Ark: Survival Evolved - Dinos and Leveling Survival Game

One of many reasons why I will never play on an official server. Of all my 4050 hours I’ve spent in Ark, I’ve been on an official server for probably 60 seconds because I wanted to test something, I think it was to determine if I had a mod mismatch with my server.

When I spawned in, someone had placed spike walls at the spawn location, so I couldn’t move or do anything. Pretty much sums up officials.

Ragan your summary pretty much describes ANY online PvP game for me. You have legit players, legit players who suck, and players that cheat. If it were only the former two, I’d have no issue. But when you bring the latter one in, it just ruins a lot of the experience for others.

I have yet to try PvP for ARK though.

Updates from the Island. The server is now auto-updating per the other two QT3 servers. It also has a few additional mods (spoil bin, dino bars, stargate.) We are up to 3 active players, and I think all of us are 70+ now. I just made a huge mistake attacking an alpha Rex with our two best dinos. Yay!

Questions for you guys:

I understand getting the highest level dino possible when taming. I also understand checking stats before tame and how those correlate to stats via Dododex or similar. I’ve also incubated and hatched a few dinos now. BUT, I’ve just started using Nanny for more consistent imprinting.

  • Does imprinting affect the base dino? In other words, can I take a newly imprinted (once adult) and the stats gained count toward genetic info passed to new eggs/babies?

  • Besides a perfect tame on a high level dino or a perfect imprint, how do you guys select a stat and max it out via breeding?

I’m looking for examples of how you guys went about something like @Grembel and the Spinos he has. They are massive tanks. What’s the progression (generally) in getting to that point?

Ragan is the master but its just a matter of getting a couple high level dinos and breeding your desired traits into the line.

So I say get a female with huge hps and a male with nice attack. you then breed them until you get new dinos with both stats. Just kill off the dinos that dont have the stats you want.

No, the imprinting stat bonus is not passed on. When a baby is hatched (with 0% imprinting) or a wild dino is tamed, whatever their stats are, those are the ones that can possibly be passed to the next generation.

Not all max level dinos are worth taming, unfortunately, it is not possible to know that before you tame them. As Grem said, you a pair or more of dinos and start breeding them. And yes, if you really want a monster uber dino, you will do extensive inbreeding.

As I’ve mentioned, I keep a spreadsheet of all the dino stats I am breeding. For each stat, I find the max stat out of the entire herd and highlight it in the spreadsheet. Then when I breed, I find all the possible combinations that could give me a baby with all the highest stats. If the highest stats are spread across more than two dinos, I breed some of them until I get a baby that has highest stats, then add the baby back into the breeding herd.

Also, you need to be an opportunistic tamer. As you travel around, whip out the spyglass and check out the levels of random dinos. If you have the time and energy, tame anything that is even moderately high level. Occasionally you will find a lower level dino that is min/maxed, i.e. one stat is pumped really high while the rest are really low. I’ve tamed non-max level (130/135 stuff with max 150) that had a useful stat.

If you find one that has a better stat that you want, you add it into your breeding herd. Or if you get a mutation in a stat you want. It will take time though, but once you get a male dino with all the max stats you want, you’re almost there. Now you just use that male and breed him with all your females. Eventually the RNG will smile on you and you will get several max stat females.

Once you have a max stat male and 3 to 5 females, you can go have fun with the rest of your herd. I generally take them out and fight a giga or titan. If they win, I find another one, and another, until they lose. Why? Because at that point you could easily have a herd of 30+ dinos. Don’t be afraid to cull the herd when you get a breeder dino you no longer need.

Those are my ramblings on how I handle breeding. I’ve feed so many of dino babies with the meat from another dino baby that didn’t quite measure up. Another person I played used the same process as I did. We started calling each other Dr. Moreau for all the dinos we killed that just didn’t quite meet expectations.

Morbidly funny. But thanks to you both. It’s building up tamed stock that takes so much damned time.

Current game breeding stock is limited. I just killed off our awesome Theriz high level female because I’m an idiot. But thats ARK. Highs and lows, all mixed together.

BTW, we’ve run into a Structures Plus bug. It seems something got hosed on wiring currently. You can’t pick up wires once placed. Or at least we cannot. Not sure if this is a mod incompatibility or a bug.

Happy post-valentines event. Here’s hoping you guys got some ridiculously colored tames in. The tribe got several, here are some highlights.

Based on the advice above, I’ve begun breeding some of our high level argents to get a more pristine stock. We still have a lot of wild tamed ones that just really need to be culled. I have exactly one breeding pair above 225, but working on another female that we picked up in the 150 range with decent melee.

Thanks for the advice @Grembel and @Ragan.

I am looking for some advice re cross play.

I am playing on PC and my son on xbox. I can set up The island on a non dedicated and invite him to join but how would i go about using the other 2 maps.

Can I run a dedicated server on this pc and join it from here as well him joining on the xbox or any other simple solutions? Non dedicated is greyed out on the other maps Ragnarok and The Centre

cheers

I am making the assumption that you have the Windows 10 Store version of Ark (and not the Steam version) because Windows Store & Xbox are the only two platforms that allow cross play.

That being said, I have no experience with that type of cross play. I did find this article that describes how to run a dedicated Win 10/Xbox cross play server: https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/articles.html/ark-survival-evolved-available-now-on-windows-10-with-crossplay-r638/

Scroll down to the edit section where Microsoft says how to set one up.

Well I got the steam version then my son got the xbox version so i now have 2 versions, steam and windows 10 store :)

Thanks for the link.

