prodigy1202

A wipe wouldn't fix anything. Ark's official servers are notoriously unbalanced, as we know, and the middle-game of ark basically disappears on PVP servers because when you join you are either killed repeatedly, never being allowed out of the early game, or you immediately join an alpha tribe, putting you in the late game, essentially removing the actual central gameplay loop. It's a really glaring problem that should have been addressed long before this game was officially released. One of the things people subconsciously, or consciously, love about ark is just how powerful you are by the end of the game compared to the beginning of the game. It's a system that means that basically, you could play for hundreds of hours and still have a ladder to climb. It's great in that way. *Really* bad for the type of competitive multiplayer system they currently have. The best solution I can think of is to make PVP conditional and inconsequential. Instead of having servers that are always PVP-central, have servers that have "PVP days." These would basically be just what they sound like, days on which players can engage in PVP, destroy each others bases, kill each others dinos etc. Once the PVP day is over the server is reloaded and anything that was destroyed or killed is back the way it was.

The raptors that are already in the game are Utahraptors

So if any of you bothered to read my one or two past posts on this thread you'd know that I just restarted a new world on the Island, however I'm doing it again. Why you might ask? Because I'm going to try to play Ark Hardcore mode. What is Ark Hardcore you might ask? Well I'm sure other people have their own rules for Ark Hardcore mode, but the only rule I'm abiding by is this: The game doesn't end until you either beat the game or you die. I will have certain multipliers on. The taming speed and xp gain will both be 2x, and gathering rates will be 3x. I get that that may not be hardcore enough for some of you, but frankly the game is too boring for me to play with base resource rates. I don't want to feel like I'm spending 90% of my time grinding. Also I will be playing on the max difficulty, so highest level dinos will be able to spawn. I'll be posting updates on this little experiment of mine whenever I get the chance to play.

So I'm now in college, and sadly there is no room in my dorm for my PS4, so my old Ark world on The Center with my old dino buddies must be put on hiatus. As of a few days ago I hadn't played Ark in almost two months. I had, however, previously downloaded Ark via Steam on my old Macbook Air. As you'd expect the game ran like a slideshow on the lowest settings. Good news is, I've gotten a new computer since then. So, I downloaded Ark onto my new computer a few days ago. This is no gaming laptop, but it's certainly more powerful than a Macbook Air. Anyway, I now have the game running fairly smoothly on Medium settings. Day 1. Went pretty much as you'd expect the Ark Adventure to begin. I started building a thatch hut, crafting cloth clothing, spears, and the necessary tools. Since I was building a fairly large starter home, I actually ended up upgrading to wood before I finished the house. I quickly worked my way up to Bow and Tranq arrow level. I was having an incredibly hard time finding high level dinos for some reason. The vast majority of the dinos seemed to be level 20 or less. Eventually I did find a level 100 Dilo, knocked it out and tamed it up immediately. I don't have a name for her yet. I upgraded to Hide armor and completed my wooden home. I died at one point at the hands of a Titanoboa, but managed to keep my now level 149 Dilo from having the same fate. I knocked out a level 100 Pteranodon and things seemed to be going well. It was at that point that I decided to log off. Day 2. Didn't go quite as well. I didn't exactly lose any progress. I did die and lose all of my stuff, but at this point in the game recovery is super easy. My Dilo is still alive and well, but the Pteranodon woke up while I was out looking for other high level dinos. I found a high level trike and started gathering narcoberries and narcotics in order to tame it, but it ended up getting killed by a spino. I wandered around for another hour and a half and found nothing worth taming. It was pretty boring. Hopefully I can find something useful eventually, but we'll see.

Questions: My baby rex, Princess, is only level 204 while her father is level 267 and her mother is level 273. Is it just me or is that absurdly low? Is level 204 reasonable with parents of that caliber or is that as far in the low end as I think it is? I play on single player PVE without maturation speed cranked yet she grew up so fast that she only needed to be cared for once and she was at 100% imprinting. I went through this process about a year and a half ago with a baby Carno and I took MUCH longer. What’s changed?

