(Help) Bosses without changing game settings

[Vytov]

So it's my first time making a world in ark and im level 92. (From note runs so I still dont know a lot about the game and im still pretty bad) 

I was thinking about doing the (easiest?) broodmother on the gamma level and I was wondering if I could do it and what I needed to do it so I looked it up and it showed people with level 250 creatures and I don't understand if I can do that with the default settings because I only get wild creatures at level 50 at best. I really dont want to change game settings so is their anything I can do?

[Dreadcthulhu]

What is the max level wild creature you have seen? The bosses do scale with difficulty, so if you tame near the highest level you can find, and then breed your best stats together & get imprinted babies (easy to do on single player, since you can boost rates), and toss saddles on them, the gamma bosses will be no sweat. (Well Gamma spider & monkey anyways, Gamma dragon is much harder but still doable with good first gen imprinted tames).  Gamma broodmother will do down easily to basic imprinted megatheriums & a yuty you ride to provide moral support.  For example, when I did a run on the beginner servers (which are set so max wild level is 30, and tames can only gain 30 xp levels) my tribe was able to beat gamma brood with 20 megatheriums that only had like 4k health & less than 200% melee, along with 30 armour saddles. Another tribe was able to beat gamma monkey with unsaddled rexes (no rex saddles on beginner servers) with those similar constraints. 

[Vytov]

Hm im not sure what the max creature level is but I play on the standard difficulty so im not sure. Also what animal should I use?

 

[Dreadcthulhu]

Okay, so assuming single player, the difficult slider says 0.2 when you start, correct? So the max wild level will be 30 for normal creatures; you will want to tame several level 25+ creatures to get breedstock.  As for what creatures you want to use, well megatheriums are extremely good for the Broodmother, but meh for the other bosses.  You will want rexes or therizinos for the other bosses & tek cave; and for that matter good rexes or tickle chickens can beat the broodmother too. I prefer therizinos myself, their veggie cake healing is a massive help against the dragon & their tighter turn radius means they are less likely to walk into the lava in the tek cave. The downside is that finding a good saddle bp for them can be harder than rexes, and you will really want kibble to tame them with, while with rexes you can often uses mutton or prime just fine. 

You will also want to get a breeding pair of yutyrannus, and ride an imprinted one during the boss fights. Some people like to bring in a daedon set to passive heal as well.  Note, this is limited to Island creatures only; other maps have tames that are also useful in boss fights, like shadowmanes, deinonychus, and magmasaurs.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Vytov]

Ok thank you

[Vytov]

Ive still got 1 more question what level should I get the megatheriums to and how? Also should I worry about mutations?

 

[Pipinghot]

13 hours ago, Vytov said:

Ive still got 1 more question what level should I get the megatheriums to and how? Also should I worry about mutations?

For any boss fight animals you want to get as many levels as is possible within reason, with the amount of time you want to spend playing. You probably don't want to spend the time getting them to the max possible level, but you definitely want to have at least 30-40 levels added to them after they're born/hatched. The nice thing about boss fight animals is that you typically only care about a two stats. If you're using a megatherium for general game play, exploring the map and such, you probably want some levels in Health, Melee, Weight, maybe even some in Stamina & Speed, but for boss fight animals it's just Health & Melee, so you don't need as many total levels for them to be good enough. For something specialized like a daeodon, that you use for healing, you would add some Health, maybe, but almost all levels would go into Food so they can heal for as long as possible.

 

A) How to get Levels

Keep in mind that you don't need to level up any of your breeding stock until you get to the final generation, in fact it's usually easier to keep track of your breeding if you deliberately avoid putting any levels on them. Babies don't inherit levels that you've added to parents from XP, they only inherit levels that that the parent had after you were done taming it or that the parent had when they were born. There's no benefit to adding XP levels to your breeding stock during the breeding program. Once you're done using an animal for breeding and you're ready to move that animal out of the breeding area and into your general animal stock, then is the time you want to add the levels from the XP they've been slowly building up.

