Undecided on the difficulty, should I go with max wild levels at 300 or 600?

[YamiJustinX]

I am basically using a combo of official rates + the small tribe server settings for breeding. I have the Override Difficulty setting at 10, meaning creatures up to level 300 can appear. But part of me wants to try up to 600, because it would be more challenging. Or would that make bosses pointless? I am mostly single player with like 1-2 other people who might play, so I want the boss fights to be doable without spending months breeding over and over.

[YamiJustinX]

I did more thinking/research and decided to leave it at Override Difficulty 10. That way the highest wild creatures I can find (not counting Tek) are 300. After using Dododex I realized there was way too large of a level gap between a wild dino and tamed. For instance, a kibble-fed level 600 raptor would gain 286 levels alone from the taming process. On top of that I was finding ascendant level gear in green/blue drops, including a Flak Gauntlet worth 750 armor lol.

[GrumpyBear]

Higher levels is actually not more difficult.  They just take longer to tame.  The game is far more difficult when you keep the settings super low.   With out much stamina, the tames will have a harder time surviving longer battles.   A super high level tame will never feel much pain from anything in game.

[YamiJustinX]

I figured. But as I am basically soloing this, I need those higher tames for boss fights

[Pipinghot]

3 hours ago, YamiJustinX said:

I figured. But as I am basically soloing this, I need those higher tames for boss fights

Boss fights are automatically easier when you're using solo settings. Boss difficulty is different in solo than it is on Official/Unofficial/Dedicated servers.

[YamiJustinX]

47 minutes ago, Pipinghot said:

Boss fights are automatically easier when you're using solo settings. Boss difficulty is different in solo than it is on Official/Unofficial/Dedicated servers.

I should mention that I am not doing single player or using that Single Player Settings. It's a regular server just with a higher wild dino level max of 300.

[YamiJustinX]

Would it be considered cheating to allow wild creatures spawn at levels up to 600? I don't have the time to do dozens of hours of cross breeding. But I noticed loot scales crazily on Difficulty Offset 20. 

[invincibleqc]

1 hour ago, YamiJustinX said:

Would it be considered cheating to allow wild creatures spawn at levels up to 600? I don't have the time to do dozens of hours of cross breeding. But I noticed loot scales crazily on Difficulty Offset 20. 

Increasing the difficulty will also proportionally scale the health/damage of bosses so having the ability to tame higher creatures will not really help. In any case, I would not recommend to go above 10 because anything higher highly increase the chance of stats overflowing as demonstrated there:

Basically, if wild creatures spawn up to level 600, they can basically be tamed up to level 900 which increase the chance of a single stat getting more than 255 points distributed into it, etc.

If you want to make the bosses easier, I would rather suggest you decrease their outputted damage. To do so, you can use the following config:

The specific classes for other maps can be found in the following dump:

 

[YamiJustinX]

I thought I read somewhere that the bosses are separate from the difficulty offset.

I will lower it back to 300 again, sigh. I like the idea of Super Dinos but don't have dozens of tribesmates to help make it happen.

Maybe there is a mod to stop the 255 stat overflow?

I def don't wanna use ini settings or tweaks to manually make the bosses easier.

[Griffin998]

19 hours ago, YamiJustinX said:

Would it be considered cheating to allow wild creatures spawn at levels up to 600

I mean, if you're alone, then cheating is by your definition. Also, you can make loot worse (I think) so you can balance the loot crate drop quality.

[Griffin998]

They are actually connected to difficulty settings.

[YamiJustinX]

Yeah, I noticed the loot scale is 1000% when the difficulty offset is at 20. At that point you often find ascendant level saddles at crazy numbers like 155 saddles for a dinosaur or flak armor @ 750

 

I'm still undecided. What is still unclear to me is if the bosses from all the maps scale with your difficulty? Because I thought their difficulty was based on being Gamma, Beta, or Alpha.

When I briefly had the difficulty at 20, a level 540 raptor almost killed my level 80 bronto. Only due to the knockback effect of the tail swipe did my bronto survive.

What levels do people often take with them in boss fights?

[GrumpyBear]

6 hours ago, YamiJustinX said:

Yeah, I noticed the loot scale is 1000% when the difficulty offset is at 20. At that point you often find ascendant level saddles at crazy numbers like 155 saddles for a dinosaur or flak armor @ 750

 

I'm still undecided. What is still unclear to me is if the bosses from all the maps scale with your difficulty? Because I thought their difficulty was based on being Gamma, Beta, or Alpha.

