Jump to content

Diary of a Giga breeder


Peligrad

Recommended Posts

We are in the middle of the adventure of hatching and raising 7 Giga babies.

I just wanted to chronicle our experience and give tips to anyone who wanted to attempt a similar feat.

Enjoy!

LINE_P20160301_072438450.thumb.jpg.fdb1d

These are the babies about an hour after they hatched on Febuary 27th.

56d701802a80a_7juvicompressed.jpg.b17cb1

These are our babies on the morning of March 2nd in juvenile stage. I guess one of them is camera shy. They've gotten too big for our hatchery and are now in the back ally between the hatchery and behemoth gates. They seem small compared to the behemoth gates but stand higher than a carno now.

56d70211e2d75_hatcherycompressed.jpg.73a

This is our hatchery where we incubated the eggs and where we keep all the meat that we stockpiled.

We installed the hole in the middle and the handrails around to combat the glitch where baby animals fall through foundations. Towards the back of the building the floor is supported by pillars. A basement is accessible via a trap door on the far end and several feed troughs are weaved between the pillars. Smaller tames can spend the entire maturation process in this room but Gigas get way too big.

Final.jpg.d68991dfdaeef941782271f7a69623

The final result! 9 Gigas total including the parents and "Uncle Hades"

 

Day -2: Tuesday Feb 23rd:

Our tribe has been collecting fertilized Giga eggs for some time now and awaiting a weekend where a lot of members will be around to contribute to the daunting task.

An opportunity has finally presented itself in the upcoming weekend and we decide that it is now or never due to upcoming commitments that key individuals have on the horizon.

Immediately we begin gathering materials. We setup a moderately sized "hatchery" in our base which is well defended from wild dinos but enclosed away from any of our own defenses as well.

We decide that we need 6 AC units, 20 troughs, and 45 fridges and size our building based upon those initial requirements. The building will techinically be two stories with the basement being filled with troughs.

Day -1 Wednesday Feb 24th:

We have our structure built and have gathered many of the raw materials necessary to build the AC units, troughs, and fridges. Now we have to gather the last key ingredients and put the fridges in place.

After wiping the entire map out of crystal multiple times we build our 45 fridges and 6 AC units and of course a generator to power them all. Luckily I happened to have a ton of silica pearls and metal ingots in the base because I was in the middle of an auto-turret building project... which I guess will be suspended for a couple of weeks.

Day 1 Thursday Feb 25th:

I wake up before going to work and place the eggs near the AC units. It's 6:00 AM when I do this, which should put us at 8AM hatch time on Saturday after the 50 hour incubation time.

My tribe mates and I begin filling the fridges with raw meat while the eggs incubate.

We get 20 out of the 45 fridges filled with meat.

 

Day 2 Friday Feb 26th:

Our first set back occurs. Of the 7 eggs that we placed only 6 survived and a second egg took 50% of it's egg health in damage. The outer eggs must have been just a little too far from the AC units and got chilled during the coldest nights. We place a standing torch near the egg with 50% health since Giga need very high temps for incubation.

We are very alarmed because it appears that the eggs will hatch ahead of schedule according to the incubation progress bar. We adjust our schedules to accomodate the early arrival.

We farm even more meat. 40 out of 45 fridges are full now.

 

Day 3 Saturday Feb 27th: Hatch Day!

The day of the hatch is upon us. None of the eggs have lost any additional health. It looks like we will be hatching 6 eggs.

The incubation appears to have slowed WAY down and it appears that the wiki's 50 hour estimation is correct after all. We use the time to gather even more meat and fill all 45 fridges plus have a load of about 600 weight of meat on 2 hunting tames (a giga and a mosa).

8 AM the expected hatch time comes and goes... nothing...

Finally at 10 AM, 52 hours after the eggs are placed, the eggs begin hatching!

The last is hatched within 5 minutes of the first. It is chaos because each can only hold 3 meat. If we did this again we would definitely seperate the hatches by 10 minutes or so. Luckily we have 4 tribemembers on a this time and we keep all the babies alive. One of the eggs was a set of twins :) I guess we will be raising 7 giga babies after all. We have 4 males and 3 females. The levels range from 17-19 (parents were 8 and 16 wild). We were hoping they would be a bit bigger since the parents are both 50-60 now but we assume it is based off their wild level primarily.

The weight capacity increases significantly over time. 3 meat turned into a 20 stack within an hour. At which point it only took one person to keep all 7 babies with food.

We notice a really terrible glitch where babies will glitch down into foundations and you won't be able to access their inventories unless you make them move. You also can't make them move short distances because they think they are adult gigas and hence you have to move a half mile before they'll follow you an inch. We ended up moving them outside into a narrow alley between our main pens and the hatchery. With a few small adjustments to the buildings they have a roof over them and walls all around but no foundations under their feet anymore.

