Ark: Big Game Hunter

Life on THEISLAND was good. We upgraded our birds to a level, where we could quickly ride them to just about any part of the world with little to no breaks on the go. We even managed to spot and safely return some dinos, which got lost on earlier expeditions weeks ago! Generally, there's no limit to how many creatures you can tame and bring along with you at any given time in the game. Of course traveling in a large group makes it more likely for one or several dinos to get left behind and decreases the likelihood of you noticing. By some weird magic, however, Ark doesn't despawn a dino when you leave it somewhere and ignore it for a while. If you lose a critter in any part of the world, or spot a wild one living somewhere, they will still be somewhere in that area the next time you go there, even days or weeks after, unless they get killed by a larger predator or starve to death.

I have no idea how the game does that, considering there are literally thousands upon thousands of dinos all over the place, but just the other night we spotted Claire's first ever dino, who got lost nearly a month ago. He was hungry and a little cranky, but otherwise okay, so we flew him back to camp.
Maybe life was a little too good. We had electric lights now, a working refrigerator and even a saddle for Alice Cooper, our T-Rex. No one could fuck with us, now that we had a T-Rex. Well, except for another T-Rex, maybe. The toilet still eats people, though. We even started to get used to the blurry, vaseline-covered visuals, so the game started to look ... nice, I guess?

There were only two more things we really wanted - a titanosaur and a jet engine. The former is a longneck so massive, it makes a bronto look like its cheap Chinese knock-off. The latter is a giant flying dino, which is so large, you can build stuff on top of it. We have no idea what they're really called, because they're usually way up in the air and really difficult to chase, let alone knock out. Still, both of these guys were really just something for the 'nice to have' section. The most important thing was our T-Rex - and we had one of those!

At this point we spent most of our time uncovering what few unexplored sections of the map we had left. We spotted a bunch of penguins and committed some more horrible crimes against nature in the attempt to tame one of them. There was this nice little family. A daddy penguin and a mommy penguin and a baby penguin. They looked fun, so we agreed to tranquilize one and take it home. Due to some minor miscommunication, however, we both ended up shooting daddy penguin at the same time, which knocked him out so hard, he never woke up again, much to the dismay of mommy and baby. They completely lost their shit and started to run away. I punched mommy penguin in the face a few times to calm her down. We knocked her out and dragged her off with one of our birds, leaving behind a traumatized, flightless baby bird, who just witnessed two absolute fuckwits murder its father in cold blood, then punch the crap out of its mother to abduct her. He's probably still sitting on his ice floe, alone, in the night, wondering what he had ever done to deserve any of this. I'm sure he'll be fine. All of this builds character. Perhaps one day an army of penguins, frothing at the beaks and murder in their eyes, will storm our camp and seek revenge. And we'll accept our fate. But in the meanwhile, there's a very distressed penguin lady in our camp, blankly staring at the sea. She's not interacting with the other animals, she makes no sound and barely eats enough to stay alive. We're horrible, horrible people.

I still think the game looks nicer since the most recent update, but maybe it's all just placebo.

Oh yeah, we also spotted two hilariously colourful sharks on the way back south, so we went and tamed those. Easily one of our most frustrating adventures, so far. The taming process itself was simple enough. As it turns out, you can't just lead a shark back home to your base on land or via air uber, so we had to get them to swim where we wanted them. Thanks to their incredibly shitty AI, however, the whole thing turned into an absolute ordeal. First, we hopped on our birds and tried to get the sharks to follow us. They poked their heads out of the water, kept gawking at us like idiots, swam into random reefs and cliffs and got stuck there. When we finally had them back in the open sea, we decided to perform a quick relog, which forces the game to save. It only auto-saves every half hour or so and we did not want to lose this progress to a crash.

Yeah well. I restarted the game and Claire's character spawned right above the ocean while she was still loading in. Her bird fucked off, Claire drowned and we spent the next hour or so trying to retrieve the gear from her corpse, which was floating above the sea, just high enough to be out of reach when swimming, but too close to the water for our bird to reach it. If you dip a bird in water, it'll throw you off and seek a safe spot to land. Meanwhile, the sharks were constantly getting attacked by other sharks, because apparently that's how sharks work, so I had to jump into the water and poke them with a stick in order to keep them away from our new pets.

They do not know how to shark.

Finally, Claire fucked off back to camp and returned with a giant prehistoric duckosaurus. These are super useful, because they can land on water and just float. Doing so allowed her to retrieve all of her shit off her floating corpse. Alas, the sharks were too much in awe at the sight of our glorious sabretooth duck and completely derped out, going all over the place, but refusing to follow Claire. In the end, I had to swim all the way to camp and lead Sashimi and Mr. Strawberry that way. Thank fuck the water is full of electric jellyfish, which will zap you and stun the shit out of you when you go anywhere near them, because I would have hated for this trip to be easy!

Funnily enough, you can craft saddles for these guys, so we have sharks now. With saddles. Ponysharks. Guess we'll be exploring the sea one day, once we have some scuba gear. In the meanwhile, we had our very own T-Rex, who was still the coolest, deadliest, most powerful predator on THEISLAND. Except, he absolutely wasn't. During one of our expeditions we tripped upon this guy:

Yay.

This is a giganotosaurus. It's easily twice the size of a T-Rex and ... actually, let me just quote the game's loading screen hint for when you encounter one of these. "If you encounter this creature in the wild while with a tribe member, just bola the tribe member and run." Let me quote the wiki for some extra fun: "Giganotosaurs will 'casually' stroll about the Island, slaughtering anything in their path, this can lead them to wander to just about anywhere on the Island. Their lack of natural predator, or really any form of threat to them, allows for their safe voyages across the Island."

