roadrage

Had an unfortunate incident. Long story short, through a series of foul ups apparently related to 260, my center save had to be wiped, including my character. So now we begin anew. I'm now running the latest stable build of bush people, and have taken out several mods I really never use. So, spawned in jungles south, and did the punching a tree thing. Wasn't long I was building a 2x4x2 wooden house. Tamed a 140 ptera, made some forges and began preparing for the age of metal. Now, where I decided to build is just northwest of skull island, and right to the north is a rich metal spawn, a couple hundred meters or so I'd say. Ended up expanding the bottom floor to 4x4x2, 2x4x2 for the second with an equal size porch, and adding a 2x4x2 third floor for my forge room. 13 forges working at the same time. Also began the conversion to stone. Now, some of the bush people didn't like me flying over their tower to get metal. That's too bad, a few grenades, a quick run through and I came home with several hundred cp, and they have a wrecked tower. Yep, ai sucks but it gives a semblance of other people on here at least. Got a fabricator on a glass catwalk right above my smithy, built a genny, ind grill and now I need pearls to make electronics for fridges. Went on a cp run and brought home a 130 wild rex, and managed a decent dilo, a compy, and a 150 parasaur in the middle of all of this. Build a 3x3x6 on the side, and craft up the ind forge. Had to use the ptera to put the top run of walls and the roof on, but I'm 90% stone construction, and now I can really burn metal. I'm almost as far along with a base in 2 nights as I was in nearly a month with the old save. Also had to build a small pen for the tames on the side. They don't even have a trough as of yet, been way to busy rebuilding my base. But, the pace is slowing again. The conversion to metal slows things down considerably, plus I'm going to need a lot of CP now. I wasn't planning on this being my permanent home, but proximity to most resources except oil, which is not that far out either, along with a good view right up the hill and ocean access means this will probably end up being my primary base. So, this weeks plan is lots of CP, make up some more explosives, begin a metal turret wall, get some crops going, and see if I can creep toward that level 100.

Been a while, not doing much gaming lately. First off, logged into the server to a respawn screen. Not unusual, what was unusual is my bed is gone. It was in the center of my second floor, way away from the reach of anything. Ok, respawn jungles mid. And I spawn at the west end, not the east. Oh well, I'm at 473, just run back. It's all gone. Ok, this is a pve server. Wondered for a bit if I broke some rule or something. Tried to swim over to tropical south, and got killed. Respawn, run around to where the big metal base was. All gone. Run over to where the other player had his raft house. Gone. Hmm, looking like a wipe. Suicide by raptor, respawn at tropical north. Yep, base that was there is gone, check server. Day 7. Yep, wipe. DC. Relog, respawn screen. Hell with it, back to SP, what I was basically playing anyway. Walk out of my base, and my game presents me with a 140 ptera. I shall take that. Tamed it with raw, that's all I had at the time. Threw the saddle on it, and went exploring. West end of jungles mid, a 130 spino presents itself. Oh hell yes. I kick myself for not having the kibble machine mod turned on. Tame it with raw sourced from the dilos hanging around. Ok, now a long travel along the river to home. And it won't fit in my pen. Expand the pen. Go hunting CP, find a cave. Thought I had flyers enabled in caves, but get dismounted, ptera dies, I die from 3^18 spiders and authros that swarm us. Run back, god mode, get my stuff back, accidentally tranq a bronto, 130. This will do. Tame it, spawn in a saddle, and make my way slowly home. Guess what. Yep, won't fit in the pen. Nope, it's too late to start that. Shut down and that's the last I played. Gotta start on a new base but geez that's such a grindy prospect.

Picked out a reasonably central base location with a bay, and am still considering whether or not to spend any more time on a server. On nights my internet refuses to cooperate, it makes my life hell. Otherwise, just more tedium. Now I get to build a moving raft, oh what fun.

Real short one this time. Went and claimed some more mats and built magic crop plots to get my own started. Yeah, real exiting night. Moved my ark install to my ssd this morning as well to shorten load times, which meant moving nearly every other game to one of my hdds. Oh fun.

