Cymas

Unofficial Cluster, The Island / Genesis 2 Did my morning round of saber breeding. Doesn't matter what I got though because the dino storage mod broke and anything in a terminal was lost. By sheer luck, I did not lose Glitch. She survived another impossible scenario due to me having her in my inventory rather than my terminal. I will say the owner of this cluster does an amazing job. He ended up pulling a server backup save and anyone who lost tames was able to go on it and retrieve almost everything. 2 day old backup so some things were lost. E grabbed our tribe's. Got almost everything back, however this set me back massively on the saber line. Not quite to square one, more like square 2. Lost all of the muts, all but 1 of my multi-stat sabers, and some of them are even back on cooldown. Anyway while all that was going on in the background, I took Glitch and some gear over to G2, which was a "safe" map during the recovery process. And we went on a taming spree. I got 5 maewings, a snow owl and an r-thyla, then went over to visit M's new G2 base. He built it pretty much while taming Glitch the other day so it's right over the spot where she, well, glitched. Fitting. A rare thyla popped and M decided he really wanted it so we headed back over to the Eden side to hunt it down. I managed to trap it, then he did the rest while I fooled around with Glitch. Stats aren't the best but since he recovered his thyla he can now breed them together which is arguably better anyway with the imprint. Then i grumpily returned to The Island to start breeding the sabers...again. Also Glitch is not in a cryopod or a soul ball now. She's asleep on the floor in the middle of the base. Not risking her again. If she's not with me she's going to be on solid ground somewhere. So while I was working on rebreeding the line, E returned with a new tribe member, K. M assures me he's a cool guy. I can't help feeling a little nervous about all these tribemates I don't know. I'm also a bit wary because literally everyone plays with Glitch when they see her, being the tribe's only Shadowmane right now. I'll be so upset if something happens to her while I'm offline. Still thinking about what to do to repay M for taming her.

Unofficial Cluster - The Island Did my morning round of saber breeding. Got a perfect stat cat...but mutated. Sigh. Would be my luck lol. Been getting a lot of muts lately, which means I'll probably get none when I finish with the stat build. So typical. Well, it turned out there was a bit of a miscommunication with M and he didn't realize I had abandoned the tame last night despite giving him multiple warnings so...well first he kept at it for like an hour after I left, but second he left behind all of the gear I had left for him to use including Eeyore. So on Genesis 2 this morning he went back to the scene of our defeat to pick up our stuff and... Guys. The shadowmane was still there. Somehow she hadn't despawned, wandered out of the trap during rendering and most shockingly, she survived the daily server reboot and dino wipe. What? I can only surmise because she was stuck on aggro on the trap or because I had attempted to feed her the game registered her as a non-wild entity somehow and didn't delete her. So my absolute saint of a tribemate M spent a very, very long time working out what went wrong and...he tamed her for me! I've been staring at her for like an hour and I still can't believe it lol. Given how amazingly well, glitchy, the whole shebang was I had no choice but to name her Glitch. And she is amazing. Here she is, enjoying a well deserved nap after killing M thrice during the taming lol: Can I just say Wildcard really outdid themselves with the animations on these and their abilities are totally off the wall amazing. I want all of them. So aside from messing around with her a little bit outside, I did my second round of saber breeding. Finally got a 3 stat male so this should go a lot faster now. I'm still so surprised that we actually recovered such an impossible scenario that I just don't know what to do now lol. I do know I really need to repay M somehow. I've been thinking about what would be an appropriate thank you gift. Especially since he's already been scouting for a mate for Glitch after spending literally hours on this. I can think of plenty of things, just not sure what would be "big" enough, you know? Yeah it's only one shadowmane, but the amount of effort and trouble he went through to get her for me was insane.

Unofficial Cluster - The Island Not a lot of Ark going on this week. I was ill on Monday night so no Ark. Tuesday morning I popped on to breed the sabers. Got home late after getting my second vaccine shot, did another round of saber breeding. Was feeling exceptionally tired for some reason so I turned in very early. Just bred the sabers again this morning. If I'm feeling ok by the time I get home I plan to do another round when I get home, then hop over to G2 with supplies to tame at least one Shadowmane. It's my present to myself for getting vaccinated lol. I was going to do it last night but too tired. Overall goal is to hopefully get a breeding line of them going at some point soon. The saber line overall is starting to make progress with all the regular breeding. I guess I'm the tribe breeder now? Which is ok but kind of annoying. This isn't even my saber line, it's M's. If I had known I was taking over this project I would have farmed a different creature. I really don't like sabers as cave mounts, I've always found them to be a bit too fragile. I like barys. I'll probably go over to Ragnarok when M has the base there in better shape and tame up some to breed for myself. Speaking of, according to Discord chat Crystal Isles might be the next map added to the cluster. I love CI, it's my absolute favorite map aesthetically speaking and I love the crystal wyverns. I was going to build up a base on G1 but I'd much rather have it on CI instead. Since it seems like everyone has been kind of "claiming" different maps. E built the original base on The Island, M is setting up on R, and newest tribemate S is on G2. A hasn't been around lately and D doesn't seem inclined to go to another map so they've been hanging out here. ETA: Well tonight was a pretty big fail. I bred the sabers and actually made a lot of progress, almost completely out of the first gen line. Then I dragged M along with me on a Shadowmane hunt. We found a great 150, perfect for a base bloodline, right next to a 145 with good potential. Decided to try taming them one at a time but in a bit of a freak accident M managed to get them both into our taming box at the same time. This completely broke the taming as neither would sleep and one kept randomly aggroing the box. So we did what we had to and sacrificed the 145 to get rid of it. The 150 calmed down but it still wouldn't sleep no matter what we did. Eventually I had to leave because if I don't go to sleep I won't be up for work in time. Sigh. Total fail.