When I briefly had the difficulty at 20, a level 540 raptor almost killed my level 80 bronto. Only due to the knockback effect of the tail swipe did my bronto survive.

What levels do people often take with them in boss fights?

It just depends on the boss, and how you want to approach the boss.  THey don't all need monster tames to beat the alphas, and some can be beaten with no tames at all.

 

FOr example, you could beat brood w/ a shotgun and a procoptodon of average stature pointed in HP.   Jump to top of middle of the area, and shoot from above. 

Rockwell on aberration can be beaten with a tek suit and a shotgun.   Hover in the air, and shoot from above, just move around a little to avoid the shots from the reapers below.

Dragon can be beaten w/ just an imprinted deino w/ super high hp and 600% melee, feed it wyverns milk and you can do it w/out a mated pair.   A magma can be used, but it takes a longer time and has to be close to top stat status on officials.

Ape , everyone just throws teams of rexes w/ a yuti.   We beat him back in the day w/ just 700% melee base before imprint.  I'm not sure if that still is enough on official.  

People use shadowmanes too, I have no idea how they fair outside of RockwellPrime on Gen2 - I'd assume they murder every other boss too.

[Pipinghot]

On 11/1/2022 at 1:39 AM, YamiJustinX said:

I should mention that I am not doing single player or using that Single Player Settings. It's a regular server just with a higher wild dino level max of 300.

Whoops, sorry about that, for some reason I thought you had said you're on SP.

[Pipinghot]

On 11/1/2022 at 6:21 PM, YamiJustinX said:

Would it be considered cheating to allow wild creatures spawn at levels up to 600? I don't have the time to do dozens of hours of cross breeding. But I noticed loot scales crazily on Difficulty Offset 20. 

There's no such thing as cheating on your own personal server.

This is one of the things that WC got really, really right. When you play game on your own, it should be entirely up to you how hard or easy you want to make it, how much or how little time you want to spend playing the game so that you enjoy it. Games (and by extension their developers) that refuse to support mods or difficulty settings are a bunch of knuckleheads. Any time we're playing against other players then it's important that everyone has to play with the same restrictions, and it's important to stop cheaters, but on your server it's your game and no one can tell you how you should play it. This is entertainment, not work. Authors don't tell you how to read their book, directors don't tell you how to watch a movie, and game devs shouldn't try to tell you how to play a game as long as you're playing it solo and not trying to pretend that you're better than other players.

Mind you, if you ever want to play on Official servers then you don't want to make your private server too easy, otherwise the transition to playing on Official will be mighty painful. But even that is only intended to make the game more enjoyable for you if you ever want to play Official, it has noting to do with rules or cheating. It's your server, it's your game, enjoy it however you want to, have fun.

[Pipinghot]

On 11/1/2022 at 8:23 PM, YamiJustinX said:

I will lower it back to 300 again, sigh. I like the idea of Super Dinos but don't have dozens of tribesmates to help make it happen.

You can still have super dinos, you would just do it a bit differently. Here are a couple of options:

1) Use admin commands to spawn in saddles or saddle blueprints until you get a really good one that has a reasonable cost in materials. Some blueprints cost much more than they're worth to manufacture.

2) Use a mod that includes a blueprint maker, this lets you create blueprints from the saddles that you find from loot drops. It can be pretty painful when you find a really good saddle but the game doesn't let you make blueprints from it. Having a blueprint maker may be all you need to get good saddles while keeping the game fun.

3) Once you've done all your taming and your breeding, when you're ready to do your boss fights, use admin commands to max out the levels on your final generation just before you do the boss fight, which means you can give them the best stats possible, which is pretty much what "super dinos" are. You will have to decide whether you think that's cheating or whether you just think it's a better use of your game time so you can spend more of your time doing the parts of the game you enjoy more.

4) You can use mods and/or admin commands to imprint animals. Imprinting is a an annoying time sink which to some degree makes sense on Official servers because some people are willing to spend the extra time to have 'the best' dinos and some people aren't. But on a private server, you get to decide whether it's worth your time and/or fun, or whether you just want to use a mod or a command to take care of it.

Obviously you don't want to make the game too easy, because then it loses all sense of being challenging and becomes boring, but those decisions are up to you. Use whatever mods/settings/commands you want to in order to make your server fun for you.

