Ark: Wolfie's Moving Castle & The A-Team

 

I was done with Ark, was over it, had seen and done everything I ever cared to see and do on there, and then some. I was finally free, clean, able to spend my time on all these other games I've so grossly neglected. There's Elite Dangerous, the #1 VR game I'd choose to live inside of, if I could. And I honestly kind of do whenever I find the time to play it. I'm half-way from level 98 to 99 in Path of Exile, getting so incredibly close to my ultimate goal of reaching level 100 after all those years! There's a whole new expansion to explore in Everquest 2, and I still haven't completed the final mission in the re-released season 1 of Guild Wars 2! So much to do, thank fuck there's no Ark to mess with my plans! Yeah, about that...

Family got me a chonky new SSD for my birthday, large enough to sate Ark's insane, uncompressed, poorly-optimised cravings for storage space. We're talking about a game, which may take up half a terabyte of space all on its own once you've progressed far enough into its content. I have a lot of tolerance for weird, unusual games and their poor design, but at that point, Ark had become so bloated, it wasn't even realistically playable anymore unless you gave it its very own dedicated drive. Which I suddenly had. I had also been cooking up this daft little idea for the game at the back of my head for a very long while, but always pushed it to the side, because no time, no space … then suddenly dedicated SSD and holiday season. There was no escaping my destiny.

A monstrosity, but a cute one at that.

It's fascinating how obsessive my autistic brain can get over stuff. The moment I got started on my new project, I started building day and night, sustained myself on around 4 hours of sleep every 48 hours or so and a single meal per day, which I couldn't avoid cooking, because I had to have something ready for whenever Claire got home from work. I didn't feel tired or hungry during that period of time. All I felt was the need to build. I needed a new castle in Ragnarok. A cooler castle with better defences, more intricate detail, more interesting features, more interesting architecture and less clutter. But most importantly, it had to be mobile.

I put my new castle on top of a titanosaur. Atlas, who quite literally carries the weight of my new virtual home upon his shoulders, can relocate my walking fortress to just about any place I want in all of Ragnarok, including the ocean. This castle swims and it even dives. I made a little video, which shows some of its interior, you can see it moving around and at the end of the video you can see it go for a swim and then emerge from under the sea, which is only the single-most amazing thing I've ever seen in Ark.

There's still a fair amount of jank at play here, but that's alright. Building atop a living, moving dinosaur frequently causes attachment points to derp out, many bits and pieces are a bit crude and lopsided, the whole thing gets a little out of whack unless you freeze time and/or put your carrier dino on a perfectly flat surface. These are things I didn't know or apply until well into my experiment, so alas, it's not as pretty as it could have been, but MOVING CASTLE, GOD DAMNIT! Ragnarok is huge, and it always annoyed me how we had to spend ages flying to different areas of the map, set up secondary camps, try and relocate a bunch of dinos, basically have a whole bunch of time-consuming prep-work for every cave, mission or adventure, which wasn't in the direct vicinity of our old, stationary keep. Now I can just move the entire base and all its inhabitants wherever I need it and stay for as long as I have to. Or just relocate for a change of scenery.

It's incredible. I originally built the whole thing in the area of Ragnarok the game literally refers to as Scotland in its files. It's my favourite area in all of Ark's content. It's nice to look out the window or over the balcony and see green hills and fields and blue skies and just a whole lot of nature and scenery. Then I had Atlas move the whole thing to the beach, so now I can see the ocean and the edge of the large redwood forest in the distance, I see the fakey Giant's Causeway and some rocky cliffs. Maybe I'll take it to the desert next. Or the jungle. Or some snowy mountaintops. I'll always have the warm, cosy safety of my moving home around me, without being tied to any specific place. 

Areas like the castle garden can actually be rather dreamy.