Unofficial Cluster - The Island / Genesis 2 Wary but ready to play again I logged on and did some breeding first. The sabers haven't been doing well and today's results were no different. Not one successful stat transfer. I don't know how anyone bothers breeding on official, even with halved mating intervals this is frustrating. I usually have them off in single player. While the salvageable sabers were growing up (I keep the 1 stat females to keep breeding), I went out hunting for tames. Found a female megatherium, tamed her up, and brought her home to breed with my male. Didn't get the best stats but good enough ones for now. Named the baby boy Eeyore because he's dark grey and kinda broody looking. A rare allo popped up while I was doing a second round of breeding on the cats that had come off cooldown so I ran over and had a very frustrating redwoods tame, but I got it. Colors were great, stats meh. Typical. But I love allos and one of the op loot crates I got the other day was an asc allo saddle, over 100 armor. I totally need to breed up one for myself. Got home in time to claim a new baby saber to raise up. Then I grabbed supplies and hopped over to Genesis 2. What was I hunting today? R-Thylas. M died the night before while hunting one of those rare dinos that sometimes spawns, it was a high level special color thyla. So he lost everything on him and didn't get the tame. I love the new variant and had thought to gift him one, he doesn't really keep up on any Ark stuff so he would have no idea to expect it. Sadly, I did not find any good thylas. The only high level one I came across was stomped to death by mammoths before I could intervene. I did however find a very nice snow owl. It took a bit of doing but eventually it flew into my trap on its own lol, got it down and tamed. The stats didn't turn out the way I'd hoped but you know what, it's fine. I had just started to look for a mate for it when M needed help again, he was trying to tame another special thyla on The Island this time, he had come over to gear up, breed a new bird and maybe see if the maewings were ready to breed (they weren't). E who is his cousin was being a selfish so-and-so and refusing to help so M almost rage quit, but I talked him into staying and letting me help. Not gonna lie...I'm not surprised he died and lost another bird. He built his trap way too close to the edge of the swamp and got kapro'd and I guess he either didn't have a melee weapon or panicked and didn't use it so it killed him. I did find and recover the bird, then kinda took over the tame a little bit. But man I have to say I never have trouble with solo tames in this way but somehow it was really frustrating trying to do it with him. His bird eventually ended up dying in the utter chaos and my owl came close a couple times. We eventually got it down and while it was taming I spotted a 140 thyla on the ground nearby. Being a rare spawn on The Island, I suggested we tame that too and rearranged the taming pen to be a makeshift second pen in front of the first one. It didn't quite work the way I wanted, M couldn't drop it into the pen with his spare bird for some reason. The rare thyla tamed up and I put the pen back the way it was, M kinda freaked out and started being weird for a few minutes so I lured the thyla in myself and was wondering if he was going to tranq it or not when...he asked if it was tamed, opened the gate and ran into the pen with a wild thyla! Um wat? He realized his mistake when I started shooting it to keep it from turning on him and ran back out but man what even was that. We got it tamed, I told him to keep it even though technically it was my tame then went back to base. I offered to let M come with me taming snow owls after a quick lunch break. An hour later he still wasn't back so I logged out and went to single player to mess around with a new character on Genesis 2. He rage quit for a few hours because of E being an equus butt and I was a bit tired of dealing with it all. Stayed on single player for the rest of the day. I did do a little more building on my Crystal Isles character but mostly I was just on Genesis 2. Logged out early, honestly I was really disappointed. I had set this weekend aside for a major gaming session and it was just total fail. I also logged in early this morning in the hopes of doing a quick round of cat breeding before work to find the servers down. Again. I have major reservations about this cluster, it is clearly not very stable and the fact that it only has 5 maps, of which my tribe will only play on 3 of, is really offputting. I didn't pick the cluster though, E did. He always picks really bizarre ones with dumb mods and gets bored after a couple weeks, leaving M to run everything indefinitely. The last cluster, which I joined briefly, was worse, but at least it had proper uptime.

Unofficial Cluster - The Island / Genesis 2 / Ragnarok Very frustrating day. Whatever we accmplished today didn't matter at all. The server was down for half the day, then after it came back up it overheated and crashed, rolling back 3 hours and erasing everything we did. I had a breeding quality rhino tamed up that I lost. My tribemate had his character accidentally duped and ended up having to start his character over at level 1. I quit and spent most of the day building on single player, on Crystal Isles with a fresh character. I wasn't going to play on the server again but M needed a rescue so I popped on, headed over to Ragnarok and helped him recover his bird. His body, along with the maewing I gifted him, unfortunately despawned. I gave him Sugar before I went home and logged for the night.

