heliantha

player names aren't unique -- there are several (a lot) players with the name 123. battlemetrics just lumps them together.

Not much has been happening the past few days. I've been raising a bunch of babies: - the 13 weight argies I hatched a few days ago - 5 baryonixes, as replacements for the ones that drowned in the lava cave - 2 snow owls - 2 brontos & a mammoth, for no specific reason - I just wanted to see what the babies looked like. Oh boy, bronto babies are really special looking 😁 Also, an extremely generous person gifted me 3 fertilized boss giga eggs. This is amazing - my island server has undergone a HUGE price inflation in the past few weeks, with people asking rather outrageous amounts of tek building parts even for simple stuff. The worst part is, the newbies now think they have to progress to boss fights & element gachas super fast to get element themselves, thus perpetuating this whole mess. Anyway, my point is we would not have been able to afford more than one of those giga eggs without a lot of additional farming. Since this is my first time raising gigas, I was a bit shocked to see the incubation time. Our "incubation room" ist not separated form the rest of the base, meaning I had to be extra mindful about always closing ALL the doors. Unfortunately, we have a bunch of jerks on the server who would like nothing better than to steal some valuable eggs. If I want to hatch more giga eggs, I'll probably have to build an extra room where I can just throw down the eggs and forget about them for two days. So today, the eggs hatched. One of them produced twin gigas. Unfortunately, they're all girls, so I'll have to look for a powerful male for mating. But, 4 giga girls is still better than 4 giga boys - at least I can produce more eggs, and finding a breeding partner should not be that hard. (I have a wild 145-tamed male one, but I would like to avoid crossbreeding our new highly mutated gigas with that one) I named all 4 girls after the player who gave me the eggs. Too bad it was a guy . Now I'll just have to get them to juvenile stage without accidentally getting them killed. I've decided to go the extra safe route, just taking them out of cryo in the morning hours, to minimize the risk of a server crash ruining everything, plus I'll just take care of two at a time until they can hold at least an hour worth of food. Such is the joy of playing on an unstable official server .

We had a crossbows & grappling hooks, since I'm a bit anxious about the very last jump before the artifact, and yeah using those would have been the only thing that could have saved us. But what happened there caught us completely off guard, since - from our perspective - we had not even been close to the lava pool - and we wasted the valuable time we had cursing and DILO-ing in voice Next time I'll either go in there alone and be ready to grapple during the entire trip, or bring a rock drake instead of a bary. Although in hindsight, going in there on a saturday afternoon on an official server was probably the biggest mistake.

Seems we pissed of some of the ark gods, since today we suffered another annoying loss. Buddy & me were running the caves on the island, we were planning to do both alpha brood & alpha ape. We were in the middle of the lava cave (south eastern), and debating which way to go - when suddenly my buddy said "woah, I think we're in the middle of a crazy lag spike". Before I could reply, we both found ourselves swimming in a pool of lava. We were caught completely off guard by this, and could only jump around helplessly until the lava killed us. Seconds later, our otters died as well. As we respawned and flew back to the cave, we received the message that our baryonixes had also perished. I don't think there's anything we could have done to avoid this, as my buddy went back in to see if some of our stuff was recoverable, and she says there was absolutely no way out of that pit, and no way to get to our stuff either. So that's 2 dinos, 2 shoulder pets, 2 ascended saddles, and our equipment down the drain, plus all the work form running a bunch of other caves before the lava cave, as we lost the artifacts. Also, we do not understand how this even happened - normally when we're hit by a lag spike, even if we move we are warped back to our original location when the lag ends. And I'm pretty sure that we were not inside a pool of lava at any time We discussed if maybe we should not have taken our best barys with the ascendant saddles, in order to avoid the loss - but really, what's the point of having nice stuff in the first place if you can't use it because you're afraid of a lag spike or an antimesh bug or any of the other 1 million bugs? Ugh. Anyway, we took a deep breath afterwards and decided to rerun the upper south cave, and then proceed to do carno island cave and western water cave, so that we could at least fight the megapithecus. There was just no way I was going to set foot into the lava cave again today, I'll probably go there in the middle of the night when nobody is online the next time. The only dangerous part left was the carno cave, but at least if you're hit by a lag spike in there, you don't fall into lava. 😐 The ape itself posed no problem whatsoever. Idk when we're going to do the broodmother. I'm going to breed a bunch of new barys over the next few days, so that we have more spares. That's key with ark: you always need spares of all kinds of dinos. The one thing I'm really glad for is that I left my chibi at home. We had already left the base & were heading towards the first cave, when I turned around and put the chibi safely away.