They would chew through a fridge of food about every 20 minutes... as hard as we struggled we could not keep up with the consumption rate due to the high population of the server during peak weekend play times.

When the night hits the server population dropped off and heavy respawns blessed us with a feast of meat that restocked our dwindling supply. At one point we were down to 25 fridges full of meat, which would have been disasterous since we only had 2 guys working the graveyard shift.

With great effort we were able to restock 15 fridges bringing us up to 40 out of 45 full going into the late night shift.

Luckily at this point we could leave the gigas alone for about 45 minutes if we stocked their inventory full. This allowed the graveyard shift to have one guy hunt full time while the other guy unloaded the hunting tame when it returned and he could also take some breaks.


Day 4 Sunday Feb 28th: Juvi Day!

At 4AM I got up to relieve one of the graveyard shift guys. The second guy stuck around to toss stacks on the gigas between episodes of anime until he was relieved by the next tribe member on around 8 AM.

By 9 AM we had 3 members on and made great headway on the meat supply. We fully restocked the fridges and kept every giga filled to the max by noon.

Exhausted and held back by the high server population, we did little but tred water from this point on which was fine because we really didn't have the materials or man power to build more fridges anyway.

Around 3:30 the gigas turned from babies to juveniles. No more hand feeding!

I took the wife out to a good dinner to appologize for neglecting her for 48 hours.

The guys fill just over 2 troughs every hour.

Around 9 PM we have 5 members on. We decide that stocking all 45 fridges up to the max and also stocking all the troughs with a combination of cooked and raw meat and also loading each giga full of raw meat is what we should do to insure that they all survive the night.

We also have one graveyard shift guy poke around and farm a little meat through the wee hours.

 

Day 5 Monday Feb 29th:

I wake up at 6 AM before work and refill the troughs. Only 4 are empty but the 20 stacks are now all 15 in the remain troughs (25% spoilage...)

The cooked meat stacks still have 27/30 though (10% spoilage... not so bad).

By my estimation they were on troughs for about 3 hours unattended. No one else is awake yet and I have no idea when the next guy is going to be up. I assume the worst and fill up everything.

10 fridges worth of meat to do this... and go to work.

The next guy gets on around 10 AM. He pulls all the meat out of all but 4 troughs and restocks a lot of the fridges. He then checks in every hour and refills those 4 to reduce the lost of spoilage.

Another setup back arises. One of our key individuals, Coltron, gets a call from his boss and his days off are cut very short. He was supposed to be able to farm meat and be a on most afternoons but his boss wants him on a job starting tomorrow (Tuesday). We've now lost our afternoon babysitter and meat farmer for the afternoons for the rest of project. His attendance and participation is going to be unreliable from here on. This is rough because we were already down to three guys (myself, shifty, and him) who could dedicate time consistently to farming meat. Luckily enough we have a little time to react and already had backup guys who can at least check and refill troughs.

Since we are now going to be on troughs a lot more instead of active babysitters and because we literally only have one guy who SHOULD be able to get on at the scheduled times, we need to start thinking about back up plans.

Our solution... kibble and jerky along with a lot more cooked meat troughs. Luckily enough we have literally thousands of low tier eggs in the base fridges that we have no immediate use for.

Around 12 PM we get 8 preserving bins going non-stop making cooked meat jerky and start setting up a "safety net" bin filled with jerky and kibble just in case someone misses their turn filling troughs. The jerky and kibble won't spoil so as soon as we set this bin up it will not to be attended again for the length of the project.

In addition we refill every fridge and get 4 industrial cookers going non-stop for several hours to make the necessary amount of cooked meat to run the preserving bins and fill the 7 troughs of cooked meat.

We're caught up and still have a few hours of having multiple tribemembers online, but with Coltron leaving us we need to get that much farther ahead of the hard times coming.

We need more fridges. Another tribemate and I get on the quetz and anky and go farming. Metal and crystal along with ingredients for spark powder to run the preserving bins.

The tribe member running the Mosa starts hitting up the caves and grabbing pearls in addition to meat farming.

Our bounty yields another 20 fridges. We immediately fill them with meat. We also notice that some of the fridges are starting to have some spoilage so we completely refill them all to all have perfect 20 stacks.

We are now set up where we have someone on to refill the bins every 3-4 hours but have troughs setup to last us 8 hours. We'll just have to eat the extra spoilage and farm that much harder. We have come too far to allow a lack of meat to stop us now. Shifty and I will pull all nighters if it comes down to it. The only way we'll lose these Gigas now is if someone has a crisis or forgets or falls asleep instead of filling the troughs. With 3 hour shifts and 7 hours of food in them, we'd need 2 misses in a row to fail.

