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Breeding: How to avoid all the math?


Zapha

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For me breeding became first accessible with the Maewing, currently trying it with Deinos, but now I'm facing another big problem: All the number crunching which makes it into a real job, eating up more of my playtime, beside of the breeding itself.

The Egg-Incubater shows me the distribution of points, that's great, but if I look at the stats of my dinos I see nothing. I have first to do a complex research before I know if a stat is good or bad. I would have to attach a second monitor to my PC or use a smartphone with dodoex ... and would most of my playtime moving numbers around. That's not my imagination of playing, so I'm looking for mathless breeding strategies.

I like the idea to work with zero-point Dinos, I already have two level 20 dinos with zero points in food. Is it difficult to breed "formated" dinos with all stats at zero points except one stat?

I think also about breeding with low-levels instead of high-levels. Usually you start with stats from high-levels and then you stack mutations onto their stats. But why not go the other way?
Stack mutations on low-levels and then level the last round of them for the fight. I would have always easy numbers referenced for level 20 while doing the mutation stacking. Is this possible?

Are there other ways to avoid the massive number crunching?

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It's not that bad.  Helps to have ark smart breeder.  You can go thorugh all the dinos u want to play with, and see what their expected values would be.  

The maths for most stats is simple - on a typical 7 stat dino , that includes just about all walking dinos, a # in the hgih 30s is good.  Low 40s really good, mid to high 40s, extremely good, low 50s - about as good as it can get, god tier stat for a tame.

 

How those #s translate on each species is different.  On a rex 50 points in hp would be 12k hp, on a deino that would be 2,200 hp .... THese #s you can't just figure out off the top of your head without having a baseline understanding of what can be expected of each species.  Using ark smart breeder allows for you to just put in the #s and see what they look like.  THen you can start to spot, what is good when you tame things.


Once you put your tames in ark smart breeder, you know what dinos you have , which ones have what stat #s.  You can easily plan which dino matings to make, and what #s you want to see in an egg.  There's not much math really involved at this stage, its simply pick the better #s.  


The incubator wont be the first solution when breeding new lines w/ new stats to figure out.  You will only know what #s to look for after you have hatched and raised a generation or 2(that is, if you don't use ark smart breeder),  if you use ark smart breeder, you will then know exactly what #s you want to see on the eggs when incubating them.

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The only real way to avoid the math is still a time consuming slog with no guarantees.    If you don't take the time to figure out the stat allocation in each dinosaur, then you basically have to just keep taming and finding better stats until you get an idea of what constitutes a good or bad stat on that dinosaur.   You can figure out that above a 350% melee damage on a Rex post tame (for example) is worthy of breeding.   But like I said, that requires taming over and over again until you get a good idea of the stats for each dinosaur, or at least researching what 40 points in a given stat is worth.   You're also going to run into headaches trying to figure out how many points it has in speed since those don't show in game.

You could cheat and spawn in the blink rifle and it'll show you the points in green mode.

Unpopular opinion, but the randomization of stats on tames should never have happened.   Every tamed 150 should have the exact same stats and the bosses should scale from there.   You can still do your breeding and mutating, but this would take a lot of the slough out of taming.  

I remember when I played official, I spent months and months just flying around on my argy scouting.  I enjoyed it.  I would scout for the whole server trying to find those elusive 150's.   I didn't know anything about stats and points at the time, and everyone wanted 150's and I was too ignorant at the time time to tell them, that basically stats are a crap shoot.   When I finally learned enough about breeding to see that taming a 150 wasn't enough, it really took a lot of the joy out of taming for me, knowing I would have to do it over and over and over and over and over again until I found something good, that levels were basically meaningless.

After I quit official because I got sick of WC, and sick of the people on official, I quit playing for like 7 months, but I started getting bored with the game selection out there and I started thinking about all the things I could have accomplished in Ark, but didn't.  So I started playing SP and I learned about a program called Larkator that lets you track wild dinosaurs, their locations, and their stats.   Probably similar to how the S+ Transmitter used to work, although I've never used mods, just seen it in videos.

