What did you do in ASA today?

[yarnevk]

This game does not want me to get a doedic to finish my keep with.  Spent few ark days farming metal on nearby hill next to  the egg farm using the argy and raft as the ferry (a pego stole my dart stack so I need to restock), while spending some time on the egg farm trying to get clean mating clones established between running out to check for more beavers, dams and metal.   Entertained myself getting a high level dimorph and got it cloned into a flock, so that plus a raptor killing beaver (they are just short of a saber and also a functional smithy and a good swimmer) will be my initial foray into the hunters cave since the anky refuses to get the metal just past the start.  Looks to me like it could make it if you angle it right - but that is hitboxes for you.

So finally after saturday RL chores after dinner I set out with the argy heading north yet again on a doedic hunt.  Got distracted spotting a high level beaver fighting something where the swamp meets the river just NE of the redwoods, figured move in close to target track it with the binocs.   I guess a high level thyla had come down for a drink, as I got ripped off the argy and tossed into the swamp.    Fly back with my latest ptera, land on the other side of the river pulling my argy off the leaping cat so I could check why the death bag icon was not on.  Guess when I relogged to reset the weather it did not update the tribe log because no death bag.  So had a primitive campfire with some thyla rump roast as it swam across wanting to keep on fighting the birds,  while I cleared all the brush looking for my loot, snagged a few green drops for better cloth gear but no luck on the loot.   I headed back home to kill baby beavers and logged off to watch an movie instead.

Guess I need to get the ankys working another metal hill because I need to make more metal gear and taming darts.

 

[Chudz66]

I decide to scout the redwoods from the ground to avoid further crashes, so Buggsy and I head back to base. Once there, I pod a couple of dinos, grab a generator/cryofridge set, and head back to the platform on BB Attack.

Five minutes after the cryofridge begins humming away, I un-pod Birbs and Sabene and set them to neutral. BB Attack is then podded and stored away securely in my inventory. And after another look around for predators, I mount Birbs before heading out with Sabene on follow.

Ten minutes later, and we haven’t run into many predators yet. So I’m thinking, “You know, the redwoods can be a rather idyllic place at times.” Then *Wham!* A microraptor knocks me out of the saddle. “Forget it. Just forget what I was thinking. This place is Hell!”

We come across two low level Thylas during our hunt and dispatch them, along with an Alpha Carno that levels Mini-Hulk. “Woo Hoo! I’m gaining experience again!“ Unfortunately, it’s getting late at this point, so we begin heading back to the Sap platform.

Things are going well . . . until we see a carno. It sees us, too, and battle is soon joined. A couple of raptors join in to spice things up, and then *Wham!* I’m micro-raptored out of the saddle. I hear something else join the fight, but I can’t see what it is because I have a microraptor glued to my face like one of those creepy things from the Alien movie.

Once I’m able to stand, I see that a dark furred Thyla is the newcomer, but I’m too busy chasing Birbs, trying to get back in the saddle, to notice what level it is. Birbs finally pauses when the carno crumples before him, and I’m able to hop back in the saddle. The raptors and lousy microraptor are out of the fight as well. I maneuver my mount, so I can get a better look at the Thyla’s level, and it’s a 150! It’s also super bloody, so I whistle all passive, and Sabene stops attacking. I take out my spyglass, from the Super Spyglass Plus mod, and see that the Thyla is also super low health. If I let it heal, before trying to knock it out, will Sabene be bled out?

Yah, it’s a tough decision but I gotta support Sabene, so I whistle all neutral. The Thyla goes down in seconds. And once again, I think, “This place is Hell!”

 

(In hindsight, I probably could have tried to run away and lose it, but I’ll just have to remember that for next time. Happy Ark’ing, All!)

[extrageneity]

I've been playing intermittently since launch in single player. Hard difficulty but with some of the settings individually tweaked closer to medium. I was mostly on raft-based bases until the release of cryopods, and then relocated to hidden lake, where I've built a 3-story base out of stone, glass, and metal. Ground floor has exterior stables/pens for tames, including one pen I keep empty for creature taming, storage for gear, items, and base pieces, and a full set of industrial crafting stations. Second floor has a bed, a trophy room, resource storage, an industrial grinder, and my cryo fridge. The roof has a greenhouse with 5 plots each for advanced crops, 4 plots each for the original berry types, and 1 plot each for the new berry types. Behind the base, a glassed-in structure with arrays of 6 air conditioners above and 6 air conditioners below, and a refrigerator--an egg hatchery.

My core un-podded tames are:
- an imprinted Argentavis, leveled for health, stamina, movement speed, carry weight, and melee damage, primarily for scouting supply drops and carrying liftable tames back to base
- a high level Beelzebufo, leveled for health, melee damage, and carry weight, primarily for underwater and cave exploration
- a high level otter, leveled mostly for melee damage but also with a bit of health, providing the insulation I need to survive the higher temperature extremes which cover all areas of the map in ASA
- at the base: an oviraptor to collect eggs; a dung beetle to make fertilzer, and groups of dinos to supply eggs for various kibble types, including kairuku, raptors, ankylosaurus (one is imprinted and leveled for melee damage and carry weight), argentavis, and rex. I also have a therino for wood and fiber harvesting, a doedicurus for stone harvesting, a lystrosaurus to help things build experience, an ovis for wool, and an equus just because.
- I'm gradually breeding high level rex for use in boss fights, but haven't been especially rushed so far.
- I do have a giant bee hive, although I will admit I had to cheat it into existence because of the single player glitch where all natural bee hives despawn every time you start the game.

