We Have Ark 2 at Home

 

If you're one of the three or so regulars to this blog, you may be aware of the fact that we used to play Ark: Survival Evolved a lot in my house. For hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours. And then the game ran its natural cause - I've seen everything I wanted to see, tamed everything I ever cared to tame, had a quick look at Genesis 1 and 2 and decided that no, I'm happy to end my adventure with a completed Extinction and a huge-ass castle / retired dino holiday resort on Ragnarok. I never cared much for the hardcore survival aspects of Ark or the more fantastical, made-up creatures like Tek dinos, flying, magical cat things, dragons and other stuff that isn't a dinosaur.

I like my creatures to be realistic or at least plausible.

I haven't really played much since the last summer bash in 2021 and really just wanted to take another look at it when the family went crazy for that Paleo Ark mod, which adds some slightly-altered versions of existing dinosaurs with a couple new textures, some changed sounds, skills or animations here and there. Nothing huge, but it adds a bit of variety, which is always nice. So I played around with that for a while and, yeah, not too shabby.

That's when I started looking into other mods, which introduce new dinos and other creatures. The vast majority of them are incredibly bad: Walking dino skeletons (which are really just re-used halloween assets), dinos with glowy auras, glowing eyes and flashy neon colours, a trillion new wyverns and dragons and other fantasy creatures, as well as mods with actual new dinosaurs, which simply weren't on a level of quality with what already exists in the game. Stuff with crappy or no bump maps, making dinos look like they're made of rubber. Dinos with shoddy textures. Stuff that isn't animated properly, overwrites existing content or simply combines two existing creatures into one, with one half almost always being a dodo. Dodoreaper. Gigadodo. Ten different iterations of Dodorex. The creativity is overwhelming.

Not that the devs aren't perfectly capable of stupid creations, themselves.

So after a few hours of research, testing and experimentation, I ended up with a nice collection of mods, which add only decent quality dinos and animals and none of the crap I don't like. I also allowed creatures from all Ark expansions to spawn in Ragnarok, because most of them are pretty neat. Bloodstalkers can get fucked, but they're plausible and high quality enough to stay. The new apes are insanely annoying and stupidly powerful, but they fit the setting. I don't think I can reasonably justify space whales, but after I've seen one fight a T-Rex, some other brand new giant carnivore and a bunch of argies, they're pretty cool. They're really well-designed, they're freaky, mysterious and otherworldly enough to be interesting, and they're very rare and tend to get eaten pretty fast, so I'll allow them for now. 

They also go incredibly well with all the other lights and effects around our fortress at night.

I've basically turned Ark into an entirely new game, with countless brand new creatures in every biome. I'm not even trying to remember what each of them are called, but we have large new predators, which look a lot like a much bigger dilophosaur, with a much more powerful spit attack, that'll melt you in seconds. We also have more variations of dilohposaurs full-stop, which will spawn in addition to the existing, original dilos without overwriting them. We get the X-versions of existing dinos around volcanic areas for a bit of added variety, then there's the aforementioned Paleo Ark mod, so many dinosaurs now spawn in various different shapes, sizes and colours, as it should be. 

This guy is an incredibly agile swimmer, but also runs and fights like a raptor.

We're basically flying all over the place right now, always stopping and watching whenever a new creature shows up. Whenever something looks fun, we attempt to tame it. This doesn't always work out - potential tames get killed, we get killed, we knock something out only to learn it's a passive tame and so forth. Basically just like we used to play Ark back in the day, before we knew everything. These dinos are new, we know nothing about their abilities and attacks, about how they're tamed or whether or not they'll tame at all.

Many of the new predators come with super deadly bleed or poison attacks. Some heal, stun, buff, use all sorts of unexpected effects. And some are so weird and silly, you kind of want to get rid of them for not being believable at all, but at the same time they're too fun and interesting to delete. Like this guy:

This dino's eyes turn into extremely intense search lights after dark for some reason.

