I dont really know what to do next , pls help!

[Paulitaut]

Ive reached kind of a roadblock , i just reached lvl 80 on the island (this is my first playthrough in the whole game btw) and idk what to do next , ive tamed 15+ different dinos ranging from ankylos, therizino , argentavis and others , ive even found some pretty good quality equipment like a uncommon sword that kills carnos in 2-3 hits . Since then i just dont know what to do , i cant find an efficient way to get the things im missing (cemmenting paste and polymer and even chitin because for some reason trilobites are rare in my map) and thats been really bugging me to try progressing , i feel like any dinos that are even just about the size of a rex are gonna insta kill me and my dinos and set my progress back by a lot and that also stops me from doing much so im wondering , is it time for me to try one of the dlcs? i mean ... the max level for the island without killing any bosses is 100 and im pretty close to that or should i try fixing the problems i currently have on the island ?

[GrumpyBear]

Breeding, making an army of tames to start taking on the bosses.  And caving.  going into the caves can get you better equip, saddles, blueprints...  

Have you built shelter that is at least made of stone?  Metal can't be damaged by anything except arthropluria.  Upgrading and making yourself some room to raise your dinos.

[wizard03]

4 hours ago, Paulitaut said:

Ive reached kind of a roadblock , i just reached lvl 80 on the island (this is my first playthrough in the whole game btw) and idk what to do next , ive tamed 15+ different dinos ranging from ankylos, therizino , argentavis and others , ive even found some pretty good quality equipment like a uncommon sword that kills carnos in 2-3 hits . Since then i just dont know what to do , i cant find an efficient way to get the things im missing (cemmenting paste and polymer and even chitin because for some reason trilobites are rare in my map) and thats been really bugging me to try progressing , i feel like any dinos that are even just about the size of a rex are gonna insta kill me and my dinos and set my progress back by a lot and that also stops me from doing much so im wondering , is it time for me to try one of the dlcs? i mean ... the max level for the island without killing any bosses is 100 and im pretty close to that or should i try fixing the problems i currently have on the island ?

Cementing paste is always a problem to deal with. You can raid beaver dams, but you might find it better to tame a doedicurous and a megatherium. Meg is for chitin while going through a cave, doed for stone.......Make a chem bench and run both the stone and chitin to make your own paste at max effeciency. Or just keep raiding beaver dams. And the poly can be a problem, but have you considered murdering poor innocent penguins? They give a lot of organic polymer and there are specialty tames that gather larger amounts poly compared to regular tames. Look to the glaciers in the upper western corner of the map.

As for a rex. Trap it!

You can make a really easy drop trap, couple ramps leading up to a box made with stone foundations and stone doorways, rex walks up ramps, falls into trap, cannot get out, use either darts, tranq arrows, or even shocking darts with the highest level crossbow or longneck and it will put him to sleep asap, then just add meat!
Either that or use one of your tames to kill it....If your worried about your tames getting killed, you can either go find a super high level tame and get them to join you for the fight, or you can purposely level up your current tames for that fight....Health and melee only. Nothing else. I constantly use my argy to kill rex's, 2000 health and 500% melee is a good rex killing argy!

========================================================

Above all else, I think you need to start hitting some of the caves right now. The easiest cave is the cave of the hunter. Location is 81, 49. Deep in the jungle and in sort of a trench, the cave entrance is on the southern wall of the ravine. 

Id suggest bringing an "ok" tame for this cave as their will be bugs and snakes. And if you decided to play in the water, there will be dozens and dozens of piranha, and max level Sarco's. Id suggest either using a Thylacoleo, or a baryonix. However if you have a VERY high level anky, you can use it in this cave fairly easily.
 

[DirkInSA]

6 hours ago, Paulitaut said:

i feel like any dinos that are even just about the size of a rex are gonna insta kill me and my dinos and set my progress back by a lot

Tame or breed a flock (like 6 or 8 is adequate) of dimorphs. Anything from level 90 upwards. After these little guys have been "trained up" with some levels in health (aim at at least 1500 health) then there is very little short of a giga on the island that will trouble you. And once you have them, yes as above start probing some of the caves with your flock. You will get more chitin than you know what to do with!

