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Cymas

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Everything posted by Cymas

  1. Dodorex can spawn anywhere so just make sure you have a good security perimeter. For myself, I didn't play at all on Thursday or Friday. But yesterday...yesterday was huge. First I spent the morning finishing my prep. I am very, very sad to report my unnamed bary, who has been so crucial to my success, has died. I lagged/mistimed the final jump in the lava cave and...yeah. The worst part was raising a new bary and otter and entering the cave again knowing I was going to see the death message and there was nothing I could do. Sigh. But I brought some prebuilt structures and built a bridge across that jump, totally forgot I can do that with PVP settings on. I won't say his death was for nothing, but it was avoidable. I also figured out a little trick for the artifact, at least on SP: don't pop any loot drops before getting the artifact. Get the artifact, then go pop one loot drop, then go back and the artifact should have respawned. Much better than waiting 30+ minutes for it to respawn naturally. Wish I'd figured that out 3 caves ago. Anyway, with my prep finally done I went back to base to gather everything I needed. I had already moved my army to the obelisk since they needed time to wake up. So spoiled doing this now with cryopods, so easy. Parked my bird and my pig, positioned all of the rexes. Saved the game just in case. Took a breath and popped gamma Broodmother for my first ever solo boss fight. Victory! Barely even took any damage. Back on the platform, put my new flag and the precious element away. Gathered the second set of mats and popped beta Broodmother. Victory! Definitely took significantly more damage, although no one was really bloody. My worst hit rex was down maybe 10k max. As an aside my strategy was to turn group whistles off on the yuty. I hop on whatever is closest, whistle attack, then when they clear out I can jump on the yuty and whistle attack again to get the last rex moving. Then circle around behind to get the rexes to fill in the gap so she's circled. Yulia definitely needs a better saddle. Healed up again, stashed the prizes. Big, deep breath because I know the first two fights are nothing compared to this...alpha Broodmother. And the verdict is...victory! But not unscathed. I lost 2 of my first gen battle rexes and in the rush of first victory I stupidly forgot their saddles. And we definitely took a lot of damage, I had one bloody army. Yulia actually came close to death from the spider swarm. I think I'm putting the rest of her points in HP, I did boost stam a bit and was considering some melee but no. Also I really should replace her, I have a significantly better yuty I can breed with much higher base HP. Nonetheless, I was extremely happy about my hard work finally paying off. Somewhat anticlimatic though, not much to celebrate just yet. I packed the army up and took it home to heal, along with my prizes and a total of 112 element. But, losses don't slow me down. If anything I come back stronger. I spent some time breeding and hatched 3 of my second gen boss rexes. My first gen hatched out at level 239, pretty respectable. My second gen hatches out at 271. Nice. I only needed 2 but I happened to pop a third so I'm keeping it. Also got another HP mut while hatching everything. Did a large metal run, checked my mats. I really need to spend some time organizing everything, it's such a mess. I ended up building a new crafting station just for the replicator. I have everything I need except I'm short on black pearls. I gathered my gear and some kibble and took my new bary out to the open sea. A crossbow mitigates the jellyfish threat. And honestly these things are OP. The fact that it can stun alpha megs never fails to amuse me, we killed 3 of them in our travels. Scouted an alpha mosa that I'm not going near for awhile, and a 145 kraken that I may tame for the sake of it as I've never tamed one before. But the real prize, eventually I found a 140 basilo and tamed him up. He has high melee, which I'm pleased about, but low HP, which kind of sucks. But that's fine. Cryo'd my bary, popped on the ascendant basilo saddle I found while farming swamp cave, and continued farming in hopes of finding another. No luck, but then it was getting late anyway. It's been a long day! Back to base, very, very happy. Current goals, leveling up the new boss rexes, making their saddles and the Tek replicator, taming a mate for my new basilo so I can breed them, which also means finishing the water side of my base perimeter.
  2. @caleb68 Thanks, fingers crossed that you get yours quickly! Being stuck relying on rng is such a terrible gameplay mechanic, but it's also most of Ark so...meh. @d1nk No, I didn't bother doing that. I suppose if I hadn't been so excited to finally make progress and jumped on making saddles right away I probably should have. If I end up wiping to one of the bosses and have to rebuild I probably will. @Darkholis Thanks for the tips! I've watched a couple solo runs of the map now but they were all old, from before cryopods were available on all maps, which I didn't take into account. I love allos but I'd just as soon take a rex through if I can get it to fit since I already have the rexes...I had heard that allos actually might fare better against the Overseer due to their speed so I was thinking of running a line for that anyway, though if it's not necessary I'd just as soon roll with what I have. Honestly I don't expect my first gen army to survive much past the gamma dragon. They aren't mutated at all, just imprinted and leveled up. If I had realized getting a saddle bp would take so long I wouldn't have jumped the gun with raising them so quickly. On the bright side, in the meantime I've been stacking up muts so any rexes I lose to any boss will be replaced with significantly stronger ones. My base bloodline wasn't that impressive, just 10.1k HP and 349 melee. They now hatch with 13.6k HP and 443 melee. Still popping eggs regularly, plan to just keep stacking it up since I'll be using this line on all applicable maps. Life is too short to breed a new army for each map when I have a well established line already... Anyway, overall after all of yesterday's excitement it was more or less back to the grind today. As much as I want to explore and mess around with the event after doing a dino wipe, I have so much work to do. I miscalculated how much metal I had so I ended up doing a metal run first thing. While that was smelting, I ran over to the redwoods base to pick up my bary in preparation of running other caves. Built my last few saddles and did some cleanup around the base. Starting to put together my gear and figure out what else I might need. Definitely need to make a few more pods, I only made 20 and they are now all occupied with my army. Popped lots of eggs that had been building up, nothing worth mention. That was about it for me. Pretty short day all told, the update took longer than I expected to download and install.
