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Falling behind


MykTronic

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  So my partner and I’ve been playing on this server since November, and I keep seeing new tribes join and get so much far past us. it’s just the two of us in our tribe and we are barely getting electricity now we have maybe 90 dinos and feel like we can barely keep a footing. Our next project is AC units because we barely have enough time to hatch a raptor. Let alone a Rex. Are we missing something? Do we just need more tribe members? Is there something we should be focusing on? I feel like we can barely keep our Dino’s alive and a new tribe if 3 weeks across the river just started hatching mutated Rex’s already. 

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The right dinos can make a difference to a tribe. Going from no Anky to using an Anky for metal makes a difference. Going up to a good Anky makes a difference again. Having an Argie to transport the Anky to and from decent metal spawns helps. Having a better one that can carry all the weight in one go is even better. 

Smelting in a couple of forges is great to start with, getting an industrial forge or two is revolutionary. 

If these guys went from nothing to mutated rexes in 3 weeks, they used the above method to buy the eggs! 

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4 hours ago, iHartOvi8 said:

It sounds like you either don't play a lot or aren't using your time very efficiently at all, I play solo official and would be much further than that in that time.

 

42 minutes ago, MichaelRichards said:

I agree with the ppl that say you arent using your time efficiently, i play mainly solo or with 1 other person, stop breeding garbage animals

This.

Its easy to get lost in ARK. You probably have had a great time until now with your friend. Had some fun, tranqued him out a few times, etc. Now its time to get serious! 

Argy, doed, anky, beaver/mammoth, theriz, start getting these. Need kibble? Tame up some kibble dinos first. Get a baryonyx - twofold. One for caving, great. Two, silica pearls. Dive down to some pearl caves to advance quicker.

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8 hours ago, d1nk said:

 

This.

Its easy to get lost in ARK. You probably have had a great time until now with your friend. Had some fun, tranqued him out a few times, etc. Now its time to get serious! 

Argy, doed, anky, beaver/mammoth, theriz, start getting these. Need kibble? Tame up some kibble dinos first. Get a baryonyx - twofold. One for caving, great. Two, silica pearls. Dive down to some pearl caves to advance quicker.

Yep, screwing around can be fun occasionally but it gets boring.  Much more fun to set goals and then reach them.  Getting a good anky and argy or quetz(since you have a tribemate, quetz and platform saddle would be the better way to go, if you don't know the metal farming build look it up) and farming a ton of metal will do wonders.  Buying some good boss rex eggs, among other things, will change everything.

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5 hours ago, CCRogerWilco said:

You either need to make ARK your job and play many hours a week, have a really large tribe, or play on unofficial servers with modified rates and settings.

Not for PvE man. Ive done all content solo on official PvE before I quit to unofficials. It just takes planning, networking (for trades or extra eyes for spotting tames) and some grit. The usual complaint is "im solo I dont have time to raise rexs.." Plan it. Hatch on weekends when you can hand feed. Heck.. now with cryopods its easy. "I dont have it unlocked cryofridge requires replicator!" ..trade! Grind.. etc

5 minutes ago, iHartOvi8 said:

Yep, screwing around can be fun occasionally but it gets boring.  Much more fun to set goals and then reach them.  Getting a good anky and argy or quetz(since you have a tribemate, quetz and platform saddle would be the better way to go, if you don't know the metal farming build look it up) and farming a ton of metal will do wonders.  Buying some good boss rex eggs, among other things, will change everything.

Couldnt agree more. If @MykTronic doesnt like to grind all the time (personally I enjoy the mindless grind) then set days where you can. Tuesday and Friday night.. grind metal, etc. With a tribe mate its even better! Team work goes wonders. Our old tribe we almost never actually worked as a team to farm (except for big tames or caves etc) but I would go farm metal, another tribemate would go farm metal at another place, another would farm pearls, etc.. Try that? Switch off if it gets tedious.

@MykTronic Let us know your progress :) use the mention function (like above: @name of person) or quote a post so we know.

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3 minutes ago, d1nk said:

Not for PvE man. Ive done all content solo on official PvE before I quit to unofficials. It just takes planning, networking (for trades or extra eyes for spotting tames) and some grit. The usual complaint is "im solo I dont have time to raise rexs.." Plan it. Hatch on weekends when you can hand feed. Heck.. now with cryopods its easy. "I dont have it unlocked cryofridge requires replicator!" ..trade! Grind.. etc

Couldnt agree more. If @MykTronic doesnt like to grind all the time (personally I enjoy the mindless grind) then set days where you can. Tuesday and Friday night.. grind metal, etc. With a tribe mate its even better! Team work goes wonders. Our old tribe we almost never actually worked as a team to farm (except for big tames or caves etc) but I would go farm metal, another tribemate would go farm metal at another place, another would farm pearls, etc.. Try that? Switch off if it gets tedious.

