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.

The Joy of Balancing Ark

 

Tits.

Ark does some stupid shit, because it rarely knows wtf it even wants to be. There are lots and lots of dinosaurs, some (and only some) as scientifically accurate as you can get right now, but then you get fantasy creatures like dragons, wyverns and a comically huge spider with 'little spider anatomy', which would crush itself under its own weight. And then there's that whole thing where you put a bunch of old-timey ship cannons, but also gun turrets and laser guns on your dinos and half of them are actually robots or some shit.

The only thing dumber than this random, arbitrary combination of stuff is the explanation for it. "Aliens, right?" is what most players said, so the developers kept stressing, "it's definitely not aliens, we promise!", so people kept going, "Okay, but still, it's definitely aliens tho", until they wrapped it up with this nonsensical story about how the last remaining people of earth chucked random people and creatures from all sorts of different times and places together to teach them about nature and peaceful coexistence or whatever. Because humankind had gone extinct and so have the dinosaurs and even though they never existed alongside one another, it's somehow helpful to bring them both back together, but there's also dragons and cyber-dinos because CORRUPTION or wtf do I know.

Just smile and don't question it.

It's also hilarious how the message behind Ark ultimately wants to be this thing about how people have to learn to live with and alongside nature instead of exploiting it, when the entire game is about murdering dinosaurs, keeping dinosaurs in captivity, then forcing them to murder even more dinosaurs and every other living player on your server. Also, rocket launchers, gatling lasers and machine guns, because, you know, peace. But story is often added as an afterthought and usually written by people, who don't actually play the game a whole lot. I know, because I wrote quests, stories and content for games I don't play.

It's nice how you can customize Ark with mods and either fully embrace or maybe even attempt to fight the stupid. Claire goes for the former. She uses a dino collection, which adds a whole lot of really high-quality community-created beasties to her game. The model and texture work is top notch, they come with lots of custom sound effects and special abilities. They're also really dumb. This mod's idea of a cryolophosaurus is that it should freeze its prey with arctic breath. Because hurrdurr, cryo. It adds a really cool-looking concavenator, whose special ability allows it to blast other dinos with sand to suffocate them. It can kill a titanosaur in less than a minute that way. Most of the critters in this mod are silly or completely broken in this way. Its dinos also follow a weird visual trend, which... 

Why?

Look. If you believe every creature in this game should glow in the dark, shower you with particles and have so many overpowered element-based special attacks that even wyverns and dragons become obsolete, more power to you. I see the videos showcasing these mods and more often than not, it's someone constantly playing in GM mode, summoning in and force-taming everything via console commands. And that's ... fine? It's a game, games are meant to be fun and entertaining and I'm not telling you how you should play. Just not how I would personally do it. I can still remember how and where I've tamed most of my dinos, how many attempts it took, how many times we died, how long we spent actually playing the game for hours. You know, the hours you skip by copy-pasting console commands, riding around on everything for five minutes, maybe spawning in 500 random dinos for your tames to fight for a YouTube video, then instantly getting bored. But you do you. 

At the end of the day, setting up the version of Ark you personally enjoy is all about finding the right balance. Modded dinos have to fit in, visually, thematically and mechanically. I'll draw the line at bleed and venom-based attacks, I'm also not adding any more dragons, gorgons, minotaurs or other high fantasy or ancient mythology stuff. We play on Ragnarok, a certain mythology is already there and implied in this ark's very name, and that's okay. But if I'm adding stuff, I want it to be dinosaurs. I also want the game to remain challenging without becoming impossible, which requires a balancing act of a very different kind.

This bitch was ridiculously tough to tame! I'd never just spawn them in.

Stuff needs to be difficult, there always has to be a threat, a challenge, death has to be a real risk, because otherwise I don't need to fire up a videogame and I can just watch a powerpoint presentation about dinosaurs. Setting this up in Ark is never easy, especially since most of the time we're only two players. Our dinosaurs are set up to get fairly chunky health boosts when leveling up, because we treasure them, we don't just consider them tools and we also can't mass-produce them like large clans, which breed tons of dinos for mutations. 

Of course this creates a risk of trivialising the game. If most tames can simply face-tank any threat after enough levels, things are at a risk of becoming a little braindead. So that's where all those toxic, bleedy and generally nasty dinos come into play, which impale you, drag you off your mount and find all sorts of fun ways to kill you, even when you're sitting on something that's relatively unkillable. We've also doubled the spawn rates and amounts of active dinosaurs, so you're gonna need some tanky tames when the entrance to an artifact cave is guarded by literally 100 bats or more.

