riceandvegetable

You said that the time of no communication would end with the launch of ASA... but here we are again. Please just be a bit more open, I hate how I'm just caring less and less about a game that used to mean everything to me.

Can I just say WOW to that saber? As someone who's spent entirely too much time looking at saber fossils and reconstructions, this is super nice! Has even got the typical unapologetically long saber face! I'm happy!

We did custom bosses and everything went wrong. Our cluster provides a couple of custom bosses in exchange for in-game currency, one of which is based on the Savage Acro. (I won't give details of the fight too much though) You are confined to an arena. We ran the fight several times, and while it was really close at times, always made it through. However, the boss minions can spawn beyond the arena border. Also the modded dino I was riding glitched out and my survivor was unable to move after that. So I suicided and tried to run back to the group. But one of the minions got me. Alright, so far so unremarkable but then I got the message that my Fjordhawk was killed by the minion. I'd totally forgotten about the bird. So my player inventory had just turned into a creature inventory as the hawk was trying to deliver it, and the decay timer became a real pressing concern. It had all my best gear and a buttload of irreplacable loot from the boss. My two tribemates immediately had my back, ported out of the arena just to help my naked self look. One suggested I craft an S+ Omni Tool to transfer the items manually from the hawk, that was decaying somewhere in the tall grass. But the timer for the next boss battle was already counting down so they had to get back soon. They found my hawk and I was so relieved! With seconds to spare we all went back into the arena. And then the real f*ckup happened. The Omni Tool was still equipped since that was all my character really had now, my inventory being on their tames. So my dino couldn't attack since clicking only opened up the tool's menu screen. Also you cannot idle near the Savage Acro in case it starts its "Dangerous Attack" that will oneshot you. But it wasn't a question of one more death, it was a question of losing a one-of-a-kind modded creature that had been incredibly expensive for my tribemate to craft, and she only lent it to me for the fight. So what I had to do was get out of that tool menu screen. Then I only saw the Escape screen open and just like that I was back to the main menu. The valuable dino and my tribemates were now alone with the Acro and also had to save my mount. While I was fumbling to get back on the event server, which also had a time-limited access so that groups would not steal each others's slots, I heared they were struggling heavily and lost a fully leveled and mutated Carchar. Finally I got my sh*t together and loaded in to the server, that means, began loading the 29 mods. Tribemate informed me that the access timer was at 3 minutes and after that my survivor would be stuck. But they finished the fight, and I actually made it back online last minute. Since I technically didn't die but log out, I had offline protection and my rudimentary inventory with me. The guys and gals brought all the other stuff home safely. I have amazing tribemates, this was a hell of a bonding experience for sure. Meanwhile, on a different server of the cluster, another tribemate got dragged under the mesh by a tuso and lost all their stuff and lot of fresh breeding pairs of creatures for real...

Took a looong break from Single Player and joined a cluster a month ago. Yesterday we did Alpha Rockwell with an alliance of 5 players. First time was a wipe. One player let his cactus broth run out for a few seconds and that was enough to start a cascade of mishaps. (You can refresh cactus broth even before the timer runs out.) After everyone else died, the arena calmed down a lot. I finally died because the timer ran out, otherwise I think I could've finished the fight. That fact gave everyone hope for a second attempt. We quickly gathered the tributes again (possible because a dino scan is available + a fixed spawn for an alpha basilisk), even though the alpha reaper got tricky. The second time around went really well. Still, most of us got reaper aggro at one point or another, but what you have to do is run run run, don't get tribemates involved and don't fight back. I also brought a good charge lantern and stunned nameless when they swarmed somebody, but I don't know if that actually helped or just looked cool. And after the ascension and after the intro to extinction, Helena's voiceover sequence crashed my game. Waiting if the ascension still counted was nerve wrecking but I was lucky and kept everything.