@MykTronic Let us know your progress :) use the mention function (like above: @name of person) or quote a post so we know.

Yep I totally agree.  I actually think higher rates would be boring and have a feel of beating a game on super easy mode lol, especially with breeding.  Things that shouldn't come easy don't come easy on official.  Cryopods and cryofridges are one thing that people are especially willing to help you out on since keeping dinos cryo'd is good for the whole server.  Just ask in global chat if someone would be willing to craft you some cryopods and a cryofridge if you bring them the mats and someone will probably be willing. 

Put out eggs and set a timer on your phone so you can throw them in the fridge a few seconds before hatching and be ready to just hatch a bunch at once so you can knock out the hand feeding for a bunch of babies all at once.  Use the Survive Ark companion app's breeding calculator to see how long you can leave them.  Cryo before you get off so you don't miss any imprinting or let anything starve.  If they ask for something that's a pain for an imprint, cryo them and throw them back out to get them to ask for something else.  Raising babies is not that difficult and most of it is something that you can let time tick off for while getting other things done.

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The single biggest change you can make to affect your tribe progression is to set goals. You're seeing tribes pass you left right and center because as soon as they get on the server they have a mission and a gameplan to see it through. Do you think tribes hatching dozens of mutated rexes are breeding raptors, for example? No, no they aren't. What these tribes are doing is spending their time in the most efficient possible way. They're probably doing Explorer Note runs to get to a high level quickly and open up all of the advanced Engrams and saddles they need in order to get established in a very short period of time.

Honestly in your position I would skip the ACs and breeding raptors and focus on your "big wins"--doing the tasks that will get you the biggest return for your efforts. Aim for level 80 to get the Industrial Forge before anything else. It's grindy but not hard. If you haven't already take a bird and go run notes to level up. Then if you're not there yet, hop on whatever your strongest combat mount is and farm alphas for exp. If you don't have any animals that can comfortably take on at least alpha carnos, then there's a new goal to add to your list. You don't need to kibble these tames or anything, that can all come later. Right now you're in the middle progression tier where everything is a grind and you're not quite in a position to do any of the bigger endgame tasks like breeding.

Forges are expensive so you should also start farming for it now, which is why I suggest skipping building ACs or breeding until you have it. It takes a ridiculously long time to smelt that much metal, so you'll need multiple forges, a good argent and a good anky. If you don't have any of those, well there you go more goals for your list.

Honestly even playing on SP I constantly have advancement goals that I write down and check off as I go. If I don't it's much too easy to get caught in the trap of not knowing what to do and getting frustrated about not making progress. It's even more important in a tribe, as I learned as a former tribe leader myself. If you don't have a running list of tasks and goals, you'll just never get anywhere because of the sandbox nature of the game. So my advice is to take a look at what these other tribes have, think about what you want, and then figure out a plan to get to that point.

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I hate to be the guy that mentions this but if you are on a pve server it's often very easy to trade your way to decent dinosaurs with a little bit of farming.  I find it unfun but some of the fastest progress people i've seen will trade metal to a tribe for one of their runty cast off dinosaurs and other things.  it's often easier than taming if the server is high population.

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I've played solo alot on ark.  I second the suggestion of doing small tasks that build up to something bigger.  Focus on task and then move on to the next step.  Having some routine also helps.  Set up a small list of things you need to get done, do them in an order that gets the most done possible at once.  For example u can go farming wood and narco berries at the same time.  Then put all that wood in campfires or a forge and cook it all. Store those berries then go do a meat run.  Come back from the meat run and split up the meat on ur char to spoil it all fast.  Make your narcotic after that.  While all that was going on, you could have set loose a few doeds following a leader on wander by some stone near your base and they could have precollected some stone for ya. So while the narco is crafting u can start making some stone structures. Same goes for breeding, you let the eggs work down their timers and u set up a timer for yourself to get back on time with your phone and go out and do other stuff.

If you can find ways to improve your use of time, you'll find you can get to the fun stuff alot faster.

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On 3/13/2019 at 3:14 AM, MykTronic said:

  So my partner and I’ve been playing on this server since November, and I keep seeing new tribes join and get so much far past us. it’s just the two of us in our tribe and we are barely getting electricity now we have maybe 90 dinos and feel like we can barely keep a footing. Our next project is AC units because we barely have enough time to hatch a raptor. Let alone a Rex. Are we missing something? Do we just need more tribe members? Is there something we should be focusing on? I feel like we can barely keep our Dino’s alive and a new tribe if 3 weeks across the river just started hatching mutated Rex’s already. 