I continued the process of smelting up twenty-five thousand metal ingots using refining forges. I destroyed my camp fires and made an industrial grill. I hatched and raised a female T.rex names Princess. (Question: Her Mom is a 273 and her dad is a 267. She hatched at 204, but that seems incredibly low. Am I right about that?) She’s got mostly orange skin with a white underbelly. She was about 60% finished developing when I logged off. (Question: I checked and maturation speed is not cranked for my game, yet for some reason Princess matured very quickly. I only needed to care for her once and she was at 100% imprinting. This was not the case many months ago when I had a baby carnotaurs to take care if. Have the devs changed something for single player and if so how do I change it back?) I also started building up the third floor. I decided to let Princess roam around the base, but once she’s all grown up I’m gonna need to go on an obsidian run, because lots of the tech I need requires Polymer.

I started the LONG process of smelting all of the metal I have. I managed to craft eight air conditioners and a generator with electrical cables connecting them. I then built a ramp from the second floor of my base (where all of my crafting and work stuff will be going on, including incubation and hatching.) to the outside of my base where my dinos are. My next order of business will be to load the forges back up with more metal and to build a dino breeding pen.

Alright so my metal gathering expedition was cut a bit short at the small volcanic island... I died, but as expected my boy Cloud prevented any further death. The part that really cut the trip short is that three of my large storage boxes of metal were destroyed when my group was attacked by T.Rexes, so I needed to spend about 45 minutes transferring the dropped metal to the remaining storage boxes. I then decided that since all my other storage boxes were below half health that I wouldn’t risk losing all this metal so I headed back home. Overall I’d still call this a successful trip. All in all I gathered over twenty five thousand ingots worth of metal: a solid haul, and probably well enough to finish up the body of my base. My next step is to start forging all of this stuff. While the forging is going on I’ll need to go on an enormous cementing paste run. Really wish you could get cementing paste by killing Araneo and such with the frog, but sadly I need to go into the swamp for dragonflies. Anyway after that my next priority will be air conditioners so that I can incubate eggs while I continue construction.

Single player: as friendly as it gets, lol. I don’t have any industrial forges yet. I’m just now upgrading my base from stone to metal and industrializing. I’ve been operating with a room full of ten regular forges.

Damn that’s literally just across the bay from my base XD. I should have started off with that. I might fill up my storage chests before I get back there. Meh, I can build more storage chests. But thus far I’ve collected the equivalent of about twelve thousand metal ingots: already twice the amount that I gathered this past weekend.

Today I set off On a quest to find and mine metal all over the center map. I loaded up my raft with like ten large storage chests, my 230 Ankylo named Oreo, Cloud my 270 battle argy for security, and Victoria my 210 cargo Quetzal for easy metal transport to the raft. Now I’m setting sail across the ocean like jack raptoring sparrow in search of metal hotspots to mine out. As of now I’ve stopped by Skull island, and the southeastern island. I also plan to stop by the two lava islands (Cloud can three shot a mid level rex so I’m not so worried), and the northern jungle area. I know that there’s metal at the top of the two snowy mountains, however I’ll be saving those for last because I’d need to park my raft really far away from there and therefore metal transport from there would be tedious. Are there any metal hotspots I’m forgetting???

Technically they’re Utahraptors, not Velociraptors. Just sayin’. Cool tho.

As expected today I ran out of metal during my base upgrades. I finished the body of the bottom floor, thankfully, but the second floor isn’t even half finished. I’m on the Center Map so finding more metal I’d gonna be a bit of a pain XD

Reached my metal gathering quota, finally, and started on the base upgrades. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I’m gonna need more metal XD. I ended up gathering about 6 thousand metal ingots worth of metal, but I think I’m gonna run out before I even finish upgrading the body of my base, let alone the hardware inside of it. All I did tonight is upgrade the bottom floor’s foundations to metal as well as a few walls. By the time my base is done I will have my living quarters on the bottom floor, my work stations on the second floor and my aviary/hangar and storage room on the third floor.

Since I’ve defeated the Gamma Center Arena it’s time to get to get to phase 2 of Ark. that basically means I’ll be upgrading my base a poopton. It’s gonna require tons of metal and just as much stone. I started gathering metal today. Gonna have about two thousand ingots once I’m finished smelting what I have thus far, but I’m not done yet. I’m confident that by the time I’m finished I’ll have over four thousand metal ingots to work with. I dunno how far it’ll get me in terms of my upgrades to my base, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

So after I beat the Center Gamma Arena I gathered my army and we made the trek back to base. I died a few times on the way back so I actually returned with more dinos then I let with. So that’s great. It’s time for phase 2 of Ark. I’ll be upgrading the main structure of my base from stone to metal, and the walls around my base from wood to stone. I’ll be getting a gas grill, a cooker, power generator, AC units for incubation etc. Anyway in order for all of that to happen I need to stop relying on my one Ankylosaur (Cliffe) for metal. So I got two high level Ankylosaurs (one male and one female) and knocked them out. It was all easy enough to do. While they started to tame up I put notes on my dinos. I do this to remind myself what roles I want that particular dino to fill and therefore what I’ll want to be upgrading it in. I’ve done this before so I figured I’d keep doing it until tha Anks are finished taming.