We have 7 troughs filled with raw meat and 7 troughs filled with cooked meat along with the 1 "safety net bin" primarily filled with 100 stacks of kibble along with some jerky. In total that should buy us 8 hours (4 hours raw, 3 hours cooked, 1 hour kibble/jerky). We also have 65 fridges fully stocked with raw meat along with a couple fridges in the base stocked with cooked meat to top off the cooked meat spoilage.

 

Day 6 March 1st:

We've survived another night. Friday is coming and along with it the promise of relief when these Gigas go to Adolescent stage coupled with the extra free time granted by the weekend.

But it's going to be a hard road to get there...

I log on at 5:30 AM to check the troughs. Yesterday it took much longer than I expected to refill everything and I was almost late and today I have to stock twice as many...

I find 4 empty bins and the remaining 3 half spoiled. Unfortunately that's the way it goes... you get less and less value from each bin after the first and if I logged on 30 minutes later like I was supposed to all but 1 raw meat bin would have been sucked dry of consumable food.

The cooked meat troughs are only missing 4-5 pieces per 30 stack though so we have a lot less spoilage doing it this way. The safety net bin hasn't budged or been touched of course... if we had thought of this before we could have made a lot more jerky and saved ourselves a lot of spoilage...

I ended up throwing away 150 meat per cooked meat bin and almost 400 meat per raw meat bin except for the first 2 troughs they went for... about 3,000 meat lost to spoilage QQ but that's the price you pay for sleep and the ability to sleep at night.

in addition to restocking all the troughs I get more oil, spark powder, and cooked meat into the preserving bins and put the jerky that dried overnight into the troughs in place of a few stacks of cooked meat... another small victory against the enemy of spoilage.

After I get every trough topped it's off to work for me. 10 fridges worth consumed between the cooked and the raw, which is about the same number of fridges/stacks as yesterday, but since the cooked stacks in 30s I put more total meat. Even still, it is encouraging that we can have twice as many troughs filled and have about the same amount consumed per refill. This is because we are being a little smarter about combating spoilage and also because the Gigas will eat slightly less each and every day.

The next guy on gets on around 9 to do the same thing I did 3 hours prior. He reports that our meat supply is already down to about 60% (yikes!). I'm not sure how this could have happened so quickly... I'm hoping that he exaggerated his estimate, but maybe we missed refilling a few fridges or something... With as many as we have it is possible...

Around 11 O'clock Shifty the hero gets on early for us and starts farming. The farming is sub-optimal but he's able to tred water atleast.

Around 4 PM I'm able to get home and do some meat farming. Shifty only got one or two hunts in and he got pulled away. Based on the state of the troughs he had been gone for a couple hours.

Surprisingly there isn't a soul in the ocean to contest me for the thousands of meat available there. I bring home load after load. Every circle around the island puts me at the item number limit on the mosasaur despite me dumping thousands of hide and angler gel on the ocean floor.

I'm able to farm roughly three thousand pounds of meat over the course of 4 laps. Plus I found 2 red supply drops with some nifty blueprints.

Around 6 another tribe mate joins the hunt. Around 7:30 Coltron hops on.

At about 8:00 PM Coltron says, "You want tell the rest of the server what we are up to finally?"

It's a PvE server and our base is very secure... we agree that at this point with them having 10,000 hp and having most of the meat we need to finish this process in the fridges there is very little anyone could do to impede us.

We offer a really good trade to a guy that we've done a lot of trades with in the past in order to bring him over... but he's busy with a tame. Instead a guy that we don't especially like replied, "I'll take that trade." He's not our first choice of people to reveal our big secret too, but at this point we're just dying to see the servers reaction to our "little projects".

He flies over to complete the trade and we bring him over to the Gigas. The trade was a quetz egg for some silica pearls. We toss the quetz egg in front of the line of babies. He ignores the egg and walks past it.

"OMG" he says....

"This wolf.... it is ORANGE!"

He walks past the whole line of giga babies and looks at one of the 200+ wolves that we have set as guard dogs around the babies...

Amused but kind of frustrated we say, "But look at what the wolf is guarding..."

...

...

...

"Sell one?"

"Probably not" We responded

At which point his reaction was very hostile... which really surpised me.

Apparently there is a rumor of a "Giga server cap" where if so many Gigas are tamed, no wild ones will spawn. This was the first I've heard of this and my very brief google query did not seem to agree with this rumor.

At any rate he said we were "Greedy" and that we were "Ruining the game for everyone else."

Needless to say, this individual who already wasn't our favorite dropped down our list considerably.

This was not the reaction that we expected or wanted and I felt the moral of the whole group really sag.

Luckily though there were a few others on the server that were amused, interested, and awed by our project... which was the reaction we were hoping for.

We gave a few brief tours of our hatchery facility and a couple guys jumped into our party chat to talk about our endeavor.