  3. Huge, huge win today. I know I said I wasn't necessarily up to playing much this week, but I wanted to paint my redwoods manor. I figured while I was over there I would run the swamp cave, then paint. Well...two cave runs in and I finally, finally got an ascendant rex saddle blueprint! A month of constantly searching for one, running this cave and popping every red drop I could find on The Island, and mass slaughtering hundreds of penguins to repair my arthro'd armor. It all finally paid off. Now, there is a slight downside to this blueprint--I have loot quality turned up precisely because I didn't want to spend so much time farming. So it's a 202 armor saddle, which is great! Except it's stupid expensive. But, that's where the grinder comes in. All the junk saddles and armor I've been picking up has just been collecting in my grinder. Smashed them all up and actually got enough mats back to make 5 saddles. I could make 4 just from the mats I had in base on top of that, plus the 2 saddles I found last week. I went on a giant metal run, then took my theri around shredding all the vegetation we could get our ticklers on. And luckily I had the foresight to save every bit of hide starting from day 1. Just waiting for the metal to smelt down and have been crafting more saddles as we go. Just 3 left to go! That said, I'm not going to start running bosses until the weekend. I'll spent the rest of the week doing some prep work. I've only done maybe 3 boss fights ever, never solo, and sp has some limitations that online play does not. So I'll be setting up small feeding/respawn posts at each obelisk since you have to actually go to the corresponding ones in single player. Plus now that I have otters I can go farm the rest of the artifacts I need, going to start with Broodmother of course. I plan on getting 4 more of each artifact; 1 for each difficulty level, 1 in case of a fail, and the set I already have for display purposes. My otter can carry that many so it should be pretty easy. Assuming I don't get lost in the stupid lava cave again, man it is so easy to get turned around in there. I'll also start looking around for a female allo, level doesn't matter, just to start breeding for the snow cave, and I still need to find a pair of good basilos to breed for the underwater caves. Aside from that and getting my gear together, I'm basically ready to start the Ascension process! Also I feel like I need a name for my baryonyx. He's been so critical to this entire process and he doesn't even have a name yet. Bred, fully imprinted, not mutated, and we've been through so, so much together. I just honestly have no idea what to call him. Rejected the names Dweller and Fisher already, and Mini Spino is the common nickname I use for dimetrodons. But if any of my animals deserves a name, it's this bary for sure. I'll think on it, I still need to bring him back to base and breed him as I never did get a perfect pair with his stats. Still can't believe I finally got the blueprint and can start progressing at long last. In game it's like day 184 or something silly, just insane to think about how much time has gone into this and thus far so little to show for it.
  4. Very long weekend. I spent almost the entire time in game camped out in my redwoods outpost farming the swamp cave. It's been my observation that leaving the cave loaded in/not leaving render seems to vastly increase the amount of time between respawns. So I was able to loot the drops 3-4 times per each respawn of the cave dinos. Much less armor broken, many new items acquired. I must have looted 50 red drops alone. I finally got 2 ascendant rex saddles...but not blueprints, just the saddles. Sigh. 2 down, 17 to go... But in the meantime, I had to do something while hanging around in the area. So this happened: Totally unnecessary but it gave me something to do. My outpost is rapidly becoming a full fledged base on its own. It looks a little weird in the front because that section isn't done yet, it requires a lot more crystal than I was willing to put in the effort of farming right now. I haven't actually moved anything in from the outpost yet either, I'm pretty much just building for the sake of it at this point. Also no I did not make a second forge, I just moved the one I already made over in anticipation of getting a blueprint. I did spend enough time at my actual base to advance my spino stack and both rex stacks a little more. I find it interesting that the rex muts have been advancing evenly despite the rng. I'm stacking HP and melee separately but I'm at 8 for both. Just a weird little detail to take note of more than anything. Makes checking them a lot easier when I'm only looking for 1 level change for both stacks. I did return to base before logging for the night. I don't know that I really feel like playing too much during the week right now with the way things are going. Spending hours farming this one cave is extraordinarily dull but I am eager to advance and there just really isn't anything else for me to do until I get that blueprint. A whole month spent on this endeavor with very poor results so far.
  5. Took a break on Wednesday. Yesterday ended up being productive. Ran swamp cave and hit 2 red drops outside, nothing again. Headed back to base. Popped some spino eggs, got the HP mut I needed for my stack. Looked at my pair of tapejaras and decided to go ahead and breed them. The stats aren't the best but tapes are rare, and I've found myself grabbing the female more often than the argents these days. Long story short I've now got 5 tapejaras; the original female I'm keeping, a perfect stat pair, a cyan mut I happened to pop, and: I named her Boo, being that it's October and all. She didn't get all of my stats, but I feel like she got the best possible color combination out of her parents. It's weird to feel this way about pixels but sometimes you tame/hatch an animal and you just immediately get attached to it, well that's why I decided to keep Boo instead of rebreeding her colors onto a full stat tape. This isn't an active breeding line or anything anyway, the stats are not bloodline quality, but it was something to do and now I have backup tapes in case I need them. I also bred a mutated pair of spinos I had kept aside for color projects and got both of the combinations I wanted out of them, so I'm quite happy with that. Neither project is finished, need to get lucky on color muts. It'll mess the counter up something fierce, but these are only for colors so it makes no difference. I'll breed the stats in later and the counter won't matter then anyway. The new rexes grew up and I put them into breeding rotation. And that was about it for the day. Spent most of it popping eggs and managing the babies. I really need somewhere to house all these birds, my little deck has enough space for my "rescue ranger" ptera and my 3 main argents, but definitely not enough room for 5 tapes, plus all of the breeding argents I have scattered around. Still looking for a high weight argent to tame too.
