TotallyUncool

A lot has happened since the last time I wrote here. I'll tell the more interesting one I think. I started playing more actively again on our Aberration server, but it was basically only me playing and I got bored of being alone (I blame my friends for introducing me to online multiplayer... I was fine sticking to my single player games, but now I want to play with others). Also, after watching some youtube videos, I got a craving to play on Ragnarok again, as the map wasn't finished when we played on it before. With this in mind, I went to check the server advertisement section of the forum and found an active, unofficial PvE cluster that sounded like a good fit for me. I've been playing on this cluster for a week and half now I think and I'm liking it so far. I started on Ragnarok, in one of the easy areas. Tamed a 140 lystro that was walking around in front of me and set off to build my starting shack. One thing I noticed immediately that separated the cluster from an official server, was the lack of 1x1 thatch huts littering the beaches. Instead you had either proper bases, or just a pristine beach (they have rules about cleaning up after yourself, which I like). I made my shack and tamed a bunch of animals (dodos, dilos, trikes) and had a good time puttering around, killing every dastardly seagull I could. My friends got curious and decided to join as well, so we now have a small tribe on the cluster. Of course, two of my said friends have pretty much stopped playing, so it's just me and S playing atm. At least now, if she also stops, I can join another tribe and don't have to feel all alone anymore. My plans on this cluster is to do things a bit differently. I want to tame things I haven't tamed before (like tuso) and use tames I haven't used as much such as wolves, sabers, raptors etc. Basically, I won't breed any rexes/theriz and instead buy fert eggs for boss fights. I also won't use said rexes/theriz other than for boss fights and instead stick to smaller tames with argents as the highest tiered tame. I haven't decided yet how to go about collecting wyvern eggs, because I want wyverns even if they'll only be base decoration. I might use a wyvern for it when I get one, but we'll see. Also, I want to do all the caves, bosses and ascension on all difficulty levels, which I still haven't done all of. Hopefully, it'll be fun to try and accomplish this. As of now, we only lack a fiber/thatch gatherer as we have all the other essential tames. I've started looking for dimorphodons for caving, but haven't had much luck so far. Tamed a 140 male, but he got hit so I lost some levels on him unfortunately. I'm going to breed the dimos I thought, mainly because I haven't before and because I can. I'll continue to look for more dimos today and also to keep an eye out for tek stegos and event coloured creatures. This is our small base, which I call small as dino gates are the largest gates that will be used in it: I just realized that the breeding building is not on any of the images, but oh well.