Larkator really illustrates how it really is a crapshoot.   I've seen creatures with 35 points in the wild get only 2-3 points post tame making them not even breedable.  I've seen a creature with 25 points pre-tame end up with 40+.    The people who check pre-tame stats and say a dinosaur isn't worth their kibble really don't understand how random numbers work.   Ironically, these are probably the same people who agree that you need to hatch as many eggs as possible to have a chance at a mutation.

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Sorry, I play only on official (cheat console would ruin my single player experience), so I can't use any mods.

It's also clear to me, like you have described, that I would get a feeling for the numbers after a while. But there are so many different dinos ...

What do you say about my plan to stack mutations only on level 20 dinos?
I have now zero-point-stat dinos for hp, melee, weight and food. I will find the missing two soon and then I can start with the breeding of the formated dinos.

All I want is a clear arrangement with numbers I can easily identify without permanent switching to desktop for using wiki/dodoex.

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19 minutes ago, theopheus said:

The people who check pre-tame stats and say a dinosaur isn't worth their kibble really don't understand how random numbers work.   Ironically, these are probably the same people who agree that you need to hatch as many eggs as possible to have a chance at a mutation.

No, said people are just looking for something specific, said specific result has a higher probability of happening under certain conditions. And that is mostly the case because of how RNG works, on average the result they want (likely 50+ points), is more likely to happen more often if the base is above a certain value. And thus, anything below said base value, is not worth there time and effort.

Breeding is a bit different, mainly super breeding with the 3.7% mutation probability (starting at 7.3% on fresh pairs), because you have to repeat the same process over and over again. Witch in turn means, that the desired result can happen on the first hatch but also a thousand eggs later (or even more because that is how RNG works), and thus to get to the end asap you will need to hatch as many eggs as possible (or sort true, considering the new incubator).

Considering official rates, and how RNG works, what those people are saying actually makes perfect sense. So you either misunderstood there explanation, or failed to see how RNG actually works yourself (no offense intended).

 

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13 minutes ago, Zapha said:

Sorry, I play only on official (cheat console would ruin my single player experience), so I can't use any mods.

It's also clear to me, like you have described, that I would get a feeling for the numbers after a while. But there are so many different dinos ...

What do you say about my plan to stack mutations only on level 20 dinos?
I have now zero-point-stat dinos for hp, melee, weight and food. I will find the missing two soon and then I can start with the breeding of the formated dinos.

All I want is a clear arrangement with numbers I can easily identify without permanent switching to desktop for using wiki/dodoex.

Starting mutation stacking (super breeding) on a low stat base, is potentially a very bad idea on official servers, it very quickly becomes very time consuming. So if your goal is to create a super dino line with say high melee and health, you want at least those 2 stat to be as high as possible to begin with, reducing the total amount of time required to reach your goal.

However you do want all other stats as low as possible on super dino lines, so having breeders with 0 points in each stat, is imho a good starting point. Even if you don't have a second screen, or don't want to swap between the game and a website, i would also strongly recommend the Ark Smart Breeding App. Once you 'get a feeling' for it, you wont really swap between the game and the app that much anyways, but it really helps new breeders understand what is going on in the breeding process.

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7 hours ago, Zapha said:

For me breeding became first accessible with the Maewing, currently trying it with Deinos, but now I'm facing another big problem: All the number crunching which makes it into a real job, eating up more of my playtime, beside of the breeding itself. The Egg-Incubater shows me the distribution of points, that's great, but if I look at the stats of my dinos I see nothing. I have first to do a complex research before I know if a stat is good or bad. I would have to attach a second monitor to my PC or use a smartphone with dodoex ... and would most of my playtime moving numbers around. That's not my imagination of playing, so I'm looking for mathless breeding strategies. I like the idea to work with zero-point Dinos, I already have two level 20 dinos with zero points in food. Is it difficult to breed "formated" dinos with all stats at zero points except one stat?I think also about breeding with low-levels instead of high-levels. Usually you start with stats from high-levels and then you stack mutations onto their stats. But why not go the other way?
Stack mutations on low-levels and then level the last round of them for the fight. I would have always easy numbers referenced for level 20 while doing the mutation stacking. Is this possible? Are there other ways to avoid the massive number crunching?

