LadyCrescent

Aberration - modded single player: It’s a full house. So, I still haven’t found a place for my offsite facility, mainly because I got distracted by my main joy in Ark, breeding. I decided to take a break from the featherlight mutation pursuit, and instead hatched a round of dimorphodons. Four eggs, five jet black birds...no mutations, but that’s okay. I moved them out and tried again, and currently have another five jet black juvenile dimorphodons. Some day I will get a color mutation. Some day. My two adolescent wyverns are sitting at around 95%...they should be finished today or tomorrow. And, I realized my hoard of shoulder pets had something missing, so I spawned in four jerboas and immediately bred a fifth - my first jerboa baby, who hit a jackpot with a health mutation, but again not a used color region. I really do have abysmal luck. Fun fact, jerboas alert on earthquakes like they do for electrical storms. And I also found a satisfactory female otter, and therefore took one of the dragons and ate the entire river several times over to gather fish. I accidentally ate a few otters and it made me sad. ? But if I wanted to breed my otters I needed a boatload of fish, because one of the Ark quirks I find most inconvenient is the way carnivores of all sorts favor fish over meat, meaning otters (and my pelagornises in other games) have to be inventory fed because I hate the water in Ark and want to spend as little time as possible messing around in it. And sure enough, my first juvenile otter is sharing the trough meant exclusively for her with every other carnivore in range. It’s a massive pain. But she is adorable and Aberration’s extremely friendly, shallow rivers mean I don’t have to submerge to keep restocking, so I can cope. That totals out to nine babies on the nursery level right now, and I’m going to wait until these little bundles of joy are matured before I add more. I’m thinking it’ll be another couple of wyverns and four more dimorphodons...and I might pursue more jerboas since I was handed a valuable mutation on a silver platter.

Aberration - modded single player: Breeding, Building and Basilisks So, as per my last update I was just about ready to breed and hatch my next round of featherlights, and I followed through with hatching four more, looking for that second mutation...which I got with one, but...it was the food stat and not a used color region again, and male to boot when my only other mutation is a stamina mutation on a male. So, it happened, but it’s not exactly usable. I have them up to 85% mature...then we just keep trying. I can see why people recommend you choose an animal that has all six color regions. Naturally my shoulder birds aren’t even close. Better news on my other breeding project - breeding my wyverns with the help of the S+ mutator. I was using my natural gold female Ayumi and a bronze with gold/orange wings. I had a mixed male born that I named Aeolus and recolored in shades of blue as part of my Pern collection...I’ll just need a brown male now to have the set. But much more excitingly, I had a second generation gold female born that I named Tiamat. Given my obsession with my gold wyverns, I’m just enamored with her. Meanwhile, I’m real estate shopping again, because extra levels on my main facility is only a bandaid on my shoulder pet hoarding problem, and for the sake of my poor game I’m looking for somewhere to build an offsite facility to move my low level tiny dragons and unused featherlights out to. I’m still hunting for a decent spot, but I also spent several hours gathering and stocking stone, wood and thatch to start crafting pieces for when I find a spot. In between gathering runs I was hunting for a good female otter, too, because I want to breed them but the females I have all have pretty garbage stats. And on my way out the side door to go grab another load of stone, I discovered a certain someone had come to apply for the open basilisk position I’ve had for ages. I don’t know how she got to right outside the door in the time since I last used it, and I was admittedly being careless because I’d more or less cleared my usual gathering area of most of the problems, so by discovered I mean “OH GOD OH GOD WHY?!” and a frantic sprint around the side of the building to scramble to a different door before she could nail me, knock me out and eat me. From the safety of the hangar I got to a window position where I could scope my assailent and discovered that a level 100 female basilisk had delivered herself to my doorstep - literally. I’ve been searching for a three-digit female basilisk quite literally for months. Hours and hours of time were spent at the Portal with one of the dragons or wyverns, casually consuming the wildlife because there was always a basilisk spawn or two up at the starting area of the map (because nothing says “Welcome to Aberration,” quite like getting immediately consumed by a mythical snake monster) to no avail...but at last I’d found one. So I grabbed one of my dragons and a couple of junker rock drake eggs and set about the ordeal of making her mine...and on success had tamed Meretseger...joining Renenutet and Wadjet, and I’d completed my set of Egyptian snake goddesses. With Apophis...one of the Egyptian snake gods, whom I tamed to get the mate boost for my ladies. So, mission accomplished there...a new set of featherlights will be happening soon. Lots of crafting of construction pieces to come, and a slightly better solution to my hoarding problem, just as soon as I find a build site.