It maybe be that the other new tribes are progressing quite fast, but the tribe members may in fact be more established players already. It makes a huge difference if you already have a ton of engrams learned and are just new to a server/map. 

I will say that I've been playing on a private PVE server since December, after you, and although still a noob, it sounds like I'm much further ahead then you are (level 94). Not to mention our tribe switched from Extinction to Ragnarok part way along that time. I was hatching with air conditioners more than a month ago. We're now breeding Gigas.

One other thing... be sure to push the envelope with new experiences and building/making new things- you gain XP way faster, which in turn impacts what you can do.

 

Of course, I mentioned we're on PVE, because PVP would be a different kettle of fish... more hostile competition. 

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Another things I've noticed... sometimes a person can play it too safe. Don't be foolish of course, but as my brother always tells me... sometimes you have to take a chance. You can make leaps & bounds advancement by making the right choices and taking the right chances. Of course, you need to analyze what those  advancements should be.... choices & chances.

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That's a good point too, I completely skipped over that part of their post. 90 animals is a lot to maintain, especially if you're breeding and doing upkeep on babies, but say you're barely keeping them all alive. Logically that means you either have too many animals, or you have too many small animals. It sounds a bit counter, but it's actually easier to maintain a large amount of large animals than it is to keep many small ones. Mainly because if you have one large animal like a rex or a spino, and one large herbivore like a bronto, you should have absolutely no problem keeping up with food for the rest of your tames. Even a junky low level big carnivore can munch dozens of smaller wilds in a very short period of time, providing more than enough food for armies of tames.

If you have lots of small animals (like raptors...) and no big ones, that's why you're having such a hard time with upkeep on them all.

I mean, I get it, I really do. One of my friends is a huge dino hoarder, she'll tame anything that looks pretty regardless of species. When we were tribing with a couple of other friends, she had more tames than the rest of us combined. But, by that point we all had large carnivore mounts and all shared feeding responsibilities so it wasn't a big deal, we'd just empty our mounts' inventories into the troughs before we logged for the day and rarely had to do a separate food run unless we were raising babies.

I'd say your first goal in this case should be to go out and tame something you can use to feed the rest of your animals. If you can make ACs without a blueprint, you're a high enough level to make a thyla saddle, and are very close if not already capable of making argent saddles. Both of these are very capable animals that should give you more than a mere foothold and should be top priorities. If you can make tranq darts and have a decent longneck you can also take a shot at taming a direbear, which is also a very good mount but tends to die easily to tranq arrows because of their relatively low HP. Their HP is low but they hit like a much larger animal and will shred quite a lot of things.

That's actually another reason why these other tribes are passing you, a lot of times it's about quality over quantity. I can't remember the last time I had more than 10-15 animals when actually playing through the levels for progression. Generally what you want is a doed, anky, mammoth or beaver, argent (I usually make sure I have two in case of accidents) and a rex/spino/theri. If you don't have at least one of each of these animals you would speed your progression up quite a lot by going out and getting them.

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  • 1 month later...

Hey guys thanks for all the feedback! We currently now are thriving a bit better. Part of our problem was that Alphas kept spawning in our base or nearby, we created more plant x and balanced out. We are on the west rocky beach next to the bay at south zone 3. Part of my frustration was just we had a few unlucky weeks of all our favorites getting killed including all our Xmas colored dinos sans one random lystosaurus we had. We are up and running with electricity now and traded with a bigger tribe for a couple cryopods so we can actually have a baby survive now. I’m actually really happy with our house, and our small and medium pens. My husband and I actually play together on separate ps4s on side by side tvs. Resources were never a par of our problem in keeping our Dinos alive we lucked out early on and got some pretty good Therins. But trying to do anything else was a real struggle until we were able to rebuild after a 150 alpha raptor followed immediately by a 90 alpha Carno then a cherry on top Rex swept through our base a couple months ago which took out most of our highest tames including all our argys. We are now back up and flying and are doing -okay-. I’ll try and post some pics of our base thanks again for all the help guys!

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I suppose the other element to progress is to not build where alphas can spawn, lol. Hopefully by now you've learned the value of a safety perimeter. I actually dealt with this myself yesterday, in the process of moving bases and part of my new yard is not secured. Lost my new, breeding-quality spino to a 145 alpha carno last night because I didn't check the level and panicked a little at it getting too close to my utility animals. Went back to finish it off with my ugly rex, arrived just as a friend last hit it with their wyvern, bye bye exp...and spino. Hadn't lost one in combat in ages. So, it can happen to anyone really, sometimes Ark just really doesn't want you to have nice things.