Not going to be a real long one this time, as it's kinda boring. Hopped on the new server, and finally figured out the difficulty, I think. It's between 16 and 17, probably 16.6ish. I'm seeing 16s and 33s, so that would be the only way the levels make sense. Farmed metal for about 900 more ingots, and decided since my internet is actually behaving I'm going to explore. Flew over to south tropical, and found a huge metal base. Demolish allowed! Hmm genny is running, not been that way long. I'll come back later. Flew up to north tropical, another base, stone. Doors have been demolished, and there's a flying raft belonging to another tribe up for claiming. Ok, so I know for a fact at one point there were 3 tribes on the server, one recent. Off to the floating island, didn't see anything. So I went to the green obi and collected oil. Around to the bridge and the massive waterfall, then to skull island. I don't see any other bases this way. Hmm, odd that the only two bases would be in the easy areas. Even being PvE, I would think moving to better resource areas would be a priority. I need to check out lava island, might be something up there. Back to base, drop off the oil, make some gas, a fabricator, and go electric. Ok, I need CP. Fly up to the lake near my base, raid 5 dams. Net nearly 1500 CP. Nice. Also nearly broke my flak. Go home, finish making my electric stuff, and repair my armor. Farm another round of metal. That abandoned base is bugging me. Go back and check it out. Some nice dinos up for claim, including a rex, bronto, and mosa. Ok, gotta get on a pen. I'm the only one that's been on this server in days besides the admin. Apparently claiming is allowed judging by the other base, but I'm just going to get access, not destroy the whole thing. Check out the greenhouse. Holy mother lode! Knock out the door, and they have resource plots for nearly everything! Yep, I'm having this. Go home, craft a raft and a bunch of metal storages for 100 stacks each, put a trail to the water, and 8 on a raft. Here we go. Hours and hours of work. Metal is stacking to 500 on this server. Make black narcotics from the narcotic plot, go from lvl 130 to 450 in just a few minutes. Carrying 1k at a time takes a while, and since the generator is still running, the plots are making more! I'll be at this for days. Made foundations and walls to build a warehouse for my loot. Tame a 466 raptor. Make more runs. Should break in and claim the bronto, but I spyglassed them and their food is good for now. Trying not to destroy anything major, as I'm trying to be courteous, they might come back and this way the only things that will be destroyed are a few doors, easy to replace, and the plots will refill. I'm going to give it a few days of watching the food while I build a water pen and a more permanent base, and if they don't come back I'm going to claim their dinos. May just keep that genny going for a while, infinite resources ftw. There's a gasoline plot right next to it too. Anyway, figured out a standard raft is not up to the task, so I went to claim that flying one, couldn't get it to fly, so I destroyed it. Yep, midnight and brain didn't engage, didn't hit space. So this morning I logged in, built a floatstone forge to get what I'll need to get another raft. Maybe by tonight I'll have the floatstone so I can just fly up next to the door and transfer stuff much quicker. Life is so much simpler when someone else does the work for you.

Well, discovered a metal deposit right above my base. Yay for me. I still need a bird. Anyway, set out to get a little hide. Chalcio roaming around outside my base, gonna cheese this one. Threw the windows open and started shooting. 80 arrows later I have my hide. Crafted my saddle, and set out on the raptor. Slow going, but go around and up onto the land bridge across to the metal deposit, get all the metal the raptor can carry, which is not much, and walk off the cliff. Dismount right before we hit the ground. 3 hours of that got me several hundred ingots refining. Alright, I need to build a bird nest. So, gathered stone and built a gateway, along with some large walls. Fixed myself a box on top of my house with a landing platform. Ok, now to find a bird. Headed off northwards, found 2 50 pteras. Not even bothering with that crap. Tamed a 333 monkey, and looked for crystal as well. Back to base, nothing worth taming over here. Back to farming metal. Got bored with that, made a six gun and upgraded a few things. Head southward, across the mouth of the river. Wow! A 416 Ptera. One blue arrow, and put some meat in it. Now I need a saddle. I need chitin or keratin. Kill a turtle. Just 6 short. Kill a trike, didn't drop any. Damn. Try to tranq and kill another one, it's high level and runs off. Double damn. I'm out of tranqs. Ptera stands up. Well, let's go home. Don't see anything in the water, so I dive in. Right in the middle of the river, a 450 bary finds me. Yep, died, 4 times trying to get my bird and raptor to follow me across, lost the raptor in the process, along with all my stuff, keratin included. Triple damn. Bary has a long aggro range apparently. Got my bird home, beaten and battered, but alive. Finally fooled around and got it up in the bird loft, getting hit and accidentally taming a pego in the process. Luckily, I keep some stuff in reserve. Made up a new bow, upgraded it, and grabbed the 3 extra blue tranqs, along with the asc stone hatchet and pick I stored. Grabbed the ingots, and whipped up a set of flak. Alright, I'm as armored as I was in the upgraded hide. A turtle and 2 trikes later, I have the mats for the saddle. Yay! Craft it and throw it on my bird. Up the cliff we go, to the metal. Filled the forges with 700ish metal each in about 20 minutes. This is much better. Head off an get some crystal. Yay, I now have a super spyglass, and with the extra CP I made up, crafted myself a water tank. I'm not far from the beach, but it is easier than running pipes for now. Plan is to build a small greenhouse for narcs and veggie cake mats, and go hunting achatinas. Also, now that I have a bird, if my internet will cooperate, I can scout out a new base location. I do not like it here. Got the bird nest roofed, and called it a night.