Unofficial Cluser - The Island / Genesis 2 Having gotten home from work a bit early, if very tired, I decided to hop straight on to the cluster. Almost everyone was around, and we have a new tribemate A who appears to be a friend of D. I didn't waste any time; having explored enough in single player and knowing G2 had been added to the cluster, I went ahead and transferred over. First thing I did? Tame a maewing. Second thing I did? Run loot crates until my inventory was full. Got some pretty good stuff. Not gonna lie I stored some of the best that I'm likely to use in my personal vault. Put the rest in communal storage. We honestly have almost no good gear, no one seems to be running drops or anything at all. Headed back across again, tamed another maewing and grabbed more loot. I tried to get more maewings but they are so squirrely. Went back to The Island and bred the maewings. So bizarre. Every mating is guaranteed at least two babies because both parents lay eggs. Lol. I'm keeping one for myself--white body, named it Sugar. You know, like a sugar glider. I'll give the other one to M, named it Nutmeg for now. I'll give it to him along with the canoe I built because I know how excited he is for that. I made 2 actually, put one in group storage for everyone. I also made up a mining drill. I'm the only one in the tribe who has gone over to G2 yet, I took the opportunity to learn a bunch of the Engrams no one else has yet. I couldn't resist going back a third time with carrots for horses. Only found one good one and of course I messed up the tame. Sigh. I don't know why but I am just terrible at taming them. But it's still pretty neat. Since I was there I grabbed more loot crates. Got an apprentice mining drill that I almost lost to stupid pegos. Almost. I also bred the sabers we had collected for a line of cave cats on The Island. M hasn't been breeding them since he's over on Ragnarok making a base there. Didn't get any good stat transfers but at least another female to add to the group, we have 4 males and 1 female lol. Spent some time cleaning up for tomorrow. One thing that's always a huge pet peeve of mine is people not putting stuff where it belongs. Smithys especially are not dump stations. Ugh. And that was it for the night. So far my plan for tomorrow is, I want to go over to Rag to drop off M's presents. While I'm there I can run the desert crates with Sugar. Beyond that I don't really know. I do have plans regarding Genesis 1, I'm just not entirely sure I feel inclined to do that right now.

Single Player, Genesis 2 I wasn't originally planning to do this before the weekend but I got the download finished in a decent amount of time so I loaded up a fresh character and headed in. I just want to say the tek suit is crazy to start with. I spent a lot of time just exploring, checking out the scenery and grabbing loot crates, all from the comfort of my suit. Eventually I had to stop and start building a little bit because I needed somewhere to store my loot. It took awhile but I think I found my first base spot, I really like it so far. GPS coordinates in the top left corner of the screenshot for anyone interested. There's an equally lovely view perfectly framed on the other side too. There are tons of maewings over here and I've spotted a few sheep. I actually power punched one to death for its hide lol. The loot crates are absurd, btw. I've been getting tek building pieces, I actually got a tek sword that I can't equip on this character, and I even have a maewing saddle already. Pretty good stuff. Wonder how long before they nerf the drops, should grab as many as you can now. Lots of mats too which is nice, and H-LNA has the hexagon store again for even more accessible stuff. Anyway having picked my spot I started setting up. It's not pretty, just super basic stuff for now. But I've made my bed and my first set of metal tools, so that's pretty decent progress for about 2 hours when I spent half that time just flying around the map. Don't want to stay up too late and ruin myself for the busy day work is going to be tomorrow, so that was it for me.

Well, work was bad as expected, so I ended up getting home an hour late. That kind of threw a wrench into my Ark plans. But then Ark threw a wrench into my Ark plans anyway. First I went out to try to find a female megatherium to breed with my male. There was a 145 theri standing literally right outside our taming pen so I lured it in and discovered D had dropped a wolf in there that was running around. He came back over and we got them both down and tamed up. D also tamed a 145 roo that was also standing nearby, because why not. Got all that sorted, D logged for the night and I started my run to look for a mega. Got one rhino nearby kited into the pen and tamed up, then lost a really nice wild one to stupid pigs, so annoyed. It had great potential. Sigh. #Arklife, right? Overall I was about halfway through one loop and a rare giga spawned. I immediately went back to gear up while spamming E in Steam chat because I know he's been looking for another one. It was very late in his time zone but he was still up and jumped in game while I was busy scouting it out. Found the giga, a female, perfect for what he needed. Together we trapped it, got it down and tamed. Nice. He bred her immediately when we got back to base of course. We hung out for a bit chatting and doing some cleanup around the base, then he went to bed. By that point it was rather late, especially with my shortened time tonight. I did a small farming run, mass produced some sparkpowder and gunpowder, did a little more general cleanup, and that was it.

