Moebius137

Short: A brick wall using temporary dirt structures for utility and battlefield control. I've been working on this for a while, with feedback from Discord friends, but got a little bit overwhelmed by how fast the new suggestions went up. I hope you'll still enjoy it! Core Abilities: Tunnel While the Placerias can burrow, it does so differently from all existing creatures. While it can burrow up walls and through bodies of water, it does so very slowly and at great Oxygen cost, forcing it to surface after a short distance. But if you surface at a valid point (above water, either on flat ground or on a wall with a floor in front) it creates temporary "burrow" structures that work as a shortcut from now on - similar to an s+ tek elevator, if you're familiar, but with a much more limited range. Burrowing on top of an existing burrow uses it as the entrance, allowing you to link several to form larger networks. Excellent for shortcuts, ambushes, secret exits, and much more. Simply walk on top of it with your Placerias and it will highlight all connected tunnel exits, look at one while holding spacebar, and you and nearby small-medium tames following it will be teleported there. After a small digging animation, of course. The burrows decay if not used regularly, as to not fill the world too much. As temporary structures, they do not block spawns. They are invisible to enemies unless they stand almost on top of them, and if discovered, they can be blown up or have a Purlovia burrowed on top as a nasty surprise to anyone attempting to travel through. Dirt Wall With a great effort of stamina and a cooldown, Placeras can throw up a wide dirt wall. The higher its weight stat, the wider the wall. Excellent for blocking up chokepoints. The wall is very resistant to all but the stringest damage, but decays in less than a minute or when leaving render, and leaves behind debris that prevents you from building one in the same place. Any creatures swarming it will also be thrown behind the wall on creation. Including a 'turret mode' of sorts where it creates one when damaged or approached. Resistance to Damage over Time To complement their wasteland nature and allowing them to stay in combat for longer, their thick hide makes them highly resistant to bleed, fire, posion and lava, and completely immune to all other sources of environmental damage, such as sulfur pools, radiation, molten element or freezing water. Implacable While walking, they can push all but the largest of creatures around. Good for not getting stuck, pushing wilds into traps, or disloging Enraged creatures from Supply Drops. Clay Specialist While it can harvest wood and mineral resources, it only excels at gathering clay, collecting it whenever it would normally gather sand. Making it an interesting choice for builders. Temporary Ramps and Bridges In addition to the Wall, there are smaller temporary structures to choose from. Notably piling up dirt to form a ramp, each use making it a bit taller, or using gathered wood to form a bridge. (UI similar to a zipline. I imagine an animation where a tree appears out of nowhere in front of its snout which it then topples.) "Thick Skin" buffs I'm not 100% on this, as it migth be a bit hard to balance. Each time you are attacked you gain a small, stacking defensive buff. The more you have, the faster they decay. Would be great to increase survivability while swarmed. Using your regular Melee attack drains all Thick Skin points, but gives a short speed and damage buff, to help out your allies in tough spots. The more stacks you had, the greater the buff. Stats I'm no game balance expert, so these will be more suggestions than raw numbers. Health: High to Very High Stamina: Below Average Oxygen: Very High Food: High Weight: High Melee Damage: Low to Below Average Movement Speed: Low when walking, Average when sprinting, but at great Stam cost. Controls Main attack (left click): a bite/tusk slashwhen looking forwards, a kick when looking back. Mediocre damage, harvests bushes, rocks and trees. Secondary attack (right click): Create Wall. Crouch (C): Create Misc. Structure. Jump (Spacebar): Tap to create new Burrow. Hold to travel through existing burrows. Circle Menu (Hold R): Choose Misc. Structure type. Saddle (Art incoming!) Outfitted with rollover bars, spotlights and an erectable canvas canopy to keep the dirt out, this is a true living bulldozer. I imagine the player would lie on their stomach rather than sit, to lower the profile for tunneling. Taming To complement their digging nature, they are knocked out through a game of Whack-a-Mole. When damaged below half health, wilds will burrow until they regenerated. Players can then interact with the burrow to coax them out, starting the taming process. They poke out their head, and in this state, any damage dealt to them will deal torpor instead. After a few seconds, they burrow again and move unseen to a different spot and poke out again, repeated until they are knocked out. Letting them reburrow without taking damage removes a bit of torpor, and letting it do this too often will reset taming and heal it back to full. Additional Ideas Stuff I cam up with during brainstorming. May not be the most balanced things, and not vital to the playstyle. These are not serious suggestions, more records. Using resource nodes as weapons. A special attack that throws rock nodes, topples trees, explodes lamp posts, etc. Might be fun, but very niche. Mud Puddle temporary structure Kicking its back legs repeatedly, the ground and creatures behind the Placerias are covered in mud. Greatly slows attackers, but also gives them some damage resistance. Wooden Spike temporary structure created using wood from your inventory. When stepped on, it deals high damage (like 250 + 10% of max health), but is destroyed in the process. Megaphone Saddle A megaphone mounted on the saddle provides increased Whistle range. As this is already a creature you want to be mounted on for its full potential, this would help out singleplayer and smaller tribes greatly. I hope you enjoyed my suggestion, despite the rather scuffed and temporary art. I'll see if I can get some proper animations to you over the weekend. (Just need to remesh my sculpt into a workaple model, do the UV unwrap, slap some textures on, do the rigging, and take some Ark screenshots to photoshop it into. Maybe even rip some models from the files so it has someone to interact with.)