Most days when I play, I fly around on my argent scouting for high level megatherium and yutyrannus to tame for breeding, killing alphas to gradually build my chibi (a purple dire wolf) to its final level, or swim around on the ocean floor looking for stuff with my frog. I've found two ocean chests so far, but their rate of appearance seems dramatically lower than it did in ASE.

I finished getting all the cave trophies a week ago. I had to use the noclip console command on several of them, because my frog tame either meshed partially into the ceiling or got me wedged between it and the ceiling so that we couldn't move; if I was mounted, our hitbox was too big, and if I was dismounted, our hitboxes collided so that neither of us could move. In ASE I would fix this by cryo-podding my mount and then getting him back out, but this is no longer a viable option in ASA due to cryofridge and electric generator range considerations. There's apparently an INI file setting I could use to turn that off if I were playing on PC, but I'm playing on Xbox Series X, so I have to wait and see if the devs ever expose a UI or at least a console command setting to let me do it--or if someone releases a mod which does it.

On Tuesday or Wednesday, I logged into the game and all of my map and explorer note progress had been reset to nil for no reason. I don't know why this happened but it's probably related to having done "rejoin session" and been met with a "create character" dialog rather than with my game  being restored. Restarting the Ark game does fix this transient problem when it happens, but I suspect my map progression was reset by it. The game does still have a sense of which explorer notes I've opened, because the ones I re-open no longer give me an experience reward. I had been generally putting off explorer note collection anyway, so that I could use them to power-level imprinted tames, but had walked over quite a few by accident while exploring, harvesting resources, etc., or to grab an experience bonus before killing an alpha. I took this as time to start re-gathering the notes in organized fashion, and spent about five to six hours in the game with an Argent flying around and collecting the notes. I feel like I got about a third of them. I had stacked about five hours of bonus experience on my Argent, so instead of quitting game at the end of the night, I just paused overnight. I made a decision that I should stop getting explorer notes with this tame, as experience was starting to come really slowly, and revert to my pattern of collecting nearby notes before fighting alphas. By the time I got to this point, my imprinted Argent had run to about 360K experience, having started from less than 100K.

Friday was a huge day for me. Right before pausing my game and going to bed Thursday night, I had finally found an Ascendant Longneck rifle, the first non-primitive Longneck I'd found in a supply drop, and only the third Longneck of any kind I'd seen at all. About 400% bonus damage. Biotoxin is hard to come by because cnidaria are currently mostly spawning meshed into the sea floor, but I had zealously gathered 2-3 stacks of it and been storing it carefully in refrigerators. In spite of its spoil rate, I still had enough left to make 50 shocking tranquilizer darts. It was time to start my Yutyranus hunt in earnest!

In the far northeast of the cold area, I got lucky, and found a level 130 male, terrorizing the local mammoth population. From the back of my Argent, I cleared out his carnotaurus escort, cleared out the mammoth prey he was chasing, and killed two abominable snowmen that were stalking around the area harassing me. (That kind of sucked! My argent feels pretty strong against most things but only does about 400 damage per hit on the Snowman, and his "circle behind your mount" AI tactics made the fight slow going. I could dismount and fight him toe to toe, thanks to a full set of ascendant armor including several 500+ pieces and a 1100+ flak helmet I somehow scored in the eastern water cave, and thanks to an 800% ascendant pike and decently leveled melee damage, but doing that meant having to return to base and do several hundred metal ingots and about a dozen chitin stacks worth of repairs, during which I was afraid of losing track of the Yutyranus. But I found him, and brought him down with 4-5 Longneck shots. I tamed him with 100% effectiveness using starve taming tactics, cryopodded him, and then found a female Ovis on the way back to my base, finally awarding me a breeding pair of Ovis and therefore a supply of mutton!

The Yutyrannus was so tall that I needed to reorganize my stables. I built a large aerie for argents above the Oviraptor pen, and then resumed hunting for a female to add to the breeding pair. I finally realized that it was important to start getting a supply of extraordinary kibble, and that even a low level female would let me get started on that, and tracked down and tamed a level 60. She ran nearly all the way to the ocean before I tamed her, but I knocked her unconscious on an ice floe clear of any likely predators.

I went scouting for fresh prime meet to feed her during taming, and when I came back, she was gone, but I could still hear her snoring. On a hunch, I enabled 'noclip', and there she was, glitched just below the ice floe, laying in water but not quite drowning. I tamed her there, cryopodded her, went back to base, made my first extraordinary kibble, cleared my inventory of loot, recycled anything I wasn't going to use in the industrial grinder, made sure troughs were full and that my generators and preserving bins (for jerky) were good on fuel, parked my toon in the hatchery (which, due to its extreme climate control, was an ideal place to be walking around with no otter), dropped my otter off my shoulder, and logged out for the night, quitting to the main menu but not exiting the game.

I went to bed excited. I felt close, finally, to being able to take on boss fights for the first time. I had never done it in single player ARK, only ever on a private server with low difficulty settings and a couple of friends who now no longer play. And I had certainly never done it on a server with max level dinos. All I had left was to find one good female megatherium, and then a few hours of "breeding program" work. I even already had all the alpha trophies I needed to get into the alpha versions of the fights, if I was feeling brave enough to risk disaster. I even set an alarm to wake up early and get started right away. I had six rex eggs all ready to hatch, check for mutations, and perhaps imprint. Maybe some hard grinding on high level supply drops in the hopes of getting lucky with a good saddle blueprint for one of the dinos I would be taking into the boss fight.

