Cymas

Last night was highly unexpected, in a good way. I actually logged in a little later than usual. M was already on and at with his argents, had a fresh flock growing in the hatchery. As is quickly becoming the norm, he had yet another color mutation--blue head feathers. I hope he combines it with his blue wings, unfortunately so far they've all come out with those pukey green foreheads that I dislike so much. I might already want an upgrade to my bird, lol. It was straight to business for me, I went and bred my allos for the usual round of disappointment. But not today. Out popped a 5 stat male with *both* of the stats I needed, I've been having the hardest time getting them to inherit on anything. Awesome! I will be retiring all but 3 of my breeding allos now--this new male, a full color female and a full color male, both 4 stats. I do anticipate another few rounds of breeding to finish off, but I'll be stockpiling eggs just in case I happen to get the allos I want. Even with 6 stats I don't think they'll max out very high, maybe around 240 or so. Considering there isn't a single 150 tame in these lines, I think that's pretty respectable. I'll probably continue to collect high level allos as I see them, they just don't pop up very often. P came on shortly afterwards and got started on his usual rounds. Admire the new babies, do a bary check, swamp cave run. But first he came across an unexpected surprise, a red 150 diplocaulus roaming around the city grounds. Apparently M rescued it from a sarco and dropped it in the taming pen in case anyone wanted it, and at some point it glitched out of the pen lol. No one is interested, I know A would be if she was around but sadly she is not. So we let it roam around and enjoy living while it has the chance. With one good allo growing I moved on to my stubborn ankys. 2 to cull and 3 new ones added. Another round of breeding. Hatched the first egg, out popped a 280, 5 stat male. Fantastic, much better results than I had been getting. Popped the second egg...twins! Male and female, level 286, max stat ankys out of this line. Holy crap. I could not have asked for a better result. I was honestly stunned. I did decide to keep the 280 anky. For one, it's a much more attractive animal than the twins, who followed the Ark rule about high level animals being ugly, lol. It's actually a mostly black anky, so I'm hoping if I can get a 286 with those colors, I can then breed for color mutations. I miiiiight still work on getting to base 300 though, I'm only 14 levels short. Only. I feel like that's a good benchmark for a strong animal though. Noticing the argents and my allo only had about 30 stacks of meat left in the troughs, I went on a quick fish run while M did something or other. P didn't get anything good out of the swamp cave this run, as per usual. Once I was done getting meat I afk'd to take care of a few things while the animals grew more. I wanted to at least see them to adolescent before logging for the night, given all of the food/stasis bugs and whatnot. I returned in time to hear about a 145 bary M found for P. It was actually already up by then, the report came back a few minutes later. No good stats. I am honestly very surprised about that, P's bary line originates from just 2 high level tames, I definitely did not expect them to have such significant stats that fresh tames aren't adding anything to his line. P went off to do one last scout and we were all getting ready to log when... 135 male swamp spino! For real, game? P didn't want it, I guess because he's obsessed with his barys and getting mutations on them right now. I offered it to M first, as I have already tamed a 135 spino but he hasn't found any at that level yet. Unfortunately it was near 3 a.m. for him and he didn't think he'd have the time to stay for the whole tame. So P stayed with it while I got supplies. I didn't really have the time either but I am never going to waste a high level spino, or let someone else tame it. We need them. Grabbed Gina and took off with kibble, arrows and narcs in hand. Unfortunately the swamp spawn is about the least convenient, but also the most consistent spino spawn on the map for us. It took awhile but together P and I lured him over to the nearby cliffs and got the area cleared of other animals. I asked M for support as well, he grabbed his Rogue and came over just to body block him in once his torp got high. Chasing a fleeing spino through the swamp is how disasters happen. Tranqing went off almost without a hitch, at one point Rogue got too close to the spino's hitbox and I shot him a couple times, but M kept it pinned until it went down. With his face in a cliff like 90% of all spino tames lol. M and P both checked the area again, especially the top of the cliff. I've had bad experiences with things jumping off to destroy tames, and we want no mistakes for something as rare and valuable to our tribe as a spino. I sent M home shortly afterwards, he was falling asleep at his keyboard as per usual. P stayed on patrol until disaster struck a community member. O was bored and complaining about it as usual so I suggested he go tame a thyla since he'd been away for a long time and hadn't seen most of the new animals. So he did, but unknown to me he took his allo, an argent and an anky with him. It ended poorly. The thyla ran into the swamp, he followed, got dragged off by kapros and since he didn't know how to fight them he died. Twice. And ended up begging global for help getting back to his animals since he couldn't spawn at his base for some reason. It later turned out half his base had been rekt because he didn't put up a fence in therizino country. Anyway. He wasn't too far from us so P went off to the rescue, carrying him all over the place in search of his animals/body while I continued the spino tame solo. They found O's animals right about when the spino stood up. It was late by then and P just went on to bed while I walked the spino home. Literally. He was a little bugged and couldn't sprint, but fortunately a dilo was useful for something and somehow unbugged him by getting him involved in a swamp fight. We passed O on the way home, I just shook my head and said nothing. In global, anyway. I don't have much sympathy for people who should know better. I got the spino down to my spot in the lower tier, screenshotted his stats and put them in my spreadsheet, then checked on my babies. It took so long they had all grown up...and under. All 3 ankys were underneath the map. Not in the sea, just buried at what I imagine is Purlovia level. Fortunately whistling popped all 3 out and I moved them and the allo into the breeding pen for tomorrow. Dunno what that was about, I tore the hatchery floor up precisely to avoid these shenanigans. Thus ended my night in Ark. I won't be hatching any more eggs from either allos or ankys until the weekend. I need 2 286 ankys to be imprinted, replacing our current tribe ankys. The parents will be kept behind as a reserve with some eggs preserved in case of disaster, and also to possibly get a color morph done now that the stats are handled. I also don't want to pop allos just yet in case I get the ones I want, I need 3 allos to make a pack, with some eggs in reserve from them as well. I think I'll make a new fridge solely for these types of eggs, that are basically just for reproducing the line in case something happens.

Got home a little early tonight so took advantage to breed both my allos and my ankys. No good allos, but all 3 ankys are keepers. I can replace two of the parents, finally starting to make some progress. M was on this morning and got yet another color mutation on his argents. Magenta bellies this time. Pretty sure I'm not getting mutations because M's stealing them all, like a breeding pego lol. Not much else going on. P found a 145 bary to tame, another with nothing much to add to his line. I did a quick scout for ankys, didn't find anything to tame. Went home, logged for the night.

Well, since it's the work week again I don't really have a lot I can do in game. Since I've been making progress with them lately I bred my allos again, 2 duds and one keeper, a full color 4 stat male who can replace his father in the breeding rotation. The last 2 stats are being incredibly stubborn but I refuse to breed anything less than 6 high rolls, show levels or not. Then I went to take a look at M's new birdy. He got yet another color mutated argent, man he's lucky. Gorgeous bird too. He bred his new color mutation and wasn't satisfied with the baby, but she was so pretty I couldn't let him cull her. So I guess I have an argent again, or will when she grows up. Did a couple laps for meat and spino/bary spawns, nothing doing there. P found a 135 bary with no good stats for his breeding project. He's still very new to breeding so I have to encourage him to get out of the 150 only mindset, especially with less common animals. Took another look at my new birdy before I logged. Isn't she pretty?