Ho boy...where to start... This is gonna be a long one. After three months of no ARK (but plenty of PixARK), me, S and A decided to return to our Aberration server. It took a while before we could even start playing, because of server maintenance and it also turned out that all our settings had been returned to vanilla for some reason. We had to fix that and it appeared we got it, except for egg hatching speed and baby maturation. The plan was to go to the surface, as me and S hadn't been there yet. Said and done, all three of us jumped up on our Drakes and went to the entrance/exit we remembered the location of. Thing to note, was that I was horribly rusty with the glide controls (and I never was that good with them to begin with), S hadn't really used her Drake much, so only A pretty much knew what he was doing. What could possibly go wrong, eh? ? Well out on the surface, we got attacked by Reaper Kings, me and S totally panicked and took off in different directions, while A tried to keep us calm (didn't work). We failed to get the Drakes gliding so many times and it was extremely frustrating, especially with Reaper Kings up our butts. This is when disaster struck. While me and S where whining, A had gotten surrounded by Reaper Kings and we didn't realize until the death message of Droopy (his pretty Drake) popped up. While trying to meet up, I took this screenshot of the rising planet (Earth?): Somehow, we managed to rally around the red obi, A found me and we switched places (because he's a much better Drake pilot) and then we also found S. This had taken some time and we had to get off the surface before the sun rose. After a lot of searching, we eventually found the entrance/exit again and could leave before losing everything. After this, we felt that A needed another, pretty and high level Drake, so we jumped up on our crabs and went down to the nests. S was a bit worried, as last time we did this she lost her crab, but since me and A had gone down there with two crabs and made it, we calmed her down about it. Just as when me and A went down there before, we were much smarter about the whole process and with me tanking the Drakes with Surimi, A and S smacked them while taking relatively little damage. We turned off our light pets from time to time, to get some nameless to spawn since this is the best way to get meat down there. We came away from there with two 190 eggs, a 185, two 170, a 165 and one 160. Quite a catch. After that we logged out. The next day, the plan was; hatch baby Drakes and then go and try to find a high level reaper Queen and get A impregnated. ? None of us had even seen a Queen so far, so we were quite nervous about it, especially me and S given the giant cowards that we are. We killed two babies and kept the rest. Some of them were even quite good looking: Oh, me and S were also practising gliding with our Drakes and we managed to figure out WHEN we failed getting them to glide properly. This is when A came to the rescue and told us how he did it (hold shift, press space and then W) and this worked! I know I will mess up again, especially during stress, but it feels great to finally getting to grips with the mechanic. Anyway, we all went into one of the areas where the Queens spawn and we found one pretty much immediately. It was a low level one, so we fought it (yep, us cowards managed to help A out). As we knew where one spawn was, we built a trap: After it was done, A realized he had forgotten to bring a shield so he went and got two of them, while me and S stayed by the trap and kept an eye out. Looking at our Drakes, we suspected that another Queen had spawned (the feathers on their heads were standing up), which we told A. He came back and landed closer to the ground and found the Queen, she was right outside the gate of the trap AND she was a level 135! A kited the Queen, while I prepared to swoop down and shut the doors behind her and S prepared to drop down in front of her: Everything went according to plan and I cackled gleefully while shutting the doors on her and then we started fighting her, taking her hp down until she started emitting the reddish glow/aura (it kept turning on and off, so you can't see it in the screeny): You see where I sit, right? I'm on the Drake with blue feathers. While the Queen was focusing on A who kept trying to get close to her when she had the red aura, I was sitting there, watching the spectacle and we were wondering if she was bugged somehow. Luckily, she started emitting a stable red aura, A moved in and I was all of a sudden in the trap with the Queen! She had snatched me from my Drake and impregnated me while I was watching from the sidelines! So, with like 1 hp left and very surprised, A told me to get back to my Drake and keep safe since if I died, the baby would die too. Back in the base, I now had to get as much xp as possible, so me and A jumped on our Spinos (btw, while the TLC Spinos look silly when walking/running/walking on two legs, they're AMAZING much fun to use now) while S took her Drake and we went out and cleaned the map pretty much. We went down into the red zone after cleaning out all the Spinos in the fertile zone. Down there, we killed pretty much everything we came across and we also got attacked by several Queens, once two at the same time (A almost lost his Spino then). I managed to get full xp on the baby and then it was time to log out again and A shut down the server so the baby wouldn't...burst out during the night (there was like three + hours left). The following day, after A had started up the server, I logged in, secure in the knowledge that I had several hours to build an enclosure for the baby, but it turned out that I had less than like 10 minutes since A had changed the egg hatching speeds and thus, the gestation speed too. So I panicked and shut myself in on the second floor (we had planned to get a glass house for the baby, so we could see it), but since A and S wanted to see the miracle happen, A cheated in some glass parts and built a glass-room with me inside on the second floor. Well, the "baby" burst out and I imprinted on the ugly little larva: When he turned juvenile, I could move him to the other babies since he stopped trying to attack every creature that got too close. Mommy, a.k.a. me, used a pheromone gland so I could feed him and we also sent in S loaded with meat, only so we could see if he would kill her (he did). All in the name of science of course. After us going down into the red zone yet again today, harvesting red gems and leveling our new Drakes, Kingpin (my Reaper) was all grown when we got back (huzzah for sped up maturation times!) and he's such a cool looking monster: I'm kind of happy his mom grabbed me instead of A and A's totally jealous. ? Plans for the following week are: Finding and taming good Spinos Expand the base (it got very crowded all of a sudden...)