As most of you know, time consuming doesn't equal difficult. Official rates are tedious and time consuming, this server is frakking difficult. I love it. I just wish my internet would behave. So, I'm used to difficulty 5. That's child's play to me now. I'm still trying to work out the difficulty on this server, but it's at least 3x that. Two nights ago. I want to get off the beach. Log in, and I get hit, inside my house. I die. What the hell? You have been killed by Raptor (266). Oh my. Respawn and get off the bed. Three raptors are chewing on my stuff. This is setting the tone for the night. Grab my buddy to keep him from getting munched, grab my weapons. The two 116s went down fairly easily, the 266, not so easy. Yep, I died. Twice. So did my buddy. Frak. Finally emerged victorious. Ok, I need guns. Lots of guns. The bow is just not going to cut it. The problem is, I'm in a very metal poor area, and I've not seen a single flyer, on the server owned by the author of Classic Flyers. So, after breaking several stone picks and hatchets, I have enough ingots and metal to make an upgrade station, and a metal pick. All the while I'm making all the arrows I can, and getting hit by lvl 200-350ish raptors, troodons, and dilos. And dying a lot. This is difficult. Time to go to bed. Last night. Log in again. I hear something outside my base. Troodon, don't remember the level exactly, but it was over 300. Frak. Ok, stone construction is now a priority. Finally manged to get rid of it. So I began gathering stone. Lots of stone. Ran across a dilo. Hey meat and hide. Well, I need crystal for a spyglass as well. Level 466. Yeah, and it called 3 more, all over 100. Broken bow, broken everything, die, respawn, run to my loot bag, game DC. Frak. Manage to log back in, dead, manage to get my stuff this time. Never mind the stone, time to do upgrades. I now have an ascendant bow, stone hatchet, stone pick, torch, club, and hide armor from JM to asc. I also made getting some more powerful narcs a priority. I need some of the blue ones. This mod adds tiered narcs, very convenient, and more balanced than max torpor. Don't remember the name. So I go back out to gather. Run across a 466 dodo. Try out the new tranqs. Wonderful. This will make my life easier. Wound up replacing my lower walls with window walls, and expanding my base from a 2x2x2 to a 4x4x3. Lots of windows to shoot out of. Now, right as I was about happy with my base expansion, a 116 raptor shows up. Now, on a normal server, that's a great find, here, it's meh. Oh well, I need a fast ground mount, and this is a fast ground mount. One blue arrow, and two cooked meat later, I have a new raptor. Ok, now how am I supposed to get it in my base? Swap out my back door for a double door. Still won't fit. Take down the upper wall, let it in, replace the wall. Check on making a saddle, 16 hide short. Well, not tonight. Hear something. Theres a carno running around the beach now. Oh frakkin great. I'm out. Log off, maybe it'll be gone tonight. I must also adjust my tactics, as I'm afraid the max dino level on this server may be 500 or better.