  6. Well, a surprisingly productive day for me today. No luck on the red drops, naturally. In fact I only saw one today anyway and it had junk in it. I ended up doing some work around the base, got my forge back up and running and connected the greenhouse to the main base building. Ended up making space for another crop plot so I threw some more narcos down. Can never have too many with the amount of spoiled meat I generate... While I was scouting drops on my tape I was also just roaming around, looking at everything. Not much else to do these days. Found a 140 male tape. Lured him home to my taming pen and tamed him up. Sadly he's ugly and his stats don't do much for me, but at least I can breed with my female to get an imprinted baby with hopefully all of mom's colors. Also found a 145 iguanodon which I'm not sure but might actually have been leftover from the 4th of July event, since I haven't dino wiped on this map at all I still come across them randomly now and again. Tamed it because it also had stats I was looking for, didn't tame out as well as I expected but hey, it's blue and looks pretty. Also got a 174 tek para, I'm collecting tek animals mostly for looks when I get to tek tier. I have a neat raptor already too. Then I got super duper lucky on eggs. Got a double mut on my spino line, sadly not usable because of the second mut but it did get colors I can put together with one of the spinos I have saved for color morph projects, so that's nice. Then I got a new melee stack for the rexes. Almost immediately after that I got an HP stack to go with it. Awesome. So that's 6 melee and 8 HP and finally starting to hit numbers beyond anything possible in the wild. Honestly I think I did more today than all weekend. Pretty happy overall, and considering some interesting base expansion plans. Basically just trying to fill the gap while I pray for a rex saddle bp to rain from the red drops in the sky. Or the swamp cave, when I feel inclined to go back in there. Currently I don't, just bored of it now. Literally all I need on The Island is that bp, a female allo to breed with my 2 males, and a pair of basilos to breed for the underwater caves. That's it. Although tbh I might be able to make do with my spinos for the underwater caves as long as I can avoid the cnidaria. Their melee isn't the best but I have an asc saddle and my best one hatches with 9.2k HP, which doesn't sound like a lot compared to a rex, but is quite respectable for a spino. That's 61 points and about 4 muts shy of 10k base. It makes me very happy seeing how strong my death puppies are getting.
  7. Well, I've had a relatively dull Ark week since my last post. Partly why I haven't posted, there just isn't anything worth talking about. Week 3 of hunting for a rex saddle bp came and went without success. I haven't been playing as much simply because, well, I'm getting bored. I don't want to start too many side projects on this map when I know anything I do now I'll probably have forgotten about by the time I come back to The Island, so literally everything I've been doing is investing in boss fights. And even continuing breeding, my lines haven't been giving me that much success either. I've advanced my rex HP stack by 2 and melee not at all. My spino HP stack has advanced by 2, hitting just under 9k at hatch now. I don't plan to make this my main line anyway, it's just for fun. I vastly prefer aberrant spinos for their awesome glowyness and also because they really need that extra 5% boost to melee imo. The most exciting part of the weekend was taming a max level tapejara; Halloween themed to boot: She doesn't have a name yet, and I kind of don't want to jinx it by naming her since she's my only tape. Stats aren't great, but she's immediately become my de facto drop runner because she's so much faster and more maneuverable than the workhorse argents. I actually forgot how much I enjoy flying on these, it's been so long since I had one. Hopefully I can get her a mate at some point and breed up a baby. Eventually I think I'd like to have a stamina focused breeding line, maybe with HP and some weight too. Melee, not really useful on these but then that's what the tek saddle is for. I wish they actually came in tek variant. I think anything that has a tek saddle should have a wild tek variant, because normal saddles look silly on tek animals and a tek saddle is 1000x cooler on a tek animal. Also since spinos don't have an alpha variant they should come in tek and have a tek saddle too. They don't even get a bone costume and they would look amazingly terrifying if they did. Anyway. That's about it for me. Just alternating between breeding and drop running. Taking a bit of a break from swamp cave, I am so, so sick of it and the stupid arthros constantly breaking my armor. It's a cheap mechanic that doesn't make the cave harder, it just makes it more irritating to go through. I don't even die if all 3 sets of armor breaks, I have enough HP to survive the run back out again. So it's just a waste of time and resources. At least running drops I get to look around for neat things, like the tape that I found as I was out and about scouting for red drops by the volcano.
  8. @caleb68 Love the screenshots of your base, awesome builds. I think it would look a lot less prison/schoolhouse-like if you added some paint, I see a little bit on one roof but you'd be amazed how much depth and character it can add to the whole build. Also switching up the materials, like using wood ceilings and railings instead of stone, would add some warmth and break up the monotony of the stone. Thursday I didn't play at all, needed a break. Friday through Sunday was the usual shenanigans. Swamp cave runs, hatching lots of eggs, chasing red drops around the northern half of the map. Still nothing. I am honestly starting to get bored playing. I really want to progress and start getting these boss fights done, but without a saddle bp I'm totally stuck. It's frustrating and slowed gameplay down to a crawl after I devoted so much of my time to getting set up for it. I'm even on my second round of rex leveling, about halfway done pushing every boss rex to 600 melee damage. I got tired of it and spent a significant amount of time on my spino doing laps around the map for anything interesting. Finally got a decent weight theri, took it up to the volcano path and came home with almost more rare flowers than my bird could carry. Got another allo too. Still need a good female before I can start breeding them. Just knocking off smaller goals and projects here and there to break up the routine. Got another round of muts on the rexes, we're now officially at 5 each, putting each stat 10 levels above my tamed base. Not that impressive, but fun for me to compare to my clean rexes and compare the raw values. It's an increase of something like 50 melee and over 2k hp over the original base. Plus I got this as my new breeding male for melee: From moldy pea soup to proto-Alpha, I like it. Still, I feel like I'm running out of things to do. I have tons of projects I want to do, but I've been holding back on most of them because I want to progress through the maps first, get that all sorted out, then pick a map to settle my true main base on and go from there. It will most likely be here on The Island simply because to me this map is 'home' but I don't deny the possibility that I'd like another map better and would end up there instead. I've played on almost all of them, but none as extensively as here. I'm almost considering, once I make it to Extinction and do as much as I can there, to pod up whatever animals I want and wipe all previous map bases, almost like I was gone for so long my bases decayed like the ruins you see scattered around, and then start fresh on the maps with my hopefully fully ascended character. But none of this will come to pass if I can't get that stupid saddle bp. Relying on RNG sucks and is imo poor gameplay design. That was why I used to use the upgrade station mod, I'd rather invest a ton of resources into a guaranteed result than continue wasting my time for dozens of trash bps and gear that gets pitched straight into the grinder.