Bigger challenges require bigger tames. Like this flying mantis.

Death is a very real possibility at any given time. And since our server doesn't hibernate dinos the moment you're a few inches away from them, getting murdered in one of those situations will put even the tankiest of tames at risk, because they will continue to sustain attacks while we're trying to get back to them. We're also not using any of those 'keep all your stuff when you die' mods, because why even try to avoid death if it doesn't sting? Every decision should always be balancing the risk vs the potential rewards. We might die, lose our stuff and our dinos. Is it worth it? Is it too dangerous? Some people enjoy themselves more when they don't have to think about these things. We don't.

Another part of balancing is convenience vs repetition. When we started our adventure on Ragnarok, we had a small selection of very powerful tames, which we kept around for most of our playthroughs of all the other arks. We kept them inside our castle, set up some feeding troughs, then made sure these troughs were always full and each dino had access to one. Then we set up a second camp and placed a bunch of new dinosaurs there. So more troughs, more food to collect. More diverse needs and wants. Fish, berries, vegetables, meat, cake, honey. A fucking buffet. Some days would simply begin with maintenance - split up, one of us gets meat and fish, the other goes for berries and such. Place new troughs, move dinos around, make sure nobody goes hungry.

Tiny tribe and lots of tames means lots of stress for very few people.

Now that we have access to tons upon tons of brand new dinos, many of which we're taming simply because they're new, interesting and/or we want to learn about their abilities, we've got such a large amount of tames, that keeping all of them fed at all times is becoming less and less realistic. On top of that, I have to keep feeding Claire's family. Her mother's and sister's characters are sleeping in our tavern and I frequently have to feed them in order to prevent them from starving to death, because survival sandbox games are stupid.

To cut a long story short, I've finally given in and installed a mod for self-refilling troughs. Park a dino next to it and it won't die of starvation and you don't have to constantly refill them and spend half your day gathering groceries for virtual animals. It does take away an aspect of the game, removes the whole feeding and caring for your dinos bit, but once you're sitting on a hundred or more of these guys, feeding them becomes a full-time job. And seeing as we're already spending more time harvesting materials and converting them into repair kits and tranquilizer darts than we do actually hunting dinosaurs, there's got to be some added convenience somewhere. 

I'd rather actively tame my own gigas and titans and skip some of the grocery shopping via mods than console-tame everything in order to manually harvest berries all day.

Of course it's not all tits, troughs and rainbows. We've made the game more interesting and challenging in other ways. Do you have a minute to talk about our lord and saviour, -preventhibernation? By default, if you play Ark solo or on a small, non-dedicated server, the game hibernates everything that isn't immediately surrounding you. Remember that bright-red Tek rex you spotted near the volcano the other day, but left alone, because you didn't have the resources to tame it? Come back to the exact same spot a week later and that same rex will be sitting right there. Everything that isn't in your vicinity gets hibernated by the game in order to save resources. Wild babies (if you have mods for those) don't grow, alpha predators don't roam and murder everything, tames you leave out in the wild don't die of injuries or starvation, unless you stay very close to them. Move away from them and they just remain in the exact same state you've last seen them. 

This is pretty neat, because not only does it help preserve memory, but it also lets you control areas of an ark to a point. For instance, our keep was mostly surrounded by harmless sheep and sauropods. At some point a giga showed up, so we tamed and (re)moved it, causing the game to spawn something else in its place. There are only so many different things that can spawn in each biome, so we just kept removing all threats until they had all been replaced by sheep. And since there can only ever be so many creatures in any given area at a time, once everything is filled up by sheep, no nasty predators will appear out of nowhere to take their place.

There are certain things you simply don't want to spontaneously appear.

You can disable this hibernation effect. Dinos will still 'pause' in time at a certain distance, but it's far less strict and you'll frequently come to a previously-visited area, only to realise that new dinos have moved in during your absence, certain predators have killed a bunch of stuff, perhaps some of them also managed to get eaten and so on and so forth. You may find that the strongest predators surrounding your base have eaten all of the weaker dinos and suddenly things have become considerably more dangerous on your home turf. This is great!

