Ark: Dick Move

 

Originally, our plans for our return to Ragnarok consisted of three elements: Collect rare spawns, gather all the artifacts, and do fun shit with our moving castle. Our problem with the first aspect of this plan is how the Rare Sightings mod is really just a rare fish generator. The mod upgrades any stray creature inside your game to an upgraded rare at random. It has done so three times in our game now, and each time we got blessed with a rare fish. I don't like underwater content in any game, I particularly dislike it in Ark. Water is stupidly dangerous, and the whole concept of "there's a rare fish in your game, which is surrounded by eleventy thousand hungry predator fish at all times" is just a little too frustrating to be enjoyable. You get drastically reduced visibility, the rare is borderline impossible to spot and even if you do, it'll be stuck inside a cloud of shark and squids and krakens and fuck everything with a rake.

As for the caves, each of them is an absolute nightmare in Ragnarok. Platforming, human sacrifice, dino sacrifice, everywhere is a dark, giant maze, here's a fire golem to ruin your day. Caves in this game have always been janky, barely functional, borderline unplayable crap. The caves in Ragnarok are so garbage, they should force irredeemable criminals, who killed their own parents to play them. Either as a form as punishment or to build character, I don't even know. So when we tried to decide what to do today, I opted for the third one: Take our walking fortress on an adventure!

It can climb the tallest mountains and dive into the deepest oceans.

To me, this is the ultimate tame, the creature to end all creatures, the Top of the Pops, the alpha and the omega. If the best you can come up with is to sit on a T-Rex with a Tek laser or some dumb shit like spawn in an army of 500 gigas, then you're just boring and you lack imagination. I took Atlas, our fortress-carrying titanosaur, and headed straight up that volcano on Ragnarok. Into the deadliest area full of yucky spider swarms, jumpy mantis fuckers, acid-spitting moustaches and bats, wyverns and extra toasty X-variations of dinos, because Genesis crossover mods. And I stomped that shit.

These four big towers in each corner of my moving fortress aren't just for show. Each of them have windows and provide a stunning view of the surrounding landscape, one has a fully functional shitter and they all are completely covered in turrets. So as Atlas rumbled across the hot lava, causing small earthquakes with every step, the air was filled with the thunder of two dozen cast iron cannons, utterly obliterating everything within our very generous reach. Oh, so your favourite tame can roar at stuff or use crappy AI to chomp on things in those rare moments where it's not getting itself stuck in some rocks? That's cute. Mine brings the end of the world and floods the land with packs of wolves and a kerfuffle of raptors when I lower its drawbridges.

The volcano? No, didn't notice any baddies, sorry.

The interesting bit was getting all of our dinos to follow in Atlas' footsteps as we relocated our moving home. Generally, you can keep them parked inside the fortress, but long trips through tricky terrain can cause them to get knocked out of their stables and into the landscape, so it's usually safer to have them walk alongside Atlas and provide cover. 

And since I'm playing with Claire, we've already got more than three times the dinos I originally wanted to keep.

We plowed across half of the map, which is a lot easier than you'd think. Basically, any place that is within reach for a titanosaur can be accessed with an entire castle on top, because it doesn't seem to have any collisions outside of the titanosaur's hitbox. The castle will clip right through any cliffs, trees, mountains, just about everything, for as long as the carrier dino can fit through. Only tames contained inside the castle will get stuck behind world geometry, so if you get half a mountainside to clip through your castle interior, any dino slapped in the face by it will get thrown outside. 

Originally, I didn't seriously expect to be able to cross the entire volcano, get everyone across without casualties (on our side), let alone relocate the fortress in one piece, but we saved a backup, started the journey for the fun of it, everything went much better than expected, and we ended up reaching one of my absolute favourite spots on any ark. There are these cascading waterfalls in an area, which spawns mostly argies, the odd griffin here and there and an occasional T-Rex. It's as beautiful as it is dangerous, and most certainly not your first choice if you were to set up a base from scratch and in a more conventional fashion.

The most perfect spot.

With a little persuasive power provided via means of gunpowder and cannonballs, the argies quickly accepted Atlas as the new dominant life form in the area and vacated the place. How nice of them. And now it's just ... well, when I sit down on my balcony, this is what I see:

It looks even cooler at dusk.

When I peek through the windows I see this:

It's actually quite beautiful in VR.

Turns out there's a hot spring at the bottom of the waterfall, where you can sit and dangle your feet.

Also works for fishing.

There's a big, shady tree in front of the castle, where our dinos like to sit in the shade and chill.

I just wanna sit there and hang out with them.

The tree is big enough to give Atlas something to chomp on.

We've never been so careful around a tree before. We don't want to destroy it by accident.

You can hear the waterfall and see it through the windows when you're inside the fortress, which is great and pretty soothing when you don't have a hyperactive bladder. The water is deep enough to park all the rare fish we keep taming until something more interesting spawns in. There's even a hidden cave behind the water, which is spacious enough to host a secondary base, a crafting area or whatever we may ultimately decide to put there, if anything. It's easily reachable with just about any flying mount.

I giggled, but apparently that's only his tail.

While I never really wanted any tames beyond the small handful of powerful specialised dinos we keep inside the fortress, our new location at least allows us to spread out Claire's extra tames in a way where they don't get completely cluttered and intrusive. And they actually serve a purpose there, because the place is frequently visited by carnivores. Atlas and the cannons can handle them, but it's nice to have a bunch of hungry praetorian dinos waiting outside to receive uninvited guests.

And lowering your drawbridge to walk into this landscape isn't so bad, either.

Sadly, these screenshots don't really show just how nice it all looks in motion, with HDR, let alone in VR. Something tells me we're not going to move Atlas anywhere else for a very long time. It would be incredibly difficult to find a place more suitable and inviting than this one.

Sometimes it's enough to know you could move your home if you wanted to.