Also, I've never done boss fights with settings like yours so lets talk about that for a minute. I've played mostly on Official servers, Unofficial servers using Official settings, or even when I've played some Single-player I've used Official settings. If you're using the 0.2 Difficulty that DreadCthulhu mentioned, that means your maximum level in the wild will be 30, which means if you put 30 levels on your tamed animals they'll be double the level of wild animals, which is really strong. If you've already done breeding to have breeding stock with good stats I'd be super surprised if you need more than +20 levels from XP when you do boss fights.

Just to put this into perspective, on Official servers the max wild level is 150. If you get a perfect tame they tame out at Lvl 223. Then after a breeding program they would typically be hatched/born at Lvl 260-280, and then with about 50 levels added from XP they would typically be Lvl 310-330 for the boss fight. This is only slightly more than twice as powerful as wild animals, so if we use the same comparison for your single-player game I would bet that you could do boss fights with animals that are born/hatched at Lvl 40 with +20 Levels from XP, or +30 at most.

On top of that, I'm not even sure you need to do breeding. With the max wild level being 30, you could probably tame a bunch of Lvl 25-30's, they'll finish taming at Lvl 37-44, then you add 30 levels from XP and they'll be Lvl 67-74, which means they'll at least twice as powerful as max level wild animals. Even without breeding that might be powerful enough to do boss fights.

 

As for how to gain XP there are multiple ways to level up your animals, it basically just depends on how you like doing things.

 

1) Passive XP.

The easiest but slowest. Having said that, once you have taken the time to tame some animals to prepare yourself for breeding, and then taken the time to complete your breeding program so that you have good bloodlines for your boss fights, the extra time for letting animals gain XP passively probably won't bother you.

The important thing to know about Passive XP is that it only happens when you are logged on and close enough that the animals stay rendered in by the game. One way of doing this is to have your character sit on a chair in the middle of your base. Your character consumes food & water very slowly like this, you can leave them logged on for hours at a time, like overnight or while you're at school/work, and nothing bad will happen to them. You don't actually need to see the animals on your screen, they just need to be within range, which means you can do this inside of a building to keep your character safe. Also, you want to be sure that you've built your base with protections so that random animals can't wander in and start attacking your stuff while you're away. It's ARK, always build for safety.

 

2) Cryopods.

About equally easy, and somewhat faster. Keep animals in cryopods in your inventory or a cryofridge. I'm assuming you don't have cryofridges because that's a Lvl 88 engram, so once you get to Lvl 51 you can start making cryopods and keep animals in the cryopods in your inventory. When they're in your inventory in cryopods they gain an extra 5% XP. Then, once you get to Lvl 88 put them in a cryofridge and it gets even easier.

Two warnings about cryopods:

a) If you get into the habit of carrying animals in cryopods, it will be extremely important to recover the stuff from your body when you die. If you can't rescue your stuff after 30 minutes, when your body/bag decomposes, that means everything in your inventory is gone, completely gone. So if you get into the habit of carrying animals in cryopods because you like the extra XP they get, you will need to think about when you want to temporarily put them in a box/vault/bin if you're about to go do something really dangerous. Dying is part of ARK, it's going to happen, the key to long term success is to prepare your plans for what you're going to do when it happens (and in this case those plans either mean making sure you can recover your body quickly or having storage where you can put the cryopods whenever you're about to do something extra-dangerous).

b) cryopods will eventually discharge. At the end of 30 days they will run down and anything in the cryopod will be gone forever, you can't get it back. You will still have the cryopod but it will need to be recharged in a cryofridge and your dino will be gone. This isn't a big deal, but it means is that you need to keep an eye on the charge level of your cryopods. Whenever the charge level of a cryopod gets to low you need to unpod the animal and put it into a newer pod with more charge. Eventually, when you get cryofridges, this won't matter because the cryofridge will keep the cryopods charged up. But during the time between Lvl 51 and Lvl 88 you need to pay attention to how much charge your cryopods have left.

 

3) Active fighting/leveling.

For leveling up an individual animal the fastest way is to ride it around fighting stuff. This might make you think that you could lead a pack of animals around the map killing stuff and they'll all level up fast, and that's partially true. But the catch is that when you kill things only 1 animal at a time will earn the XP, whichever animal landed the killing blow will get all the XP and the rest of your pack will get nothing. So you could, for example, ride around on a yuty, leading a big pack of megatheria, just killing everything in sight, but some animals will have more luck than others, some of them will get more levels than others, and you'll still need to do some extra hunting to help the unlucky animals make up the difference. Then again, you'll also be collecting a bunch of meat which you can use to help feed the next generation of megatheria (or other carnivores) that you're raising, and you'll get other items from the stuff you kill as an added bonus.

This is also good practice for the boss fights, so you get accustomed to leading a pack, using whistle commands, maybe you even divide your animals up into "tame groups" so each group has different assignments. Learning how to use tame groups & whistle commands will make your boss fights easier and more fun.

 

 

B) Mutations.

I think for what you're doing it would be a complete waste of your time to work at getting mutations. You're going to get a few of them just from doing your breeding program, but when you compare wild animals with max Lvl of 30 to your animals with levels from taming + breeding + XP levels, There's really no added benefit for you to spend extra time trying to build up mutations.

Just to put this into perspective for you, I run a private server for myself and some RL friends, we use Official settings for our levels, and we still don't ever bother with working on mutations. We tame a bunch of animals until we have starting stock with good stats ( we look for 34-40 levels in any stat we care about ), then we do the breeding program. Sometimes we get lucky and get a few mutations before the breeding is done, sometimes we don't, but frankly we've never needed them and we don't really care.

Even on Official PvE servers mutations aren't needed. They're nice to have, they can sometimes make a boss fight easier, but if you start with good breeding stock they're not necessary. Of course in any game there are people who try to max everything out even when it's not really important, so on Official PvE servers you'll find people with max level animals for sale/trade, but really that's just for the min max'ers.

The only reason to have mutations on animals is if you want to avoid imprinting. On an Official server (or an Unofficial server using the Official settings) this can be important, because imprinting is time consuming and a pain in the neck. Which leads us to imprinting...

 

C) Imprinting.

What's (usually) more important than mutations for boss fights is imprinting. On our private server, for example, we don't care about mutations but we do care about imprinting - but only for the final generation, only for the animals that will actually be doing the boss fights. For general-use animals on a single-player game imprinting isn't important at all. It can be nice, after all more-powerful animals are always easier and more convenient than less-powerful animals, that's why you want to tame Lvl 25-30 and not Lvl 1-5, but it's really not a big deal in single-player for general game play. And, again, with 0.2 difficulty settings that give you max Lvl 30 animals in the wild, I'm not even sure that you should care about imprinting.

Which takes us to...

 

D) Benefits of Single-player (bear with me, this is for a reason).

The best thing about ARK in single-player mode is that you have complete control of the game. You can use mods, you can change settings, you can use admin commands, you can make the game as easy or as hard as you want. You can experiment with any of these things and decide which ones to keep and which ones to get rid of. On our private server we've played 6 maps (Island, Center, Scorched Earth, Ragnarok, Aberration, Extinction) and we're just about to finish up playing Valguero. We've changed our settings multiple times based on when we want to make things harder or easier for ourselves, we've experimented with different mods, we've used admin commands sometimes or conversely forbid ourselves from using admin other times, we basically do whatever we want to do in order to make the game more fun for the group.

For example, we use a mod that picks up poop and eggs for us, because both of those are tedious busy-work tasks that don't make the game more fun for anyone. We build and seed our gardens, but the mod keeps the gardens fertilized because, again, that's tedious busy-work that no one likes. If the game glitches and causes someone to lose stuff they shouldn't have lost (like if they lose an animal because of a meshing false-positive) we respawn a replacement for their animal and stuff because no one should have to waste time recovering from the game screwing up, but if someone dies or they lose stuff because it's their own mistake, or even just from normal game play, well then they lose those animals and that stuff because ARK is a game with consequences. We have chosen mods and settings that take away all of the pointless nonsense and leaves us with the challenges of playing ARK.