A single reaper lagged out his game, and he rage killed it instead of cryopodding it? Yes, doesn't sound like a server one wants to be on. I'm very sorry. I lost my unofficial server to admin bullsh**tery last fall and still miss it despite everything. - - - Aberration with friends. We wanted to get our rock drakes flight ready before Winter Wonderland ended. That meant a rushed jump back into the red zones to get gems. After that, I took the one terrible drake I had to look for more eggs, but there wasn't a single one. Our dino level cap is just 30, so the drakes run out of stamina constantly. You can level them to 1.1k in a reasonable time, but that's without a single level in health. The guys are getting a wholly wrong idea of what kind of tame drakes are. Then we looked at the SW surface area and had a few successful runs, however Raptor Claus didn't drop any good BPs for us. A couple of times our drakes stamina ran out shortly before the exit, in which case I just had to take the damage and then walk slowly up a wall. There wasn't always a wall available. Like for example, just when the sun came up, I couldn't see the exit anymore and finally had at least four reapers on me. I just chucked out tames that I thought could fight, then my drake and my bulbdog died and so did I. I don't know if the room was just very cold but I was legit shaking like a chihuahua when I got to the respawn screen. But no further death messages followed, despite the sun rising. Tribemates tried to help as soon as it got dark again and they'd finished cleaning up their own messes (courtesy of pouncy raptors). However, almost everything I had out there died, including my best spino. Only my favourite megalosaurus made it. And even that was something we could only pull off because we had the death recovery mod that gives you back anything that was in your inventory. We fed all the Xmas coal and mistletoes to Gacha Clauses but still didn't get anything that actually helped us. Base looks real festive now, though. I love that map, not a boring minute.

Did the Sulfur Caverns on Svartalfheim. I brought the best gear from Raptor Claus and a bit of cooked stuff, as well as 4 dimorphs since I didn't know if they would even fit through the crouch passage at the entrance. There aren't any videos on that cave yet, but I heard it had wyverns. What I didn't expect was that these have cave levels. I repeat, you're forced to do this on foot. Of course we got totally wiped. RIP my favourite aberrant otter. I grabbed all the dimorphs I still had in the fridge, coming out to 18, as well as more rocket launchers for the rubble golem that cut off our retreat, and tried to do a more controlled step-by-step approach. That worked well for a while, except that my armour got broken right out of the gates. I tried to have both cactus broth and bug repellant on just in case. It all went to hell when one especially mean wyvern grilled half my flock and I had to respawn inside the cave. After a while however, all the enemies in the immediate area were dead and I could get the two artifacts. More chaos ensued on the way out when a cave rex decided to spawn right in the exit tunnel, and then I got killed twice by the same lv 1020 bat. I crawled out of the cave with 3 bloody dimorphs and naked. Built a little monument for my otter and went home. Nekatus lol'd at me on the Discord. All in all, excitement and fun were had, but I don't need to do this again, ever.

Hyped! Hope you'll have news on the streaming service soon! btw, I cannot believe that people in the comment section actually complain out loudly about 'race mixing'. What century are we living in?

Svartalfheim, after the big update. I leveled up my dimorphs to 3k health and went off to the Aberration cave with 8 of them. I also brought a simple pistol with almost 500 dmg just in case, which turned out to be a good move. Not only did I use up all my ziplines but had to do some precise shooting as well. Things were calm in the beginning. When we got to the big drop, I was preparing to fix a zip line and whistle my dinos to attack from the next plateau - but suddenly I found myself tumbling into the death river because a snake had snuck up on us. I readied my climbing picks and clambered up, fixing the line in reverse - but my ravager had already jumped in as it fought its own battle, accompanied by all my dimorphs. I ran around, whistling the flock on targets, abort useless battles, regroup, and shot the sarcos and piranha that were after the ravager. The dimorphs kept me safe from karkinos, but the enemies kept coming and the battle never really calmed down. Spinos especially just swat the flock like flies, dealing damage to the whole swarm at once. One of the dimorphs died, and I pulled out the pumpgun and helped them. I even managed to direct the poor ravager back onto land. We had more dicey situations with spinos in the next part, I tried to tame a green one but instead, it came at us hard. Still, it felt like we were making slow progress. Then on to the artifact room, where I could have avoided most of the seeker battles but didn't know where to go at first. Finally had the artifact... didn't bring the otter so I guess we'll have to go through this hell again to get more, or use a fjordhawk in a cheeky way. But we had to go back through the whole cave to get out. I dropped into the death river two more times, each time with more karkinos, spinos and piranha coming after us, chaotic battles ensuing. In the end, four of the dimorphs made it out again. One is dead and I had to abandon three which I couldn't find. I feel a bit bad about this but there is no choice. This was harrowing. We had to fight tooth and nail, loot drops were horrible, lost half our squad, but the Artifact of the Devourer is ours!

