Ark: Survival Evolved - Dinos and Leveling Survival Game

Taming extravaganza!

First off, I’ll introduce Gaia. I managed to tame her over the course of 3 real life days. It was a pain having to constantly move the cannon, but got her in the end.

Titans are like rock elementals & crabs. You have to bludgeon them into submission with large blunt objects to specific parts of their anatomy. It took me probably over 100 cannon balls (with all the misses and hitting the wrong spot).

The stats. All titans are lvl 5 and do not level up. Once tamed, they gain 2 levels and their health is 334,000, stamina 2000, O2 600, food 8640, and weight 50,000. Their normal attack does 1860 damage and does full damage to rock elementals (instead of only 10% like most dinos & weapons).

I’ve lowered the food consumption rate to 1% so that I don’t have to log in and feed her every day because after a server reboot, tamed titans no longer will eat on their own.

I pretty much use them for mass resource gathering. I’ve had to put storage boxes on the platform saddle (saddle takes 4000 metal ignots and 4000 hide) because the titan will fill up the 300 inventory slots long before it gets overloaded.

Second tame was last night. Skruggle mentioned that there were two more titans for me to kill (titans give around 4500 hide and 250 primes when you use a 400% chainsaw to harvest the body, plus 28,000xp). As I was gearing up for that, a rare sighting message popped up, a rare rex. The first one I’ve seen on any server.

Found him on the edge of the mountains and desert, a male 210 rex. I promptly tamed him (think he tamed out at 314). But now that I have him, I have to re-do all my boss rexes. His tamed stats are 11440 health, 2480 stamina, 980 weight, 372 melee. Health is 2000 higher than any of my other rexes, including the 162 tek rex I tamed on the Center. But the tek rex has just a little higher melee (378). All in all, this will be a huge improvement to my regular rex herd.

My Super Duper Rex

Awesome work on both. By the way, this is just like me taking a screenshot. Clean everything up, step back to take a pic and the dino takes a dump, right then.

I can’t wait to see how much you can breed out of the rex to another line. I think you have some females that level so let us know how that changes the boss group.

I finally got my industrial grinder made and promptly ground 3 containers worth of loot drops I had stored up. Then upgraded to nearly double the fridges, and added several more metal storage units to the ones I have at the base because I’m running out of room, again.

Now I just need more land area at the base to set up some Rex hatching, and work on a Yuty. Thanks for the eggs, Ragan. That’ll save a ton of time.

@Grembel @Ragan @Kyle700 @DeepT

I’ve been toying around with adding a new mod challenge on one of the servers to test it out for a bit. The mod is called Primal Fear and a write up can be found here. The quick summary is that it massively modifies the dino spawns on a server, adds a lot of variance and gameplay related to them, and injects a bit more fun into taming and killing things.

Since it is a pretty big change from where we are now, I thought maybe a good fit for the testing would be The Center server. I’d like your thoughts though before I attempt something like that, as it might be too much of a change to the gameplay if you guys like where things are now.

I’m also always welcome to changing up mods or testing new ones you hear about. This could be something of a way to differentiate the different servers in the cluster, but as part of testing I would need to see how well it works in a mixed setting.

Quick writeup on Primal Fear:

Primal Fear is a massive dino mod. This mod adds varying tameable tiers of dinos, as well as special boss dinos. Currently, you can tame Toxics, Alpha’s, Apex, Fabled, Buffoon, Celestial, Demonic, Elder, and Elemental. The bosses include Primal, Origin, and the Creator. Toxic, Alpha, Apex, and Fabled dinos are math based, and are 3x, 5x, 10x 16x vanilla stats. Almost every creature has an alpha variant. Apex variants are carnivorous fighters, and Fabled variants are passive work horses.

Demonics are cast away creatures hell bent on becoming useful, powerful, mounts. They have sold their soul to evil in order to gain ultimate power. Celestial’s are the pure and true counter part, set there as a counter balance.

Primal Fear currently has over 200 different creatures in it, and it grows all the time.

On top of dinos, this mod also adds varying items to enhance game play. These items include a tranq system, healing items, dino blood, multiple sets of armor, tranq pike, taming helpers, wake up stimulate, and more!

Added video spotlight:

Sounds pretty drastic. I know for me I am still working on taking down vanilla bosses. Sounds like this mod would really change game play by a ton.

It does indeed seem drastic. I could always test locally to see how much. My question is if it’s possible to run it on one server only and if that causes transfer problems. I don’t think this changes bosses, rather it adds the ability for “Primal” boss spawns in the world using the model of the equivalent actual bosses. In other words, these are not the arena bosses you have to use tribute to get to. But I imagine they are still quite formidable and one spawning near you might, uh, be destructive.

I’s also an add-on to the Primal mod itself, and can be fully bypassed.

The mod itself is mentioned a lot as one of the two more popular dino mods:
Extinction Core - Apparently slower progression and more balanced
Primal Fear (this one) - quicker progression and more excitement

I think adding that mod to all the server right now would wreak a lot of havoc. No one’s base or dinos are prepared to deal with stuff like that. That being said, the Center would be the perfect map to try it out on. No one has any sort of permanent base there. People could transfer over and try it out.

For transfers, you would probably want to turn off dino uploads on the Center so no one could take any of their uber dinos to another server. If that would even work since the Primal Fear dinos wouldn’t exist on any other server.

