Ark: Survival Evolved - Dinos and Leveling Survival Game

Games
1522

There isn’t a server update, so there must have been a mod update. Tracking down which one because the host does not have a good process for doing batch mod updates. <grumble, grumble>

Edit: There is a server update, but S+ was updated as well which is stopping everyone from connecting.

Edit 2: Servers are updated and running, make sure to give your client time to download the S+ mod before logging into the server (it will tell you in the lower right corner of the Ark screen if it is downloading a mod)

1523

@Skipper & @Grembel

Server is updated and running.

1524

Awesome. Thanks Ragan. You’l have to let me know the procedure, I’d be glad to help. Kelan forwarded me the info needed, but I don’t know the procedure for server nor mod updates. Are you guys remote managing via RCON?

I noticed that earlier and assumed it was part of the issue on the server. I didn’t know we had a game update though.

1525

It’s Monday so it’s question day. I lost a spino taming by accidentally killing it, Ragan gave me advice on using a pen, and using narcotics directly in their inventory to keep the torpor up.

Can I get some consensus on taming pens for larger dinos? There appear to be a million youtube videos on them, but it seems like a large amount of them are overkill. If you’re just trying to tame one dino in an area, why on earth would you create an elaborate pen? The trap style looks like it would be ideal and fairly easy in the spawn spot closest to me.

Spinos are large, do I need a behemoth gate or will a normal dino gate work? How big should the pen be, will 2x2 work or 4x4, etc? 3x wall height?

And once you have a spino, do you guys spec yours for combat or general purpose?

Also, @Ragan , thanks again for the help this weekend. That Anky is coming in real handy with base expansion for metal. I’ll pick up a Doed this week for stone. I feel like I’ve crossed a threshold in my learning curve for the game. Things aren’t easy, but I don’t feel like I’m swimming in unknowns.

1526

We use the S+ mod which makes our lives much easier when making taming pens.

For large dinos like the spino, I use S+ behemoth gateways/gates. I’ve got 4 stashed away for when I see a big dino (spino’s mainly. Some other dinos may not fit through a regular gateway).

I setup all 4 gateways/w gates in a rough square, but I leave enough space at the corners so that I can escape the trap. I then set one S+ gate to automatically open & close and set the close delay to 5 seconds. Next I ride a dino that is faster than the spino, aggro the spino, have it chase me to the automatically opening door, door opens, I run inside, spino follows me inside, I run out through one of the corner openings, S+ door automatically closes after 5 seconds, congrats, you have a trapped spino. Now you just stand far enough back that the dino can’t reach you, then start tranqing.

You do something similar with smaller dinos like ravager/raptor/megalosaurus.

When you are done taming the dino, you go around and pick up the gates then gateways, in that order, because if you pick up the gateway first, it destroys the gate, and stone behemoth gates can be expensive to build at first.

As for leveling your spino, all combat. Health and melee. How much health vs melee? That depends. If you get a low level spino (75 or lower), it will be unreasonable to try and get it’s health to boss level fighting (10K+). Initially, I would shoot for 5k health. That should give you enough to take down most regular dinos and be able to survive if you get a minor swarm on you.

I’ve found that making a general purpose dino pretty much means you have a dino that isn’t really good at anything. You may have to do this when first starting, but once you can get a good dino, it’s all about specialization. For example, I have 5 crabs. One I’ve designated as my cargo hauler. Once I got his health to a decent level, I’ve done nothing but pump weight. Another crab is just for combat, etc.

1527

The only general purpose type I have is Kono’s Iguanodon. It’s a little of a pack mule and distance runner. I love it for that very reason. I can see where having them specialized is the key though. Not having tamed a Spino though, I wasn’t sure what uses there were beyond a higher end combat mount.

Perfect explanation of a good trap, I’ll try to duplicate that this week. Thanks again, man.

1528

TL;DR: I have a reaper king now.

I present Ripley the lvl225 Reaper King!

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Kinda of a pain to get. There is a spot on the edge of the swamp and central spire where reaper queens spawn. I setup a reaper queen pen in the swamp, then would go looking for a queen to drag out of the radiation. The first one I found was down on a ledge and had no way to get back up (lvl 85). Then on my way out, I noticed the “rumbling dirt” sign that indicates something is moving underground. I whip out the spyglass to see it is a 150 reaper queen! woohoo! Jackpot!

It took a couple tries, but I was able to lure her into the pen. My megalosaurus chewed on her until the red cloud appeared (means she is ready to impregnate you). Pull out my shield and started tanking her, all the while hoping the nameless hold off spawning, because you have turn off your charge light for the final phase.

Finally she grabs me and does the impregnation and disappears. But no reaper baby buff. Not very happy with that.

I’ll preface the next part here by saying that I am not above using admin commands to fix game bugs. Stuff that should have worked, but didn’t.

Since I did all the hard work the right way and everything happened the way it was supposed to, but still didn’t work, I did use admin commands. I respawned a 150 reaper queen, turned on infinitestats on my character (because nameless were swarming at this point every time I turned off my charge light and all my nearly all my gear was trashed from the first attempt) and did the whole process over again, and again, and again.