Well it's been a very busy few days. The short version is I'm now playing on an unofficial cluster with some friends for the first time in literal years. We all stopped playing together when the server we used to play on shut down. So it's my old tribemate M, his cousin E, his cousin's guild friend S, and another guild friend I've never met before, D. So we're now a tribe of 5, which is the biggest tribe I've ever been in. The cluster hasn't been up for very long, maybe a week or so. I'm not super happy about all of the mods and settings but whatever, this is just a mess around and hang out with friends cluster anyway. So I spawned in on Friday after work onto The Island. I hadn't been sure if we were going to tribe up or not so I started on my favorite area, the west coast, and claimed my old base location that no one ever wants anyway. Then spent Friday leveling up, gathering some tames, etc. 1-70 in a day, exp rates are up a bit but really, exp is so fast now compared to the original rates. I think it was actually better back then when you had so much time between levels you actually needed to build in thatch, then wood, then stone, instead of throwing down a few thatch foundations and powerleveling yourself into the metal age. Man I sound old now lol. I got my first set of utility tames and logged for the night. By Sunday afternoon I had the mats for an industrial forge, 3 argents, and a tribe invite from M. He knows where my base used to be so he stopped by to pick me up when he was available. Together we carried most of my stuff and my tames over to the base they had built, which is a very nice looking building but very poorly designed. But I digress. Knowing how the boys are, I talked to them for a bit to suss out what was going on and, well, it's a bit of a mess really. Like old times. E is the tribe leader and he built the castle we're staying in, but he's not very organized and out of everyone I'm the only one who has cleared multiple maps and done more than like 2 boss fights ever. So I guess it's kind of up to me to get things moving because they all do want to do bosses, but no one can stay on task long enough to get anything done. I am a former tribe leader, I know how it goes. There's a reason I play solo these days lol. I spent some time organizing their crap then powerleveled myself courtesy of their chem bench and many, many, many, MANY narcotics. The cluster has the DS mod, happy days, and E gave me my own terminal for my personal tames. Everyone has their own, plus we have multiple community terminals for farming dinos, spare birds, etc. It's a good setup. I chucked most of my tames into the community property bin, we'll need them when we go to other maps anyway. The only one I kept was the crappiest, lowest level argent. A bird I won't mind sacrificing if it comes to it. If you play this game long enough you learn that sometimes you need to sac a dino to get something good, the Ark law of equivalent exchange. Then we went on a taming spree. We know we need cave dinos and M had some sabers with poor stats (thanks awesome spyglass I'll never play without you again), so I went out scouted, brought my finds to the taming pen and we basically built a whole new line from scratch. I grabbed a direwolf with good melee while I was there since I noticed someone had a wolf. Sadly I did not find any good barys, which is my preferred cave mount on The Island since thylas only fit in one cave without podding. It was getting a bit late for them by then, they're all EU players so it was well after midnight. On my way home from scouting dinos I stumbled across a unicorn lol literally right near our base. I brought it home with me and tamed it, literally my first personal tame as a tribe member. Bad level but who cares, it's a unicorn. Named him Willow, if you get the reference I like you. If you don't, I probably like you anyway. Unless you leave the wood in beaver dams. Before he logged E explained a special mod or server setting or something about special dinos that spawn in at higher levels and event type colors as they had grabbed a special doed that had spawned while we were playing. Seems neat, I wish I knew how they were doing it, it's not the rare sightings mod. I would dearly love to have something like that on sp though. I'm pretty sure it's a mod there's an incoming pod animation and everything which now that I think about it is the dropping OSD/meteor animation. Anyway I was going to go on a meat run for E's new baby giga and then log myself when one of those special dinos dropped. An argent! I took my crappy one out with some supplies, it took awhile but we found him, complete with magic red glowy bits, and lured him into a quickly set pen. No change to the taming process, but he was a wild 177 with lovely peach and white feathers and a green spot on his head. Got him down, tamed him up, named him Lucky, did the meat run, then went to bed. Monday being a holiday meant an extra day of play and very busy with all of my friends online at once. Because of the time zone difference I started much earlier with the intent of getting...something...done. I looked through what we had and honestly there is so, so much that needs to happen. I spent almost all day scouting, killing stuff, running drops, and tamed up a few dinos. I wasn't planning on it but a 140 theri was literally just steps away from our taming pen, so basically a free tame. Almost cost me Lucky thanks to a surprise raptor/high level carno attack. The raptor pinned me, the carno ate my face, and our plant X were off because I didn't know the code to turn them back on and E was afk. Then as soon as I respawned my game crashed. So that was fun. Just barely cleaned up in time. Eventually ended up with a couple of rhinos and bred one out. Can I just say I suck at taming them lol can never get them into my trap. I just want to try them out a bit since there's so many of us and well our rex line sucks hard. It turns out I'm the only one who knows how to use the awesome spyglass or knows how to breed actual bloodlines not just level 150s and random colors. Sigh. Got a megatherium too, going to try to find another one to breed up a baby for the swamp cave and I'll take it to Broodmother with me. Our kibble supply is virtually nonexistent because this server has a store and E says to just buy kibble when you need it but...that's not nearly enough to keep up. So M started kibble going, we need more yutys we only have one right now. S was just starting on the server and getting situated, E took his older giga out to go pick him up. D is spending all his time underwater, I know he's been running at least one of the caves which is awesome, it's the one we need for the megapithicus which we decided will be our first boss. He's the only one with water tames right now anyway. I took a break for awhile, until M asked for help. He had gone to Ragnarok to look for a spino for his asc saddle. Don't get me wrong I love M but he gets tunnel vision so bad and I know he'll get grumpy if he doesn't get what he wants so I told him to go there and get one. He had been lucky, a special spino dropped while he was hunting, but now he couldn't get it down. So I took Lucky out to Rag, prayed to the Ark gods I don't lose him because we don't have any good birds to breed him with yet, and met up with M. It was frankly a mess. He was trying to tranq the spino in the canyon without any setup whatsoever, just a bird and a rifle. He'd already lost his original bird, broken his rifle, died in the snow and been rescued by someone on the map. Sigh. But I saw where he was and I know this spot very, very well. I had some gates with me from rhino taming so I set a few up, then took a few more from M and got ready. He tried to lure the spino to the pen but it ended up liking Lucky's butt better. So I lured it in and put the gate down at the same time, not an easy task I assure you. But here it was safe and couldn't run off. Of course M ran out of tranqs but I always have some on me so I finished KOing it. Then gave him some mutton because I spawned in the highlands and killed a sheep on my way over and he had nothing to feed it with. Got the spino up, praise the Arks. But I know him too well, I suggested we tame a 145 male that was conveniently nearby to breed with the female so he doesn't bring that one out and get her killed. He agreed with this plan. So we reset the trap, lured the spino over, and I KO'd this one myself then fed it. Got it up, M took it for breeding. And I suggested we build our base on this spot because we could make it a taming base, it's very easy to tame spinos here. He liked the idea so much he started building immediately. Meanwhile I went on a mission to the desert to kill Lymantria. Then I brought the precious silk back with some other mats and managed to set up a forge, mortar, smithy and the real reason I did all of that, made myself some desert cloth armor. Aw yeah. Headed back to The Island. My bred rhino, Stampede had grown up so I podded him out of the way. Rhinos are tanks man. I had bred a theri from a community dino and mine for a future dragon fight, it was still raising. Dyed my armor and that was about it for the night. Work is going to be an absolute disaster today, it always is after a holiday. We'll see how things go.