That's actually one of the reasons why it's so common to find bases built either on top of things, or in easily defensible locations like valleys. A beach is very exposed and on a server, is easy to grief by a player when the game isn't busy griefing you itself. In fact one of my main bases was once on top of Weathertop, the region above where you are now. If you can build up on top there it's a great spot, but very popular and not uncommon for a tribe to stake a claim there.

I'm on Ragnarok now, at the top of the sandstone cliffs but there's a bit of snow above me and animals can fall in on one side. I'm still moving and haven't walled that side off yet, which is how the carno got in. But, while my perimeter is not secured my tames are now, for the most part.

I would still caution against doing a lot of breeding or other resource intensive things until you're in a better position as far as level and tames go. With cryopods taming is a breeze so it would be well worth using them to increase your combat presence and lower the risk of anything else wrecking your base/tames. I would actually recommend a high level tapejara as well, it has less combat presence than an argent but a two seater saddle and can land vertically, great for taming when you have a partner.

I would also in this case second what someone else said about buying tames. I tried to do it on my server and ended up getting the animals myself until I'm better established. But buying a few older boss bred rexes would give you a huge advantage and probably won't be hugely expensive.

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7 hours ago, MykTronic said:

Hey guys thanks for all the feedback! We currently now are thriving a bit better. Part of our problem was that Alphas kept spawning in our base or nearby, we created more plant x and balanced out. We are on the west rocky beach next to the bay at south zone 3. Part of my frustration was just we had a few unlucky weeks of all our favorites getting killed including all our Xmas colored dinos sans one random lystosaurus we had. We are up and running with electricity now and traded with a bigger tribe for a couple cryopods so we can actually have a baby survive now. I’m actually really happy with our house, and our small and medium pens. My husband and I actually play together on separate ps4s on side by side tvs. Resources were never a par of our problem in keeping our Dinos alive we lucked out early on and got some pretty good Therins. But trying to do anything else was a real struggle until we were able to rebuild after a 150 alpha raptor followed immediately by a 90 alpha Carno then a cherry on top Rex swept through our base a couple months ago which took out most of our highest tames including all our argys. We are now back up and flying and are doing -okay-. I’ll try and post some pics of our base thanks again for all the help guys!

I love the fact that you and your husband play together and you each have your own TV/PS4 set up!

 

I know this seems crazy, but perhaps you might consider moving your base.  Try to find a place that is easier to defend and keep out the bad dinos.  Protect it with Dino gates.

Then at least your dinos will be safe, while you are grinding out the resources to advance.  (And now that you have electricity,  you should breed your best egg layer dinos and store the eggs in a fridge.  These can be back up, in case one of your dinos gets killed. Then you can just hatch the egg, instead of going  out and taming a replacement.

 

Last but not least .... HAVE FUN with ARK ..... a lot of people posting here have ambitious goals.  But just do what you and your husband enjoy most. This is gaming after all, it should be fun!

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and for those who have contributed here is a link to some photos of our base. and if that doesn't work, click my profile and you should see a gallery I set up with some photos from different angles. So it sorted in decending order. gross. But so at the bottom going up: 

  • Front of the house.
  • Entrance looking right, stairs up
  • Entrance looking left, color coded minor material storage fridges, cooking
  • upstairs looking left fabricator, major color coded storage (narcos, gasoline, element/pearls, cementing paste/oil) left side extra weapons, armor, tools
  • upstairs looking right 20 stacked beds, grill, and color coded armor personal supply cabinets. I have developed a thing where I HAVE to paint all our amor, weapons and Dinos in our "Team Colors" which is White and Black with me being Purple and my husband being Cyan
  • front of taming pens, six pens sorted (gatherers, medium storage tanks, therins, raptor/carno/saber, beetle room, Parasaur egg drop, phimo poop corral, other Dino room.
  • inside pen hall with troff and right hand side is that beetle room
  • looking from atop the roof next to staircase to make it easier to walk up a Dino onto the roof for flyer pickup/ lighting situations
  • inside the breeding room with a listo, pig, hatcher, and underneath are the troffs and more storage
  • this is from on top of the pens looking at the breeding room with a landing zone and ramp for drop off at the forge, and on the right hand side is our grinder level up platform

 

Not pictured is the back area with the large tames of Brontos and Spinos because I haven't fixed how I want their storage to be, and our ugly temporary storage for the flyers because it's just made of thatch.  


I'm definitely the dude who is more into the building, and painting, organizing, and catching pretty tames haha, and my husband is more the adventurer who keeps getting into trouble. It really is a nice dichotomy, and at this point of over a year of playing and 6+ months of being on this server I worry about having anyone joining our tribe at this point.

 

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