Well yesterday was pretty quiet. My tribemates weren't really active for various reasons so I was on my own pretty much all day. I decided to breed my allos again, I'm hoping to get this project temporarily finished with my current stats so I can actually start using them at some point. Finally got a full color, 4 stat female; the game has been throwing male hatchlings at me all weekend. So that was a huge boon. The biggest issue I have right now is most of my animals still have that annoying yellow belly when they need light grey. Breeding for non-mutated colors is a very frustrating mechanic. Won't say it's not rewarding though, I love my Indominous Allos. I'm also somewhat annoyed that two of my current favorite animals, allos and thylas, do not have higher tier saddles available in game. I can't help but wonder if that's just something that's been overlooked when other, newer animals definitely do have good saddles. Either way, I needed a break from breeding at that point so it was time for a hunt. Loaded up Gina and off we went. I also finally figured out why theris weren't really respawning--so when they were first introduced and for awhile afterwards, they were surprisingly common spawns. They were all over the place in some areas, which was problematic for some given that they are basically herbivore rexes and they will chase you for a very long time. So their spawn rates were adjusted down. Our server is so quiet and our admins never do courtesy wipes, so all this time we've still had the now overspawned theris hanging around, as animals don't despawn the way they used to, they're much more persistent now. So I've basically been single-handedly clearing out all those spawns, making theris a much more uncommon animal. Somewhat disappointing, but I got some good results nonetheless. I managed to find and tame not one but two 135+ theris. That's a good day by just about any metric. Plus one was male so now we have mate boosting and potential breeding partners. I'm not breeding them yet though. After my experience with ankys, I've decided to play the long game and not immediately breed for stats as I collect animals. I'm going to tame at least 12 of them first and see where I am in comparison to target benchmarks before I do any breeding. The theris that don't make the cut will be offered to other players on the server and then culled if they aren't all adopted out within a reasonable timeframe. In other news, Gina has been proving herself to be quite worthy of the time investment and constant walks. She's a personal bird used mainly for running drops and scouting/carrying tames home, so I've been building her to be a bit more versatile. I've got her up to about 10k HP, 5k stam and getting close to 500% melee for spawn clearing. After that I'll probably work on stamina again. We have two tribe quetz, I just really prefer imprinted animals, and it's not an issue if both of them are being used. I keep forgetting to take screenshots, but here's one from Saturday's allo breeding, yesterday looked pretty much the same:

Well if you're expecting some crazy adventures from me today, I'm afraid there's not much to report on that front. For one thing, it's Saturday or what little remains of it, which means baby day for my tribe. I started out the morning with my anky eggs and was sorely disappointed. Not a single one to keep. Sigh. But then I decided to take advantage of our server's drastically increased breeding-related multipliers--the only way to make it possible to 100% imprint animals was to do this. Given how much I hate raising quetz and the disappointment of no ankys, well it was an easy choice to make. So I popped my Q egg and out came a 212, vaguely eggplant colored female. Naturally I named her Gina, as in aubergine. And then I basically cleaned my apartment in 10 minute bursts between imprint windows. 34 imprints, and 90% of them were walks. Some people have dogs, I have a bird the size of a small plane who thinks she's a greyhound. Typical. But there was some excitement if you like breeding. I was talking to someone in another tribe in global, one thing led to another and I offered to breed my color mutated sheep for them to raise as a birthday present for their tribe partner. So they came by and set up a trough on city land and I gave them berries and mated the sheep. They claimed the baby and we just hung out and chatted while we raised our babies together. Then P came on early in the afternoon and got to work hatching the bary eggs he'd saved up all week. Out of those 20 eggs we ended up with 2 tribe tames, 1 female gifted to PP, who was raising his sheep, and 1 new color mutation for P's personal collection, a red underbelly. While this was going on I also worked on a side project between imprints and successfully converted one of our taming pens into metal for ongoing theri taming. Even S+ can't salvage vanilla snap points but hey it works and that's really all we need at the end of the day. I wanted to do the whole thing but my patience was wearing thin by then. Then M came on and hatched his argent eggs. He has a color mutated bird with gorgeous purple back/wings, plus his own color morph to work on. Somehow he ended up with another color mutation--and argent with deep green wingtips. Not on one of the purple wings, a different one. I really want one of those purple ones, especially if it was white everywhere else. Beauty. Not wanting to be entirely left out of the fun, I sorted out my allos and bred them up as well, still working on getting stats into my "Indominous Allo" color morph. Got two more full color males and a female with...what's this, a mutation!? Yes, finally! I wonder what stat it is since it would be obvious if it was a color...oh, I got a nice mutation bonus to oxygen. Thank you Ark, really. A non-aquatic, poor-swimming therapod definitely needs that. Sigh. By then Gina had finally grown up with a full 100% imprint. Dear obs, I hope I never have to do that again. Poor Val will most likely be retired, though not by our wyvern which is what usually happens to things lol. She's relegated to being the backup bird/rescue ranger. Naturally I had to go get Gina some levels, so we took the opportunity to do some theri spawn clearing. Lots of levels, a 135 male sheep and 2 140 male ankys later, giant goose egg to show for it. I guess in Ark it would be a quetz egg, no? But anyway. As you might expect I was getting pretty tired by now, and annoyed at my overall lack of success, so I called it a night.

Well, last night I didn't play on my server... I started recording season 2 on my single player instead. I just kinda felt like it. S1 was an herbivore tame only challenge run with the goal of defeating an Alpha Rex. S2 is what I'm calling "100 Days in the North", basically I built a small supply depot, then created a new character and spawned in the snow. The goal for this season is to spend 100 game days completely within the snow biome. Definitely not an easy thing; it is literally not possible for a freshly spawned character to survive in the cold, which is why I had to add an RP element of finding an abandoned supply cache with some fur armor in it. I also learned some really fantastic news. Since I haven't been in SP for a long time, I decided to bite the bullet and check the obelisk terminal. So waaaaay back almost a year ago now, when we learned we were wiping I went ahead and uploaded a few very select animals in the hopes of at least preserving something of their legacy. Because I do these challenge runs and wipe my SP on a regular basis, I never downloaded them and with the changes to how uploads and downloads work I assumed they were all long gone. Turns out they're all still there. That means I still have Smaug, my absolute favorite spino. He's my perfect 120 tamed dossier spino (before the difficulty increase obviously) who's gone head to head with a lv. 100 Alpha Rex, granted this was before the great HP/melee nerf. But still a pretty impressive thing. This makes me incredibly happy, even crippled by the nerf bat he's still my beautiful world destroying spino. Also worth noting is I preserved my very first color morph project, the "Arkannion Blue" spino, which I was almost done with. I also still have Mocha, the very first giga ever tamed on our server, and Seleene, my old tribe partner's perfect tamed albino rex, completely white including the spine. He asked me to take the latter, for the record. That was a very happy Ark night for me. This is Smaug:

Unfortunately I have no adventures to share today. Our server appears to be having some connection difficulties that prevented me from logging in. However, I did finally get around to fixing my volume issues (I think), in case I decide to start recording again. I did discover at some point my SP game save had corrupted, forcing me to wipe it. Oh well. It wasn't anything important, just a test run for a new YT season I was contemplating. I was only going on it to test my mic/game volume level balance. Ark for some reason is insanely loud whenever I record, no matter how I try to adjust the volume. I think I might finally have a handle on it though, so I may someday supplement stories with video adventures.

@maze He doesn't die every day, just...most of them. I've been trying to keep him out of trouble but he just doesn't listen... Anyway, very short night tonight. I got home from work a little late and no one else was around. First thing I did was a quick metal/crystal run and get the forge going. It's slow going but I'm building up our supplies again, most likely to use it all up on the weekend lol. I'll wait until baby raising day to do a building project since I'll be stuck in the city anyway. I do have a very rough estimate of what I need, given that the pen I want to upgrade already exists. But I can never resist a chance to renovate and improve on the design... In the meantime though, just the usual supply stuff. Moved a spare item collector into the egg pen near the farm building to act as our main poop distributor. I need lots of poop to keep the propellant flowing anyway. Did refill the compost bins, they don't really seem to be getting filled by said item collector, but it only takes a few seconds to do it manually anyway. Made a bit more propellant and some narcs, did a quick run over for sap, and fed the herbivores. That's about all I had time for tonight. So yeah, not much to report. But since I was asked so nicely and I actually remembered to do so, I did take a screenshot to share. It's the taming pens I'll be renovating, hopefully this weekend. Possibly expanding as well, but we'll see. The building they're attached to is our hunting lodge, a combination trophy room / taming supply storage area. The quetz is of course Val, whom I talk about often enough I thought I should show her too. Her full name is Valencia, but I almost never call her that, it's Val for short. She is really not a very good quetz--was only 100 when I tamed her, and she's been all but crippled by the nerfs. But she's my personal quetz, and her pink wings have actually made her somewhat distinctive. I've grown rather fond of her, truth be told.