On extinction, I spent a lot of time flying in circles around the snow biome, watching every single snow owl through spyglasses and either murdering it or luring it back to my taming cage. I must have killed so many innocent snow owls, oh my. 😞 The spawn levels were really depressing, I think about two thirds were level 20 and below. I ended up taming 4 owls in total: 2 male 130s, 1 female 120 and one female 135. For now I've had enough of the snow biome, but I might try to find a level 150 one again next week. I transferred the owls over to the island, this time without any terrible accidents. I also had a scary encounter with a corrupted wyvern, which appeared out of nowhere and started to roast my poor argy with purplish fire. My argy was too slow to get away from the wyvern, and probably had too little melee damage to kill it (altough in hindsight, I think I should have tried fighting the wyvern). I watched in horror as my argie's hit points were going down, down, down, while trying to dodge the fire and also trying to come up with a plan to get rid of the wyvern. In the end, I managed to aggro it onto a wild bronto, and escaped with a very bloodied argy with ~2k hp left of 15k. Ouch. 😐 Spent the rest of the evening on the island, together with my buddy. I was waiting for my argy eggs to hatch, and doing farming / maintenance around the base. I cooked a ton of special kibble, farmed flint, farmed meat for the baby argies, and loaded up our of oil producing gachas with stone, since they had collected a ton of owl pellets that were about to spoil. We now have so much oil, it should last for many months 🙂 I will probably switch to a pair of sap producing gachas next. With an hour left on the agry eggs, I then got the idea of taming a queen bee. Beehives have been very rare ever since the last event ended, and our achatinas need veggie cakes. And really, how hard could it be? So I mounted our quetzal, put our dire bear on it's platform saddle, and started flying around the redwoods, looking for beehives. My buddy was following me on another flier, watching for thylas in the trees. We found an occupied beehive quickly, but after destroying it, I was not able to feed the queen bee, despite having the correct kibble in the last slot. We followed the queen for a while, but eventually lost track of her. We quickly found another beehive, but I had the same problem as before. My buddy started googling for solutions, while I tried again and again to tame her, without success. Then, the worst thing happened: a ugly, poopty, totally punchable jerk of a pegomastax appeared out of nowhere and stole the kibble. An entire stack of it, because I am apparently a very stupid person and put an entire stack of it into my inventory, despite knowing that I would only need a few. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh! Buddy and me slaughtered all dinos around us, hoping we would get the kibble back. I even returned to our base and returned on a snow owl, to use its heat vision. But we did not find the pegomastax anywhere. And that was the end of our bee taming attempts. I sure hope the damn pegomastax chokes on the kibble. 🤬 Buddy logged out, and I took care of the argy eggs, which were about to hatch. There were 35 eggs in total, so it was necessary to be selective. All the argies that inherited neither the high weight stat nor a decent amount of hp were led outside of our base and left to starve. Since there were still way too many baby argies left after that, I also killed off those with crappy stamina, unless their color combination was nice/interesting. This still leaves us with 13 argy babies, which is still way more than I wanted, but 10 of those have the "good" stats combo, and I just can't bring myself to kill these off, even if their colors are ugly. I keep telling myself that one day, I'll give them to a newbie in need, but the truth is that most of those argies will spend their entire existence inside a cryopod. I think I might have a slight dino hoarding problem 😇