Likewise you, on single-player, have the ability to decide what mods/settings/changes you want to make in order to make the game more fun for yourself. My suggestion would be to play ARK plain-vanilla until you decide which things you like and which things you don't like, and then look for mods & settings that will change/fix the the things you don't like.

The reason I brought this up is because we were discussing Imprinting. Imprinting is painful, it's tedious and inconvenient, and when you're playing on single-player the whole system for how imprinting works will cause you to leave your character logged in because the clock stops whenever your logged off. You should try imprinting once, decide whether you like it (and of course by then you will also be thinking about whether you actually need it or not) and then you can decide if you want to use a mod or an admin command to imprint your boss-fight animals.

 

I know this is a bit more than you were asking, but hopefully giving you a full discussion will help you make decisions that will make the game more fun for you. Good luck and happy ARK'ing.

[Griffin998]

3 hours ago, Pipinghot said:

levels that that the parent had after you were done taming it or that the parent had when they were born.

Or mutagen levels, but that only works with unbred creatures.

Anyways, good luck with your boss fights, and happy ARKing!

[Vytov]

Thank you! I understand everything but I still dont really get the generations. Could you explain that?

[Vytov]

Also if it helps im a little above level 90

 

[Pipinghot]

10 hours ago, Vytov said:

Thank you! I understand everything but I still dont really get the generations. Could you explain that?

Rather than type out an explanation, I'm going to suggest you watch a couple of youtube videos on breeding, multiple people have already done some great tutorials and you'll probably understand it better if you see some examples on videos than if I try to explain it in writing.

What really helped me when I was first learning about breeding was this series by TimmyCarbine. There are other good ones, obviously, plenty of people are providing good content for ARK, this is just the series that brought it together for me. I'm sure there will be one or two small things in there that are out of date, but the fundamentals of how breeding works haven't changed so it will still be 98% true.

 

 

[Griffin998]

Syntac's mutation guide (linked down below), was really helpful when I wanted to learn about mutations. Plus, Syntac's just generally really cool (I'm a fan-sue me ).

 

[Vytov]

Also what level of saddles should I get because I watched a video and 1 ascended saddle was 4.4k cementing paste and I struggle to get 600

[CervantesMor]

Hi, the cementing paste isn't a problem if you have good Megaterium with more damage point: collects a lot of chitin from insects (eg Myrma or Meganeura, by killing them it also gets a temporary bonus to increase the damage and which therefore further increases the collection of chitin) and gets even more by killing Acatina, collecting a lot of chitin it becomes easy to create enough cement paste . If you then go you know where to find Castoroides, you can get a lot of PastaCem ready by looking inside their dam / lair, just be careful they get aggressive when you do. PS: I advise you to look for other "posts" here in the Forum where they have already discussed Boss level with modified difficulty settings because if I'm not mistaken the Bosses are affected differently from other normal creatures in SP by changing the difficulty settings. here you have the map of where the beavers are: https://ark.wiki.gg/wiki/Castoroides https://ark.wiki.gg/wiki/Megatherium

[Moonie1]

You can beat the first difficulty Broodmother with tamed Megatheriums that are near the max wild level of your server. You dont need to breed any for mutations or higher stats, but it will make it easier. Either keep taming near max ones or speed up the process by mating all your females with your top male to get the 18/20 you want for the fight. Riding one imprinted to you is a big bonus too. You can also bring a Yuty and a Daeodon for buff/heals. Saddles are a plus as well, primitive ones will work. The first boss is killed all the time on the Beginner servers using tamed Megatheriums where the max wild dino cap is level 30 and players are 44(49).

[Vytov]

Ok thank all of you so much lmao this really helps

[Pipinghot]

11 hours ago, Vytov said:

Also what level of saddles should I get because I watched a video and 1 ascended saddle was 4.4k cementing paste and I struggle to get 600

Well, the short answer is "the best you can afford". And as with everything in ARK that means, "How much time do you want to spend?"

You can spend hours and hours flying around your map (or swimming around the oceans) constantly checking loot crates trying to get the best saddle blueprints possible, and then farming up lots and lots of materials to make those saddles... or at some point you'll decide "I've spent enough time on this" and you'll just try it an see if they're good enough.