Where to start. Last night was, interesting, to say the least. Well, all the mods are loaded, but that server is going down regularly. Owner is playing with the mods, so I decide to start a new character in SP on the center, just to see if I want to move my main one over. Selected jungles mid as my spawn point. Spawned in next to a river, some cliffs, and ruins. Took a quick look around, poop, pack of troodons, think I'll take a walk the other way. More troodons. Hmm, the woods look like a good option, poop, dilos. Grab some rocks, fiber and punch a tree that happens to be close, you know the drill. Leveled quick, learned the bow, made arrows. It's frustrating being a beach bob again, but kinda fun. Don't have all the good stuff I've learned to rely on now. Killed a dilo for meat and hide, crafted a campfire, killed more dilos, one a 130, and picked a spot for a temporary base. So far so good. Now that I'm cooking meat, and have clothes, I start to examine my surroundings. I know absolutely nothing about this map. If it were the island, or SE, I'd be going full out by now. Looks like I have two good accesses to the forest from this location, and a relatively flat spot to build. I'll take it for now. I can also see the blue obi just over a ridge. And a pego finds me. It tames from the berries it stole. Wonderful, I have a pet. Build an AA crafting station. I need to spoil some meat and get narcs going. It didn't take too awful long till I manage to get a wood 2x2x2 up, complete with a large storage box, smithy, S+ crafting station, forge, and mortar. Put a couple of extra foundations outside with a compost bin, meat spoiler, egg collector(all from automated ark), and a silica pearl plot. Went on a killing spree, to collect hide, and upgraded to hide armor. Once I got some narcs, and made up a max torpor pike, I went after the lvl 10 trike that is roaming around. I need a mount, this one sucks, but it'll do for now. Tamed him up, made a saddle. All is going too well. Another damned pego tamed itself. Well, whatever. I need crystal for a spyglass. Took off to see if I can locate any. Just into the woods, theri. Hell no, take a left. Another theri. Dilo, 145. More meat and hide. Raptor, 130. Crap, getting low on arrows. Then, after it's dead, I realize all I had to do was hit 5 for the max torpor pike, and dump the meat I got off the dilo and I would have had a nice mount.*Beats head on desk* Think dummy, think. Continue into the woods. Another theri. Nope, head home. Gonna look for a flyer when the sun comes back up. So I make a bunch more arrows, hop on T1(I'm not feeling like naming tonight), and head off. Make it to the east beach, no pteras. Finally found a 70 flapping around the northern river of the isle I'm on. Shot it with a blue tranq dart, it goes down. Dilos again. TE is down to 19. Pump it with some stims I had made. It wakes up, tranq it again. Damn seagull decided to attack. First time that's happened. Well, between T1, the dilos he stirred up, and the seagull, back to 40% TE. Pump stims into the bird again, tranq when she stands up. This time I managed 97%, and she's nearly dead. Stood up at a 103. I'll take it. A monkey comes wandering up. Why not, lvl 5 but who cares. Tame it. So, with my new pet on my shoulder, Ptera1 on follow, and myself on T1, we go home. Get home and a bronto has decided it likes the area, along with 2 more packs of troodons, and a pack of pegos. Oh frakkin wonderful. Clear out the pegos, and park my tames. Go to do some things inside, and hear my ptera being attacked. Dilos again. Kill them, and decide it's time for a wall. I wasn't going to put this much effort into this base, but apparently I'm in a slightly dangerous place. So I farmed mats and built a 4 high wall with dino gate around my base. I also crafted and placed 15 fires to cook all the meat I've collected. Crafted and placed a preserving bin, and stocked it with sparkpowder. Alright things are moving. Leveled up my bird, and took off looking for a bit of crystal. Found metal. Gathered, returned and fired up the forge. Killed some bugs for chitin, learned the engrams, and now I'm in chitin armor. Three metal runs later, no crystal. But I have a longneck, shotty, and a little ammo, along with metal tools. Head off and fly around until I find crystal, not far from where I tamed the bird. Alright! Grabbed it and went home. Crafted up my spyglass and some other stuff. It's getting a little late, but that server hasn't shown a reboot in a hour or so. I'm gonna go try it. Logged in, jungles mid. What the frak! That's what he was doing, testing a new mod. The World Turtle. Looks like the size of an aircraft carrier, and I'm looking at 4 of them. Well, better get started. You know the drill. Max player level is 500 on this server IIRC, so I'm leveling up at a ridiculous pace. Rates are higher than my SP rates. After spending half an hour in the engrams screen, I decided to say screw it and just get crap when I need it. Otherwise I'm leveling up twice in the time it takes to learn one level's engrams. Got my bow and arrows, got my hide, got a campfire cooking meat, time for a wood shack. Server restarts. Log back in. Wait a minute theres a monkey. Ease over, level 200. Ok, wonder what the difficulty on this server is. One mejo and it tames. Wow. Ok, got a companion. Now the derps start. Saw a female dodo, and thought kibble. Tried to club it, lagged into a world turtle. Yep, died without a respawn point. Respawn, back at the location of my base in SP. Great. Server lags and restarts. Went to eat, as it's really getting late. Come back, server is back up. Log in, start to run back amid masses of gigantic turtles. A seagull decided it doesn't like me. I hit the deep water. Finally get away. Get back, my monkey I named goofus is alive, but battered. Turtle and my stuff is gone. Oh well, wasn't much anyway. Gotta get a 2x2 up before I log, so I start on that, and a Chalicotherium decided to walk into my fire, which aggros it. It's a frakkin level 230 something! My buddy helped by throwing poop, and I expended nearly 100 arrows, along with breaking my pick and hatchet to kill the stupid thing. Geez. So I get my base built, with a bed, storage, and preserving bin. Go out to gather mats, get my arrow reserves back up, and somehow aggro another Chalico, a lvl 330 something. Advance to the rear! Run home, it proceed to attempt to disassemble my base while I attempt to turn it into dinner. To be fair, I was right beside my base anyway. Out of arrows, broke my pick and hatchet, again. I haven't gotten to gather metal for advanced tools yet, I've only been on the server maybe 2 hours. Needless to say, I died. Respawned, and grabbed the extra set of tools I had made. Died. Wait. Respawn, at least goofus has taken the aggro. Grab my stuff off my bodies, and manage to kill the darn thing this time. Repaired my home, locked my things up in my storage and logged off. And to top it all off, it's 12:30 am!