@ILuvTheAwesomeDevs I checked through my library and I don't currently have any good shots but I'll try to remember for the future. The city we built occupies basically the entire Weathertop region on The Island. Last night was short but busy. Because we made the grinder on Monday night, that actually took care of my main goal for the week. I'm not lacking in projects by any means so next on the list, I was determined to work on automating a few things with the help of the S+ mod. When you have a few thousand hours of gameplay experience, I think you can excuse a few luxuries here and there, no? I've had my fill of staring at dino butts for the immediate future. One item collector was already running, and I discovered they have some neat side features I only read about in the patch notes and I wanted to take advantage of. Most importantly, poop distribution. The item collector will send poop directly to any S+ compost bin in range, and the S+ compost bin in turn will automatically distribute the fertilizer it makes to crop plots within their range. And on top of that, you can make the gardener to collect your crops for you. Tribemate M has been maintaining crop farms for literally years in two tribes, across two iterations of this server. Give the man a break. So I did. I demoed our current collection of compost bins and replaced them with a smaller number of S+ compost bins, then crafted a gardener and got some beer from our pub for him. Made sure everything was working and whoa, gardener was full almost instantly. We tend to only harvest what we need on an immediate basis, whoops. Tons of narcoberries available so I went ahead and crafted lots and lots of narcotics. We don't have anywhere to put them though, there's 4 completely full boxes of them in the hunting lodge already. No matter. I put them in the workshop smithy instead for making darts later. Completely filled our crop fridge full and still have tons to spare. Same with our mejo fridge. And we'll never have to collect berries for anything again lol, we have some of each type primarily for making dyes on demand but in these quantities...had no idea we had so many crop plots honestly. Then it was off to the nearest metal mountain for a short run. Not the volcano--the mountain directly east of us has metal and crystal, which is mainly what I need to restock on for my planned taming pen upgrade. Honestly I wonder why we always go to the volcano when that mountain exists. I can get one quetz/anky full of mats, which is perfect when I don't have the time to dedicate to a full run. So I did that, threw the metal in the forge and did a little more organization while I waited for it to smelt. Made a resource puller gun and might have been playing with it lol. Too bad the range is so short, still had to carry the ingots from the forge to the metal box like a pleb. Ah well. I had little time remaining by that point so I grabbed Fiona and ran over to the lower south cave to check for megalos. Found one, or I should say, I saw one at the same time as it aggro'd me coming around the corner. Sadly it was a male, decent level too 105. But we have a male and no need for it so we killed him. Fiona's traveled the depths of the swamp and the swamp cave, she's not afraid of graboidosaurus. Grabbed the artifact since we were there, then ran home and logged for the night. P and M were both on, but we were all busy doing different things so aside from some chat, no stories from them to report. P did run swamp cave and got a mastercraft para saddle, which he was happy about because he loves paras. I did show M the location I had scouted for the deep sea pen and he agrees that it's a good spot to work with, he plans to get some foundations down today while he plans out the build.

Short and sweet tonight. So I spent some time this morning before work putting together a to do list and basically delegating tasks to my tribemates. Kinda weird, but the only way we're going to make as much progress as we can is if we can focus on multiple areas at once, and the best way to do that is by splitting the workload. I feel like I occupy an odd niche as tribe leader because of course we're all pretty good friends by now, but I'm also in charge of everything, however nominally. Naturally I gave myself the most boring tasks. We wanted to make an S+ industrial grinder. We have a regular one, but we need the S+ one to make propellant for our item collectors. Right now the only way to make it is for me to fly all the way up to the volcano and use the public mining outpost to make it. Only slightly inconvenient coming from weathertop with a quetz full of feces. So I gave myself the task of farming the mats for it, as well as stockpiling the propellant itself. M is on jerky duty for the week and also megalo hunting. P is on swamp cave runs and whalespotting. First thing I did upon logging in was breed my ankys. We won't have them before the next patch drops most likely, but my super ankys will make it so much easier to farm mats, especially when the "easy" metal is much more high risk. Also snuck a peek in the egg pen, no new megalos, but that's ok. Grabbed Val and our one non breeding tribe anky and headed up to the volcano. M had told me while I was at work he went ahead and farmed enough metal for the grinder on his own. How awesome is that? But I knew we were really short on crystal, and I needed to make propellant anyway, so up we went for a quick run. On the way down, disaster. I had just left the volcano when my game crashed. It hasn't done that in a very long time and I was, as you might imagine, more than a little upset. I let M know immediately and since he was with P doing a swamp cave run, they both came straight out to help find the animals while I got back on the server. Fortunately I've had parachutes on the same key in my hotbar for ages so as soon as I logged back in I hit the button and narrowly avoided death, instead safely parachuting to the public hatchery/taming pen nearby. I did spam J but Val had already flown off, as is typical. Luckily P found her almost immediately. Those pink wings really stand out. I swear this quetz has more lives than a cat, I should have lost her several times over by now. To think I used to not even like her, but can't imagine life without my pink n purple bird even if she was badly affected by the nerf. Anyway, he brought her back to me and we commenced the anky hunt. P found that too, turns out while Val hadn't been in J range the anky had and somehow chased me all the way down the side of the volcano and eventually fell into the river in her effort to get back to me. P fished her out and watched her until I got back to pick her up. We made it safely home, albeit slowly and slightly overloaded. Gathered up the rest of the mats and crafted our new grinder, yay. Plopped it down in the kibble pagoda in our narc room since this grinder basically exists to make propellant. Made up enough to last a couple days, noticed the requirements changed recently so it's much easier now, yay. Logged off early tonight though. I'm still pretty tired after last night's late running adventure, and I need to stay rested for work, so off I went. Might have been a short session but we got a lot done. M and P are still playing so who knows what I'll log in to tomorrow evening.