One problem with having a reasonably safe base is that the majority of your dinos will only serve decorative purposes. Sure, you can take them on a boss fight or squeeze them inside a cave, but even then, how many of them will you realistically take on an adventure? Our bases are now under constant threat, so we've set up our strongest dinos to guard them. You also have to tether them to tanky, stationary dinos or to a specific spot you assign to their tame group, so there's a bit of a tactical element involved, unless you want them to go walkies and potentially never find them again. We like to assign our dinos to certain spots around our camps to make sure they're protected from all sides.

You can try to take our castle, but you'll have to get past the royal guard first.

It's actually pretty cool when each of your tames get jobs, not just the ones you use for harvesting and getting across the map. Now some of them actually get to fight, even when we're not grinding out caves and bosses for the nth time.

Turning off hibernation also allows us to use a mod called Rare Sightings. With this thing activated, every so often you will get a random broadcast, informing you of a rare creature, which comes with unique colours, effects and abilities. Something may spawn in with horns or antlers, which looks particularly dumb on a dodo, but nothing's ever perfect, I guess. You can try to tame and keep them, even pass on some of their freaky shit to potential offspring if you mate it, or you can kill the rare critter for some extra juicy loot. So if you ever had one of those days where you just sat there, trying to figure out what to do on Ark, maybe give this one a go and hunt down some freaky, mutated critters for a bit of extra challenge. There's an alternative called 'Shiny! Dinos', but their random critters can be frozen, on fire and literally ghosts or skeletons and that's a little too freaky for me. But you do you.

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.

Gigaslayer Chickens

 

Given enough time and level-ups, just about any creature in Ark: Survival Evolved can attain god-like power. Obviously, this effect is drastically increased in single player sessions and on small custom servers with easier rulesets, but for as long as you keep dumping points into health and melee damage, your treasured pet will become more and more tanky, whilst learning to dish out like a T-Rex. Once your humble jerboa sits on a 5000 percent increase of its otherwise humble melee damage, it's gonna fuck shit up. Obviously, on hardcore rulesets you'll have to go through a lot of selective inbreeding and causing mutations to reach levels anywhere near that, but it's still possible to raise critters so unreasonably powerful, they'll be infinitely stronger than anything naturally spawning all over the arks, apart from maybe a giganotosaurus.

We may be raising titans and direwolves, but every creature can be a hero.

Claire and I have frequent arguments about this, whenever we play together on our Ragnarok dino retirement server, which is a very chill setting, where I built a huge fortress to house all of our favourite veteran dinosaurs, who accompanied us through the story and boss fights across all the different arks in the game. She'll tame random shit, just because it happens to be level 150something or tries to talk me out of taming stuff, when it's only level 5, as if any of this had any meaning outside of hardcore, competitive settings. Really, all you have to do is get them through a few easy fights or even just some harvesting or even just have them watch you build a toilet, so they'll gain experience and you can start beefing them up. Naturally, higher-level dinos will end up even stronger, they get an easier start, but time is the ultimate balancing factor.

Anything can be powerful. Even a cow.

To prove my point to Claire, I proposed a farming run. As in, a journey across the Ragnarok ark using only common farm animals, in this case the cows and chickens added to the game via the Animals of Atlas mod. We'd both ride cows, order our five chickens to follow the cows and set them up to join every fight we'd get into. If we run into a stray dinosaur with beef cravings, we'd be allowed to defend ourselves (using only cow attacks, no tek or ascended shotguns), but the chickens would always have to join the fight. And just by raising their health and damage whenever they gained levels by fighting alongside us, I was sure we'd be able to take them on a trip around the world and bring them back unharmed. Of course, cows are naturally tanky and can soak up a lot of damage in order to protect our chickens.

Also, our keep is surrounded my harmless herbivores, so the first steps weren't too difficult.

I reckon our feathered friends gained at least a dozen or so levels due to Claire randomly murdering countless innocent sheep, pteranodons and wild baby dinos. I don't like killing stuff just for the fun of it, but she always does it when she thinks I'm not looking. She'll happily wipe out an entire ark with server commands if she isn't satisfied with what's spawning in an area. I don't want that. The idea of my little Ragnarok server is that everything gets to live in peace. Within reason. A T-Rex has to eat and I'm not gonna stop it from gobbling up a bunch of sauropods. But that's because T-Rex is gonna T-Rex. There's no reason to destroy a herd of harmless plant eaters just for fun, especially when you don't even need their meat or skin.

Don't mess with that giga in the distance, if all you've got is a bunch of lowbie cows and chickens.

