Well damn, I feel like a goof. Thank you for that info!
Ragan is crazy-good with the taming and breeding stuff. He talked me down from the ledge of rage-quit frustration a few times on original QT3 Ragnarok server. Sometimes, when I couldn’t hit a bullet with the broadside of a barn, he’d take pity and knock out the poor beast for me.
Also ruthless. The euthanasia spam still haunts me!
Are you still playing, Calelari? We have a server cluster you can join in on if you’re interested.
I shared Ragan’s taming story with Skrug the other day and we were laughing about all the bad times we’ve had so far. They were full of what I’m guessing are typical stories.
Ark is all about those crazy moments when it all goes to hell. I love those moments. “What the hell ate half the base?!?” “Hey, where did all our dinos go?”
I haven’t been. I bounced off Abberation pretty hard. The Ragnarok server apparently fell over. I had kind of set Ark aside for the time being.
On the other hand, I read about a neat mod called “Zoology” that peaked my interest. I rather enjoyed just watching the dinos on occasion and it sounds like it ups the fun factor of that quite a bit.
On the gripping hand, my little one is interested in PixArk, so I may be setting up a small private server and diving into that for a while.
Most of the mods on the cluster servers are ease-of-use oriented. The same for most of the server settings. But if you do change your mind it’s:
The Island
Ragnarok
Aberration
Scorched Earth
You can freely (obelisk or beacon) bounce between them. Aberration is the only one with dino transfer-in restrictions.
The map wasn’t big enough to handle the baby rejects from my breeding programs. It got so bad a friend and I took to calling ourselves Dr. Moreau.
On several occasions, when I finally bred the dinos I wanted, I would take the leftovers and go find a giga or titan and see if 30 to 40 therizin/rex/allo could kill it. Sometimes yes, most of the time no. But it was entertaining and it reduced the dino head count of the server.
@Ragan @Grembel I’m checking in on you guys. I have a ticket open with the hosting provider because our Aberration server rebooted with no save data (no characters, no structures, etc.)
I don’t have a character on Scorched Earth, so just wondering if that server is okay. It looks okay based on the “days” uptime, but let me know if not, I’ll add it to the ticket.
Aberration was back up within 30 minutes. Great response by the hosting team. He suggested a corrupt save due to a mod, but didn’t know for sure. Please let me know if you guys see any strangeness.
Will check havent been on this weekend much.
Looks like everything is okay as verified by Ragan.
The first giga kill on the cluster!
I was exploring the island looking for a high level therizin to take back to Scorched Earth when I found this guy up on a mountain. Just took a lot of kiting, getting bit a couple times, and biting back before I was able to lure him into the deep water. Then I left him to drown.
I would have jumped off to get the giga trophy item, but there was at least 5 mega’s swimming around.
I’ve long suspected that dino levels in Ark are weighted for the low levels, and tonight I’ve pretty much confirmed it. See how many rex arms are in the screenshot? Divide it by two, and that is how many I killed tonight and out of all those, only 2 were above lvl100. The average level was like 20.
Yes I had already discovered that. Getting the one 135 to spawn I leveled twice killing rex the other day :P
Hey, congrats on the Giga kill!!! Nice work. Love the desert gear btw.
I think we confirmed the same though anecdotally on dino levels. It took a LONG time for me to get even 5 rexes above 100 on the last server we were on. It was just crazy how many were low levels. I mean it makes sense. I also don’t see level 1 dinos that often.
And I’ve seen the same here on Aberration, however I have noticed one strange occurrence. Where Skrug and I set up at the edge of the blue zone, There are two strange crab spawn spots out of several nearby. Both of those seem to average over level 80+ and I’ve seen level 150’s there multiple times. It makes me wonder if that is entirely the variance of the random spawn generation or if it those spots are somehow marked.
I also wonder if this is simply more encouragement to somehow push players to breeding, since that’s really the only way to work around some of the issue.
We finally got the Industrial Grinder and Industrial Cooker up and running. I suspect Skrug will want to try a run for a Drake egg this weekend.
Since we’ve not done that before, I should ask for tips!
It was weighted against high levels even before breeding came around. It probably has to do with how the dino spawners are configured. Which is one of the reasons I liked playing on the Center map, the dino level range was random with no weights. You had an equal chance of seeing a 5 as a 150.
The trick is, you still need to get semi-high level dinos to start your breeding program. I did manage to tame a 130 rex that ended up with pretty good base health (7k), but I can pretty much assume that the rest of his stats suffered because most of his level ups went into health.
The only good news with all those rex kills, is there were that many rexes to kill. The SE map has a couple dino spawn locations that are guaranteed to have “X number of type Y dino”. And Grem and I have found the spot for rexes. There are three locations that have a 100% rex spawn rate. Kill the rex in one spot, go to the next, and there will be a rex there, every time, all the time. Great for leveling.
- Don’t die
- Expect to die and lose all your dinos
- Bring at least one spare set, if not two of hazmat suits.
- Bring enough dinos that can kill off a group of 5 or 6 drakes at a time
- There is a spot where there are 4 or 5 rock drake nests that are not down in the trench. That way you can have your big dinos (like a spino) there to help kill the drakes after you get the egg.
- It would be highly unlikely that you will be able to outrun the drakes, you will have to kill off all those that aggro you.
- Rock drakes respawn pretty fast, so don’t bother trying to clear them out, they will be respawned in a few minutes.
- NEVER, EVER, EVER, NEVER transfer the drake egg from your inventory to any where else until you are faaaaar away from the drake trench. Because if you do, that re-triggers the rock drake aggro and they will come and swarm you.
- Grem is the master rock drake kidnapper. I was just along for the ride and subsequent deaths and eventual success.
Tell me more about The Center map. I actually didn’t add one to the cluster because I’d read mediocre reviews on it for PvE. Most said it was aimed more for PvP as an experience, pushing things towards more action.
Since I haven’t played it, I honestly have no idea.
Ahh the first egg napping run…
Ragan hit a lot of the points. You want at least 2 suits 3 is better. In our early runs I used a crab with tons of hps for the grab dino. There jump lets you get to the nests easy and with a ton of hps your not going to die as fast. You are going to want at least a pair of high level mated spinos. (2 pair for the first run is probably better)
I played on the Center for about a year. It was pretty interesting. Lot’s of interesting things to find.
Huge ocean, check. Deep oceans, check. Huge caverns, check. Ever watch “Journey to the center of the earth”? The center has an underground cavern that is just like that, you can almost play your entire Ark experience down in that cave. It has islands and large tracks of variable land.
The deep ocean was something the map maker added later, but it extends a big section of the ocean downward. It’s probably 4X to 6X deeper than the normal deep ocean on the Island. The side cliff face has tons of tunnels and caves.
I’ve always played PvE so I never really looked at the map from a PvP perspective.
On a side note, I just hit 89 (go me!), so if neither of you on Aberration are close to 89, I can transfer over and craft up an industrial cooker.
So based on today, I think I’m going to do a remove/reinstall of Stargate Worlds on the Aberration server, just in case. In the meantime give me a bit and I’ll dig in to the log files from the server.
The center actually sounds cool. I get a discount for each server in the cluster. So I’d planned on adding the new DLC when it comes out. Maybe I’ll add the center.
Trip (Skrug) and I had a bit of a setback today but caught back up a bit. Next step is the dive down to get an egg. He did fight and beat a reaper queen I believe. No impregnation though. Not sure if he knew that process.
How are the servers setup? Does each map server have it’s own directory? Or are all the servers running from the same directory/files? Because if they are the same directory, removing it from Aberration will remove it from all the servers.