Started this day's session with a game file integrity check, which took forever and revealed 10 damaged game files. How odd. After fixing those, I finally managed to log into my base at the sanctuary again. I teleported back to the sunken forest, took out another flier, and went searching for my lost ember wyvern. It took a while, but I eventually I found him - quite close to the sunken forest entrance, actually. My spirits lifted quite a bit after getting the wyvern back. Losing the owls sucks, but I was not really that attached to them yet, they did not even have names. I then decided to work on the outpost I had built in the snow biome, so that I can store everything necessary for taming snow owls there, and park one argy there. The plan is to log in once a day, circle the snow biome once or twice, murder every low level snow owl I see, and hope that a high level one spawns soon. At least those owls are super easy to lure into a cage, and a fast tame without the need for narcotics. I flew around a bit, but the highest level snow owl I found was 95 - not really what I was after. Instead, I found a level 150 managamr. This was not really what I was looking for, either, but I decided to tame it anyway, after all 150s are rare 😉 Finally, I checked on our base at the island, and let our argies mate. I now have 30 fertilized argy eggs. Soon, I will hatch them all and see if I've got some pretty colored argies with the ultra high weight stat. The not so pretty ones and those with crappy stats will die

The game decided to punish me today It started off really well, I logged into extinction and went to look for a decent snow owl. I found a nice lvl 135 female, and was of course super happy since most owls flying around the snow biome are low level. Taming was quick and easy. I then flew around a bit and spotted a male 120, which I also tamed. I brought them back to my base, and logged off. Decided to come back before going to bed - why oh why did I do this, playing for a bit before going to bed never ends well, although this time it really wasn't my fault. Anyway, I decided to move the two owls over to the island, for breeding purposes. I hopped onto my ember wyvern and flew towards the sanctuary (I know there's a city terminal near my base at the sunken forest, but I can never find it...), but as I neared the city walls the game crashed. I restarted, waited until I could log in again, but the game crashed again. Now I started to get a bit nervous. I restarted my PC, logged in again, and the respawn screen came up. I picked the outpost at the sanctuary as respawn location, hoping that I could quickly recover my body bag. Immediately, the game crashed again. I realized there was not much time left to recover the body bag, and the cryopodded owls within it, so I asked my buddy to log in real quick - turns out she had not yet downloaded today's patch . I attempted to get into extinction a few more times, without success. I made one attempt at creating a singleplayer game, and running towards the location where the crashes happened: crashed again. At this point I was sure the body bag had despawned. I decided to quit for today. I just hope my ember wyvern is allright. If he stayed up in the air, nothing should have happened to him, and now that I'm offline the damage protection must have kicked in. I hope my buddy can find him tomorrow - or maybe, just maybe, I can get into extinction again myself. I'll have to run an integrity check on the game files, maybe this will fix it. I can visit all of our other bases on other servers just fine, its just the sanctuary that causes problems. But of course, I'll constantly be anxious as long as this issue persists, so I won't do much on the other servers. Anyway, it's been a long long time since I lost tames to an ark bug. And to lose them on the very same day I got them 🙁 I know many people have lost way more dinos than me, but I really really hate losing tames, no matter how. I normally put cryopodded dinos into the inventory of my flier, just so that nothing happens if I die - but this time, I wanted the transfer timer to go down while travelling to the city terminal. I'm now really, really tempted to just buy a good snow owl from a breeder on my island server. If only his prices weren't so crazy 😐