After about 20 minutes of hanging out with the rest of the server we got back to farming. Filled every fridge, built about 20 more to fully fill the upper story and filled them. We started cooking meat to stack it in larger quantities just so we could shove it all in there.

One tribe member did a little experiment to see how cooked meat lasted against raw. Cooked meat does a pretty decent job tbh as long as you don't mind that you have to put 50% more in to get 30 stacks over 20.

A full raw meat trough lasted 39 minutes. A full cooked meat trough lasted 35 minutes. This gave us a lot of confidence going forward that our cooked meat safety net was going to be very effective for us.

This also made us realize just how much that their consumption rate had decreased. We used to get less than 30 minutes from a raw meat trough.

Based off this experiment we figured that we could go down to 5 raw meat troughs from 7 and then just have a larger cooked meat safety net of 8 troughs of cooked meat plus the emergency kibble/jerky and this would save us a lot of spoilage.

I went to bed feeling confident that the rest of this project was going to be considerably easier than the last 4 days have been.

 

Day 7 March 2nd:

 

The same ol' song and dance. I get up early and refill the troughs. They didn't even get through the 5 raw meat troughs all the way. The amount of spoiled meat I threw away this morning was less than half what I threw away yesterday.

I refill everything and snap a couple of pictures of the dinos and the hatchery like I promised to the readers that I would.

I had everything done in 15 minutes. I even had time to shave the week old beard that the wife has been pestering me about.

At this rate I'm pretty sure we have enough meat in our refrigerators to lean back on where I don't think we are going to have any issues, even if we slack off on the farming a little bit.

I promised my wife that we could go the 45 minute drive to the city and get her her favorite meal this evening.

There are a handful of tribe members that will be farming meat off and on today. Even if we bleed our supply a little we will still be sitting pretty.

It is my hope that the story from here on will be pretty boring (sorry readers, I think we've passed our climax on the drama).

Hopefully by saying so I didn't just jinx myself...

 

Second Entry of Day 7 March 2nd:

 

Don't tempt fate... he's a complete jerk...

I know some of you are probably thinking that I'm making this up for the sake of dramatic story telling... I wish I was.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I didn't get on until a lot later today because I took the wife to dinner. Around 8 PM I finally was able to get back on and all was well.

90% of the fridges were full... we had 3 guys online and were ready to get the remaining ones filled up.

Coltron had just finished offloading a pile of meat from the hunting Giga. And he noticed that the Gigas were beginning to grow into each other. He decided that he'd space them out a little more.

I grabbed my scuba set and walked down to the beach, jumped on Ursula the mosasaur, and made it about 20 feet outside our harbor when Coltron said shakily,

"Guys I think I lost a Giga..."

After painfully long moments of complete silence, "Explain please..."

According to Coltron he was moving Chronos and Chronos turned around and then stopped for no reason, and then "poof" he was gone.

We've both watched tames fall through the floor before... this was different... just... "poof". It was like the server just decided to delete him...

Immediately we tried to find him. We grabbed a Quetz and we used the grab glitch to look through the floor... nothing.

He walked to the beach in hopes that Chronos would follow him out from under the floor... nothing.

I grabbed a pterradon and took my scuba gear to the cave near the volcano. I know a trick to make myself fall through the floor at this location. I've used it before to rescue tames that have fallen through.

I then swam all the way back to our base. I can say with 100% certainty that there was not a single dinosaur under the floor at our base.

Knowing that sometimes things glitch around the 50,50 coordinates, I swam over there and looked. I looked under the map, on the ground there, and then I grabbed a pterradon and flew up to the map ceiling... nothing...

I then glitched myself under and swam all the way back the base and looked again... nothing...

I spent so much time looking that the raw meat stacks that I grabbed to put on him if I did find him decayed down to 5 per stack...

We are now raising only 6 giga babies...

While we searched  for Chronos not only did we not farm meat... we burned through it. We're now a lot lower on meat than when I got on 3 hours ago.

And we were counting on that meat to get us through tomorrow safely. We've got almost no one around tomorrow to farm. But we just don't have any desire to farm now.

Moral is at an all time low. After the game just removes that much of your work for no reason, no one wants to play it.

I think we have enough meat to carry us through tomorrow still. My brain is just fried at this point so it's really just a guess. Maybe one of the less active members will jump on and farm a little or something...

We never did receive a death notification that Chronos died... maybe at some point the servers will backup or something and he'll reappear?

It doesn't seem likely and if he does spawn back in there is a high chance of him not being close enough to a filled trough.

One of our raptors named Yoshi did the exact same thing... just vanished without a trace... and it never reappeared (never got a notification on him either).

If there are any Wildcard folks out there that want to make this right, we are on server 32 Official for Xbox One.

I'm frustrated... I'm angry... and I'm tired. Sleep will fix at least one of those things.