6 fair level dipmorphs will SHRED a top level Rex in next to no time. I would not throw them at an Alpha rex or a Giga until they are well high level, but for day to day they are perfect. Caving with them is a little difficult because they tend to get "stuck" with the dodgy AI path finding through the twisty tunnels. But with patience they will again 100% protect you from the denizens of the caves and get a bunch of insect chitin to boot. As above a barry is a good "companion" mount in the caves with your buzz saw flock.

Despite it decaying over time, organic polly from penguin murder is good (and plentiful). Just make the polly the last thing you do before you build thing x so the decay doesn't hit too bad.    

Last thought - beaver den raids do bring in considerable cementing paste - just stating the obvious here (ignore me if you know this), but you need to empty the den altogether so that it will respwawn .........

[Paulitaut]

8 hours ago, wizard03 said:

Cementing paste is always a problem to deal with. You can raid beaver dams, but you might find it better to tame a doedicurous and a megatherium. Meg is for chitin while going through a cave, doed for stone.......Make a chem bench and run both the stone and chitin to make your own paste at max effeciency. Or just keep raiding beaver dams. And the poly can be a problem, but have you considered murdering poor innocent penguins? They give a lot of organic polymer and there are specialty tames that gather larger amounts poly compared to regular tames. Look to the glaciers in the upper western corner of the map.

As for a rex. Trap it!

You can make a really easy drop trap, couple ramps leading up to a box made with stone foundations and stone doorways, rex walks up ramps, falls into trap, cannot get out, use either darts, tranq arrows, or even shocking darts with the highest level crossbow or longneck and it will put him to sleep asap, then just add meat!
Either that or use one of your tames to kill it....If your worried about your tames getting killed, you can either go find a super high level tame and get them to join you for the fight, or you can purposely level up your current tames for that fight....Health and melee only. Nothing else. I constantly use my argy to kill rex's, 2000 health and 500% melee is a good rex killing argy!

========================================================

Above all else, I think you need to start hitting some of the caves right now. The easiest cave is the cave of the hunter. Location is 81, 49. Deep in the jungle and in sort of a trench, the cave entrance is on the southern wall of the ravine. 

Id suggest bringing an "ok" tame for this cave as their will be bugs and snakes. And if you decided to play in the water, there will be dozens and dozens of piranha, and max level Sarco's. Id suggest either using a Thylacoleo, or a baryonix. However if you have a VERY high level anky, you can use it in this cave fairly easily.
 

Thx for the tips ! I thought i had nothing against a Rex but never thought of trying to tame him! , my only concern is that the only Rex i ever saw , which was a lvl 4 on the volcano , was surrounded by allosauruses and im sure if i try to tame him ill be surrounded by the allos

[Paulitaut]

6 hours ago, DirkInSA said:

Tame or breed a flock (like 6 or 8 is adequate) of dimorphs. Anything from level 90 upwards. After these little guys have been "trained up" with some levels in health (aim at at least 1500 health) then there is very little short of a giga on the island that will trouble you. And once you have them, yes as above start probing some of the caves with your flock. You will get more chitin than you know what to do with!

6 fair level dipmorphs will SHRED a top level Rex in next to no time. I would not throw them at an Alpha rex or a Giga until they are well high level, but for day to day they are perfect. Caving with them is a little difficult because they tend to get "stuck" with the dodgy AI path finding through the twisty tunnels. But with patience they will again 100% protect you from the denizens of the caves and get a bunch of insect chitin to boot. As above a barry is a good "companion" mount in the caves with your buzz saw flock.

Despite it decaying over time, organic polly from penguin murder is good (and plentiful). Just make the polly the last thing you do before you build thing x so the decay doesn't hit too bad.    

Last thought - beaver den raids do bring in considerable cementing paste - just stating the obvious here (ignore me if you know this), but you need to empty the den altogether so that it will respwawn .........

Never thought that dimorphodons were op but hey, ill definetly try it!