Today I decided that was finally time to hunt for a decent snow owl. We have some, just to have access to their pellets, but they're all low levels. I want to raise rock drakes on other servers than aberration, and I need a better snow owl for healing, since transferring nameless venom off aberration sucks. (I start separate chars on different servers -> no access to transmitters 😕). So I visited our little base on extinction, and started by crafting the parts for a taming construct. I flew over to the snow biome, and luckily found a spot to place the taming cage & a small 2x2 outpost, with beds & a campfire. This particlar server is pillared like no other server I've ever seen, so I was really happy to find such a good spot. After building the taming pen, there were zero snow owls around. I did however spot a managamr hovering a short distance away. I wanted to test if the managamr would also fit into the cage - and how a mana behaves if you attack it, since I have zero experience with them - and fired a test arrow at it. The managamr completely ignored me. So I ran up to it and fired more arrwos -> zero reaction. After standing right below it and firing a bunch of arrows directly at its belly, it suddely dropped unconscious - right where it was, floating in the air. DILO! I took out my spyglass and checked its level: 110. Well, crap, because that meant I now really wanted to tame this thing, as 1) we dont have one yet and 2) anything higher than 100 seems really rare on extinction. So, snow owl plans = cancelled, I was going to tame a weird looking flying dog thing instead. I checked the dododex for its preferred food, and found that we did not have the necessary kibble, nor any of the other food sources that would tame it quickly; So I contacted my buddy and told her about my taming plans, and that I really needed her to transfer some exceptional kibble over from our main base while I was going to figure out how to actually feed it to the the mana - since it was still hovering in the air, completely out of my reach. I grinded up the mats to build a really long wooden pillar with a platform on top, with some ladders to climb up. While standing on the platform, it was possible to interact with the managamr. By the time I was finished, my buddy had arrived with a stack of exceptional kibble, and I shoved it all into the manas inventory. Since so much time had passed, it was tamed pretty much instantly, yay! But that's when the real fun began, because instead of landing, as I had expected it to, the damn thing started to just... float up, up and away. I whistled like crazy, but this did not help. The mana just hung in the air and rose upwards, like some weird balloon animal. My buddy also whistled, and it did not help one bit. I feared what would happen once it reached the sky border - maybe it would be instakilled? Plus, there was still the entire stack of kibble inside its inventory. After flying around for some minutes and being really, really weirded out by this behaviour, we decided that we would not give up on our newest acquisition. My buddy would guard the mana, while I was going to fetch a quetzal+platform saddle from our main base. I hoped I would be able to cryo it while standing on the platform. I also brought a managamr saddle along - if the cryopod did not work, maybe I would be able to saddle it & jump onto its back... By the time I came back with the quetzal, my buddy & the mana had left the snow biome. The mana was no longer drifting upwards, but was moving towards the eastern map border. I circled it on the quetz, trying to get into a good position to use the cryopod. Unfortunately, this did not work, even after multiple attempts, as the mana just moved too much. However, at some point I managed to get close enough to put the saddle onto the mana. So now all I had to do, was to somehow mount it. It took another ten minutes of flying around the floating managamr, trying to find a good position, carefully balancing on the quetz' wing, but in the end, I did it - I suddenly found myself on its back. I just had time to notice the "out of stamina" debuff on the mana, then we both were plummeting towards the ground. Now falling from that height with great speed actually gave me a bit of a scare, which does not happen often any more in this game. I had no idea if the mana would take fall damage in this rather unusual scenario: if it did, it was 100% going to die. But, zero fall damage was taken, and buddy & me could finally cryo it & fly home. And that is the story of how we got our first managamr 😅 (P.S. after logging off, I researched a bit about managamrs... apparently what happened with ours is a well known bug. I wish I had known about this before I tried to tame one 😉 Oh well.)