Aberration - Single Player: Welcome back to Ark So, because of a seemingly endless sequence of events, I’ve spent almost no time with my desktop, and it’s been almost two months since I’ve gotten to play Ark. Which is entirely too long...I can’t wait for the mobile game. But I returned and spent a moment getting my bearings and wracking my brain for where I left off. I checked in on the nursery and set my stopwatch for the imprinting timer on my current four baby featherlights, and then set about the main project I needed to accomplish...expanding my storage for shoulder pets. In a word, I had amassed so many shoulder pets my game had started crashing if I looked at the entire level, leading me to have to move through by looking at the floor or wall, lol...so I needed to space them out so my game would stop crying. I had already crafted the pieces for the construction project, so I just had to haul the pieces and add three levels to that part of my sanctuary. And after that I had the excitement of moving 256 glow pets and modded tiny dragons one at a time from floors three and four up to the seventh floor, leaving only a few on the main levels and pausing twice for imprinting on the adolescent featherlights. And then I celebrated having more storage by what else? Going to hoard more shoulder pets, of course. I found five tiny dragons and three featherlights to bring home. But as I was teleporting back with one of those tiny dragons, Ark happened. It seemed there had been a pack of ravagers straining against the wall of the barn, and the half second it took for my building to render after teleporting in allowed said ravagers into the building, inciting chaos. A few dozen sheep, ponies and unicorns went ballistic, the new tiny dragons leapt into action, two wyverns and one of my modded drakes, the seeker level above the barn, and the tiny dragons and dimorphodons on the two levels above them...all trying to get the four ravagers that had gotten in. Well, the ravagers died quickly, being ganged up on by that many animals and given that even the sheep get levels in melee. And then I spent nearly an hour putting everyone back in their proper positions and neat rows. The featherlight babies are at 96% mature, and when they’re done, I’m going to breed my mutated male again and keep trying to expand that line. I’ll hatch four eggs again...Here’s hoping to get that second mutation this time, as the current four struck out... and I’m going to fire up the S+ mutator and breed my wyverns again, and get two or three new babies to raise.