 

Day 8: March 3rd

I get up as usual at 5:30 to refill the troughs. There is still no sign of Baby Chronos. He's now been missing for nearly 12 hours. He had no food in his inventory, certainly now if he still existed somewhere he would have starved to death... but there is no entry in the tribe log... "poof"

(I did see that there was an incident in the tribe log where one of our tribe-members got murdered by one of our hunting Gigas yesterday afternoon... you've gotta watch those cliffs Rebelus!)

If I didn't know better I'd say that Chronos' brothers and sisters were depressed by his loss because the troughs seemed barely touched. I threw away almost as much spoiled meat as they had consumed.

I went to refill the 2 troughs that they ate through and replace the spoilage and was surprised to find that every fridge was stocked full of meat. Shifty was busy last night.

I'm still very upset about the loss of Baby Chronos, but at least the fatigue associated with a panicked search was wiped away by a good night's sleep.

Unfortunately, I really doubt Chronos is ever going to just show up again... if we have any chance at all it's in getting Wildcard's attention and moving them to intervene (which I have never heard of happening before on Xbox 1).

The only way I can see it happening is if you readers really help us out and give this injustice a lot of attention. If you did this for us we'd be very grateful.

At any rate, my job for the morning is done... now it is time for work.

Hopefully if we just leave them all sitting there from now until they mature (and we can equip a saddle) we won't have any more incidences.

After another long day of work I got home and after spending some time with the wife I logged on to help farm a little meat.

At this point our meat farming is pretty relaxed. We even do some scouting for the first time in a week. We turned several animals into meat that we would have happily tamed over the course of the week... most notably level 120 Mosasaur that we had the quetz eggs for but we just didn't have 4 hours to spare.

Of course now that we have time we didn't find anything worth taming.

I did come up with a couple more red supply crates though, always a bonus.

We haven't really been trying too hard to keep all the fridges filled anymore... the gigas aren't eating enough to merit this anymore.

It's mostly just a waiting game now...

 

Day 9 March 4th: Adolescent Day! (Finally!)

 

I got up at 5:30, same as usual. The gigas hardly ate anything. I think they got through about 2 troughs out of the 6 or 7 that we had prepared for them.

We've been going to less and less raw meat and more and more cooked because their consumption is so slow.

They've gotten a lot bigger since I snapped the last screen shot. They push you around with their heads now when you are trying to fill the troughs... which is annoying but we don't dare to move them after what happened to Chronos.

Chronos is still gone. Hope of him ever returning is dwindling.

But the rest should reach adolescent stage tonight. I plan to stay up a little later than usual to see the event.

We may put out extra food into the troughs... just in case Chronos breaks himself out of stasis somehow. We've yet to see a server roll back or restart since he disappeared... so maybe an event like that will force him out of stasis? Our fingers are crossed but we can't say we are very optimistic. It's actually a little bit of a liability to be honest. If he does show up and we aren't prepared for him he could end up cleaning out the troughs and leading to all of the gigas starving... Luckily we have a lot of safeguards and tend to way over prepare.

We are slowly getting over the loss of Chronos as we begin to make our plans concerning the day that we can finally slap saddles on them and take them out for a tour of the island.

 

Day 10 March 5th:

 

I pretty much was the only one on for the majority of today, which was fine because the babies are pretty easy to take care of now.

They are eating about 3,500 meat per day each now which is less than half what they were eating as newborns. They are a lot easier to take care of now but at the same time we are all burned out on meat farming. Day 14 Wednesday March 9th they will reach maturity and that will be the end of our long road. We just need to hold on a little longer.

Despite them not eating as much as they used to the fridge reserve is lower than ever because no one wants to farm any more. It should be fine but I am noticing a lot of tribe members dodging the task of meat farming (and RL stuff keeps others from helping as well). We all are very ready for this project to end.

The babies are getting huge. Their heads have grown through the wall and are visible inside the hatchery now. Their tails have reached the behemoth gates behind them. We put up a second layer of fence behind them just so that nothing tries to attack their tail when eventually it sticks through.

If you were raising gigas on a PvP server, it would be pretty hard to conceal these guys at this point.

9 gigas for tribe SLi... why does that sound like so much less than 10? We've discussed it and decided that we are going to tame one more wild giga the first chance we get. I'm sure the server will scowl for taking another one but 10 was our goal and we'll get there one way or another. If it's a male his name will be Chronos.

 

Day 11 March 6th:

 

I was the only one on again for the morning and early afternoon. I did one hunt around 8 AM and the meat from that single hunt lasted most of the day.

The Gigas are pretty minimal upkeep at this point. It's just a matter of filling a trough every 2-3 hours or so.

In the early afternoon Coltron jumped on for a while. We farmed metal, spark powder, and some oil and I was finally able to build the mosasaur platform sadle and industrial grill that I've been meaning to build along with the materials I will need to make a bulk quantity of jerky.