On the island, things seem to have calmed down a bit. The sever did not crash today, so I hatched some more argies. I caught a really cool lavender, purple and green lowlevel argy last weekend, and I want to get a combination of the color scheme & my weight argy's stats. I also have one nice looking blueish argy from the christmas event, and I want to combine that color scheme with my weight argy stats well. I collected 22 fertilized eggs in total and hatched them all today. I did manage to get twins with a combination of the purple color scheme & the weight stat, but the other stats are extremely messed up. I kept them because they can still be useful to haul stuff around inside the base, even if I'll never take them for a ride because of their non-existant stamina. I did not manage to get any blueish argies with decent stats. Most of the babies inherited the cyan-pink color scheme of my weight argies, which I personally find incredibly ugly (many people on my server are fond of cyan-pink dinos, which boggles my mind), or a combo of pink & other colors. I left a lot of argy babies to starve I then checked the magmasaurs on genesis - they have reached juvenile stage, so they can be left alone. Upon logging in, I received the message that my character was killed by a daedon. DILO! I was sure I had logged out in my base, next to the fridge. I was rather scared, fearing that the daedon might have harmed my precious magmasaurs. Indeed, when I respawned, there was a daedon in the middle of my base (inside of the closed building, I mean). It definitely was not there when I logged out, I would remember if there was pig in my kitchen 🤨. Luckily all my dinos were unharmed, and I quickly disposed of the daedon. Then I discovered that that I had not left a body bag behind. Again, DILO. This is annoying, as I had a set of rather expensive fur armor in my inventory which is gone now. Upon checking the tribe log, I found that the same daedon had also killed my buddy's character, which also had not left a body bag. I made a mental note to remove all valuable stuff from my inventory when logging out, and collected some ambergris. Later, I dragged my buddy to the rock drake trench on aberration. With the event nearly over, I wanted to collect some rock drake eggs, hoping for event colors. Somehow, on the way down to rock drake land, my buddy managed to lose the entire inventory of her rock drake without realizing it (I assume she hit drop all at some point, although I do not understand why or how ) We noticed this once we reached the rock drake area, and by then, it was way too late to do anything about it. This caused the loss of several sets of hazmat gear, and also of our two water bottles and extra food, which meant we had to cut the expedition short. However, we still managed to steal a few eggs in the 180-185 range, and I will hatch them soon. We then spent the rest of the evening running around on aberration, looking for glow-in-the-dark dinos with pretty colors. I found the prettiest stego I've ever seen, and it was a high level one, but some jerk o a managamr just had to run up to me and kill it. This is the 5th or 6th time that happenend to me, and its always some jerk on a mangamar who lands next to me, sees me standing next to an event colored dino and decides 'hurr durr must kill wild dino with ice breath' and then jumps away without even harvesting it. At this point, I no longer think its an accident . We then tamed 2 doedicuruses, 1 iguanodon, 1 stego and 1 shockingly pink spino. We named the spino "loverboy", and although its only level 5, I will soon let it mate with all of our female spinos

The island server our main base is on is constantly crashing ever since the evetn started. I had hoped it would be better today, since weekend is over, but nope 😕 it crashed right on the second when some argy eggs hatched; I refreshed the server list like crazy and immediately logged in when it came back up, to find my nursery empty. Naturally, I assumed all babys were starved - until I noticed a red font below my feet: turns out the newly hatched argies were still alive, but had somehow sunken into the foundations. So I started to tear out foundations, and in the process, destroyed a few air conditioners as well Still was too late for half of the argy babies - they died just as I was about to claim them. But that's ok, because after checking their bodies, I saw that they had not inherited the weight stat I bred for. I decided to cryo the survivers and flee from the server, because I could just feel the next crash coming. On CI, I then flew around looking for a valentine rex or a high level female giga (any colour will do), but all gigas were clearly hiding and all the event colored rexes I saw were extremely ugly, so I had to kill them to put them out of their misery. I then tamed a lavender 150 megatherium, for no special reason - I just liked its color. Finally, I went to genesis and put some of those magmasaur eggs me & my buddy stole yesterday into the nursery. I hatched five eggs, and one of them actually is event colored, and also lvl 150 😍. Now I am more happy than ever that I farmed up all those mats for a nursery + tek through on genesis last week, because with my island server constantly crashing, I sure would not want to raise that magma over there. Meanwhile, the genesis server has been surprisingly stable...

