Ark: The Best Home & The Joy of Failure

 

I'm in bed as I'm writing this post, and I love everything about it! My new handheld PC is absolutely fantastic. I need to write a bunch of monster and character lore for work over the weekend, and I think I might actually charge the power bank and sit in the park to write my stuff, if the weather allows it. Life is good right now and, funnily enough, Ark is a big part of that again. And that is, in no small part, because of our lovely new walking fortress.

It is, without a doubt, the most detailed, intricate and lovingly-crafted base I have ever made. If you haven't watched the video about it in the previous update, first of all, fuck you. Secondly, I've made a few important improvements since. Our favourite, cosiest sitting corner now has a nice vivarium with a couple of snakes in it, because until now there was just nothing entertaining to look at. There's no TV on Ark, my paintbrush on canvas skills are limited, so the nice little sitting corner never had anything interesting to look at beyond the comfy furniture itself. This is now fixed.

It's no TV, but it's better than nothing.

I've also fixed the room at the very top of our fortress, which used to be a bit underwhelming so far. I mean, it has a nice dining corner, queen-size beds, a working bathroom with all the facilities, but it also had this gaping, empty void right in the middle of it, as all the interesting stuff had always been arranged alongside the walls, with nothing at the dead center of it. I could never quite figure out what to put there. Another set of chairs and a big table could have worked, but how many more of those does the place really need?

Our bath tub is immensely satisfying.

The big new main attraction in the middle of the room is now a terrarium full of otters. It's the first thing you see when you come through the door, it's nice and unusual and wholesome and makes you want to stay. Bit like the fish tank in a posh Chinese restaurant. It, uh, really ties the room together, I guess.

Still images don't really do it justice.

I really love the place. It tells an interesting story, especially when I think about how it all started. Many years ago, back on THEISLAND and Nintendo Switch, we started off with this crappy little thatch hut, which ended up half-eaten and buried in crap because of some raging fuckhole carnotaurus. But we rebuilt. And as we spent an entire year around that little hut (content on Nintendo Switch was very limited at the time), we added more buildings, painted and decorated the place, built little houses out of wood and stone, with working windows and everything. At the time, we were convinced it was the coolest base one could possibly set up.

When we moved on to Scorched Earth, we started to use giant gates, built tall walls around the place, created buildings which provided actual protection against the elements, had gardens and proper irrigaton. Definitely the coolest base one could possibly set up! Moving even further along until our first exploration of Ragnarok, and I've built my very first own castle. It was blocky and crude, a bit boring in places, not entirely structurally sound and very angular. I also combined about 32 different mods and their art styles and time periods, so the interiors made very little sense. I loved everything about it and we still miss the place now and then. Perhaps I will rebuild it in that same spot, but make it better. Fix the issues the original castle had. 

World's okayest castle; never been as good as nostalgia tells us.

It was a good home, and I miss that massive, torch-lit flight of stairs, which went all the way down into a green, picturesque valley full of flowers and friendly herbivores. Racing down those steps on a battle-clad unicorn of all things, heading down to the beach where we had our secondary camp, those are some of the fondest memories of Ragnarok I have. So perhaps, in the coming days and weeks, I will work on bringing it back. For as much as I miss it sometimes, having a much better castle, which can literally walk or swim anywhere we want it to, is objectively better and even more enjoyable. But I can't deny a certain sense of "remember when we used to live here?" whenever we roam that territory. It aches a little, but it can be fixed. Perhaps I will.

In the meanwhile, I have brought back another incredibly important thing, which helps me enjoy Ark a lot more, and raises the immersion to levels, you probably can't really imagine until you've experienced it yourself: VR.

There is nothing like Ark VR in first person.

You might imagine the VR experience as simply having the game plastered on to your eyeballs with added stereoscopic 3D, but it's infinitely more intense than that. You don't get a sense for the sheer size of your dinos until you really have to tilt back your head to see them in their entirety. You don't know what it's like to live inside a walking fortress until you've sat in its chairs, slept in its beds and looked out of its windows. It does something with your mind and your senses. When I ride Amon, my black direwolf, in VR, watch the world race by at incredible speed, listen to Ark's brilliant sound design, I can feel her fur against me, I can feel the wind in my face and the rain against my skin. 

When I turn my head, I can see Claire next to me on Lavastorm, her fiery velociraptor. And in theory, I could see her turn her head and look back at me, but she gets motion-sick in under ten seconds, so I'm the only one using VR in this house. Stability is also a bit iffy if I host a multiplayer server and run the game in VR at the same time, so I think I may have to lower things from 4k to 1080p for this particular style of play. Nothing's ever perfect, but we're getting there.

VR absolutely makes me live inside this thing.

My descriptions may sound cheesy and exaggerated to you, but it's absolutely true. The game's stupidly detailed and realistic textures and bump-maps (Ark literally takes up HUNDREDS of gigabytes of space), combined with believable 3d, head-tracking and surround sound make it easy for the brain to fill in the blanks and add sensations such as the touch and smell of things. I need to set up Voice Attack, so I can command my tames just by talking to them once more. It's nice when you can just tell a tame dino to come, stay, be peaceful or ask it for help in a fight. Imagine getting picked off your mount and instead of finding the right keyboard shortcut, you just say, "help me!", and your dinos start attacking whatever is trying to kill you.

