Ark: Die Hard On Opposite Day

Yes, it's another one of those, because Ark is my life now.
Having tamed a pair of personal airplanes, we decided to check out what's on top of that giant mountain, which is located straight in the middle of THEISLAND. You know, take a bit of a break from Mission Raptor, just enoy a bit of exploration without death, drama and all the horrible everyday crap that happens on here.

I painted Ptetra's beak just for the occasion. Yep, there are actual paintbrushes for exactly that purpose in this game.

The top of the mountain was as surprising as it was disappointing. The surprising bit was how it's all covered in lava, because the mountain is actually a volcano - zit of the earth. There was a whole bunch of crystal and obsidian up there, all of which is super helpful when you want to craft some advanced gear. We were still using sticks and armor clobbered together from bits of dead trilobites. The disappointing part was the huge-ass locked gate that prevented us from exploring more of the volcano. The whole thing looked rather endgamey.

Well, at least nobody died for a change.

So we had a nice, uneventful flight back. Until we made an emergency landing at the edge of the swamp. Unlike modern airplanes, our pteranodons have limited stamina, so they get tired after a while. And then something bit me and I had a nice little skull and crossbones debuff icon and my character started coughing a lot. Claire noticed a green cloud around my head, came to inspect it and - boom! Both of us were down with the sickness. And all the time we were getting attacked by bugs, snakes and crocodiles. Claire lost her pteranodon in the chaos. It flew away, landed god knows where and we had no idea what happened to it.

Then we got fucked by trying to trick the system without fully understanding the system. We decided to have Claire log off, then I'd fly back to camp by myself and have her log back on, so she'd spawn in near me. Except that's not really how things work on here. When you log off on a running server, your character just stays there and goes to sleep on the spot. So Claire dropped on her ass and nodded off in the middle of the swamp. It took all of 20 seconds before she got swallowed by a boa. Now she was back in camp with me, naked and without her gear, both of our characters coughing their lungs out and her airplane missing. Time for a rescue mission!

Time to bring out the T-Rex!

I wasn't gonna dick around this time. I jumped on Horm, our Triceratops, who can just charge into a forest and send all the trees flying. I had our T-Rex, Alice Cooper, with me for added protection. Nobody fucks with the rex! Meanwhile, Claire rode her parasaur Ducky and brought Barry, the weird sausage lizard, because she doesn't have anything badass in her collection.
We were attacked by all the snakes. We were both sick and coughing, Horm got paralyzed and we sat around and protected him while Alice Cooper fucked shit up.

After way too much fighting, drama, poison and paralysis we finally got Claire's stuff back and found her pteranodon stranded on some rock in the middle of the bog. Alas, the adventure didn't end without casualties.

He died like he lived - a complete idiot.

Barry fucking drowned. In an ankle-high bog. I don't know why he didn't just swim to the surface or make it to the edge of the swamp. He chose to just sit there and inhale the fresh, clean swamp water or some shit.

Pictured: technology.

Back at camp, Claire used some of the obsidian we had mined earlier to create our first high-tech tool: a fucking pair of scissors. Which is fair, because hair just keeps on growing, so we both looked like we were on our way to a furry convention. Time to cut each other's hair. We also got some freaky glowy eyes customization thingie as a reward for curing our swamp fever, and I put some smooshed berries on my armor for extra colour.

Yes, we're edgy.

Now that we were super sexy and perfectly healthy again, it was time to fail Mission Raptor once more. So we went back out there and ... look, they're basically killing themselves now at this point instead of letting us tame them. The closest we came to actually catching one of them was knocking it out, then it got eaten by those tiny fuckers, who look all cute and friendly as they surround you and rapidly grow in numbers before they finally decide to attack. So we ended up doing what we always do when we attempt to tame a raptor and killed a bunch of them, then came back with something we never wanted in the first place: birds!

So majestic!

Like most of our pets, this guy up there was special. He had his head stuck under a massive rock, so we just tranquilized his ass, then got rid of the boulder to free him. He's a super high level airplane, so we cannot even fly him yet. We just took him back to camp for the time being.
Before we went home, though, we spotted this huge snowy mountain in the distance, which made a nice change from all the redwood and tropical island stuff we had encountered so far. So we figured, heyho, whatever, let's just go check it out. And we headed north.