I had to go through 4 reaper queens doing the impregnation animation 4 times before I finally got the reaper baby implanted in me. After that, I turned all the admin stuff off and went and leveled up the baby (when implanted, all xp you gain goes to the baby up to 52,500xp for 75 levels). With our 10X hatching rate, I had about 1hr 15 minutes before the baby ripped my chest out, but I maxxed the xp out in around 40 minutes (using my super megalasuarus and killing everything in sight, the rivers up in the green zone are great xp). Side note, when you log off, the birthing timer stops. So it won’t “hatch” while you are logged off, which would be really bad as it eats you and then probably attacks any nearby dinos.

I had already made a birthing room, because when the baby reaper hatches, it is basically wild and will run all over the place and sometimes will try and attack you, unless you manage to get a reaper pheromone gland from killing a reaper queen. I didn’t go that route because by the I remembered, I was already implanted and didn’t want to risk my haz suit getting broken because a single tick of radiation will kill the reaper baby.

You can use a S+ hitching post to hitch the reaper baby to, which stops it from running all over (it’s fast) and allows you to access it’s inventory to put food in. When it reaches juvie stage, it behaves like a normal baby dino.

At this point, it was just a waiting game, with the exception of imprinting. The S+ nanny doesn’t seem to imprint on reaper kings, so again, game not working the way it should, admin command to give it full imprinting bonus.

I took him out for a quick spin this morning before starting work and seems really nice. Melee started at 410% and with the imprinting bonus is doing 400 damage a bite. The right click attack is like a tail spit that slows dinos, ‘C’ key is a tail whip/spin aoe attack that does about 250 damage with a huge knockback. Spacebar is jump. Not an impressive jump, but a dino that can jump is very handy when getting unstuck from the terrain. They are affected by the charge light, even if it is your own. So when fighting with the charge light debuff on them, they take full damage, turn it off, they take way less. Probably around 66% to 75% less.

edit: spelling

1529

Wow! I didn’t know those were in the game. I should check all the new creatures out sometime.

Yeah, I totally agree, Ragan. I have told others in the past to not be shy to use admin commands if the game breaks on you.

1530

Nice work!

1531

Nice job, man. I’ve watched a couple of videos on how this is done, don’t forget you had to feel that little guy drops from nameless as he was growing. And I wasn’t aware they didn’t like charge lights. That’s a bit of a pain if you’re going to use that as a primary mount.

I do like the fact that it’s Alien like, however. Like a T-Rex mated with one, almost.

I have a quick question on the server side. When I connect I see we have 13 mods. How do I know what mods those are? And would it save login time if I subscribed to those mods so they are loaded already on my client? My login times take a bit and it slows down just trying to jump on for a quick session.

1532

TL;DR: Why do all my posts seem to turn into mini-War and Peace length novels?

Reapers, so far, seem pretty good. When I was leveling Ripley last night, I didn’t bother assigning any stat points until I had like 36 or so points saved up. He was just wrecking everything with the base stats. Although he is a perfect tamed 150, so he started out really good. I’ve got him up to 43k health and 500%+ melee (doing around 500 damage w/ imprint bonus).

I feed my reaper at raw/cooked meat. Although I did go out last night with him, after I leveled him, and killed several queens so I have a stash of reaper pheromone glands now.

The Nameless venom is used to for raising rock drakes or healing adult drakes (just learned this from the wiki). That is easy to farm if you have a crab. You go to a spot where nameless would spawn then turn off your charge light. Once the nameless start spawning, you wait for one to turn into the alpha. When that happens, you use one claw of your crab to pick up the alpha. Now you turn back on your charge light and use the other claw to bash the non-alpha nameless. Once they are all dead, turn off the charge light and let the alpha summon more nameless. Turn off the charge light, bash, rinse, repeat until you have enough venom.

If you use this method, I do recommend killing off the alpha every minute or so to prevent it from summoning a reaper king. Just kill it and wait for a new alpha to appear and grab him.

Maybe keeping the alpha nameless alive isn’t necessary, but I thought they were the ones that keep summoning more regular nameless. I’ll have to test this tonight.

There isn’t a good way to see which mods the server is running. There are ways though. You can browse via Windows Explorer to the Ark Mods folder and cycle through the folders. The files inside the folders usually have the self-explanatory names.

When you join a server with mods, Ark automatically subscribes you to those mods. You can view all the mods you’ve subscribed to by opening Steam, open the drop down menu under your steam name, select Content, click on the Workshop tab, scroll down until you see a link for “Subscribed Items”. Next, at the towards the top is a “Filter by game” option. Select Ark from that list. That will show all the Ark mods you’ve subscribed to. Now this is all the Ark mods you’ve subscribed to. So if you played on another server with different mods, they will be in that list also.

That is one of the downsides to Ark. I remember when it was first released, it would take 10 minutes for me to load into the game.

The best thing I can suggest (and yes, I’m about to spend your $$) is buy a solid state drive (SSD) that is at least 240gb and move Ark to it. I run with a 480gb SSD and all I have on it is Windows, Ark, and Xcom 2 (just to speed up loading times). I have a second regular 2tb HDD for everything else. That will be the biggest performance enhancement you could do.