  9. Pretty short Ark day for me. I got home from work a bit late. Loaded up and sat in my chair while I ate dinner, then made another cake. It's actually the same one, just this one is for sharing. The first one was a test. By the time I got it turned out on the rack to cool I had over 100 eggs ready to pop. Hatched them all. Kept none. Feeling a bit tired, so I logged for the night.
  10. Another slow day on the Ark. Two Swamp Cave runs that resulted in a lot of repaired armor, one red beacon with nothing, another red beacon that dropped in an inaccessible location. I'm not one to complain usually, given how huge and complex this game is but this many years on and the original map still has leftover problems from the terrain changes...really? So frustrating. At least I stopped falling for one of the other inaccessible beacons, I can tell which one it is from my usual perch. No lie, I was so annoyed when I returned to base that I sat idle and baked a cake irl. Baking is one of my other main hobbies and it was a new variation of an original recipe adaptation of mine that's been bouncing around in my head. When you need a hobby to destress from your hobby lol...that's my breakfast for the next few days, and if it turned out as well as it looks I'll make another to bring in for my dock crew at work. The reason I stayed idle while doing this is so when I came back I had a whole mess of eggs to hatch. Popped over a hundred yesterday easily, but no keepers. All in all, a total bust. But at least I have cake now.
  11. @Spiral3 I agree with d1nk, it's a dirty breed. If you put the stats into Ark Smart Breeder you'll probably find it's not particularly great. The breeder either doesn't understand how to stack mutations, only bred for colors, or learned how to breed and pawned off their earlier mistakes. Not sure I would pay that much kibble for a thyla of unknown lineage, but as long as you're happy with it that's what counts! I'm a real stickler for quality so I usually end up breeding everything myself. Have to on single player anyway. Another meh day on the Ark for me. Nothing out of the swamp cave, and only one red beacon drop with nothing of note. I did however pop another spino HP mut, up to 5 now. Female though, so I raised her up, bred with my clean male and am now raising a new breeding male. Took a long flight around the map just to see if there was anything interesting. Finally found where all the otters are hanging out, stumbled across about 4-5 of them in a very small area. Naturally only the lowest level one was a male. Doesn't matter. Tamed him up, brought him home and bred with my female otter. This way I won't mind if I lose one in a cave, which I probably will at some point. Fun fact, raising otters on a foundation makes them resemble tiny, furry deathworms.
  12. A very busy weekend for me. No, I did not get a rex saddle bp despite many swamp cave runs and hours spent chasing drops in the northern half of The Island between cave spawns. I'm getting pretty much everything except that. At least I got a really nice asc crossbow bp. I can't be the only one who has an asc longneck and still tranqs most things with a crossbow simply because I always have arrows and narcs around, it's easier than crafting darts that most animals don't need anyway. While my mission failed, I did make some lateral progress. While out running beacons, I kept an eye out for daeodons and ended up taming a pair to breed later. I don't intend to take them into the arenas, but I'll stage one outside for the inevitable post-battle healing. I also happened across a 145 thyla which I grabbed and tamed up just to have. And I finally found a decent female doed, bred with my better male and now have an imprinted doed, that's been on my list to do for ages. It could just be me but I feel like a lot of people neglect to breed their utility animals, even a non-mutated imprinted harvester is a significant improvement for things you'll be farming continuously anyway. Mammal breeding can be a bit meh though. I also hit my current max survivor level of 105, so that's something. Not all that useful at this point, but a first for me. I'd say most of my progress was in breeding over the weekend. I spent plenty of time at base tending to the hatchery. I'm now up to 3 HP and 3 melee mutations on the rexes, very happy with that especially since the HP muts have been lagging for awhile. I'm also up to 4 HP mutations on the spinos, which I'm only really doing for fun but still pretty nice. As for colors, I have the weirdest breeding luck in that every time I get a female rex with nice colors and breed to my clean male, the colors never transfer to the new breeding male. So we're still on moldy pea soup. I did pop a rare double mutated spino who got an HP and a melee mutation, and happens to have very nice color mutations. While it's not useful for breeding, I did keep it as my new main mount. No name yet, though. And while I was cleaning up at the end of the night on Sunday, I spent some time renovating my base, which is much too small for my current needs. The exterior didn't change a whole lot, but I put in a second floor and a loft over the stable, plus changed the roof to be a deck for my main fliers. I don't have a proper aviary for the breeding birds yet, but on moving them I did notice that I think my melee mutated argent actually got a wyvern red, which is neat. The downside is now I need to set up a new hatching area, because I need to put my forge where the hatchery is now. It didn't fit where it was anyway, I just hadn't felt like building. I'm regretting putting my greenhouse where I did because that's prime real estate for base expansion. Still strongly considering building a new Tek base elsewhere later on, so I'm just not sure how much more effort I want to invest in this whole compound overall, honestly. Current goals remain unchanged. Rex saddle bp is a top priority, I cannot move forward without it. Continuing to work on the rex and spino lines, but at this point it's basically filler, something to do while I'm stuck. Will be doing swamp runs all week in the hopes of getting a bp so I can prep for a big boss battle weekend.
  13. A "small" swamp cave outpost that was the majority of my time this evening. I didn't intend to get quite so involved but I was feeling inspired. A pen for the bary, a deck for the bird, the roof has my generator and the cabin has basic amenities for storing and repairing my gear. And yes that's a titanosaur in the background humping the pond. He did briefly get stuck on my outpost during construction, luckily no accidental pick to the tail swings. Moved my bary in and ran the cave while I was there. Got another asc theri saddle...at the rate I'm going it would be faster to tame and start a theri line from scratch... On the other hand, my rex line is doing well, popped a new melee mut and a male to boot. Alas, no colors so we're still in the moldy pea soup phase. I did pop a melee mut on my hp line and it's a nice red body, kept that one to use as a backup/replacement rex if/when the first gen ones start to die off. So I'm pretty much set for a weekend of swamp cave farming now.
