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Why are my bred dinos gaining so much Speed?


BobInSeattle

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I am breeding two Baryonyx. Mother is level 220 and has 122.4% speed as her base speed stat. Father is level 336 and has 120% as his base speed stat.

Every time I mate these two, the hatched baby starts off with a normal speed apparently derived from one of the parents. As soon as they level up, however, their speed jumps up to 1100%, rendering them unmanageable and worthless. I unclaim, destroy and start over. Rinse and repeat, always goes immediately to 1100%.

I run my own private server and have tweaked the PerLevelStatMultiplier for Tamed dinos, leaving the multiplier for speed at 1.0, which I believe was the default. Do I need to adjust this down, to say 0.25 to get a modest increase? Since this is a percentage multiplier, I would expect that to DECREASE the speed, which is not what I want. I expected that setting that value to 1.0 would leave the speed at its base value and let me add points as desired. But no matter where I set this value, I keep getting babies with 1100% speed.

I'd appreciate any insights or suggestions on how to achieve my goal of raising the significant stats (Health, Stamina, Melee) and leaving speed alone.

Thanks

EDIT: I should point out that the hatched baby starts off with reasonable stats. As soon as the first level occurs and I put in any one point, Speed immediately goes from 120% to 1120%. Also, it appears my hosting service editor is not editing the correct file, so I'm doing it manually directly on the controlling Game.ini file.

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Honestly I think single player settings check box is plenty enough boost to all tames to make things work well, adjusting any of the other settings really does kick everying in the pants. I tried adjusting the health and melee settings for dino's once so I didn't have to mate anything, and well.....a dire wolf with levels could solo the gamma brood mother. x.x Killed the game for me, have never done it again since and highly would not recommend messing with that stuff.

As for any true advice on the matter to figure out what is going on. Try to reset everything to default, rebreed and see what the stats are.

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I'm with @wizard03.  Changing the values you get for points really undermines breeding.  Unless you want to play and not breed at all, then that is the best way to skip that process.   With that in mind, its not a horrible idea if you want to just dive into the story more than the breeding mechanics which can be all consuming.

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I totally hear you guys and I have always takes that same approach to games. For a variety of reasons, my wife and I are approaching this one with a somewhat different attitude. For one thing, we're very new to the game and, frankly, it's quite overwhelming to the new player with zero exposure. On the other hand, I'm typically a crafter in games and I love to get down into the weeds with complex systems, so I'm attracted to the intricacy of the breeding system. But not enough to invest the kind of time and energy needed to learn all of the ins and outs of mutation stacking, etc. at a time when I'm not sure how long we're going to be playing this before Ark 2 comes out.  I was very reluctant to change any of the server settings because I know how that can ruin a game, I've been there. Part of our thinking here is that with Ark 2 is coming out sometime this year apparently, we plan to save all our time and energy investment for that experience, this is more of a training ground to have some fun while experiencing some of the technical side of breeding, enough to understand the basics. 

So with that in mind, and keeping in mind that admin commands are given to us for the purpose of tailoring the game to how we want to play it, after trying unsuccessfully to capture a wild Baryonyx male to partner with the one female I tamed, and experiencing a *great deal* of frustration with that experience, we decided that wasn't fun and so I spawned in a male and mated that with my tamed female. At the time I captured the female I had the settings altered to give significant boosts to several stats, including Speed, because at that time we were mostly playing around with Flyers (Argents, Pteranodons, etc.) and we wanted them to go faster. I suspect that what is happening here is that the female I tamed  inherited those settings and every egg she lays is carrying with it a predetermined unnatural boost to speed, so that every hatchling I raise from it winds up getting to 1120% speed at the moment I first put points into it. That's my theory anyway, I could be totally wrong of course, and I welcome any corrections or suggestions.

That said, after reverting all the settings back to normal I spawned in this new Male Baryonyx and mated it with my existing female and still the babies are getting 1120% Speed as soon as I put points into them. This is what leads me to believe that the female is tainted and I need to start over completely from scratch. I'm going to unclaim her, spawn in a new one under the new settings and see if her joint offspring with my male produce an unboosted chlid.