Saturday morning, I logged back in, not in my egg hatchery, but in the jungle southeast of the northeast mountain, standing next to an opened explorer note, with my argent and otter standing next to me, and a sweet vegetable cake from a Winter Wonderland drop (I'm still getting Wonderland drops, because in Single Player you can't disable the mod yet without losing stuff you got; the event has already been over for nearly a month but there hasn't been a console update since the day it began). I remembered that sweet vegetable cake. I had put it in a refrigerator back at base on Wednesday or Thursday.

Horror dawning on me, I looked at my hotbar. In the LB+leftpad slot where I had been keeping my prized Ascendant Longneck, there it was: The spyglass I had been carrying there since November, when I found it in my first white drop on the Footpaw, while I was still building straw bases. The game had rolled back over a dozen hours of critical, irreplaceable progress.

I flew back to base to confirm my fears. No Ovis pair. No Yutyrannus at all. No Argentavis aerie. My imprinted Argent, that I had been power leveling with explorer notes, had lost about 230K experience, meaning that I had rolled back to a game before I had killed my first Abominable Snowman, to a game where I had not killed one Alpha Rex with that Argent. And now I had no idea which explorer notes the game considered me to have unlocked or not, so resuming play will be a wearing task of going through the notes and manually making a checklist.

I didn't have time to deal with any of this right then, as it was about 10:15am on Saturday morning and I had a Facetime call with my mom coming up. I passed that 45 minutes in part by explaining to my stepdaughter, who was playing her own single player game on a separate console, and let her know that if she didn't want to lose large amounts of progress, she needed to be sure to quit the game, then quit the app, then come back into the game, no more than every couple of hours.

She had questions for me about how Studio Wildcard could leave the game in that state, so I showed her what PC+Xbox patch notes looked like, and where they had diverged, and speculated that ASA's product manager has made the strategic decision to: 1, prioritize poor multiplayer performance and exploits over user experience in single-player, non-dedicated, and unofficial servers, including timely release of the needed patch to keep a "passive mod load" command line switch from being used during server startup to let Winter Wonderland end, and 2, to pause further console releases until that delayed post-Wonderland patch was complete, since consoles don't have a way to do passive mod loads.

She also had questions for me about why Wildcard would release a game with a bug as severe as saved game rollback, and then leave the bug officially unacknowledged for 3+ months. I said that I didn't know for sure, but said that game development was challenging, that the game studio was trying to do a lot of things at the same time, and that developers can only work on so many things at once. I said that problems like this are frustrating but that companies who do these kinds of things to their users aren't indifferent to that frustration, they're just accountable to other forces that we don't see. I could have elaborated, but she's still a tween and doesn't need to hear my thoughts about business politics in a product technology organization.

We also talked a bit more about console commands. Let me tangent to those for a bit.

Key console commands I run in single player:
- r.volumetricCloud 0
- r.volumetricFog 0
- grass.sizeScale 0.65

These three are quality of life things. The clouds are "can't see your face" dense at points, and can often make it impossible to see what you're doing, especially at mountain altitudes. Water visibility is equally bad, and turns every search for resources underwater into a battle against a pack of 6+ megs, because you can't see them chasing you until you're already in the fight. Maybe these things are fun, or in some way balancing, on the servers, but they do nothing for me in terms of single player. I would consider finding features to tune the density on those settings instead, but disabling them also improves the frame rate for me.  The grass scale is just... I can't see resources in the grass at all. Not baby dinos, not metal nodes on the mountain east of the footpaw. It honestly feels like a glitch to me, having played the original Ark. It looks good but it doesn't seem to match the original intention of the designers.

- ghost
- walk

These enable and disable noclip, and are essentially required to play single player unless you want to periodically die or lose tames as a consequence of meshing bugs. I had some horrible experiences using these settings in the original ASE and ending up with tames glitched so that I couldn't reliably re-mount them, so I've used these incredibly sparingly, but sometimes there's no other choice.

- kill

Yeah, I mean, this one actually is cheating. But I've only done it twice. The first time was after a glitch made the corpse of an alpha tueso despawn after I had finally killed the thing, with no loot drop; I spawned a new one in of the same level and immediately used this command to kill it.

And I will confess to having used it on the abominable snowmen. These seem to be spawning at a much higher rate than normal because of the Santa's Big Helpers, and on my difficulty settings each one of them has like 65K health. I'm just not willing to spend 20 minutes fighting one, then have to spend another 20 minutes fighting the next one before I've even had time to heal my tame and repair my armor. The deal I made with myself is that I'll stop doing this to those after I've disabled Winter Wonderland.

- destroyWildDinos

Easily the most pernicious problem in single player is the way the stasis/hibernate system works. You eventually get whole stretches of map with no wild dinos on them at all, except for the occasional fish. It never happens on official servers (except in PVE when the pillar density gets high and GMs are asleep at the switch), but can get so bad in single player that in certain areas, bases will fail to load because of local dino density, and dinos can hardly even be found elsewhere on the map. I probably have to do this every 20 game days or so, especially after a long run flying around the map collecting supply drops. Ideally I shouldn't ever have to do it at all. But I suspect Wildcard doesn't have any plan to fix this in single player, ever, especially not during the window between the final map update for ASA and the Ark 2 release.

The Facetime call with my mom went well; we talked for about 90 minutes, on a variety of topics, and agreed to both buy the B Dylan Hollis cookbook "Baking From Yesteryear" and try out one or two recipes per month and compare notes. I live in Minnesota and she's currently doing the "snowbird thing," wintering in an Arizona townhome, so finding a way to collaborate on an activity like that from a distance will keep us feeling closer to one another.