One of the things you'll notice as you collect blueprints of various types is that the Ascendant blueprints are not always worth the cost, some of them cost you a lot of resources for only a small gain in effectiveness. Sometimes you'll even find "lower quality" blueprints that give better protection than the blueprints that are supposed to be higher quality. This is because every quality level has a range of possible numbers and sometimes you'll get extra lucky on a lower quality blueprint. You have to be the one who looks at your blueprint collection, looks at the armor value, looks at the cost, and then decides which blueprints are worth your time to farm up the materials.

Without diving into the math, it's important to understand that most of the numbers in ARK have diminishing returns. So, for example, a saddle with 50 armor is not twice as good as a saddle with 25 armor, it's slightly less-than-twice-as-good. You can look on the wiki if you want to dive into the math for how armor ratings work, but even if you don't want to learn all of the details you can just keep in mind that there are diminishing returns.

Let's say you have a saddle blueprint that has 45 armor and costs 500 ingots and you have another blueprint that has 55 armor and costs 1000 ingots. Is the extra 10 armor really worth doubling the cost, adding another 500 ingots? The only person who can answer that question is you - how important is that extra armor to you, how good/fast are you at farming metal to make ingots, and do you think it's worth the extra time to farm that metal?

 

You're going to get better at farming everything in ARK as you play the game more so the question of "how much time will it take" is going to change as you play the game more. As you can see from the post by @CervantesMor there are usually multiple ways to get resources and part of the game is learning which methods work best for you. (Side note: another way to get a lot of paste is to tame a good beezelbufo and ride it around areas with lots of insects).

[Griffin998]

For saddles, if you absolutely cannot afford anything above primitive, just use primitive saddles. You will probably lose some, but if you have breeding going on, you should be good. If you can get better than primitive, 100% go for it. But like @Pipinghot  said, there are some ascendant saddles that are worse than mastercraft, but costs double (probably sort of exaggerating, but education). If you're going to be riding on one, just make one silly saddle and then use lower-level saddles for the rest. Also, beelzebufos are amazing at cementing paste gathering, since they just gather straight cementing paste instead of chitin.

Good luck with your bosses, and happy ARKing!

[Dreadcthulhu]

Something else you should do once you find a usable blueprint (and stockpile a suitable amount of raw materials) for your boss fighter saddles is to make a mindwipe tonic, and use that to put every level you have into crafting skill. Then make the saddles; items made from blueprints get a bonus from crafting skill, and by going all in on that stat you can get some noticable increases.  There is a random factor to the blueprint bonus, so some saddles will come out better than others, i.e. if you have a 60 armor blueprint most of your saddles might come out at 70 to 75 or so. This is also the time to craft other blueprint gear, and to create custom recipes (which also get a bonus based on crafting skill).  Then you take another mindwipe to get back to normal stats after.  

 

[Vytov]

One more question, if I breed a tamed dino (Argy in this case) and I tamed it at level 4 (Very desperate) but I got some notes and its at level 61 will the traits of that argy pass down or should I get a new one at around level 25-30? How does that work?

[Griffin998]

Levels you pump in do not make a difference during breeding (incredibly important) Only mutations, natural stats points, and mutagen levels on the og non-bred parent will pass down. Nothing else really makes much of a difference. Hope that helped!

Good luck boss running, and happy ARKing!

[Vytov]

Thank you!

[Vytov]

Wait... Then would it be worth it for me to get a new argentavis in general if the one I tamed started at level 4 but I got it to 61? Or should I just keep it?

[Dreadcthulhu]

Yes, getting a higher level argy or three before breeding would make a notable difference.  Argentavis are pretty easy to tame, and are the sort of creature you will want a backup of anyways.  My general advice for any kind of creature you plan on using outside of your base, is that you should tame a good breeding pair at minimum, that way when stuff happens (like surprise microraptor when you are leading a giga into a trap) you can just mate the parents again. 

[Vytov]

Ok thank you