I wish I could find a 174 spino. Oh wait, my max level is 150, must be on a difficulty 6 server. Well, I was going to start a character on a center pve server, to test if my craptacular internet will even allow me to play multiplayer. ISP has a bum router, switch, or cable somewhere they can't find, 6 months of pings to google shooting from 30 -1500ms and 2% or so packet loss. Ugh. Anyway, decided on a mod author's test server that's open to the public. There's a few on there I want to check out, and I don't want to put them in my SP game until I know I want them. 2.5GB of mods. Welp, I'm playing Factorio instead of ARK this Memorial Day evening. *Grumbles about slow ass internet, and how there should be a law requiring a minimum of 10Mbps speed up and down.* So, wake up yesterday, start computer, hear a gulp, and air hitting the D5 pump. Oh yeah, I need to check the water level in my cooling loop, haven't done that in a couple of years. 20 oz bottle of water later we're good, slimy and crummy looking, but good. Who says you need to change coolant?(cpu and mobo are 7 years old anyway, so I don't really care) Downloading resumes, surf the net, patch drops, oh wonderful, another 4GB to dl. Ended up being out all day, including 3 hours in a T-storm. Come home soaked, and not in the best of moods, gonna get on that server. WHAT!? Steam has done it again. I checked The Center and Prim + to dl way back when I bought ark, did it dl and install? No. So, I loaded my SP game while Steam did what it was supposed to do months ago. *Beats head on desk* (This is more of a what did I not do in ark today post.) So, what do I want to do on the island in SP tonight? Well, let's organize a bit. Set the hatched raptors I'm not going to breed to a new tame group, Guard Dogs. Yep, I get the occasional dilo inside the fence, among other things. A dozen raptors or so will nip that one. Gonna imprint them as well, the high damage stat ones are popping at 370 melee, and with boosted imprint bonus, they're turning out in the high 600s. Good guard dogs. My 236 breeding male matured. Good. He has my high stats for everything except HP, stam, and oxy. Crap, the pelas are out of fish. Oh well, they'll survive a while, I need to build a barn just for them out of pull range for everything else anyway. Grabbed the 130 female out of the breeding pen, dropped her off in the raptor area, as well as the 224 male, and picked up the 224 female with the 39 oxy stat. Smart breeding helps, but I think it's a little goofy with the breeding plan. I was going to do this with two sets, one with hp, stam and oxy, the other with the rest, then breed them to get them together. Oh well. Throw her in the pen, third egg that popped was a set of 246 twins, male and female, with the crappy purple coloring of their mother, not the nice tan of their father. Crap. Oh well, 248 is max from this pair, and the stat they don't have is going to be bred out anyway. These are keepers I guess. Lead them to the trough, as I've quit raising raptors in the nursery, just not enough room for the dozen I try to pop at once. Swap out the 224 for the 130 wild female I have for the HP stat. Screw smart breeding's plan. Max level for this pair is 256. Well, hours later, she's dropping almost all 194-235s Not a single 256. I have killed untold numbers of babies now, my prime meat reserves are getting so full I'm considering stocking the troughs with it. So i throw the 224 female back in there as well, to see if I can get a 248 or two with tan coloring, not purple and green. Nope. Damn I'm tired what time is, oh poop. 1:40 am. Some nights I wonder how I can do so much to accomplish so little.