Continued with project anky and I'm now up to five melee mutations and four weight. I've also got a bunch more colour mutations, some I save in case I can make some funky colour combos (I promised (or threatened) my tribemate I would give her a rainbow coloured super-anky, and she'll get one). I have so many more than what I've taken screenshots of, like three different versions of purple, pink, white, green etc., but I thought it could be more fun showing them off when I have a complete set on one anky. This was a double mutation I got (in the wrong stats, naturally), so I didn't keep it but it looked funky: These two I kept for possible use in the rainbow anky (more blue than purple I think, it's a bit difficult to tell at times, because of the surrounding colours): Other than that, I got rid of a bunch of rexes, due to the updated model changing the colours on them. It felt a bit sad getting rid of colour combos I've had for one-two years, but if I think they look like garbage, then there's absolutely no reason to keep them. Also, I spawned in a tamed creature for the first time. I felt I wanted a flyer smaller than my wyvern and I wanted to check out the new argent model, so I spawned one in. I must say, I LOVE the new argents, they look so majestic compared to before (only thing bothering me are the tail coverts - it feels like they're end too soon making the tail look very long). I thought he needed a fitting name to go with his impressive statue, so I named him Squak: The last two days, I haven't played much ARK per se, but I've played a lot of PixARK single player. As someone who loves ARK to bits despite all its flaws and who loved Minecraft back in the day, I was very interested when this game was announced. After watching some streams and youtube videos, my decision to hold off on buying it due to not trusting Snail Games that much (especially with how they're handling Dark and Light), crumbled. I really love it so far; it's like a mix of ARK, DnL and MC and the good bits at that. There are some issues, as expected this early in...erm...early access.., and we'll see how Snail handles the development, if they pull through on this one or not. I honestly believe the game has a lot of potential and hopefully, it'll be easier to handle for the devs as it's less complex than ARK I imagine. I'll just sneak some PixARK screenshots in here, nobody will notice. Me having tamed the two most essential creatures in PixARK; a firefly and a bunny: Here I am escorting my dodo home on my trusty steed (the "claptrap" in the background is a quest mailbox-thingy): Me, my ptera and my trusty head-warmer are out harvesting clay-cubes for my base when the sun rises (I'm trying to decide what I want to go with the stone I use, clay walls or sandstone walls): Plan for the holidays, is to alter between Aberration and PixARK (yep, all four of us who are still actively playing ARK got PixARK as well, we're such suckers all of us! ) and I can't wait to play this together with the others! Oh and we're definitely going to get some rock drake eggs when we're on Aberration. I've decided this, just now in fact, and the others will just have to accept it. Btw, please keep writing about your adventures in ARK. Even when I'm not playing myself, I always read about what you guys have been up to.

I've not played ARK for quite some time, none of my tribemembers have, so we've shut down the server for now. Started to feel the urge to play again and started up single player, instead of poking our admin to start up the server (don't feel like playing alone on it anyway). I have downloaded all of my tames into sp, because it feels a bit safer than having them all uploaded. Naturally, I don't use sp-settings, as that would mess things up for me. I decided to try and wrap up my passion project, the ultimate anky, that I've been working on for like two years or something like that. It's about time. So, after spending some time looking for any better stat, I gave up after getting an anky with 49 levels in melee. I just couldn't be bothered to look anymore, since I have such high stats already, it's almost impossible to get any higher for me on my own (no matter how greedy I am). I started breeding them and got surprised when one of the babies hatched at level 294 with, what I thought, was only two of the best stats. It turned out that my oxygen boy had somehow managed to sneak in 45 lost levels to go with his 47 in oxygen. I got happy for those lost levels, but at the same time a but bummed as he could've spent those points in oxygen instead... Since I have mating/maturation turned up a lot, I got all of the good stats on a male and a female reasonably fast and they hatched at a base level of 340. I also managed to get two males and four females with my desired natural colour-combos, which is something I've been working on for quite some time. The good thing about that, is that I could kill off a bunch of useless ankys and make room for the mutated ones. I do have another natural colour combo I'm considering getting; I tamed an anky with a black body, and I like her appearance so much, that I might go and look for other ankys with black colour regions. I'll see if I can be bothered though. When trying to get my natural colour-combos/stats ankys, I managed to get mutations in every stat, too. I'm now working on getting some more mutations in, focusing on weight and melee first and then we'll see if I can be bothered with any of the other stats. There's a lot of "if I can be bothered" going on, but that's because I'm extremely tired at the moment, so even something as relaxed as breeding ankys (using S+ hitching posts), is a chore. I got some funny/nice colour mutations to go with the stat ones. I'll upload them later if, you guessed it, I can be bothered.

Changing the colours back on my rexes and being bothered by the lessening of colour grading on the new (improved, especially the "waddle" when walking ) rex model. Some colours I've "brought" with me for two and a half years, feel ruined now. This is the same non-mutated rex, pre- and post-patch:

So, I've spent some time trying to learn how to glide with the drakes and it's going a bit so-so. Down is pretty much always easy, but sometimes, he just won't glide and pretends to be a rock instead. I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong when this happens and the only thing that "fixes" it is to dive very steeply. It's like the jump never registers, so he doesn't get enough momentum to stay airborn (holding the Shift key pressed at all times when this happens, so it's not that). Also, I'm trying to learn how to do the dive attack. I succeed a few times, but most of the time, I miss and land right next to whatever I tried to damage, looking a bit foolish. Aside from that, I joined A and T, when they went into the first cave for more glowtails. I tamed what I thought was a blue one, but it turned out it was a really dull looking one. Bad on me for not bringing any kind of light source with me. T did tame a black and blue little fellow, however, so as I wasn't feeling too well yesterday, I spent the entire day breeding glowtails. I've gotten a colour combo that I like a lot, so now I just need to get the colour together with our best stats (not that they're that impressive, but it's better than the low level ones). I've also been ordered to breed a copy of my little Shuri Ken (my orange/black glowtail) for S, as she thinks he's still the prettiest of the bunch. Personally, I think he has a contender in Gem, the black and blue glowtail I bred. I'm going to do some more breeding today, and maybe try to go and look for more drake eggs. Don't know if I dare to, as I'm 99.99999% convinced I'll die and lose one of my drakes. I might go and look for glowtails instead, or maybe featherlights. Still need to get me a blue and white one, like the one that got away. Or I could be useful and gather resources.