Aberration with friends. Finally continued our game, and it was supposed to be Rock Drake day. Three of the four of us never did this before so I wound up talking and talking and hoping I wasn't going to send everyone to their doom and ruin their evening. Ab looks fantastic with the 100% event colors WW going on currently, so we kinda got distracted. I improved our megalos a bit and filled the base with Bulbdogs while my friend added as many colourful glowing ovis as she could get her hands on. My partner worked on his diplo project. Finally we saddled our spinos and trekked to our secondary base in the blue zone, where we found that our defenses didn't work and lots of stuff was getting destroyed. Over 8 hours into the gaming session we still hadn't made our move, instead getting into really silly problems and I began to think our group just wasn't ready. But then we actually went ahead and down. Took a wrong turn and immediately had multpile reaper queens on us. That too was a first for most of our players. Everyone was equal parts terrified and amazed. But with four people working together and helping each other manage their charge pets, we didn't run into anything we couldn't overcome. In the end we had a breeding pair of rock drakes, no amazing levels but now getting better ones is going to be a piece of cake. If only we hadn't neglected to bring red gems for a saddle!

I'm on PC.

Had a very awkward experience on Scorched Earth. I suspected that only playing that map on single player / non-dedicated made it too easy. So I found the least populated official European server and hopped on for an hour or two of the official bob experience. But turned out even the most deserted server was still so full with buildings that I would've felt weird to plaster my bob shack next to them. So I tried the medium to hard spawns, which were better, but I still spawned plenty inside of other peoples' bases, and so did unholy amounts of terror birds. Tried to get a beginner tame to get away from the suburb I was in but after well over an hour gave up. And that's that.

Aberration with friends. Our goal was a secondary base in the crystal swamps. Leading up to this, we took our spinos back up to the surface but drops were disappointing, so everybody got back to their breeding programmes. Except my dumb ass who noticed that this time our zip lines weren't burned away by the rising sun and went back solo. I got cornered by reapers and killed off my mount despite my best efforts. However, in the end I could save everything except my bulbdog. Had to leave two red drops... but next time for sure. Megalos and spinos are coming along nicely. I also tamed and bred more roll rats and welcomed Ratloaf, Gollum and Röllchen into our team. We collected resources for a proper metal cliff platform and some starter equipment, then wound the long way down into the swamps. One tribemate's still not fully sold on hazmat gear but I've been stocking up for everybody as rock drakes seem like then next logical steps. I have to admit though, the diplo still performs fantastically. It outruns my megalo and nothing except stray drakes attacks it. We set up the metal platform very high up, did more comically long ladders and water pipes, planted some Z Plants for charge light and then waltzed back to green.

Did the current version of the Caballus Adventure, which was a lengthy dungeon crawl without any crashes, thanks to the driver rollback I guess. The cave got a few extra details, like the demented scribbles of a previous explorer, which were wonderfully creepy, and a new numbers riddle. It took me a while to realize what I was looking for but then I gradually found them all. They unlocked an absolutely stunning room with bright nodes of "Shimmer Element", which is going to be used in a future update. I stuffed my pockets full. Getting all the stuff back to the exit transmitter was a bit of a chore, since that is in the center of a jumping puzzle in a giant lava room, but I've had enough forced practice to be halfways competent at that. Teleported out, brought loot home feeling very pleased with myself, updated cave guide on reddit.

