Pipinghot

People transfer characters all the time, what they don't do is try to merge characters by editing the hexidecimal files on the server. The game is fundamentally designed so that each account can have only one character on each server/map, having more than one arkprofile for a single account on a single server is exactly what ARK is designed to prevent. If, for example, you play on the Official servers you could have a character on The Island, one on Center, on on Aberration, another one on a different Island server, and yet another one on a different Center server. You could also move those characters from server-to-server. If you wanted your character from Island #1 to move over to Island #2 you would first have to move the character on Island #2 to a different server. You just can't have two characters on the same map at the same time. There are tons of admin commands that let you do a lot of stuff - add or remove people from tribes, assign tribe ownership, take ownership of buildings & dino's for a tribe. This is a rough idea of what you would do: 1) Choose which character you want each person to play on that map. 2) Make each of those characters a member of the tribe you want to have active on that map. 3) Assign ownership of all structures on the map to that tribe (the "TakeAllStructure" command). 4) Assign ownership of all tames on the map to that tribe (the "TakeAllDino" command). You will probably want to spend a bit of time looking at all of the possible admin commands to see if there are other things you want to use them for.

I've seen posts for fixing individual, specific issues with characters by editing the profile file, but I've never seen anything, anywhere, that gives enough information to do a complete edit like you're trying to attempt. Unless someone posts a big surprise in this thread, I think what you're asking for has never been documented by anyone. Not on youtube, not reddit, not these forums. I'm pretty sure that your only option is to make a backup copy of a character file and then use trial & error to start manually editing the backup file to try to accomplish your goal. Having said that, since you have admin rights on the server the idea of editing profiles seems like a waste of your time, it would be a whole lot easier to use some admin commands to effectively do the same thing. * You can grant XP to characters until they're whatever level you want. * You can spawn in bosses then kill them with admin commands to unlock the tek engrams associated with those bosses. Then, as long as the characters you wish to "promote" are nearby you can use "cheat kill" to kill the boss you just summoned and all of the characters will get credit and unlock the engrams for that boss.

That sounds like you have your tribe settings to personally owned. If you care about this, you can change the tribe settings so that anyone in the tribe has the ability to name animals no matter who tamed them.

Again, there's no definite time frame, it all depends on how many tickets people are submitting.

Even without talking about breeding, I find it's always a good idea to have extra animals at your base, you never know when something is going to go wrong and you need a spare. If you had a bunch of argy's that would be different, just make sure you always have extras of any animals that are important to you.

I find that chocolates and flowers usually give 100% taming effectiveness.

Changes? What changes, when, what patch?

Yes, but but exactly how much is anyone's guess. Just to use an abstract example: Let's say an update includes a new dino and the graphics files for that dino take up 15MB of disk space, then a few days later they make a slight change to the graphics for that dino and the files for the new "version" of the dino take up 20MB of disk space. If you wait until after the 2nd patch to update your system you will only have a 20MB update, you won't have to download the first version of the dino and then the 2nd version, you'll only have to down load the dino once using the 2nd version. Having said that, if he's using slow internet as his reason then that pretty much means he just doesn't really want to play. I mean, he could leave the update running overnight while he's asleep, or during the day while he's at school/work, and it would eventually install and update. Then again we might be talking about the wrong thing, when he complains about his internet he might not mean download speed, he might be talking about latency (ping). All real-time games are less fun with a high ping, and if you guys are playing Official server then when you add his latency to the fact that official servers are pretty crappy even with a good connection... well it may just not be fun for him. Maybe he does want to play ARK, but he wants to play with better performance giving him a better experience.

Well, the short answer is "the best you can afford". And as with everything in ARK that means, "How much time do you want to spend?" You can spend hours and hours flying around your map (or swimming around the oceans) constantly checking loot crates trying to get the best saddle blueprints possible, and then farming up lots and lots of materials to make those saddles... or at some point you'll decide "I've spent enough time on this" and you'll just try it an see if they're good enough. One of the things you'll notice as you collect blueprints of various types is that the Ascendant blueprints are not always worth the cost, some of them cost you a lot of resources for only a small gain in effectiveness. Sometimes you'll even find "lower quality" blueprints that give better protection than the blueprints that are supposed to be higher quality. This is because every quality level has a range of possible numbers and sometimes you'll get extra lucky on a lower quality blueprint. You have to be the one who looks at your blueprint collection, looks at the armor value, looks at the cost, and then decides which blueprints are worth your time to farm up the materials. Without diving into the math, it's important to understand that most of the numbers in ARK have diminishing returns. So, for example, a saddle with 50 armor is not twice as good as a saddle with 25 armor, it's slightly less-than-twice-as-good. You can look on the wiki if you want to dive into the math for how armor ratings work, but even if you don't want to learn all of the details you can just keep in mind that there are diminishing returns. Let's say you have a saddle blueprint that has 45 armor and costs 500 ingots and you have another blueprint that has 55 armor and costs 1000 ingots. Is the extra 10 armor really worth doubling the cost, adding another 500 ingots? The only person who can answer that question is you - how important is that extra armor to you, how good/fast are you at farming metal to make ingots, and do you think it's worth the extra time to farm that metal? You're going to get better at farming everything in ARK as you play the game more so the question of "how much time will it take" is going to change as you play the game more. As you can see from the post by @CervantesMor there are usually multiple ways to get resources and part of the game is learning which methods work best for you. (Side note: another way to get a lot of paste is to tame a good beezelbufo and ride it around areas with lots of insects).