Temperatures started to drop rapidly. We noticed, because the game loves to nag you about it. Hurrdurr, it's cold, go someplace warm. You get little snowflake and ice cube symbols and shit. Sometimes you get a little flame icon when you're hot. We never really noticed any ill side-effects, apart from stuff like increased thirst levels and the like, so we ignored it and moved on. A miracle happened on the way there. A raptor showed up out of nowhere and started to eat Horm. He sat still and took it while Claire tranquilized it. Technically, she tranquilized me, the triceratops and half a dozen other creatures until she knocked out the fucking raptor, because this game doesn't have motion controls for some reason. And in a shocking turn of events, nobody killed the raptor by accident (or intentionally) this time. Had we reached a point where things would finally change for the better? Could it be?

And then there were two.

In a moment of breathtaking creativity, Claire named her raptor Ripper. Well. At least it wasn't Alfred or some shit. Moments later, another raptor showed up, so we decided to do that thing with the Triceratops again. You know, send him in first, have the raptor chew on him for a bit while we knock him out. We repeated this little game a third time when the ugliest sabertooth cat attacked. I'm not even joking. We've seen pitch black sabertooth cats. We've seen orange, tiger-looking ones. The one I tamed was fucking green, because of course it was. Everything I tame ends up being green.

For fuck's sake, out of all the possible colours!

The snowy tundra is a shitty place. It's full of wolves and giant warthog things and mammoths and other shit that wants you dead. We tamed an ankylosaurus and I named it Poundland, beause it pounds stuff to pudding with its spiky club tail. And then we started dying of hypothermia, because temperatures actually do have ill side-effects after some time.

We set the entire place on fire for warmth, then quickly started to retreat. Sadly, our newest friend got left behind and was quickly torn apart by a pack of hungry direwolves.

Well that's a bit of a bummer.

Oh well, at least we had our raptors now. But it became pretty clear that fighting with sticks and dead animal bits for clothes wasn't gonna cut it anymore. So I went and tamed another pack animal - Polygon the stegosaurus. Her animations are weird. She struts and swings her tail, flaunting her stuff all sassy-like. We brought her and Horm and just about any dino that could carry a bit of stuff and completely loaded them up with iron ore. On the way back I tamed the most worthless, annoying pet, yet. A hyena. Or hyaenadon, as the game calls them.

They're worthless, because a single one of them doesn't do much. You need several of them in order to trigger their pack buff, mix their genders a bit for the mate buff, then have a pack leader for maximum efficiency. I didn't know it at the time and kept Claire awake until 5:30am that night in an attempt to tame the fucker. We knocked one out, which does absolutely nothing. You have to sneak up on it and pet it. Once every 30 seconds. Failing to re-pet after 30 seconds means you rapidly lose taming progress, forcing you to start over. Getting in touching distance with a hyena for more than literally two seconds will cause the critter to freak out and run away, which also ruins your current taming attempt and forces you to hunt it down all over again. I was at it for hours, only to learn on the wiki that a single one is practically useless. After the fact. Oh well, only gotta repeat this nonsense twice or thrice more. Can't wait.

You can put bags on them, which will keep your meet fresh 8 times longer than your regular inventory. A fridge on legs!

I also tamed an animal, which turned out to be surprisingly useful - a giant scorpion! It can paralyze dinos, causing them to become entirely helpless to your taming attempts. So we just ran around the place for a while knocking out whatever got in our way, taming most of it in the process. So we have a giant prehistoric crocodile pet now! Yay!

Repeatedly stinging them also deals a lot of damage, hence all the blood.

We've got metal armor now. Claire has a sword. I crafted a shotgun and spent most of the night crafting ammunition. I shotgun-blasted a sabertooth tiger and nuked it into orbit. Life is good. Well. Not for the tiger, but you get the idea. I can't wait to see what we'll encounter next.

They're about to drop an epic album.