Ark Reborn - Dying in Glorious 4K

I've done a thing.
If you're somewhat familiar with my blog, then you're probably aware of my Ark diaries. I've sunk countless hours into the Nintendo Switch version, wrote about all my glorious misadventures, then somehow turned this into my RL job. I'm not making this up. I pay my bills by bitching about Ark: Survival Evolded and other horrible games. Between that, some actual game reviews here and there and people throwing money at me for furry porn, I almost make a decent living. Or I would do, if it wasn't for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs aaaand we're already drifting way off. Focus, damn you!

So. Ark. Dinosaurs. Survival. Yeah. I love this game on Switch. I've been playing videogames for all my life and I had a whole lot of really awesome moments in a lot of games. Completing heists on GTA with some good friends, laughing so hard that we couldn't breathe. Defeating Ragnaros during the first year of WoW. Dominating the absolute shit out of several consecutive lobbies and sessions in countless fighting games and shooters. Watching Warframe's Rebecca and Meg try to pronounce my username. But if I had to name that one moment, that single-most awesome day I ever had in any game ever, it would have to be our journey across THEISLAND with all our favourite dinos, which we gathered up for a boss battle.

If you're bored enough to actually click on that video above, all you see is the two of us stomping about the place on a bunch of blurry, pixellated dinosaurs. I cannot possibly describe to you what a thrill this was. Every single one of these dinos has a story. We've stalked some of them for actual days! Our massive gigantosaur must have killed me hundreds of times. We crafted thousands of items, built ramps, traps and ladders, spent insane amounts of hours until we finally captured him.

I remember every hunt, every taming attempt, all the drama, anger, frustration and the sense of reward when we finally managed to tame one of these suckers. Gathering up the lot of them, watching them rule THEISLAND together, absolutely nothing left to stop us - it's something you just don't get if you spawn in a bunch of random high level dinos and wreck the place in five minutes. We worked our way up from tiny, helpless little sacks of flesh, clueless morons with absolutely no idea how anything works. Absolutely destroying the place with a pack of the absolute deadliest dinos in the game wasn't something we cheated up in a few seconds. We worked on that for hundreds of hours. That shit was our reward. It meant something. Doesn't matter if you get it or not. It was a pretty big deal for us.

And now we party!

And then we played the game less and less. Not because we got bored or ran out of stuff to do. But because of technical issues. Before starting a game, you have to adjust several pages full of options and settings and sliders. This plus the insane load times will easily take up a whole five minutes or more before you're even in the game. And then Ark will reliably crash once every 30-60 minutes. It may run for a whole two hours before the crash on a good day or instantly kill itself after less than ten minutes. Good days or bad - the crash is ultimately inevitable.

Every crash means having to set all the options again for a new session. It also means repeating everything you've done up to ten minutes before the crash, because that's how often the game autosaves. If you were on a flying mount during the last save before the crash, you'll spawn into the game in mid-air, fall to your death, then spend the rest of the day trying to retrieve your flying mount and all pets and belongings you had on you at the time.

Time and time again you'll wake up alone, naked and fucking shredded for some reason.

These problems just kill all motivation to play any serious content. You simply can't explore caves and search for boss artifacts if you could crash at any moment, lose tons of progress and find yourself forced to retrieve what's left of your shit from a pool of lava, because Ark always autosaves at the worst possible moment.
Of course there's always the Steam version, but there's just no way I'd ever want to start over. I'm attached to all our dinos, to our ugly little base camp, our characters, all the dozens upon dozens of hours we've spent building it all from nothing. There's just no way I'd ever give up on all that! So no Steam version for me. Unless ...

Okay. So I went and re-created Camp Nova and all our progress and dinos from the Switch version on PC, down to the last pixel, by hand. The little video above shows a comparison of how every hut, dino, crop plot and just about everything else appeared on Switch, compared to its PC counterpart. I used console commands to spawn in each of our dinos, named and coloured them just like on Switch, put our houses in the exact same spots using the exact same materials, paintjobs and furniture. No tweaks, no upgrading, no editing anything in our favour, with two exceptions.

One, I fixed some of the messy wiring we had on Switch, because building stuff just feels a little bit easier with a mouse and a platform that runs the game at more than 10 FPS. Two, I've added some weird fertilizer machines to our crops (the blue and yellow glowing cylinders), so I won't have to spend 80 percent of my play time collecting dino shit and spreading it on my taters when I could be exploring, fighting, taming and doing all the cool stuff that happens outside of the poop farming gameplay loop.

It's ugly and ramshackle as base camps go. But it's home.

And one all-nighter later, I had re-created all our stuff from Switch on the PC version, coming as close to perfection as one could possibly get. We were ready to continue our big adventure in marvellous 4k! And with a tougher ruleset to boot!