  14. Upon logging in last night I got started with my new daily-ish routine. Checked on the dinos, repaired my Scuba tank, and headed to the swamp cave. Got an asc theri saddle bp this time, but that was it. Dropped the bary off at base and M2 had grown up, so I put him in the breeding line. Then off to chase drops around carno island. Nothing. Took the spino out for a run, proved profitable as I finally found and tamed an otter. We also looked for the basilo I lost in a previous forced rollback, no luck. It must have despawned. Or maybe I'm just not seeing it, I only have a vague memory of where I found it the first time. Returned to base and spent some time popping eggs, no keepers. That was about it really. Spent the time between eggs grinding some mats out. Naturally because of the swamp cave I've been collecting loads of chitin so I ground a lot of that down into paste. Honestly I could afford to make a lot of hard poly with all of this, which would be good for when I start unlocking Tekgrams. Completely bottlenecked without that saddle bp, though. Honestly I'm not really sure what to do, as everything I've done in game so far has been about progression. I'm rapidly reaching the point where there just isn't much else. Because I plan on playing through each map in sequence, I'm waiting until I'm done with the entire process to really invest in any big non-progression projects. Debating the merits of making a small outpost just for farming swamp cave, so I can leave the bary there between runs. I think that's honestly going to be the majority of my weekend. Not exactly exciting but without saddles my rex army is just a really big set of paperweights. I suppose I can alternate cave and metal runs, once I do get a bp I need to actually make them after all.
  15. I started my day with enough eggs to make a chicken farm jealous. Since rolling back my save, I've had quite a few of them building up so I went ahead and started hatching them. The very first rex egg I popped gave me my second stack melee mutation. Great! Except for one thing. People are always posting cool blue, purple, even red rexes. This is what I got: If Lisa Frank did dinosaurs, it would be this rex. With dubious progress in progress, I took my bary out to the swamp cave for another run. Got an asc theri saddle, which would be more useful if I had one. I plan to tame one if I can find a good weight stat out there somewhere, need a mushroom/flower harvester. Nothing else was worth mentioning. Then I ran out to carno island and stalked drops in the area for awhile. No luck there either. Flew home and the rave rex was grown. Also a female, so I put her with my clean male, luckily we popped a moldy pea soup male to continue the stack with. You know it's bad when that green is an improvement... Did a few chores around the base and called it a night.
  16. This is why I don't play Ark angry. After a good night's sleep and some time for rational thought, I was able to recover my lost items. The easiest way to do it was to go into my game files and load the previous save. So, I lost about 5 hours of progress but kept about 100 hours of stockpiled items. As fair as trades go, that's pretty fair. I didn't really lose anything of value from the now lost time period, but I did have to finish leveling my last army rex again which was annoying. With my mats restored it was back to work. I took my bary down to the swamp cave and did a run. I did get an asc fur cap bp, handy for someone who lives a stone's throw from the snow, but that was about it for loot. I know on SP caves can take a long time to respawn so I took the bary home for now. Took the argent out to run drops for awhile in the meantime. The alpha rex was still stomping about on carno island. When I checked its HP I noticed it hadn't regened at all, I have taken the occasional swipe at it on my way by. So I decided I wasn't going to let it run my map just because it's an alpha, and pushed the unnamed argent into a dive to strafe that rex's back with our talons. With only a primitive saddle we had to be careful to keep out of bite range as much as possible, luckily I always put 10k HP on my battle birds. It may seem excessive, but with every bite doing 145-200+ damage every point counted. It took 2 breaks for stamina and a few tertiary kills of interloping carnivores, but then... A victory hard earned. And the argent finally has a name. Considered that we straight up assassinated this alpha rex, I decided it would be fitting to call him Altair. We flew home and I decided to end my night while we were ahead.
  17. Short session today. My stack mod updated at some point since I played last. I logged in to find all of my consumables gone. Empty generator, empty fridges, dead crop plots. all of my mats gone...things I've been stockpiling since day 1. I have my animals and my gear and nothing else. Played just long enough to get gas in the generator before it ran out, harvested a few rare flowers for the beehive, and started the beetle again to start refilling my crop plots. Then I logged off because I had a really bad day and this is just too overwhelming to deal with.