After the call ended, I opened the "My Games & Apps" menu on my Xbox, and went to look for updates, bargaining with unseen forces that Wildcard would have released an out-of-cadence console update for Winter Wonderland and the single player save rollback issue. There was of course no such patch, but a number of other good single player games on my system had updates, including Starfield, where press said that the release improved things but included no new content, and Cyberpunk, where press had been saying that the updates are very good and have finally delivered a game which is much closer to what the initial teasers said would be delivered.

I spent the afternoon starting a new character in that game. I can't bear to come back to ASA before the next update.

It sucks, because ARK has been an ADHD hyperfocus for me off and on for years now, and I love ASA when it's working. Some of the base design features you can get in this game are just incredible compared to what was possible in unmodded ASE.

And if I were a PC player, I would just be working around this stuff. I'm technically competent enough to be able to troubleshoot a lot of stuff.

But I'm a console guy. An Xbox Series X is a fixed cost, with an expected service live of 5-10 years, amortizing out to an annual hardware expense less than the cost of an Xbox Live (or, now, Game Pass Core) subscription. PC hardware costs mushroom well above that, especially if you choose _not_ to build your own--in part because game developers don't feel the same obligations to release software that works within spec for a 5 year old hardware fleet that they feel on console with the muscle of a Microsoft or a Sony pressing the issue. And, normally, this means that the user experience on consoles is _less_ glitchy than on PCs--you can do more extensive QA against a known hardware spec, and you don't have to do as much defensive coding against modders and similar. (Although, jailbreaks being a thing, you still have to do some.)

But in a game like ARK, or like Payday 2 was, where you have a studio that's struggling to maintain both platforms, and has a core user base with a strong preference for PC, console titles can become second class citizens, with players on those titles frozen out of core features. (My most annoying bug in ARK to date: My stepkid, who is a "horse girl," couldn't tame Equus until I hooked a USB keyboard up to her Xbox and showed her which key to press, because the "feed" button and the "dismount" button have a collision which ASA mediates in the wrong direction and which we couldn't figure out how to resolve. This probably just got straight-up missed because of low gamepad QA coverage.)

I love this game. It's unique, with the difficulty curve of a Souls game, the pure scale of a Skyrim, unique gameplay elements that aren't available in almost any other title, and customization almost as great as what you can achieve in something like Minecraft or a modded Fallout. I want so much to play it, to thrive in it, to share it with others.

I just can't, right now. So in a week I'll be back to annoying friends in real life by addressing them as "choom" again. I guess I'll see you all in a few months.

[yarnevk]

XBOX SP is like PC was the first week a giant steaming pile of restarts.  No way I would play the way I am on PC if I had an XBOX - I have 10x slower resource spawn been playing for months and just recently saw a leafy tree come back from my clear cut and there is no way metal spawns are coming back.  Also have 0.125x XP  and harvest rates are a stone pickup is a single stone to make it OG EA ARK - so am months in and I have yet to finish my stone keep.   I have prevent hibernation at startup which fixes the spawn issues it is nonsense that with todays PCs being multicore/thread that that is not default - it was a performance opt many years ago when it was needed.   On XBOX I would put it in creative mode just because of WC.   But SP on PC has been abandoned since they made it years ago - the patch notes are all about compromising server quality for bandwidth, and new features are about the FOMO skins they want to start taking a piece of your hide.   FOMO only works in MP not SP where nobody can see your skin (not even you if you stick to FPV!)  But this thread is not for complaining about WC but for those that can manage to enjoy their daily fix, sad to see the state of xbox means less contributors!.

I as well have a choom 2.0 to get to but am going to wait until they are done done done.   My female V finished the game and would love to go back to Judy and hangout but she cannot, while my male V and panam rode off into the sunset betraying the corpos.   Do not really feel like redoing their builds just to play liberty from the end point save they had their story.   So that means restarting and hundreds of hours.

My Starfield got hung up in the starborn powers quest which is claimed fixed with this month patch, but I really want to wait for survival mode since that is the original design of the game they nerfed and I hope it ties a bunch of vestigial disconnected features together - and after playing ARK I really need it to be survival.

Everyone left for Palworld seems like, I unsubscribed every ARK youtuber except ButchX3 who is living that blind SP experience and making it fun and inspirational.   Never been into the pokeball games, do not even want to use arks version of it.   I hear Enshrouded gives that survival game plus Skyrim RPG fix - but way too early access for me - I have not had a good realistic voxel game since Planet Explorers got ditched.  There there is...there is whatever Hello Games is doing for their fantasy world.

Edited February 4 by yarnevk

[Chudz66]

After what has now come to be known as the Redwood debacle, I decided to head over to my Rex base. We landed, and I stopped by Ethyl to grab any fertilized eggs that she was holding before heading to the hatch pad. I got my first mutation! Too bad it was weight on a female rex. I also got an oxygen mutation on a male, and for one brief instant, I imagined an Aqua Rex line taking on the sea caves. That’s definitely not going to happen. Ethyl is also now semi-retired as I got Barney out of cryo storage and leveled his weight to 600.
 
Back at my main base and trying to think of things to do, I came up with an idea to make metal outposts near select cave entrances. This way, I’d have a safe spot to un-pod dinos for those caves. I took the metal building pieces that I had in storage, made the rest, and loaded everything onto Buggsy. The first outpost was constructed at the cave near Herbivore Island. I had to move its location three or four times due to building being blocked at some point, but it was finally done. Next, we headed for Carnivore Island. Buggsy landed on the safe isle, and I hopped off. My heat indicator instantly went ballistic. I was building and drinking medical brews like crazy. When the outpost was done, I was still overheating inside. I double checked to make sure the little house icon was showing, and it was. That’s when I figured I’d check the temperature. “Holy *Beep!*” it was 153 degrees Fahrenheit, so we got out of there. The last outpost was constructed by the cave near the volcano without any crazy weather shifts.
 
