentage of your creatures current health, and the arena for it is literally designed around "the floor is lava."  AI controlled pets will try to chase it when it flies, lose half their health to the fire breath no matter how much health they have, then fall into the lava and die.  The Broodmother is supposedly more or less farmable if you have decent megatheriums.  The dragon is just a really efficient way to get all your creatures killed, apparently.  But without Ascending, I don't have enough engram points to unlock stuff like the metal cooker and biotoxin darts.  I ran out before I got that far up the tech tree.

[ZyraSeedling]

I have a base on the western shore of the fertile lake. Metal was a real struggle (long trip) until I got a hazard suit and found out the cave to the surface entrance has TONS of weird melted/pitted rocks that are all metal rocks. And it is right near my base. 

If you can get a Spino, trilobytes are easier to kill because of the massive aoe attacks until you can hit up the surface rocks. I take my Spino to the really safe section of river south of the lake (it ends in the eastern most waterfall looking down on the blue: and no predators at all) where it is basically just massive amounts of coal and trilobytes and go to town. Since mutton is easy to come by, the Spino tame isn't too bad. I made a trap for the Spino by the lake and shot it from afar to lure it in. They are pretty good at coming at you if you shoot them, unlike the crabs.

[ZyraSeedling]

You are correct, this game is built upon the idea you are supposed to attempt the "default" settings in a multi person tribe. I play on a server with only 1 other person. You cannot truely expect a fair experience with the gathering rates and engram points at default. You can adjust the ini file to let you get more engram points (since you dont have tribe mates to pull any engram weight). IMO you should also give yourself a small boost to gather rates to save yourself some work (2 or 3 times maybe?). Again, you don't have tribemates to pull that weight.

[xXGunzaHavokXx]

U could try building a 3x3 stone structure two walls high near your base. Put no ceiling on it, then build wooden ramps leading up to the lip of the building. U can do this on just one side. Make a doorway with no door leading out under the ramps. Then, later when affordable, make a dino gate on the opposite side. This will make it easier to get tames out. 

Once you have said structure, build pillars up adjacent the structure and place a ceiling. Put a ladder on the edge and climb up. Make sure you're close enough and high enough to shoot tranqs into the trap. Now you can kite wilds into the trap. Then you can run out the doorless doorway, climb up your ladder, tranq your tame, and then tame it up, all while keeping it safe from attacks.

Side note. Spike walls do damage wilds that run into them, but ive never lost effectiveness having one pass out on one. I do play official pvp so perhaps thats why. Sorry my method didnt work for you. 

Remember that the game is tough. And aberration is the toughest yet. So perhaps trying to make it harder was a mistake that you should contemplate. Ab is so fun once you get goin. You just need to have lots of patience. Find a good base locale. Set up slow and steady. And pre plan every move. Just writing down what u need will help. 

Me and my buddies joke that the other maps r creative mode and ab is the map for the hardcore. Its a challenge to master but extremely rewarding once you get what you need. 

Again to reiterate. You should never tame a wild thats low level. Its a waste of effort and will die soon after taming. Tamed out 120 plus lvl wilds are the only way you should go ever. Again all it takes is time and patience. I assure you that you can do it if you get stubborn and settle in. 

 

[EmberStar]

9 hours ago, ZyraSeedling said:

If you can get a Spino, trilobytes are easier to kill because of the massive aoe attacks until you can hit up the surface rocks. I take my Spino to the really safe section of river south of the lake (it ends in the eastern most waterfall looking down on the blue: and no predators at all) where it is basically just massive amounts of coal and trilobytes and go to town. Since mutton is easy to come by, the Spino tame isn't too bad. I made a trap for the Spino by the lake and shot it from afar to lure it in. They are pretty good at coming at you if you shoot them, unlike the crabs.

I've tried to use spinos for trilobite hunting.  I find them less than useful because of the high knockback, and trilobites low carry weight.  IE, when a spino kills them they tend to bounce a fairly long distance.  On the Island, I've waded into clusters of them, and only ended up actually harvesting two or less because the rest flew halfway up the beach as they died.  Thanks to the flee mechanic, I haven't had any luck taming a high level spino on Aberration.  When they get anywhere near passing out they run, and they don't stop running.  (I deeply hate the flee mechanic, and would absolutely disable it if there was an .ini setting.)  The ones I've tried have all started to run, and been attacked by something else.  None survived long enough to pass out.  It is not a fulfilling experience to spend the resources trying to tranq something only to watch it run until it gets beaten to death by a random low level crab. 

[Kraken]

Really sounds like you just need to learn how to build taming pens.

[EmberStar]

7 hours ago, xXGunzaHavokXx said:

Remember that the game is tough. And aberration is the toughest yet. So perhaps trying to make it harder was a mistake that you should contemplate.