I had that today... wanted to get an artifact on Caballus for a quest that's been updated. The cave is Rockwell themed and near the end there's a part that I call "the Thyla room". That's where the game decided to crash. That was the final straw. Did a massive rollback of my display drivers and have my fingers crossed that this fixes the increased crashes.

Panterra... what even is this map? Mountains stacked upon mountains stacked upon mountains. It's the grandest thing in terms of scale I've ever seen. You could put hundreds of players there and they'd never meet each other. The size of the whole thing is disheartening. I just wanted a doedic... I flew on and on without finding a single one. Crossed into the redwoods biome, where a lot of the terrain is still not fixed or solid and then tried to find the south-west corner of the map. When my character left the drawn map, there was still more land. I spotted a little mission terminal and thought that would be a little easteregg to mark the corner... nope, there was still more land. My positon arrow left my mapbook altogether. More. Land. I'd been on that journey for an hour just flying in one direction and began to feel that I was doing it all wrong. This map is probably amazing on the cluster where people just need space! But imo totally unsuited for single players. Large parts of it look really rough as well but at the same time it's got sights that are almost shockingly beautiful, like Tree Biome at night. Anyway, I'll unsub for now unless I'll join the cluster... the community still seems extremely nice. Will be keeping the sino and the iguanodon though, they can live on Caballus with me.

On Panterrra, a 140 Pelagornis was attracted to Smelly Beach and I was close to unlocking the saddle, so I tamed it. I bred up a travelling dimorph friend and rode out on my tek raptor to keep exploring and find a better base spot. Found a better dimorph and had the old one follow, but a theri took offence and murdered it. Not long after, a curious event colored sino approached me and I ditched the new dimorph too, but that one survived and is currently safe at our new base spot. Before we found that, our group had grown by another tek raptor, the prettiest event iguanodon I ever owned and a dinopithecus. I'm almost disappointed that I got the uber monke so early in the game. I'm still not convinced by how the map looks. The terrain is beautifully formed, extreme verticality and interesting shapes, but much of that is covered in a single green tiled texture which is a complete eyesore. Wonder if the devs simply looked at it for so long that they don't really perceive it any more. But around green ob, the landscape changed into an enchanted swampland that even makes Vanaheim look boring, and something as simple as a new set of ground textures made all the difference in the world. We found a naturally enclosed safe spot between mushrooms, rocks and the edge of a bioluminescent shallow lake. I set up spikes and a bed, left my new dinos and fast travelled back to Smelly Beach. With the pelagornis saddle finally unlocked, I grabbed my smithy and transported it to the new place. I still hadn't found any crystal so I explored a nearby cave and harvested a few nodes. Didn't get much but enough for a handful of soul traps, a water jar and hopefully a spyglass. I need a doedic if I want to build there, and now I can realistically move one through the swamp. I noped out when a lightning wyvern showed up near the crystal cave and returned home.