@Pocolate I haven't tried that dino mod but I can verify the .ini edit works amazingly well. Story maps are so much more enjoyable when you don't have to spend weeks looking for decent tames lol. So if you're not already aware, Syntac has PVP settings enabled on his servers. This has two functions: one, to make culling unwanted babies easier. Two, it's by far the easiest way to level up boss dinos, or anything else you need to get exp on for that matter. Because killing the unclaimed baby gives the same amount of exp as killing an adult. So you don't even need to leave your base to level your army if you run it this way. I cranked my kill exp up a bit to make this even faster because it just takes so long to level up an entire army, especially on single player when you don't have the advantage of passive offline exp from the cryopods. Honestly if you haven't tried the Dino Storage mod I highly recommend it for breeding. I just started using it myself and it is so much better, plus it fixes the issue with running PVP settings as you don't have to worry about cryo sickness. If you crank your settings high enough it becomes very viable to do separate mutation stacks and DS automates a lot of it too. I know some people are all but muh challenges but like...it's not really that challenging to breed dinos, it's just super tedious, and we don't all have 14+ hours a day to invest in a glorified Tamagotchi game. The reason why you want to do the mutations separately is so you can breed a significantly stronger dino faster. Once you hit the mutation cap, your chances of getting new mutations are halved. Because of this if you're aiming to do a lot of mutations, it's better to max out each stat you want in their own stack until they cap, then combine all those stats into one animal. It's less work, basically. It's not necessarily required but that was how I did it on my rexes and it really wasn't too bad as it meant I almost always had one new mutation raising up and could work on the other one in the meantime. With enough females and high enough breeding settings you can easily get at least one per game session if not more. You can also set the mating interval to 0.0, just note you have to set it every single play session or it defaults back to 1.0. That's how I'm managing to get a new gacha mutation every day. Speaking of gachas, while I was letting the new mutation finish raising up I checked my current crop of babies and wouldn't you know it, I finally got an element dust gacha. So my original plans for tonight ended up getting a bit derailed as I definitely wanted to raise her up right away. So basically today was another maintenance day. That's fine, I got a few random things done around the base. Did go out scouting with my snow owl, didn't find anything particularly interesting. Just as well, dimetrodons are overspawning again, forcing another wipe. Not sure what could be causing that tbh. None of the mods I use are particularly known for this type of issue. Maybe the .ini modifications, not sure. I don't like doing dino wipes but I'm not above taking advantage to check again but again nothing of note. That finished off my night pretty much.

I am sad today. I was afk letting the gachas breed and at some point a high level defense unit rolled up and killed Runt and my male yuty, who were both on passive. I was tabbed out so I didn't hear the music, I came back just in time to see the yuty die. That really sucks. Runt was one of my favorite tames. And the yuty happened to be my stat breeder, as my other ones died in the Overseer fight. Fantastic. Well, I know I don't need yutys on this map and I can get X ones on Genesis but still. So annoying because that was totally on me. 100% preventable. At least I got another crafting skill mutation out of it. I guess. Also started preparing for my next objective, because honestly the gachas aren't really a priority, just something easy to do when I'm afk. Crafted metal gates, bear traps, lots of tranq darts and many, many narcotics. Heartbreaker needs a mate if I'm going to get anything done on this map. Unfortunately my night was cut short by a thunderstorm in the area so that was about it. Off to read instead. Which tbh I probably would have been doing anyways while the gacha grows up.

@Pocolate The non-story maps spawn higher level dinos by default. However, you can actually edit your .ini to make the story maps behave similarly, they are weighted to spawn lower levels on purpose. Just follow the instructions here https://old.reddit.com/r/playark/comments/bbrrul/updated_level_equalizer/ if you want, then do a dino wipe. It makes such a huge QoL difference I refuse to play without it now. Also don't sweat breaking your own transfer "rules" I did the same thing on my run when I was still on The Island and got a bunch of Christmas deinos lol. I keep to the rules mostly to keep myself from constantly getting distracted and never progressing, otherwise I'd just be running around taming a million spinos in all 3 variants all day. Also just a quick tip if you're only planning to use the rexes for bosses you don't need stamina/weight on them, just hp and melee. They don't use stamina while unridden and you can disable harvesting so they don't overload themselves in the fight. Alternately if you're planning to do mutations it's more efficient to "stack" the mutations on each stat separately so as long as you have two identical animals with the stat you want to stack it doesn't matter if they're all combined or not since you'll breed them in together at the end anyway. Breeding is tedious enough as it is lol. Pretty calm day for me today. It was a real storm at work and I ended up getting home late. Was happy to jump in game to relax, funny how a survival game of all things can be relaxing but then when you have as many hours as I do... Anyway, I kept my gachas breeding and got a new crafting skill mutation. Got him raised up while continuing to replenish basic resources from nearby. Up to 144%, so will need 8 more muts to get to 160 for maximum loot quality. That's really not too bad. Unfortunately super unlucky with colors, they keep landing on an unused region. But it's a fair enough trade. The hunt for the elusive element dust gacha continues. Kinda wishing I had some other breeding project to keep myself amused with since I can't go out of render with the gacha babies out. I suppose I could do colors on something if I really wanted to.