Today on Aberration: Pure Chaos, “The One” and 4,000 Dino Wipes Later... So, my day started with absolute chaos...as is wont to happen in Ark from time to time. But it hasn’t been since my days of mods like ACA and Annunaki Genesis that this particular form of chaos happened, specifically the kind of chaos that can break out because of the nightmare clipping problems our lovely Ark has. Clipping since the aforementioned crazy mods taught me to never store anything I love near exterior walls, and compared to the horror of, say, having half a level 1,000+ Annunaki fire rex inside my house, is normally a point and laugh affair. With Aberration, the common point is my barn of sheep and ponies, and the perpetrator the occasional raptors and ravagers that can do nothing but poke their heads through solid stone and stare hungrily at my delicious barn animals. Point, laugh, shoot in the head (clipping works both ways!)...repeat. Today...not as much of a laughing matter as I was puttering around my crafting room processing out narcotic and cementing paste from the crabs I’d just finished murdering when I heard combat music. This was...odd, and I noticed that an absurd amount of activity was happening on the other side of the wall - my seeker pen, five floors up. Seven floors up, small pet storage...notably my dimorphodons and whelps. Below, the four story barn... which opens into the hangar mostly full of mythical reptiles. Dragons, wyverns, basilisks, and my eagle. The seekers were going ballistic, and I skittered to the spiral staircase to try to get a view of what was happening to find the barn animals attacking one wall, my eagle in the mix, one of my wyverns circling frantically, breathing fire on everything (thank god for “disable friendly fire”), trying to cram into the four story barn area, one of my three basilisks in a tizzy plus a drake for good measure. What caused all this? The only thing that could agro a large group of neutral pets found its way to my barn: a level 20 male basilisk was raining AOE acid bombs into my barn, and had apparently nicked some beasties from the hangar for good measure. Long story short, I was on my way sprinting to a different door (nightmare clipping sieges from the crazy mods also taught me to install several access points) to get an angle to shoot the damn thing when my level 204 male basilisk, Apophis, got the killing blow. I’m glad I’d had him out for training the other day. I then spent forty-five minutes rearranging all my animals back to their carefully organized previous positions. — — On a less chaotic note, I had the breakthrough I’ve been waiting for in my featherlight bloodline! After twenty-one birds that stubbornly would not inherit my best male’s melee stat, I **finally** hatched two that got all the stats I wanted! My first was the most exciting, because on top of finally getting all the stats I wanted from his parents, I also got my first mutation! Not a color region that featherlights have, sadly, but it’s a stamina mutation, which is phenomenal for glow pets, so I’m extremely excited. I named him Neo. ? — — And we leave off the day on a cliffhanger: So, I’ve been having fun on Aberration with everything, but I recently decided I was ready to try for the last thing on my Aberration bucket list...my reaper. And it has been...an ungodly process getting a good one to spawn, and fraught with screwups. If anyone wants to know, I can take you on a guided tour of every reaper queen spawn in the Trench, and the route I’ve been flying over, and over, and over again, wiping and repeating endlessly waiting for a quality spawn. Two days ago, I finally got a 104 to spawn, and I was thrilled. But I was also not prepared...in an unexpected way. You see, I have a habit of avoiding trouble down there by mostly sticking to the air, since I’m usually shopping for featherlights and whelps and nameless are a real pain with an empty shoulder, so when I feel like participating in the world I usually fly. Sometimes I feel like being a passive observer down there and apply god, infinitestats and enemyinvisible true and just go for nature walks and admire Ark without actually taking part in things. Because of this my only experience with a reaper queen was a brief damage test with my sniper from dragon-back, and I barely dented the stupid thing...a level 40 I just wanted to do a DPS test on since I was starting to shop for a reaper queen to actually challenge. Well, I spotted the 104 and teleported home to grab my gear: four snipers, six hundred bullets and four magic staffs from the Party of Six mod, and my chosen bulbdog sidekick Fenton. I was ready for war. And I was going on foot, very prepared for a ten+ minute boss fight that would challenge every bit of my skill as someone who prefers to fight alone. I teleported back, killed off the other nonsense, and bravely approached my target. Long story short I took a bunch more damage than I was planning on, but I sort of liquified the 104 target by nuking it as hard as I could with one of those staffs. It died...way faster than I expected. Two things were brought to my attention as I cursed and harvested the body: 1.) I was going to fail anyway, because reaper pheromones are a thing I forgot about, and 2.) Oh. Right. Reaper queens are basically invulnerable without a glow pet, so my DPS test on that 40 was totally invalid. Oops. Well, the good news is that I now have that super important pheromone. And back to the track I went. Lap, lap, wipe. Lap, lap, wipe. Over and over waiting for another good spawn. And then today, right as I was about to have to get off...I spotted a 116. Tune in next time to find out if I succeed!

Today on Aberration: The intersection of “pushing your luck” and “be careful what you wish for.” So today I had the intention of hatching two featherlights...hopefully of opposing genders. I’d prepared four eggs last night and was all set to continue my quest for color mutations and high wattage adorable light fixtures for the hangar. I did my imprinting on the wyvern I’m currently raising, timed so my egg would hatch within a couple of minutes after, and out popped twins! Two lovely girls, and I figured I’d go ahead and set down a second egg. With my egg hatch speed it takes about three minutes for a featherlight egg to hatch, and I used the time to secure my girls, got ready to welcome my new featherlight, and poof! Triplets. There was a stretch of marginal chaos wrangling the babies...claiming, disabling wandering. But I got two boys and a girl. So, I got what I asked for and a little extra. On the modded side of my game I rounded out a set of whelps I’d been collecting from Dragons and Enhanced Creatures...a color collection from the “Dragon Riders of Pern” novels. How freaking cute are these tiny dragons?! I seriously can’t get over how adorable they are. And I also bagged a drake this evening...which was extremely chaotic, featuring a spino attack, a couple purlovias and a narrow escape from a reaper queen. But he’ll be a great meat farmer and I’m quite pleased to have found him.

