Ark: Survival Evolved - Dinos and Leveling Survival Game

Had quite a successful Ark night.

My first goal was to get a reaper king. That is always a challenge to find a good level since there are not a lot of queen spawns. I killed off about half a dozen before I had a lvl 145 spawn.

@Skipper had asked earlier on how I trapped reaper queens. I used the trap from this video:

Using this trap, I was able to get 3 reapers from the single queen. I could have gotten more, but 3 was enough for me. I had to be careful not to go to far from the queen because she is trapped and if I went out of render range, she would despawn.

After I birthed all 3 reapers (got impregnated, birthed the reaper, rinse, repeat X 3) and leveled them up a bit, I went down to the rock drake trench. There were a ton of old eggs I had to clear out. They would expire as soon as I picked them up. When those were all picked up, new eggs spawned. I got a few low level ones, then a 155 & 175.

Another reason I was after some drake eggs was to try and get a rare basilisk (lvl 195) that had been around for a couple days. I knew it wouldn’t last to much longer. After some searching I found it up high on one of those rocky pillars in the swamp/blue zone. First, I placed stone gateways around it (while I was riding my reaper) so it couldn’t escape. Then I dropped one of the low level drake eggs. Finally, I just off the reaper to aggro the basilisk. I had to re-aggro it several times so that it would keep trying to attack me and in the process eat the drake Eventually it ate both eggs and was tamed.

I hurried back to my base and logged off before Ark could punish me for having such a good night.

It’s that time again, an ARK DLC arrives tomorrow.

I’m in the process of getting a server added to the cluster. It sounds like the DLC launches tomorrow, which means I might not quite have everything up to snuff before changing the map name tomorrow, but I’ll certainly try. At worst, it’ll be some time this week.

I -think- they have room on the host where our cluster resides. If not I’ll roll it standalone, but I’ll be kind of sad if that’s the situation.

More updates here once I get them.

@ragan I’ll try to copy the mods from current servers as well unless you want things differently. Should I mess with resource rates at all?

@Skipper The mods from the current servers will be fine.

Sounds good. Active ticket opened to have them put the new server onto the current cluster. After that it’ll go similarly to the last two, just changing the map name post-release.

FYI, per Cedric, the Genesis download will be huge, 50gb+

I’m not even sure that will fit on my SSD anymore. Probably have to move some stuff.

Good god. That’s nuts. Well we’ll see soon enough.

The server is in the cluster now. The API and Cross server chat are loaded, the mods are loaded and the config files are set up. I’ll be on Steam as QT3 Skipper. If you see the map name or that the patch has been released, ping me. I’ll pull all the servers down and update. All servers will have to be updated today and until that is done (post-DLC release) the new map will not be available. There may be mod issues, as usual. For now the server is up, but it’s The Island map. That will at least let you add it to favorites.

Settings for the new server, QT3_ARK_Genesis:

  • 155.254.28.106:27055
  • Server password: T0mCh1cK
  • Admin password: <same as other servers>
  • Battleye is NOT ENABLED.
  • Breeding/Baby-growth is pretty fast at the same levels I last left on Extinction.
  • Harvest amount multiplier 2. All specific resource gathering is x3 (approximately the baseline on our other servers.) No x5 until we know that isn’t enough for something specific. I expect oil/crystal/obsidian/gems will be either too high or not high enough depending on this new map.
  • Dino gathering is 4x the above amounts for players, the same as for other servers.
  • Mods have been left the same as Extinction, if anything is missing, let me know.

Cedric just tweeted some interesting death factoids:

It would be kinda nice to know the level ranges of those that died, like XXXX of deaths for lvl 1 - 10, etc. I find it hard to believe that the higher level characters would be dying that much, but hey, Ark happens sometimes. Playing on unofficial w/mods skews my perceptions of how difficult officials are.

Dilos and Piranha’s screams low level folks. But the pounce raptor effect has certainly killed me a few times. Especially with the pack mentality they seem to use.

I haven’t decided how I want to play on the new DLC. Reroll or transfer in at current level but naked.

Have you made a decision yet?

The private servers I frequent seem to be adding genesis to their clusters with transfer stuff out but not in settings, FWIW.

Yeah, I had that problem on my recent Aberration restart. Once I got a good supply of materials and got a good set of upgraded armor (hazmat set with almost 3k armor, go go Upgrade Station mod!) it hasn’t been to big of a deal. They still pounce me off, but do like 0 to 3 damage and the durability damage. The centipedes and their acid spit is my main worry. Two or three hits from that stuff and all my armor is trashed.

I will probably reroll a new character because, for me, the starting and middle level game is where the most challenge is. Nothing like feeling the adrenaline rush of trying out-run some predator.

That would be fine with me. I typically transfer to other servers (Extinction mostly) to tame specific dinos types (cough velons cough). So I’m pulling resource off the server, not bring much to it.

We did that for Extinction. Really it wasn’t a huge deal since we’re PvE. If people want to bring things that’s up to them. Later I disabled that and allowed free in/out. That forces people to play the initial bit but a few of us have done full on new characters during something new, then later overwriting that with your actual character transferred back in. You lose dinos being imprinted to you (since they are player bound) but can rebind everything else to you with admin commands.

Maybe I should do that again but with as few as we have playing, may as well let everyone use their own honor system.

So tempted to jump back in… Although we all know how ark treats me…

Dude without you we have no stories. Just saying …

Haha suppose that settles it. Better clear some space on my drive.

Done deal. Installing ARK once again.

Yeah, now that you mention it, restricting transfers on a friendly server like yours is probably unnecessary, because the community is nice and cooperative. It’s when you’re playing with strangers (pve or pvp) that you want to be careful and make sure there’s equal footing and all that.

One other thing I will say about the new release: expect bugs! Y’all probably already do, but still worth mentioning, lol.

Your are the gold standard when it comes to Ark experiences. When we say we had a “Grembel level adventure” everyone knows what we mean and how bad it was.

Wait, that would mean bugs eventually went away in ARK! Hahaha. No worries there, expected gameplay. Plus mod issues, plus initial instability, etc, etc.

For the most part, Extinction went well. I’m trying to think of the specific issues we had there for a bit, I know there were some but they didn’t last too long. Valguero went well too but it was mostly just a new map, not nearly as much in the way of gameplay changes, etc.

Looking at all the hype screenshots posted. Definitely a cold biome, also a volcano, an underground lava area, the low gravity area, a swamp (looks like Ab undergound,) a large foggy area with very tall trees, etc.

Rad suits look to be a thing again. Gas masks as well. And fur being worn in the cold biome. Not many posts of what look like newbie style areas so I guess we’ll have to find out.

https://twitter.com/CudaCores