Mission Raptor

Claire and I bought the Switch version of Ark: Survival Evolved in a moment of insanity. Next thing I remember, it's 4am on what was suddenly Monday and we had spent our entire weekend crawling through dino shit and getting eaten by giant prehistoric snakes. The game is still so ugly, it physically hurts just to look at it. But at this point it has become one of my favourite games of all time.

After an incredibly rough start we finally had a humble little base camp. There was now a little wooden house next to our shitty straw hut. We set up some storage boxes, which contained extra resources for when the next death would inevitably claim all of our gear once more. We both had a pair of tame dilophosaurs as hunting partners, a fresh suit of hide armor and pokey sticks made of metal to replace our old wooden ones. Claire set up a mortar and pestle, so we ground some rotten meat and narcotic berries into a tranquilizing paste, which can be applied to arrows. We were ready to start mission raptor. Our goal was to sneak up on a raptor without getting eaten, shoot it with a tranquilizing arrow and capture it. We had already looted a raptor saddle from a crate earlier and having our own pet raptor as a mount and/or hunting ally was gonna be the best thing since tits!

Things didn't go as planned.

We headed to the forest, which lead to horror beach. We've been murdered by raptors there countless times, so if there was any spot for us to find our prey, this was it. And then I got distracted by this really awesome black triceratops. It was almost entirely pitch-black, apart from some cool red markings here and there. And hey, we still had to test those tranquilizer arrows, right? How about we shoot this slow, harmless plant eater before we go after a raptor? Yeah, about that ...
The arrow did nothing. Neither did the next six or so. Or the rocks I fired at him with my slingshot. Or my club. The dino charged at me once, then my gear was destroyed. Not lost, not dropped on my corpse - fucking destroyed. On the plus side, the battle took place just around the corner from our camp, so I could just run back after respawning there and go at him naked and with my bare fists, which went about as well as you'd expect. Finally, after what must have been another half dozen deaths or so, we knocked the bastard out. Unfortunately, the unconscious dino slid right into the stream by our camp and got submerged under the water. The game flagged him as unconscious, he played a breathing animation and I shrugged it off, because heyho, videogames. We stuffed him full of food in an attempt to tame him. A few moments later he showed up as dead. Right. Turns out unconscious creatures can drown in Ark, it just takes a moment. RIP triceratops.

But now we knew we had the power to knock out one of these bad boys. And we knew they could drown. So we stalked another one, who wasn't as cool as the black dino we just murdered, but at least he was still alive for now. This time around we attacked him from opposite directions, pelted him with arrows and started kiting him for a while. Then I hid behind a shield and ate a few of his attacks to give Claire an opportunity to finally knock him out. I put a saddle on him and tried to name him Horny, but dumb fingers and dumb touchscreen controls turned him into Horm. Honey, I'm Horm!

So we parked our new friend back at base camp, because we didn't want him to get slaughtered while we were in pursuit of our raptor. This time we wouldn't let anything allow us to get sidetrac... hey, is that a stray parasaur right outside the camp? I wonder how many tranq arrows it would take to KO one of these guys. Besides, who wants one mount when you can have two?

Right! This time we'd get our damn raptor! Except, Claire spotted a giant sausage-looking lizard, which she tamed just by chucking random bits at food at it. She rode it back to camp entirely without a saddle or anything. She grabbed another, smaller lizard for good measure. We named it Desklamp. It performs a little backflip when you pet it.

Fuck my dignity, I'm riding a sausage.

We checked horror beach. No raptors. We checked dodo beach. Dodo beach used to be dilophosaur beach, but we murdered all of the predators there and now the dodos are breeding like crazy. They're all over the place, because they have no more enemies around there. The irony! No raptors, though. We ended up stalking pteranodons, instead. They're surprisingly docile. One of them would occasionally land right next to me and inspect me, squawk and stare and waddle off again. I clubbed it over the head. That didn't knock it out. It flew away and so did all the other pteranodons. They still circled the water looking for fish, but they refused to land whenever we were around. So we laid down in the shadows and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Finally, one of them landed mere feet away from us. Arrows to the face! Again, he didn't go down. Instead, he crawled into a nearby jungle. We went after him, but all we managed to find was roots, trees and snakes. Not a trace of the pteranodon.

We lured another one, then another, but they'd always crawl off into the jungle after the first arrow or two. Finally, when we nailed one of them, it started to fly away for a few feet, then crashed face-first into a rock. It was out cold. I shoved all the fish I could find up its ass and 'nursed it back to health', by which I mean I manipulated it into thinking I was a caring friend, who wanted to help it get better after it had been hit my a mysterious projectile, which clearly came out of nowhere and had nothing to do with me. A brand new hunting buddy and future flying mount!

Ptetra is the best!

Mission Raptor was going insanely well! The only thing missing now was, well, a fucking raptor. But we were pretty good at capturing dinos now. We crafted a bunch of awesome crossbows to tranquilize and/or murder even more critters with and went out once more. We had to explore some new locations if we wanted to spot another raptor. So we went out into the swamp. That's where the shittest snake in all the videogames bit me. A titanoboa.