Today was a day of not much progress, but a lot of testing. I decided I liked my new mod setup enough to use on my main file too, but that doesn't come without costs. The dangers of using stack mods is if you ever need to stop using it for whatever reason, say goodbye to all your mats. But honestly aside from the element, thanks to gachas and having imported all my utility tames nothing is going to be that difficult to replace. So I bit the bullet and after adjusting some settings, loaded up. I checked my other spare character on Crystal Isles first and sure enough, all my consumables and resources were gone. Gear and whatnot remained. Honestly there was nothing doing there so I deleted that file afterwards. Then I went ahead and loaded into Extinction and, well it could have been so much worse. For some bizarre reason, likely the old stack mod being something like 3 years out of date, my element shards were the only resource that did not poof into the ether. So my hard won element is gone, but I'll be able to run my tek generator for ages with my thousands of shards. Honestly that's fine. I was most concerned about losing power and having to go back to my gas generator which obviously had no gas in it. Not necessary. And I can just run another element vein to replace the element itself. Will probably wait until the weekend for that as I need to build up a bit again. I have literally no resources, no ammo, nothing. Just bare gear. Even lost my crops, so annoying. For now I've been testing some of the other stuff I added to my game and so far I am very happy with my results. I also have been breeding gachas as part of the testing. Got a new crafting skill mutation and am raising one other with silica pearls. If you like spinos, you want a pearl gacha. Those saddles get expensive fast. Also needed for yuty saddles for some bizarre reason and I've been too lazy to look for them when I can farm enforcers and defense units for electronics so...yeah. Handy stuff. Overall I'm pretty pleased with how things are going. Yeah it kinda sucks to have lost so much but I haven't been on this map long enough for it to really matter that much either, you know? I kept all my important stuff, the rest barely matters. Also especially pleased that the adjustments fixed my missing Engram issue.

Every once in awhile I do something completely random. Today I set up new mods, a new character, and started up on Valguero. Why? I don't know. I felt like it. I'm really not familiar with this map at all aside from the deino areas. So naturally that was where I spawned, and I actually ended up in The Maul, a fairly large, extremely safe grotto with only one land based passage. Got set up with the basics and ventured out of to find my first challenge, a pair of allos. It took a lot of arrows and multiple trips for repairs and crafting, but I actually killed both of them with a normal, primitive bow and some spears. Lol. Then I poked my head out a little bit more and found a deino nest very close by. I headed back to base, put all of my stuff away, and grabbed the egg. Did not die and successfully returned home. Hatched the egg and yes, my first tame was a deino. Only level 20 but hey. Raised him up then took a quick ride out and about. Got another egg. Level 20, different parent. Raised him up too. Just to have them really I know they're not that useful at that level. My third tame...a lymantria. This is one of the most bizarre starts I've ever had on any map, honestly. They seem to wander into the tunnel frequently and get stuck, makes an easy tame. The moth turned out to be a lot more useful than I expected as we were able to go out and pick up more deino eggs, including a 135. Yep. I picked up the bare minimum utility tames and started rotating. Grab some deino eggs, then farm resources and build while they hatched and raise up, then repeat. I also happened to get a 150 moth in my base, which I tamed. Then a 140 moth, which I also tamed. So I ended up with a preserving bin full of future kibble eggs, one bloodline worthy deino, a bunch of random deinos to cull, and one bred moth. Honestly, moths are super underrated. I've felt surprisingly safe fluttering around farting on deinos and stealing their eggs.

Finally making some progress. Found another 25k element vein and this time we managed to find all the hostiles and secure a victory. I quickly took advantage of the spoils to build my replicator, generator and trough. Finally in tek tier for real, only took 2 years lol. I mean, I had some stuff on The Island and all that but farming bosses for element is too tedious to be practical. I scouted around some more, got fed up and decided to just expand my current base rather than build a new one. So most of my time today in game was spent on that. It's not a base I'm particularly proud of but it's doing what I need it to do and that's good enough. Continued breeding gachas. Funnily enough I got a new mutation on crafting skill but wasn't paying attention, by the time I noticed the baby it was already juvenile. Still no dust gacha but it's less of a priority now. Actually I'm more interested in muts to max our crafting skill out. Meanwhile I also started setting up for the next phase of my plans. I brought all of my rexes up to the snow dome and threw them all out. PVP settings so they're sleeping it off. But hopefully my rex army should be enough to kill wild gigas so I can start the hunt for Heartbreaker's mate. I'll be doing that off and on between other things.

Busy couple days for me. Gacha breeding is still ongoing without decent results. Went back to the desert and tamed another velo. Decent stats, not really good enough for a line, but good enough to breed and imprint one just to have. I love velos and hope to do some color work with them eventually. Also want to mess around in The Island caves and see how it does there. Went into the snow on my now adult snow owl and found 2 high level manas. Honestly wasn't super hard to trap them. Male and female, stats are high but not quite bloodline worthy. But again, good enough to breed one. Lucked out, the first baby had all of the stats and imo the best combination of colors. Got him about half raised before ending the night. I know manas aren't super useful in PVE but I've never tamed any before and their speed makes them super nice for scouting. I really, really need to find an element vein. Not really a lot of forward progress but until I get my replicator up I am a bit stuck. I also still need to pick a permanent base location, I have everything out in the open right now. I did want to hold off and do a tek base just for the aesthetics on this map but I might just settle for stone for the sake of getting it done.

@Pocolate Yeah before cryopods were a thing it wasn't possible, but those have opened up all kinds of new options that wouldn't otherwise work. There is so much content for this game out there already that it's sometimes hard to find information that's up-to-date, especially for solo play since it takes so long to do anything in this game. There's a couple spots where you do need to cryo and uncryo the rex while inside so it would be worth it to bring an extra rex with you in case you get attacked while moving through those spots. It's an awful place full of purlovias and whatever you do don't fall in the water, you'll die. Had a pretty calm Ark evening. Still pretty tired so I didn't want to do anything too involved. I did set up a rudimentary breeding area and got my snow owls going, got one good baby out of it. Not really doing mutations right now since I know the stats aren't the best for a bloodline, just want to have an imprinted one I can use. Went ahead and raised him up. Kept on breeding the gachas as well. Didn't get anything out of them. Did get a nice crossbow though so that's ok. Finished my book, too. It was pretty good.