Things almost went pear-shaped again, when playing. I wanted to have another drake egg, hoping for a better and better looking rock drake, so I asked A if we could do a trip down to the trench with our crabs. He asked me if i was suicidal, but since he could make it there and back, ALONE, I thought it should work with two people as well. A was game, since he also wants better and better looking drakes (we're so shallow all of us). S was working, so she couldn't join us unfortunately, but we'll make more expeditions during the weekends when she can join. Said and done, we jumped down on our crabs and got there faster this time around. This is where we landed, love the giant skeleton on the cliff: We fought our way towards the trench and killed a buttload of high level drakes, which sucked. They weren't in the trench proper anyway, only around it, guarding it and dealing out plenty of hurt, even on our mateboosted crabs. We arrived at what we thought were the trench, but apparently, we found a small offshoot that A hadn't seen during his trips. After dealing with the drakes around said trench, we nabbed the eggs we'd found (no high levels) and took care of the drakes that came for us. While there were a bunch of them, it wasn't even close to how it was the first time due to us being a bit smarter about it. What we did notice, however, was that you barely get any meat from the drakes, so we turned off our glowpets from time to time, to get nameless to spawn so I could heal Surimi. Then we went looking for the large trench, but this is where A had too leave for an hour and a half (putting god-mode on his character so as not to die), and I had to keep his crab, me and Surimi safe. Luckily, we had stopped at a relatively calm area and I only had to deal with three drakes that came too close. This break was a good thing too, because it meant Surimi could heal quite a bit before A came back, from the less than 10k hp (out of 25k) to at least 17k hp. Yeah, we fought a LOT of high level, mate boosted drakes down there, and they put quite a dent into her hp... Something we had realized after the fact was that we needed to bring a ton of cooked meat next time we did this, because healing Surimi took such a long time. At least the place we took the break at, was pretty: When A came back, we went into the large trench and by the time we were heading back out of it, we had found no high level eggs (but killed plenty of high level drakes, they just don't feel like laying any eggs... grumbles) and we had been mobbed a few times out of nowhere, while actually NOT stealing any eggs. Maybe the drakes had followed us for a while and not caught up to us until then? No idea. It was when we had discovered that I had picked up a level 175 egg somewhere (which is weird as we hadn't found any high levels, at least we thought we hadn't) and A had managed to find another 175 egg, that things almost went horribly wrong. We had dealt with the drakes after taking the eggs and we were about to continue, when we were mobbed again. This time, the drakes just kept piling on top of Surimi, with several high level among them, and A got held back too by some other drakes. I watched with horror as Surimis hp went down rapidly, while the screen turned more and more red. A managed to kill his drakes and started helping out, but I thought that me and Surimi were toast. A got freaked out by how bloody she was and that's when the drakes finally started dying. Surimi's hp stopped plummeting and I said "I think we're okay", before we managed to kill the last drakes off. She had less than 3k hp left and if A hadn't manage to come to the rescue, she would've died. Again, we said to each other we needed to bring cooked meat next time, as we didn't get more than maybe 20+ meat from the drakes. We decided to not continue and head back instead, because she wouldn't even survive against two, high level, mateboosted drakes with her remaining hp. While trying to find the way back up, I did what any sane person on a very badly hurt mount would do, and jumped into the pink water (element river?)... I was trying to follow after A jumping up, but misjudged and got too close to a protruding cliff, which pushed me to the side and into the water. Let's just say that the panic was real, but that I somehow made it back up. To make matters worse, we couldn't find the way back up at first, so there was plenty of nerve-wrecking instances, where we had to take on drakes, but A tanked this time instead and I just stayed close enough to give the mateboost. Eventually, we found the way up, and we turned off the glowpets and just kept jumping, ignoring everything we could ignore, focusing on movement and finding a plant-Z. I have never been happier I think when we finally found one and Surimi could get all of her hp back! After this, it was pretty much smooth sailing back up. Let's just say that A said he never wanted to see Surimi so hurt again, it almost gave him a heartattack. Oh, and despite everything that had happened and it being quite late, I still almost went after some featherlights I saw. Well back in the base, I decided to hatch my 175-egg because I could. I got another male, but with decent melee this time I believe, 335%, compared to the other ones we have. I'm feeling conflicted about his colours though; I like the colour on his feathers and body, but unfortunately, it looks like someone has thrown poop on him as he has brown scales (the one to the right, is A's 175 drake): Well, I have two drakes now, which is good, because I will fail when going for eggs the first time on one.