Man do I have a story to tell tonight. This my friends is why I keep coming back to Ark no matter how many breaks I take. It started out like any other Ark day really. I logged in, turned up gamma because it's always night when I log in for some reason, and got my gear on. I know they fixed that bug ages ago but I still store everything in a logout box every single day. Went down to port and got out Belle, the tribe bary I've been using, stocked up on fish, and off we went to the swamp cave. Alone. P was nowhere to be found and M can't play until much, much later. We easily chewed our way through the usual legions of scorps, spiders and dragonflies, and then my long search began. Drop after drop, slowly cycling between their spawn points every 20 minutes or so. I didn't leave the cave, didn't need to. Just endlessly cycling with Netflix in the background as I did chores and whatnot around the apartment. I honestly spent probably a good few hours in there. No fishing rods, but did get a journeyman assault rifle, mastercraft mammoth saddle and flak gauntlets BPs, and an ascendant miner's helmet BP. Later on, while I was thoroughly sick of the cave, a player who hasn't been around in quite some time came on. We chatted for a bit, and he asked someone else about his gigas, which apparently got stolen from the person he gave them to. Tribe politics. This is why I don't invite randoms. But anyway he was thinking about getting back into it and ask for some help. I was bored of caving anyway so we safely made it home and stored our well earned, if lackluster treasures, and got to work. I collected up a midtier set of chitin armor and all the basics, with some taming supplies. Threw it all on my female saber, gave her the spare saddle from the saddlery, and flew out to meet the guy. Gifted him the saber full of gear. He'll probably make a new base, play for a month and get bored, then leave again until new patches come out. It's kind of his MO. But whatever, we had plenty of spare gear and the saber I don't need since I have Fiona and the tribe barys now. He's lucky, I usually cull animals I don't need anymore. Instead of going back to the cave, I took our one whale out to go hunting for new whales. It took a long time and I was ready to head back when I came across a lvl 95 basilo. Not the best of whales, but a vast improvement over our poor level 20. So I went ahead and tamed him up, fighting what felt like half the ocean in the process, and got him home. Wasn't feeling creative so I named them Diver and Delver. So one disposable scout whale and one midrange, it's something. Kibble definitely works better than mutton due to the spoil timers. With that thought fresh in my mind I turned my thoughts to another animal on our priority wishlist, who happens to also be useful for whales. The therizinosaurus, our planned boss battling force since my tribe doesn't really do rexes. I happened to have just enough kibble for a 150, so I grabbed Val my trusty, pinked winged quetz and took to the skies. M finally showed up and got ready to log in shortly afterwards, but I decided to check one last theri before going home...145 female. Ok then. I scooped her right up and learned the hard way if you grab them the wrong way they get very annoyed and start hitting you. Ouch. Sorry Val. Dropped her, picked her up the right way, and continued home. She tore up our taming pen like nobody's business, surprised she didn't outright break something by the time she passed out. Guess we'll be upgrading our pen... M logged in and we talked about plans while she tamed up. P wasn't around for whatever reason so I decided it would be a good time to scout for some megalos, which we need for the theris, which we can then use for basils. Inadvertently establishing a kibble chain, always nice when that happens. We just tame based on our needs mostly. And I do like P, don't get me wrong, but megalos are a tough tame and his lack of attention would be liable to get himself, or worse, me, killed. After the theri tamed (pretty meh stats but hey female at least) we set out to look for the elusive cave dwelling graboids. We split up, each picking a cave to check before hauling whatever we needed out. I checked lower south, which was closest to us anyway even if it was a rare spawn. What do you know, I practically tripped over a 25 female. Ok then. Good thing we did it this way, as soon as M showed up with the lambchops my internet took a dump, dropping me seconds before the megalo woke up and I took my first shot. Awesome. M got her down without me, letting the megalo chew on Fiona with my permission as a distraction. By the time I got my net sorted and back into the game she was basically tamed. Walked her out, poor thing was so tired. I legitimately felt bad keeping her awake lol. She slept while M got the quetz to carry her home, and as soon as she was in the pen I let her go back to sleep. By then it was getting late and I was tired after a long day, but I wanted to do one more scouting run. Lower south had respawned by then but no megalos. M was checking the volcano cave. He got a little lost and ended up at the artifact first. I didn't expect much by then and planned to log but then he started yelling in chat about a 135 and running for his life. Yeah. A 135 male megalo. He barely escaped with his life and his cat intact. We quickly put together a plan. He started luring it out while I grabbed the quetz and flew out to meet him. Perfect timing, I showed up just as he got it all the way out. Rushed down, grabbed the megalo, and carried him home slowly. Once there I held him above our battered taming pen and let M shoot him after their normal wake up time. I got my very first intentional starve tame going with help from the Dododex timer and pulled a sheep from our herd. Kinda felt bad, he was so excited to get tons of levels right before I poked him with my pike. Tamed the megalo easily and ended up with over 200 more mutton to cook. Wow. It really does work. So there was a significant amount of scrambling to get it cooked, as M had gone off to fight an alpha near the city walls while I tamed the megalo. But we got it all cooked and in the fridge, and our new megalo is in the pen with his lady friend, and Ark life is very good tonight. I logged off feeling very good tonight, this is a huge amount of progress for us after months of our tribe being in the equivalent of stasis mode. Time to wake up boys, we got work to do. I really do wish A could be here, she would be loving this. Especially tonight's theri, who has a bit of purple, A's favorite color. For now though, it's time to end the night. In the morning I'll plan out my goals for the coming week.

@Psych0P3nguin Honestly I don't think unofficials are hugely different from official if you aren't running that many mods. We have 5 mods, 3 of which are purely for aesthetics, one is death helper, and the last one is S+ for improved building mechanics. The core gameplay doesn't change, it's just with higher but not insane multipliers the server is a very nice place for solo players and small tribes, which is what our community is mostly. Average tribe size is 2-3, at 4 we're the biggest active tribe on the server. You'll only count 3 of us in the stories though, my last tribemate isn't able to play right now sadly. Saturday did not go as planned, pretty much at all. I started off early in the morning to pop the eggs I've been building up all week. Only did spino and anky this week. I thought about popping our quetz egg but I hate raising quetz so I stuck it back in the fridge lol. While I was there I incubated all our bary eggs down since P hadn't for some reason. Eggs were almost a complete bust, I had around 10 total and only got 2 animals out of that. A female 4 stat anky for my breeding project, and a female 3 stat spino. Both only slightly helpful as what I really need right now are high roll males. Such is life on the Ark. While raising them I did mostly city maintenance due to the number of recent bugs with raising babies. My big morning project was reconfiguring our herbivore egg pen. It was getting messy, and I wanted to change a few things up. Moved the herbs around to be neater and more out of the way of their main trough. Then the real reason I did this, I moved all of our egg carnivores into that pen. It only took 2 trips to move 5 rexes. I also moved our Scorched Earth tames over into the corner. We're not a cluster server, we just had a weird bug for awhile where most SE animals were spawning around Dead Island and the mainland around there. Naturally we made sure we got some of them. Our jerboas are long dead but we have a moth, a thorny dragon and 2 morelltops. Anyway. Paired with our S+ item collector I can minimize propellant use and still get a maximum number of eggs collected, which is great. Finally P got on (no M today, computer access is limited on weekends) and we started popping bary eggs. We had 7, and got 3 keepers out of it. One for P's personal collection and 2 tribe animals. Not bad. While he was busy raising/imprinting them I took our basil out for a lap around the map for scouting and general exploration. Saw my first "kraken" from a very safe distance. Only found a single whale, not worth taming but more oil. I also took a look around our sea pen and we may end up doing an underwater one for the big tames, there's a kind of shelf right underneath the current pen that would be high convenient and fairly protected overall. M said he'd check it out, sounds promising. By the time I got back, between that and scouting for theris/red drops, the barys were almost done. Once they were we decided to take two of them out to dead island for some level laps. All was going well until P decided to run that cave without doing any prep. I didn't know what was in there myself, but I wasn't going to leave him to do it alone. Yeah, bad times. The treacherous path wasn't terrible aside from being terrified one of the bats was going to push us off the edge or we were going to miss/lag out on a jump. It was also very cold. I was ok, only cold with my 50 fort, and I had some berries on me to keep my hunger up. P wasn't so lucky, he has only a fraction of the fort. We both fell on the way back up (ok I fell a couple times on one jump), but I managed to dismount with enough ground clearance to not die. P, not so much. But I didn't have enough supplies to stay down there long enough after already making it to the entrance to go back, so he jumped on a different bary and came back. As is typical for P, he did not think ahead at all and didn't bother to bring any armor, never mind fur, which we have plenty of. So yeah, he died again to the cold. Now we have 2 barys stuck at the bottom of the dead island cave, he lost his gear again, and even with a torch I can't get all the way in without a high chance of death myself. Instead of thinking logically, P did exactly what I expected him to do and asked one of our admins who happened to be on for help. Yep. So she went and got them for us. Somehow his microraptor survived again too. Not the best showing for us, but I'm not going to berate a tribemate in public for being a carebear. It's easy to panic when you're in a bad situation, and I know how he felt when I nearly lost my bred saber last week to a server problem. Once they were out and he came back (on his pela this time), we made the long swim home. I had enough levels on the new bary to be comfortable, so I asked him if he wanted to do a swamp cave run. He said sure, but then admitted he lost all his swamp cave gear when he died. Sigh. And naturally he wasted all his engram points on whatever P does, so he couldn't replace it himself. Luckily we have BPs and armor stocked in the armory. But seriously, who brings all their gear with them when they don't need it? He wasn't wearing his caving gear, he was wearing his flak. I don't understand. But whatever. We got that sorted and did our swamp run. No good drops but the new barys did very well. I honestly don't like the bary that much, and I'm not really sure why. But Belle, the tribe bary I'm using, does well enough for herself. My goal is to get her leveled for solo swamp cave runs. Tribe runs are all well and good, but one run a day is not going to produce the results we need. That's today's plan actually, swamp cave until I get something good or get sick of it. But as far as the rest of yesterday went, by then it was late and I was tired, so I logged for the night and left P to do whatever he does when no one's around. Probably waste all our tranqs without replacing them as per usual. He's a good guy, he just never follows through with the tribe mentality, which can make for some frustrating experiences with him. As you've read in these posts, he also never anticipates and tends to be 70% yolo, which is a very bad combination in this game.