Very much a background thing today. I did a quick meat run with Heartbreaker, picked up a new Enforcer bp in the process. Looks like it would be a good cargo bot, if I needed one. I don't but I think Enforcers are awesome so I want one just to have it. Spent the rest of my evening breeding off and on while doing other things. Best part about sp is being able to pause when necessary. Popped out some more gacha babies, nothing to keep. That's it for tonight. Not sure what tomorrow will bring. I suppose I could go look for wild gachas again since I dino wiped and now have a massive excess of owl pellets. Or I could look for another velo. Or try to find another element vein. So many options. Depends on how tired I am tbh, work today was rough and very poor timing considering how busy I have been at home.

Pretty laid back evening. Took a flight around the wastelands, didn't find any element veins up. Returned to base and have been breeding my gachas. Got my first mutation...in crafting skill. Amazing. Also got a metal gacha which is nice. Can never have too much metal. I got obsidian too which is somewhat less useful but since I'm already raising some I might as well for completion's sake. Not really doing much while they raise up since I know you can't leave render or they'll probably die. So I'm legit just sitting here reading a book. Heartbreaker occasionally destroys random things in the background. Mostly spiders or the odd defense unit. That's it for tonight. Will probably do more of this tomorrow since Ark is 100% background while I do some other stuff.

@Pocolate You can do the snow cave with rexes now that cryopods exist. The only reason you couldn't before is because there's a couple spots where they will get stuck if you don't have pods. Still put a bed/box down with a backup set of gear and a rex just in case though, that cave sucks. Had a very busy day yesterday. First thing was to load up with gear and take my Island-hopping argent over to the snow biome to tame snow owls. Got a pair of them 140+. Also got a couple heart attacks from managarmr hit and runs. I want to tame some but at the same time I know what a pain they are to deal with. I've actually never tamed one although I have had a few. Got the owls home, finished the materials for my forge, but now I'm kind of stuck because I really want to start building my tek stuff before I get too far into base building. When you think about it the progression in this game kinda sucks unless you're transferring freely between maps as you go, as far as endgame gear goes. The Island - tek basics and can use in Overseer boss arena. SE - you can only get black pearls from deathworms, takes forever to farm in any appreciable number. At least the manticore is easy. Aberration - element is so ridiculous to get might as well not even bother since Rockwell doesn't drop any. Extinction - all the element, and by this point you've got basically all the toys too. Then I loaded up again and set out into the wastelands. I found a blue OSD, which I started just to try it. I've never done them before just watched videos and as I can tell you from doing Rockwell, it looks so much easier in videos lol. We were doing...ok. I was doing more damage to the drop than the enemies were. But we had to bail due to a meteor storm, I didn't want to risk it. Annoying. So then we went out to look for an element vein. I didn't take my boss rexes this time. Found a medium vein. Took it on with just my argent, we actually did really well. They couldn't damage the bird fast enough between the healing and the fact that this is a bred combat bird with 10k HP and close to 800 melee. With 3k stamina on top of that we were in fine form. Got to wave 4/5 and got stuck on 2 hostiles. Couldn't find them. Went just a little too far trying to hunt them down and the stupid vein blew up. Rip. What a waste of 45 minutes. Bet it was the 2 corrupted pteras chasing a normal one around, obviously I couldn't catch them on my argent. I feel like after a certain amount of time with no damage the next wave should start, that was so stupid. Feeling a little defeated I went back to base. While I was distracted reading the wiki a bug-frenzied megatherium stormed into my base, ignoring all of my combat tames and ate my dung beetle before Heartbreaker destroyed it. Seriously? That beetle was literally in the center of my base and I was standing next to it. I was unharmed and the beetle was just gone. Sigh. So i had to go tame a new one. Decided to take a break from progressing and went out to the desert biome to look for velos. I don't know why but I just love those things. And, well, I came across a slight problem... Now, I do like dimetrodons, just not that much. Obviously I had to do a dino wipe to deal with the overspawning. I can't imagine what a nightmare this would be on an official map, like how would you even deal with it? I lagged out just looking at them. Eventually found a velo. Then died to the velo. That's like a rite of passage on this map, right? Flew back and recovered everything, then got the velo down and tamed. Returned home, not risking finding a mate right now. Things were starting to wind down for the day by then. I mean, I did a lot of stuff. Can you tell I was procrastinating on my taxes? (Which did get done, eventually...) Finished out the night with some gacha breeding, which I have never done before but since I couldn't find the one I wanted and I have one with decent crafting skill, I figured why not. At least I think 136 is decent, I have no idea since my awesome spyglass doesn't show that stat on the little display. Annoying. Didn't get the one I wanted but I did breed a new black pearl gacha with the high crafting skill, which means all future babies will be guaranteed that. Raised her up and that was about it for me. Today and tomorrow are going to be very RL busy for me so I think I might just stick close to base and breed some more gachas. I would really like a metal one, but the element dust is a priority. Sure, my doed can farm it all day but it's really tedious and takes away time from other things I need to do. Plus I was figuring if I hold off on base building until I have my gachas ready, I can farm their crystals all day while setting up. Smarter, not harder.