This Week on Aberration (continued): Kept My New Year’s Resolution: So there was a thread on here asking about your Ark new year’s resolution, and mine was to diversify my breeding, since before I’ve only ever raised wyverns and bred dimorphodons. Here at the start of February, I don’t really count wyvern breeding with the S+ mutator, but to join my wyverns and dimorphodons I’ve added featherlights, and growing up on the nursery level as we speak I have a baby sheep and unicorn foal being raised along with Mithras and Ayumi. Next on deck I want to keep going with my featherlights and breed my otters. It’s nice to have options now that I’m a more confident breeder. I’ve come a long, long way from my first dimorphodon baby. It was a haphazard, small room with five air conditioners and four campfires...five refrigerators full of meat and two waiting troughs. I did so much homework. Every video I could find, but I was so, so scared because in one of the videos I watched I saw an unprepared breeder have a baby dimorphodon die and it was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. I was so terrified I’d fail too I was almost too scared to try at all. I had carefully selected my birds, and sat literally for hours looking at my pair, eventually told my friends and family not to bother me, and for good measure turned off my phone. Total, absolute focus. Absolutely no distractions. I was shaking so badly...and I was glued to that baby bird with an intensity that’s hard to describe. Her name was Prodigy, and she’s with me to this day on Xbox. It would have been hard for that me to imagine that I’d ultimately grow confident enough to have multiple babies growing up at the same time. The me that LOST HER MIND in a total panic at my first dimorphodon triplets wouldn’t have willingly welcomed that stress again. Megaera, Tsisiphone and Alecto...also safe and sound to this day. I’ve never lost a baby. Nowadays breeding is my greatest joy and relaxation in Ark. The Case of the Defective Basilisks: So this week I finally lucked out and found a basilisk over level 100 - a 116 who introduced herself by being so pigheaded about my offering she almost made me late for my imprinting. I did get her though...named her Renenutet and brought her home to the hangar for large dinos...and every day since I’ve sent friends and family pictures of the weird things this snake does. From partially sitting up with her head at an awkward angle down to sitting straight up so her head is sticking through the top of the next level, six stories up, I think my mythical snake monster might be defective. And last night I was on the hunt for cute shoulder critters in the trench, and noticed something...odd, at the top of a tree. Specifically the tail of a burrowed basilisk magically at the top of the tree. As I investigated the hilariously broken basilisk my spyglass revealed it was another 116 female. And while I didn’t *need* another basilisk I thought my defective Renenutet might like a defective sister for company. She was more obliging about the tame than the former, and I’ve named her Wadjet. But I’ve also now committed to finding a third female, because there are three Egyptian snake goddesses, and now that I have two I want the set. / End This Week on Aberration.