[Pipinghot]

15 hours ago, Paulitaut said:

Ive reached kind of a roadblock , i just reached lvl 80 on the island (this is my first playthrough in the whole game btw) and idk what to do next , ive tamed 15+ different dinos ranging from ankylos, therizino , argentavis and others , ive even found some pretty good quality equipment like a uncommon sword that kills carnos in 2-3 hits . Since then i just dont know what to do

Since, as you have discovered, ARK doesn't really give you any guidance for what to do next (No quests! ) the high-level for each map of ARK looks like this:

1) Surviving / Taming

2) Exploring / Taming

3) Building / Taming

4) Get artifacts / Taming & start to learn how breeding works

5) Do boss fights / breeding beforehand is usually necessary (although on Single-player it's possible to do boss fights with wild tames if you've gotten lucky on equipment and saddles).

So, in general, this is the advice I'd give you

1) Find out where the caves are and start to explore them.

* If you're the kind of person who likes to figure things out for yourself then don't take any mounts yet. Set up a little mini-base outside of the caves, go in with equipment that you don't mind losing, and start to get an idea of what types of threats there are in the caves. Of course it needs to be said that you will die a few times and you will lose some equipment that you'll need to replace.

* If losing time and equipment to multiple deaths doesn't sound fun to you, then go to the wiki (use the current wiki ark.wiki.gg, not the old one) and look up the caves on the Island. The information pages for each cave will tell you a lot about what to expect and what tames you might want to have before you go in there.

In the early days of ARK one of the most popular tames for cave exploring were sabers. They're easy to find & tame, they get strong pretty quickly once you start leveling them up, and they're small enough to fit into most areas of the caves while staying mounted. The first time I ever did the "easy cave" on the Island was on a vanilla PvP server, we had 2 people, we each rode a tamed saber (not breeding and no imprinting) and we each had a second saber on follow/neutral. We were able to complete the whole cave the first time we tried it without any dying. You can do it other ways of course, people with good equipment and blueprints can clear that cave solo, on foot, with pump shotgun. But you don't want to try stuff like that until you have more caving experience. This should give you a rough idea of how easy/hard the first couple of caves are.

The process of exploring caves will teach you a lot to add on top of what you already know. Exploring the surface of the map, where you can pretty easily escape most threats, is a different experience from being in a cave where you have to completely pay attention to survival all the time.

2) As you go through the process of exploring caves you might to decide to tame, and start breeding, some additional species. Megatherium, for example are especially good any cave with lots of insects (as long as the cave is big enough to have them in there with you. And you will, of necessity, learn the value of things like gas masks, grappling hooks, and various buffing foods, none of which you need on the surface.

3) You want to use these learning experiences to prepare yourself for being able to do boss fights. Lots of people like to do the Island bosses with rexes, because they are the classic choice for boss fights. But personally I think theri's are superior to rexes in every way for boss fights - they are equally good at fighting, they can be bred up with berries rather than meet so it's much easier to farm food for babies, they have fire resistance which will matter for the dragon boss especially, and they can self-heal during fights if you put sweet cakes in their inventory. The downsides to using theris are that they take longer to tame and they're less common than rexes so it will take longer to game good ones to have a good breeding pool before you start your breeding program. But I think that extra time gets paid back to you once you start breeding and once you go into that boss fight.

15 hours ago, Paulitaut said:

i cant find an efficient way to get the things im missing (cemmenting paste and polymer and even chitin because for some reason trilobites are rare in my map) and thats been really bugging me to try progressing

Your best bet is to take a look at the wiki for each of those resources and decide which tips you want to try. Every resource has more than one potential solution, it just depends on which solution you prefer.

It can also depend on whether you want to use mods. There are mods that, for example, will auto-collect paste from snails. Once you tame just 2-4 snails you'll soon have all of the paste one person can use. But if you don't want to use mods, be sure to read the wiki for any resources you're having trouble with.

15 hours ago, Paulitaut said:

i feel like any dinos that are even just about the size of a rex are gonna insta kill me and my dinos and set my progress back by a lot and that also stops me from doing much

A big part of getting better at ARK is to make sure you always have a fall-back plan for then things go wrong. You're going to die, it's inevitable. You're going to lose some tames. It's inevitable. You're going to lose some equipment. It's inevitable. So your goal is to have plans in place that let you recover as efficiently as possible when things go wrong.