Yet another productive day on Aberration yesterday, though not quite as crazy as our trip down to the drake nesting area. A found, kited and knocked out a 145-crab for S. It was black, with blue accents and an orange belly. Not quite as good looking as her previous one, but good enough and she tamed out with slightly better stats, too. Of course, ARK spent most of the day mocking us, by spawning blue, low level crabs close to our base. Just rub it in, ARK, just rub it in. A was a busy bee and went down to the nest area, by himself, and grabbed more drake eggs. He was being smarter than we had been on our previous trip and killed off all the drakes in the area, before nabbing any eggs and he got three high level eggs. Since he couldn't wait, he went ahead and hatched two of the eggs. We also decided that S could choose between two of his eggs, so I got to keep my 170-one. Me and S decided to go down to the red zone and tame a male featherlight, while A was babysitting. We got a bit lost trying to get down as we're still not that familiar with the zones below the mushroom forest. We arrived to the right zone eventually and I spotted a dark red featherlight male almost immediately. I tamed him up and we went off, looking for a featherlight for S. In an area, crawling with enemies, we spotted two birds, one male and one female. The male was a brighter shade of red and the female was blue and white. S wanted the male and I wanted the female, and not only that, the male was a 150 (the female was a 110)! When S went after the male, a mega attacked it so it flew off with S in hot pursuit. I followed them shortly, as I couldn't tame the female due to already having a featherlight on my shoulder. Luckily, for S, her bird had flown into one of the metal ruins, so he had stopped sort sort of. The problem now, was that he was stuck in fleeing animation and couldn't be tamed. S was devastated as it was a high level and pretty and that doesn't happen too often. We decided to leave the area and look for my blue bird instead, hoping he would get 'unstuck' so S could tame him. Unfortunately for me, we couldn't find the blue female again, so she was probably eaten by something - plenty of suspects around. We went back (almost jumped right into two alpha crabs on the way) to where we had left the 150-bird. He was there, but looked like he was still stuck in fleeing animation. Again, S got down, fearing he had bugged out and wasn't tameable anymore. I decided to check and got the prompt to feed him seeds, told S and she got super happy. After a bit of running around, she tamed him and we went back to the base. Here are our handsome fellows (the featherlights really are the prettiest glowpets I think): After the successful featherlight trip, I wanted to hatch my drake too, so I did. I got a male with 'meh' stats and 'meh' colours so I named him Meh. Funny thing is, that after we had hatched all of the high level eggs, he was the one looking the most unique. I do like the colour on his body, but the feathers are really dull looking. On the other hand, it's my first drake! Here is my drake (the smallest one) and two of A's: While caring for the babies (they eat less and the maturation speed is still boosted), we went about doing some resource gathering and I tamed a pair of carnos for eggs. Before I logged off, I also managed to find and kidnap a male and a female baryonyx and tame them as well. I tend to get turned around quite easily in the blue zone, but I have started to be able to navigate down there, and I have a favourite route back home: A tree climbing, giant crab. Now I want more glowtails, featherlights and drakes. I look forward to taking my drake out on his first flight as I'm no good at using the gliding suit. Hopefully I'll be able to learn to fly properly with the drake at least. Oh, and we should probably try and finish the second floor on the community working area... Any day now...