This Week on Aberration (A collection of short stories.): Dream Come True: Follow up to my last post reporting breeding a pure gold male wyvern, when he matured I set out on my quest to get my queen dragon. It took two tries. The first was another male that I named Mithras. After consideration I ended up giving him a bit of a makeover - I left his gold wings and orange undertones and made his body brown. Since I didn’t need another gold male, I’ve decided to make versions of all the dragons from the “Dragon Riders of Pern” novels...he’s now my version of the bronze dragon. And I’ll ultimately do brown, blue and green...all fire wyverns of course, since they’re my favorite. A second try with a guaranteed golden baby finally made my dream come true...I got my naturally born queen dragon, whom I’ve named Ayumi. It means “follow your own path” - one of my favorite names. Laugh at me if you want, but I got a little misty-eyed when she was born. Lost Its Charm: Well, I had one of the most terrifying things to ever happen to me in Ark occur this week. I love Aberration and I’m spending all my time here, but much like the Scorched Earth weather events, the earthquakes have soundly lost their charm. They were already getting annoying...basically making me stop everything I’m doing for 90 seconds or so until it’s over. But the breaking point was when I was just entering the trench from the bioluminescent chamber, and paused to wait for the silly earthquake to end sort of close to a ledge, but I’ve always been decent at correcting my movements during the event. Not so much on that day. I got tossed off the edge and went tumbling downward. Falling, flailing and trying to right myself with my glider. Long story short I hate heights, falling, get bad vertigo and fell from the end of the bioluminescent chamber to the freaking rock drake eggs. Not. Fun. Safe to say I’m over the earthquakes. Everything is Better with Dragons: So as I said I love Aberration and am quite happy in my home, but I found I was somewhat lacking things to hunt to tame, so I decided I would reinstall one of my favorite mods, Dragons and Enhanced Creatures. When I made the move to PC one of the things I was most excited about was a mod with tameable dragons, and this one won me over from the selection with the wide variety of available dragons, but in particular it was the whelps that sold me: tiny little shoulder dragons smaller than a dimorphodon. As I’ve referenced the novels above, the same novels also had fire lizards - tiny little shoulder dragons. You all may have gathered the great impact the novels had on me when I was young, and my ongoing love of the series meant OF COURSE I wanted tiny shoulder dragons. Well, long story short it appeared the mod wasn’t working on Aberration. My skeleton crew and barely formed Outpost on Ragnarok revealed it was working there, but several dino wipes and careful combing of Aberration didn’t turn up even one creature from the mod. I was disappointed but figured I could start developing my Ragnarok game and get my fill there, and returned to business as usual at home base. I was down in the Trench doing my usual thing...on this day it was seeking out dung beetles to start my farm. I was meandering along with my eyes more or less on the ground, caught flapping wings out of the corner of my eye and paid it no mind, since I was used to the seekers. Then, in what I imagine was a quite cartoonish fashion I stopped dead in my tracks as my mind registered, “Wait...those weren’t seeker wings...” It was a whelp! I leapt into action, glad I always keep taming supplies on hand...bola’d him, tranq’ed him and a couple of pieces of prime later I had a fire whelp! I named him Eros and was so thrilled. The mod had some major stability issues a while back, so I haven’t had it installed for a while, and thus haven’t had whelps in a while. But as of now I have a small pod of the cutest things you’ve ever seen. Everything is better with dragons. Continued...

Yesterday on Aberration: A dream come true, more special than I could have imagined: So, in the last couple of weeks my nursery level in my hangar has been in full swing. With a maturation rate at 0.05 I’m finally getting the significant amount of bonding time I like with my babies. I’ve bred two featherlights, but their stats aren’t great. However, I did stumble upon the seeker cave, which was blessedly chock full of 100+ featherlights, and of the six I found I got a male and two females with much more favorable stats. I’m putting my first two girls to good use though...since Aberration is so darn dark I’ve ended up justifying my glow pet hoard by tossing them around the hangar levels to supplement the several hundred electric lights that aren’t getting the job done. I’ve bred four dimorphodons, and I’m working on hopefully someday getting mutations in that bloodline. My research says it’s just RNG and I have abysmal luck...but I also have 5,000 tame slots so...someday. My line right now is pure black birds, so it’ll be a great palate when it does happen. But all those lovelies cannot compare to what happened yesterday. So, S+ recently introduced the S+ mutator, which has a mode that allows animals to breed that normally cannot. I found out about this and Hello dream I’ve had since Scorched Earth came out, wyvern breeding. I have wanted to breed wyverns so much. So I spawned in a couple of wyverns to compliment the one I’d already brought in to raise...went through my convoluted process of spawning, force taming, admining them back to baby, unclaiming / reclaiming to activate imprinting...53 hours later adults that I can try this miracle device out on. Now, I already had a gorgeous black and orange female, but I spawned a second female because from the very first wyvern I hatched I’ve had a female wyvern I paint gold. It’s a nod to a book series that I absolutely loved growing up, and a symbol that has always stuck with me. These were the “Dragon Riders of Pern” novels by Anne McCaffrey. There were five colors of dragons of varying importance, but none more important than the gold Queen Dragons. I love these books so much, in fact, that when my very first wyvern - a fire wyvern - hatched female, I knew that none of the possible color patterns were gold, so I ended up using the settargetdinocolor to 32 - a light brown that looks gold, and named her Ramoth, after a dragon from that series. In every game I’ve had since I always have a gold female fire wyvern...and anyway, my queen dragon for Aberration I named Izanami...and she’s particularly lovely because she spawned with light orange wings that compliment her gold paint. Now, I was originally going to use my black and orange female, since only natural colors can be passed on, but I ended up using Izanami instead, because my queens just always get preferential treatment. I fired up the S+ mutator, and was already over-the-moon excited to be breeding my first baby...such a long-cherished dream I wouldn’t have thought I could be any more excited. But then my baby was born and a miracle had occurred. It seems the S+ mutator interpreted Izanami’s painted colors as natural, and a natural born, pure gold baby was born. He’s a boy, but that’s okay. I know now that I will be able to breed a natural gold female, and words fail to express exactly how much that means to me. Since my boy is a direct clone of his mother I’ve named him Izanagi, and he means the world to me as the product of one dream come true, and the promise of fulfilling another.