Ugh, forum ate my long post analyzing stat specialization. Not redoing all that. So, went to raise my new guard dogs and the one breeding raptor. Friend invited me to ride back with him to his home system in Elite. Why not, haven't played elite in months. After taking the fighter out, buzzing the cockpit, boosting off the cockpit nearly making him spill his food, and other shenanigans, we made it to his home. Didn't get to blow anything up. So, continued the exploration trip I started 10 months ago. At this rate, I might get finished with this around 2025 or so.....

Well, anywhere you can find lots of coel. I fish in the mouth of the river just west of stonehenge, by my current base. Life interferes with ARK, that is a fact. Weather has been nice, and work needs to be done. But, I decided I'd load up the game for an hour or two last night and get something done. First, had to update. It's 9 p,m, Update finishes. Load game. S+ has to update. Sigh. Read changelog for S+. It's 9:30. Finally get to load game, it loads in at about 9:45. Well, there goes nearly an hour. More startup lag than usual, and oh wonderful, the fix for s+ multi-lamps resetting position has changed them all back to auto on/off. Grab the light setter and go about correcting that, and replacing the one lamp that ended up upside down. Well, so much for a productive session. Took a quick look at what needed to be done. Alright, if I don't start on the new base, it will never get done, and I've decided I'm not going to carry all the mats to my base, make the parts, and then carry them all the way to the green obi. I'm going to build a workshop up there, and craft the parts on site. That means I'll need a generator shack, and a place to put the ind. forge as well. So I made up 20 metal foundations, 80 walls, 20 ceilings, and a couple of the new double doors in s+. This will also give me a spawn point by the obi, so I can go back to SE for a bit a relearn the engrams, and fast travel between the bases. I'll use the bronto or a Q as transport, or might just upload/download the stuff. I'll also need to move my achatinas up there. Oh joy. Loaded up an argy with the stuff, and headed north. Well, the plan was working out, until I got almost to the obi. There's a diplo getting munched on by dilos, nothing unusual there. Lvl 80. Nope, don't start or you'll not get even a single foundation down. Raptor runs through the spyglass view. 125 male. Sigh. Fly down, tranq him, check stats. He's specialized, and I have the kibble on me, and am not going to pass up an opportunity for a new high stat. Slap some kibble in him, deal with the dilo that is roaming around, he stands up. Re-check stats. Ok, I'm convinced this is wrong, but I can't find evidence otherwise. He has better than 200 more stamina than my best, and is a 187. 46 levels in stam! He spent nearly half of his bonus levels in stam! That adds a few levels to the pool. Ok, taking him home, right after we deal with the lvl 80 female that just found us. Well, there goes the plan, again. Took him home, and decided to throw him in with my hp specialized female. I need to get the raptor program going again. Did some quick math in my head, and with this new addition, I should be in the 260-270 range once all the high stats are together. I don't even want to look at the time. So I do that, and check smart breeding. It says to throw my other 193 female in with my 225 male. Makes sense. Took one egg, and swapped pairs out in the pen. Egg popped at a 207, and honestly not bad looking colors, will keep him. Not bad for the first run. Messed around the base, letting several eggs drop and hatch. Junk, junk, junk, junk, 236! Yep, got a male with full high rolls, and he managed not to inherit his father's ugly green color. He got his mother's earth color. This is the next step. Just need the other 2 high stats in there. What was I gonna do tonight again? Looked at the time. 12:45 a.m. What happened to an hour or two? Oh yeah, updates and raptors. Today is going to be hell, cause I've stayed up until tomorrow, again.