Tried out the Panterra mod map, which was released in its 1.0 version yesterday. It's one of several maps by Project Sumero. Joined their discord, which is a super friendly community from what I've seen. For now, there seems to be only one spawn point, on the desert island where you have trees - but you cannot punch them. Sacrilege. So I trekked nude across a huge, seemingly neverending bridge towards the mainland. I spotted several pelagornis and ichthyosaurs, but no land animals. But from the rough look of the textures and models there I guess the spawn is in one of the areas that haven't received their final polish yet. For now I could eat berries and leftover cactus, but without hide it would be difficult to get set up. And the landscape looked... not good in this area. I blindly ran land inwards until I got trapped in a series of giant hollow logs, with the only way out being a suicidal jump down. I respawned and ran down the endless bridge again. Near the end of the bridge I found a little (punchable) grove by the water, where five or so basilo corpses had washed up. These provided hide, so I could finally make a sleeping bag. I made a little camp there which I nicknamed "smelly beach" and even drank from the water. When I turned around, I saw the first land creature, a little trilobite. I proceeded to whack it with several spears, which broke. Because that thing was lv. 300 and the text above it was so tiny that it was for all intents and purposes invisible. I still ate it. The dodos that began spawning were lv 400 plus, and I got myself a first dilophosaurus in that level range as well. Asked the discord if this was normal, it wasn't. So I went back to fix my settings, turns out the Official Difficulty Override was missing from my ini for whatever reason. The last animal I tamed was a chonk of a Parasaur before the normalized levels took effect. Took said chonk on a trip to find a more finished area of the map, instead came home to Smelly Beach with a new saber, high level tek raptor, two dimorphs, a hyaenodon and a little lystro. In absence of cryos or soul traps we did the good old dino caravan back to camp, where I completed a little bob shack against the worst of the cold and logged off.

Aberration with friends. We wanted to risk it and look at the surface with only spinos. That went surprisingly well. Nobody died and we managed to hold out for the most part of the night. Proud of my tribemates! Drops however were underwhelming, and the one red-with-ring that appeared was too high level for us. That's what you get for rushing! But it was a great test for our spinos. After much searching I finally found my dream spino to complement our weak melee stat, all event purple too. The new spino line looks pretty atrocious with hot pink and red, but they're strong! Like "take them to the red zone" strong. We had fun with the Fear Evolved goodies that came our way and decorated our dinos and the base. Lots of basilisks around, though. Standard ones, ghost ones and one alpha. Alpha Basilisks were one of the last great unknowns of Aberration for me but with our strong tribe we triumphed easily. Out of sight of my arachnophobic friend, I then rode my crab into the blue zone and had a long look around for drops, but only wound up risking my butt for compass and door blueprints. Tribemate had used the opportunity to fill the base with breeding piles of featherlights and otters after a big metal run. Fluffy. When all was said and done we cleaned up and called it a day. Not much drama but many little successes.

Just farting around on Scorched Earth. We play on that map mainly for atmosphere and the feeling of being on a mini vacation so we don't have any actual strong dinos there. I did however have a little Crystal Wyvern that I fed with halloween candies and used to zip around the Scar while my SO's phoenix provided backup. While we had no real chance of defeating the Dodo Wyvern on this playthrough, we at least wanted to find it and poke it a bit. That went fairly well, and at least I got a little consolation prize in the shape of all three zombie dermises. Now my SO has this idea in his head that he'd like to land on the Dodo Wyvern's back just to see if it's possible. I'll update if he actually pulls it off.

Aberration with friends. Two of them are playing the map for the first time so I'm trying to nudge them towards the funner things you can do there. One still can't get over the shenannigans you can do with a Karkinos, of which I trapped another good one. Pocket crab is the way. Still unlucky with spinos, though. Since our max dino level is 30, the best melee we currently have is 4... We also tried to get the most out of Fear Evolved and went way out into the blue zone to look for event colored dinos. My other friend accidently ruined or killed two separate ravagers that I wanted, but we found ourselves a first baryonyx and a good purple megalosaurus. A few more sessions and I give us a realistic chance at beating the Hidden Grotto. Everyone also got a valuable lession on the utility of Hazmat gear since we kept passing through the same cold spore cloud and skirted the radioactive areas. My partner laid the foundations for a metal outpost in blue but wanted running water there, which led to the construction of the longest ladder and water pipe I've ever seen, and three fatal or near fatal drops into the same karkinos infested lake. Then I died trying to reach a candycorn drop underwater. Then to a skeletal raptor. Then I accidently threw my bulbdog into a ravager pack. Then my partner's shinehorn got eaten by a crab. Then a random forgotten otter died to a rock drake as well. Good old Aberration fun. Another fun thing is that my partner really, really likes diplos and actually uses them. While they are not radiation proof, they get ignored by predators and you can move the entire tribe around the map very quickly, especially with halloween candy. I'm enjoying the heck out of that. Back at base, I fenced in a new area to get the new dinos breeding, and when that was done, we called it a night and logged out.