 

I really have no idea what you mean by that.  I'm using the "single player settings enabled" option, which already makes the game far easier than default Official settings.  I've also turned down the creature population spawns to 0.6 which, if I understand the setting, means that I only have 60% of the normal amount of wild creatures to deal with at any one time.  I did turn the "difficulty" setting back up to 1.0, because that is the only way wild creatures will spawn at all above level 40-ish.  To be honest, I fully intend to turn that back down to the singleplayer default ( which I think is 0.2) before even attempting any of the bosses.  I'll probably have to turn harvest amounts up to twice normal, simply because otherwise I'm spending all my time mining rocks instead of exploring.

If I make the game much easier, I may as well just "Power Overwhelming" and give myself god mode and GMSummon level 1,000 breeding pairs of any creature I want. (Heck, why restrain myself, I should set the difficulty down to 0.1 *AND* summon level 10,000 auto-tamed pets.  I may as well meme out and cheat myself to a power level of over 9,000.)   I'm attempting to maintain at least some illusion of trying to play by the rules. 

*IF* I all six bonus Ascension levels and am selective about what additional Engrams I learn, I don't think I'd need to turn Engram points up.  A lot of the saddles are either optional or simply pointless, or they're common enough in Beacons that I'm likely to have a better blueprint anyway.  My problem for Ascending is that I haven't learned the Engram for the gasmask or its consumable, and apparently those are both possibly required for one of the revamped caves on The Island.  I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with the crazy number of creatures in the caves by myself though.

It may turn out to be not possible *for me* to do any of this solo and without cheating.  It may be that I should simply admit that the singleplayer balance of this game utterly sucks, grant myself all the Tek recipes and full Ascension and just get on with my life. 

[bigfishrob]

On 1/7/2018 at 7:51 PM, iAmE said:

Roll Rat + Grinder is hands down the best. Second to that, probably a guy with decent melee and a pick. Past that, they're all kind of abysmal. For fiber, all I can think of is a sickle sadly. 

Grinder for the win

 

[Psych0P3nguin]

Fiber - Sickle is literally the best in Ab.
Thatch - Farm mats for a grinder, get a roll rat, and grind wood into thatch.

[xXGunzaHavokXx]

The final suggestion i have for you is to spawn in at each spawn location on the map about 3 to 4 times per spawn option. Each time you spawn explore until you die. Keep doing this until you have a pretty good idea of where you are on the map in relation to possible spawn locations. This will key u in to some really good base locations. Of course you could always go in ghost mode in a private server and explore that way but it wouldnt educate you as thoroughly with spawns. 

Sorry i couldnt be of help to you. Good luck in your endeavors. 

[Thorium]

I think a dedicated thatch farmer is kind of pointless on Aberration. Even if you don't have a grinder, just harvest metal in the blue area with a anky and you will collect tons of thatch as a byproduct from all the trees you need to smash down to get to the metal nodes. I have 500 stacks of thatch made this way, now i just throw them away.

[TheGamingRiot]

use a dire bear for fiber realy good fiber

 

[Frogspoison]

37 minutes ago, TheGamingRiot said:

use a dire bear for fiber realy good fiber

 

Note the date of the thread. At the time, the Direbear and Bigfoots weren't available on Aberration.

[Monkey1]

by the time i get the mats for a grinder, i won't need thatch anymore.... sometimes i'm not sure that they put logical thought into the creation of some of these things... the resources from a grinder would be better, at low levels.. higher levels do not need a grinder as much.. yet it's nearly unobtainable for anyone except high tier players. <facepalm> so yeah, i do not have a kark yet and am suffering from the same issue, lack of thatch.. anky is great, but you need about 20 guards to run it anywhere it it's slow af. 

[Morty1212]

I use a Dire Bear for fibre, berrys, shrooms and honey there a good all round mount there an easy tame just collect honey there are hives all over the place just make sure u have med brews cause those bees can be nasty

[whosyadaddy]

On 1/13/2018 at 7:35 PM, EmberStar said:

I'm aware I can solo harvest.  I'm trying to find a way to do it efficiently, because I want to spend my gaming time building and exploring.  Not petting random shrubbery and hoping fiber falls out.

I have tried the Patrol mod.  I've run into a few difficulties though.  First, as I leave and return to my fort it seems to screw with the nodes.  I set it up as a single path, rather than a recurring loop.  And as I was cleaning the harvesters out to send them out again, noticed that several were missing.  After going along the route and looking around, it seems that several of them just detached from the patrol and were wandering around aimlessly.  And three of the raptors had gotten stuck.  One had been pinned between two of the small minable rocks with weirdly impassable collision boxes, and the other two had gotten hung up on the metal pillars around the edge of the portal room.  (I'm in single player.  I guess in multiplayer, most of that room is not a buildable area.)