My brainless work around for this is simple, tame anything up over lvl 100, find the one with the most points in the area Im most interested in {health, melee, weight, stamina}
Then breed the highest stats with either something the opposite sex, or something opposite sex with stats I want in a baby. Once I get all the stats nice and even on two breeders, you can then track those stats much easier in the offspring.....If a baby has a mutation, you will see it much sooner with the incubator. 

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3 hours ago, lordbufu said:

Starting mutation stacking (super breeding) on a low stat base, is potentially a very bad idea on official servers, it very quickly becomes very time consuming.

It's always time consuming.

As I understand it, saving time by starting with wild high levels looks for me like a fallacy. All you save is the time a dino needs to level to 150. But you lose time while searching high levels with a good stat and you lose so called wasted points the high levels have.

If I start with low levels I have two advantages:
- I don't have wasted points because I level them
- I don't have to spent time for searching high levels with good stats

How long does a level 20 need to reach level 150? Maybe some weeks. Makes not much difference for me. All you can get from wild dinos are level points, but no wild dino can beat my self leveled dino. Or am I wrong?

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4 hours ago, lordbufu said:

However you do want all other stats as low as possible on super dino lines, so having breeders with 0 points in each stat, is imho a good starting point.

This is completely unnecessary unless you've got so many mutations you're pushing 450.  

I saw all these people with their level 7 Gigas on official and for what?  You don't need Stamina, Oxygen, Food, or Speed on a Giga.  Mutating health isn't going to give you very big returns, nor do you need a lot of weight.   If you max out the mutations on a Giga, at 254, even if you found a Giga with 50 points in health and weight, you're still only at level 355.

Mating your dinos with a level 7 doesn't make you get mutations faster, it lets you get MORE mutations if you're in danger of hitting the max level.

If you're stacking mutations using a low level dinosaur, now you've got to take that mutation and mate it back with one with useful numbers in the other stat.   You're creating more work for yourself.

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2 minutes ago, Zapha said:

It's always time consuming.

As I understand it, saving time by starting with wild high levels looks for me like a fallacy. All you save is the time a dino needs to level to 150. But you lose time while searching high levels with a good stat and you lose so called wasted points the high levels have.

If I start with low levels I have two advantages:
- I don't have wasted points because I level them
- I don't have to spent time for searching high levels with good stats

How long does a level 20 need to reach level 150? Maybe some weeks. Makes not much difference for me. All you can get from wild dinos are level points, but no wild dino can beat my self leveled dino. Or am I wrong?

You're really overestimating how quickly you're going to get mutations.  That's why taming high numbers is better.  

Unless you're using some mod that pushes out more mutations, the chance of getting a mutation is something like 7.3% and the chance of that mutation being in the stat you desire is now cut to 1/7 of that 7.3%

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6 minutes ago, theopheus said:

This is completely unnecessary unless you've got so many mutations you're pushing 450.  

(...)

If you're stacking mutations using a low level dinosaur, now you've got to take that mutation and mate it back with one with useful numbers in the other stat.   You're creating more work for yourself.

True that I have some more work but main reason why I want to do that is clearness in the numbers. Maybe I even save time if I don't have to recalculate everything because of wasted points.

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2 minutes ago, Zapha said:

True that I have some more work but main reason why I want to do that is clearness in the numbers. Maybe I even save time if I don't have to recalculate everything because of wasted points.