Now for the downside to using a SSD for Ark. Due to the way Steam updates files and because Ark is a space hog, you need at least a spare 80gb to 100gb for the big Ark updates. Steam makes a copy of the files that are being updated and some of Ark’s files are huge. So even if the update itself is only 200mg, if it is updating a file that is 25gb, it will need at least 25gb to update. (again, this is how I understand Steam update works, if someone else has better/correct information, let me know).

1533

Crap, I had forgotten I watched drake videos as well, and this was exactly what I was thinking of. Essentially I’m lowering the angle on my learning curve by watching videos on youtube based on what I’m interested or special things with Aberration. It’s helping a ton. I had watched drake egg stealing tips, raising tips, etc, but also watched one on the reaper king and impregnating yourself, etc.

As for the performance tips, I had suspected it was disk based. The majority of my system is good to go. However, I run everything but Steam off a smaller SSD. Steam itself has a standard hard drive of 500GB. I had considered getting an SSD for it in the past but nothing seemed to run so slowly that it was required. I’ll put that in my queue.

And since I sometimes fool around with a game on my own, I set up a small server at the house for that, which just led me down the path to get the info below, which are the SteamIDs of the mods on the Aberration server:
ActiveMods=731604991,538827119,622595587,866871171,876038468,719928795,725398419,750483861,566885854,962984672,566887000,770854372,708807240

What I did not know is what you mentioned about Steam subscribing you when you join a server with mods, so that’s a nice tip!

1534

It’s been a productive week, or so I thought. I got my first Carno killed so I tamed a level 147 one and have leveled it up well past 200 now. I also tamed a higher level Bulbdog and Lystro. I added a Doed, a Roll Rat, and a Trike. I built 4 behemoth gates/doors and trapped my first tamed Spino (and I can’t even get the saddle engram for three levels.) I upgraded the base and my armor. All in all, I thought I was doing well.

But then I had to go wander around over in @Grembel 's base. Holy schnikes. Multiple spinos and other large dinos, multiple drakes, tons of other dinos, electricity, automation, a nice greenhouse and barracks, etc. I’m officially jealous. Haven’t you guys only been on Aberration a few weeks?

And how on earth do you guys level dinos up so high and so fast? Are you just waiting to tame only high level ones? What after that?

1535

Aberration was released beginning of December and a number of us (I know Grem & myself) were on vacation the last couple weeks of December so we put in a lot of time.

Part of it is, yes, we look specifically for high level dinos. High level becomes more “fluid” the longer we have to search though. Then as we would go about our travels, we would be randomly checking out dino levels. Do that long enough and eventually you find a good/better dino.

Also, you can get higher level dinos by doing breeding. As you keep breeding (and in-breeding, which basically is necessary to get all the best stats into a single breeding pair of dinos. Good thing Wildcard never implemented the in-breeding penalties), the babies keep getting a higher and higher base level because the level is based on the stats.

I do have a spino saddle blueprint, so I can drop it off at your base so you can get a couple crafted.

1536

I would love you if so. (that’s not true, I love you already, that Anky is awesome.) You mentioned some of that stuff about taming and hatching on your perfect taming advice a while back. I’ll dig back into it as I get closer to electricity and having the ability to hatch more than just hot weather eggs. I did notice on my second Carno tame that the bonus of the higher level had a huge impact on stats as well as how quickly it gained stats through leveling as well. Hell, the first one struggled with 2-3 ravagers, while the new one took down a spino and several ravager packs yesterday. This first spino is a pretty paltry low level, I’ll have to keep my eye open for another.

Regardless though, I’m still impressed at how far you guys have gotten in such a short amount of time.

Speaking of blueprints, I’ve looted a few recipes. I don’t know how to learn them, but I’m assuming they just go into whatever relative crafting vessel and you then obtain the ability to make them? So far they all seem to be food.

1537

If you wanna get into spinos I would be happy to donate a few eggs. Mine all have a base 346.6 damage and 5300 hps before imprinting. I wait until industrial cooker to do any recipes it makes it so much easier. Also once you can get hazard suits let us know we will take you on a trip to get a drake egg. its a good time.

1538

I noticed you had a lot of spinos and wondered if you were breeding them. Makes sense. That’s impressive stats.

How does it work? highest of the stats from mom and pop? Average? And what does the perfect food bonus do when taming or post hatching? Just speed it up or actually affect stats?

The hazard suit will still take me a bit, I’m working up to generator/fabricator.

EDIT: Digging into it I found some great info. Not sure any newbs are still in the thread but worth posting:

1539

@Grembel I’m thinking about relocating but see you closer down to the river as well as a big Grembel sign down on the river. Will it bug you if I’m nearby? I’ve not played with you guys before,so I don’t want to get too close if someone needs room to grow.

1540

Haha Berz stuck that sign up so he wouldnt get lost. No worries at all.

1541

I can completely understand that. I got lost there for over an hour last night. Every bend in the river looks the same, and since it breaks into multiple pieces it’s insane trying to find your way around.