Today / Yesterday on Aberration: Hoarding, Hoarding, Hoarding...and Ark’s Exceptional Kindness. Total transparency, it’s been a rough start to the new year, but Ark has been going above and beyond its usual escape to give me reasons to smile. Yesterday, I hatched my second rock drake...a gorgeous green male with an orange belly and blue feathers, and used him to figure out what broke with my meticulously worked out maturation settings. Apparently something changed before the full launch, because what used to be a 42 hour wyvern raise with 2.1 maturation gave enough time for 100% Imprinting. Suddenly 2.1 raises a wyvern in just around an hour! Which, while I guess is convenient isn’t at all satisfying for me...I love having the long hours to bond with my babies...as of now my maturation setting has been altered to 0.05 to achieve that. Anyone know what gives? Anyway, my new rock drake baby, Thoth sorted out, I decided to take a few more steps to make my sanctuary feel more like home. Following getting hideously (and fatally) lost on an excursion trying to get back to the rock drake eggs, I decided I’d like to finally allow myself the aerial perspective I so desperately rely on, and spawned myself an eagle, whom I have loving dubbed Lady FTS. Acronym here having come about by my exclamation as I was consumed by angry rock drakes “F* this sh**, I need an aerial view!!” ...I was a bit miffed about the misadventure, lol. Lady FTS is there to help me out while I try to figure out how to rock drake. I get really bad vertigo in games sometimes, and am very easily disoriented, and ride in first person...so I can report my training sessions with Phaidra have been nothing short of nauseating. I’m determined to get the hang of it, but...oy. It’s bad right now. And an eagle is a staple part of my roster anyway...she’s done more flying me between levels of my hangar than anything else, but Aberration is even more gorgeous in the air. Anyway, my quest to truly make my new sanctuary a home started with some dimorphodons for me to breed, adding an eagle, and there was one more thing I needed before I could truly call my new house “home:” a wyvern. And this starts off where Ark has just been amazingly kind: I went through this very convoluted process to get myself a wyvern that I could raise on Aberration. Froze time, spawned a fire wyvern - a girl, just like I wanted - force tamed, then ran setbabyage 0, unclaimed the newly baby-fied wyvern, reclaimed...poof! Baby fire wyvern with imprinting bonuses enabled. And then I noticed that she spawned with my very favorite color scheme for fire wyverns - jet black with orange wings. I’ve named her Ishtar and am raising her alongside Thoth. Then I took off to the trench to try to scare up a level 100+ female featherlight so I could start breeding those...and keeping a keen eye out for any 100+ seekers I could bring home. Diligent near-daily searching for those seekers had netted me three. But in Ark’s incredible generosity yesterday it decided to send me eight. At eleven strong I have the beginnings of a proper hoard of my cute little dragon-critters. And I found another 100+ male featherlight, and right before the end of the night, a level 92 female. Which.......might just be good enough, because I want baby featherlights. And today Ark delivered me another cherished gift practically on a silver platter: I took a dip in the nearby river hoping to find 100+ otters for breeding, as the six I have were all low level...and sitting underwater, without so much as a piranha nearby to interrupt me, were a level 112 and 116 mating pair just looking for a loving home. And a subsequent trip back gave another pair! 100 and 108. They were a little more chaotic and I accidentally gave a fish to the wrong one, so a seventh low level otter came home after I successfully managed to kill the sarco trying to make a snack of the boys after the tame. And just for good measure I found a level 112 pony, a pretty white and tan girl I named Mayfaire and brought home to my trusty Hallows...my first Aberration tame, which means I can now have baby ponies too. In summary, life is good at the Aberration sanctuary. Nothing lifts my spirits and puts a smile on my face like Ark can...finding highly sought after critters, and bringing in the other-Ark beloved pets...I can say the house I worked so hard on is finally a home.