Does all this make sense, or am I completely offbase?

 

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well, I would do the same thing.. also it remains as an experience and as a test. later you will have better understood how it works and you are always in time to leave them aside and try again to capture other wild ones to confirm that everything works and is fixed. PS: you're new but it soon becomes clear that you have excellent playing and learning qualities, I'm sure you'll get used to this game very quickly and you'll have even more fun than you expected ;)

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1 hour ago, BobInSeattle said:

I totally hear you guys and I have always takes that same approach to games. For a variety of reasons, my wife and I are approaching this one with a somewhat different attitude. For one thing, we're very new to the game and, frankly, it's quite overwhelming to the new player with zero exposure. On the other hand, I'm typically a crafter in games and I love to get down into the weeds with complex systems, so I'm attracted to the intricacy of the breeding system.

My opinion is that tweaking the PerLevelStatMultiplier is both a waste of time and in all likelyhood counter-productive as you could easily hose the game balance on your server without realizing (until after the fact) that you've made the boss fights too easy or too hard for yourself. In addition to this big factor, once you start tweaking the PerLevelStatMultiplier you're pretty much on your own for deciphering any wonky results you get. Every person who tweaks them will get unique results based on the tweaks they've made, which makes it darned hard for anyone to help you unravel any issues that result.

I would like to suggest a different approach to you, which I think will solve multiple problems for you. My suggestion would be to undo those changes and, instead, modify the four settings related to breeding times (MatingIntervalMultiplier, MatingSpeedMultiplier, EggHatchSpeedMultiplier, BabyMatureSpeedMultiplier). There are multiple benefits to doing it this way, which I'll outline after showing you the settings.

 

1) MatingIntervalMultiplier=1.0   (the smaller this number is, the less time in between matings. The default time is a randomized time in the 18-48 hour range. This value is just a simple multiplier. If you set this to 0.5 the interval will be 9-24 hours, if you set it to 1.5 the interval will be 27-72 hours.

2) MatingSpeedMultiplier=1.0   (the larger the number, the faster they will mate.)

3) EggHatchSpeedMultiplier=1.0   (this also applies to the gestation period for live bearers. Again, the higher the number the faster the hatching time / gestation time. If you set this fast enough you avoid having to stand around waiting to pick up eggs or claim babies or, even worse, setting a timer to log into the game when the baby is about to be hatchedborn.

4) BabyMatureSpeedMultiplier=1.0   (the higher the faster. I'm assuming you've looked at the wiki that shows you the mature speeds for various species, you can do the simple multiplication for the value you use to see how much you're speeding up maturation.)

 

These are the settings we use on my server when we're doing serious breeding:

1) MatingIntervalMultiplier=0.005   (this results in mating intervals from 324 seconds to 864 seconds ( 5.4 minutes to 14.4 minutes). This is a long enough period of time that if you're only breeding a couple of animals you have time to evaluate the offspring to decide whether you want ot keep them, and just about the time you're done making your decision the parents will be ready to mate again.
2) MatingSpeedMultiplier=40.0   (this makes the mating speed fast enough that you have just enough time to cancel mating if you set a wrong animal to making, but you don't have to stand around waiting for them to finish).
3) EggHatchSpeedMultiplier=40.0   (we like this especially for live bearers, it makes them fast enough that we're not waiting too long for births, but just slow enough that we don't have babies wandering around waiting to be claimed and accidentally starving. A castorides, for example, has a default gestation of 7 hours, 56 minutes, with this setting of 40.0 the gestation period is 11.9 minutes)
4) BabyMatureSpeedMultiplier=100.0   (Tired of endless meat & berry runs? Speed up maturing. Using the Rex as a reference point, the default time from egg hatching to fully mature adult is 3 days, 20 hours, 35 minutes. That's a lot of meat farming. With this value our rex's mature in just under 56 minutes.

 

Benefits of this approach:

1) Share common knowledge base with everyone on these forums. A level 150 animal on our server it exactly like a 150 animal on any other server. Likewise after we level them up, our animals look just like everyone else's, we all share a common frame of reference for mathematical discussions.