It's this highly enjoyable gameplay loop of spotting a creature for the first time, learning what it does, trying to figure out how to tame it, then to ultimately make it yours - and to find a fun way to utilize it. After several years of Ark, you'll already know all of this stuff about all the animals, especially when you speed things up through the wiki. With the new creatures I've added, the world feels strange and exciting again, we're not prepared for every new threat that lurks around the corner, we have to think on our feet, learn, adapt, come back smarter. You know, the interesting stuff you do in survival games, which happens outside of stupid food and water meters.

Of course our existing tames are still useful, too. Cloud can hold a search light.

We've tamed a new prehistoric murderbird, which can fight like an argie, dive like an owl and knock people off their mounts. We found a water lizard, which electrocutes its enemies. We encountered a boss-level creature, which is roughly the size and shape of a quetzal, is as powerful as a giga and announces its presence with an ear-shattering screech. We have found whatever the fuck this is:

I don't know, either.

The grasslands around our fortress, which used to be home to nothing but harmless herbivores and one of the safest areas in all of Ragnarok, now gets the occasional visit from magma lizards, camelspider-looking monstrosities the size of a triceratops, as well as those invisible killer cats from Genesis, which go into stealth, aggro you from three continents away and basically inhale you in a split second. Suddenly, these thick walls aren't for show anymore and our titans are being forced to earn their keep.

This suchomimus fits right in and matches the quality of Ark's default dinos. 

We've also added some fun new items and quality of life features, trying to find a decent balance between making life easier as a small tribe (there's usually just two, sometimes four of us), such as attachable search lights, which you can fit onto your dinos for better visibility or the really handy repair kits. Ark's armor is usually paper-thin and only sustains a few hits before it breaks. High quality gear requires insane amounts of resources to repair, which is borderline unattainable for small tribes, and ultimately results in having it all broken again five minutes later. Now I could install mods for unbreakable gear or just straight-up spawn in new items whenever our stuff breaks, but once you start cheating, what's to stop you from going overboard?

Some new dinos don't have any amazing new features, but just look fun.

We try to find a middle ground between making the game too easy or simply cheating and making it so hardcore, it's simply not fun for a small group of players. The repair kits are a great mod for this: You need to craft them from resources such as metal ingots or cementing paste, which still require a certain amount of time and effort to collect. Using one on an item will restore 20 percent of that item's durability. Fully repairing a complete set of broken gear is still going to require a fair amount of these kits and the resources to craft them, but this is much less stressful to handle than frequently harvesting literally thousands of units of hide, metal and other items in order to repair damaged high-tier items.

Some creatures are best watched from afar, such as this new crocodilian.

We have encountered a whole lot of super dangerous new apex predators, many of which are incredibly difficult to tame. We'll be busy for a very long time, trying to find and capture each of them, with our ultimate goal being our very own "flying giga", the strange new flying boss we've spotted. We also have loads and loads of new underwater creatures to discover, but I feel this is going a whole new adventure all in itself, once we've learned about all the new land-based threats out there. And of course we can look forward to a whole lot of epic battles with these new creatures! Dangerous new dinos threaten our fortress, so we'll have to assemble our strongest new creatures and fight them back with an assortment of new abilities and attacks.

T-Rex is still deadly, but he has a lot of fierce competition. It'll be fun to watch them all in a big fight!

There are even a few new shoulder pets, like a fun new flying dino, who steals honey and allows you to attach a grappling hook for added mobility or a red panda with an AoE heal. I never cared much to collect all the artifacts on Ragnarok in order to fight the bosses there, I never came there in order to progress in any meaningful way, but with all the new creatures and possibilities we've got, I'm actually tempted to go all the way once more. At some point, anyway. Right now, there are still dozens of new creatures to discover, predators to tame and new abilities to figure out. And there are only so many hours in a day. We're gonna be busy for a long time.