Today on Aberration: I rang in the New Year! - I finally finished my formal home, and have tons of space to house my critters. - Hatched my first rock drake; a lovely girl I named Phaidra. - Found a river full of otters (!!!) and brought home every single one I saw, to the tune of six new furry friends. I finally cracked the code...I expected them to be on the shore, but nope. Bottom of the riverbed. I’m so excited. - And rewarded myself for another successful mega-build by spawning in ten dimorphodons to start breeding with, because it’s just not home without dimorphodons. I spawned them until I had ten with nice colors, and now there are several dozen wild dimorphodons just loose on the map. I’m super excited for 2018 at the Aberration Sanctuary. ?

Today on Aberration: I finally have to be responsible. When I start on any new game, I have a blueprint Outpost I knock together every time: First I scout, kill and die as needed until I unlock stone. Simple floor plan: 6x6 foundation, dino gate, four wall high floor one, floors two and three two walls high. First floor is meant to hold one berry gatherer and one or two transport dinos. Floor two is plenty big enough for the essentials - storage, forges, smithy...everything through fabricator fits if I happen to spend a while there. Third floor is my bedroom - beds, storage, table and chair, and it’s mostly meant for my hobby pets...usually dimorphodons and microraptors. The point is, it is in no way meant to be a long-term living area...just enough to get me by and let me do a bit of taming and have fun while I find a place to build the forever home. And as it stands on Aberration, I can’t afford to have much more fun until I have a proper home, because I am running out of floor. I am such a hoarder. I’m up to eight bulbdogs, five shinehorns, six featherlights...and today I finally found glowtails and brought home seven of those. And on the bottom floor I have my pony, and since my last update confessing that I forcetamed a seeker, I’ve fallen so in love with them I’ve found Cthulhu two friends, Hela and Oavatoc, all stored with said pony. Meanwhile I still have my rock drake egg I want to hatch...but I get so distracted snatching up every adorable thing I see (yes, I think the seekers are adorable and may actually be my favorite pets) that I have not actually spent any measurable time on a proper home. But. After a lot of sort of directionless hunting I’ve found one area on the map with enough available real estate for me to build the hangar I’ll need to start my rock drake hoard. When it’s done, I’ll have plenty of housing for everyone, and I’ll be able to get the other beasties I’ve had to wait on for lack of space, namely spino, crab and basilisk. I’m strongly considering a forcetame if I find a good basilisk, because I’m not a fan of the idea of sacrificing a fertilized rock drake egg that I could hatch and love instead. I’ll make a decision if I ever find a basilisk worth the effort, I suppose. But I think this will be the last “I tamed half the map” update for a bit. I must finally be responsible and build myself a home so that I might continue my shameless hoarding. ?

Today in Ark: I gave into temptation. I’ve had a great time with Aberration so far. It’s a completely new way to challenge myself as a player, since I always use fliers for everything, learning to manage on ground level has been a royal pain, but in a way I find enjoyable. I love the new animals. I have yet to lay eyes on a creature I didn’t want, which leads me to how Aberration broke my heart - the only thing about the map I hate. On my first day, I learned I’d set up by a cave that had surface access, and it was far too enticing to not climb my way up to check things out. And I saw them - mid-size dragon like creatures...I wasted no time at all grabbing my long neck and unloading into the two that were there. A dozen odd darts and lots of frantic sprinting later, something seemed up, and I grabbed my super spyglass...to realize these creatures didn’t take torpor, but clearly couldn’t be passive tamed either. So I skuttled back below and grabbed my phone, because by god I wasn’t leaving without the little dragons. They were seekers, I learned...and they weren’t tameable. It broke my heart. I haven’t stopped coveting these weird little dragons, and as I was battling through the trench today hunting high level featherlights, my spyglass landed on a level 112 seeker...the first 100+ I’d seen. It was too tempting. I wanted him. So...I quickly hit playersonly, wandered up to him, and one forcetame later he was mine. Teleported him out of there, led him inside, and named him Cthulhu. I realize that at a certain point I do not care about Ark’s rules. I play single player, so those high level seekers are mine if I say they’re mine, gosh darn it. I regret nothing.