So we spent the first day of our journey just awkwardly dicking around in the immediate surroundings of our fortress, pecking away at sheep and other such harmless animals. Bit depressing and disappointing, but I suppose you have to start somewhere. And things were about to change, as we were finally starting to get into territory, whose inhabitants were considerably more hostile.

Our first day was about to end. I was starting to get used to riding a cow in VR.

The volcanic area in Ragnarok, as well as the adjacent beach, is home to all sorts of nasty insects. Giant scorpions, which will put you to sleep with their stingers, icky spiders that shoot sticky webs and rainbow-coloured mustaches, which dissolve your armor by spitting on you. They go really well with the occasional mantis, which will leap at you from a mile away to rip your face off. Fortunately, cows are the type of beast, which will take all the damage while you're riding them, meaning you'll be safe for as long as you stay mounted and your raw burger stays alive. On many smaller creatures the rider remains vulnerable, which I had to learn the hard way during one of our cave exploration attempts. So I got jumped by scorpions and centipedes and the occasional mantis, but Tofu, my leathery companion, kept me out of harm's way. Yay for bovine intervention!
Birds like to eat insects, so going after these particular kinds of creatures seemed a reasonable approach to motivate our prehistoric killer chickens to find their bloodlust. And it didn't take them long to learn how to fight. 

Chickens destroying giant scorpions in the pale moonlight. Videogames.

Despite my best efforts, I couldn't get our chickens to harvest the flesh of their enemies. Most carnivorous critters can do this. Have a raptor or a wolf munch on a dead dino and their meat will go straight in their inventory, sustaining them for the coming days. I figured that training a flock of flesh-devouring chickens was our best bet for the journey ahead, but they only kill for the sheer pleasure of it, never for sustenance. They were also becoming more and more willing to mercilessly destroy even the most harmless and innocent of animals for little to no reason, like when Claire accidentally bumped into this prehistoric elk-looking thing.

The poor creature's face is frozen in horror and covered in its own blood. But the chickens' soulless, uncaring eyes show no remorse.

As we made our way across the redwood forest, our heartless murderbirds only kept growing in power. It's a dangerous place, where hungry carnivores burrow and lurk in the ground below or drop on you from the trees above. Tofu and Supercow collected many a scar that day, but our impenetrable phalanx of omni-powerful doom hens would make short work of each and every single one of them. Where we once started with humble sheep and scorpions, we were quickly moving on to sabretooth cats, microraptors and bears until even a full-grown carnotaurus would seal its fate by attempting to sink its teeth into one of our cows.

A second after this image was taken, the carno vanished into a cloud of feathers and beaks, never to be seen again.

It's a bizarre sight, watching a bunch of overgrown hens stand up to one dinosaur after the next, many of which towered above our chickens like undefeatable titans, only to be taken down with a few swift, deadly pecks. It was incredibly stupid, but in the most entertaining way possible.

When you think about it, chickens are really just evolved velociraptors.

Once we had worked our way across the forest, we were headed straight into the desert. The folks who designed this area of Ragnarok have truly outdone themselves, for better or for worse.

You see, on the one hand, this place is easily one of the best, most believable and realistic-looking deserts I've ever seen in a game. It's almost photorealistic. You just see miles and miles of sand and very little else.

Except the occasional cow.

And while that's visually and technically impressive, it also makes for an incredibly dull, frustrating and tedious journey. We'd frequently stop, keep our eyes peeled for some sort of landmark, somewhere to explore, a direction to pick. Or at least a body of water. After all, Ark is still a survival sandbox and temperatures and hydration quickly become an issue, especially when you choose sexy plate armor over practical, light desert clothing. We'd frequently stop and scan the surrounding areas hoping to find an oasis or a vending machine.

Imagine looking around in VR and suddenly this stares at you.

Oh, here's a fun fact about VR: Ragnarok's desert is another area crawling with all manner of bugs and insects. When these fuckers appear out of nowhere and go straight for your face and you see them appear very suddenly, in stereoscopic 3D and right in front of your nose, there's a decent chance you'll attempt to move out of the way in your swiveling arm chair and pancake your cat in the process. 

One nice thing about most open world videogames is that if you keep going in one direction long enough, you'll inevitably reach the end of the land mass and find an ocean. And for some reason I'm never going to understand, the ocean in Ark is very drinkable, so that's where we stayed for the night, refilled our canteens and had our cows pose for some sexy pinup shots.

Home of the whopper!

Things got considerably wetter the next day. Instead of vultures and scorpions we were now surrounded by moths, jerboas and prehistoric kangaroos, all of which were driven crazy when a storm kicked off. 