First of, we kept the difficulty slider on the highest setting. Back when we first started on Switch, we had no idea what we were doing, got owned a lot and toned things down. But it's max difficulty on PC, baby!
Secondly, no save scumming. Back on Switch, it got a little out of hand. We're out hunting, Claire brings her favourite raptor. Raptor dies, we terminate the game, load the most recent autosave, raptor is fine. I can absolutely understand the motivation here, but death should matter. And so it does on PC. Holy shit, does it ever! But I'll get to that in a minute.
Lastly, we're raising the affinity for health, carry weight and stamina on our tamed dinos. We're only two people. In between managing camp, generators, crops, feeding troughs, taming and exploration, we simply can't spend even more time selectively breeding tons upon tons of every species in order to get ideal stats. We're tweaking the sliders in a way that makes our dinos tougher and lets them become useful mounts fairly quickly. They're not immortal, they also don't oneshot brontos, but they're definitely sturdier than average.
This is how we balance our game. We want it to be challenging, without it becoming completely impossible. It's what works for us. Your mileage may vary.

Rest in peace, Fidget!

So, about that death thing.
Once everything was set up and good to go, we decided to re-explore THEISLAND, now that it's all in super high resolution and incredibly detailed and what not. So we hopped on Twitches, our gallilimus. Up to three people can sit on him, he's an incredibly fast runner and he's really great at jumping, too. Claire controlled him while I was sitting on the tail end, pointing at stuff with my shotgun. It looks a little something like this:

In the video above you may notice how there's a rather spectacular leap off a cliff. You may also notice how our dino is covered in blood and bruises. I did make my driver away of this, asking about fall damage. She told me our dino can take it. He could not. After one too many giant leaps, Twitches got crushed and never got up again. Something about carrying two people in heavy riot gear and gravity-induced blunt trauma.

Now we were short one gallilimus, miles and miles away from home and surrounded by hungry raptors and other nasty shit. And I can only shotgun so many things at once. We managed to hang in there for a while, but were ultimately overwhelmed.

At that point, my day was ruined. We lost a dino, we got owned by wildlife, and now I was just sitting there, watching as my unconscious character and his belongings were torn to shreds. These moments are incredibly frustrating. Not only was Twitches an incredibly fun, useful dino, but the gear I was about to lose is pretty hard to craft and repair at this point in the game. And my pet otter, who accompanied us on the journey, was likely toast, as well.

Yeah well. Turns out the otter was the one thing that stopped this miserable day from turning into an absolut catastrophe. Claire managed to turn him aggressive before she got munched on, so the little shit went absolutely berserk and defended our characters and their stuff with the burning fury of a thousand suns.
So my character is just on the ground sleeping and you can hear stuff get torn to shreds by an angry otter. Meanwhile, a giant turtle keeps running back and forth across the screen, chasing after a naked Claire (all her gear got eaten), who occasionally forces stimulants down my throat in order to wake me up. And by some miracle, she manages to revive me on time, I nuke the damn turtle and we make our way back home, past two more angry raptors and through shark-infested waters. You can watch all of it in the video below. Full disclosure: Raptors usually pin you down and completely fuck you up when they chase you. They didn't do that in the video, which is likely the only reason we ever made it back home. Apparently this is because of a mod, which also stops little dinosaurs from stealing your items. I may have to deactivate this, because for as annoying as that first experience on PC was, I want raptors to be deadly. I mean, they're fucking velociraptors, damn it!

So we made it back home, repaired our stuff, everything was great. Except, you know, we no longer had a gallimimus. So we decided to travel out into the redwoods and tame a new one. Fully unprepared, because I had not touched the game in a year and had no recollection of how fucking terrible these fuckers are to tame.
We went with the strategy that worked for our giga, it works for a rex and for most of the other aggressive dinos in this game: Claire picked me up with her argentavis and I started pelting random gallis with tranquilizing arrows from above. See, if you do that sort of thing to an angry carnivore, it's gonna come after you, trying to eat you as you dangle in the air like a tasty treat. Thing is, the gallilimus had absolutely zero interest in attacking and simply ran away at a speed, which made it impossible for us to chase after it. Even in the unlikely event that we managed to shoot one enough times, it would rather die than get knocked out by the tranquilizers.

Bolas didn't work anymore, either. On Switch you can just tie them up, then knock them out. Doesn't work on Steam. There's also a lot more dino activity on PC in general, so you rarely get the chance to chase after any of these guys before some predator gets ahead of you and eats them. To cut a long story short, there was no way we were gonna catch one of those guys using our usual methods.