@Psych0P3nguin Thursday wasn't really exciting enough to report about, sadly. But last night has some stories. Friday being the end of the week, I of course snuck out of work early in the hopes of getting some extra Ark time in. We have a lot of goals, our little tribe, and many things to do. I had heard M was scouting for locations on our planned sea pen expansion; we have one small pen, but we do need a much larger one for future tames. So as soon as I was in I headed down to the docks and stumbled across a freshly assembled pen full of...wild dodos. M wasn't as lazy as I was the other day, it seems. I hopped right in with Tigger to collect eggs for a bit while I chatted with M and other members of the community in global. Our server is fairly low population right now, but everyone is friendly with each other for the most part. We used to be a very busy unofficial until the YTer who owns the server stopped actively advertising it. Oh well, it is what it is, as long as he keeps the promise he made to keep the server up for the life of the game, which after 2 years so far he has. I got just enough eggs to make bunny ears for myself while waiting for P to log on. As soon as he was in we geared up and headed to the swamp cave for our daily disappointment. I wasn't wrong. We got three more useless BPs and a journeyman trike saddle. Thanks game. Two more artifacts for the pile at least. The cave runs are faster with every day, although today we stayed extra to try to farm for drops a little. Cave wasn't feeling generous. Ok then. Everyone scattered upon exiting the cave, as has been the trend. I made my way back home. P went scouting for animals, and M went on the hunt for new argents for his breeding project. He was dismayed but not daunted by the nerf, and his latest bird showed very promising results, so he wanted more of them. I know the feeling. Recalculated, my ankys should reach a maximum level of 292, and my goal was to hit base 300...I might have to now, knowing I'm so close to it. But not today. I hopped on Korotangi, one of my spinos, and headed out. On the way through port I was amused to note a wild spino had spawned, swam across the river and discovered M's dodo pen. Why catch fish when you have a free dodo dispenser. I let him have his free meal at our expense. Unfortunately the server has been a bit laggy lately, and while making my way down the coast we lagged and Koro fell in a spino-sized hole between three rocks and promptly got stuck. This is one of a very small number of places where a spino can actually get stuck, the gaps are too small and the rocks are angled just right that you can't climb out. Fortunately M hadn't left on his hunt left and brought the taming quetz over with some building materials to get her out. We left our little ramp there in case it happens again. I've only fallen in that hole once before, and always avoided it, but server lag, man. If anyone complains, I will invite them to fall in that hole without the ramp there and see what happens. Anyway, we all got back to business. I had decided that because of the ongoing dangerous and high risks to our tames, I was going to tame the next basilosaurus I found regardless of level. No one wants to risk their spinos, and the rest of our tribe aquatics are either too slow, too low in level, or used for something else, like our cave barys. So I took Koro, and we swam, and swam, and swam some more. We headed east out to South Haven, more commonly known as herb island. Spent some time there but the high number of local jellyfish forced us to move on to less common whale spawning grounds. We went north, up to dead island, where there were even more jellyfish. Still no whales. So I reluctantly set my sights on cold water and we went west, passing under ice and doing our best to stay warm. In my infinite wisdom I left my Scuba gear on my saber, who is now named Fiona. Ark is 90% preparation, 10% yolo. Truth. We passed through the snow, finding nothing. Despairing, I decided to just head home when...what's that off the west coast, right by the western approach where I used to have my solo base. A cloud of mantas and...finally, a basilosaurus. Don't care about level, just need one. Cleared out the mantas, checked the whale. Level 20. Well, not a good whale, but a whale. I learned two things about taming basils. You really need a Scuba tank, and spinos are awkward taming partners because you have to have them on follow or they won't stay submerged. Koro did her best to stay out of the way, but there's only so much a house-sized animal can do, you know? Seriously, spinos are literally the size of my personal house at the city. I did put out a call for assistance by my tribemates, but I was impatient and paranoid so I started the tame with the best food I had available, some raw meat Koro hadn't eaten when she had a belly full of fish. A little tense, not sure what to expect, but we successfully tamed our tribe's very first, if not particularly impressive whale. Getting her home was surprisingly easy, as she kept up with Koro easily. Spinos can't sprint in water, but they hardly need to with their base swim speed, even with the nerf. Koro's at 120% speed I think, and she's outswam eels before, which is really all that matters these days. Anyway. Got home, got the whale in the pen, sort of. This is why we need a new sea pen. Ran up to the workshop, made a saddle and right back down to the harbor to spend some time with our new friend. The whale really is the king of the sea right now. First thing I did was clear out all the problem jellyfish in the area. Partly utility, partly revenge. The first and so far only spino I lost in combat was poor Amazon to a group of them, stunlocked and no arrows as I didn't know how dangerous they were at the time. She died within city of the harbor. Sad days. But the whale will ensure that never happens again. We went on a long swim for levels, jellyfish and general spawn clearing, and for fun really. I don't spend much time in the ocean if I can avoid it, but I felt pretty safe again. Tore apart a group of eels too, they were right on the surface. The whale's stats are, as you might imagine, not that great, but we worked with what we had. She tamed out to I think level 29. I got her HP up to 10k and during our explorations, we ran across some plesis. Level 38 whale vs level 95 plesi, took a couple of dives (still no Scuba) but we took it down. Nice. Upon clearing out the herb island jellies, popped a new whale almost immediately. Felt bad killing it but we need better whales, and the oil is handy. In the meantime M found an argent and did a P by dying to the bird twice during taming. First time it pushed him off the quetz somehow and he fell to his death. Second time he accidentally fell in the taming box and got stuck while the bird ripped him apart. Good times. M and P soon logged since it was getting late by now. I was on my way back when I decided to investigate the area around port a bit, supposedly a very common area for whales. Lo and behold, a level 95 swimming very close by. Amazing what we missed by simply not being bold enough to go down that far with our spinos. I decided to attempt to tame it with the prime from the plesis. Sadly it ate one prime then the rest spoiled before it got hungry again. I attempted to continue the tame with raw fish, which was frustrating, risking, and took forever even on increased timers. We were 75% done when the whale bugged and we lost the tame. Sigh. I didn't feel like watching our new friend die to the passive tame bug so we just swam home. Still a very good night, even if I didn't have any surprises for our tribemates. One whale to help us find more whales, that's a really huge victory even if it's essentially a starter aquatic at this point. It was very late so I logged off. Today will be another day of babies, and who knows what else later.

Well, today didn't quite go as planned. M wasn't able to play tonight, and P was late coming home from work so I ended up with some time on the server alone. I bred my ankys and also a pair of spinos, slowly building up that stock for weekend hatching. I still need to figure out what to do with my brontos, and my allos are just a mess, I need to really spend some time documenting and re-pairing them up. The downside to working on projects for a long time and getting lazy about keeping records. Once I did that I decided to work on a high priority tribe goal and took my shark out for a swim. He is cleverly named Quint, and is basically a trash tame, a shark I tamed a very long time ago before we really had any aquatics. No one would miss him if he died so I was fine with potentially sacrificing him. We took a swim out to South Haven in search of the elusive whales, this time deep enough to annoy a couple of plesis and nope the heck away from some eels. Saw some dunks and angler fish, and a leed, but not a single whale. Hm. On the way back into the pen an icthy actually followed us. Low level, completely useless, but I tamed it anyway in case we need something super disposable in the future, potentially for the recovery of a more important tame. Named him Flipper. Wasn't sure when P would be around and had some time to kill, so I gathered up a bunch of wild dodos with Val and dumped them all on our lighthouse deck. Then I went afk and did some chores while they did their thing and pooped out some bunny eggs. Didn't get enough, was hoping to prank M with one of the costume items. Ah well, there's always tomorrow. P finally got on, very late, and said he was still up for a swamp cave run. We both did a kind of crap job stocking our mounts with meats and headed off. He was ahead of me, I was so busy looking up I got super turned around and felt like a noob. Finally made it and in we went, all business tonight. We skipped the blue crate and even the artifact, just straight in, yellow crate, journeyman raptor saddle, red crate, electrical bp, and back out again. Meh. Maybe we can sell/trade the saddle. P found a unicorn while he was out doing whatever it is he does. Low level female, not interested. Called it in chat but no one else was available/interested, oddly enough. As far as I know we're the only tribe who has any so far. Well, whatever. The next unicorn I tame will be a decent level male to go with my 140 female so I can breed some battlecorns. Gave P the pretty iguanadon I tamed last week, I like her but I'm never going to do anything with her, and I'd rather she have an owner who might occasionally ride her around at least. Then he logged and M also logged off of Steam, leaving me alone. Honestly sometimes this is my favorite time of night, when it's me on my own in the city. Not because I don't like my tribemates, but because it gives me some time to do some of the smaller, quieter tasks. I rearranged our armory a little to make room for artifacts and the other boss summon mats, then went around collecting up whatever I could find to move into the repurposed boxes. Then I spent some time in the workshop cleaning, putting things away in the boxes, and moving things to and from the warehouse just to keep things neat and fully stocked. I didn't do all of it, but a little at a time really makes a huge difference, especially with crafting stations. There are always BPs, leftover mats and random gear in them so I try to go through and pick that all up once in awhile. Pretty much out of time at that point, so I logged for the night and came here.