My magamasaurs on the island finally reached 100% maturation. Finally! Today I found the time to test them out. I had been super lucky last week, and received an 120 armor saddle from a mission on genesis, so we were ready to go. I was not disappointed. The magma, to me, is way more fun to ride than an anky... Its so much faster, and smallish predators leave you alone. Plus, since its so big & you can stand in its saddle, you can put an argy on follow and easily move the resources to its inventory without dismounting. I attempted to ride the magma up to the volcano, to harvest some obsidian & crystal, but I did not make it there - I filled my argy with so much metal on the way there that I had to turn around. I think the days where we're in constant need of metal are finally over 🤩. (Of course, the current event helps a lot, with the boosted harvesting :D) I also saw a gorgeous rex in lavender and dark purple. Those colors look really good on that dino. Unfortunately, the server crashed right after I saw it, and afterwards it was of course gone. If I find the time during the event, I might try to hunt for one with similar colors. Later, my buddy & me decided we would try to tame a ferox. We went to the ferox cave, cleaned out the polar bears and wolves, and looked for a high level one. We found a lvl 150 male, unfortunately not in event colors, and decided to tame it. The server was lagging really badly, and we had trouble with the whole "grapple to the ceiling" technique - most of the time, the crossbows would not shoot anything, but we still lost a grappling hook each time that happened. After a few tries, the ferox broke our fur armor and killed my buddy. But by that time, we had already fed it several pieces of element, so we really wanted to finish taming it. We decided to move one of our boss rexes next to the ferox, and run to the other side of the rex right after feeding. The transformed ferox would then hit our poor rex' big butt, instead of us. This worked really well, and we successfully tamed the ferox. (In case anyone else wants to sth like this: the rex had a 100 armor saddle and still lost about 15k life during the whole process, so you can't just do this with low level dino and a primitive saddle) Right after we tamed it, a lavender female 130 appeared, but we did not have enough element left to tame it 😕. Oh well. I then dragged my buddy to the magmasaur cave, in hopes of getting an event colored one. I saw several nice pink and purple magmas in the cave - too bad you can't tame those... But we took several eggs, and I have high hopes for those eggs. My buddy then decided it was enough ark for today, and to go to bed. I wanted to try one more egg stealing attempt, just a quick one, before also logging off. As always in ark, doing something real quick before logging off resulted in total disaster It started with a sever lag that caused me to fall into the lava, righ next to a pissed of magmasaur, and ended roughly 1,5 hours later when I finally managed to safely loot my body and teleport out. I died like 5 times during that time, typically right after picking up my previous body bag. The absolute highlight was when I had to crawl into a magmasaur nest to get close to my body, found a 150 egg in there, and decided I would have it all: I would start the teleport, loot my body and then quickly pick up the egg - after all, what could possible go wrong? - and it would have worked, but when I took the egg the whole nest suddenly despawned from under me 🤨, which has never happened before, I fell into the lava yet again, the teleport was interrupted, and every magma in the cave started shooting fireballs at me. In the end, there was so much equipment in my body bag that I was completely unable to move after looting it. Good thing the teleport function doesn't care about this 😅

Farmed a metric ton of crystal on crystal isles and crafted them into greenhouse roofs and windows. After raising the first batch of magmasaurs to 90% on the island, I decided that the next batch will definitely be raised on genesis. But of course, I needed a decent base for that - my little 4x4 stone shack wont do. So I built a nice flat ground floor out of metal (no ugly pillar nubs poking through the floor! 😊), then calculated how much crystal I would need for the windows and roof. I came up with about 25k, which is a lot (for me), but I like bases with greenhouse windows better than pure metal boxes. And I wanted to finish the base before the breeding event starts, for obvious reasons. Also sacrificed most of our element stash on the island to craft a tek generator & tek through. After transferring those over to genesis, I discovered that my genesis character can actually interact with the generator, which means I wont have to swap my characters around just to turn the generator on, yay. 😄 Over on the island, I managed to get absolutely, utterly stuck between two of my adolescent magmas. It happend because of a lag, I fell down from the first floor of my base and landed right in between them, with absolutely no way of getting out again. (You cant crawl out under their bellies, and they're way too big to jump over their legs & tail). Of course, I had no cryopods with me. In my annoyance, I attempted to use a whistle command to make them walk away from me. This was a mistake - not only did the two magmas themselves not move by an inch, but instead every single dino inside my base ran over to me. So I was still stuck between the two magmas, while a bunch of argies jumped on top of me. Unfortunately, those argies were unsaddled, so I could not use them to escape. (That's just my luck, I of course have several saddled argies... where were those?) Meanwhile my rexes and my giga were pounding against the wall from outside, wanting to come in and join the fun. At this point, I decided to just turn the sound & monitor off and do something else for a while. About 40 minuted later, I returned to the game - by then, my character had finally died of thirst. I then spent ages rearranging my dinos. I really, really hate whistle commands. 😕