  18. I had quite the busy Ark weekend, although I had to work around some scheduling issues so a lot of my play was actually passive. Friday night was mostly sitting around carno island watching for drops. Had a little accident at one of them and died, but I have a bed over here so I grabbed a rex to go get the bird. Almost lost the bird because the stupid rex couldn't turn around. I really, really don't like rexes as mounts. So I did the obvious thing. I took down my apex taming pen, flew home and made kibble, then struck out for the green ob river. I had scouted a 150 spino over there quite some time ago, I just hate making kibble without a cooker and on my taming settings if I use kibble I don't need narcs for them. Turned out to be a female with high HP, she stood up with an excellent 45 points. Started to head home and what's this? A 150 male spino had spawned in just ahead of us and was running rampant. (If I was good at art, a spino rampant would totally be my personal Ark crest.) I had enough kibble and arrows left so I tamed him too. Got them both home easily. If you've never walked a spino home, it's the easiest thing. A water boosted spino is faster than an argent and they do not care about terrain at all, so you won't lose them or get them stuck 99% of the time. So happy to have a pair of death puppies, this is probably the longest I've ever gone without one barring my very first time playing. Because back then, spinos weren't in the game yet lol. Anyway. I got them home, got them breeding and got all my stats together. Also popped an HP mutation almost immediately, which is great. I'm not planning to do much with spinos here simply because I prefer the aberrant ones and intend to do most of my breeding with them. Their base HP is low enough that I feel they really benefit from sacrificing 5% more of their HP in exchange for 5% more melee damage that they really need. But I'll still work that HP line for a bit, baby spinos are great for exp anyway.... That took up the rest of Friday and part of Saturday. I also realized the major QoL change I hadn't paid attention to due to not being super interested in Valguero, and went over to the obelisk to make myself a cryofridge and 20 pods to start, enough for my entire army. On single player you can't use drops to start boss battles, and you have to actually go to each individual obelisk. From a progression standpoint I think it should still be locked with Tek tier, but from a practical standpoint I love it. Ran lots of mats between breedings, and finally made that asc longneck. Also scraped together enough for a grinder. I've been saving all the higher tier saddles and other gear out of drops even though I knew I was never going to use them. Tossed them all in and the grinder pretty much paid for itself that way. I then took my bary out for some adventuring; we ran all 3 artifact caves for the Broodmother. Had never been in the lava cave before but the other two I'm familiar with, so it didn't take long. But it was pretty fun, I just realized how little time I've spent on the ground. Mainly because if I'm traveling anywhere on said ground, I prefer to do it on the back of a spino, which I now have. Sunday ended up being very lazy. I spent quite a lot of my game day in a chair doing non-game things while waiting on eggs. It was quite tedious, but I leveled my entire army to the bare minimum of 35k HP and 500 melee. Finally got the melee mut I wanted, and popped another HP mut that I kept over the first one because it's easier to see new muts with the current breeders. Two separate mutations, two color options: moldy pea soup or moldy pea soup. I know it's not the old SP mutation bug because I popped quite a few mutations, all of which were useless but in way cooler colors. Sigh. So I made a lot of progress but at the same time, I'm still stuck without a good saddle BP. Obviously my next goal is to start running the swamp cave since that's my best option right now. My bary is more than enough for that, and I have the longneck to deal with stupid arthros. And now with cryopods I don't have to worry about setting up an outpost to keep my bird safe, or risk running it.
  19. Not much of note happened last night. The rest of the army grew up. I went through the rest of the eggs hoping for a melee mut, no luck. I did keep and raise one more rex to serve as my temporary main mount until I get around to taming some spinos. Also made my cooker, although I haven't set it up yet. Need to do some rearranging first. Honestly what I really need to do is rebuild this whole base from the ground up, but what I'm thinking I might do instead is actually start planning to build a brand new main base somewhere else and leave this one as my "boss factory" that I'll just do a few QoL upgrades to after I start unlocking Tekgrams. It's plenty big enough for mass breeding, and my taming arena is here. I did run over to carno island again to look for drops, didn't get anything noteworthy, but here's an action shot: My unnamed argent, already bloodied after taking down a 120 alpha carno, boldly taking on two level 90 alpha raptors while the 135 alpha rex hunts in the near distance. Following the fight, we went home to rest up and I decided that was enough for one day.
  20. What is there to say, really? I spent my day breeding, hatching, culling, and raising rexes. I would have been done a lot faster if I realized I had the wrong male breeding...but it's a moot point now. This is my first generation of self bred boss rexes, ever, just 5 left to finish growing up. The far corner is my current cull pile, surely I'm not the only one who does that. I find it way easier to put them aside and periodically remove them after I'm sure I don't need them anymore. The rex standing off by itself is actually my new male breeder, once I realized my mistake I waited until I hatched one with matching stats to my current breeding female and pulled him aside. The reason why is so he doesn't get imprinted, makes it easier to not accidentally take him out with me. I also keep the breeders on the other side of the compound, at least until I can unlock cryo and get all that sorted. Not pictured is my first HP mutated rex, who I actually got fairly early on in the process. I didn't want to wait for her to grow up and then breed for a male though, and I was also kinda hoping I would get lucky with a melee mutation so I could establish both stacks, but Ark was generous enough for one day. Also not pictured is a very fat yuty who has been eating dozens of baby birds and rexes. Honestly it probably would have been easier to raise a new bred yuty with my high stats than level this one, she's still a couple levels off from my minimum HP goal of 35k and already has the requisite 3k stamina. It's fine, though. My bird is also new, the first baby from my new high melee clean base pair. Also not pictured is my first melee mutation, which I am honestly pretty excited about. I did also get an HP mutation, I'm just not sure if I want to work that stack or hold out for a 50+ point tame. 48 base HP is already quite respectable, 50 with the mut. Still need one really good weight bird, and I suppose I could go find a low level 0 food/0 oxygen to clear my junk stats, but it's hardly necessary at this stage. All in all, things are progressing quite a lot faster than I expected. One of the reasons I wanted to breed the army as quickly as possible is so they gain a lot of passive exp while I'm doing the rest of the boss prep. By the time I'm done collecting the artifacts, hunting down a good saddle bp, etc they should have quite a few levels stacked up, and once I'm done with the yuty I'll start rotating rexes in as my baby eaters to maximize exp gain. Even when it's "just" argents that's still a lot of exp when you're culling 5-15 at a time... For stats I plan to go to 35k HP each and then dump the rest into melee. Maybe overkill on the HP, but this is a base bloodline that simply isn't very strong yet, so I think I'm better off focusing on longevity a bit more until I get a good melee stack going to provide the raw power I'll need for the higher level bosses.