Disaster struck yesterday! Things went horribly wrong and right, during our last play-session. As we had three mateboosted crabs, we decided to go and find where the rock drakes' nests are. On our way down, we spotted our very first featherlights (they're very pretty) and I was very tempted taming one of them and carry my bulbdog the rest of the way with the crab. S and A managed to convince me that it was a dumb idea (it was), so I decided to maybe tame one on the way up instead. While jumping down, we came to a very pink zone, where the water looked extremely suspicious. A tested by stepping in with his crab and immediately lost a 100 hp, so I was right in not trusting that water one bit. We continued down, fighting our way through nameless (whenever one of our glowpets ran out of juice), seekers, megas, crabs, basilisks and rock drakes. As we had gone down in a bit of a remote location, we had some trouble finding a good spot to jump down from. In the end, we jumped down in the pink zone, by a really tall waterfall. Pants were pooped, because if we missed, we would've ended up in the pink water. This is the view from where we ended up (I believe we found the "proper" way by accident): We continued downwards and started seeing more and more rock drakes. S was a bit uncertain if we should continue or not (maybe she had a premonition of what was to come?), but we pressed on as our crabs had no problems dealing with anything we'd come across so far. We found the drake nest area not that far away from our landing spot and, as with pretty much everything on this map, it was beautiful: I really like that the zones are colour themed on this map. Nothing still beats the blue area though, that one is the #1 feast for the eyes. We jumped down with our crabs and decided to see if we could find any nests. I spotted two and went over to them to take a look-see, A told me to maybe check underneath the nest in case I didn't see anything, but I saw a glowing, beautiful egg perched where it should be. A jumped up the the second nest and found a second egg and we debated if we should nab them. His egg turned out to be a 175 and mine a 170, talk about stupid luck. We decided to go for it, I grabbed mine and jumped down. This is where things went very wrong, as I hadn't been clear enough that I had grabbed the egg before jumping down, which meant when the swarm came for me, A couldn't help at first because his crab got stuck on parts of the mob. There were so many rock drakes, it was insane! S smacked as fast as she could to help me out, but her crab took a severe beating in the process. My crab got so crowded, she started floating and I couldn't hit anything. With horror, I saw her hp bar go down at a rapid pace (she had 22k-23k hp before we started fighting as I had only leveled her hp to use her as a tank) and then S pulled back, saying her crab was dying, while A tried to help (he couldn't quite reach me). I started panicking and yelled at S to get back in and help me as my crab was also dying, unfortunately, I didn't realize how badly her crab was hurt (as she has a tendency of exaggerating how bad her tames are hurt at times, because she cares about them so much) and he died not long after. We killed the last rock drakes and Surimi, my crab, was down to 3k hp and I felt absolutely horrible for making S get back into the fray and lose her crab while trying to save mine. Meanwhile, A went and grabbed his egg and we dealt with the few rock drakes that came for him, while S was still being understandably upset. All of us just wanted to get back up again after this. S was now on foot so it would be even more dangerous for her and her bulbdog. During the fight, I didn't realize I was basically the reason her crab died, but it sank in while we tried to get up from the drake area, so I told her she could get my drake egg as compensation. Do you know what the little DireWolf said then? She said she wanted A's higher leveled egg instead! This made all three of us burst out laughing, calling her a greedy DireWolf, dispelling the sad mood from just moments ago. I really love these fellows, they're so silly in so many ways. We decided that we'd hatch both eggs and that she could pick the one she liked the most of them. On the way back up, I took it upon myself to carry S and try to keep her safe. Let's just say that we fought a LOT of critters on the way up, since they all wanted to have a taste of what I was carrying. When we got back into the red zone, I spotted a female featherlight and decided to try and tame her. It only took two Z-seeds as she was a level 40, so it went faster than I had expected. Now I had two things to carry; S in one claw and my spare bulbdog in the other. In the end, S managed to stay alive until we got further up, where there were more enemies. A asked if we should carry her bulbdog and gear back or he should teleport her back to us so she could continue her adventure. She wanted to come back to us so he teleported her. She died a few more times and she gave up when we had finally started seeing the mushroom forest again (the whole adventure had taken three hours...). I got her stuff and A got her bulbdog and we made it safely back home. A was really eager to hatch the drake eggs and asked if I had any nameless venom left. I didn't as I had accidentally force fed it to my crab while healing her. Oops... So an exciting and sad adventure for our little group. Next time we go down for more eggs, we'll be better prepared as to not lose another crab again. I've also taken it upon myself to find a new high level, PRETTY, crab for S so that's what I'm going to try to do today. Luckily, the gender doesn't matter at least, as we have one of each. Oh, and I also realized we need carnos for imprinting kibble, so I'll have to tame two of those as well. In the end, we lost a crab with okay melee, my spare bulbdog and gained two high level rock drake eggs and a very pretty featherlight named Tweet:

Okay, since my post got waaaay too long, I decided to put it behind a spoiler, so you don't have to read it unless you want to (and you won't have to scroll through a novella to get to a more interesting post either). In short; some very productive days on Aberration and it's been fun playing after a short break.