2) Doesn't affect mutations in any way. If we really wanted to breed specifically for mutations (which we've never done, by the way) then our mutated breeding lines would look just like everyone else's, we'd just be able to do it faster.

3) Time management. Oh boy, time management. In my view, the default times for breeding in ARK are understandable for Official servers, but one of big reasons we started a private server to begin with is that we want to play the game on our schedule rather than having to schedule our lives around the game. Breeding is a huge time sink on Official server, and that makes sense when you think about the number of people breeding and interacting with each other. On a private server it doesn't make any sense as far as I'm concerned. Rather than having to set alarms, log in when the game needs us to, spend hours and hours (and hours) farming meat and berries) we have the ability to complete breeding programs in a matter of a few days to a couple of weeks rather than having it stretch out over loooong periods of time. Creating a good bloodline still takes a lot of work, we have to mate parents with deliberate intent and we have to evaluate al of the babies to see which ones will go on to the next generation, but this way we're spending our time on managing the bloodlines rather than many hours of tedious busy-work.

1 hour ago, BobInSeattle said:

But not enough to invest the kind of time and energy needed to learn all of the ins and outs of mutation stacking, etc. at a time when I'm not sure how long we're going to be playing this before Ark 2 comes out.

I can tell you that on our private server, with default settings for levels, taming bonuses, and boss difficulty, we've never felt the need to do extra work on mutations. One of our guys did it once, just for fun, because he wanted to see what argy's with 50 mutations look like ( hint: hugely overpowered is what they look like :) ) but we've never deliberately stacked mutations for bosses. Instead we focus on taming a bunch of animals until we get the stats we want, and then the process of merging those animals into a good bloodline can be done efficiently. I would much rather tame 20 extra rexes looking for a good stats in HP & Melee than to spend time managing a herd of breeders until I stack up mutations. Sometimes we get lucky with a mutation here and there, which slightly extends the amount of time it takes to create our finished bloodline, but we never pursue mutations intentionally, and our boss fighter dinos have been strong enough on every map we've done.

1 hour ago, BobInSeattle said:

at a time when I'm not sure how long we're going to be playing this before Ark 2 comes out.

In my mind that's another reason to speed up your breeding settings rather than tweaking a bunch of stats.

1 hour ago, BobInSeattle said:

this is more of a training ground to have some fun while experiencing some of the technical side of breeding, enough to understand the basics.

I suggest for your consideration that this is what my suggested approach will accomplish for you. You'll still need to wrap your heads around the breeding process, but you won't waste tons of time doing mindless busy work nor waste time with mutations that you don't need.

1 hour ago, BobInSeattle said:

So with that in mind, and keeping in mind that admin commands are given to us for the purpose of tailoring the game to how we want to play it, after trying unsuccessfully to capture a wild Baryonyx male to partner with the one female I tamed, and experiencing a *great deal* of frustration with that experience, we decided that wasn't fun and so I spawned in a male and mated that with my tamed female.

Taming pens, my friend, taming pens. Once you've build 3-4 taming pens you'll completely get the hang of it and they'll make your taming experiences so much better. You can even tweak your taming settings so that the taming process is a bit less boring and you don't need quite so many resources.

On my server we use a taming multiplier of x2.5, which gives us what we feel is just the right amount of risk of something hostile walking up and ruining our day, but not so much of a time sink that it becomes super boring to do a lot of taming.

1 hour ago, BobInSeattle said:

I suspect that what is happening here is that the female I tamed  inherited those settings and every egg she lays is carrying with it a predetermined unnatural boost to speed, so that every hatchling I raise from it winds up getting to 1120% speed at the moment I first put points into it. That's my theory anyway, I could be totally wrong of course, and I welcome any corrections or suggestions.

As I read that part of your paragraph, all I heard was a buzzing sound as the blood rushed to my ears and I started chanting "La la la I can't hear you". ;) Which is to say, I have no idea whether your tweaks caused this issue for you, hopefully someone else has an answer for you or maybe you modify your approach and just call a "do over" on your bary's.