I'm afraid my story today won't be all that compelling. I got stuck in traffic and ended up getting home much later than usual, which also means less time to play. I only have a max of about 3 hours on a good night, assuming I do nothing else but Ark. Anyway. Despite the delay we did go for our evening swamp cave run once everyone was assembled. P yolo'd it through the Redwoods and not gonna lie, I just followed him. If there was a thyla around it would have jumped on him first, so I could kill it while it killed him, lol. I'm not above sacrificing my tribemates when the situation calls for it. In fairness I do remind people to look up, not my fault when they don't. Our cave run did go significantly faster than yesterday. A combination of confidence, experience, and lack of accidental dismounts contributed heavily in our favor. Drops were underwhelming, no surprise ascendant gear today. One mastercraft Trike saddle, one journeyman Trike saddle, one Auto Turret BP and a journeyman flak helmet were our spoils, not including two more artifacts. Both of which actually made it home this time, no pegos around to snipe them. Having completed that and made it safely back within the city walls, I moved on to my next goal of the evening: whalespotting. Took a spino instead of my quetz. It's a very strange feeling to me to be unsettled while in the water. For a long time the spino was the unchallenged king of the seas, but with jellyfish and eels lurking I just don't feel safe anymore. The first spino I ever lost in combat died to a pack of jellyfish because I didn't expect to be completely stunlocked and couldn't react fast enough to save her. So I am wary and keep close to the surface and the shore, in case we need to retreat. I found not a single whale. Plenty of mantas, sharks and icthys, and I swear I saw an eel that somehow didn't aggro us, but nothing of interest in terms of levels or species. Went all the way out to herb island and back, too. They're either deeper than I'm willing to go with my spino right now, or not in this part of the map right now. Meanwhile, P started taming a couple of icthys for disposable aquatics so we at least have something. As will surprise no one in my tribe, he died to jellyfish a short time later. Yeah, I don't know either. He doesn't die every time we're on at the same time, but I'd bet real money he has more deaths than the rest of us combined. I fished his microraptor out of our sea pen on my way back in for the night. How that thing is still alive is a mystery of the Ark. Some days are just average and part of the routine.

Lol it's Ark, everyone does no matter how many hours you have. I just hit 3700 in this game and while I don't (often) die to my own stupidity like my tribemate, it still only takes a second of inattention or distraction. I've at least gotten to the point where I don't lose stuff or animals all that often anymore, which is why I was anger-panicking at the idea of losing my fresh bred saber to the server taking a dump. Speaking of, last night was a short but productive day. My time zone challenged tribemate M was on so I hopped on as soon as I got home from work and asked if he wanted to do a cave run. He was excited to have the chance, and my other tribemate P also logged in shortly after I did. So we had mate boosted cats, one bred one wild tame, and one wild tamed bary for caving. What I don't understand is how I've been in that cave more than anyone else but my cat is still the lowest level animal in the group lol. Then again she was only a 202. Still don't have a name for her, want it to be swamp related but not silly. Anyway, after making sure everyone had all the gear they needed and herding everyone to the cave, while looking up for thylas, man I can't find a single one when I'm hunting for them but go caving and they're on every other tree...anyway. M was freaked out a little bit by the first giant dragonfly swarm, which is understandable. I may have internally panicked a little bit the first time I encountered them (solo, no less) myself. We were making good progress, about halfway in when...tribemate P accidentally dismounts his bary midfight. You can guess what happened. I picked up his microraptor, shoved his gear in the bary and we walked it back out of the cave again. P did the naked run of shame through the swamp to get back, impressive in that he survived and made good time. Back in again. Blue drop, stone pick. Woo. Yellow and red crates also filled with disappointment, though I can't remember what they were now. Then we hit up the artifact, while I was grabbing it the red crate respawned. M got it and told me to look in my saber when I got back. Ok, I'm both apprehensive and excited now. He's either trolling me with a stupid drop or it's something ridiculously amazing. Get back to my saber, jump on, and check my inventory. Spino saddle ok not bad...wait it's light blue, that's not primitive. Ascendant spino saddle. Yes! We are a spino tribe so this is a huge, huge find for us. Individually no one really does things like run caves so we don't often hold even mastercraft, never mind ascendant gear. Hence why I'm organizing events for the tribe like this. Pressure's on now though, the mission is to not die while carrying this saddle. Oh I remember now, one of those other crates was a mastercraft regular bow. Anyway. The artifact did not respawn for some reason so we ended up leaving with just two and the saddle. Still a good run. Once we got out P effed off to go do whatever P does, it's just one of his things. That left M and I to safely navigate our way home through thyla infested trees. Yeah. I was so busy looking up trying to avoid death by tree cat, I didn't see a certain small, aggravating animal lurking nearby. Then some of my arrows disappeared, I was robbed! And then my artifact was stolen too, it was the only other thing on me because you can't put them in animal inventory anymore. Seriously? That's incredibly frustrating. At least we weren't actively hunting the artifacts right now but still, that's just mean. The saddle was in my cat's inventory fortunately, because I'm not an idiot and the cat is clearly much more likely to survive than I am. As soon as we were safely inside the gates I sure did make sure I got that saddle straight into what is currently our only vault. Not putting that on any of our current spinos, going to wait until we've got at least a decent bred one. If I'm being honest with myself, that saddle has Smaug's name on it for once I rebreed him back into existence. By the obs I miss that spino, he was my alpha slaying world destroyer, the only thing he couldn't take was a giga. Then the major stat nerf hit..lost him to a server wipe actually. By that point I had a headache, probably from a long day at work honestly, so I called it early for the night after a short failed scouting run for some basils. I am still quite pleased with how things turned out, even if we only ended up with 1 artifact.

Lightning struck twice today... So after the shenanigans of last night the server ended up being down until this morning. I logged on and after a night's sleep and no longer fresh panic I was able to do a more systematic search and find my saber, she was chewing on a sarco and not seeming the least bit concerned. Took the long way home because I was tired of the swamp, then did prep for a test run of the swamp cave. Ironic I know but in fairness it's in the redwoods. Headed out, turned to fight a snake, walked under the first tree at the edge of the woods and bam! death by thlacoleo. Great start huh. Luckily it was a low level one, saber shredded it while I did the naked flight of shame back to get my stuff and the cat and try again. Made it to the cave and cautiously proceeded. It was both terrifying and not as bad as I thought. Those dragonflies are brutal but we advanced slowly and stopped often. Made it to the first loot crates but ran out of raw meat and was unable to go further. But the cat got a lot of levels and I got an idea of what to expect. Lazy Sunday so after we got home (checking every tree for thylas this time) I took Val out for some flying time. Collected up some drops while scouting for sheep and/or a good breeding saber, came home empty. Had an early Easter dinner with family. Went back out and heading along the volcano river, I see a flash of white. It's an equus. Do I dare to hope? Break out the spyglass. Level 140 female unicorn. Holy horned horses! I grabbed that thing so fast and carried her home as fast as Val's wings could carry us. Whipped up the kibble, threw on the ghillie, now I have a level 209 unicorn to go with my level 14. Sadly both female and no one else on server has any, male or otherwise. So I head out again, catch another flash of white. Are you kidding me? Spyglass again. A level 10 male unicorn, just up the river from where the female had been. I can't believe my luck. You better believe I grabbed that unicorn and again sprinted home. He got carrots, not kibble. But seriously what are the odds, two unicorns within 10 minutes of each other, and one an actual good level at that. Amazing. I can now offer bred unicorns to my server, and try to breed up some nice ones with the 140 too. I almost felt like I should just log off right then and there because when Ark luck turns, it turns tragedy. But my tribemate finally came on and we did a successful, if underwhelming swamp cave run. But hey two unicorns is a massive success by any metric. I still can't get over how incredible that was. I now have 3 unicorns (and one regular equus) in my suddenly very cramped stable that was originally meant to house one raptor.