Examples:

* Have extra dinos. Always.

Tame enough dinos that you always have backups if you lose one. If your ability to progress on your map depends on a single rex that you tamed, and if you lose that rex you're going to be hosed, then you need to make sure you have backup rexes for when yours gets killed. And the truth is you don't even want to use your best dinos at first. If you tame a Lvl 150 theri that's going to be great for when you start breeding you obviously don't want to risk losing that theri. Put it in a cryo-pod to save it for later and to look for a less important theri to use for now. And, of course, the same is true for harvesting dinos. Make sure you have extra ankys, doeds, etc. anything you use for harvesting.

* Have extra gear.

If you just made your first flak armor, and you don't have enough metal to make extra sets, then don't just go running into the first cave you find. Make sure you have extra sets (or at least have the resources to make extra sets) before you do anything extra dangerous.

 

Also some general strategic tips:

* Air power rules.

   Pteranodons are outstanding for scouting out the map and figuring out where you want to go/do/build.

   Argentavis are your work horse. With their stamina and carrying capacity, you can fly an argy with others on follow and do just about anything you want to, anywhere you want to. Build taming pens, build mini-bases, pick up smaller animals and carry them to taming pens. Make big animals angry and lure them into your taming pens. Argy's can do it all.

* Taming pens are you friend.

If you haven't done this yet, it's time to master the art of making taming pens for the species that you want to tame. Whether you build a big 4x4 with tall walls and ramps that will let you tame anything from a doed to a rex, or whether you custom build different pens with varying sizes and styles for different species around the map, you will make your life a whole lot easier if you have a network of taming pens in the locations where you go looking for tames.

* Rafts give you a huge amount of flexibility (if you're careful).

The Island has alpha leeds in deep water areas (and some of those areas are deceptively close to shore in a couple of key locations). But even the most basic raft with a bunch of storage boxes on it can carry a whole lot of raw materials or finished building pieces to a location where you want to build. In some areas (swamps) they can be vulnerable to animals with AOE attacks (sarco's) but you can always do a "naked run" (just you and a basic raft, no equipment, no tames, nothing but some food as you explore) then you can start to learn where rafts are powerful and where they're vulnerable.

There are lots of videos showing how to build taming pens on your raft so you can get to many places on the map without building taming pens at every location. It all depends on whether you want to build stuff all over your map or just drive your mobile taming pen to where you want to go.

15 hours ago, Paulitaut said:

so im wondering , is it time for me to try one of the dlcs?

I wouldn't start going to other maps until you've "mastered" The Island. If you are not yet comfortable with losing dinos and stuff on the island, then you definitely don't want to arrive on some new map where you can lose stuff even more quickly and easily.

Make sure you have mastered the basics, or at least learned them well enough that you have extras/backups/reserves of everything important. You would hate to, for example, teleport to Scorched Earth and in a short time lose your best tames and equipment.

* Taming pens.

* Extra dinos.

* Extra resources/gear/equipment

* Cave exploration.

* Maybe begin to learn about breeding.

If I were in your shoes, I would do all of those things before trying to explore other maps. 

15 hours ago, Paulitaut said:

i mean ... the max level for the island without killing any bosses is 100 and im pretty close to that or should i try fixing the problems i currently have on the island ?

The thing to remember is that your personal level, your personal power, is only a small part of success in ARK. Dinos are the backbone of anything major you want to accomplish, they the force multiplier that makes you better at everything you want to do in ARK. Even if you get to Lvl 100 you're not going to be all that powerful as an individual characters, it's the dinos in your stable that give you the ability to really accomplish things in this game.

 

p.s. Dimorphodons are awesome. They're my favorite "non-important" animal in the game. They're difficult and time consuming to tame and raise (and especially to breed) if you don't use any mods or if you don't customize any of the taming/breeding settings, but they're quite fun to go hunting with.

[NokyRed]

today i tamed the best damage argy 😍😍

 

https://ibb.co/ScChdBK

[GrumpyBear]

I would make raft traps that you can move up and down the river, you can lure a rex into the trap then drive it away to a safer area.  Also, if the allos got in the trap with the rex, you can tame them all at once.  they don't hurt each other when fighting you, or being tamed while another is knocked out.