I took it for a spin and collected 140 cooked prime meat in one circle around the map to add to my 600 hundred pounds of raw meat for the gigas.

I think Coltron took the mosa out for a second spin that evening too and he made comments about the amount of cooked prime he was getting being "ridiculously broken".

I'd like to breed quetzals and brontos in the near future but before we do so I need to tame a big male bronto and big female quetz, hence I'll need a lot of prime jerky for kibble.

The gigas are so large now that their entire head has grown through the second floor of the hatchery and all the fridges and all the meat inside them are inaccessible unless we move them (Which we will not do). They of course want to look at you all the time so they'll block any fridge you are looking at and sweep you off the catwalk with their snout. There goes half of our remaining reserve... oh well.

After stocking up the troughs I called it a night.

 

 

Day 12 March 7th:

 

It's back to work for me today. I got up and did my regular 5:30AM refill. There was more spoiled than eaten.

Shifty has been doing other stuff the last few days but he said he'd be around to tend the gigas today.

The amount of meat they go through now is minimal and it drops substantially every day.

The first day they ate almost 70,000 meat between the 7 of them.

Yesterday the 6 ate less than 17,000. Today they'll only eat 12,000 and tomorrow they'll be down to 7,000. Finally 2,000 on Wednesday.

3 hunts worth of meat is enough to entirely finish the project even if we didn't have a single meat in our reserve.... which is good because our reserve pretty much is zero.

After work I logged in and checked on them to make sure the update didn't do anything nasty. All was well.

There is big news on the server though as I log in. Upon the server reset to apply the new update a wild Giga spawned. By the time I got on another tribe had already knocked him down and was well on their way to taming him, but it did put to rest the whole "You guys are ruining the game for everyone else" argument that has clouded our project with negativity since the day we revealed it to the rest of the server. This is good because our celebration day is only a few days away and we really didn't want to have to fend of trolls.

The gigas have gotten so big that they are starting to push each other around. Freyja especially got shoved forward and is now more in the hatchery than outside. Hopefully we will be able to just back her out but if not we may need to do some demolishing... OUR PRECIOUS FRIDGES!

Coltron and I did part of a hunt each in the evening, but then I found a 120 pleezy...

It's been almost 2 weeks since we did a tame and we couldn't resist.

I was able to solo knock it out while Coltron was on his way over with the kibble. Our mosa is a true monster. She tanked the pleezy for the entire duration that I tranq'd and she still had 90+% of her hp left at the end.

 

Day 13 March 8th:

 

I did the 5:30 refill thing again. It didn't take very long so I played around with a few other things... I made some kibble, got more jerky going, harvested crops (which grow crazy fast now with the greenhouse effect, we have more than a full fridge of veggies), got more poop on the beetles and pulled the fertilizer off, and I put the fertilizer and a species X seed in some crop plots outside that we neglected at some point.

I just did the math and it says that our gigas should mature very early Thursday morning (around 2 AM). I guess we better get around to making some saddles. We also should finalize our plans for the victory celebration.

The guys made me pretty nervous this afternoon while I was at work. I set up the troughs thinking that someone was going to check on the Gigas on occasion throughout the day. 2:00PM rolled around and I see in Line chat, "Has anyone checked on the Gigas?" Silence.... 15 minutes later "I don't think so..."

Luckily Shifty found time to hop on and check on them and refilled the troughs. He commented, "You guys know we have literally nothing life in the fridges now right?"

He must have done a hunt because there was a couple fridges with meat in them when I got home.

In the evening I was able to get on and farmed a load of meat. Coltron got on as I was unloading the Mosasaur and he also did a about a hunt and a half as well. We got enough meat where we were pretty confident that we'd be able to finish the project but we definitely didn't over-do it.

At 10:30 someone spotted a 116 Male Bronto. I've been asking people to call it out if they saw a 116+ male. Starting a two and a half hour tame at 10:30 probably wasn't my best decision... but I always have a hard time saying no to something that I want. After taming it I then had to march the Bronto from the green obelisk to the red one to get it home. I also got started on my next breeding project of brontos by collecting my first fertilized egg. I would like to try breeding brontos on a PvP server some day but want to do a dry run on our PvE server first.

We also waited until the last minute to make the Giga saddles. Since I am the only one in the tribe that knows the engram I stayed up a bit longer to make them. I'm sure by now Coltron has several of them painted up; making colorful saddles is kind of his thing.

Finally around 1:30 I get to bed... (I am a responsible adult...)

 

Day 14 March 9th: THE FINAL COUNTDOWN!

 

I actually slept through my alarm this morning and woke up just after 6AM. I hastily refilled the troughs and basically threw everything we had left at them this morning... which wasn't that much TBH.