You're always going to deal with wasted points.   There's nothing stopping you from getting a mutation in speed, oxygen, or food.  Unless you just really prefer breeding instead of taming, but you're going to do probably 500x more breeding than you would taming to get stats that you can already find in the wild.

 

You're looking for an easy out and there isn't one or we'd all be taking it.

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5 minutes ago, Zapha said:

If you at the end with finding wild high levels with a good stat, you also have only mutations left. All you save is the level time from 20 to 150.

Are you thinking that you can level up a dinosaur and then add mutations on top of that?    Domestic levels don't pass on when you breed them.   Only the stats that you had right after the dinosaur woke up from a tame, plus a small bonus to make up the taming efficiency.

To go from 20 to 150 in mutations would take 65 mutations at only a 7.3% chance to get one.  Actually, that isn't even true because after 20 mutations your chance at mutations gets cut in half since one parent will have 20/20 mutations.   So you'd get 20 levels @ 7.3%, and then the other 45 would be at even a lower rate.

And 150 isn't even realistic.   When you get a perfect tame on a high level dinosaur it's going to end up well over 180 unless you're taming really really low dinosaurs.   A level 100 will even give you a 149 when it's done taming.

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5 minutes ago, theopheus said:

You're looking for an easy out and there isn't one or we'd all be taking it.

OK, last try:

Wouldn't it be great for you to find a wild level 150 dino who has ALL points in one stat?

I think that would be great but we know you can't find such a dino in the wild. But you can make one by storing a low level dino for some weeks in the fridge until he reached level 150.

Why should this thinking be wrong?

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3 minutes ago, Zapha said:

OK, last try:

Wouldn't it be great for you to find a wild level 150 dino who has ALL points in one stat?

I think that would be great but we know you can't find such a dino in the wild. But you can make one by storing a low level dino for some weeks in the fridge until he reached level 150.

Why should this thinking be wrong?

Because the levels you put into a dinosaur don't pass on when you breed.  I said that in my last post.   It doesn't work that way.   You're confused.

Only post tame stats pass on.   Any training levels/domestic levels you add manually will not pass on.   Period.   It doesn't work that way.

Let me break it down for you:

You have pre-tame stats... You find a level 150 dinosaur.  Those stats are a baseline, they don't effect breeding.

You get a perfect tame.   Your dinosaur is now level 224 in most cases.   You got the 50% taming levels at a 99% efficiency.   THESE are the stats that get passed on.

You can put 73 additional levels into the dinosaur yourself called training or domestic levels, but these levels do NOT pass on to the offspring.

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12 hours ago, Zapha said:

For me breeding became first accessible with the Maewing, currently trying it with Deinos, but now I'm facing another big problem: All the number crunching which makes it into a real job, eating up more of my playtime, beside of the breeding itself.

If you're just breeding so that you have extra animals in your base to replace any that you might lose then you don't need to track anything. Just breed the highest levels you can find and they'll be good enough for just about anything. But if you're trying to create good bloodlines by combining the best stats then it's going to take some work and there's no way around that. No matter what method you use, no matter what tools you use, there will always be numbers involved. It's possible to save time by finding a more efficient way of keeping track of your dino's and your breeding, but no matter what you do it will always be necessary to spend time keeping track of your breeding program.

Having said that, your two most efficient choices are to create your own spreadsheet or to use a tool like "ARK Smart Breeding". If you're good at spreadsheets then you will be able to figure out a way to store your information efficiently so that it's intuitive and easy for you to use, but if you're not good at spreadsheets then using a tool like ARK Smart Breeding is a great way to keep track of the information. It takes some time, but not as much time as taking notes or creating your own spreadsheet.

Here's a screenshot of an Official  server I played on a few years ago, the smart breeding tool makes it easy to see which dino's are good and which ones are not. If I had wanted to breed compy's (for example) that picture would have told me that I wanted to breed Archie & Leslie together.