  21. @caleb68 When I was a tribe leader I did the same thing all the time. Long after my tribe had all logged off I would still be on, organizing, cleaning up, restocking mats, etc. Not quite for 16 hours, but probably a good hour or so every night. I don't think anyone ever noticed, but I knew. I miss playing with my friends, but I don't miss the responsibility lol. Some huge, huge progress last night. Having done a little more research, I started out my day with confidence. I built a really basic apex taming pen, loaded up my argent, and flew out to carno island. I set up the pen in the shallows on the safe side. I actually have a high level icthy there, I keep forgetting to make a saddle. It was just chilling the last time I was taming rexes, so I tamed it too. I still have 3 rexes stationed there also, 2 males and the precious female who made my actual breeding line possible. My plan was to raid drops and farm rexes at the same time, since I can do that here. But it's Ark, plans rarely survive the bird landing. Because on a whim I scouted the nearby argents, and the first one my spyglass touched had 41 wild points in melee. Well then. My pen didn't have a roof, but I successfully kited and dropped that bird right where I wanted her, in front of my temporary bed/respawn point well away from the pen. She stood up with an impressive 53 points, surpassing my previous base by 9 whole points. Not wanting to take any risks, I took the opportunity to fly her all the way back to the safety of my base. I returned to an island transformed. Since much of carno island was in render, naturally a lot of animals died and respawned when I came back. I almost immediately spotted not 1, but 2 level 150 female rexes. The celebrations were cut somewhat short by their traveling companions--I counted no less than 5 alphas, including a 135 rex. Even if I brought my best rex across, there was no way I'd be killing that thing. It seems Ark had decided to cancel my plans for me. But, without risk there is no victory, in Ark or life. We boldly flew in on one of the 150 rexes when it wandered away from its alpha mommy and draw her aggro, leading her across the island and straight into my new trap. She was the uglier of the two, with 31 points in HP that I sorely needed to gamble on. Got her down without trouble and waited patiently-impatiently for the tame. Success! She stood up with 41 points in HP, just over 10k base. Perfect! But you might be wondering, how am I going to get her home without cryopods, and on single player where you can't use supply drops to upload and even if you could, there's an alpha rex camping the drops? Easy! The other rexes are still there because I didn't. I take advantage of my higher single player settings. I bred 3 eggs from the new female and one of the trash males, they're just sacrificial here anyway, I use them to clear the island because raptor pounce is a thing. Then I flew home, got the the new argent breeding, and got my eggs into the hatchery. The first egg popped out exactly what I needed, a female with my 10k base HP. The other two eggs were trash. I also almost immediately popped a 4-stat bird with my new melee, breeding with my clean, high stat bred male. I spent the rest of the night around the base, popping eggs and waiting for my babies to grow. It was getting a bit late now however, and I was sleepy. The argent grew up so I replaced her mom and started the next breeding cycle anew. The rex is 75% grown and will finish within the next hour of play. All in all, a very happy night. Shame about all those alphas though, I won't be able to clear that area for a long, long time. A next gen battle bird could, but not without the high armor saddle I don't have. The rexes I have on carno island wouldn't last 2 minutes against such a behemoth, especially with 2 alpha raptors and 2 alpha carnos in the immediate area as well. Plus a 3rd carno some distance away. I have never seen so many on this island at once, it's insane. Going to be great for exp, if I ever get a saddle worth a beaver. Obviously my next goal is to continue breeding my argent and rex lines. I believe I can go ahead and start building a rex army now, with my base stats being 41 HP and 38 melee, clean and unmutated. As long as I get decent saddles, I should be able to take on gamma and possibly even beta bosses. I plan to simply breed the full 19 rexes, keep any mutations aside to start stacking, and then I'll simply replace the ones that die with next gen rexes as I progress. I'll name them by gen too, it'll be interesting to observe how long the older ones survive. Assuming I don't immediately wipe to something lol. Still need an otter for artifact collecting. I have my bary for caves, but I should probably breed a backup just in case. My bary is actually my only tamed with an actually good saddle, he has a mc on but I have a bp for an asc one that I haven't gotten around to making yet. And I still need to make that asc longneck too. Busy, busy. But a happy busy.
  22. Decided today my main goal would be the most critical one: my outer perimeter wall. So it took up quite a chunk of my time today, but I got it done so aside from being open at the shoreline, my base is now completely protected. Then of course came the annoyance of rearranging all the animals inside the walls so everything wasn't just crowded around my house. My argent grew up during this time period so I put him with my clean base female and started working on my next mutation. No luck so far, but Yulia is getting a lot of levels from eating all the rejects. Cruel? Maybe a bit. But the exp isn't going to waste this way. With my walls complete, I took my rex out and kited the 150 yuty back to the taming arena. Boy am I glad I tamed her. She stood up with 40 points in HP, a solid 9.9k, and a whole 10 points over my previous 30. Fantastic. I know they don't need it but she also has a new high melee stat too. I am honestly very excited to work these stats in together, especially with my 39 stamina. Really need to push for the final 2 levels I need to unlock the Industrial Cooker, I have so many yuty eggs now. Definitely want to hunt down a few more rexes and hopefully find a good HP stat like the new yuty. I think if I can get 40+ in HP, paired with my current 38 melee I should be in good enough shape to potentially take on gamma bosses even with primitive saddles. Should be able to run swamp with my bary to look for bps, just need to set up an outpost over there first. And make a longneck to handle arthros. Still many, many things to work on in the neat future.
