Ark: Survival Evolved - Dino Valhalla

 

Having finished THEISLAND, Aberration and Extinction, I've finally gone and done the one thing I always wanted to do since moving from the Switch version of Ark to Steam: create one epic new camp in the best spot I can find, then move all of my favourite surviving dinos there, gathered from all across the content I've played. Then they can just hang out there, I can take them out to explore, just random sandbox-y adventures à la 'let's find and stockpile resource X' and no more ascension or progression. I've got all the alpha ascension stuff done now, and I could only care less about Genesis if it didn't contain some crazy new shit like miniguns. From a gameplay perspective, though, I already hated every second I've spent on Aberration, which went out of its way to make players completely miserable. I don't need a repeat of that with Genesis. 

There's one more thing we're gonna try in the near future, which is the THEISLAND Single Tame Challenge. We're still working out some of the rules, but basically, it's a fresh start with a level 1 survivor and a single level 1 tame of choice. The tame can be literally anything from any expansion, but has to be spawned in at level 1 - you may also spawn in a primitive saddle, if it can be equipped with one. That's it. No other tames, no other cheats, you try and survive the first map and all of the three bosses at gamma level with just the one tame. Allowed mods are for reusable tools like grappling hooks and parachutes, as well as soul terminals in case you get your one and only tame killed. We're using single player settings for obvious reasons, as well as 300% spawns. 

Everyone can cheese content with full Tek and 20 T-Rexes. What if you only get one dino?

Claire is considering a Velonasaur, as they're pretty versatile, tough, mobile and come with a ranged attack. I may go for something a little more insane like a dodo, with every single point put into health. Sure, he might not be much of a fighter, but I can pick him up and throw him at large creature spawns, then sneak by and steal artifacts while the entire island is beating up my bird. Or maybe I'll go for a frog for super jumps and the ability to just lick everything till it goes to sleep. The idea is to absolutely master your tame of choice, use its strengths and work around its weaknesses. You could go for something big and beefy like a T-Rex, but you won't be able to squeeze him inside an artifact cave. An otter is immensely helpful with extreme temperatures, but they make poor fighters and offer no added mobility. The whole thing is a really dumb idea and I can't wait for us to get started! Single survivor, single tame - let's see who makes it the farthest!

Meanwhile, I've built my own castle on Ragnarok, then put all my favourite tames there, including the 3 titans from Extinction, which were a bitch to tame. Then I decorated the titans, put trees, mushrooms, crystals and smaller castles on them, then parked wyverns on top of their castles. It's still a bit of a work in progress, and setting up just the courtyard and main buildings required hundreds, if not thousands of foundations alone. Actually, you know what? A video says more than a thousand words, so here you go:

I have this dream on occasion, where I live in a castle with more rooms than I can reasonably figure out what to do with. I believe it's a somewhat distorted memory of when my family would occasionally book a comically oversized house in the Black Forest for our winter vacation. Three siblings and I would always join our parents there, even when we were no longer kids. I brought my girlfriend, my sister brought her boyfriend and so on and so forth, the place had enough massive bedrooms and bathrooms for everyone, all on the same floor. Each room was basically like a fully-functional hotel room on its own, then there was a massive living room, dining room and a kitchen. Each room was also connected by a gigantic balcony, which went along the entire back of the house. You could look all over the forest and snowy mountain tops. Stupidly beautiful, amazing view. The damn dog would actually try and hide behind the sofa when it was time to go back home, which looks amazing when the dog in question is an overweight golden retriever.

Basically, imagine spending a couple weeks inside a house, where every room is bigger and more luxurious than an entire average flat, and when you look out the window or step on the balcony, you see this:

If I hadn't moved to England, I'd likely be living there now.

My family was the very definition of dysfunctional, but we had some really happy times there. I mean, who the fuck wouldn't? Maybe that's why my brain is clinging on to this stuff, I don't know. Anyhow, castles are nice, the idea of having a base that doesn't look like complete ass just once was also nice, so I went to work. I'm pleased with the result and would totally open up my little realm to the non-dysfunctional UK side of the family, but I reckon just going anywhere near the place will melt most older computers based on the ridiculous amounts of objects alone. On the plus side, Claire's PC can handle the place okay(ish), so at least I'm not all by myself.

Laying the basic foundation for my keep. These are hundreds and hundreds of individual parts already.