You have to spend a little bit of time putting their stats into the tool, but once you do the information is super easy to understand and to make decisions about breeding.

image.png.15e70529ebdb1627a0630544b2802ff8.png

 

12 hours ago, Zapha said:

The Egg-Incubater shows me the distribution of points, that's great, but if I look at the stats of my dinos I see nothing. I have first to do a complex research before I know if a stat is good or bad. I would have to attach a second monitor to my PC or use a smartphone with dodoex ... and would most of my playtime moving numbers around. That's not my imagination of playing, so I'm looking for mathless breeding strategies.

Everything in the game is based on math, your stats, dino stats, weapon stats, armor stats, there's no such thing as a mathless breeding strategy, no matter what you do there will be numbers involved. But, again, the breeding tool makes it easy to see which dino's are good or bad, all that matters is that you do a good job of putting the information in.

12 hours ago, Zapha said:

I like the idea to work with zero-point Dinos, I already have two level 20 dinos with zero points in food. Is it difficult to breed "formated" dinos with all stats at zero points except one stat?

It's not difficult, but it is time consuming and... it will involve math.

Let's say you perfect tamed a Lvl 150 rex that came out as Lvl 224 which you know has good health, good stamina, good melee + 27 points in food, and you also have a Lvl 20 rex that obviously has bad bad health, bad stamina, bad melee and has 0 points in food. You breed them together until you get male and female offspring that have the good health, stamina & melee and also have the 0 points in food that you want.

This might take multiple generations to get all of the stats you want to combine together in just the right way.

Mind you, when people are breeding to get super-dino's this is what they do. They carefully create bloodlines that have the lowest possible numbers for stats they don't want which leaves more room for higher numbers for the stats that are important. But again it's quite time consuming and it's not something that you can do "mathless".

12 hours ago, Zapha said:

I think also about breeding with low-levels instead of high-levels. Usually you start with stats from high-levels and then you stack mutations onto their stats. But why not go the other way?
Stack mutations on low-levels and then level the last round of them for the fight. I would have always easy numbers referenced for level 20 while doing the mutation stacking. Is this possible?

That's possible but would take a horrifying amount of time, absolutely not worth it.

Just to think about it let's compare two dino's.

1) A Lvl 150 rex that you perfect tame will come out as Lvl 224.  On the average it's going to have 32 points in Melee.

2) A Lvl 20 rex that you perfect tame will come out as Lvl 29. On the average it's going to have 3 points in Melee.

It would require 15 mutations in melee for a lower level bloodline to catch up to a higher level bloodline which would take much Much MUCH more time than finding high levels to tame & breed together.

12 hours ago, Zapha said:

Are there other ways to avoid the massive number crunching?

No, this is an RPG which means everything is built on numbers. At some point you must learn what those numbers mean so you can figure out the most efficient way for you to breed.

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1 hour ago, Zapha said:

OK, last try:

Wouldn't it be great for you to find a wild level 150 dino who has ALL points in one stat?

I think that would be great but we know you can't find such a dino in the wild. But you can make one by storing a low level dino for some weeks in the fridge until he reached level 150.

Why should this thinking be wrong?

Finding a Dino like that would be some astronomical odds.  Something like (1/7)^150.   Basically sometime around when the earth is consumed by the expanding sun would you find a Dino like that.

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6 hours ago, Zapha said:

It's also clear to me, like you have described, that I would get a feeling for the numbers after a while. But there are so many different dinos ...

That's why it's important to start thinking in terms of levels rather than the presented stats.

If a doedicurus has 40 levels in Melee and a rex has 40 levels in melee those two numbers are the same but obviously they are not equally important. Having lots of melee on a doed is nice but not as important as having 40 levels on melee on a rex.

Or if you're comparing two rexes to see which one you want to breed, it's a lot easier to think about the fact that RexA has 34 levels in melee and rexb has 40 levels in melee, those are numbers that are easier to mentally compare than the actual percentages that you see in the game.