Buggsy and I went drop hunting a couple of times, and we got some good things for the grinder, but nothing else too exciting. I’m still wearing a regular flak chest piece that I pretty much have to repair every time Glenda sneezes, so I’m looking forward to replacing it.
 
BB Hauler took my anky, Haze, on an epic metal run. It’s weird, though. With him on wander and BB Hauler carrying him, circling around a metal node, he will sometimes harvest it and other times not. It’s like he has the MS spinny cursor flashing above his head at times.
 
I noticed we were a little low on rare flowers, so I took Zeena, my slate gray moschops, out of cryo and leveled her up. Her extra harvesting points all went into rare flowers as well. For a change of pace, I decided we’d head out on foot, or flipper, instead of flying her to the swamp. So we crossed the river and were traveling along the beach. Surprise! Pego self-tame number twenty-ish for this play through. We decided to save some time and swim through the ocean instead of following the beach. *Jaws music* Zeena had to stop to chomp four sharks to death along the way, so the beach probably would have been faster. We eventually made it to the swamp and harvested the plants that I remember giving rare flowers, but no luck. So after a brief YouTube interlude, we began harvesting the right plants. My nameless pego was eaten by a titanoboa during this time. All in all, we came back with over two hundred rare flowers, so the bees will be happy for a while.
 
After that, Buggsy flew me over to the volcano cave outpost where I installed a bunkbed, generator, and cryofridge. I popped Birbs out of his pod five minutes later, and we ran the cave without any issues.
 
Next, we went back to the Rex base and hatched the latest batch of eggs. Huzzah, we got our first HP mutation!
 
I decided to call it a night after that, so Happy Ark’ing, All!

[MirageUK]

Had an adventure to the "easy" underwater cave.  My friend and I both on imprinted decent level Basilos (1k melee, 35-45k hp).

We were screwed by an overspawn - must have been hundreds of sharks in there, mate boosted and supported by a minimum of 4 alphas all in first open room.  Both dead, basilos dead, gear lost!! ARK'd!!!!!

[Chudz66]

The deep water caverns were like that for me in Genesis 2, just never ending sharks and other bad things.

[yarnevk]

Finally got a mid-level doed so rolling stones now!

This time I took the anky/beavers on taming raft into the river between the mountains (which turns into a creek into a ditch specifically so rafts are useless past the coast) hoping being more present I will catch a doed.   Have the egg farm on a egg timer so I can bedport back while the beavers get busy clearing the hill with the ankys.    Moving the ankys around on the mountain as they walked past metal nodes, and landed near some raptors getting blue balled by a blue ball so I rescued and dropped her into the taming raft.  Calling her Blue Bell!

[MirageUK]

Returned to the death water cave this morning before work on my Rhynio to find it massively over-spawned again. 

Thankfully got out of the water rapid before they glitched and stopped me moving but decided to do a DestroyWildDinos and take advantage of the time I had with empty ponds to place down a few stone pillars.

Fingers crossed this prevents so many spawning and we can do the cave genuinely. Although I can get in there on Rhynio and collect notes/some drops it's impossible to get to artifact with that last pond so full of nasties backed by alphas.

Will see what it looks like this evening after work but out of curiosity I did GCM into the "hard" east cave and found it to be reasonable and more than likely do-able with Basilos and Megs.  I think WC just got sick of people referring to the West as "easy underwater" - it definitely is not that anymore.

 

... edit ...

Guess pillars did nothing to help.  This is what awaits me this evening:

 

.. 2 alpha sharks, a cave mosa and approx 130 sharks to back them all up.

Edited February 8 by MirageUK

[yarnevk]

devs are trolls. 

I have been enjoying Butch X3 channel as a noob ark player, he has a fear of open water full of sharks so that will be some entertainment if he gets to this cave!

 

Edited February 8 by yarnevk

[prosans]

10 hours ago, MirageUK said:

Returned to the death water cave this morning before work on my Rhynio to find it massively over-spawned again. 

Thankfully got out of the water rapid before they glitched and stopped me moving but decided to do a DestroyWildDinos and take advantage of the time I had with empty ponds to place down a few stone pillars.

Fingers crossed this prevents so many spawning and we can do the cave genuinely. Although I can get in there on Rhynio and collect notes/some drops it's impossible to get to artifact with that last pond so full of nasties backed by alphas.

Will see what it looks like this evening after work but out of curiosity I did GCM into the "hard" east cave and found it to be reasonable and more than likely do-able with Basilos and Megs.  I think WC just got sick of people referring to the West as "easy underwater" - it definitely is not that anymore.

 

... edit ...

Guess pillars did nothing to help.  This is what awaits me this evening:

 

.. 2 alpha sharks, a cave mosa and approx 130 sharks to back them all up.

insert allow us to introduce our self meme here

 

[prosans]

22 hours ago, yarnevk said:

Finally got a mid-level doed so rolling stones now!

This time I took the anky/beavers on taming raft into the river between the mountains (which turns into a creek into a ditch specifically so rafts are useless past the coast) hoping being more present I will catch a doed.   Have the egg farm on a egg timer so I can bedport back while the beavers get busy clearing the hill with the ankys.    Moving the ankys around on the mountain as they walked past metal nodes, and landed near some raptors getting blue balled by a blue ball so I rescued and dropped her into the taming raft.  Calling her Blue Bell!

one i named a bever a goat same for the doed and anky the admins did not like this so they wiped my base

 

[yarnevk]

Well I had a thrilling afternoon in ARK.