After yesterday's scare I don't want to take any chances, so I didn't leave much of anything for reserves... I'll do one last meat hunt after work and that should be enough to get us through this project.

At this point we are going to fight spoilage a lot more than the Gigas are going to consume. So I setup only 1 and a half raw troughs and did several in cooked meat.

I'm fairly confident that at this point our emergency buffer trough alone has enough food in it to get them to adulthood... but why gamble if you have the option of an assured win.

As I write these words we have only approximately 18 hours left until adulthood is reached. I'll try to remember to snap a couple pictures tonight before they hit maturity just to show you how crowded together they are currently.

I probably won't be able to stay up until 2 to watch the process complete but I'll definitely get up tomorrow morning to check in on them.

The tribe chat has been really dead lately. Everyone is super busy (which is why we had to start the project 2 weeks ago if we were ever going to do this).

Hopefully we will be able to get everyone on to do a little celebration, but we haven't had everyone on at the same time since the day we hatched them... so I guess we'll see.

 

Day 15 March 10th: Adult Day!

 

I woke up expecting to see 9 adult Gigas... but to my disappointment the 6 are still adolescent.

I think that this is because of server lag time, primarily.

By my estimation they have about 3% to go, which I'm thinking will be about 6-8 hours.

I'm kind of hoping that they delay just a bit longer so that I can be home when they go to adult size.

Right now they are really tangled up in a giant ball of dino.

I'm concerned that when we pull them apart that one might fall through the floor.

I would like to glitch myself under the map when they move them. That way I can get them out very quickly if any of them fall through when we untangle them.

Gigas have a pretty significant oxygen stat but they are absolutely horrible swimmers and they are fairly prone to drowning. If one does go through I want to be right there ready to lead it out immediately.

I've asked the guys if they could not touch them until I get home, but I'm sure they the temptation to play with them is going to be extreme.

Here is a picture of our nearly adult sized ball of Gigas. EGGROLL is not visible in the shot because we moved him before we moved Chronos, so he's hidden behind the line of dinos to the far right.

56e17b2b6f1ae_Finalhourscompressed.jpg.9

To my surprise the guys did wait until I got home to touch the Gigas... well... almost... they did spend the level up points and equip saddles on some of them but no harm done.

After I glitched under the map Coltron moved each Giga one at a time.

To our surprise, we moved all of them without any incident.

We lined all 9 up and took a photo.

The whole "march of the Gigas celebration" was a complete flop.

It was only me and Coltron on the whole evening as everyone else was tied up with RL stuff.

I'm not sure if we'll do that kind of thing or not. It kind of seems like the time for it came and went.

At any rate, our project has come to a close.

Final.jpg.d68991dfdaeef941782271f7a69623

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 76
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Just a little dossier of the dinos.

Level 19 Male: Kamodo - Brown

Level 18 Male: Chalet - Forest green (twin)

Level 18 Male: Chronos - Forest green (twin) Lost to a server glitch. Permanently stasis'd

Level 18 Male: EGGROLL - Brown (name change probable)

Level 18 Female: Vesta -Brown

Level 17 Female: Gaia - Forest green

Level 17 Female: Freyja - Brown

Father Gigabyte - Forest green

Mother Ragnarok- Brown

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Most important tip is to hatch them somewhere they will stasis and keep them stasised as much as possible.

8-10 AC units are required to guarantee no health damage.

Do not seperate the hatchings by any time if possible, it just extends the time until all are juvenile.

Cooked meat should never be used unless you intend to leave them alone for >12 hours.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

52 minutes ago, Crumplecorn said:

Most important tip is to hatch them somewhere they will stasis and keep them stasised as much as possible.

8-10 AC units are required to guarantee no health damage.

Do not seperate the hatchings by any time if possible, it just extends the time until all are juvenile.

Cooked meat should never be used unless you intend to leave them alone for >12 hours.

After doing this many myself I'd give a few tips just slightly different.

Agree on the AC units. We are on the south beach so we got away with 6 and a torch but we'd have 8+ gigas if we had one or two more AC units (can't say I really want one more to take care of at this point though).

I'd suggest separating hatch times by doing pairs of 2 every 10-15 minutes if you are doing more than 3. When they come out they only hold 3 meat and they guzzle the stuff quickly. By 30 minute though they can hold nearly a stack of meat and can be left alone for 30-40 seconds. If you do it in pairs this way you could solo attend all of them without too much trouble (up to about 10 probably). If you hatch 6+ at once like we did and only had 1 guy trying to feed them all.... good luck to you. You'd have to be faster than I am, that's for sure...

We had 4 guys on when ours hatched, so we handled 7 without any problem all at once. Doable with 2 guys... but DC's and crashes are way too frequent in this game to count on 2 IMO.

If you are setup to do 28 hours of hand feeding... what's one more hour for a little safety net.