Went back to the Caballus map because I always do. Decided to take my best horse and two deinonychus and just roam around in the general swamp and redwoods area looking for a Sinomacrops. Had to spend a night in the swamp, and this map gets *dark*. My glowtail wasn't cutting it but I keep night vision goggles in my inventory as I dislike using gamma. At one point, an allo pack attacked my two deinons and a second pack decided join halfway through the fight, had to stop and heal after that. In the end, we found a good male Sino on lv 145, which zipped off into the neighboring and much more dangerous zone. I chased it for half a day, but in the end it tamed up with crazy 51 points in melee. I brought it home and we set off again towards the redwoods border. Found two more resource caves I didn't know were there. One had a crystalline statue of an Ice Wyvern that gave me literal goosebumps when I noticed it. The other had the last clue for the Easter Egg cave that I was still missing. Cave-wise, Caballus is like swiss cheese. Even if you find all the caves, there's so many that you constantly keep forgetting the locations and can just start over discovering. On our way home, we fell down a ravine into a ridiculously deep and salmon-rich mountain lake and it was a pain to get the deinons out of there again, but I found a blue loot treasure in the depths, so it was still worth it. Deinons earned a lot of levels on the trip, which is nice, too.

Aberration with friends. They accidently set the max dino level as 30 and we kept it that way. Stat points matter so much more now, there's only bad dinos and barely usable ones. So much more taming and breeding required, but I like it. Well - except spinos, obviously. A spino with 4 in melee still does 300 - 400 damage per hit easily. I am awe. I built Captain Fatdog's karkinos trap and for the first time got the taming with a catapult turret right. It seems extremely easy, when on my previous playthrough I killed every crab I trapped. So I got two near max level crabs, but turns out they trigger my friend's arachnophobia. Sad crab face. The rest was leveling, getting metal from the blue zone, people dying to freezing spores, resources and crafting.

I firmly expected Abberration Survival Stories by Ned as a featured video! Next week perhaps?

It was finally time to face The Eärrion Alpha boss (big custom monke). The army had grown by the 6 rexes with ascendant saddles upwards of 100 armor, all leveled up, plus the 17 stegos with the levels from the first fight, the yuty, two sinos and actually the velona again. My SO wanted to try and stay inside the protection of the stegos on the way through the tek turrets. We were missing fire and poison talons. For the fire ones we went back into the volcanic chasm and started messing around. Doing so, we found a whole new area of nests and got two very nice ones. However, this prompted all the wyverns that had spawned inside the wall to move, and we basically unleashed hell upon the whole island. Cleaning all those roaming wyverns up took a while. The poison ones were easier to get. I really love the giant tree where they live. The sheer height with the cityscape below is vertigo-inducing in the best way. So then it was time for the big battle. The strategy seemed to work, but I had to turn back several times to retrieve stegos and help the velona and its group along. Hard to tell how much damage the rexes got from the turrets before we even found the boss, but it was about five times more per hit than the stegos, despite the vastly superior saddles. Once we engaged the megapithecus, everything went more than smoothly, and the velona helped out a lot. The reward was over 480 element! Yes, thank you! Also more tekgrams it usually doesn't unlock. The rexes suffered 20k damage each despite the expensive saddle, but we lost none. I still feel there's a lot to explore on the map and I hope the next update won't be all too long. We'll try to build some nice little outposts next (except on Fairy Island, the bug that deletes buildings still exists) and roam the beautiful landscapes on ground mounts. Loving the map, and that fight was satisfying!

For me as an unofficial player, this rustles my jimmies on your behalf. How much of the resources the stryder grabs are just going to be thrown out anyway?