Yessss. THAT is the screen shot I would want to see. Success is great, but failure is much more funny.

Rather than type out an explanation, I'm going to suggest you watch a couple of youtube videos on breeding, multiple people have already done some great tutorials and you'll probably understand it better if you see some examples on videos than if I try to explain it in writing. What really helped me when I was first learning about breeding was this series by TimmyCarbine. There are other good ones, obviously, plenty of people are providing good content for ARK, this is just the series that brought it together for me. I'm sure there will be one or two small things in there that are out of date, but the fundamentals of how breeding works haven't changed so it will still be 98% true.

Whenever I have a vendetta against a species I tame the heck out of them until I've shown them who's boss. The obvious exceptions are ichthyornis and pegomastax... death on sight.

I'll take Therizino's over rexes or spino's any day. They do just as much damage, they have fire resistance, they maneuver much better than rexes (and somewhat better than spinos) and they will self-heal during fights if you put some veggie cakes on them. If you're ok with breeding up more than one species for boss fights then I'd say megatherium & therizino for those three fights, or if you want to focus on a single species I would go with theri.

Joe was joking, but also telling the truth. Something that will make ARK better and/or more fun for you is to think about the game a little differently. Rather than being scared of dying it's better if you just assume that you're doing to die sometimes, and then make sure you have some plans in place for what you're going to do when it happens. This includes things like taming or breeding spare animals that you can use to go rescue your stuff, making sure you have duplicates of your important equipment stored and ready to use, and maybe even some practice dying on purpose to get used the idea if what things you need to do when it happens. It's better to be prepared to recover from dying than to be constantly scared of it happening, just food for thought.