Today was a reminder of how even completely innocent things in ark can go wrong real quick. I started by feeding my magmas, loading up my gachas witch stone & farming a few things around my base at the island. As I fed my dung beetles, I realized just how much fertilizer I had, way more then needed. And suddenly I got an idea: why not make some re-fertilizer and make the area around my base pretty again? So crafted loads of re-fertilizer, and tried it out for the first time. I know that tames can vanish when a rock or tree respawns right where they are, so I was careful to move away from them, focussing instead on the area near my fence. I really liked the results of the re-fertilizing. Soon I was hopping around my base, poofing trees back into existence, feeling like some hippie wood elf. But then suddenly, found myself unabe to move! I was stuck inside something, although I could not see what it was. I tried crouching down, which did not help, and seconds later found myself dead. Ok then, the re-fertilizer can evidently get you killed, how funny... As I respawned and ran towards the place of my untimely demise, something strange occured to me: There was no green ray marking my body. Oh crap. 😕 This might mean that I had fallen through the mesh - something which I managed to avoid in this game, until today. Sure enough, there was a big gray rock in place of my body, and no body bag to be seen. I realized what this meant: I had just lost a set of rather expensive armor, as well as my favorite chibi, a featherlight. Even worse, my favorite shoulder pet, an event colored aberrant otter, was not there either. In complete denial, I hit the whistle button, hoping to at least make the otter appear again somehow. Immediately, the earth started rumbling - in my panic, I had just caused every dino in my base to run towards me. 😅 I moved the dinos back to their feeding throughs, which took forever, then grabbed a pickaxe and removed the rock that had killed me. As I had feared, there was no body bag under it, either, and no otter. In this moment, I really just wanted to rage quit for today. My favorite shoulder pet & chibi, gone forever, just because I wanted to make my base pretty. I walked back into the nursery to cryo the magmas and log out. As I stood inside the nursery, looking out of the windows, across the river, I noticed a green glow. "How strange", I thought to myself, "I've never seen a supply drop come down in this exact location." Then I realized what the green glow meant, and what I was looking at: my very own body bag, which somehow had moved to a completely different location, across the river and into the redwood biome, where I definitly did not set foot today. I raced out of the base, hopped onto a wyvern & flew over, and sure enough, there was my body, with ~3 minutes decay timer left, and with the otter chilling next to it. None of this made any sense: why was my body there? And how did the otter survive being in the redwoods of all places without being eaten by the terrorbirds, or trodoons, or carnos, or any of the other nasties? DILO DILO DILO. 🤪 I decided that ultimately, none of this really mattered. I took my stuff & my otter, went home and logged out.

Killed the megapithecus for the very first time today. I've been putting off doing the island bosses for a while now, despite having raised an army of boss rexes and farming the swamp cave for a rex saddle blueprint back in 2020. Somehow, it never seemed important (I dislike the look of tek bases & wont build one), and there were more interesting things to do. Plus, I got tek transmitter & replicator unlocked via a free-for-all alpha dragon raid which I joind a while back. However, two days of dealing with magamasaur babies - their insatiable hunger for their preferred food, astrocetus poop, I mean ambergris, coupled with the insane spoil timer of said poop - made me realize that I simply must have tek throughs, otherwise I'll go crazy soon and dump those little bastards on the nearest glacier. So, I dragged my buddy online and told her we were going to murder a giant ape today. We debated whether we should start at gamma difficulty or go directly for beta, since we had two sets of the required artifacts. I knew for sure our rexes were powerful enough to slay the megapithecus without losses even on alpha, but this was going to be our very first boss fight, and in the end it seemed wiser to just try the easiest difficulty first. We watched a short video about the boss fight to get an idea about pulling, positioning etc. I looked through my keybinds & wrote down the most important group whistle shortcuts. Buddy decided to ride the yuti and stay in the back, while I was going to be in charge of the rex army. I also had all of the boss rexes mate in a giant orgy in the back of my base, so that there would be plenty of eggs to rebuild the army in case something went horribly wrong. On the whole, it went a lot better than I expected. The biggest problem we faced was actually getting into the boss arena together with all our dinos - once we stood at the blue obelisk, we both realized we had no idea how close the dinos had to to the terminalin order to join the fight. Another problem was the positioning of the rexes: once we teleported in, I whistled all rexes to follow me, so I could move the away from the edge of the arena. However, some of them started to zoom around the place, just like my cat usually does, and nearly fell off despite being on follow. However, none of them actually fell, and once they were positioned, the bossfight itself went absolutely smooth, as the yuti-boosted rexes made short work of the boss on both gamma & beta difficulty. The elementium we received as reward was then immediatly used to upgrade our nursery with a tek generator & four tek throughs, and I rejoiced in finally being able to leave my juvenile magmasaurs alone for more than an hour.

