Hey Skip, we are on Hawai’i time, which atm compared to the East Coast is a 6 hour difference, 4 hour difference to Mountain time, and 3 hour difference from the Pacific time zone. I too apologize for not remembering your time zone but just in case here are a few. The server turns off at around 10 pm the first time then again for a longer period of time at 11 pm so I was just wondering if you could move it to possibly 2 or 3 am our time? 8-9 am eastern, 6-7 am mountain, or 5-6 am Pacific. If that is too late, or if one of you guys are usually/sometimes on at that time in any time zone just let us know and we are more than willing to work around it. I/we would hate to create any sort of inconvenience for any of you guys
8AM is early enough I’m the only one it would ever even rarely affect. I’ll get that set up. I should add, obviously I missed the window last night. =P
Okay, all set. For all cluster players, the servers will cycle either Steam updates or mod updates at 8AM each day. One day it will update Steam (aka the game) the following day the mods.
This keeps the downtime shorter per day and gets the time to a point that shouldn’t affect anyone in a bad way. If you guys are up at 8AM EDT playing ARK, well, it must be because there’s a new DLC. We will cross that line when we come to it.
Only issues I would see is weekends. I am not playing currently but raegan and I both do early morning. Should be able to work around it.
I’m on early occasionally, 6:00-7:00ish weekdays. I can work around 8 though since we no longer have back to back “Steam update plus mod update.” That took quite a while in total with the two of them. With just one, it would be about 5-10 minutes on a normal day, or maybe up to 15-20 on a day with a major update. But cycling Steam one day and Mods the next.
if it affects you it can be adjusted, don’t mean to bother you guys. the time zones coupled with arks server restarts time lol…
I seem to have lost my character (I am on a new computer atm so maybe that is why) so I had to restart my character. just finally got ark up and running, I had to use a old usb backup drive to fit the dang game on my computer.
ive been looking around at some ark mods and found some “intriguing” ones and wanted to know what you guys thought.
Human NPCs: Steam Workshop::Human NPCs
I think this one looks pretty funny, also they can “gather” resources in an area. I like it the most, but dunno if it would be considered too overpowered? the grindy aspects of ark are a bit annoying sometimes, would be nice to improve that without being overpowered or unfair
Better Dinos: Steam Community :: Error
seems to tweak and change small features on a lot of dinos to make them more interesting. some of the dinos are kinda bad, i think we’d all agree haha, but not really sure about all the stuff it adds. thought it looked intriguing though.
Automated Ark: Steam Workshop::Automated Ark
this one adds automation buildings but looked much more overpowered than the Human NPC one. I wish we could have ark + satisfactory in one game haha.
I’ve been out of the Ark loop mostly for a while. There seems to be a huge amount of S+ overlap there. Does S+ not work anymore, or are people building new mods for the day an update inevitably breaks it? (The better solution would, of course, be if someone(s) could pick up maintaining S+.)
It’s got a lot of overlap. The main thing is mining metal, stone, small resources etc. After playing satisfactory it is a bit harsh to go back to ark and go back to the farming lol. But honestly that mod looks too easy, it’s not fun if it’s just something that automates all challenge away. The human npc mod looked much more interesting IMO
Kyle I’m sorry I’m replying late to this. I know you’ve been playing some with Trip, did you get your character sorted?
There are ways to “reclaim” you stuff on the other servers if needed. It takes a bit but the only issue you’ll have is imprint is locked to a character once it is done. You can claim a dino from another created ARK character, but unless it is tribe tamed, you won’t get the imprint. Not a huge deal, just use that dino to mate with another and off you go.