Well, I was having a great day... Started bright and early with big plans this morning. Starting with mammals, I bred, hatched and raised 7 babies today. Would have been 8, but sadly my baby sheep died to the food bug. But I did successfully raise and imprint a saber for caving. Not great stats, mostly low rolls from the parents, but it'll do well enough for now. I also managed to pop a male spino with our high HP roll, which is perfect. I can continue breeding him back to his mom (I know...) until I have a spino at the max level our tribe can currently produce. Then I can take a shot at a spino color morph. I already have one in mind, want to recreate my spino from the last iteration of our server. He was even the dossier spino, absolutely perfect. So sad I don't have him anymore, so I'm resurrecting him via breeding to come back even stronger than before. Next I popped a perfect "Indominous Allo" for my color morph project. An all light grey, no color mutation, 100% bred allo line project I've been working on for months. The hardest part is getting the colors and keeping them as I work my good stats in. They look so much like a mini indominous rex, it's fantastic. Love em. Then two good ankys, one a base 271, the other a 240 with the two missing stats the 271 needs to push those levels as high as I can currently get. Very happy about that. My original goal was to hatch a base 300 anky but it's still mainly a side project and I don't know if I feel like taming more of them. And then, yes there's more, two good brontos for my red bronto color morph project. One with colors, one with stats. They're still growing of course, but I am super excited. I also got my first stat mutation! My stat bronto got 2 levels in stamina, awesome. Really helps with the big guys. My tribemate was also on to breed but his day was not so good. First he killed a bary baby that I had told him not to kill because we needed them to replace the 4 aquatics he lost last week. Then his color mutated bary died because he wasn't paying attention to it and it bugged. He did find a new 145 bary, but it didn't have any usable stats so it's a tribe tame now. By the time I was done dealing with the babies and getting the saber imprinted, they had almost all done that annoying thing where they get stuck in the foundations. When my newly grown adult anky got stuck, I finally snapped and started doing what I should have done months ago and ripped the hatchery apart. I took out almost all of the non support foundations and most of the ceiling. Added ramps and railings, moved the troughs, added a door, filled in the gaps with walls as necessary. It's so much more open now, still has the incubating "hut", and no more tearing up and replacing the floor with every other baby anyway. Still needs work but I am much, much happier with it. Then it was time to go level the saber. During my travels I found a gorgeous 125 iguanadon, which I couldn't resist taming. I rarely impulse tame anymore and I have no idea what I'll do with her. I was going to give her to my tribemate since he likes iguanadons and pretty animals, but he's been annoying me too much this week. And then we come to the not so fun part. The server started having problems with rubber banding and whatnot. One of the admins sent a message to let us know to get to safety before he pulled it to fix the problem and get the Easter update done. So I was rushing home, DCing several times, and crossing through the swamp to get back to the city. I got stuck along a ridge I couldn't climb out of with the saber. Cue the inevitable kapro assault. I piked it and the snake that was also attacking me and promptly got rubber banded to the bodies. While I was whistling for my saber and trying to clear the corpses out of the way, a second kapro killed me. I respawned and promptly DC'd. Great. Hopped on my spino, found a rock to craft a corpse finder and set off. Unfortunately between lag, rubber banding and tripping over every animal in the swamp, I was not able to find my corpse before the loot bag despawned, which also means I have no idea where my cat is. I was knocking down trees, killing everything in my path and trying to get one of my tribemates to help me look for this cat. Then the server went down to hopefully get fixed. I now sit in limbo, frustrated after having such a lovely day and wishing I never got out of bed this morning. Amazing how quickly the tables turn in this game. My stuff can be replaced, even if I did lose my favorite crossbow and my best pike. But the cat I spent all day raising and leveling and just thinking about naming her? Not so easy to replace. I really don't want to go in the swamp cave with some trash bary my tribemate didn't want, but if I lose that cat I definitely don't want to risk my breeding stock when it took 3 days just to find a decent female. Sigh. Assuming the server comes back up tonight I'll probably recover my saber if possible and call it a night. I was going to do some early swamp cave runs with my tribemate who often can't join us due to time zone differences, but not at this rate.

Short but productive day again. Worked on a little project that's been on the backburner, but made sense to do with a major breeding day scheduled for this Saturday. Made a new fridge and put it in the hatchery, then made 10 of every imprinting kibble and stocked the new fridge with it. No more scrambling for the kibble house when babies want treats. Then I decided to go test out the spino swim speed nerf for myself. Honestly...I didn't really notice a difference. But then I do give my spinos movement speed since we spend as much time running up and down mountains as we do in the oceans. Speaking of ocean, farmed a couple of basils and discovered how much easier it is than hauling an anky all the way to the north from weathertop. So two trips and one grumpy spino later I added 1200 oil to our stores, not bad at all. Also chewed through a ton of mantas and megs, but did not manage to pop any good level ones to replace our 4 lost aquatics from last weekend. No matter. Tribemate has multiple bary eggs ready to pop and any breedjects he gets will be made into tribe tames for general purpose seafaring/caving adventures. I finished out my night by breeding my newest spino Jasmine with a male from my Corazon's line. The only male we have with our best spino HP, a very respectable 5.3k. Jasmine has all of our high rolls otherwise--not surprising given that she was a 135 and our next highest was a 120. Fingers crossed for, if not a perfect baby, then at least a male with HP that I can breed back to her until we get it right.

Short but productive session today. Ran lower south cave to add to our artifact collection. Tamed a new ewe for our small but growing sheep herd. Found another one but was sadly unable to save it from the jaws of a direwolf. Scouted for another female saber but didn't find one; did see a 145 male, but we have 2 males without mates currently so I left him.

Wasn't the most exciting day but I got some stuff done tonight. Gathered up all the spoiled meat from all the troughs in the city and discovered we have way more than I expected. I have one tribemate who really enjoys filling entire troughs full of meat every couple days and calling that "helping" when they really don't need that much, and then of course he never makes narcs or anything with the spoiled. So I took one of the brontos out for a narc run, barely put a dent in anything. While I was there I made a few stacks of stimulants for the upcoming cave runs since I know I'll be prepared but tribemate won't be. He was actually on, went off looking for a new bary again and later, sheep or another female cat. Found a ram, not the most useful but we can always sacrifice him for mutton later. The sheep, not my tribemate. He's made of something but it's not mutton, alas. Then I spent some time doing other housekeeping things. Now that things stay sorted, I've been really trying to clean up and organize. One tribemate is almost as neat as I am. The other one is often forced off the game before he can clean up his mess. The other one just makes a mess everywhere he goes. Sigh. So that usually falls on me to keep everything tidy. I hate, hate hate random boxes of crap. I only have about 3 hours max to play during the week so I rounded out my night with a few breedings. Not hatching anything until the weekend but I would really like to get back to progress on some of these. Bred 2 pairs of ankys and 1 pair of brontos. The ankys are my best bred for levels so far, at a respectable 260+, slowly working all of my high rolls in. I had hoped to bred a base 300 animal but I'm not sure I have the patience to hunt down new tames for what is essentially a side project, and with this line already having high melee and the new metal weight reduction, I think they'll do great as is. The bronto pairing is working colors into stats, so I don't expect much out of it honestly. I have a gorgeous bronto color morph that I bred, now I need to get some stats into the line to make a really fantastic battle bronto. That's about all I managed to get done, but I did check off everything on my list that I wanted to do. Honestly tomorrow I might just try running the cave myself as is, I have all the gear for it...I'm just trying to organize some tribe events since it seems like no one really wants to do things alone, but won't suggest things like this either lol. One problem with being really established on PVE, people start getting soft and fear death. You'd think it would be the opposite since it doesn't take us a lot of effort to replace most things, but then we are severely lacking in certain types of gear. One reason for the cave runs.