Today was a good day. After wasting time at the rock drake nests and nearly getting some dinos killed yesterday, I decided to visit the volcano on Genesis (official PVE) and look for some magmasaur eggs. After all the initial troubles, I'm finally starting to get somewhat used to this place. And since I go into the cave solo, the only thing I can lose is the equipment I carry with me, which can easily be replaced. So I loaded up my rex with several sets of cheap ghillie armor +glider wings, healing potions, crossbows and a ton of grappling hooks. Teleported to the volcano, and parked the rex under a rock formation near the cave, where it's safe from meteors (hopefully). As I entered the cave and glided above the lava pit, I saw something beautiful: all the magmasaurs - there must be like 30 of them - gathered into one corner of the pit. It was like a huge ball of yarn, only with magamsaurs instead of the yarn. The two nests on the other side of the pit were completely abandoned. Now in my opinion, the only possible explanation for this would be other players, who aggroed them to one side of the pit. But, were they still in the cave, or had they left already? I glided in circles down into the pit, looking for a player, or maybe the outlines of an invisible rock drake: I saw nothing. As I sank lower, I spotted two magmasaur eggs, both in abandoned nests. I landed at a safe spot, and asked in global if someone was currently farming eggs in the volcano cave: no-one replied. Ok then. Not wanting to waste any more time - the magmas were slowly starting to scatter again, but still pretty clustered - I jumped into the closest nest. I looked at the egg - it was level 150! 🤩 I immediately started the teleport sequence, then picked up the egg right before the teleport finished. But the magmasaurs were so far way from me, there was no risk to it at all. My first 150 magmasaur egg, and it was the easiest egg grab I've done, by far. I quickly went back to the volcano - after putting my precious egg away, of course. Now, the magmas were no longer clustered on one side of the pit. They expressed their joy at seeing me again by running towards my position and shooting fireballs, even as I was gliding high above them out of reach. So I decided to look at the larger pit in the back of the cave, hoping they would calm down in the meanwhile. Suddenly, I crashed down - right into the lava! As expected, the message "The volcano is about to erupt" appeared on my screen next. I then realized I had crashlanded next to a magmasaur, because I got a fireball thrown at me, which broke my armor. By then, it was clear I would not be able to get out of the cave alive. My #1 goal was reaching a safe spot, where I could pick up my body bag after the eruption. I had to get out of the lava. However, as I was running towards solid ground, chugging down healing potions, I ran past a nest with an egg inside. Since I was going to die anyway, why waste this good opportunity? I grabbed the egg, made it to solid ground, then even managed to reach a slightly higher altitude via grappling hook, before a second fireball roasted me. I went back to the volcano again. Once the eruption was over, I went into the cave and looked for my body bag. I was able to retrieve it, and found that the egg I had just taken was level 140. I could not believe my luck - two high level eggs back to back! After storing the egg, I went back and attempted to steal some more eggs (the whole egg stealing business is kind of thrilling & addictive 😅), but by now the magmas in both pits had declared me public enemy #1. I waited patiently for a chance to grab another egg, finally managed to get to a lowlevel one, nearly died after picking it up and decided to quit while I was ahead (for today, at least).