Only 95 for Alpha!? It takes 100 just to build a replicator! And you’re fighting two bosses! For the center what I’d do if I were a developer I’d crank up the requirements to battle a the bosses and then gave it be 50, 100, and 200 for Gamma, Beta and Alpha respectively. Also the wiki is incorrect about the arena requirements for gamma. You don’t need any animal parts, just artifacts.

Okay, so I completed the Center Gamma Arena without losing a single Dino!...but there’s a problem...y’see I only actually got 16 element out of it. Is that normal???

Today’s the day, ladies and gents...I’ll be taking on the Gamma Center Arena within a couple of hours...I’m so raptoring nervous...

Honestly I don’t think they had a story in mind when they were making this game...at least not a complete one. I doubt many people play ark for its story anyway.

Alright. My boss squad is full. I have all the tribute items that I need. All that’s left is to transport my army to the green obelisk. This has gone almost too well so far. Every other time that I’ve tried to transport a large group of dinos across the map like this somebody has gotten lost. So far I’m only a few steps from the Savannah biome and once I’m there my chances of losing somebody fall drastically. Sadly I’m only able to really travel by night because there are three Megalosaurs in my army. They tend to slow things down if they don’t get their beauty rest. Right now I’m camping out on a small island in the middle of the swamp while daytim passes. This will be a boring wait but hopefully we’ll worth it in the end... MyArsenal for the Center Gamma Arena fight: Full riot gear w/backup flak gear A longneck rifle w/ 100 rounds A shotgun w/ 100 shells 50 stimulant food and water 5 Rexes 4 Allosaurs 3 Spinosaurs 3 Megalosaurs 2 Therizinosaurs 2 Yutyrannus 1 Daeodon Im only able to play Ark about 5 hours a week maximum, so this is about a real-time year and a half of work that it took to get me to this point. If I lose this fight I lose all that time as well. I’m nervous, but I feel ready... I’ll be streaming this either tomorrow or Monday. I’ll try to let y’all know at least an hour ahead of time if anybody’s Interested.

Today was a good day. I FINALLY killed that Tusoteuthis (which I way over prepared for btw) and got eight Tusoteuthis tentacles. Now I just need the Artifact of the Brute from the bottom of the Southeastern Trench. Here’s my current problem, though. I looked up some videos of people attempting the Center Gamma Arena and all of their dinos were in the mid 200’s in terms of level. Most of my dinos are in the low 200’s and there are some that are in the mid-high 100’s. Am I that underprepared for the boss fight? I’m thinking of doing some grinding...

Oof, so tonight I went off on one more scouting mission to make sure I could find that Tusoteuthis that I had found earlier. If I was able to find it I would get my aquatic squad amen go after it. That’s just not what ended up happening... it seems like every time I gonna scouting for Tusoteuthis i find a DIFFERENT tuso. The first time I found the alpha, then I found the good level 55 that I’d be willing to kill, but tonight I found a level 150 which is great if I’m able to find it again I’ll go tame it, but that sucks because there’s non wagbin hell I’m gonna try and kill that thing. Does anybody here have a good strategy for trying to find Tusoteuthis? It’s become a bit of a struggle...

I was thinking about doing that. Might not be a bad idea.

So I went on another squid hunt today. I don’t think I’m gonna risk taking on an Alpha Tuso. It took me a solid hour and a half, but I did end up finding a Tuso. The only problem is that it’s right next to a Mosasaur. Both of them are fairly low level: 55 and 60. I think my aquatic army should be fine. I’m strategizing the actual poop out of this. I’m going to ride Nessie in and try to make sure that she is the one that the Tuso grabs. I’ll then hop on Bruce, my Megalodon instead of my other Plesi because the turning radius is more manageable for the plesi AI than it is for a player riding it, which is not the case for the Megalodon. I’ll also be bringing a couple hundred stone arrows and three crossbows in case I want to sacrifice my own safety for some extra damage during the fight. I also may be live-streaming it but that’s tbd.