 

Also, cementing paste can come from the riding the frog and attacking the ants and flys.  There's a cave in the redwoods that is loaded with those flies. 

 

Everything about ark though is super difficult in beginner settings.  You get in a fight and your mount could pass out from how long it takes to defeat another animal.  Once you use max level settings, the animals you can tame will have much more lasting power and power in general.

 

The megatherium with bugs around that it can regularly attack is one of the most powerful mounts you have access to.  That is a really good idea to seek out one of those.  The beelzebufo, however its spelled, the frog, is a super good travel mount early on too.  It jumps far, swims fast, and doesn't drown.

[wizard03]

12 hours ago, Paulitaut said:

Thx for the tips ! I thought i had nothing against a Rex but never thought of trying to tame him! , my only concern is that the only Rex i ever saw , which was a lvl 4 on the volcano , was surrounded by allosauruses and im sure if i try to tame him ill be surrounded by the allos

lvl 4 is a cake walk. I would not use it against any of the boss's, but if you want the undeniable power of a t rex, thats a great start! Low level, so its easy to KO, will not take long to tame, especially using prime meat, and will give you a feel of what to expect with rex's.

If your worried about that location in particular, you can try other places that spawn them in from time to time.....the river north of the red woods is a good spot, the rivers on the south end that lead to the green obelisk is good too, and finally the island at the north east side of the map is really good. But you better bring some firepower. Alpha creatures spawn there all the time, along with the rex's, carno's, argies, sabertooth, and scorpions. It is a very dangerouse place.

[wizard03]

8 hours ago, NokyRed said:

today i tamed the best damage argy 😍😍
https://ibb.co/ScChdBK

Nice! 

[SarraceniaUser]

To tame a Rex, I recommend getting 16 foundations, making them into a square, and getting 4 Dino gates (normal sized ones, the Rex won’t fit through them.) Place down three of the gates and leave the side open that you want to lure the Rex into. Place a large bear trap next to the gate on the opposite side of the opening. Then lure your Rex into the trap by running through, letting the Rex follow you in (you won’t accidentally trigger the large bear trap while on foot, so don’t worry.) It will get caught in the large bear trap for about 20 seconds. Quickly run around to the other side of it and place the last gate to seal it in. Then knock it out (preferably with either a crossbow and tranq arrows or a longneck rifle with tranq darts.) Then feed it some exceptional kibble, raw mutton or just go kill that bronto stomping around over there for his prime meat (there’s always one on the island within easy access) simply wait for him to finish eating, and congrats, you have tamed a rex.

[Griffin998]

On 4/10/2023 at 3:16 PM, Paulitaut said:

i feel like any dinos that are even just about the size of a rex are gonna insta kill me and my dinos and set my progress back by a lot and that also stops me from doing much so im wondering

Trust me-you'll be fine. Definitely don't go up against a rex on foot, but with even just one good theri, a wild rex is a cakewalk. At this point, like everyone's said, try starting up your boss army, and hit up some of the caves. Tame a thyla or a bary, and breed, imprint, and level one as your go-to caving mount. Both are also great for exploration, since both are fast and powerful. Maybe cautiously venture into the ocean by getting yourself a high-level sarco or a bary. Sarcos are fast and fairly easy to tame, but barys (I think) have better power and have their stun attack. Sarcos are going to outrun pretty much everything in the water, and can put up a pretty good fight against the swarms of megalodons (just avoid jellies, they are death). Start exploring! Take risks! Dying is a natural part of ark, and losing progress is as well. Exploring is an especially great way to pass the time, just take your argy or some kind of fast or powerful land mount and just run/fly around. Oh, and about the rex situation-allos are cool too. They've got their pack boost and bleed attack, and they're pretty fast-so maybe look into getting a bunch of those and run around wrecking rex face as you go .

Cheers, good luck, and happy ARKing!

[HoganRyan01]

Bring a decent level frog in to the swamp cave in the redwoods and clear out the insects. Tons and tons of cementing paste.