One big question though is what is the player and dino level cap? I’ve seen some people play with those and the characters are like level 600+. Again, it would throw off the balance of the other servers if a lvl300 character transferred over and everyone else was still capped at 101. Not even sure if the transfer would allow it. It might scale the character back to the current server’s level cap.

All great questions. I do think a test might answer some of them, so I’ll look into setting that up on the center, but disabling transfers of dinos outbound until more is known.

I think this looks really neat. I’d be totally willing to try it on the Center. Pono (Kiptah) also said he thinks it sounds good and would like to try it. As someone noted above, no one has a permanent base there or uses it much right now.

However, i also agree that it should only be on the one server. And does the entire cluster have to have the same mods? Maybe if you just disable dino transfer as Ragan said it would be fine. As long as it doesn’t wreck anything or impact any of the other servers / character files / stuff like that, I’d be fine with it.

I am not playing much anymore, so it doesn’t matter much to me. I am not really into dinos it seems.

Sorry to hear that, man. No worries though, the dinos will be around if you get bored! And if not, there are always the game backlogs I think we all have. :)

Okay, I think we are set to try it out. I was able to log in this morning, though I noted the server up time said 0, I still saw structure sfor both me and Ragan when I logged in. I’m not sure what that means, but it is what it is. The mod was installed and should have loaded, but I cannot tell how rare the spawns are, so I don’t know if it is active or not. I’ll test more this evening.

I modified the Center server to allow anything to transfer IN to it. However, only YOU (player,) and your items can go out. So if you bring a pretty dino in, well, it’s stuck there forever. I don’t know how restrictive this will end up being in operation. I’d ask you all to understand that I do not know how eggs from the new mod are handled. Until I know more, please do not transfer off the server with eggs, as anything from the new mod might either cause issues, or poison the supply we currently have with stats obtained from the new mod.

PreventDownloadSurvivors=false
PreventDownloadItems=false
PreventDownloadDinos=false
PreventUploadSurvivors=false
PreventUploadItems=false
PreventUploadDinos=true

For now I ONLY have the base mod loaded, Primal Fear. There are no additional add-ons loaded, so the following are NOT present:
Primal Fear Bosses
Primal Fear Noxious Dinos
Primal Fear SE Dinos
Primal Fear Aberration Dinos

This should breathe a little life into the Center, hopefully. Enjoy!

How does engram leveling work? since there are new engrams, will it mess up skill levels when transfering?

Nah, you’ll be fine. Your character is just a data file, but includes how many engrams you have now, what you’ve picked to spend them on before, etc. But it also includes your items worn and carried. So when you transfer to anther ark (a choice at any loot beacon or Obelisk) you end up there with whatever you have on and your items in your inventory, along with with whatever you’ve spec’d your character into as you leveled up, even engram points not spent.

The game even encourages you to explore a bit with those grayed out engrams like, “only available on aberration or Scorched Earth,” etc.

You can also “upload” a dino near you from the creatures tab, or “upload” items on the “Data” tab. Those are a little different, they leave wherever you are at and go into a data hold for 24 hours. Within that 24 hours, you must “download” them on the same server or any other server you travel to. After the 24 hour period they disappear. Be careful with dinos, they lose any inventory. So take off their saddles and anything in their inventory you want and carry it with you.

Once you travel to another server, you’ll not be in any tribe, as those are per-server. And if you haven’t been there before to build or whatnot, you won’t have a bed to spawn in, so you’ll need to select an area on the map, then, “Spawn here with current survivor.” To travel back, it’s the same principle. Ragan has been traveling around putting stargates on a lot of servers and usually has gates to the Obelisks, so when you’re ready to come back, if you can’t find a loot beacon, see if you can get to one of the Obelisks.

There is a LOT more detail here:

All 4 servers being updated, this should be the end of the recent server event I believe.

UPDATE: All servers have been updated and should be available again within about 5 minutes.

@Grembel you should be good to go once it is fully back up.

Many thanks!

No worries man!

So its been a wile since we had a Grem adventure…

Skruggs was there for this one. Was finishing up the glass house doing my thing. Had a couple holes in the wall but nothing that should cause any issues.

Had two rex i had just hatched so I left the door on the hatchery open so as to give them room to grow… 1st mistake.

As i am crafting wall after wall and ceiling tile after ceiling tile I see a death message pop up. Ragans find… man that sounds familiar. Oh Hell No!!! thats one of my pheonix. I drop what i am doing and run for the hatchery. I round the corner to see my two rex fleeing and a level ten raptor chewing on my other phoenix.

How does this raptor avoid agro on my elemental my two dragons and a yard full of rex… hahah just another day on the Ark with Grem

Looks like some of the servers went down due to a mod update

thank you so much I was having a hell of a time trying to pm skipper. -Kiptah. Also could it e possible to move the server reset time. Kyle and I are on the West coast and it sometimes interrupts us in the middle of things. It wouldnt have to be too long just maybe and hour or two. Thank you Boyos

No problem, man. I was out of town for the weekend. All servers have been modified to reboot now at 8AM EDT, which should be 2AM there for you guys.

Someone mentioned the servers need an update again? If so I’ll be home in a bit and address it. I’m going to resend info on how to fix that to a few of you in case this happens while I’m traveling.