I’ll take a look at the mentioned mods. The first two sound cool! I think the next expansion timeline was roughly holiday timeframe. I may spin up another Island server so I’ll have a cluster member available when we get to that point. If so I’ll add some new mods to it. I hesitate to add to much to ours now since unless we add the mod to every server, you’ll get items that won’t transfer and whatnot and lose them when hopping around. It was the same with the Primal mod that Trip and I played for a while, I think you joined on that server. Whenever I hopped to another one I would lose all the Primal tools, blood and ammo I had in my inventory during the transfer. It was a pain. Though the ones you linked look okay note that we already have 3 or 4 mods affecting dinos at this point:
Classic Flyers
2x Valguero mods for dinos
Dino level variance fix
So there can be issues with how the mods stack if they change base dinos. It also affect spawn points, since sometimes the new dino won’t match a named variable of a hard coded spawn on a map. Thus it’s easier to load an play on a test server before I add one to the stack.
Upon further inspection, it seems like the one that looks most interesting is “Better Dinos”. It is still actively being updated, it doesn’t seem to break balance much at all, it improves some of the much weaker dinos and improves the variance a bit. He actually says in his description that if you remove the mod, everything just reverts to vanilla. It doesn’t seem like this one would conflict with those mods you listed, and it even has a “classic flier” option in it. I do feel you about the items disappearing though.
some of my favourite little changes:
Ankylosaurus:
Takes reduced overall damage, takes 1.67x damage to head and 1.5x damage to legs. Returns 10% of melee damage inflicted to damage causer. Can auto gather when on wander and will gather up to 75% of its inventory weight. Tail swing attack animations increased speed. Has 75% weight reduction for Obsidian.
Gigantopithicus (Remapped):
Capable of wielding weaponry and tools (hatchet, pick, pike, sword, club) can be equipped with ‘Ape Armour’ shield (saddle item) Can be put into turret mode and throw explosive Oil Barrels, or Barrels of monkeys that are crafted and equipped in its inventory. Has ‘Gardening Mode’ will auto collect Veggies, Narcoberries, and Stimberries from nearby crop plots, has double spoiling timer in its inventory for veggies. Melee attack has a chance of gathering Longrass and Citronal from berry bushes (if not equipped with a weapon)
Coelocanth (Remapped/Renamed):
Also properly tamed by the Fish Basket, when on tamed wandering will produce various resources in their inventories as long as their inventory is at less than 50% of its full weight. Resources able to obtained include: Sap, Cementing Paste, Silica Pearls, Polymer, Electronics, Gunpowder, Rhino Horn, Charcoal, Metal, Stone Arrows, Tranq Arrows, Metal Arrows, Tranq Darts, all types of berry, Jelly Venom, Leech Blood, Ammonite Bile, Squid Oil, Angler Gel, Sulfur, Sand, Crystal, Obsidian, Clay, Cactus Sap and Absorbant Substrate. Any of these items can be excluded via Ini
Meganeura (Remapped/Renamed):
Able to be tamed via Fish Baskets, tamed dragonflies will receive a gang bonus of up to +8, able to be carried.
Tek Dinos:
All Tek Dinos have 10% damage increase and receive 10% less damage.
There’s just a bunch of nice little changes. I love the ank change that allows it to collect on wander, the Doed can do it why can’t the ank!!! it should be in the base game. I wouldn’t really suggest adding anything that would make anything too overpowered. I wish there was a way to improve some of the dinos without adding the item changes.
As I was looking through the mod list I came across this custom map: Mod:Ebenus Astrum - ARK: Survival Evolved Wiki
If you were thinking of spinning up a new server, have you ever given thought to running a custom map? this one looks quite interesting for the pve elements, as long as it is balanced.
I didn’t figure out how to get my character back, i just made a new one and Kip can craft everything that we need. I think it’s because we changed computers. I didn’t know that Gatcha’s even existed before I got on, so that’s a pretty interesting way to create a metal farm. We’ve got 2 sets of metal breeding gatchas going on now, trying to make at least 5.
The Raptorpocalypse has come with Fear Evolved 3!
That dark mass you see? That is all raptors.
