A Literal Dream Come True, But Nobody Cares

I'm still alive somehow, even though I'm not a big fan of the idea. Funny story, actually. Our cat was put down the other day, because she had a nasty infection, needed an incredibly expensive operation to save her life, but the chances of survival were so slim, the vet told us that putting her to sleep was "the humane thing to do". You know, you get that whole thing about how it's not right to let the animal suffer, she wouldn't enjoy her final days and so on and so forth. Poor kitty didn't want to die. Didn't even understand what was going on. We were cuddling in front of the heater just an hour before they told us to have her killed. Because it's so humane.

Meanwhile, here am I, unable to find sleep during most nights, because my brain never shuts up. ADHD, Asperger's, randomly going through every failed social interaction since I've been three years old. I rarely manage to pass out before sunrise, then I'm usually haunted by nightmares. They won't let me have any pills, which I'm sure has absolutely nothing to do with the fact I once deliberately overdosed on them to end it all. I'd very much like to be dead. The thought of not existing, peace and quiet, no more existential dread, no nightmares, no insomnia, no self-loathing, I'm not exactly enjoying my existence, so can somebody please put me down? It's the humane thing to do, isn't it?

Turns out I'm not a cat, so they're not allowing me to just die. Instead, I get a lady calling me on the phone every now and then to check if I'm still alive, before she proceeds to remind me of all my progress and achievements. I understand that sort of thing helps a lot of people, who desperately need someone to talk to, someone to listen. Thing is, if I ultimately decided to go ahead and end it all, my telephone lady would be the last person to know. It's my life, I didn't ask to be born, I should be allowed to end it whenever I want to, without anyone telling me what to do. Yes, I know, what about your friends and loved ones and all that. Turns out if you're already feeling inadequate for not being able to provide properly, going on about everyone who depends on you isn't the great deterrent some people seem to think it is.

Don't worry, I'm not planning anything drastic right now. Since it sucks all the ass to sit alone in an empty, cat-less house all day, I've started a friendship with trusty Patches. This guy:

Patches is a leopard gecko, and geckos are stupid. I figure, a good way to measure at least some form of basic intelligence can be detected in how a creature goes about taking a shit. Our cats knew when they had to shit and would do so in a box. Our monitor lizard would only do it in his tank, and only ever had a single accident in all his life, which is more than I can say for the family dog I grew up with. A gecko just shits. It's like blinking or breathing, they don't even think about it, they'll just do it right in the middle of their food bowl, because there isn't enough brain capacity to tell them what a terrible idea this is. 

I find this to be the most undesirable trait in any pet. An animal that may take a shit at any given moment, without warning or any signs of it happening before it is too late isn't really something I want to hold in my hand or spend time with. Not just because it's icky, but if that's how unaware they are of basic bodily functions, the odds of them ever learning any cool tricks, seriously bonding with you in any meaningful way, showing any signs of personality outside of bog-standard gecko behaviour are basically zero. I like intelligent animals. Especially exotic ones, which are hard to read, which are still unknown compared to cats and dogs. Our monitor lizard was utterly fascinating when he wanted to play or when he sought to socialise. Things you wouldn't necessarily expect from a reptile. The gecko just wants food and to shit on things.

Still. He does this thing where he comes to the front of his vivarium every night, puts his front paws (hands? Feet?) against the glass and watches us. So I'll slide his door open and he'll climb up onto my hand. Then he usually just sits there, taste-tests my fingers, chills for a few moments, turns around and hops back in his tank. Last night he decided to crawl up my sleeve and went all the way up on my shoulder. Which is kinda cool. Would have been even better had he not attempted to throw himself off my back and into the darkness of our night time living room, so my significant bear had to get up and intervene. Stupid gecko. "I don't know where to go from here, so I'm just gonna jump into the void and hope for the best." Still, it's a little something to keep me sane, I guess. Wonder if I can get him to actually stay still on my shoulder or to go to sleep in my pocket or something. We used to walk around with our bearded dragon that way, but stopped bothering for pretty much the same reasons. Stupidity, random surprise shits, suicide leaps, lizards are idiots.

Earlier this week I have done something so wild, so awesome, to me it felt like actual magic. You could throw a fireball right in front of me or pull a live dragon out of your ass, and I wouldn't have been any more impressed than I already was by what I was doing there and then: I sat on a park bench, fired up an MMO and completed an endgame dungeon.

I'm a rat paladin.

I've been messing around with a handheld PC for a few months now, a little something like the Steam Deck, but significantly more powerful. It runs Windows and just about every AAA game you throw at it. My favourite game to play on there is Everquest 2, because it just looks so cool on a 1600p handheld screen with all the details and eye candy cranked up. Besides, it's an actual, proper MMORPG just running in my pocket! It also runs Guild Wars 2, and I could put World of Warcraft on there, but right now, EQ2 is my MMO of choice. I've set up a controller profile for it, which lets me play the entire thing without depending on a mouse and keyboard, so I can just sit and play it just about anywhere I want. 