I'd completely disagree on the cooked meat thing though. Cooked meat is a great life insurance policy. I'd highly recommend having one cooked meat trough completely filled as a backup just in case you forget to refill while you are playing or someone is late to refill at some point. The dinos won't touch that trough unless all the raw is gone so all you have to do to keep it full is combat spoilage. That's about 1,000 meat per day to keep that insurance policy active. A high level Mosasaur can pull 50+ meat per kill... that's 20 extra kills a day to make sure your dinos stay alive through a brief period of absent mindedness. And believe me, throughout the period of keeping a project like this going for a week, you WILL have periods where you make mistakes. Just yesterday we had 3 guys online, myself included, and we let the troughs drop down to about 100 raw meat... if we didn't have that cooked meat insurance we would have been mere seconds away from them starting to starve.

If you want to be extra safe, like us, and have enough to cover a missed shift, you multiply that 1000 per day by however many backup troughs you think you need. At any rate, at 50 meat per kill I'd say a couple extra troughs is a very cheap life insurance policy.

Also, you estimation of 12 seems too high. I'd say at around 9-10 hours cooked meat troughs become more efficient than raw ones. You'd never want to do all cooked meat troughs of course because the nutrition value is half out the gate. But they do stack in 30s and spoil half as fast so even after 10 hours there is a significant amount of nutrition value in there... a lot more than a raw meat trough with 7-8 pieces per stack left.

I'm pretty sure that raw meat will completely spoil after 13 hours. At twelve hours you only will have 2-3 pieces per stack... that's 10-15% efficiency. Our lovelies would have that sucked down in 3 minutes... Meanwhile you'd spoil half that amount (18/2=9) and they stack to 30 so you'd have 21 per stack left in a cooked meat trough. That's equivalent to 10.5 raw meat per stack.  10.5>3

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 3/1/2016 at 9:07 AM, Mephos said:

what a story.. WHAT A STORY!

I actually feel you. Waking up before work, refilling the fridges and troughs and then leave them and hope for the best. ^^

 

Thanks :) I'm glad people are enjoying our little tale.

It is a little bit of "hope for the best" but we do get together every night before I log off (I'm first to bed, first to rise) and discuss the plan for the next day and make adjustments.

There is a lot of planing and scheduling and managing when trying to attempt something like this.

We've only gotten as far as we have because we have the perfect balance of management, engineering, raw toughness, and skillful execution in our tribe.

We'll have 10 gigas total if we pull this off and we don't even have 10 active members in our tribe. It's only possible because of the amazing team that we have and because we're playing our strengths as much as possible.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

We are on an Official Xbox Server.

Good tip Perrin, we'll look into that.

We did move the babies around when they were glitched into the floor, but eventually we ended up moving them in the ally along side the hatchery. Since we've moved them outside we haven't had any issues with them glitching.

Most of the troughs in the hatchery are still usable at this new location. We've built a few more and oriented them in a way to make them easily accessed and organized by their contents.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

17 hours ago, SwishPapaSweets said:

Ah darn if it was a player dedicated I could have thrown in a few higher levele to breed lol. I don't have all that time and manpower to even raise one baby giga atm

Haha I see where you were going now. Yeah we will probably be taking a break from breeding for a couple weeks after this one. Our wives can only take so much!

 

@n_scheffel yeah I thought so too. At this point we aren't really willing to try anything new. Maybe we'll do some testing on a smaller tame where we have less invested.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

We (the tribe of SLi) are seeking your support in an attempt to move Wildcard into action and restore "Baby Chronos" to us.

If you have read the second entry for March 2nd you know that the server decided to delete him before our very eyes for no appearant reason.

It's now been almost 12 hours since his disappearance.

If you would like to see Wildcard restore "Baby Chronos" please sign this thread.

We would greatly appreciate it.

 

Thank you,

Peli and the tribe of SLi

Link to comment
Share on other sites

We are nearing the end of our project and planning our victory celebration.

Let me know if you have any suggestions about what we are going to do.

As of right now, we are going to make the saddles and each tribesman is going to decorate one for his/her Giga.

We are also making beer and flare guns with the fireworks skins.

I'd like to get a group picture of all the tribe members and all 9 Gigas as well.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

39 minutes ago, Peligrad said:

We are nearing the end of our project and planning our victory celebration.

Let me know if you have any suggestions about what we are going to do.

As of right now, we are going to make the saddles and each tribesman is going to decorate one for his/her Giga.

We are also making beer and flare guns with the fireworks skins.

I'd like to get a group picture of all the tribe members and all 9 Gigas as well.

Sounds great! I'd love to see the pictures!

What a touching story, amazing to hear what you guys have gone through - such dedication!

I didn't know that the eggs can hatch as twins, that's amazing!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.


×
×
  • Create New...