I followed and escorted Atlas on a small convoy of agile dinos, as Claire helped steer the titanosaur down to the beach. You think you may have seen and done everything in a sandbox game like that, but damn, this was a whole new experience. I even sat inside the castle for a bit as Claire walked it around. It was like an earthquake, only at less than 5 frames per second, because I was also hosting the whole thing as a multiplayer server, and the game was desperately trying to keep track of a moving fortress consisting of hundreds and hundreds of individual objects. Frankly, I'm amazed it worked at all, without any crashes or catastrophic glitches, but we're definitely pushing the game to its extreme limits now.

In the coming days I'm hoping we can take Atlas for another swim. I want to be inside the castle and see what happens as it gets submerged. I genuinely don't know whether the interior will stay dry or whether it will all become flooded. Will lowering the drawbridge let the water in? Can I see sharks swim by when I look through the windows? I find the idea fascinating from a technical point of view. How is the engine going to handle this? 

I tried to turn it into a place I'd genuinely want to live in.

We're also trying a different approach to tackling exploration, caves and general content in a way that's a little closer to an RPG. What usually happens when we play Ark is that we get so carried away taming every single dinosaur in existence, we usually end up with an impossibly large base camp full of so many critters, it's basically impossible to take care of them all without the help of some mods. A dino has a cool or unusual colour, does something silly like spawn on top of a tree or stands out in some other way, we usually get attached to it, tame it and add it to the family, only for it to sit around in our base, consume resources and never do anything, unless it gets chosen to be one of the lucky 20 or so tames to go into a boss fight.

This time around, we're limiting ourselves to a very small amount of very strong, specialised dinos with very specific strengths and jobs. With the help of mods (Antinode and Organic Saddles, to be precise), we've gifted Atlas with extreme carry capacity (otherwise, there's no way he could move our fortress). We also enhanced a tapejara with ludicrous speed, have a wolf as a dedicated tank, a raptor with a strong DPS aura, as well as a strong swimmer and mounts, which are exceptionally strong in hot and cold surroundings, respectively. We're at ten specialised animals, including shoulder pets.

Antinode specifically lets you set up a tame to be a tank, organic saddles can give a raptor and its master water breathing and so forth.

The idea is to have a very small, yet incredibly strong group of tames, each of which excel in very specific areas and situations to give each of them their own identity and a purpose. This has always been a problem with our adventures in the past, as we'd simply tame vast amounts of just about everything we could find, then dump all their stats into melee damage and health, until we had so many powerful fighters, you could take any number of them into an alpha boss battle, get a guaranteed win and shrug off any potential losses, for as rare as they were. 

Rather than simply overwhelm every obstacle with sheer numbers, we're hoping to bring only a small selection of ideal tames on each adventure and use their abilities instead of simply spamming everything to death. With Ark being the unpredictable monstrosity that it is, we'll see how realistic this idea is ultimately going to be. For what it's worth, we're off to an interesting start.

Some of them also get some interesting visual effects. I don't usually like glowy dinos all that much, but these are rather pretty.

Before anything, we had to head out and get some levels on our brand new, would-be super dinos. Judging by our first few trial runs, the whole thing looks rather fun and promising. After eating a nice collection of baddies roaming around the direct vicinity of our recently-beached castle and dumping our first lot of points into vital dino stats, we went and tackled some level 130 alpha carnivore. Honestly can't remember what it was, they're all huge, toothy, running around on two legs and eating everyone around them whilst flailing with their two pathethic, stubby little arms. Amon, our tank-specced wolf, would go in first and draw its aggro. The Antinode mod gives dedicated tanks lots of health, but also reduces their speed as a balancing method, so they become these strong but sluggish beef machines.

Claire then jumped the alpha from behind with the help of Terra, our jungle raptor. Jungle raptors get a significant DPS buff for themselves and their rider, but you wouldn't necessarily put them head-first in harm's way. To stick with the RPG comparison, the wolf would take the role of a warrior, whilst the raptor played rogue, with additional mounts providing support (pack boost, mate buff, flanking, you get the idea). We also have a roguey dimorphodon to help clear cave trash such as bats and bugs, there's the water raptor for flooded sections, as well as Everfrost and Lavastorm, a pair of raptors, who perform exceptionally well in cold and hot environments, respectively, as well as protect their rider against the elements.