Like the Direbear's and Procoptodon's visual upgrades and all new abilities sound fitting and good (the rex will truly be a king once again, as its arch-nemesis, rocks, won't be able to challenge it anymore! Bow rocks!). Other creatures in need of a visual overhaul are pretty much everyone up until the Allo (?), maybe, especially the first creatures are in dire need of some facelifts (the quality difference is so big). A creature I personally wish gets a facelift and that's not mentioned, is the Pelagornis. Please give the Pela som proper wings/tail instead of what it has now + some better flying animations (look at videos of wandering albatross/southern royal albatross to get a better idea how their flying animation could look like). Oh, and going out on a limb here, I would love to see the flying mechanics get changed so that it feels more like you're actually riding a flyer. I was thinking something along the lines of: [Spacebar] - jump [Spacebar][LShift] - takeoff [LShift] - flapping to gain altitude/speed (uses more stamina) [W] - glide or soar (uses less stamina) (S) - hover (uses more stamina) [Spacebar](S) - land [C] - Dive [C][LShift] - Faster dive (?) Well, something like this at least. I was thinking that if you only press [W], you'll lose speed and thus altitude after a certain period of time, how long you can soar/glide for depends on which flyer you're riding. Same with hovering, how long your flyer can hover, depends on which flyer it is, this might apply to diving as well, maybe not all flyers should be able to dive too fast or far due to their size/build (Quetz)? Encumbered flyers should have problems staying airborn and use a lot of stamina to fly (i.e. flapping like crazy), over-encumbered ones shouldn't be able to get airborn/stay airborn at all. ^ I think this idea/suggestion might be too much and could probably lead to lashback, and I honestly don't know if it's even doable, especially as you'd probably have to change some of the stats, like, stamina and stamina drain to not kill the flyers. It's just a wish to have the flying mechanics feel a bit more "realistic" than what we have now.

Our tribeleader discovered this to his dismay when he bred Megas to use on bosses on our Island save. For some reason, the unridden Megas use the grab attack instead of the proper bite attack...

My friends are back, so the server's up and running again and we've manage quite a lot during our sessions. We have moved to a new location in the Mushroom Forest, close to one of the ramps down to the blue biome. While the base is far from finished, we have a fabricator, refinery forges, smithy and fridges up and running. We've also selected a cliff for our individual houses and placed cliff platforms where we want them. We've also managed to tame quite a few critters: A 115 Spino A 150 crab (on spoiled meat as we have no turtle kibble) A 140M Anky and a 150F Anky A 110 Doed A 140 and two 130 Megas, unfortunately they're all male and none of them are breeding material... We've also lost a couple of tames, I lost my mutated Ravager, Broccoli Jr. (had a green back), and my high level Bulbdog when I was about to move a trap to tame the 140 Mega. I was ambushed and killed by three other Megas, that I've no idea how they managed to sneak up on me. We also lost the Spino (or I did) to yet another Mega that attacked from behind, while I was busy fighting another one. Bino, as was the Spino's name, didn't have good hp and I got stuck on some rocks and couldn't turn around or get away. I tried getting him to follow me, but it was to no avail. I felt extra bad about it as it wasn't a tribe owned animal, but our tribeleader's personal tame. He wasn't too upset about it, probably because he had tamed the 150 crab when it happened. To get an equally "good" Ravager, I bred ours and managed to get several mutations (reddish back, dark green body, blue back and white/light grey back) and now I have backups, in case of surprise Megas happening again. While breeding them, I discovered something rather silly; the saddles on the females bloat during their gestation, they look incredibly stupid. Baby Ravager with blue mutation: After my breeding frenzy, we decided to look for a Mega for my friend and we found a 130 for her. Waiting for it to starve, we went exploring for a bit. Armed with two Megas (she borrowed our tribeleader's), a crab and hazard suits, we felt brave enough to venture into the blue biome and explore a bit. It's absolutely beautiful there and we must have a base there at one point. We got jumped by Nameless at times when one of our glowpets would run out of light, but we had no problems dealing with them. I would go so far as to claim that the Ravagers are the biggest threat because of their gnash/bleed attack. We fought other crabs as well, but me and my friend hung back while our leader attacked first, then we attacked from the sides/behind, to avoid getting grabbed. I did get grabbed, twice, but it was by our crab by mistake. I got a bit surprised when it happened though. Lots of Megas around: After a while, we got to the entrance to the red biome I think and as soon as we walked into it, our characters and glowpets started making noise as if hurt by the radiation. We immediately pulled back and checked our pets to see if they had taken any damage. It didn't look like they had, but none of us felt like experimenting as me and our leader had our precious Glowtails with us. We'll return later, with disposable glowpets and more hazard suits. Oh, we got an Alpha Nameless attacking us in the blue biome, but disposed of it quickly. Also fought two Basilisks down there, but avoided an Alpha crab, mostly because our Megas aren't particularly good, especially as they're not mate boosted. Entrance to the red biome (sorry for it being so dark)? Still much to do as we need to finish the community working area, our houses and find Spinos, female Megas/better Megas, more crabs and other creatures to tame. We need to get some crops going/check if a greenhouse is even possible and gather resources for industrial grill, chemistry bench and so on and so forth. Oh, and I didn't get that far with my Aberration fan-art, as I discovered Dishonored while my friends were away.

