Playing through the lore

[Allorex216]

Playing through the lore

Hey I need help because I am wanting to play through the way intended but I need recommendations because I dont know if I should use mods and if so which ones I also need settings and if I should play on a server or singleplayer so I need lots of help!

[Darkholis]

Depends on the time you are willing to spend. If you want a true experience in terms of lore, then I'd say to play without mods. However, if you don't have/want to spend as much time, feel free to boost the rates and you'll be set.

That being said, you can either do it on a server or in singleplayer (SP). SP has the advantage that you can "pause" the entire world when not playing the game and thus you are not vulnerable to the issues seen on servers, such as decay timers, creatures starving or actually being raided, etc.

My only grudge about SP is that there are no known ways to replicate the exact boss settings has seen on a server and thus makes the whole thing extremely trivial. In fact, you can easily beat the dragon/tek cave with tamed creatures in SP, where bred ones are mandatory on a server.

-------------------------------------

If you are ever looking for a place to get yourself started, feel free to take a look here :

I'm doing it solo on my main account, and with tribemates on one of my other accounts.
The next map is only unlocked when the boss of the current one is beaten in alpha difficulty.

Cheers!

[Cymas]

If you want the "true" game experience don't use mods. Personally I use a small number of what I consider to be essential QoL mods in order to make my gameplay experience more enjoyable, such as S+ and the Awesome Spyglass. I also used an ini file fix I found on reddit to make animal spawns on all story maps equal; on vanilla they are heavily weighted toward the lower end and I didn't care to spend weeks hunting down and taming enough animals to start breeding lines for bosses.

For specific settings, it all depends on what kind of experience you want, and I would also say it depends a lot more on if you're playing single player or on a server. On SP I have settings turned up quite a bit more than what I would normally because when you're not playing, the world stops progressing. I adjusted my rates accordingly to account for that, because I can't just leave babies growing overnight, etc.

[chase12124]

The only mod that I would use for playing through the lore would be S+, as it just improves all basic building mechanics and has custom .ini settings to, for instance, change the slot sizes of containers, or change the crafting speed. But honestly, there are some cheaty things in the mod like the nanny and mutator.

Typically what I do is just edit the game.ini and gameusersettings.ini and i can change the stack sizes of certain items, so it functions as a stack mod, but doesn't lessen the weight to any degree and I just boost the rest of the settings to still be forced to grind, but to a lesser degree of what official players have to deal with (i.e. 5x taming, 1.15x XP, 3x harvest, etc.).

 

Which by the way, here's a link to a list of all the items you can change the stack sizes for:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/346110/discussions/0/1739980540122123082/

[chase12124]

3 hours ago, Darkholis said:

Depends on the time you are willing to spend. If you want a true experience in terms of lore, then I'd say to play without mods. However, if you don't have/want to spend as much time, feel free to boost the rates and you'll be set.

That being said, you can either do it on a server or in singleplayer (SP). SP has the advantage that you can "pause" the entire world when not playing the game and thus you are not vulnerable to the issues seen on servers, such as decay timers, creatures starving or actually being raided, etc.

My only grudge about SP is that there are no known ways to replicate the exact boss settings has seen on a server and thus makes the whole thing extremely trivial. In fact, you can easily beat the dragon/tek cave with tamed creatures in SP, where bred ones are mandatory on a server.

-------------------------------------

If you are ever looking for a place to get yourself started, feel free to take a look here :

I'm doing it solo on my main account, and with tribemates on one of my other accounts.
The next map is only unlocked when the boss of the current one is beaten in alpha difficulty.

Cheers!

 

"My only grudge about SP is that there are no known ways to replicate the exact boss settings has seen on a server and thus makes the whole thing extremely trivial. In fact, you can easily beat the dragon/tek cave with tamed creatures in SP, where bred ones are mandatory on a server."

All you have to do is type this in your game.ini: bUseSingleplayerSettings=False, or you can uncheck it in the general settings before getting in-game, the settings amps up everything for the player, especially their per level up stats, it also gives an exponential buff to creatures' melee %, making them very overpowered. It also completely buffs baby growth rates, for example, it supposedly gives egg hatch speed 16x and baby mature speed 32x. This is primarily due to the fact since your playing alone, they expect you not to want to waste your time on playing official settings, because there is no competition in SP. But, you totally can disable the setting and go to official settings if you really wanted to, this is how I play, but up the settings, like I do 5x tame, 3x harvest, 50x mature, 50x egg hatch, 2x imprint, etc. etc.

Here's where I got most of the information (I knew what it did, but not the specifics.):

https://ark.gamepedia.com/Single_Player

 

I hope this helps answer the thread's question.

[Truthgamer10055]

It’s not lore you can’t play through lore 

story you can

story you see with your own eyes arks story 

lore you can’t find on your own it is shown with explores notes

[Darkholis]

1 hour ago, chase12124 said:

All you have to do is type this in your game.ini: bUseSingleplayerSettings=False, or you can uncheck it in the general settings before getting in-game, the settings amps up everything for the player, especially their per level up stats, it also gives an exponential buff to creatures' melee %, making them very overpowered. It also completely buffs baby growth rates, for example, it supposedly gives egg hatch speed 16x and baby mature speed 32x. This is primarily due to the fact since your playing alone, they expect you not to want to waste your time on playing official settings, because there is no competition in SP. But, you totally can disable the setting and go to official settings if you really wanted to, this is how I play, but up the settings, like I do 5x tame, 3x harvest, 50x mature, 50x egg hatch, 2x imprint, etc. etc.

Here's where I got most of the information (I knew what it did, but not the specifics.):

https://ark.gamepedia.com/Single_Player

 

I hope this helps answer the thread's question.

Yes you can change the ini as much as you want.
However, fact remains that some settings of bosses are hard-coded for SP, such as dmg taken from guns, for instance.

[Wikus]

15 hours ago, Cymas said:

If you want the "true" game experience don't use mods. Personally I use a small number of what I consider to be essential QoL mods in order to make my gameplay experience more enjoyable, such as S+ and the Awesome Spyglass. I also used an ini file fix I found on reddit to make animal spawns on all story maps equal; on vanilla they are heavily weighted toward the lower end and I didn't care to spend weeks hunting down and taming enough animals to start breeding lines for bosses.

For specific settings, it all depends on what kind of experience you want, and I would also say it depends a lot more on if you're playing single player or on a server. On SP I have settings turned up quite a bit more than what I would normally because when you're not playing, the world stops progressing. I adjusted my rates accordingly to account for that, because I can't just leave babies growing overnight, etc.

Could you point me in the right direction with a link to that "ini file fix" to get proper level dinos easier on story maps please.

[Cymas]

@Wikus Sure thing, here's the link! https://old.reddit.com/r/playark/comments/bbrrul/updated_level_equalizer/ There are ini files there for all current story maps and after using it on The Island I can verify it's a huge, huge boost to the gameplay experience. It doesn't remove spawn level ranges like the DLC maps do, it just fixes them to be weighted properly so you're 7x more likely to get high level animals (they did the math in an earlier iteration of this thread). It's such a big QoL change I would put it on par with S+ and it's not even a mod...

[caleb68]

17 hours ago, Darkholis said:

My only grudge about SP is that there are no known ways to replicate the exact boss settings has seen on a server and thus makes the whole thing extremely trivial. In fact, you can easily beat the dragon/tek cave with tamed creatures in SP, where bred ones are mandatory on a server.
Cheers!

could always run a non-dedicated session and tick private match, i do that myself for my single player play, that way im leveling and doing things as one would expect to happen on official servers, makes it a bit more challenging as well over single player.