I haven't yet, I've been writing for the last couple hours. Arambourgiania is the tallest azhdarchid, so one of the better known ones. edit: ...Oh, right. Now I get it...

Preamble: Azhdarchid Pterosaurs were weird. In the sixites or so it was believed that, just like modern bats, pterosaurs were helpless on the ground, so these giants must have spent their whole lives in the sky, and this is how the Quetzal is presented in the game. But they were wrong. Azhdarchids were a groundborne nightmare, a giant slenderman of a pterosaur, with a head bigger than their body, stalking the land for anything small enough to swallow whole. And as they could grow to the size of a giraffe, that was quite a lot of things. (Art source: Spuno on deviantart, https://www.deviantart.com/spuno/art/Quetz-Forest-937672488) Now, as far as we know no azhdarchid was flighless. But imagining one is a common paleoart trope, and would fit quite well into the mutated caverns of the Aberration. I went for Arambourgiania as it is the tallest, with the most extreme proportions. Also it is only known from neck vertebra, so it is not unreasonable to be very speculative. Playing up the spooky atmosphere even more, I would like to combine this with a rather obscure cryptid called the Van Meter Visitor - A large bat or pterosaur with a glowing horn that terrorised the town of Van Meter, Iowa, for a few weeks in 1903. In the end they organised a posse and tracked the creature down to an abandoned coal mine - Where they spotted it with a smaller individual, probably mate or offspring. After being disturbed, they fled into the dephts of the earth, never to be seen again. (I think you see why I think this one fits onto Ab so much) One of many interpretations of the Van Meter Visitor. While this is one of the more common illustrations used, I'm not sure who the artist is; The earliest link takes me to a deviantart page that no longer exists. Even the art is a cryptid! Creature Concept: About the same footprint as a Paracer, but more than twice as tall, these giants stalk the darkness of the blue and red zones, the light emitted by their hornbill-like crest promising a brief respite from the Nameless onslaugt. But nothing is free in these caves, and many survivors have approached the light only to be promptly eaten and killed by their savior. But should you succeed in taming one, it makes for an excellent living lightpole to keep your bases safe or bring otters in caves, and it can use its light for long-range signalling. Stats: Despite its size Arambourgiania is a glass cannon, weaker than the usual boss creatures. Wild: Spawns mainly in the blue zone, but more rarely in red. Wilds are hostile to small creatures, neutral to large ones. Though they will prefer any Nameless or Reapers they see over tames. (getting themselves wrecked in the latter case) Taming: There's no shame in using vanilla taming methods now and again. But if I have to pick something more creative, luring Nameless to them to eat might be fun and not too annoying. Mobility: Jump and a weak glide, more like a Deinonychus or Terror Bird than a drake. Wing-assisted climbing to get up steep hills, but not vertical walls. Initially slow, but gathers speed like a rhino. Decent underwater speed with its little wing stubs. Would be nice to have an underwater light that's not as flimsy as an anglerfish. Can move in any direction and turn on the spot. Double-tap directional keys for a short dash. Changes direction when gliding. This mobility is needed for... Combat: Chargeup peck attack. While immensely powerful, it attacks far away from the main body, requiring skill to get the max out of it. At max charge, unleash a chaotic flurry of pecks that causes something like a localised earthquake, disorienting survivors, disloging climbing picks, etc. A stab using its underdeveloped, blade-like wing fingers. Doesn't cause much damage, but knocks back enemies as an emergency. Picks up decently sized creatures in its beak, with an attack to shake them to death. Against small wilds, this instantly kills and harvests them, with a swallowing animation. Including nameless. Against small tames and players, it instead has to do an animation where it fights back, which can be interrupted by a headshot, dropping the creature and disbling the attack for a while. A turret mode of sorts, where it will always return to its starting position. Not that it needs to move much with the massive range of its neck. Can grab fliers, and mode to jump at and snag enemy fliers in turret mode. Utility: Using a whistle while riding makes it play morse code on its light - massively extending whistle range. For those bigger boss fights... Light is always on, and drains stamina to supress. Radiation immune. No oxygen stat. All-purpose rock harvester, but not as good as the more specialised Doed or Anky. Roles: Base lighting and Security. Pack counter. Excentric choice for travelling and fighting. Caves and the Bossfight without needing a light pet. So you can bring otters into the Ab caves, and nobody has to endure the loss of their lightpet by accidentally dropping them during the bossfight. (RIP Alfonse. And Alfonse II.) Here, have another picture of random azhdarchids being unnerving: (I love them) Sources: Arambourgiania on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arambourgiania Van Meter Visitor on Cryptid Wiki, LOL https://cryptidz.fandom.com/wiki/Van_Meter_Visitor (Paleontologist Darren Naish famously described fellow azhdarchid Hatzegopterix as "a shoebill stork crossed with the terminator") I'm not the best artist as you might guess from my illustration choices, but I might try my hand at some photoshopping over the weekend. Who knows.

Appears to be both posts and topics, from what my profile view says. So if you need extra posts as well, just go through the creature suggestions and compliment other peoples ideas.

I absolutely love the idea of using Prototaxites like Cordyceps and having a passive buff "creature", but I gotta admit that many of the ideas feel overly complicated.

I haven't really used the forum yet. You need 6 posts to qualify, but is that new topics or comments? (I guess I'll see after posting this)

Was hoping this one would show up.