6 hours ago, Zapha said:

All I want is a clear arrangement with numbers I can easily identify without permanent switching to desktop for using wiki/dodoex.

That doesn't exist. You're going to need to swap back-and-forth no matter what tool you use, whether it's a spreadsheet, Smart Breeding, dododex or whatever.

But let's keep that in perspective, all you have to do us use ALT-TAB and you can swap back and forth between programs. This is 2022, it's not not 1982, you don't have to shut down ARK every time you want to look at another program, switching back-and-forth is super easy.

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1 hour ago, Zapha said:

OK, last try:

Wouldn't it be great for you to find a wild level 150 dino who has ALL points in one stat?

I think that would be great but we know you can't find such a dino in the wild. But you can make one by storing a low level dino for some weeks in the fridge until he reached level 150.

Why should this thinking be wrong?

Ahhh I see the problem here.

The stats that you add after you tame a dino do not get passed on to the babies. The only stats that get passed down are the exact stats it has at the moment it finishes taming.

If you tame a Lvl 20 rex that comes out as a Lvl 29 with 3 points in melee, and then you level it up by adding 71 points in melee as it levels up, those 71 points do not get passed down to the babies. The only stat that rex can pass down are the 3 points of melee it had at the moment you finished taming it.

 

This would be a good time for you to go to youtube and watch some videos on breeding, there are quite a few good videos that explain the whole process and help you understand exactly how it works.

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22 minutes ago, Pipinghot said:

Ahhh I see the problem here.

The stats that you add after you tame a dino do not get passed on to the babies. The only stats that get passed down are the exact stats it has at the moment it finishes taming.

OK, now I understand why I can't use leveled dinos for improving stats. Thanks.

But I have just found the two missing zero-points-stat eggs. I have now for each stat a zero-point egg, one of them has even two stats with zero points. As next I try to combine them and make two breeding lines, one for hp and one for melee. I guess I need a while for this.

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3 hours ago, Zapha said:

It's always time consuming.

As I understand it, saving time by starting with wild high levels looks for me like a fallacy. All you save is the time a dino needs to level to 150. But you lose time while searching high levels with a good stat and you lose so called wasted points the high levels have.

If I start with low levels I have two advantages:
- I don't have wasted points because I level them
- I don't have to spent time for searching high levels with good stats

How long does a level 20 need to reach level 150? Maybe some weeks. Makes not much difference for me. All you can get from wild dinos are level points, but no wild dino can beat my self leveled dino. Or am I wrong?

It's already been addressed, but to give a bit more perspective. You start with 7.3% for the first 20 mutations, 20 mutations = 40 points = 40 levels, then it drops down to 3.7% once you hit the 20/20 cap on 1 parental side. So getting to lvl 60 from 20 is fairly easy, but that 3.7% is a real wall in terms of progress, and that is when things start to really slow down a lot. Currently i'm looking at any where between 300-600 eggs on average to get a new mutation on my Giga line, i do use boosted rates myself, but you can easily see how time consuming that is going to become on official rates.

Edit: And yes, that obviously disregards any stat said lvl 20 might have compared to the lvl 150, its just to emphasis the time required to stack mutation beyond a certain point.

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12 hours ago, theopheus said:

You're really overestimating how quickly you're going to get mutations.  That's why taming high numbers is better.  

Unless you're using some mod that pushes out more mutations, the chance of getting a mutation is something like 7.3% and the chance of that mutation being in the stat you desire is now cut to 1/7 of that 7.3%

have to admit, even though I got my breeding settings worked out for a full imprint on a rex in ten minutes, trying to get any mutations is stupid crazy.....Iv spent nearly 40 hours trying to work my way through junk rex's and bad mutations and Iv suspect Iv only gotten 3 or 4 mutations in the right areas thus far. x.x

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