My friend managed to get off from work a bit earlier yesterday, so she could play for a couple of hours in the evening. This meant Roll Rat taming and Glowtails! For being us, we were quite effective, because as soon as she logged in, we started taming a 130-Roll Rat that had spawned close to our base. I rode around on my speed Ravager and collected the honey from nearby hives, using ghillie suit and bug repellent. At the first hive, I got attacked, which I though was weird since that didn't happen when I tested earlier, but then I realized I had forgotten to crouch... We fumbled with the taming, so we lost some effectiveness, but none of us wanted to start over so we finished taming the Roll Rat instead. At least now, we have an efficient wood harvester, even though he has the turning radius of a freight train... When trying to get him inside the fence, we discovered he didn't fit through a dino gate, so we had to make a behemoth one instead. Considering how small our entire base is, we now have a behemoth gate with some base attached to it. It looks ridiculous. After the Roll Rat, it was time for what we've been wanting to do since our first cave run; taming us some Glowtails. We hoped that the ones we'd seen before were still there, especially me as I'd called dibs on a 130-reddish male that I'd found. We didn't bring any Bulbdogs with us, since we wanted to be able to carry our reptile treasures immediately after taming them. We had 20 seeds each (yeah, I've been hanging with the local flora quite a bit lately) in case we spotted more than one Glowtail we might like. Upon entering the cave proper, we noticed a certain lack of mobs. It persisted through the entire cave, and we wonder if the respawns don't work properly in there or something. Anyway, we were lucky, as "our" lizards were still there and I tamed my little one as soon as I found him again. Our leader also found one he wanted and my friend tamed two, so she had one on follow and kept squealing how cute it was running after her (I admit, it was). So, well, the conversation the entire way back to the base went something like this: "Oh my god, they're so cuuuuteeee!" *high pitched squealing noises* "So cuuuuuuteeee!" "We need more!" "Can you get out of the way, I'm trying to take a screenshot here?" *more squealing noises* "Syster, can you please move away, your glowstick is messing with the colours and I'm trying to take a screenshot" Syster, my friend, had a green glowstick attached to her. "Can you move further away, the light still reaches here?" She ended up in a corner of the base in the end until her glowstick quit shining. We have already decided that we need about a billion more Glowtails and that when we move, we need to build an enclosure/pen/house to put them in so we can see them all the time. Here's the start on our future Glowtail hoard: Our Tribeleader with his Glowtail: Here's my super cute little lizard: Love the glowing pattern on the back when the light is activated: Last one, I promise: After our successful Glowtail trip, we went to check out what I thought could possibly be another cave. It turned out I was very wrong as it wasn't a cave but an exit to the surface. We stood at a safe distance peeking out: We decided to go exploring the first area/level a bit more, by following the river to the swamp. We found several explorer notes and killed some Spinos and crabs on the way, getting plenty of levels on our Ravagers. It was fun just running around on the Ravagers, but we forgot to look for a better spot for a base. We also found another exit to the surface along the way, can't wait until we can go out there later on. It'll be an adventure, that's for sure. The plan when the others get back and the server's up again, is to find a place to build a larger base, tame an Anky and possibly a higher level Doed, tame Spinos and Megas, tame some turtles for kibble to tame a crab, tame Scorpions for kibble to tame a frog, and explore the map much, much more. Now, I'll try and draw some Aberration fan-art, we'll see how it goes as I haven't been drawing "seriously" for quite some time now. Hopefully, I'll manage to actually finish it so I have something to show my tribe/friends when they're back.

Didn't do much today either, harvested some wood, some stone and killed Trilobites for chitin. I also made some bug repellent as our tribeleader and his friend had killed some crabs today and made ghillie suits using the polymer. There's a 140-Roll Rat hanging around in the area and I really want to tame him, but my friend still can't play right now. At least I tested the ghillie suit + repellent when stealing honey and it worked splendidly; instead of chasing me down with murder in their eyes, the bees just swarmed around the hive, looking confused. Also, the honey lasts 3 hours in the preserving bins, so that's good to know when it's time to tame Mr. Rat. While out crab hunting, our leader and friend found an alpha crab. They tried killing it, but gave up after removing around 20k hp with crossbows. I suggested us testing compound bows and see if that'll work better, so now we need to gather stuff for said bows. Oh and since I was bored I bred two of our Ravagers (our leader still hasn't fixed the breeding/maturation settings ) and then I bred them again. The result was these two pups that I will breed when they're grown, hoping for the colour (because it doesn't look like almost all of our other Ravagers) and the "best" stats: Oh, and it looks like the Glowtails will have to wait until after Christmas, as my friend and her SO will be going abroad to celebrate with her SO's family. We'll shut down the server until they're back, so I'll have to play something else. My Glowtails...