Well, I had a bunch of plans related to preparing for some cave runs this weekend, but I didn't expect 2 of my 3 tribemates to hop on at the same time I did tonight lol. First thing I did was check on my saber. It's not a fresh tame or anything, quite the opposite in fact; it's a perfect tame that's been sitting around doing nothing for months, never even named him. But with caving on the docket, none of us really have dedicated cave mounts. I was able to use all of the points newly named Gray had stockpiled to reach the bare minimum, 5k HP, with just enough points to sneak a few into melee. Then, since my tribemate took out his saber too, and my other tribemate got out his surviving baryonyx, we decided to go do a quick volc cave run just because. Hadn't even been in any of the caves since before the resdesign. It was fun, we've all played together for a long time but even as a tribe (we were all solo before) we don't really do a lot together. In fairness a lot of it has to do with availability, rarely is everyone around at the same time for varying reasons. So anyway we ran volc cave, grabbed the artifact and went home. Wish we could all use voice chat, but alas not an option yet. But with that I decided since my plans were already waylaid I would use the rest of my evening to hunt for a female saber as we only have males for some reason. Tribemate 1 assisted while tribemate 2 went off to look for a new bary. Was almost out of time when I found a 140 female, grabbed her and nearly died fleeing the snow biome with no fur on lol. Oops. The saber had good rolls and for once an animal with a low food stat, but sadly even that boost wasn't enough to top my perfect tamed male. But at least now I can breed them and get an imprinted baby. We have some ok saddles to use as well. So breeding will absolutely happen on the weekend, but by then it was late so I called it for the night.

Had another great Ark day, you know that almost never happens twice in a row. I wasn't even planning on playing today but I was so excited about my new furry death machine I decided to resume my hunt for a mate. Hopped back on Val and off we went on a much more cautious thyla hunt. Only about an hour into it, what did I spy tearing things up by the river but a gorgeous 135 female. Silver body, red back. You better believe I scooped her right up. Sadly, she wasted a lot of points, but still turned out well enough for my purposes. Named her Pandora, just because. It was still early enough so I went home, bred Pandora with Shere Khan and farmed up lots of meats while I waited. Out popped a baby...sadly he inherited his father's tiger colors and missed a high roll on stamina that I really wanted. But you know what, that's ok, because these aren't perfect tames and I mainly wanted a baby to imprint. Between imprints I did some cleanup around the city, primarily culling a lot of our farm and retired breeding project animals. Ended up removing over a dozen animals. I wish my third tribemate could play, she has a lot of outdated tames from before the 150 level cap that need to be removed, but I won't touch someone else's projects. So we've got around 30 animals taking up space and resources for literally no reason. But whatever, not really an issue at the moment. I also spent some time moving my own tames around, not really supposed to keep large animals on the upper tier but I've been lax about moving my spinos. Everything is where it should be now. My tribemates all have barns packed full of animals. I've got a tiny stable just big enough for my horse and the unicorn, My main thyla sits outside, and all my other animals are just a short walk away down on the lower tier. Easy enough. It helps that I don't really tame small animals that much though. When you're used to spending a lot of time on a spino and potentially near, in and underwater, you tend not to take things that can drown with you lol. Won't be spending much time in the water anymore sadly, silly devs nerfs are for OP animals, not super niche apex predators almost no one uses. Once my new baby Tigger grew up I put a saddle on him and off we went to go get some levels, and oh boy did we level. He was only 196, a full 6 levels below either parent, but the imprint bonuses sure made up for it. Got plenty of levels, absolutely a brutal animal. Tried to take him in the volcano cave, got sad when we got stuck lol. I guess we still need sabers after all...meh. Took a break for a few hours, then was able to show my time zone challenged tribemate (he's European and never sleeps lol) how awesome death cats are. Never seen a spino look clumsy before lol, but Tigger was bouncing all around them like it was nothing, even on the mountain. Especially on the mountain. Shredded a few rexes, showed him the brutal pounce attack, and called it a night.

Had a great day today in Ark, which was rather shocking given the way things usually go for me lol. Started out the day breeding sheep, I have a tribemate who wants to tame a basil and we decided to do it with mutton. We didn't have any sheep 3 days ago, now we have 4. 2 we tamed, 2 bred. The one I bred this morning was my first Ark color morph so pretty excited about that even if it is just a sheep lol. It's nothing wild, just a light yellow/green depending on the light. Looks nice with the blue eyes. And since said tribemate wasn't around to hunt for more sheep or whatever else, I decided to embark on a thylo hunt. I know, late to the party, I never gave them much thought until I started hearing about how great they are so I wanted to get one and see for myself. Circled the redwoods and then wait, what's that across the river by the public hatchery and taming pen, a wild spino. I check them all out of habit. 135 female. Omg yes, please. Everyone in my tribe has been hunting for good spinos for ages and just nothing. 120 was our highest previous tame, the level cap at the time, but none of us have seen even a 100+ since then. Easiest spino tame ever. Kited her into said taming pen (I was on my "useless" quetz Valencia), flew home, grabbed kibble, hopped on Nettle, my also "useless" tapejara and blasted back over with plenty of time. Got the tame. Very rare, a high level and attractive animal. Named her Jasmine, after the tea. For now she will hang out with my other spinos while I work out breeding plans. I don't generally take breeding animals out of the city unless they have offspring with good blood. Tribemate was on by then and went off to go ocean adventuring or something. He did not have a good day, unfortunately. Lost 4 aquatics and probably another set of gear. 2 icthys and a frog, all tribe tames and easily replaced, but he also lost his best baryonyx, a personal tame. What I don't get is why he doesn't at least breed his animals and keep the eggs in case of problems like this, but what do I know. If nothing else I like the speed boost from imprinting since I tend to prioritize other stats first. I resumed my thylo hunt. Was starting to get bored of not finding many when the game gave me a 135 male thylo, just chillin' waiting for me to snag him. I'm getting pretty good at shooting thylos out of trees. Carried him to the taming pen, tamed him up, carried him home and made a saddle. Named him Shere Khan because he is very tiger colored so why not. Then we went on a long run while I put him through his paces. Wow. Easily one of the best land mounts in the game, just like I've heard. It even feels like power. Fantastic. Got over 30 levels on him before we turned back. I decided I want another one immediately for breeding and went out to hunt with Val again because I'm lazy. I've tamed hundreds of animals over multiple servers, sometimes I like to do it the easy way. Unfortunately things did not go so well. As I was lining up a shot to get rid of a low level, Val drifted just a little too close before the brakes kicked in...yeah you can guess what happened. I had no chance. So I died, hopped on Shere Khan and sprinted all the way back as fast as I could. Shockingly Val wasn't even hurt, just hovering waiting for her stupid owner to come back and get her. Naturally she flew off while I attempted to get my loot bag back. It was stuck on a high rock and took an embarrassingly long time for me to position myself just right to hop off Khan without launching myself off the side of the rock. Had a few minutes of panic while I found that crazy quetz, then fought off some annoying microraptors, picked Khan up and flew home. The mark of a true Ark veteran is knowing when to call the game. Two good tames is more than enough for one day. I also bred a few of my animals, something I haven't done much of recently. Probably won't hatch them until next weekend though.

As a matter of fact, yes. I finished it over the weekend, not sure yet if I want to continue with the second book or not as I've heard many opinions that it goes downhill after the first book, and I wasn't especially enamored of it to begin with.