With a holiday of downtime I decided to hop in and see if I couldn't make a final push for the Dragon.
So, one very unexpected bottleneck ended up being giga hearts. The problem wasn't actually killing the gigas themselves; I know I said I wanted to take one down in battle but practicality won out and I ended up just drowning them, which was way easier than I expected honestly. The problem was getting more to spawn after I took out the ones that were already up. I admit, I eventually took to dino wiping until I got spawns after spending a good 5 hours doing circuits of the mountains and the Skylord cave.
Speaking of, I still haven't gotten a single Skylord artifact to spawn in the cave. Given that I've run this cave at least 20 times trying for it, I went ahead and spawned in the 4 artifacts I would have collected if the cave wasn't bugged.
So yeah, I know that was cheesy but really, this game shouldn't be this broken after this many years of development. I'm not going to sit here for another month just waiting for the artifact to spawn when for all intents and purposes I've successfully cleared the cave multiple times.
With that, I've officially collected everything I need for all 3 levels of the Dragon.
I went ahead and moved all the rexes over, built my little hut and set up all my tributes, artifacts and spare sets of armor. I've also got a shotgun to bring with me so I made some shells, plenty of med brews of course, and some calien soup. I also brought one of the pigs over.
I could have pushed to start the fights tonight but it was getting late (I wake up at 5 am every morning) and I decided I didn't want to push it. So I'll leave it for tomorrow night or maybe even Saturday, depending on how things go. Honestly I expect I should do ok on Gamma, I'll probably lose some rexes to Beta, and I'll probably have to raise a full new generation to take on Alpha. Because the bulk of my army are still my first gen rexes, all with 35k HP and only 600ish melee. I know that won't be enough. With my best gen I can easily go 30k HP and over 1000 melee, that's the kind of brute force I'll need to take it down. I have no idea if 30k is good HP or not, I just figure with the breath ultimately it doesn't matter, I need to get it down as fast as possible and none of those older rexes will be able to keep the pressure up.
So that's basically my weekend plans and if all goes well (it probably won't, being Ark...) I should be preparing for the Tek Cave/Overseer by this time next week. I have almost all the tributes I need for that too, only missing dragon trophies, alpha tuso and alpha leed drops.