Okay, so the old tease & dangle didn't work. So we moved on to plan B: poking and licking. And our day got a lot more fun before getting so much worse.
Basically, we changed from a flying mount to a scorpion and a toad, respectively. My scorpion comes with a nice stinger, which puts animals to sleep. Claire's toad can tranquilize critters by hitting them with its tongue. Of course we had to experiment first. See how many pokes and/or licks it would take to put a critter to sleep. This may sound scientific, but it really just boils down to the two of us being dicks to random animals for a bit:

Now is probably a good time to remind you that I'm only used to the Switch version of Ark.
Poking and licking random animals was hilarious. We got a little crazy. We poked dinos and licked snakes. We wiped out an entire swamp full of creatures. We felt untouchable. You can do that sort of thing on Switch and get away with it. On PC, however ... well, I poked a dimorphodon. And these guys are social. I just wanted to see whether I could knock one out in one hit. Instead, I was immediately surrounded by a cloud of dimorphodons, which completely ignored my tanky mount and murdered me pretty much instantaneously. Respawn back at camp - no gear, no mounts, no gallimimus. Fanfuckingtastic!

Sure, it's not as terrible as it sounds. I mean, we still had spare mounts back at camp, so for as long as we managed to get back to the swamp before our dropped items despawned and our pets got murdered or starved to death, we'd be fine. Just get an air lift, jump down there in your underpants, collect all your pets and items and you're all set.
Too bad the place is full of fucking crocodiles, so several rescue attempts proved unsuccessful.

In the end, what worked out was this:
Get dropped in the swamp in my underpants, attempt to find the correct otter, jump on the mount, get knocked unconscious by a snake, watch helplessly as your otter runs for its life and Claire and the mounts attempt to fight off the invading snakes, finally wake up after the battle is over, retrieve the gear - DONE! Everything turned out okay!
Except ... aw shit. We still never actually got what we came here for in the first place. The fucking gallimimus!

We rode across the redwood. We weren't taking any risks that time. We brought Rocky, Claire's argentavis, for air support. We licked. And we poked. We got mauled by bears. We got chased by all the predators. We got lost, fell off cliffs, got stuck, spent several nights in complete darkness before continuing our hunt time and time again. Here's the thing, though: You don't catch a gallimimus with a frog. You don't catch one with a scorpion, either.

This sucked ass. We had lost the one thing we seemed utterly incapable of re-taming. Of course, if we're being honest, it didn't really matter. At this point in time we have no friends or loved ones playing with us, so it's not like we desperatly needed a mount for three players. We had plenty of other mounts, including every flying one under the sun. But I had spent an entire night painstakingly re-creating every last detail from our Switch playthrough and I simply didn't want to accept that the first thing that was gonna happen was the loss of one of our most fun utility-pets.

We decided to farm some resources to craft rifles and tranquilizing darts. Maybe bear traps. Different tools to catch a galimimus some other way. When returning home from one of these farming runs one night, another advantage of the PC version became apparent: lighting and draw distance. Arriving back home in complete darkness made our camp stand out like a busy airport. It was quite a sight:

On a mildly related note, one of these farming trips also lead to the most cruel sentence I've ever heard Claire utter in real life: "It takes like four shots to kill a baby penguin." Ahem. Yeah. See, in order to create certain items you need organic polymer. Penguins are a great natural source of this stuff. I try to kill as few of them as quickly as possible to get only the amounts of stuff I need. Claire hunts down baby penguins, because they drop the most resources for some reason. I felt like Donald Trump Jr. Gross!

But then, out of some incredible luck, something amazing happened! Something completely unexpected and so lucky, I felt that Ark and I could be friends again and I could finally start to really enjoy our journey on here. Behold:

In case you can't be fucked to watch dozens of little videos whilst reading a blog or you simply don't understand what happened: We got a free gallilimus. We were on our way home from butchering dozens of innocent baby penguins farming essential resources when we spotted a cache down the side of a cliff. More importantly, however, I spotted two gallis just derping about on the edge of that very same cliff, so I started shooting one with tranquilizing arrows.

Not wanting to accidentally murder it again, I tried a different strategy this time. After every shot I counted to five before shooting again. According to the interwebs, this gives the tranquilizer enough time to fully unfold its full effect before you damage the dino again with another potentially deadly arrow. So I hit him once, twice, then the fucker fell off the cliff. Fortunately for us, however, the dino got stuck between some trees down below, so we actually managed to knock it out without killing it (by about 1.8 hit points!) and tamed it! WE HAD A NEW GALLILIMUS! Woo!