The biggest thing we had tamed so far was a brontosaurus, which took about two dozen tranquilizer arrows. This guy could stand shoulder to shoulder with a bronto, but seemed slightly smaller overall, so we figured we may as well go for it and start attacking. He ate about fifty arrows as if it was nothing, murdered every single animal in its vicinity while we tried to take him down and finally walked away without a scratch, while we were all out of tranquilizers. Our T-Rex looked a bit shit now. On the plus side, if we ever did manage to tame one of these things, at least it was extremely unlikely we'd end up killing him by accident like we did with THEISLAND's entire wolf and raptor population, as well as a few pteranodons and a triceratops. They do not like water.

Here's an otter to cheer you up.

Giganotosaurus was clearly too strong for us, so we resumed exploring THEISLAND - for now. We found a cave, which was full of all the things everyone loves: bats, spiders, scorpions and lava. Caves seem to be Ark's version of 'dungeons', if you will. Problem is, they're so full of monsters, it's almost impossible to explore them as a duo. The game reccommends bringing a few extra tribe members, so we did the only thing we could do and went there with a bunch of animals. We brought our wolf pack.

Right. Remember how I complained about sharks being too stupid to navigate the ocean? Try maneuvering a pack of braindead wolves through a cave when the floor is lava - literally. After grilling most of the pack into a bunch of hot dogs, we finally decided to just use one of them as a mount and bring nothing but small, flying dinos for support, because at least those wouldn't get stuck or melt their faces in lava all the time. When we finally made it to the bottom of the cave, we found an artifact, which could be combined with other items from even more caves in order to summon a massive boss.

Problem is, that boss is so powerful, not even Alice Cooper would stand a chance against it. We needed something bigger. We needed a giganotosaurus!
We spent the next hour crafting tranquilizer darts. Claire went out to harvest all the flint and thatch in the world to craft what Ark calls stone arrows, because clearly, these should require no wood and no stone to craft, but only flint and thatch. Meanwhile, I confiscated all the spoiled meat our T-Rex was hoarding for some reason, then took a million or so narcoberries off our triceratops. He's got a bit of a drug problem. Probably, because he watched us drown his girlfriend by accident. Many of the bigger, smarter creatures in Ark travel in pairs and receive a mate bonus for being with a partner. His mate is rotting away at the bottom of the sea. Sorry 'bout that!

Armed with 350 tranquilizer darts, we flew back north, where we first spotted Lady Giga. That's what I wanted to name the dino in case we managed to tame it. And we knew we were close, because something was very, very wrong. It felt as though physics, gravity and friction refused to work properly, simply because they were so scared. Just look at this shit!

We spotted our prey at the very top of the tallest mountain in the area. Originally, we were hoping to ambush him from above, pelt him with arrows and slowly chase him down the mountain, but it was impossible to run after him without breaking every single bone in our bodies. The mountain was far too steep! In the end, Claire picked me up with her bird and dangled me in front of the dino as live bait. He was hypnotized, trying to eat me while I kept firing tranq darts at him.

The fact that something as ridiculous and stupid as this actually works is one of the reasons why I love this game so much. Claire was riding a giant bird, which picked me up in its talons, then waved me around above a giant, hungry dino as a tasty treat, which distracted the fucker enough to let me shoot him, at least for a while.
Ultimately, he started to realize he couldn't reach me. He probably wasn't a massive fan of getting shot in the nose, either, so he raced down the mountain, slaughtering mammoths, entire packs of wolves and other, lesser predators in his path. And then he got stuck in a ditch.

If you breathed fire, I'd call you Charitard.

The good news is, he was now completely stuck and after only 200 tranquilizer darts he finally went to sleep! The bad news is, he was still stuck after we had tamed him. Also, he was in fact a 'he', so I couldn't name him Lady Giga. We named him Chompy after our first pet lizard.

We spent several hours trying to get him unstuck. The interwebs suggests cheats when a dino gets stuck. We weren't massively keen on that for two reasons - one, we weren't entirely sure how to open up the cheat console on Switch. Two, even though we could probably figure it out, did we really want to cheat? It's a dark path. You cheat once, just to make your life a little easier, so what's to stop us from cheating again? Why go out and harvest resources or farm experience for level-ups when you can just cheat all of that shit? We had been 100% legit so far, apart from a little save-scumming, but no-clipping a dino out of his ditch would change all that.
Instead, we opted for the one thing we do best - crimes against nature! We axed down an entire forest and I started to craft a system of ramps and platforms everywhere around Chompy's ditch in order to help him get out. It took all night, but by 3 in the morning I finally had such a well-crafted system of ramps, one could simply walk out of the ditch without any jumping, climbing or Super Mario bullshit. But try and teach that to a dumbass dinosaur.

You're doing it wrong!

AAARRRGH!

In the end, Claire flew her bird right underneath the dino's enormous ass and kept pushing and pecking him up the ramp. Fucking finally!

The new guy absolutely towers above everything else in our camp, with the exception of our bronto. On a mildly related note, I will not stop playing Ark until I get a witch hat for the bronto and a pair of glasses on every pteranodon in our camp!
In the meanwhile, I'll take pleasure in the fact that we just tamed the biggest and meanest thing on THEISLAND. Sure, he's a bit dumb, but sometimes big and dumb is exactly what you want.