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4 hours ago, Pipinghot said:

[Much good advice ...]

Dear Pipinghot,

You've been very helpful and we really appreciate it.

Ok, I'm persuaded. I am going to take your suggestion and implement the changes to breeding times and (if possible) revert everything else back to the defaults. Here's my problem: I can't figure out how to restore the default values. We rent our server from HostHavoc which provides some editing tools that manipulate the config files. But I'm presented with a long list of settings and the ability to set whatever values I want for each of them, without any indication of what the defaults are and no readily apparent ability to reset them all to defaults.

I tried deleting the 2 config files from the HostHavoc server using their file manager, but on the restart it appears that they pulled a backup of my old config files and the same settings are still present. Do you know of any shortcut way of restoring to all the defaults, short of going line-by-line from the Wiki entries?

Thanks again

EDIT: Searching through both config files, there is no "MatingSpeedMultiplier" Perhaps I should add that line using Notepad?

EDIT: Never mind, I just went to the Wiki and set all values to defaults, and then added your suggestions.

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By the way, Pipinghot, what do you mean by "Taming pens"? Do you mean back at my base (on Herbivore island) or mobile pens out in the world? So far we've been chasing down dinos out in the wild and knocking them out there. For Argies we built traps, but other than that, we don't have an easy way to get dinos back to our base other than on our raft.

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1 hour ago, BobInSeattle said:

By the way, Pipinghot, what do you mean by "Taming pens"? .............

. .....For Argies we built traps.....

Taming pens = Traps ((build with structures, or object in some cases))

 A good idea (for start-game) is to build a trap onboard to a Raft, but this mobile trap have the limit that can to be used only near a beach or in rivers.

 

 

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Ah ok. I have a trap I built on a raft specifically for that purpose and it was intended for Baryonyx, so riverways and beaches are good. I'll have to give it a test. So far, the only Baryonyx we caught was on foot amid some pretty nasty stuff, but we did get away with a female 138. Haven't been able to find her a suitable mate yet. I'll work on getting some practice with the raft.

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13 hours ago, BobInSeattle said:

Does all this make sense, or am I completely offbase?

Kinda, but first thing is first, ark 2.
While it was suggested that ark 2 was going to be released this year, there has been some seriouse radio silence on that matter. Id suspect it might be very late this year, or pushed back again to next year. Don't worry too much about it.
Next, trying to catch wild baryonx. Id strongly suggest using a simple drop trap. This is a single foundation, four doorways for walls, and a single ramp. Could be made of wood if two of you are playing, just make sure to bring enough arrows for both of you to shoot. Id also suggest an extra sleeping bag, and two or three stacks of fish meat since they only eat fish.
Find a bary, build box trap away from said bary, add ramp towards bary going up one wall, one runs towards bary and take a shot with bow n tranq arrow, then after hitting him ,run back towards the trap, up the ramp, and out the doorway when he gets to you......Easy clap.

However as for admin spawning, Iv noticed problems that can occure there too. Might wanna try trapping, just in case.
_--------------------------------------------------

Just noticed the everything after that post, looks like your on track. Good luck out there!

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12 hours ago, Pipinghot said:

My opinion is that tweaking the PerLevelStatMultiplier is both a waste of time and in all likelyhood counter-productive as you could easily hose the game balance on your server without realizing (until after the fact) that you've made the boss fights too easy or too hard for yourself. In addition to this big factor, once you start tweaking the PerLevelStatMultiplier you're pretty much on your own for deciphering any wonky results you get. Every person who tweaks them will get unique results based on the tweaks they've made, which makes it darned hard for anyone to help you unravel any issues that result.

I would like to suggest a different approach to you, which I think will solve multiple problems for you. My suggestion would be to undo those changes and, instead, modify the four settings related to breeding times (MatingIntervalMultiplier, MatingSpeedMultiplier, EggHatchSpeedMultiplier, BabyMatureSpeedMultiplier). There are multiple benefits to doing it this way, which I'll outline after showing you the settings.