For any boss fight animals you want to get as many levels as is possible within reason, with the amount of time you want to spend playing. You probably don't want to spend the time getting them to the max possible level, but you definitely want to have at least 30-40 levels added to them after they're born/hatched. The nice thing about boss fight animals is that you typically only care about a two stats. If you're using a megatherium for general game play, exploring the map and such, you probably want some levels in Health, Melee, Weight, maybe even some in Stamina & Speed, but for boss fight animals it's just Health & Melee, so you don't need as many total levels for them to be good enough. For something specialized like a daeodon, that you use for healing, you would add some Health, maybe, but almost all levels would go into Food so they can heal for as long as possible. A) How to get Levels Keep in mind that you don't need to level up any of your breeding stock until you get to the final generation, in fact it's usually easier to keep track of your breeding if you deliberately avoid putting any levels on them. Babies don't inherit levels that you've added to parents from XP, they only inherit levels that that the parent had after you were done taming it or that the parent had when they were born. There's no benefit to adding XP levels to your breeding stock during the breeding program. Once you're done using an animal for breeding and you're ready to move that animal out of the breeding area and into your general animal stock, then is the time you want to add the levels from the XP they've been slowly building up. Also, I've never done boss fights with settings like yours so lets talk about that for a minute. I've played mostly on Official servers, Unofficial servers using Official settings, or even when I've played some Single-player I've used Official settings. If you're using the 0.2 Difficulty that DreadCthulhu mentioned, that means your maximum level in the wild will be 30, which means if you put 30 levels on your tamed animals they'll be double the level of wild animals, which is really strong. If you've already done breeding to have breeding stock with good stats I'd be super surprised if you need more than +20 levels from XP when you do boss fights. Just to put this into perspective, on Official servers the max wild level is 150. If you get a perfect tame they tame out at Lvl 223. Then after a breeding program they would typically be hatched/born at Lvl 260-280, and then with about 50 levels added from XP they would typically be Lvl 310-330 for the boss fight. This is only slightly more than twice as powerful as wild animals, so if we use the same comparison for your single-player game I would bet that you could do boss fights with animals that are born/hatched at Lvl 40 with +20 Levels from XP, or +30 at most. On top of that, I'm not even sure you need to do breeding. With the max wild level being 30, you could probably tame a bunch of Lvl 25-30's, they'll finish taming at Lvl 37-44, then you add 30 levels from XP and they'll be Lvl 67-74, which means they'll at least twice as powerful as max level wild animals. Even without breeding that might be powerful enough to do boss fights. As for how to gain XP there are multiple ways to level up your animals, it basically just depends on how you like doing things. 1) Passive XP. The easiest but slowest. Having said that, once you have taken the time to tame some animals to prepare yourself for breeding, and then taken the time to complete your breeding program so that you have good bloodlines for your boss fights, the extra time for letting animals gain XP passively probably won't bother you. The important thing to know about Passive XP is that it only happens when you are logged on and close enough that the animals stay rendered in by the game. One way of doing this is to have your character sit on a chair in the middle of your base. Your character consumes food & water very slowly like this, you can leave them logged on for hours at a time, like overnight or while you're at school/work, and nothing bad will happen to them. You don't actually need to see the animals on your screen, they just need to be within range, which means you can do this inside of a building to keep your character safe. Also, you want to be sure that you've built your base with protections so that random animals can't wander in and start attacking your stuff while you're away. It's ARK, always build for safety. 2) Cryopods. About equally easy, and somewhat faster. Keep animals in cryopods in your inventory or a cryofridge. I'm assuming you don't have cryofridges because that's a Lvl 88 engram, so once you get to Lvl 51 you can start making cryopods and keep animals in the cryopods in your inventory. When they're in your inventory in cryopods they gain an extra 5% XP. Then, once you get to Lvl 88 put them in a cryofridge and it gets even easier. Two warnings about cryopods: a) If you get into the habit of carrying animals in cryopods, it will be extremely important to recover the stuff from your body when you die. If you can't rescue your stuff after 30 minutes, when your body/bag decomposes, that means everything in your inventory is gone, completely gone. So if you get into the habit of carrying animals in cryopods because you like the extra XP they get, you will need to think about when you want to temporarily put them in a box/vault/bin if you're about to go do something really dangerous. Dying is part of ARK, it's going to happen, the key to long term success is to prepare your plans for what you're going to do when it happens (and in this case those plans either mean making sure you can recover your body quickly or having storage where you can put the cryopods whenever you're about to do something extra-dangerous). b) cryopods will eventually discharge. At the end of 30 days they will run down and anything in the cryopod will be gone forever, you can't get it back. You will still have the cryopod but it will need to be recharged in a cryofridge and your dino will be gone. This isn't a big deal, but it means is that you need to keep an eye on the charge level of your cryopods. Whenever the charge level of a cryopod gets to low you need to unpod the animal and put it into a newer pod with more charge. Eventually, when you get cryofridges, this won't matter because the cryofridge will keep the cryopods charged up. But during the time between Lvl 51 and Lvl 88 you need to pay attention to how much charge your cryopods have left. 3) Active