Currently waiting for my game to update. Crapola internet. Last session was a real exciting one. I went fishing. Gathered 1.2k sap, so why not. I now have several JM and MC bps that I didn't have before. Relaxing but boring, and what else ya gonna do when you've only got about an hour?

For Raptors, run as fast as possible, preferably screaming like a little girl, back to your base that you left the door open on, then hatchet them to death when they get stuck in the door. Alternatively, shotgun to the face. And now for my oh so awesome session. Made sparkpowder and gunpowder. Multiple metric [insert expletive] tons of them. Oh, and took the theri out gathering wood for more charcoal, so I can make a few more metric [insert expletive] tons of gunpowder. Seriously, I think I made over 10k gp last night, from raw stone, flint and charcoal. If my base ever catches on fire, the explosion will raze everything south of the volcano. Tonight, I shall plan the acquisition of a water mount for deep sea drop running. (I'm probably going to get myself killed, in other words.)

Finished my ini and dove back in. Ok, now I have my levels back. And I just noticed I haven't put anything back in fortitude after the mindwipe, so I crammed the six levels in there. It does help in certain situations. Then I went out on the argy looking for another achatina. Headed to the place I've found them reliably, and right around the corner, there's another 25. Snatch it, bear tries its best to get me, I laugh and head home. The argy is excruciatingly slow, but still my preferred taming/small animal hunting bird. Get it back, tame it. Finish the achatina pen, stock it with veggie cakes until I can get a trough set up and throw it in the pen with the other one. Now what to do? Went to my bookshelf and sorted through some bps. Hey, I forgot I had picked up that apprentice anky saddle bp. Craft up 2 for my ankys, and threw the primitive one in the grinder. That's what I'm gonna do for a bit, run beacons. Not taking anything but bps unless it's something I don't have. Think I'll take the speed ptera for this run. After hitting every purple, yellow, and red drop I could find, I had a whole 2 new bps, and an apprentice fab pistol. Really? One yellow double I couldn't access on whitesky, as I couldn't harvest the rock it was in. Loot drops need some serious work. In one instance, there was a purple drop in the swamp. Now, I mostly avoid these because of ambushes. Well, this one had one of the bps in it. Landed, immediately got swarmed by a group of leeches, 2 kapros, and a sarco. Great fun! Whup out the shotty, and several minutes of round and round, everything is dead. My ptera is almost dead. It was on passive, and the sarco had chewed on it pretty badly. Good thing I kited it away in the middle of all that. Don't know how many stims I gulped down in that mess. I love the pump shotty now. Ammo is expensive though. Grabbed the drop, and off we go. Got home, and decided my crafting area in the barn is too cramped, so I moved the upgrade station over to the ramp going to the flyer level. I didn't realize I had so much stuff stored in there, and I just happened to move it just far enough that I couldn't transfer from the bag to the station, so I lost some stuff do to despawning, but not much. Added the blueprint and augment stations to it to have a complete setup. Slapped the fab pistol I picked up in there and turned it into a blueprint. Yep, I can see why a server owner might want to prohibit the blueprint station add-on. It's a nice option though. Don't know if I'll make bps out of my upgraded stuff, or just stick to turning drop items into bps. I'll make that decision later. Put that up, checked on the troughs, and loaded all the charcoal out of the ind forge into the chemistry bench. Yep, made a metric crap ton of gunpowder. Went over to my smithy, loaded the gp in, pulled every ingot out of the ind forge, and set up to make simple bullets 600x. Yep. making a metric crap ton of simple bullets, you probably already know why. Went back to the chemistry bench and pulled all the stimberries I had, made up some more stims. Added 50 gas from storage as it's getting a little low. Hopped on the Tap and took a trip to herbi island. Titan is still there, and had decimated the trees. Looks strange now. No good ankys, or anything else for that matter. Still lots of pelas. I'm afraid that it's time to wipe them, as I think they're going to interfere with other spawns. Head back, stopping at a yellow and purple drop. Nothing of note. Figures. Get home, my bullets are done. Make 200x shotgun shells. This is gonna take a while. Oh, just noticed my lights are finally fixed. Went out to the barn, closed the door and shut off the lights in there. Fired up the fabricator and made a flashlight for my shotty, grabbed the stims, and took inventory of ingots. 36k in storage boxes alone. Now if I just had my paste reserves up, I could start making pieces for my outer wall at the new base location. The green obi is not that dangerous. I could get away with stone, but I want my fence in metal, with a two foundation buffer between the inner and outer walls. Why build a psuedo pvp fence in sp? Titans. I know there's a spawn not far from here. They are my only concern, and the reason for a metal fence, with s+ xl walls which are 12 high, I shouldn't have an issue with them aggroing my dinos. I'm also going to turret my house to help take care of any wilds spawning inside the perimeter. Well, shotty shells are done, I'm tired, so grab 50 more, head to the living quarters and quit for the night. Nice productive session, now just waiting for the game to take a massive dump on me.