Had logged out yesterday in the taming raft planning to tranq a high level tickle chicken that had been lurking about as I had just enough darts to get it according to dodoex

New patch they disabled all tracking even though they claimed it was just the new baby tracking.  So good thing I had already got the ankys down from the mountain as I would not be finding them otherwise.

Logged back in and I guess the major patch forced a dino wipe, as now the tickle chicken was instead a higher level rex stud.  Just what I need to breed up my low level rex orphans I have been egging.  Had already converted my stone into foundations so nothing left to make a trap.   That meant the old fashioned way of playing chicken with it, hopping from stone to stone hitting it with darts.   Had to deal with it swimming back and forth from the river and running back to the raft as I was grinding out more narc darts from scratch.  Right when it was ready to drop an allo decided to get into it - so my argy got a belly full of prime from that to shove it down the rexes massive throat.     While it was taming up I got an anky down from the raft and loaded up on Narcoberriess, and as I was climbing up the raft to scope out the rex make sure it was safe - GPU HANG.   In the thrill of the hunt I had forgot to save the game!

Reload and find myself back in time regrinding narcs with the allo very much still alive.   This time it was much harder as the rex got up into the forest, then broke away across the river, and before I could deal with it I had to take out two alpha raptors, and an alpha carno all high level.   My argy barely made it out alive and had to find some herbies to eat but nothing left with all the alphas around.  So I had to force feed it until it healed.   Still plenty of prime meat left I head back to the rex, but before I do I notice the alphas had been molesting  a cue ball high level lady doed much better than the one I had caught previously.   So I go to drop it in the raft but miss and it lands on the skirt partially in the water.  I finally get back on top of a rock that the rex could not figure out how to climb and was able to dart it in the nose and filled it full of prime.  Luckily the new doed had not drowned so I got her into the raft and tamed up.   Realized I had forgot to set the baby beaver timer, so rushed back just in time.  Still no mutants though - hope I get some good colors as this clone set is boring grey.

So far a good tame/mining trip.  Got a nice pile of foundations - decent rex stud, two lady doed and only lost a weak beaver and  mutant anky.   Think I will look around for some more breeders before I go!

 

 

Edited February 9 by yarnevk

[Chudz66]

Buggsy and I flew to Carnivore Island and finished the interior of the outpost. Thankfully, it wasn't 153F again. But talk about Spartanly furnished, it holds a bunkbed, generator, cryofridge, and storage cabinet. When the timer was up, I headed outside and tossed a cryopod. The morning sunlight gleamed off its metal shell as it tumbled through the air before bouncing off the rocky soil. Upon impact, its inner light flared for a moment before the device teleported back into my inventory, leaving Birbs standing before me with his usual toothy grin.

"Sup?" Birbs asked, or at least that's what I took his low growl to mean. 

"Time for a cave, buddy!" I replied. 

Just to be on the safe side, I moved Buggsy's inventory to the storage cabinet, podded him up, and placed the pod in the fridge. Then we headed for the cave. 

We had to fight two low level Alpha raptors on the way which was no problem. I checked Mini Hulk's chibi experience, and let's just say that it's going to be a long time before he reaches his next level. 

The cave run went well overall, aside from me contracting bat cooties like a dozen times. Oh, and there was that one missed jump on the way out, but we're pretending that didn't happen. 

I didn't have much time to play today, so I logged out when we were back at the outpost, artifact safely tucked away in my inventory.

 

Happy Ark'ing, All!

Edited February 10 by Chudz66
Extra text, oops!

[yarnevk]

15 hours ago, Chudz66 said:

"Sup?" Birbs asked, or at least that's what I took his low growl to mean. 

"Time for a cave, buddy!" I replied. 

Birds get thru cave restrictions?  Or are you podding them in?  I am breeding dimorph as I figured they will be my small bat killers.

 

[yarnevk]

So it took me a long time to leave last night, after having cleared the beach of all the alpha predators while getting the rex stud the game spawned in a herd of brontos on my raft, and one of them poked their head in and said hi can I come too.   A very high level which I never see on herbi island, and these high level dinos are cleaning me out of narcs so I will for sure put you to work getting berries as the trikes/stegos get tired of taking turns getting those berries..   Turned out not to be an easy tame as she treated me like a pinball machine slapping me from rock to rock.  Parked the rex next to her as I only had berries, good thing about SP is you only need kibble for speed you usually get a near perfect tame with the basics.   

Since it took so long I went down river looking for one more tame - anky, beav, or doed whatever I could find - and there she was a max+ beaver which is higher untamed than my tamed  breeder clones which took a long time to make.

So the trick to raft follow (I am not going to turn this into a pokemon game) is have everyone follow another tame on the raft otherwise it uses the same sinking follow code as following you rather than floating follow tame code -  this is something I also forget to do as it is an extra  step.  Halfway thru near the swamp sharks and gaters decided bronto was on the menu so I had to take out my beaver as I watched the bronto sink, not because the shark ate her but because she stepped over the cliff.   

Beaver killed all the sharks get everybody back following the raft make it to shark bay near herbi island where my cliff base is - but the bronto again sinks.   Go to save her again, but had to mount the bronto to get her around the rocks and the beaver shot back to the raft across shark bay as she was left on raft follow.   

Your perfect max beaver tame killed by a megalodon.

I seriously considered save scumming, but I reserve that for when the game glitch kills and it was my fault for not having her follow me.   

At least I got a doed spare and a breeder (need to get any male) so I can finish my base, will be some boring uneventful grind - but the taming raft is a fun way to go hit all the rocky beaches.   Still have levels to go before I can turn the bronto into a platform base.