I checked out some of the server stats and last night there was about 3400 raptors on the server. Today the server save file is doubled in size, so I’m guessing there is 6500+ raptors on Valgero.
I took out my reaper king and killed at least 200 to 300 of them but I barely made a dent in the total server population. Time for another “destroywilddinos”.
Funny you mention this, someone on reddit posted the exact same thing. Bug?
Yes, very much so.
The world save file for Valgero runs around 85mb, it was 91mb Tuesday evening and 181mb Wednesday. After the “destroywilddinos” command, the save file dropped to 40mb, so a lot of dinos on the server.
Strange. Now I guess the question is if it is a mod bug or full game bug. I haven’t logged in for a bit, Ragan. Did we have a new full game patch?
Do you want me to admin kill them off? (Not sure if I can prevent a respawn however.)
Also, did you fly your son over there and drop him in the middle?
One of the reddit threads:
It is a bug with the Fear Evolved patch for Valguero. The event removed all dein spawns and replaced them with raptors and introduced the over spawning.
I’ve been killing them off as needed. I’ll check the server save file size later and see if it is 90mb+. That would mean the over spawning is still happening.
No worries then. I’ll get a snapshot of the server save file if possible. Note that I’ve been unable to get into the FTP for about a month, so I do not have a recent save. I need to open a ticket to track that down.
Current Client Version: v300.1 - 10/24/19
- Fixed overspawn on Valguero and Ragnarok
- Fixed weird foliage appearing on TheCenter map
- Fixed issue that caused items (Pumpkin, Scarecrow, and Stolen Gravestone) to disappear
- Fixed issue with Headless Mask and taxidermy
Just need to update the servers and once again kill off all the dinos and life should be back to normal.
Awesome. At least that was semi-quick.
I tried Ark briefly on launch, but bounced off it. But my boy is 6 now and dinosaur obsessed, so I had to fire it back up, particularly after getting a survival crafter itch in playing Conan Exiles as well.
My kid looooves it! He and his nephews were screaming and freaking out yesterday when I was creeping around the starter area an getting ganked by various dinos (and piranhas)!
And he got to ride his first dinosaur today and walk around the beach collecting a troupe of Dodos.
Time for another Ark adventure!
I’m playing on Valguero and I’m out hunting for giga’s because I need the hearts to do the alpha boss fight. First off, it is amazing how hard it is to actually find them. I’ve lost complete track of giga’s in a forest before. When that happened, I gave up and left. There was no way I was going to be playing hide-and-seek with a giga.
Eventually I find a pair of giga’s. They are in a valley so I try to setup on the ridge lines so I can use my velon to machine gun them down, except giga’s have learned a new trick, cliff climbing. They seemed to always find paths up to the ridge where I was. That made for a few minor heart attacks.
The one giga runs around and finally ends up in a lake, where I decide to just let it drown. Then some piranha eat the body before I could recover the heart. One giga heart lost.
The second giga gets itself stuck so I was able to use my velon to kill it.
After a bit of scouting around, I find a third giga (lvl 150). I lead it down into another valley, but before I un-cryo my velon, I shoot it a couple times to see if it can get up to me and yes it can. Hop on the ptera and quickly fly out of reach. After a few minutes I think I’ve found a good spot where the giga can’t get me. Un-cryo the velon and get to work, only to discover that the giga was smarter than I was.
My ptera was quickly munched and the giga chased me down on my velon. Just before the velon died, I hopped off and left him to his fate (sorry Frank Butler the 6th, yeah, I lose a lot of velons). The giga was to busy eating the velon to chase me down.
Then I get back to my base and and figure I should tame this one since there are not many gigas on the server, besides being a 150. So I craft up the necessary building components for a portable taming pen while I am un-cryoing Frank Butler the 7th. (I actually have about 10 velons cryoed for when I lose one).
The tame was anti-climatic. The giga went into the pen, the door shut, got tranqed, ate kibble and was tamed. Now I need to figure what I want to do with a giga.