Let's see. Friday, did nothing because the patch was late as usual, and my internet is slow, so it was midnight before it downloaded. Saturday, looked at the version number. Decided not to load my game until things had settled in. Finally decided the dust had pretty much settled, so I loaded my game. It usually takes about 10 minutes. Half an hour later, I killed it and tried again. It successfully loaded this time, with much more startup lag than usual. Great. If this gets any worse I'm going to just quit playing. I have lots of other games that don't take so long to load up and get going. Now that I can actually do something, I made sure the troughs still had food in them, and took off on the wyvern to check out the volcano. I was underwhelmed to say the least. So I went back to base. Gotta respec my engrams. Thanks Wildcard, really. I have custom levels as well, just vanilla with double engram points for SP, but still. At 96, that's a lot of engrams to relearn, especially with s+. Oh, and now I've got to go back to SE, just to relearn the engrams. I've had to roll back my save before because s+ messed up and all my structures were gone, and when that happened my engram points were negative until I got the levels back. Now, why couldn't the game just recalculate what I had spent and earned and put the difference up? I guess that would be too complicated. Oh, another thing I found out. If you have a custom levels list, the game now chops the top 15 levels off for ascension. I also had no engram points to spend, they hadn't been refunded, and my max level was 90. I was expecting to respec engrams, but this was just ridiculous. So, I jumped on the argy, opened the hatch, and headed out. Went east of the redwoods, and there's that 135 compy. There's several of them around, so I grab him and head back to base. Taming a compy is not that big of a deal, the problem is trying to kill the rest while sparing that one high level. Check several times to make sure he's still there. He is. Over the hill, pull up over the taming pen, drop him, go inside, he's gone. What the hell? May have scraped him off on a tree or something. Look around the base a bit to make sure I didn't accidentally drop him on the roof. He may be in my dino pen, but probably won't be aggressive, so I dunno. I go back out. Snatched a lvl 25 achatina near the redwoods. Took it home and tamed it. Went to make a metal foundation to keep it on, wait, I can't. I can't make anything. Sigh. I happened to have 2 in storage, so I plopped one down and threw it on that. It crawled off and stopped right under the item collector. Oh well. I'm going to go get some more later, easier than hunting beaver dams. So, I spawned in a mindwipe to get my engram points back. That was over an hour of just clicking trying to get back the building and weapon engrams. I didn't even bother with saddle engrams, as I have to get in my bookshelf and figure out which ones I have bps for. Plus I apparently don't have my double points anymore because I'm running low. I might have enough to relearn the SE engrams. Might. So I closed the game and set in adding 10 levels to my custom list and spreading the xp above 100 out for the top levels. That should allow me to level back to 96, and therefore on up to 100. I've still got to add points for the top 10 levels now, if that even works. As a temporary work around, I just slapped 1k points in at lvl 90, and I'll use that unless I get to rework the rest of my ini around the new patch. It's tomorrow, I've been at this far longer than I wanted, so that was it for the night. I've still got a lot of ini work to do.