Edited February 9 by yarnevk

[Chudz66]

6 hours ago, yarnevk said:

Birds get thru cave restrictions?  Or are you podding them in?  I am breeding dimorph as I figured they will be my small bat killers.

 

I think if you're playing SP you can change things to allow cave flyers, but I was talking about "Birbs" my Baryonyx.

I tried bringing a flock of Dimorphs into the big snow cave once, and they didn't do so well in narrow passageways with the bears. Though, I didn't breed them to super levels. 

[yarnevk]

3 hours ago, Chudz66 said:

I think if you're playing SP you can change things to allow cave flyers, but I was talking about "Birbs" my Baryonyx.

I tried bringing a flock of Dimorphs into the big snow cave once, and they didn't do so well in narrow passageways with the bears. Though, I didn't breed them to super levels. 

My dimorphs are lvl48(so x5 if  max level was used) h9 m11 (points from the tek scope again x5 if max level was used so very near the ideal 50pts)  Being lower level it is more likely to get wild  point distributions.  Law of random numbers only hit averages on large population so small populations   can get wild distributions (fewer wild levelups with max wild level 30), plus I breeded to merge the good health with good melee and that is my base now hoping for mutations - and mutations are the same +2 so they will carry more weight over the base points when you are lvl 30 max vs. lvl 150 max.   

Downside of single player is it takes forever - I play a lot (4hrs) but nowhere near as much as an 8-12hr streamer and have no tribe to have someone dedicated to eggs.  Gets hard to go back and forth with all the various things to do!

Going to wait until I get some mutations before I go in the cave as I want a max beaver mount and be solid on flak production - so sad I lost the big beaver last time.

 

Edited February 10 by yarnevk

[Chudz66]

I left Carnivore Island and did some drop hunting, and I think I ran across the worst red drop ever. It had Angler Gel, two pieces of mutton, a flak 102AC chest piece, and something else junky. However, I also found an Ascendant Theri saddle and a Mastercraft Thyla saddle in other drops, so that worked out.

Buggsy and I then headed back to base for some general upkeep. I put away the stuff that he was carrying, made some kibble, made some turret ammo, etc. Afterward, we headed over to our Rex base and hatched some eggs. No new mutations popped, so we increased our store of cooked prime meat. Tikachu loves that stuff.

The lava cave by Herbivore Island was next on the list. We geared up back at the main base, podded Birbs, and began our adventure. It went well overall, aside from being paranoid about that one jump on the way in and way out. On a side note, Mega Rabies seems like it’s way easier to catch but not as deadly as it was in ASE.

My artifact stands are on top of my base, surrounding the industrial forge. I added the latest one and then pondered an issue. I can’t get the artifact from the Southern Islets cave. It’s not that I can’t get to it from a difficulty perspective; it’s that my game crashes whenever I get near the artifact. This is the only cave so far that I don’t have to turn Global Illumination up to High in order to see the correct colors instead of grayscale graphics. The ones where I have to do that don’t cause crashes for me. Strange coincidence perhaps? Anyway, since I was on top of the base already, I cheated in an Artifact of the Hunter and set it on a pedestal as well.

That’s when I decided to take a break. Happy Ark’ing, All!

[prosans]

for the longest time i though doeds layed eggs lol and i would look for the egg after cryoing them 

On 2/7/2024 at 3:44 PM, yarnevk said:

Finally got a mid-level doed so rolling stones now!

This time I took the anky/beavers on taming raft into the river between the mountains (which turns into a creek into a ditch specifically so rafts are useless past the coast) hoping being more present I will catch a doed.   Have the egg farm on a egg timer so I can bedport back while the beavers get busy clearing the hill with the ankys.    Moving the ankys around on the mountain as they walked past metal nodes, and landed near some raptors getting blue balled by a blue ball so I rescued and dropped her into the taming raft.  Calling her Blue Bell!

 

[yarnevk]

2 hours ago, prosans said:

for the longest time i though doeds layed eggs lol and i would look for the egg after cryoing them 

 

Thanks for telling me had not got that far.  Sucks that my second try at breeding some cave mutants ended up being beaver which are not egg layers.  That means starting/stopping breeding and using a return to egg farm timer waiting for the babies to drop and trying to get that to happen at same time.   Wait too long to cull them and they grow up and eat out the food bin and starve.   Doubt the doedic will be good for caves though even though they might fit where anky would not.

Edited February 12 by yarnevk

[MirageUK]

Spent some time looking for flying beavers - unfortunately it seems only their homes float in the air.  50/50 bug strikes again.

[NoobSupreme]

On 11/9/2023 at 8:10 PM, Cymas said:

Single Player, Vanilla, The Island

After a dreary and rather irritating day at work I was quite excited to come home to my tropical not-quite paradise...

And had myself a fantastic Ark day. First, I went on a rescue mission to save my other dilo. It's a long story but the short version is he ended up stranded on the coast near carno point because I didn't have anything that could carry him and it was too far to walk. So I took my new argent out and picked him up. He's almost luckier than Lucky was.

Then I decided to take my own advice about the rule of 2 for birds and fish and went in search of another argent. Nighttime temperatures sent us winging back south to a warmer clime, however. Well, there's always something to do back at base, like make more tranq arrows. We returned in the early morning and I quickly located my choice pick: a beautiful blue male that I knew I had to have as soon as I laid eyes on him. Only level 55, but a fact of little import in the midgame. I used the upper volcano path to kite and successfully KO him, well above any other dino spawns so I could safely do a prime meat run. Really dredging up my old ASE memories, tactics and techniques that have gone unused for years in the advent of modern Ark conveniences.