I love Ark. But the people making it have no idea how boas work. Titanoboa will bite you, which paralyzes you. It will then proceed to kill you and then do the exact same thing to your hunting party, your pets and everyone you love. By biting everyone to death. That's just not a very boa thing to. And yes, I know, gameplay before realism and all that, but if the fucking snake kills me, why does it continue to hunt and kill absolutely everything? I make a perfectly acceptable meal! And I know that from experience, because over the many hours we've spent on here, we've chopped up more than just one of my corpses and cooked it and fed it to everyone at the camp. They're all still alive or died of unrelated causes.

Titanoboa had lots of friends in the swamp. We left all our hunting buddies back at camp, because we didn't want them to get hurt. We also didn't want them to completely fuck up our raptor, because we only wanted to capture it, not rip it to shreds and eat it. But right now we were grossly outnumbered by giant snakes. And each other. The next boa came at me and ate my shoes. I'm not even kidding, they just disintegrated with the first strike. Then I made the boa eat my sword and everything seemed fine until Claire hit me with her tranquilizer arrow. She immediately knocked me out, which attracted more and more predators.

The arrow hit me right in the dick and I keeled over backwards. Still holding up my sword, though.

Claire spent the next ten minutes defending my sleeping character against more boas and a bunch of helicopters, which may or may not have been prehistoric dragonflies. We had to accept that it was too dangerous to go alone, so we punched out a pair of stray dilophosaurs. And one of them just so happened to be the prettiest one we've ever found.

Check out my cool new pet! Huh? What's this 'Mission Raptor' you speak of?

So here's the thing. We had a whole bunch of green dilophosaurs. Purple ones. Red ones. This one was black, with nice orange markings. She was special. Claire said she wanted to breed her, because she was too rare and too awesome to lose. Mission Raptor? Fuck it, let's protect our new pet and take it home before the boas kill us all! And it only took an entire day to get back home, because it was now night time and we had no idea where the hell our camp was.

So we parked our new dino, had a bit of a rest, I crafted a new pair of boots and the next morning we decided to give Mission Raptor another shot. On our way back to horror beach we spotted a new longneck, who had made her nest in the sand. She was guarding an egg, which was bigger than my character. I picked it up, having no idea what to do with it. "It doesn't say it's fertilized. Should I eat it?"
- "I guess?"
There was this tiny, nagging voice in my head, telling me it's probably a bad idea to eat an egg right in front of the bronto who laid it. But my finger was faster than the voice. And then the world ended.

Having one of these giants chasing after you doesn't mean you just casually get to walk away. You can't just turn around and kill it with your spear. The earth shakes. Trees get trampled like broccoli. That dino was pissed! Again, the egg wasn't even fertilized, so I really just ate one of her periods, but apparently there was a principle involved. She did not want me to live! Claire pelted the beast with arrows to no avail. It kept on chasing after me. Finally, after what must have been well over a dozen tranquilizers, one of our arrows knocked it out.

Long story short, we headed out to tame a raptor and came home with this:

We'll never fail to spot our camp again. Ever.

We now had a new problem - keeping all of these new pets fed and healthy was a huge pain in the ass. Horm eats vegetables, Ptetra wants fish, the gang of dilos wants meat and how the fuck were we gonna feed that longneck? In the end, I crafted a feeding trough and put everything in there. Meat, fish, berries, vegetables, fuck it. And what do you know, all the animals around the camp just take their favourite stuff out of the trough. While I was at it, I built a house made out of stone, we put up a protective fence to keep the Mexicans out and Claire grew the world's largest potato with the power of bronto crap. I'm not even kidding. Our newest friend produces people-sized turds, which help grow people-sized taters.

We also gave breeding animals another shot. We grabbed two dodos and put them in our log cabin, closed the doors and listened to a whole bunch of squeaking and squawking. It didn't take long and we had a fertilized egg. Problem was, the egg was rapidly losing health, because it was cold. Claire put it next to the campfire, which worked for a while. But then it got dark and the egg was cold again. 

Um... push? Hang in there? I don't know what to say, this is all new to me, too!

I lit my torch, which actually helped warm up the egg! At least for a while, then it started to rain. Now Claire lit another torch, I fired up enough tiki torches to attract a Trump rally and finally the egg was stable. And then this happened:

We hatched our first McNugget! And it immediately tried to cook itself, too! All it took was the power of our little log cabin. From now on we'd put all our animal couples in there for mating. It was time to give the place an appropriate name.

Oh yeah!

Our camp is quickly turning into a fortified little village. And I believe I can safely say that we have achieved all of our goals 100% thus far. We've got dodos, dilophosaurs, a triceratops, a parasaur, our own bronto, the world's largest potato and trusty Ptetra. Complete success on all fronts. Still, I can't help but feel we're forgetting something. Eh, it's probably nothing.