I just wish there was proper hand simulation for VR in this game. I want to pet my dinos. Hand-feed them treats like in Ark Park. That game has a brachiosaurus, which bends its neck all the way down to you to take food from your hands. I'd love to have that sort of thing in "regular" Ark just to add that one little extra bit of interactivity. Really bond with those dinos. As it stands, it's not as good as it could be, it doesn't have the same level of world interaction as a fully-modded Skyrim VR, but it's still exciting enough to make Ark feel like a new, entirely different, much better game.

And now for somethinge completely different.

My personal space has now been invaded by a cat, who believes it isn't enough to sit near or next to me. She has to be on the damn computer. Literally. This is very irritatinlg and makes it so much more difficult to write. Anyway. We took the fortress for a swim, while I was inside. It was awesome! Turns out it behaves in pretty much the most obvious and reasonable way: The water level inside the building rises and falls in exact relation to how far you submerge the place in the ocean. Dip it just a little bit, and the floors on the bottom level get wet, dunk it all the way in, and you'll be swimming and seeing sea life through your windows.

Not sure I've ever seen water flooding into a castle on Ark before.

Sharks started swarming the fortress pretty much straight away, but that's what turrets are for. Turrets were specifically invented to fire cannonballs at sharks. Everybody knows that.

Right. I am going to finish my glass of wine, then I shall look at bottom of the sea from inside my living room.

Strictly speaking, the turrets are really just for flavour, though, and not as essential to the defence of our fortress as you might think. After all, the whole place is being carried by Atlas. Atlas is a titanosaur. Atlas is very strong.

Don't fuck with Atlas.

Our little A-Team of elite dinos is working out incredibly well. It's the most fun I had in this game for a very long time. We took the wolves and the raptors and our phoenix on a trip around the ark, tarmed one of those creepy new giant bats, then went for the artifact cave under the ruined castle. To be honest, even in such a small group of dinos, these guys trivialize much of the game, which isn't usually something I enjoy, but in this case it's simply too satisfying for me to mind. Our phoenix will absolutely torch the shit out of everything. Watching countless numbers pop up all over your screen from a burning T-Rex is incredibly fun!

Terra, our jungle raptor, drastically increases the damage of the pack. Direwolf Amon has been turned into a tank via Antinode and will absolutely stand between a giga and squishy pack members and hold it for as long as it takes. Trips through scorching deserts and snowy mountaintops become a lot less perilous thanks to raptors Everfrost and Lavastorm and the incredible insulation they provide. We even tackled the undersea caves below the ruined keep with the help of Aquarius, the gilled raptor. There really isn't much we can't do, and I'm looking forward to fighting the alpha bosses with these guys, and only these guys. Well...

Claire takes good care of our dinos.

Seeing as dungeons will only entertain us for so long, I'm running Rare Sightings as a side activity. It spawns rare dinos with unique mutations ranging from horns for extra damage to quills for bleed procs, to phoenix blood for rebirth to a whole lot of other interesting stuff that makes them potential tames for our small group of super unique, special dinos. Problem is, so far it insists on only spawning rare sea life at the very edges of the map. There isn't enough stamina in the world to reach these places and scout for mutated fish without a dedicated swimmer. So we tamed a pair of austroraptors or something. I'm not sure. Raptors with fins, which are exceptionally skilled swimmers, with a unique swimming animation and everything. We just call them fishy raptors. 

I'm not super keen on the idea. We've squeezed them into the stables with the other raptors and the wolves, but the castle is very crowded now. Claire also did what she always does and went overboard, so now we also own a Baryonyx for some reason. He hangs around outside the castle, which may seem a bit cruel, but there's simply no space. He could go in the throne room, but that's meant to be exactly that - a throne room, which is for thrones. And elephants. The more dinos we hoard, the more difficult it gets to move them all whenever we relocate the castle. It also defeats the whole idea of only having a very small group of very specialised dinos. 

Large tribes trivialize challenges and get increasingly annoying to manage.

In the end, we failed on all fronts, anyway. We didn't find the artifact underneath the ruined keep, though we did find a suspiciously green, grassy little side area bathed in sunlight coming through a crack in the cave walls, which heavily implies the artifact should spawn there, but Ark decided to be Ark and simply failed to make it appear, which often happens, especially in multiplayer.

The rare fishy dino we attempted to find and capture on our swimming raptors was ultimately eaten by sharks. So we ended our adventure empty-handed. I don't even mind. There will be other rare sights to capture, other artifacts to find, we'll come back more experienced and well-prepared. It was still an adventure, our dinos performed admirably, and having specialised tames for every situation is a really fun way to play. I think for one of our next adventures I want to take our fortress all the way up the volcano and have our dinos escort it. It's batshit insane and I can't wait to see how we'll do.