The second, and more annoying difficulty is that my moschops have stopped autoharvesting most of the plants.  They'll still happily collect mushrooms, and knock down a tree if they get close to one and chew it into thatch.  But they seem to completely ignore all of the ferns and greenery and I don't know why.

It's also kind of annoying that roll rats apparently aren't interested in auto harvesting wood.  They will collect mushrooms and berries, but seem to ignore the trees.  This means I still have to spend a lot of time gathering each kind of resource manually.  I don't have the option for sickles because I haven't found a blueprint, and I've run out of Engram points before I could unlock them.  And since my moschops have quietly gone on strike, I have to collect it by hand until I can get enough oil and crystal to build a grinder.  (Apparently grinders can crunch wood into thatch and thatch into fiber?)

Crystal is annoying to get as well.  The few pure crystal nodes seem to drop almost nothing, and the green crystal patches produce hundreds of gems for every handful of crystal.  I end up having to throw away most of the gems so that my collection pack of lowish level ravagers don't end up encumbered.

Anything that revolves around "just get a murdercrab" or "just get help from your tribe" won't work.  I don't have a crab, and I'm a ways from being ready to try to catch one.  And I only play single player offline, so my tribe is just me and my pets.  I can't see spending the resources to make a crab trap until I've gotten my base walled in and set up so that random carnivores aren't running in and committing suicide on my stego herd every half hour or so.  Stegos may be slow, but a group of them is capable of flattening most raptors.  And since their attacks seem to be AoE, so far they've always managed to take out a ravager pack before any of the die.  It's still a pain to have to go untangle them and put the bigger ones back around the perimeter.  I can't even throw down spike walls, because fiber and thatch are such a pain to collect.

Simply answer is to take the time to tame a decent anky.  It’s faster than a stego, pulls 25 to 45 thatch per tree (on average).   You can also farm the green gems on the run and collect the crystal.  You can also hit the shrooms and river shrubbery for rare flowers.

[Frogspoison]

On 1/17/2018 at 8:17 PM, EmberStar said:

I'm in singleplayer, and have the setting enabled so that spike walls damage wild creatures.  I can't use them to trap anything that I don't want to end up dead, and especially not something I'm trying to tame.  They still have the annoying "run away" mechanic at high torpor or low health, so they'll flee right into the spike walls.  Even if they don't die, if they pass out on the spikes it'll instantly nuke the taming effectiveness.

For the moment I've had to run to the Obelisk and transfer back to The Island.  Aberration seems to be balanced around the assumption that you have both fully Ascended, and gotten access to most of the Tek gear.  I ended up having to cheat just to reach an Obelisk, because even with dino spawns turned down to 0.6 the number of Reapers on the surface was insane, and none of my ravagers are anywhere near strong enough to fight through an endless horde of them.  Outrunning them isn't possible because their tail slime slows you. 

Honestly, I don't know what having a quetzal is like, either.  I gmsummoned a level 1 for the achievement unlock, then unclaimed it and let it go.  I honestly don't think it's possible to tame one without cheating using the gear and creatures I have access to.  The simple fact is that this game is NOT balanced around singleplayer.  At all.  Aside from anything else, the Flee mechanic and the speed boost that a quetzal gets when it bolts means that I've never been able to even keep up with one since the Great Flyer Nerf.  No other flyer I've been able to tame can match a wild quetzal in "screw it I'm out" mode for speed, and trying just means I run out of stamina and have to land.  At that point I either lose track of the quetzal, or I get attacked by something *and* lose track of the quetzal.  Frankly, I got tired of getting killed and throwing away the resources trying.  Is "someone" awesome enough to tame one in singleplayer without cheating?  Yes, probably.  But I'm not that person. 

At least the crabs are something I might be able to attempt eventually, because it's possible to build a taming trap and then lure a half decent one into it.  But I don't consider getting one to be more essential than securing my existing creatures and equipment - I don't see how a crab could possibly be awesome enough to focus on getting one when *everything else I own* is still at risk of constant attacks from random raptors with a death wish.

 

If you are on SP, you can make a giant quetzal "trap" by using a poopting TON of pillars.

 

Quetzals spawn frequently by the Red Ob on the island. Thus, you just make a large group of pillars to where they are ~ as high as the Red Obelisk. Then you just wait for a Quetzal to fly into them and get stuck. Build a small cage around this stuck quetz, and then tame it.

 

Once you have 1 quetzal, getting more is pretty easy when you get the quetzal platform.

 

This is just the most "guaranteed" way - You will get your quetzal with a bit of wait, and since you trap and tame it in the sky, no dinos will eat it. This can even be replicated on officials if other players aren't involved, though it can be expensive.