Like me, the moths in Ark are relatively useless but pretty.

We followed a stream towards the remains of a ruined city. The rain was nice, because it meant we could actually leave the water after a while, seeing as I was no longer constantly overheating. It's nice when the weather in a game isn't just for looks. 

We decided to check out the ruined tower in the distance. A gallimimus decided to walk with us for a while.

We stayed inside an old tower for a while and waited for the storm to pass. The place was inhabited by random lizards and friendly plant eaters. The cows decided to chill and graze for a bit.

It was all pretty wholesome. You had to be there, I guess.

Since we weren't doing a whole lot, I decided to teach our chickens some new commands. Or, to be a bit more precise, I set up a few new voice lines in VoiceAttack, a program, which lets you perform certain actions and functions in games using only your voice. From there on out, when I said 'attack', our chickens would immediately attack the creature I'm targeting at the time. If I asked for 'help', they'd defend us and fight anything that would decide to come after us. Meanwhile, telling them to 'chill' would cause them to cease all fighting and follow us away from conflict. 

For the sake of immersion, I'm playing the game with the UI disabled, which makes the full VR experience a little more believable. And since it's difficult to locate all the many different hotkeys and important buttons, having voice commands for everything is incredibly helpful. Besides, it's just so much fun when you can directly communicate with your animals, tell them to come, stay, attack, help and so on. Though I may have to work on some of the phrases I've set up so far. There was a moment where I had to stop, because I needed a drink. Saying this out loud caused my character to take a drink in-game, which was funny, but unintended and also a bit wasteful, seeing as water is such a limited resource in the desert.

Though things were starting to improve on that front, as well.

We had reached the halfway point of our journey and decided to cross a snowy mountain range on our way back for a change of scenery. In order to get there, we had to travel past more ruins and past lots and lots of all sorts of dinosaurs.

At that point it had become pretty clear that nothing could stand in our way. The cows had attained an exceptional level of beefiness, our chickens were deadly enough to take on any raptor, carnotaurus or other vicious would-be predators, which would dare come anywhere near us. It was a strangely cathartic moment, when some prehistoric crocodile, whose brutal attacks once almost made us quit the game for good many years ago, just got pecked to bits by our birds in seconds.

It's dumb but oh-so funny.

There was one bizarre and dramatic moment, as we had finally reached the edge of the desert, where I was sure that all our efforts had been in vain and our adventure was about to come to an abrupt end. We decided to travel through the night and got a little too close to a pile of boulders, which turned out to be a sleeping rock golem. These guys are significantly stronger than just about any type of dinosaur you can encounter in the wild - and since our battle chickens were ordered to fight anything that poses a threat to us, we suddenly had one hell of a fight on our hands.

Cows and chickens fighting a golem. Did I mention videogames?

Every battle we had fought up to this point had always ended in seconds. But this colossal creature dwarfed our mighty cows and wasn't at all impressed by the beaky flurries of our feathered, frantic fowls. I was surprised to learn that even the massive boulders thrown by the golem at my cow Tofu was tanked in its entirety by my noble bovine steed, meaning I remained entirely unharmed, but my mount was taking considerable amounts of damage. Fortunately for us, the golem was so focused on both of our cows that our chickens could maintain their relentless attacks and whittle him down more and more over time. The whole thing took an eternity and a half, but against all my expectations, we ultimately won, our farmyard animals gained a whopping ten levels each, but there was no way we could have taken on another golem. No matter how tanky you are, you're not just gonna walk off the injuries sustained during a fight like that.

Packs of wolves attacked us in the snowy mountains, but compared to a massive golem, they were absolutely nothing.

One the one hand, our farm animals had now reached a point, where we could genuinely consider taking on a giga. Only in their fully-rested state, of course. We had defeated a golem, regular predators posed absolutely no threat, there really wasn't that much more room for improvement at this point. So the journey back home really wasn't going to be all that exciting or scary. On the other hand, chickens are dumber than shit, Ark's AI is the absolute worst and then we ran into not one, but two more golems. 

At that time it was 4 in the morning, all our animals were injured from their previous battle, we absolutely couldn't take on these monsters, but our chickens were still set to attack anything that moves. So I was circling the golems with my cow, shouting at our chickens to chill, all to the delight of our neighbour upstairs, who couldn't get any sleep because of our bullshittery. The voice commands worked surprisingly well, causing the chickens to let go of the golems and follow our cows, instead. Unfortunately, thanks to Ark's garbage movement AI, they'd get stuck in absolutely every single rock, tree, root and other random shit they managed to find. You'd think you could tell your animals to jump or attack whenever they get stuck on something, but no, they'll just keep on walking straight into every single object that pops up between them and whatever it is they're supposed to follow.