A lot has happened recently. The short version is I made it to Extinction, finally. I admit I cheesed Rockwell a little bit but I was just so done with Aberration. Too many annoying mechanics in one place. I'll be back eventually to 100% the map, I'll do it again then. Maybe. If I feel like it. (I probably won't.) I did my usual fresh start, but after I built my first small base I changed my mind. I spent the better part of this evening going back to old maps and connecting them all with transmitters, then painstakingly moving my choice tames across. What's the point of having tons of strong dinos if you're not going to use them, after all. So I brought over the remains of my rex armies. Kind of sad seeing the remnants of 5 armies, still bloody in their cryopods. I have them all out to heal up so I can run some OSDs later on. I also brought over Heartbreaker, my Valentine's giga. No mate for him yet but I know I'll need him eventually. Plus a lot of my bred utility animals and my best argent, and my yutys for eggs. General Yulia is retired, after all. From SE I didn't really bring much, just my thyla. From Aberration I brought 2 featherlights to breed, Runt of course, my rock drake, who has been my key role in all of Ab and yet still doesn't have a name, and my 2 breeding spinos. And a few stray bits of gear here and there. Once I got them all moved over I took Heartbreaker out for a meat run, then once everyone woke up from cryosickness (I play with PVP on for leveling purposes) I spent probably close to an hour shuffling everyone around. Once the rexes are done healing I'll probably pod most if not all of them up again. Have to admit I'm surprised that any of my second generation rexes survived. Current plan is to work on my infrastructure now that I have my tames. Already working on getting the forge up and going. I'm not sure if this is going to be my permanent base spot. I like the area but I get the occasional corruption dino wandering in, plus defense units rolling through, and worse, there's a seagull spawn near here. So we'll see, I might do some scouting around. I haven't been on this map in a long time.

Another evening of reaper hunting without success. This is really wearing on me. This is probably my 3rd or 4th "season" of hunting and coming up empty. Not like the reapers aren't around, I'm killing them in droves that would make Ripley proud. I still have a couple more in game days in this cycle but it's getting late, I'm tired and have a busy weekend ahead of me.

Nothing doing for me. Still in the day season which means still stuck with progression. Raised 2 more megalos to pass the time. Also successfully worked my new stats into the spino line, now topping out at a clean 262. Admittedly that is padded quite a bit by the speed stat but these are still some very respectable spinos. 40 HP, 41 stamina, 41 oxygen, 30 food, 48 weight and 37 melee. Ideally I would get 40+ in melee and dump the speed stat down to 0 to get the ideal "value" of the line. Depending on how successful my next alpha hunt is I might go for some more spinos, we'll see. In case you can't tell I love spinos and one of the reasons I love Aberration as much as I do is because this is the spino map, since it's the only one where other apex predators can't dominate it. That said I am tired of being here and I am so ready to move on to Extinction. I am still thinking about doing a dino wipe just to refresh spawns but not quite yet. I had to do that when I was farming giga hearts on The Island and I really didn't like doing that, so I'd just really prefer not to. But I'd really like to finish this off this weekend and move on.

Well, with the last few days of the season in Aberration I decided to go hunt the other surface zones for alpha reapers. Long story short, getallstate might say there are 4 alphas up on my map, but I can't find any of them. So frustrating. And then it turned back to day season which is useless for my purposes. I might need to do a dino wipe but I don't really like doing that if it's not absolutely necessary. On the other hand, I am so ready to be off this map and this is getting tiresome. On the bright side I did snag some drops while I was there and my main rock drake now has a 240 armor saddle and I moved the previous one to my backup/mate boosting drake hanging out in the "kill box" with my megalos and spinos. I have loot quality up on my settings, for the record. Because it takes forever for rng as it is, I want to at least get good gear if I'm going to farm for literally weeks on end to get good stuff. But now I have a few more game days to kill before I can go hunting again. I was poking around and found a 150 spino near my base with 30 points in oxygen. Decided why not and lured it into my taming pen, which is actually built into the front gate of my base. It's specifically for spinos. Anyway, got her tamed up easily and she stood up with 41 oxygen, nice. I bred my megalos and popped 2 more eggs just for something to pass the time. I still don't have good saddles for them but it doesn't really matter, they just need to be crowd control/cannon fodder for the one battle. I also started breeding my new spino into my established line. The new base level (clean, unmutated) will top out at 261 now according to my math. Not too shabby. I still cannot for the life of me find one with good enough melee, it's the lowest stat in this line right now and its driving me crazy since aberrant spinos have the slight boost to melee that they really do need. I mean, not that it really matters now but it's something to do and I'll eventually be coming back to collect up my special tames and breeding lines to move to my hub base on Crystal Isles. Eventually. Said base does not exist yet and won't for a long time.

Well, last night was a bad season for surface hunting so I ended up raising 4 more megalos and farming a bit more metal just to pass the time. Tonight was finally the night cycle but alas, no alpha reaper. I did use the getallstate command to verify there are currently 4 up, but I can't seem to find any of them. I'm a bit concerned that at least 1 of them is probably spawned in a cliff or a rock or something, as I often hear a reaper come up but then I can't find it. Wonder if it would be worth a dino wipe. Either way I'm yet again bottlenecked by rng. My drake has been doing quite well against them but the heavy damage takes a toll. I do lead some reapers back to my kill box for my boss dinos to shred once in awhile but I feel like I take as much damage luring them in as I do just fighting. They're mostly there for the alpha anyway. I'm reluctant to move them but I suppose I will if I find it necessary to switch to a different surface area. Night season is over, back to 50/50 for a bit. If I don't find one by the time it switches back to day season I'll rotate to another surface area. So annoying.