fighting/leveling. For leveling up an individual animal the fastest way is to ride it around fighting stuff. This might make you think that you could lead a pack of animals around the map killing stuff and they'll all level up fast, and that's partially true. But the catch is that when you kill things only 1 animal at a time will earn the XP, whichever animal landed the killing blow will get all the XP and the rest of your pack will get nothing. So you could, for example, ride around on a yuty, leading a big pack of megatheria, just killing everything in sight, but some animals will have more luck than others, some of them will get more levels than others, and you'll still need to do some extra hunting to help the unlucky animals make up the difference. Then again, you'll also be collecting a bunch of meat which you can use to help feed the next generation of megatheria (or other carnivores) that you're raising, and you'll get other items from the stuff you kill as an added bonus. This is also good practice for the boss fights, so you get accustomed to leading a pack, using whistle commands, maybe you even divide your animals up into "tame groups" so each group has different assignments. Learning how to use tame groups & whistle commands will make your boss fights easier and more fun. B) Mutations. I think for what you're doing it would be a complete waste of your time to work at getting mutations. You're going to get a few of them just from doing your breeding program, but when you compare wild animals with max Lvl of 30 to your animals with levels from taming + breeding + XP levels, There's really no added benefit for you to spend extra time trying to build up mutations. Just to put this into perspective for you, I run a private server for myself and some RL friends, we use Official settings for our levels, and we still don't ever bother with working on mutations. We tame a bunch of animals until we have starting stock with good stats ( we look for 34-40 levels in any stat we care about ), then we do the breeding program. Sometimes we get lucky and get a few mutations before the breeding is done, sometimes we don't, but frankly we've never needed them and we don't really care. Even on Official PvE servers mutations aren't needed. They're nice to have, they can sometimes make a boss fight easier, but if you start with good breeding stock they're not necessary. Of course in any game there are people who try to max everything out even when it's not really important, so on Official PvE servers you'll find people with max level animals for sale/trade, but really that's just for the min max'ers. The only reason to have mutations on animals is if you want to avoid imprinting. On an Official server (or an Unofficial server using the Official settings) this can be important, because imprinting is time consuming and a pain in the neck. Which leads us to imprinting... C) Imprinting. What's (usually) more important than mutations for boss fights is imprinting. On our private server, for example, we don't care about mutations but we do care about imprinting - but only for the final generation, only for the animals that will actually be doing the boss fights. For general-use animals on a single-player game imprinting isn't important at all. It can be nice, after all more-powerful animals are always easier and more convenient than less-powerful animals, that's why you want to tame Lvl 25-30 and not Lvl 1-5, but it's really not a big deal in single-player for general game play. And, again, with 0.2 difficulty settings that give you max Lvl 30 animals in the wild, I'm not even sure that you should care about imprinting. Which takes us to... D) Benefits of Single-player (bear with me, this is for a reason). The best thing about ARK in single-player mode is that you have complete control of the game. You can use mods, you can change settings, you can use admin commands, you can make the game as easy or as hard as you want. You can experiment with any of these things and decide which ones to keep and which ones to get rid of. On our private server we've played 6 maps (Island, Center, Scorched Earth, Ragnarok, Aberration, Extinction) and we're just about to finish up playing Valguero. We've changed our settings multiple times based on when we want to make things harder or easier for ourselves, we've experimented with different mods, we've used admin commands sometimes or conversely forbid ourselves from using admin other times, we basically do whatever we want to do in order to make the game more fun for the group. For example, we use a mod that picks up poop and eggs for us, because both of those are tedious busy-work tasks that don't make the game more fun for anyone. We build and seed our gardens, but the mod keeps the gardens fertilized because, again, that's tedious busy-work that no one likes. If the game glitches and causes someone to lose stuff they shouldn't have lost (like if they lose an animal because of a meshing false-positive) we respawn a replacement for their animal and stuff because no one should have to waste time recovering from the game screwing up, but if someone dies or they lose stuff because it's their own mistake, or even just from normal game play, well then they lose those animals and that stuff because ARK is a game with consequences. We have chosen mods and settings that take away all of the pointless nonsense and leaves us with the challenges of playing ARK. Likewise you, on single-player, have the ability to decide what mods/settings/changes you want to make in order to make the game more fun for yourself. My suggestion would be to play ARK plain-vanilla until you decide which things you like and which things you don't like, and then look for mods & settings that will change/fix the the things you don't like. The reason I brought this up is because we were discussing Imprinting. Imprinting is painful, it's tedious and inconvenient, and when you're playing on single-player the whole system for how imprinting works will cause you to leave your character logged in because the clock stops whenever your logged off. You should try imprinting once, decide whether you like it (and of course by then you will also be thinking about whether you actually need it or not) and then you can decide if you want to use a mod or an admin command to imprint your boss-fight animals. I know this is a bit more than you were asking, but hopefully giving you a full discussion will help you make decisions that will make the game more fun for you. Good luck and happy ARK'ing.