Oceans, trees, rocks - they don't care and will always attempt to move straight through it.

So for the next ten or so minutes, we frantically ran all over the place, uprooting trees with our cows in order to collect our stuck, headless chickens, all whilst constantly getting pelted with boulders. At that point, it might have been less stressful to simply attempt to fight the golems, even if it would have caused the deaths of our birds in all likelihood. 

Instead, we destroyed a small forest, gave our animals some good cardio and finally escaped the golems. We were jumped by several packs of wolves on the way back to the farm, but compared to everything that had happened on this journey, this barely even seems worth mentioning. In the end, everyone returned to the farm safe and sound, with a crapload of levels under their belt and ready to take on the world, once all sustained injuries were healed. I don't know, maybe we'll take them to some boss fights, take down all of Ragnarok's alpha bosses using only cows and chickens.

Time to mount the royal unicorns and go back to the fortress!

I feel that at this point we've turned this whole thing into prehistoric Top Gear. We're picking a bunch of exotic and unexpected methods of transportation, travel to some of the most beautiful spots in the world, there's always a lot of suffering and old people shouting at each other and in the end we're just grateful to find a pub. Well. Or in this case, our massive fortress, surrounded by tall cliffs, titans, dragons and the biggest of dinosaurs. It's quite the pleasant sight after such a long and difficult trek.

Hellsplit Arena is my new favourite thing

 

One reason why I have difficulty bonding, forming friendships, not completely fucking hating people, apart from the fact that the majority of them are unbelievably fucking stupid, is the fact that nobody likes the shit I like, and I can't for the life of me understand why.

Take reptiles, for example. Yes, they can be scary, especially when you don't know shit about them, and they're not inherently cute like cats and dogs. Thing is, when I post about how a giant monitor lizard, who roams around my house like a dog, walks around the park on a leash, plays tug of war with his toys and hops on the sofa for cuddles and human interaction, I expect people to go, "wait, what?". But you stupid cunts always disappoint me. Our giant Burmese python isn't always in the mood to socialise, but he's too smart to bite the hand that feeds him. You know what he does when you invade his privacy while he's not feeling it? He'll give you a bonk with his snoot. No teeth. He won't bite, attack, strangle your shit, draw blood, all of that shit lesser snakes do when they're scared or confusing you for dinner. He gives you the nose. "Not right now, please, thank you." He's intelligent enough to understand you don't mean any harm, he's figured out a peaceful, non-painful way to say no. Do you morons give a shit? No, of course you don't.

The time I have spent with our unusual pets has changed how I see the world and animals in general. Even something as basic and primitive as a snake has the ability to learn, possibly even displaying some form of empathy, if on a very basic level. "I don't want to be with you right now, but I also don't want to harm you." Granted, the snakes motives may be more along the lines of, "If I hurt you, you're gonna get scared and you might stop feeding me", maybe they're selfish or maybe our snake is just too fucking stupid to actually hit with the teeth. You know. Maybe I'm giving him too much credit. I can't be sure. It's still highly remarkable.

Where the fuck am I even going with this? Well, Hellsplit Arena, obviously! The game is nothing short of a dream come true for me, yet nobody seems to give a toss it exists. Pavlov VR, Zero Caliber, games where you shoot realistic guns in virtual reality, people go crazy for that shit. But swords? Oh no, please don't make me exercise! What the fuck have you all been doing when you were kids? Seriously.

If you were at least remotely normal in your childhood, and you had friends or siblings, the one thing you did when the fair came to town was to buy one of those shitty plastic ninja swords. You know the ones. They come with scabbards in any colour imaginable, the 'blade' itself is made from garbage white plastic, they were cheap and flimsy and stupid and you didn't care, because you were battling all the other kids. 

These haven't changed in over 30 years.

Alright, so maybe we were just beating the crap out of each other with flimsy plastic toys until somebody started to cry, but in our minds we were having epic sword fights. You know, like actual sword fights, not that gay stuff you've secretly done with your cousin. We didn't have cable tv back then, we had no idea what an internet is, and our imagination was still fairly healthy, because videogames looked like this:

You kids with your smartphones and your PornHub have no idea how lucky you are.