 

1) MatingIntervalMultiplier=1.0   (the smaller this number is, the less time in between matings. The default time is a randomized time in the 18-48 hour range. This value is just a simple multiplier. If you set this to 0.5 the interval will be 9-24 hours, if you set it to 1.5 the interval will be 27-72 hours.

2) MatingSpeedMultiplier=1.0   (the larger the number, the faster they will mate.)

3) EggHatchSpeedMultiplier=1.0   (this also applies to the gestation period for live bearers. Again, the higher the number the faster the hatching time / gestation time. If you set this fast enough you avoid having to stand around waiting to pick up eggs or claim babies or, even worse, setting a timer to log into the game when the baby is about to be hatchedborn.

4) BabyMatureSpeedMultiplier=1.0   (the higher the faster. I'm assuming you've looked at the wiki that shows you the mature speeds for various species, you can do the simple multiplication for the value you use to see how much you're speeding up maturation.)

 

These are the settings we use on my server when we're doing serious breeding:

1) MatingIntervalMultiplier=0.005   (this results in mating intervals from 324 seconds to 864 seconds ( 5.4 minutes to 14.4 minutes). This is a long enough period of time that if you're only breeding a couple of animals you have time to evaluate the offspring to decide whether you want ot keep them, and just about the time you're done making your decision the parents will be ready to mate again.
2) MatingSpeedMultiplier=40.0   (this makes the mating speed fast enough that you have just enough time to cancel mating if you set a wrong animal to making, but you don't have to stand around waiting for them to finish).
3) EggHatchSpeedMultiplier=40.0   (we like this especially for live bearers, it makes them fast enough that we're not waiting too long for births, but just slow enough that we don't have babies wandering around waiting to be claimed and accidentally starving. A castorides, for example, has a default gestation of 7 hours, 56 minutes, with this setting of 40.0 the gestation period is 11.9 minutes)
4) BabyMatureSpeedMultiplier=100.0   (Tired of endless meat & berry runs? Speed up maturing. Using the Rex as a reference point, the default time from egg hatching to fully mature adult is 3 days, 20 hours, 35 minutes. That's a lot of meat farming. With this value our rex's mature in just under 56 minutes.

 

Benefits of this approach:

1) Share common knowledge base with everyone on these forums. A level 150 animal on our server it exactly like a 150 animal on any other server. Likewise after we level them up, our animals look just like everyone else's, we all share a common frame of reference for mathematical discussions.

2) Doesn't affect mutations in any way. If we really wanted to breed specifically for mutations (which we've never done, by the way) then our mutated breeding lines would look just like everyone else's, we'd just be able to do it faster.

3) Time management. Oh boy, time management. In my view, the default times for breeding in ARK are understandable for Official servers, but one of big reasons we started a private server to begin with is that we want to play the game on our schedule rather than having to schedule our lives around the game. Breeding is a huge time sink on Official server, and that makes sense when you think about the number of people breeding and interacting with each other. On a private server it doesn't make any sense as far as I'm concerned. Rather than having to set alarms, log in when the game needs us to, spend hours and hours (and hours) farming meat and berries) we have the ability to complete breeding programs in a matter of a few days to a couple of weeks rather than having it stretch out over loooong periods of time. Creating a good bloodline still takes a lot of work, we have to mate parents with deliberate intent and we have to evaluate al of the babies to see which ones will go on to the next generation, but this way we're spending our time on managing the bloodlines rather than many hours of tedious busy-work.

I can tell you that on our private server, with default settings for levels, taming bonuses, and boss difficulty, we've never felt the need to do extra work on mutations. One of our guys did it once, just for fun, because he wanted to see what argy's with 50 mutations look like ( hint: hugely overpowered is what they look like :) ) but we've never deliberately stacked mutations for bosses. Instead we focus on taming a bunch of animals until we get the stats we want, and then the process of merging those animals into a good bloodline can be done efficiently. I would much rather tame 20 extra rexes looking for a good stats in HP & Melee than to spend time managing a herd of breeders until I stack up mutations. Sometimes we get lucky with a mutation here and there, which slightly extends the amount of time it takes to create our finished bloodline, but we never pursue mutations intentionally, and our boss fighter dinos have been strong enough on every map we've done.