We had a difficult journey ahead of us, but nothing we haven't done a hundred times for a hundred different dinosaurs before. Walk Fidget home to camp, protect her from predators, slowly and carefully, one step at a time. No problem. We had Charon, our tapejara for air support. We fed and healed her before we even started our trip. Then we navigated her through piranha-infested waters, past giant but mostly harmless herbivores, moved some oversized insects out of the way and ferried her past a pissed-off therizinosaur. Then it got dark, so we decided to sit and camp for the night. Never a good idea to move a fragile, vulnerable dino through the pitch-black nights on THEISLAND. Well, you can see all that in the video above.

So we waited for daytime, took our new dino home to camp in one piece, and everyone lived happily ever after. The end.
Except, that didn't actually happen. Claire got impatient and decided to scout ahead on Charon. "The path down to the beach is clear", she said. I figured the beach might be an easier place for me to guard Figdet, because at least no threats would emerge from the water, which is slightly better than sitting in an open field. We made three steps, then we got jumped by a level 64 carnotaurus and his posse. My gear exploded instantly. It wasn't just damaged - my items were completely destroyed from the ridiculous amounts of damage that came our way. Fidget just vaporized on the spot and didn't even leave a corpse.

Me at that precise moment.

I was done. I was just completely fucking done at that point. With Ark. With games. With computers. Just fuck it. I just turned the damn thing off and was already half-way back to bed when I remembered I had only been up for four or five hours.
Only on Ark. Only in this fucking game are you forced to helplessly watch as everything is repeatedly taken away from you. Then the game tricks you, throws the one thing you really want straight into your lap. Only to laugh at you and watch you suffer as it takes it all away once more. It's the endless cycle of suck. And I had enough. I'm playing videogames to escape misery and existential dread, not to make me feel worse. Fuck this shit.

Yeah well. I decided to simmer down and do some research. Allegedly, a quetzal can just lift up a gallilimus with its claws. So Claire saddled Nasca, our quetzal originally known as Kali, until it was politely pointed out to me what an idiotic name that was for a quetzal, because I'm ignorant and mixing my cultures. Claire hovered our big old bird over Polygon, our stegosaurus, and tried to pick her up. Polygon wasn't exactly happy about it, but what do you know - Nasca was strong enough to carry her up into the air!
So I went and bolted a chair to our quetzal's massive platform saddle and off we went.

So we flew back to the redwood, but before we even had the chance to look for the dino we needed, we were instantly jumped by a pack of dilophosaurs. That's where we noticed something really cool: Quetzals have a hilarious knockback attack. So we spent the next five minutes playing a round of dilo golf:

Finally, we spotted our first gallilimus, tried to pick it up and - nothing. Tried a different one. Still nothing. Perhaps we were too heavy? I hopped off the quetzal, Claire tried picking up various other dinos, mammals and snakes and lifted them all up without issue. Gallilimus? Not a chance!

In the end, we did what any reasonable scientist would do and crushed one of the bastards. Parked the fucking quetzal right on top of it and trapped one underneath. Then I went and shot it with tranquilizers. One arrow ... three, four, five. Another! ...two, three, four, five. And one more. Rinse, repeat.

Finally, the dino went down and we managed to tame it. But even after we managed to make Bill Clinton, our third gallilimus that day, our own, there was no way Nasca could pick him up. And judging by our last attempt, simply walking Bill home wasn't going to work.
So, in case you're actually still watching these, here is what we did:

The nice thing about platform saddles is that you can build structures on top of them. So we left Bill Clinton in his safe spot and started chopping down trees, which I used in order to set up a makeshift cage on top of Nasca.
Now Claire had to find a ramp tall enough for Bill Clinton to make his way on top of Nasca. We settled for some pointy rocks nearby and tried to get him to jump on the platform. It was like threading a needle. Maneuvring an incredibly skittish, panicking dinosaur on top of an oversized prehistoric robo-bird is a lot more difficult than you'd think. Or maybe it isn't. I have absolutely no clue how easy you may or may not think it is. I'm just making conversation. No, you are being weird!

I had to heighten the walls of our cage a bit in order to help catch the jumping dino. In the end, we managed to thread the needle, then balance Bill Clinton inside the cage as we air-lifted him back to camp. His face glitched through the side of the cage a bit, having us worried he might just bug out completely and fall through, but finally, after an entire day of nothing but misery and suffering, we got our brand new gallimimus home safe and sound.

Fuck my life, man. An entire day and night wasted on such incredibly stupid bullshit. Putting god knows how much time and effort into obtaining something most sane people either would give up on or cheat with a console command. But I refuse to cheat myself out of stupid adventures like this one. And, more importantly, we have now discovered a new taming method: the pancake and cage! Flatten them with a quetzal, then catapult them on top of the bird to fly them home before they know wtf is going on. I think I wanna try that exact strategy with a bear tomorrow! What can possibly go right?