Tamed him and got him home safely. Now that I have a breeding pair, I went ahead and bred them, hatched the egg and raised my first notable baby. By this point dusk was falling so I spent another night at base. In fact, I decided somewhat on a whim to expand and put a nice addition on the side, with a perch for my rapidly growing flock of birds so they're up off the ground and away from danger. Not that there's much to worry about and I do have a fence, but birds are too valuable at this stage of the game.

With my new bird grown and saddled, I took my anky out on our first real metal run. It's a bit awkward that my anky has higher carry weight than my argent does, but we made it work. But it was also extremely apparent that I would need a wood gatherer very soon to keep my hungry forge and campfire burning. So we set off again on a mission that is daring but familiar to me: a mammoth hunt. Yes, I went taming in the snow without fur, cryopods, or even a raft.

I quickly located my most likely target and while I was in fact freezing to death, I was able to KO a low level female and get berries in her. My torch was just enough to keep me from dying until the temperatures rose a bit out of the lethal zone. While she tamed up I spent my time clearing our most likely path of any problem dinos, including an allo pack and a pig. Honestly the hardest part was walking her off the glacier. Once we made it to the pond it was quite easy to just walk down the coast, enjoying the benefits of the improved pathing AI. She did get stuck once but all in all I was well pleased.

Naturally a new tame means a new run for hide so I went out and did that. Then on a bit of a whim I flew back to that forest I mentioned with the rexes again. Yes, I was very sorely tempted to, well, tempt fate. But as luck would have it I would not have to try fending off multiple rexes and the alpha for custody of the baby. Instead I found a low level adult female wandering off by herself. I had the arrows, a bird, and a lot of experience flying proverbial kites. So I made her angry and brought her down to the beach and brought her down. Came back from a meat run to find an alpha raptor camping her, so I had to kite that away. Then I came back to seagulls, which I shot to keep them from stealing the precious meat I had just farmed. Then we had to fend off a wave of pegos. But finally, finally, she tamed and stood up. It was an easy walk home, of course.

I don't have enough hide to make her a saddle yet but that's ok. She's not a great level, her primary purpose will be eggs and protecting the mammoth, as she will not fit through my dino gate and I'm too lazy to build a new fence and behemoth gate just for her. So yeah, the mammoth has a pet rex, basically.

Given how much I accomplished, I felt that would be a good stopping point for the day. I'll farm the saddle tomorrow and after that...who knows? It is becoming painfully obvious that I do need fur armor, and soon.

I’ll put my berries in your mammoth

[extrageneity]

The saved game rollback bug that was messing me up in ASA's single player mode on Xbox Series X looks to be fixed, or at least mostly fixed, so I'm back on my bullpoop.

I haven't gone back and re-tamed the things I lost last time around. I got side-tracked by taming and breeding high-level wild argents. The line I'm now working on breeding mutations into has babies born unmutated at level 152 with the following stats:
- Health 35, Stamina 34, Oxygen 0, Food 0, Weight 45, Melee Damage 37.

I haven't bred low stats into my Rex line, and am debating whether or not I should take the time to do so. Base rex stats are:
- Health=36, Stamina=32, Oxygen=37, Food=31, Weight=31, Damage=34.

I just brought down a level 135 female, and tamed her up to 202. If I breed her into the line, I could raise health from 36 to 37, food from 31 to 37, weight from 31 to 37, increasing base level to 215. As that would bring me from 7 breedable females all with a clean gene line down to 1 I'm debating whether it's worth the effort, as only health and melee damage truly matter on a Rex. I'm finally getting closer to being able to take on the end-game bosses without having to run cheat commands or lower the difficulty settings, which means I have a chance of being more-or-less done with The Island in time for Scorched Earth to drop. I feel like an extra point of health isn't worth restarting the breeding lines to incorporate. I'll put this tame in my "genome archive" cryofridge and if I also tame one that has a 40+ melee damage, I'll do the health at the same time.

I'm missing a blueprint for Rex saddles above primitive. To that end, I did a run of caves with red chests the last couple of days, bringing my metal pick percentage up above 500%, my flak chest armor rating from 360 or so to 770, and a couple of other nice things. I tamed about 8 megalodons to attack the eastern water cave for me, which worked incredibly well until 5 of the 8 got stuck completely unresponsive on the surface of the water inside the cave, still in follow mode, still turning to follow my mount, but unable to move or dive. Weird bug there, but not the first time I've seen something like that with water tames.

I love my base. Large pens for tames, centered around a small pen where an oviraptor can wander freely; a ground floor with crafting and item storage, a second floor with trophy storage, an industrial grinder, and material storage; and a rooftop with a greenhouse, overlooking patios, and an eyrie for argents and other flyers to land and breed. In the back, a really artfully constructed "hatchery", with a hatching platform consisting of six triangle ceilings; underneath that, six metal window walls, each with an air conditioner, and a similar assembly directly above. Enough steel to be able to kill disappointing babies on the spot without damaging anything, and enough glass to see how everything is rigged together. Refrigerators to store up eggs I'm not ready to hatch yet, and the aforementioned "genome archive," a reserved cryofridge specifially for tames I've retained for breeding lines. Ground floor stables for sheep and horses, when I have cause to have them out. Industrial everything.

I've climbed up to the top of the difficulty curve; all that's left now, other than breeding for quantity and mutations, is final challenges. Rhynios, gigas, the other new tames, the end bosses... the Overseer.

I've never done it, myself. I feel like I might be able to, this time.

As long as the bugs don't break me.

[Boyheat]

Decided to finally raise some Therizino babies today.
Unfortunately that's the only thing I'll be doing for the next 4 hours or so.