On 11/1/2022 at 8:23 PM, YamiJustinX said:

Maybe there is a mod to stop the 255 stat overflow?

As far as I know there isn't, or at least I've never heard of one.

On 11/1/2022 at 8:23 PM, YamiJustinX said:

I def don't wanna use ini settings or tweaks to manually make the bosses easier.

Which is your right to chose, it's your server.

[prosans]

how are you doing this wat command?
 

[Griffin998]

19 hours ago, YamiJustinX said:

What levels do people often take with them in boss fights?

As for that, it really depends on how many muts and how confident a person is. I've seen lvl 930 hyper mutated wyverns (lightning, 600+ damage per tick, 1000+max melee per tick breath-go check out Syntac's channel). 40k health, no levels. It really depends on your choice of creature. Depends on the saddle too. Ofc, doesn't really matter for king titan and dragon, since with the king titan is going to murderize your hypermutated lvl 1000 gigas anyway, and the dragon's fire ignores armor anyway. Syntac's boss rexes had 40k health or something, and did 1000+ damage (all on max lvl 180 or difficulty 6). Honestly, there isn't really a limit. You can go max health and melee, or you can just go for bred imprinted tames. It really depends on you. 

Good luck, and happy ARKing!

[Griffin998]

8 hours ago, Pipinghot said:

Use a mod that includes a blueprint maker

I personally have a suggestion. Try ARK Additions. It's one of the best mods out there, and it's got a creature that can turn items into blueprints (the helicoprion). Except there is a chance it will fail, so if you don't mind that, try it out. It's also got lots of other super cool creatures, so check it out anyway.

[Griffin998]

13 hours ago, GrumpyBear said:

I'd assume they murder every other boss too.

About right. Shadowmanes are like mini gigas. They're actually considered more powerful in many cases, since they're smaller, faster, have better armor right off the bat, better stam (but then, everything has better stam than gigas), hydration buff, roar, mate boost, yuty boost...I could go on and on. The only bosses they will have a little bit of trouble with is maybe dragon and king titan. Everyone knows about the King of Shadows, but the Dragon ignores armor, and Shadowmanes are technically classed as carnivores, so they take full damage from fire. But pretty much every other boss, they absolutely shred. Oh, and thornmail too.

[Griffin998]

20 hours ago, YamiJustinX said:

I'm still undecided. What is still unclear to me is if the bosses from all the maps scale with your difficulty? Because I thought their difficulty was based on being Gamma, Beta, or Alpha.

Partially correct. Gamma is easier than beta, and beta is easier than alpha, and alpha is toughest of all. But a difficulty 20 gamma broodmother would probably easily be more powerful than a difficulty 1 or 2 broodmother. Same for say, chunky monkey. Not so sure about The King of Shadows, since it's so op already, but I'd say most other bosses scale.

Good luck bossing, and happy ARKing!

[YamiJustinX]

Thanks for all the insight. Anyone have a recommended guide or video on breeding strats? I know mine are incorrect because I would just breed the best to the best lol

[Joebl0w13]

14 minutes ago, YamiJustinX said:

Thanks for all the insight. Anyone have a recommended guide or video on breeding strats? I know mine are incorrect because I would just breed the best to the best lol

 

[YamiJustinX]

I just can't silence the urge to go to 600 lmao. If the bosses scale with difficulty then maybe the challenge will remain. I work full time so is it possible to breed for mutations and get them quickly? I will watch that video.

[Pipinghot]

4 hours ago, YamiJustinX said:

I work full time so is it possible to breed for mutations and get them quickly?

Yikes no! Absolutely not.

Breeding, mutations, imprinting and boss fights are all end-game activities which, like end-game activities in most games, are a designed to be a large time sink. When you consider that it's a game that was originally designed to be played by tribes that can include many people this all makes sense, it would be silly to design a game that a 10-person tribe can beat in a couple of months, as a game developer you want long-term game play for a survival game like this. You can get around this basic design through the use of mods and admin commands, but it will probably benefit you if you do most things in the game at least once or twice without using mod or admin commands.

Until you know how long it takes to to activities in ARK, starting with taming, collecting poop/eggs, cultivating crops, farming materials, building bases... etc. You won't know how much you will be able to modify the game while keeping it fun. If you make the game too easy you're going to find yourself getting bored and wondering where the challenge is, so it helps to know what the "default" game looks like.