Of course you may have noticed I said I've been playing it at the park, which isn't exactly a location known for its great, reliable WiFi. I'm using a USB thingie called a wingle. You slam a data SIM-card in there, which turns your computer into a portable WiFi hotspot for up to ten devices. So now I'm playing online games whilst sitting around at the park. To me, this is quite a massive step up from, say, playing something like Mario on the go on Nintendo Switch. Having something as massive and complex as an entire MMO at your fingertips, being able to just fire it up no matter where you are, feels unbelievable to me. I can connect with thousands of other players, communicate with them, explore dungeons, upgrade my character, all whilst sitting on a bus to town.

Paladins fight alongside their mounts. My mount is a dragon.

This is something I've been fantasizing about since the very first Game Boy in the 90s. My brother and I were crazy about videogames and used to talk about "what if". What if you had a Game Boy, but it came with a massive screen that lit up and showed all the colours, and what if it ran every game ever, from any console, computer, anything you could think of? Now I've got exactly that. I've got just about every 8 and 16 bit videogame that ever existed on there, sometimes I run the PS2 version of Gauntlet Legacy on there just for the fun of it, I play my VR games on there when I'm at home and have my external RTX 3080 to plug in. And now I'm playing literal MMOs sitting outside Tesco with a meal deal. I'm about to go there right now, right after finishing this post, have a sandwich and play some WvW on Guild Wars 2, just because it's a surprisingly sunny, pleasant afternoon and I've got nowhere else to be.

The thing that completely freaks me out about all of this, though, is how nobody apart from myself seems to give a shit. This is another one of those things that'll always make me feel like a weirdo, an outsider, somebody who will never understand how other people think, feel, function. I've got this crazy little device, which completely blows my mind and feels like actual magic to me. I have found a way to play an incredibly complicated MMO with dozens of abilities and skills, using only a built-in controller, with the same efficiency and precision as any mouse and keyboard user, and I'm doing so whilst sitting around outside. Nobody cares. I wrote an article about it, and people told me that's not what you should do when you go to the park.

"Back in my day we'd feed the ducks and enjoy nature, we didn't go to the park to play videogames!" Right. Because I can't appreciate animals and fresh air, whilst also playing a videogame. "YoU'rE doInG iT wRoNG!" I don't understand people. They're so upset by the fact I'm taking a videogame outside, they completely ignore how the insanity of this even being possible to tell me I'm going to the park wrong. What in the ass? Do you people interrupt folks, who take a book to the park? Are you telling people they're doing it wrong if they listen to their mp3s in a park? People go there to sit, chill, sunbathe, nap, snack, read, do all sorts of things, but apparently playing a videogame is taking it too far. That's so far out, the wrongness of it completely overpowers how incredible it is that it can even be done in the first place.

People don't like the stuff I like. At the same time, I don't care for most of the stuff people like. I experience this every day. I write lots of jokes for my articles and columns. Most of my favourite jokes are just ignored, fly under the radar, people rarely understand or like them. But they all point out and repeat the dumb, cheap laughs in the comments section, the low-hanging fruit, the lame puns, the painfully obvious shit. They laugh at the stuff I find mildly amusing at best, but nobody finds my favourite bits funny. But I also stopped caring about Stranger Things after two seasons, I stopped giving a fuck about Star Wars halfway through the prequel trilogy, we never needed anything related to Ghostbusters after the very first movie, superhero movies are dumb shit for dumb people. I hate nostalgia bait and popcorn entertainment, but all of my friends are completely crazy about it. None of them give two shits about the stuff I like. So there must be something wrong with me. I'm not losing any sleep over it or anything. I'm just completely unable to understand why everyone loves so much incredibly stupid shit, or why none of the stuff that fascinates me and keeps my mind busy is even remotely relevant to anyone I know.

Well, there is one person. Bear has decided we should spend our savings on a GPD Win 4. It's yet another handheld pc, which is even more ridiculously overpowered than the Onexplayer. It comes with 32 gigs of quad-channel DDR5-RAM, a Ryzen 7 6800u and a Radeon 680m. If you want to play AAA games on the go on high detail settings and in full HD, this device has got you covered. You can go a little crazy, if you're willing to go below 60 frames per second. Right now she's playing Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice on high settings with fucking Raytracing enabled, and running it at 35-40 FPS, which is perfectly smooth and playable on a portable device. 

Raytracing. On a handheld PC the size of a PS Vita. Was hoping to write an article about it, but got turned down, because apparently that's just not interesting enough. I don't understand people. Everyone seems crazy about the Steam Deck, which can play a selection of Steam titles at low settings and 20 FPS, unless it's some pixellated 2D indie game. AAA games at high settings, in full HD and with raytracing? Eeeh, hard pass. Well, alright then.

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.

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.

PS

 Claire has find a fun new way to sleep.

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.