Since we're all for independence and totally above tethers 'n' shit, Claire spawned at the absolute ass-end of the world, so I had to grab a griffin to come pick her up. Our trip around all of Ragnarok quickly taught me a few things, such as ... well, remember how THEISLAND always only has one active Giga at any given time? Apparently, Ragnarok doesn't give a crap about that rule, as it has gigas running all over the place like dodos. And then we spotted a unicorn right between all those gigas, because life is dangerous when you're fabulous. It didn't take long for Claire to hop on the damn thing, right after having spawned in with no gear, weapons or any means of self-defense. She had a bunch of carrots and taters, though, because they just randomly grow on this map.

It's like one of those nightmares, where you never catch up.

The thing about taming the stupid unicorn is that the damn thing will start to panic as you sit on it, and then it starts to run all over the place, entirely out of the player's control. You may not be able to recognize it on the small screenshot, but there's a very tiny unicorn on the horizon, blindly racing towards a very not so tiny giga, because yolo, I guess. I spent the next 20 or so minutes chasing after her, trying my best to stop the unicorn from getting too close to the dangerous dinos by blocking it with my griffin's body. A freshly-imported, rather weakened griffin, that is, who was in no state to take on a giga, let alone three of them.

So after that fun adventure, we now had two unicorns. Frankly, I've never been a big fan of horses. They taste okay, I'm sure they're perfectly acceptable animals, but in a game that lets you ride dinosaurs and bears, I find it difficult to care about horses, even when they come with a decorative hood ornament. But now that we had two of them, they quickly turned into our primary non-flying mounts. Turns out they can be incredibly tough and strong, they're more agile than many other tames, and they're really well-animated. When you're used to riding in games like WoW or the incredibly shitty horses of Skyrim, the horses of Ark are a very pleasant surprise.

Green hills and unicorns. Not how I imagined this would go, but I'm not complaining.

With everything set up and good to go, we explored the surrounding areas outside our castle, which is really how I wanted to play Ark again, rather than grinding caves, artifacts, boss battles and stacking tames and raising stats in order to actually survive all of the above. There's a nice redwood area just down the hill from where we're located, which we decided to check out, since we had to get out and hunt for some meat, anyway. And that's basically where Ark decided to be Ark.

Look how nice and edgy we are.

There are certain stupid things in this game, good and bad, which have existed since day one and are never going to change. For a start, Claire and I went out on some mounts, brought one or two choice tames on low follow distance as backup, then ended up spending most of our time frequently looking for said tames, as they would reliably get stuck behind every tree, rock and mushroom they could find. I know that the stupid AI, which is basically magnetized and just trying to follow in a straight line, isn't going to be improved anytime soon. What would be nice, however, would be a setting where they teleport back to the player when they get stuck and fall behind. Many other games with tames, pets and summons do this, but Ark always has you constantly making sure you haven't lost anyone or straight-up going solo. From alpha till this day, lost tames and missing dinosaurs are frequently brought up on the forums and the Ark subreddit, with no satisfying fix or solution, apart from tracking mods, which still don't stop tames from getting stuck, but at least you'll be able to locate them.

And then a pegomastax informed me that he was now part of the tribe. I'm not even joking. I carried 100 berries in my garbage slot, the ridiculously low-level pegomastax jumped me to steal them, singleplayer settings allow for very speedy tames, so the little shit went from randomly jumping me out of nowhere to being fully tamed before he even hit the ground. Free pegomastax. In the middle of a dark forest, surrounded by terrorbirds, bears and god knows what. Disgustingly bright-blue, too, because summer event colours.

Yuck.

I never wanted one of those ugly things, I didn't want one then, so we kept moving, figuring he'd just get himself killed during the next encounter or two. At the end of the day, our castle was no longer the random animal sanctuary our old camp on THEISLAND used to be. Back then, especially on Switch, we just tamed whatever we could find, whatever looked fun or simply happened to be a new thing we hadn't encountered before. In Ragnarok, we had nothing but old animals, who had proven themselves in previous content, who fought boss battles, cleared caves, defended our base. And a unicorn. Random pegomastax jumping me out of the blue wasn't really something we'd been looking for. So we kept moving, hunting, exploring, eventually turned back to bring home our loot. And the fucking thing was still there. And then it got attacked by a bear. And the pegomastax won. And ate the bear. It ate a fucking bear.
I can't stand him. I don't think I ever will. But hey. If you just fucking self-tame, keep following us for an hour, then start murdering bears, only to sneak all the way back inside our castle, you've gotta be good for something. I may not like you, but you've earned your stay, I suppose.