  23. Well, it's been quite a long time since I posted last. One of the reasons why I don't really play on servers much anymore is because I don't have the time to dedicate to regular gaming the way I used to even a couple years ago. Life happened, and I set Ark aside. But this weekend I loaded up for the first time in about 2 months and tried to remember where I left off. I do remember I had to roll back to an earlier save after an S+ update, which even this long afterwards still sucks. I haven't gone back to re-tame that basilo yet. After checking around the base a bit and reacquainting myself with my situation I took my loyal yet unnamed argent and set off. Over the course of it, I feel like I actually made a decent amount of progress. I ended up taming 3 more rexes, including 1 female, finally. No standout stats on any of them, but I was still able to finally, finally get a bred and imprinted rex. This rex has a very important role, clearing spawns and kiting yutys into my taming arena. Immediately put her to work doing just that and tamed 3 more yutys, slowly building up both my stat line and my kibble flock. Despite their long breeding time even on my greatly increased settings, I managed to put together a pair with my best stats and even got a stamina mutation...that was immediately outclassed by my last tame. That's ok. I'll keep this bred one, Yulia, and continue working on that line in the background. If/when she falls to a boss, I'll replace her with a stronger yuty. Also tamed about 10 new argents. I'm a bit conflicted, as I did get some higher stats...but only by 1 point each, when I know I could get a good roll for 8-10 points higher on those stats. I kept those birds but haven't bred them in yet, because it seems silly right now. However, I did start mutation stacking on my stamina because I just can't imagine having a wild tame stand up with a better roll. 54 is my clean base line, which I've already stacked 2 mutations on and now have 58. During my travels I raided every red and yellow drop I could find and got an ascendant longneck, but that was the only drop of note. I desperately need better saddles for all of my animals. I still have an alpha rex hanging out on the iceberg I kited it to because I just can't kill it until I get a high armor argent saddle. My birds can and have killed them before, this one is just too high a level for my current line. Finally, I did a significant amount of work around the base. I built a chem bench and an industrial forge and rearranged my breeding area. It's open now to better fit larger animals. I'm actually playing with PVP on like Syntac does so I can level up my animals by killing the unwanted babies, it works so fantastically well that I can't imagine playing standard PVE ever again tbh. M still can't play, so unless/until he can I'll stick to single player anyway. After a couple of incidents and a close call while kiting a yuty, I also finally laid out and started building my outer perimeter, about 1/3 of the way done already. Once that's done I'm going to move my raising area away from the hatchery... While this is still based on the Ultimate Ark run, I also decided I'm going to change my rules up a bit, mainly because I dislike redundancy and I intend to play the maps normally afterwards. So my rules are going to be I still start on each map with only my character, nothing else. But once I tame an animal on a new map, I will allow transfer of that species from previous maps. So I'm not starting out super op, but I'm not wasting my time breeding a brand new army and scrounging for gear for each set of bosses either, that's just silly. I think it's a fair compromise. However, I will not allow the transfer of anything Tek between maps, that I'll have to build new each time if I want it. For animals that are map exclusive, I'll allow transfer of them only after defeating the alpha bosses of that map. Outside of boss prep I don't expect I'll be transferring much anyway, at least not until I've done everything. Current goals: continue working on the argent line, finish my perimeter wall, and tame the 150 yuty I know is running around not far from my base. Also need to get some metal runs in, I've been sorely neglecting my resources. Can't even build that longneck because I spent all my metal on my crafting stations earlier.
  24. Been cutting back my playtime a bit this week. I admit I use this as stress release a little too much and I've had a lot going on outside the game lately. But yesterday I had off from work and not much going on so into the game I went. I'm both making a lot of progress and not enough at the same time. I think I can finally articulate exactly what it is about the midgame grind that is so frustrating. It's because this is the point where rng makes or breaks your progress. Leveling up, learning the industrial Engrams, etc is all easy because it's just farming. Farming Explorer Notes and narcotics, farming metal, farming penguins, whatever. All easy to do. But then you need to farm dinos too and get your breeding lines started for bosses, and that's where the game really falls flat. I've been hunting and farming for high level rexes for a week and even with the level equalizer code, I've found 3. Of those 3, I've successfully tamed 2. Of those 2, neither one has breedable stats. Plus they are both male so I couldn't breed them even if I wanted to. I have done a lot of taming and breeding, too. My argent line is well on its way to being ready for muts. I've got a bred anky but haven't found a good female doed yet. Got mediocre but functional bred barys and a yuty. Can make extraordinary kibble now which makes life so much easier, used it to get a max level basilo with low HP but decent melee. But I just can't find any good rexes. My ideal plan would be to get my rex line established and use the time while I'm raising them, stacking muts etc to do the rest of my boss prep. Farming caves for artifacts and bps, the mats to make the saddles, taming up allos for the snow cave, etc. All the other time intensive things that could get done while raising the rex army in the background because doing them first doesn't make sense to me. Breeding is by and large a passive activity and the last thing I want to do is sit around twiddling my thumbs waiting for 20+ rexes to grow up, you know? That's when I get so much farming, taming, base building etc done. I've had days where by the time I raised one argent I tamed another one with better stats and immediately started on the next generation. So yeah. For all of the taming and breeding I did yesterday, I'm still in the exact same position I was when I started.
  25. @Richman4 All animals with the exception of dodos lay eggs at the same rate. Most people will usually tame whatever the smallest animal is so they take up the least amount of room. I will also add that with this kibble system you can use higher tier kibbles in place of lower ones. If you really wanted to skip all the hassle of a traditional kibble farm you could tame or trade for a few yutyrannus, their eggs are used for "special" egg tier kibble aka extraordinary kibble and people usually have tons of them because yutys are used in boss fights. A few of those around and you need literally nothing else for kibble. Even works with imprints. Don't forget to tame up an oviraptor for their egg boosting ability too if you don't already have one. Good plan with the holding off on breeding. I feel like it's one of the bigger mistakes new players make, they rush headlong into breeding before being set up properly and then can't keep up with themselves, basically. Luckily AC units are fairly cheap, but on officials I think you still need at least 9 of them to guarantee hatching anything. Granted I literally just did that myself, but in my case the issue was a lack of space and not a lack of prepardness. It was really cramped hatching argents in my stable lol. As for the uneven ground, it is actually possible but prepare to be frustrated. Going downhill is easier than going uphill, but using a pillars and ceilings system you can build up and then use ramps to make the addition accessible. Or just make another building entirely. I pretty much always end up with an entire base complex. It's not better or worse so much as it is that it's easier to plan and build one smaller building from scratch than it is to build one massive base to hold everything. Plus on a large base build, one misplacement or accidental removal can have dire consequences...ask me how I know lol. I have so much respect for anyone who builds in vanilla/official, I honestly can't function without S+ these days. Not being able to at least stack foundations to make even floors is just madness to me. And I have built without it, that's why I don't anymore lol. I would also add that before anything else, you really want to push for that forge. It makes literally everything else so, so much easier to get. I usually start "saving" some of my metal to build one as soon as I get my first anky. Literally I make a box just for forge supplies and 10% of all the metal I smelt goes straight into that box until I have enough for it. Also if you're rebuilding in metal and you don't already have some, tame up a few snails. They make cementing paste and polymer.
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