And sometimes you just have to stop for a drink and to appreciate the scenery.

Of course Ark is a little bit like real life when it comes to plans. It really doesn't give a crap about what your intentions are or what your are planning. So after we had been around on our new ground-based pets for a while, we decided to take our ultra-speedy tapejara for a spin. See what the game world had decided to spawn around us, figure out how quickly we could reach the opposite end of the ark with a speed Antinode, that sort of thing. And after we had decided that we were happy with our small selection of elite dinos, didn't need a hundred billion random tames this time around, and that it was really bedtime, Ark showed us a middle finger, which just so happened to be shaped exactly like a phoenix.

Never in our thousands of hours of playtime have we encountered a phoenix before. They're not even supposed to show up in Ragnarok, but one of those "dinos from other arks can spawn anywhere" mods must have helped with that. What's weirder, there really wasn't just one phoenix out there. There were two. We've doubled the spawn rates on our server, which can result in weird shit like two unicorns instead of just one at any given time. Or two phoenix sightings, apparently.

These are almost as rare in Ark as they are in real life.

This basically meant two things: One, fuck your bedtime. Two, fuck having a playthrough without any additional tames, because this toasty chicken is gonna come live with us now! So long story short, we now have a flying mount, which sets everything that comes near it on fire, shoots fireballs, has a burning, rocket-powered jet boost and pretty much puts all other flying things to shame. But hey, what's one extra pet, right? Can always stop taming them now, simply refuse to bring home anything else. We've got a moving castle, there's only so much room, we can only take care of so many. Let's not start hoarding again.

Thing is, sometimes animals just decide to become pets all on their own, without asking how you feel about it. When we returned to our castle, found a nice, fire-proof perch for the new bird and got ready to turn in for the night, Claire asked me if I had tamed anything new before we headed out. I did not. She asked me if I had lowered the drawbridge that opens the way into our throne room. Of course I hadn't! But when I joined Claire inside the throne room, it turned out that, for whatever reason, the drawbridge had indeed been lowered and we had a visitor, who had made himself at home during our absence. I guess that's one of the problems when you're a pompous fuck, who insists on having a massive throne room, which is large enough for an elephant.

Behold the elephantosaurus!

We're not currently looking to hire a new elephantosaurus. We genuinely don't need an elephantosaurus. He can't lift like our titanosaur, can't move like our tapejara, can't fight like our raptors or tank like our wolf. I opened the drawbridge, so he could leave and be on his merry way. Now, I don't know whether you're familiar with the concept of a drawbridge, but they tend to be fairly large. There was a big, elephant-sized opening in our throne room for the elephantosaurus to enjoy its freedom, venture back out into nature, eat, live, find a mate, do whatever it is an elephantosaurus tends to do.

It walked up to me and did a little toot. Like, from the face. And just stayed there. Now I don't know what to do. He's not particularly useful or even very good at anything. He's butt-ugly to boot. The kindest thing would be to lead him out back, grab the shotgun and Old Yeller the poor thing. We just went to sleep. There's a prehistoric elephant thing living inside our throne room. I don't know how it got there or why the drawbridge was lowered to let it in. I just don't think we're gonna get rid of him anytime soon. 

Sometimes you just have to let Ark be Ark. Dinosaurs are like mice, apparently. They fit through the tiniest cracks and infest your house.

I hate myself for even thinking about it already, but I guess I'll spend most of tomorrow setting the whole thing up for VR again. Maybe even bring the headset next time we visit the family, so they can enjoy a tapejara ride in stereoscopic 3D. Aside from that, I guess we'll be beefing up our new elite dinos some more, explore some caves, loot some artifacts, prepare to fight some bosses. I can't believe I'm doing this all over again.

Something something great balls of fire.