He probably forgot to add the clown skin mask to his ghillie helmet. Classic ARK mistake.

You might want to try a couple of other things listed here. https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmanager/ark-assertion-failed.html Or, since your error specifically refers to LostIsland you might need to follow this guy's suggestion and delete a couple of specific files, he walks you though it.

"Many people get it, and they enjoy the game despite it's flaws. " "Others will simply be griping about eveything that isn't perfect for the rest of their existence." "THE POINT is that other people play the game just fine as is." You didn't say it in precisely those words, but that's the implication of your arguments. You chide people for complaining, you call the game "just fine as it is", and you use the apologist's excuse that the only issue is players who don't adjust to the game's "idiosyncracies". And again... I understand it just fine, but that's not what you were doing. The game is not "just fine" for everyone, maybe for you but not for others, and for them to complain about the game not being just fine is perfectly reasonable for them to do. Your attempts to dismiss that as merely 'griping... for the rest of their existence' means that you're the one who doesn't "get that".

Blue raspberry.

As long as you have extra disk space to burn it should work. Steam and Epic install games differently, and in different locations. Heck, I'd bet that you could even run both copies of ARK at the same time (assuming this doesn't set your graphics card on fire ).

Yes, that was your point, and it was clear to everyone, but the counter-argument that you're attempting to ignore is that your point isn't the only one, it was your point not "THE" point. Your argument about idiosnycracies in not a valid excuse for managing a game poorly. I disagree with your assertion that other people play the game "just fine" as it is, what they actually do is play the game in spite of it's failures. Just as one example from personal experience, I run a private server for a myself and a bunch of real-life friends, if we didn't have the option to play ARK on a server where we have complete admin control that lets us overcome the copious failings of ARK we would have ditched this game long ago. Playing ARK on the Official servers is a nightmare of lag, glitches and terrible customer support, definitely not "fine as it is". Sure, some people choose to do it, but the simple fact that more than 70% of the player base is playing Unofficial and private servers (and that doesn't even include the number of people who play solo or non-dedicated host) provides a strong argument that people play the game in spite of its failings and not because it's fine. It may well be fine for you (which is your right, you should enjoy whatever you enjoy) but that doesn't mean it's fine for other people and it doesn't invalidate their right to complain about ARK's failings.

I think Cowgirl is right. Either you previously played on a private/unofficial server with a different map and now that server has changed their map to Fjordur or possibly WildCard gave up and IP address from one of their official servers that is now being used by one of the services that sells server hosting (like Nitrado, for example).

In spite of the fact that I agree with you about WC being a pretty bad company (and to be clear, this is not the Dev's or GM's fault, it's the fault of the business jocks who understaff their technical teams), it also seems like you didn't do this quite right. Even though ARK has a history of some pretty painful bugs, you still didn't make the best decision with your taming pen. One of the basic behaviors of how ARK works is that dinos render in before buildings which means there is always a chance of a dino glitching out of a building when it's being rendered in. If the dino is moving when it renders it it will leave the building before the building has a chance to render in. I'll never understand why the ARK team chose to render in dinos before buildings, but the fact remains that this behavior is built in to the very, very early code of ARK and I doubt they could reverse that decision without basically rewriting the core code from scratch. If you've ever done any programming you'll know that there are some things you just can't change later unless you scrap the whole thing and re-write it from scratch, and I strongly suspect this is true for the render order. You can call that a bug if you want to, or maybe one of ARK's "original sins" because of a bad design decision, but you need to understand that it's never going to change. No matter how much you like or dislike ARK it's never a good idea to build a taming pen where it can cause problems for you if something goes wrong.

That's a little bit true, but significantly misses the point. If you paid for a movie that crashed 10 times before you could watch the whole thing you wouldn't be ok with that. If you went to a theme park and got stuck in the middle of every ride for 30 minutes you'd be pretty critical of your theme park experience. If you frequently ran into a situation where you couldn't connect to Netflix or Amazon for hours at a time you'd be distinctly unhappy about it. You wouldn't be making excuses for any of those failures by dismissing them as "idiosyncrasies". Bugs are part of all software, not just games, all software, but some companies are better then others at focusing on fixing bugs and WC has a history of being bad about it. The ideas behind ARK are amazing, and many of us choose to find a way to enjoy the game in spite of the many bugs, but that in no way argues that their failures are less than failures. Learning a game's idiosyncrasies is not a blanket excuse for doing a bad job of making a game work properly. It's perfectly reasonable to like a game because it's a beautiful idea and at the same time be unsatisfied with how bad of a job the game company does with making that game work well, those two things are not mutually exclusive. All games have idiosyncrasies, ARK has idiosyncrasies and also has a long term history of failing to put enough focus on caring about and fixing bugs. Even the people who created ARK didn't know how good their idea was going to be, they accidentally created a printing press that has printed billions of dollars, far more than most games can ever dream of. They were crazy-successful in spite of their failures and as a result they never felt any incentive to fix those failures because they kept on failing their way to the bank month-after-month. Doing a poor job cannot be justified explained as "idiosyncrasies", these are two different things.

Even though Moonie's arguments are questionable, the true responsibility for this problem lies with WildCard. The beginner servers aren't really that great for beginners, and that's because of WC's lack of better oversight and administration of them. I can completely understand why some people like the beginner servers because of the wipe cycles, it's up to WC to make these servers more beginner-friendly if that's their true intent. Honestly it would be better for everyone if they just changed the designation to "Frequent Wipe Servers" or something that explains how they really work.