In my mind that's another reason to speed up your breeding settings rather than tweaking a bunch of stats.

I suggest for your consideration that this is what my suggested approach will accomplish for you. You'll still need to wrap your heads around the breeding process, but you won't waste tons of time doing mindless busy work nor waste time with mutations that you don't need.

Taming pens, my friend, taming pens. Once you've build 3-4 taming pens you'll completely get the hang of it and they'll make your taming experiences so much better. You can even tweak your taming settings so that the taming process is a bit less boring and you don't need quite so many resources.

On my server we use a taming multiplier of x2.5, which gives us what we feel is just the right amount of risk of something hostile walking up and ruining our day, but not so much of a time sink that it becomes super boring to do a lot of taming.

As I read that part of your paragraph, all I heard was a buzzing sound as the blood rushed to my ears and I started chanting "La la la I can't hear you". ;) Which is to say, I have no idea whether your tweaks caused this issue for you, hopefully someone else has an answer for you or maybe you modify your approach and just call a "do over" on your bary's.

Unimpressed Sea GIF by SpongeBob SquarePantsWell

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5 hours ago, BobInSeattle said:

By the way, Pipinghot, what do you mean by "Taming pens"? Do you mean back at my base (on Herbivore island) or mobile pens out in the world? So far we've been chasing down dinos out in the wild and knocking them out there. For Argies we built traps, but other than that, we don't have an easy way to get dinos back to our base other than on our raft.

Pen = trap, they're synonymous.

For ground animals they can be more simple than the argy traps.  Put down a foundation(s), doorframes and/or walls, and a ramp on one side. Shoot the animal with a tranq dart to get it to chase you into the trap, you run out the other side through a doorframe.
 

Taming pen for a doedicurus/anky.  Make bigger as needed for larger animals. If you're in an area with lots of hostile stuff, you put doors in the doorframes. Open the doors before luring your game into the pen, knock them out, then close all the doors and remove the bottom ramp so nothing can attack them in the pen while they're taming up.

Also, if you're building a larger pen I prefer to use a pillars & ceilings rather than foundations as the base of the pen, rather than foundations. This makes the pen slightly cheaper in materials and is less likely to interfere with any spawn points in the vicinity.

image.png

 

 

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Ok, I've been having fun building a variety of effective traps. The one problem I've had is that I built a beautiful raft trap that I was intending to pull right up to the beach or down a river and then go hunt down my prey. Problem is, I got hit by the Leeds and he 1-shotted my raft and everything on it. :(   Then I built another one, this one even better than the last, and then Leeds did it again. Not sure I'm going to build another, I rather like the idea of carrying around materials for an on-the-spot trap as opportunities arise.

Thanks again for your patient and very helpful replies.

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16 hours ago, BobInSeattle said:

Ok, I've been having fun building a variety of effective traps. The one problem I've had is that I built a beautiful raft trap that I was intending to pull right up to the beach or down a river and then go hunt down my prey. Problem is, I got hit by the Leeds and he 1-shotted my raft and everything on it. :(   Then I built another one, this one even better than the last, and then Leeds did it again. Not sure I'm going to build another, I rather like the idea of carrying around materials for an on-the-spot trap as opportunities arise.

Thanks again for your patient and very helpful replies.

keep near the beach, next to the shallowest parts. Leeds are a deep water creature and can't get close to shore

 

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16 hours ago, BobInSeattle said:

Problem is, I got hit by the Leeds and he 1-shotted my raft and everything on it. :(   Then I built another one, this one even better than the last, and then Leeds did it again. Not sure I'm going to build another, I rather like the idea of carrying around materials for an on-the-spot trap as opportunities arise.

Leeds live in the deep water, but to be fair three are some areas that get deep very quickly as you move offshore. As you can see from the spawn map, all around herbivore island is dangerous for rafts. Having said that, as long as you hug the shoreline you should be safe almost everywhere else on the map.

https://ark.wiki.gg/wiki/Spawn_Map/The_Island?creature=Alpha+Leedsichthys

 

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