I had an eventful day on Aberration today. I started off in my PC game, leading the day with a few goals. The previous day I went nuts with glow pets, nabbing two bulbdogs, three shinehorns and three featherlights. Aside: Why do the angler-puppies spawn at the surface where you can see daylight and the birds spawn at the center of the earth? With some of the “Oh god they’re all so cute I must own them ALL,” out of my system I was a bit more discriminating, finding two bulbdogs over level 100...both female, and one featherlight over 100...now I need to find him a lady friend since of course I’m obsessed with the shoulder birds and want to breed them. I would have hunted for better shinehorns, but the bioluminescent chamber wasn’t having any of it. In spite of running fine the previous day, I crashed there three times, twice to a fatal error something about animation, once straight to desktop with no explanation. And I have no ability to comprehend exactly what the fatal error was saying, so...All I can tell you is all three times I had either a GPS or a teleporter remote in my hand, and I was looking at a willow tree. I decided to abandon the pursuit for the day and took my teleporter to the trench instead, intent on discovering where the rock drake eggs are stashed. Holy poop, Aberration is DEEP. Every time I thought I was at the bottom there was another massive drop until I finally found it. Made off with a single 152 and ran for my life. Imagine my dismay when I realized that you can’t place structures down there, so I couldn’t drop a teleport pad down...well, predicatable end to that story. Shout out to the Death Recovery mod that got my prize egg out of there, lol. There’s been a lot of death the last two days. Around every corner is the opportunity to meet a new horrible fate. Next on the docket is devising a way to get nameless venom, and build somewhere to hatch my rock drake. I figure I’ve got time to work out the nameless venom issue, since word is you need about 32 air conditioners to create an ideal environment for the rock drake egg. That’ll take time. Not to mention I’m still undecided about where I’m setting up a permanent home. After that, I jumped over to PS4 to start something there, because I have a friend on console interested in checking Aberration out...need to get some stuff together to be a good host. And...after two days of super convenient mods, I lamented the many inconveniences I wasn’t necessarily thinking about, in spite of spending most of my time on console...and got eaten by a basilisk. Round two later.

Today: Day four of Operation Kitty paid off, as I finally found a high level thylacoleo to bring home. Four days’ trek through the redwoods before I found a pretty 145 to bring in. I named her Sheba. I also took the hunt time to indulge my standard venturing habits. I murdered every single troodon I saw, and stopped to scout the level of every dimorphodon I saw. I added one more to my happy starter flock today...a brown and orange 130 male I named Charr. And I addressed an apparent bug on non-dedicated PS4 Ragnarok games, where all my ice wyverns turn the same color even though they hatched / were transferred with different coloration. So three ice wyverns got a paint job to return them to their original colors.

Today I conducted my first pet transfers. I play(ed) on a friend's Ragnarok dedicated, got a nice facility built at the canyon, all the way through fabricator-tier stuff to make air conditioners and refrigerators so I could begin a new wyvern hoard. Tamed seven dimorphodons, one microraptor, one compy, one eagle, one stegosaurus, and one deer. Hatched an ice wyvern, hatched TRIPLET fire wyverns (how cool is that?! I didn't know that was even possible!) and was gifted a giga in exchange for the wyvern eggs I gifted my two friends that were also playing on the server, and hatched one more fire wyvern. In short, I was settled into a comfy sanctuary when I had the bomb dropped on me that I was outvoted 2-1, and they were changing the dedicated to Aberration when it launches. Which...prompted me to pack up the whole menagerie in small groups to fly from the canyon to the east obelisk, and walk the giga there... So that I could move them in their small groups from the east obelisk to the ice lake where I live in my non-dedicated Ragnarok game. It took all day, and dodging Yutys while walking my giga, Nemesis, to her new home was one of the most nerve wracking things I've done in Ark lately. But now my menagerie is safe in my private game, and I can simply look forward to the Aberration adventure with excitement and peace of mind, knowing my precious pets are safe from my friends' short attention span. =p