Any of you PC version players still going? My two friends and I rolled in on a new cluster with open player/dino movement between each. It’s a 4 server cluster, containing The Island, Scorched Earth, Ragnarok and Aberration.

If there is any interest here, please let me know.

I’ve done this. It takes jumping through a few hoops. Once you get it setup it is easy to start up a dedicated Ark server on Win10 and join from multiple Xboxes. No extra cost required beyond the price of Ark.

What are the server rates (xp, taming, gathering, breeding, baby growth) and what mods are you running?

Great question, Ragan. I should mention this is free to anyone wanting to join, I’m not looking for buy in, I didn’t specify that but wanted to offer QT3 folks the ability to play. Since there are so few of us, things are cranked way up for speed. Especially so as part of a cluster. The mod list is fairly similar to what you guys had but has several additions for additional gameplay, building, and assistance.

These mating settings generally get at least one mate a day, sometimes more. The eggs/gestation run no more than about 10-15 minutes and full baby to adult within a day. It’s fast, almost too much so but the large portion of the previous server we played on was just two people trying to get things done. Imprinting runs about 4 times per growth, with around a 25% imprint per (assuming you aren’t using Nanny+ or Premium Care.)

Resource rates are normal except for Oil/Silicon which have a boost.

Transfers are allowed into and around all the cluster, so it’s open to whomever and whatever they want to bring.

MatingIntervalMultiplier=.1
LayEggIntervalMultiplier=.3
EggHatchSpeedMultiplier=10
BabyMatureSpeedMultiplier=20
BabyImprintingStatScaleMultiplier=2
BabyCuddleIntervalMultiplier=.05
BabyCuddleGracePeriodMultiplier=1
BabyCuddleLoseImprintQualitySpeedMultiplier=1
BabyFoodConsumptionSpeedMultiplier=1
CropDecaySpeedMultiplier=0.001
CropGrowthSpeedMultiplier=2
GlobalSpoilingTimeMultiplier=13
GlobalItemDecompositionTimeMultiplier=5
GlobalCorpseDecompositionTimeMultiplier=7
DinoHarvestingDamageMultiplier=4
PlayerHarvestingDamageMultiplier=1

DayCycleSpeedScale=.8
DayTimeSpeedScale=.5
NightTimeSpeedScale=3
ResourcesRespawnPeriodMultiplier=.3
HarvestAmountMultiplier=2
HarvestHealthMultiplier=2
TamedDinoDamageMultiplier=1
TamedDinoResistanceMultiplier=1
TamingSpeedMultiplier=10
XPMultiplier=2
OverrideOfficialDifficulty=5.000000
DifficultyOffset=1.0

PreventDownloadSurvivors=false
PreventDownloadItems=false
PreventDownloadDinos=false
PreventUploadSurvivors=false
PreventUploadItems=false
PreventUploadDinos=false
NoTributeDownloads=False

Mod list:
642284892 - Dino Healthbars/Torpbars
895711211 - Classic Flyers
1300713111 - Rare Sightings
558651608 - Bridge Mod
1102050924 - Swim Clear Scuba Mask
609380111 - Stargate Worlds
821530042 - Upgrade Station
731604991 - Structures Plus
538827119 - Omnicular Spyglass
622595587 - Oil Compressor (Fertilizer to Oil)
719928795 - Platforms Plus
725398419 - Snappy Saddles and Rafts
750483861 - Dino Aid
566885854 - “Death Helper” Corpse Finder and Suicide Potion
962984672 - Ticket Mod
566887000 - Pet Finder
770854372 - Armor Stand
708807240 - Pillars Plus
569786012 - Meat Spoiler
876038468 - Baby Premium Care Imprint and Growth Helper

Send me the connection info, I’ve been thinking of trying some Ark again lately.

I haven’t played on the Island in ages, so I think I’ll start there and eventually move to the swamp.

Sent, Ragan. If you see anything funky or that needs changing, let me know.

Since you might not be used to the health bars on dinos, the following will help:

Home = pulls up the menu
F7 = toggle the bars on and off completely
F8 = turns the text on and off

They look like this:
image

Legend:
Small box contains the level and is either filled pink (female) or blue (male)
Yellow bar is the torp meter and/or unconscious meter
Green bar is health

Something in your PM reminded me of something.

Do you run these Arks on your own server, not rented, but have the physical server in house or something like that?

Reason I am asking is Wildcard introduced a social problem when they added the clustered server feature. There is no way to talk to anyone on a different server in the same cluster. You can be on Aberration and I could be on Scorched Earth, and we cannot chat.

I can understand that not being there for official servers, but for private server clusters, especially low pop ones, you can at times feel like you are playing along because no one else is playing on your map.

That being said, when I ran my own Ark cluster I created a process that allowed cross-server chat. I wasn’t perfect, but it worked. It works best if it can be run directly on the game server, hence my question on where the server is.

Edit: Just tried to join and prompted a question. Do we really need BattlEye? I mean I know it is enabled, but is it necessary? If you want it turned on, that’s fine, just checking to see if that was your choice, or just left it turned on by default.

Good questions, since it’s mostly just be a couple of us I hadn’t thought about cross-server chat, which would be nice. The cluster is hosted at a server, and to be honest they may actually have something that works for that, I’ll check it shortly. How was your script run? There is some leeway within the hosting service but I’m not sure how much it will allow.

And we definitely do NOT need battleye, but I don’t believe I ever saw that as a config option. Perhaps that’s a command line option on the server start? Do you know where it’s set?

Ragan, this looks doable and is on their click to add API list: