We Have Ark 2 at Home

 

If you're one of the three or so regulars to this blog, you may be aware of the fact that we used to play Ark: Survival Evolved a lot in my house. For hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours. And then the game ran its natural cause - I've seen everything I wanted to see, tamed everything I ever cared to tame, had a quick look at Genesis 1 and 2 and decided that no, I'm happy to end my adventure with a completed Extinction and a huge-ass castle / retired dino holiday resort on Ragnarok. I never cared much for the hardcore survival aspects of Ark or the more fantastical, made-up creatures like Tek dinos, flying, magical cat things, dragons and other stuff that isn't a dinosaur.

I like my creatures to be realistic or at least plausible.

I haven't really played much since the last summer bash in 2021 and really just wanted to take another look at it when the family went crazy for that Paleo Ark mod, which adds some slightly-altered versions of existing dinosaurs with a couple new textures, some changed sounds, skills or animations here and there. Nothing huge, but it adds a bit of variety, which is always nice. So I played around with that for a while and, yeah, not too shabby.

That's when I started looking into other mods, which introduce new dinos and other creatures. The vast majority of them are incredibly bad: Walking dino skeletons (which are really just re-used halloween assets), dinos with glowy auras, glowing eyes and flashy neon colours, a trillion new wyverns and dragons and other fantasy creatures, as well as mods with actual new dinosaurs, which simply weren't on a level of quality with what already exists in the game. Stuff with crappy or no bump maps, making dinos look like they're made of rubber. Dinos with shoddy textures. Stuff that isn't animated properly, overwrites existing content or simply combines two existing creatures into one, with one half almost always being a dodo. Dodoreaper. Gigadodo. Ten different iterations of Dodorex. The creativity is overwhelming.

Not that the devs aren't perfectly capable of stupid creations, themselves.

So after a few hours of research, testing and experimentation, I ended up with a nice collection of mods, which add only decent quality dinos and animals and none of the crap I don't like. I also allowed creatures from all Ark expansions to spawn in Ragnarok, because most of them are pretty neat. Bloodstalkers can get fucked, but they're plausible and high quality enough to stay. The new apes are insanely annoying and stupidly powerful, but they fit the setting. I don't think I can reasonably justify space whales, but after I've seen one fight a T-Rex, some other brand new giant carnivore and a bunch of argies, they're pretty cool. They're really well-designed, they're freaky, mysterious and otherworldly enough to be interesting, and they're very rare and tend to get eaten pretty fast, so I'll allow them for now. 

They also go incredibly well with all the other lights and effects around our fortress at night.

I've basically turned Ark into an entirely new game, with countless brand new creatures in every biome. I'm not even trying to remember what each of them are called, but we have large new predators, which look a lot like a much bigger dilophosaur, with a much more powerful spit attack, that'll melt you in seconds. We also have more variations of dilohposaurs full-stop, which will spawn in addition to the existing, original dilos without overwriting them. We get the X-versions of existing dinos around volcanic areas for a bit of added variety, then there's the aforementioned Paleo Ark mod, so many dinosaurs now spawn in various different shapes, sizes and colours, as it should be. 

This guy is an incredibly agile swimmer, but also runs and fights like a raptor.

We're basically flying all over the place right now, always stopping and watching whenever a new creature shows up. Whenever something looks fun, we attempt to tame it. This doesn't always work out - potential tames get killed, we get killed, we knock something out only to learn it's a passive tame and so forth. Basically just like we used to play Ark back in the day, before we knew everything. These dinos are new, we know nothing about their abilities and attacks, about how they're tamed or whether or not they'll tame at all.

Many of the new predators come with super deadly bleed or poison attacks. Some heal, stun, buff, use all sorts of unexpected effects. And some are so weird and silly, you kind of want to get rid of them for not being believable at all, but at the same time they're too fun and interesting to delete. Like this guy:

This dino's eyes turn into extremely intense search lights after dark for some reason.

It's this highly enjoyable gameplay loop of spotting a creature for the first time, learning what it does, trying to figure out how to tame it, then to ultimately make it yours - and to find a fun way to utilize it. After several years of Ark, you'll already know all of this stuff about all the animals, especially when you speed things up through the wiki. With the new creatures I've added, the world feels strange and exciting again, we're not prepared for every new threat that lurks around the corner, we have to think on our feet, learn, adapt, come back smarter. You know, the interesting stuff you do in survival games, which happens outside of stupid food and water meters.

Of course our existing tames are still useful, too. Cloud can hold a search light.

We've tamed a new prehistoric murderbird, which can fight like an argie, dive like an owl and knock people off their mounts. We found a water lizard, which electrocutes its enemies. We encountered a boss-level creature, which is roughly the size and shape of a quetzal, is as powerful as a giga and announces its presence with an ear-shattering screech. We have found whatever the fuck this is:

I don't know, either.

The grasslands around our fortress, which used to be home to nothing but harmless herbivores and one of the safest areas in all of Ragnarok, now gets the occasional visit from magma lizards, camelspider-looking monstrosities the size of a triceratops, as well as those invisible killer cats from Genesis, which go into stealth, aggro you from three continents away and basically inhale you in a split second. Suddenly, these thick walls aren't for show anymore and our titans are being forced to earn their keep.

This suchomimus fits right in and matches the quality of Ark's default dinos. 

We've also added some fun new items and quality of life features, trying to find a decent balance between making life easier as a small tribe (there's usually just two, sometimes four of us), such as attachable search lights, which you can fit onto your dinos for better visibility or the really handy repair kits. Ark's armor is usually paper-thin and only sustains a few hits before it breaks. High quality gear requires insane amounts of resources to repair, which is borderline unattainable for small tribes, and ultimately results in having it all broken again five minutes later. Now I could install mods for unbreakable gear or just straight-up spawn in new items whenever our stuff breaks, but once you start cheating, what's to stop you from going overboard?

Some new dinos don't have any amazing new features, but just look fun.

We try to find a middle ground between making the game too easy or simply cheating and making it so hardcore, it's simply not fun for a small group of players. The repair kits are a great mod for this: You need to craft them from resources such as metal ingots or cementing paste, which still require a certain amount of time and effort to collect. Using one on an item will restore 20 percent of that item's durability. Fully repairing a complete set of broken gear is still going to require a fair amount of these kits and the resources to craft them, but this is much less stressful to handle than frequently harvesting literally thousands of units of hide, metal and other items in order to repair damaged high-tier items.

Some creatures are best watched from afar, such as this new crocodilian.

We have encountered a whole lot of super dangerous new apex predators, many of which are incredibly difficult to tame. We'll be busy for a very long time, trying to find and capture each of them, with our ultimate goal being our very own "flying giga", the strange new flying boss we've spotted. We also have loads and loads of new underwater creatures to discover, but I feel this is going a whole new adventure all in itself, once we've learned about all the new land-based threats out there. And of course we can look forward to a whole lot of epic battles with these new creatures! Dangerous new dinos threaten our fortress, so we'll have to assemble our strongest new creatures and fight them back with an assortment of new abilities and attacks.

T-Rex is still deadly, but he has a lot of fierce competition. It'll be fun to watch them all in a big fight!

There are even a few new shoulder pets, like a fun new flying dino, who steals honey and allows you to attach a grappling hook for added mobility or a red panda with an AoE heal. I never cared much to collect all the artifacts on Ragnarok in order to fight the bosses there, I never came there in order to progress in any meaningful way, but with all the new creatures and possibilities we've got, I'm actually tempted to go all the way once more. At some point, anyway. Right now, there are still dozens of new creatures to discover, predators to tame and new abilities to figure out. And there are only so many hours in a day. We're gonna be busy for a long time.

Gigaslayer Chickens

 

Given enough time and level-ups, just about any creature in Ark: Survival Evolved can attain god-like power. Obviously, this effect is drastically increased in single player sessions and on small custom servers with easier rulesets, but for as long as you keep dumping points into health and melee damage, your treasured pet will become more and more tanky, whilst learning to dish out like a T-Rex. Once your humble jerboa sits on a 5000 percent increase of its otherwise humble melee damage, it's gonna fuck shit up. Obviously, on hardcore rulesets you'll have to go through a lot of selective inbreeding and causing mutations to reach levels anywhere near that, but it's still possible to raise critters so unreasonably powerful, they'll be infinitely stronger than anything naturally spawning all over the arks, apart from maybe a giganotosaurus.

We may be raising titans and direwolves, but every creature can be a hero.

Claire and I have frequent arguments about this, whenever we play together on our Ragnarok dino retirement server, which is a very chill setting, where I built a huge fortress to house all of our favourite veteran dinosaurs, who accompanied us through the story and boss fights across all the different arks in the game. She'll tame random shit, just because it happens to be level 150something or tries to talk me out of taming stuff, when it's only level 5, as if any of this had any meaning outside of hardcore, competitive settings. Really, all you have to do is get them through a few easy fights or even just some harvesting or even just have them watch you build a toilet, so they'll gain experience and you can start beefing them up. Naturally, higher-level dinos will end up even stronger, they get an easier start, but time is the ultimate balancing factor.

Anything can be powerful. Even a cow.

To prove my point to Claire, I proposed a farming run. As in, a journey across the Ragnarok ark using only common farm animals, in this case the cows and chickens added to the game via the Animals of Atlas mod. We'd both ride cows, order our five chickens to follow the cows and set them up to join every fight we'd get into. If we run into a stray dinosaur with beef cravings, we'd be allowed to defend ourselves (using only cow attacks, no tek or ascended shotguns), but the chickens would always have to join the fight. And just by raising their health and damage whenever they gained levels by fighting alongside us, I was sure we'd be able to take them on a trip around the world and bring them back unharmed. Of course, cows are naturally tanky and can soak up a lot of damage in order to protect our chickens.

Also, our keep is surrounded my harmless herbivores, so the first steps weren't too difficult.

I reckon our feathered friends gained at least a dozen or so levels due to Claire randomly murdering countless innocent sheep, pteranodons and wild baby dinos. I don't like killing stuff just for the fun of it, but she always does it when she thinks I'm not looking. She'll happily wipe out an entire ark with server commands if she isn't satisfied with what's spawning in an area. I don't want that. The idea of my little Ragnarok server is that everything gets to live in peace. Within reason. A T-Rex has to eat and I'm not gonna stop it from gobbling up a bunch of sauropods. But that's because T-Rex is gonna T-Rex. There's no reason to destroy a herd of harmless plant eaters just for fun, especially when you don't even need their meat or skin.

Don't mess with that giga in the distance, if all you've got is a bunch of lowbie cows and chickens.

So we spent the first day of our journey just awkwardly dicking around in the immediate surroundings of our fortress, pecking away at sheep and other such harmless animals. Bit depressing and disappointing, but I suppose you have to start somewhere. And things were about to change, as we were finally starting to get into territory, whose inhabitants were considerably more hostile.

Our first day was about to end. I was starting to get used to riding a cow in VR.

The volcanic area in Ragnarok, as well as the adjacent beach, is home to all sorts of nasty insects. Giant scorpions, which will put you to sleep with their stingers, icky spiders that shoot sticky webs and rainbow-coloured mustaches, which dissolve your armor by spitting on you. They go really well with the occasional mantis, which will leap at you from a mile away to rip your face off. Fortunately, cows are the type of beast, which will take all the damage while you're riding them, meaning you'll be safe for as long as you stay mounted and your raw burger stays alive. On many smaller creatures the rider remains vulnerable, which I had to learn the hard way during one of our cave exploration attempts. So I got jumped by scorpions and centipedes and the occasional mantis, but Tofu, my leathery companion, kept me out of harm's way. Yay for bovine intervention!
Birds like to eat insects, so going after these particular kinds of creatures seemed a reasonable approach to motivate our prehistoric killer chickens to find their bloodlust. And it didn't take them long to learn how to fight. 

Chickens destroying giant scorpions in the pale moonlight. Videogames.

Despite my best efforts, I couldn't get our chickens to harvest the flesh of their enemies. Most carnivorous critters can do this. Have a raptor or a wolf munch on a dead dino and their meat will go straight in their inventory, sustaining them for the coming days. I figured that training a flock of flesh-devouring chickens was our best bet for the journey ahead, but they only kill for the sheer pleasure of it, never for sustenance. They were also becoming more and more willing to mercilessly destroy even the most harmless and innocent of animals for little to no reason, like when Claire accidentally bumped into this prehistoric elk-looking thing.

The poor creature's face is frozen in horror and covered in its own blood. But the chickens' soulless, uncaring eyes show no remorse.

As we made our way across the redwood forest, our heartless murderbirds only kept growing in power. It's a dangerous place, where hungry carnivores burrow and lurk in the ground below or drop on you from the trees above. Tofu and Supercow collected many a scar that day, but our impenetrable phalanx of omni-powerful doom hens would make short work of each and every single one of them. Where we once started with humble sheep and scorpions, we were quickly moving on to sabretooth cats, microraptors and bears until even a full-grown carnotaurus would seal its fate by attempting to sink its teeth into one of our cows.

A second after this image was taken, the carno vanished into a cloud of feathers and beaks, never to be seen again.

It's a bizarre sight, watching a bunch of overgrown hens stand up to one dinosaur after the next, many of which towered above our chickens like undefeatable titans, only to be taken down with a few swift, deadly pecks. It was incredibly stupid, but in the most entertaining way possible.

When you think about it, chickens are really just evolved velociraptors.

Once we had worked our way across the forest, we were headed straight into the desert. The folks who designed this area of Ragnarok have truly outdone themselves, for better or for worse.

You see, on the one hand, this place is easily one of the best, most believable and realistic-looking deserts I've ever seen in a game. It's almost photorealistic. You just see miles and miles of sand and very little else.

Except the occasional cow.

And while that's visually and technically impressive, it also makes for an incredibly dull, frustrating and tedious journey. We'd frequently stop, keep our eyes peeled for some sort of landmark, somewhere to explore, a direction to pick. Or at least a body of water. After all, Ark is still a survival sandbox and temperatures and hydration quickly become an issue, especially when you choose sexy plate armor over practical, light desert clothing. We'd frequently stop and scan the surrounding areas hoping to find an oasis or a vending machine.

Imagine looking around in VR and suddenly this stares at you.

Oh, here's a fun fact about VR: Ragnarok's desert is another area crawling with all manner of bugs and insects. When these fuckers appear out of nowhere and go straight for your face and you see them appear very suddenly, in stereoscopic 3D and right in front of your nose, there's a decent chance you'll attempt to move out of the way in your swiveling arm chair and pancake your cat in the process. 

One nice thing about most open world videogames is that if you keep going in one direction long enough, you'll inevitably reach the end of the land mass and find an ocean. And for some reason I'm never going to understand, the ocean in Ark is very drinkable, so that's where we stayed for the night, refilled our canteens and had our cows pose for some sexy pinup shots.

Home of the whopper!

Things got considerably wetter the next day. Instead of vultures and scorpions we were now surrounded by moths, jerboas and prehistoric kangaroos, all of which were driven crazy when a storm kicked off. 

Like me, the moths in Ark are relatively useless but pretty.

We followed a stream towards the remains of a ruined city. The rain was nice, because it meant we could actually leave the water after a while, seeing as I was no longer constantly overheating. It's nice when the weather in a game isn't just for looks. 

We decided to check out the ruined tower in the distance. A gallimimus decided to walk with us for a while.

We stayed inside an old tower for a while and waited for the storm to pass. The place was inhabited by random lizards and friendly plant eaters. The cows decided to chill and graze for a bit.

It was all pretty wholesome. You had to be there, I guess.

Since we weren't doing a whole lot, I decided to teach our chickens some new commands. Or, to be a bit more precise, I set up a few new voice lines in VoiceAttack, a program, which lets you perform certain actions and functions in games using only your voice. From there on out, when I said 'attack', our chickens would immediately attack the creature I'm targeting at the time. If I asked for 'help', they'd defend us and fight anything that would decide to come after us. Meanwhile, telling them to 'chill' would cause them to cease all fighting and follow us away from conflict. 

For the sake of immersion, I'm playing the game with the UI disabled, which makes the full VR experience a little more believable. And since it's difficult to locate all the many different hotkeys and important buttons, having voice commands for everything is incredibly helpful. Besides, it's just so much fun when you can directly communicate with your animals, tell them to come, stay, attack, help and so on. Though I may have to work on some of the phrases I've set up so far. There was a moment where I had to stop, because I needed a drink. Saying this out loud caused my character to take a drink in-game, which was funny, but unintended and also a bit wasteful, seeing as water is such a limited resource in the desert.

Though things were starting to improve on that front, as well.

We had reached the halfway point of our journey and decided to cross a snowy mountain range on our way back for a change of scenery. In order to get there, we had to travel past more ruins and past lots and lots of all sorts of dinosaurs.

At that point it had become pretty clear that nothing could stand in our way. The cows had attained an exceptional level of beefiness, our chickens were deadly enough to take on any raptor, carnotaurus or other vicious would-be predators, which would dare come anywhere near us. It was a strangely cathartic moment, when some prehistoric crocodile, whose brutal attacks once almost made us quit the game for good many years ago, just got pecked to bits by our birds in seconds.

It's dumb but oh-so funny.

There was one bizarre and dramatic moment, as we had finally reached the edge of the desert, where I was sure that all our efforts had been in vain and our adventure was about to come to an abrupt end. We decided to travel through the night and got a little too close to a pile of boulders, which turned out to be a sleeping rock golem. These guys are significantly stronger than just about any type of dinosaur you can encounter in the wild - and since our battle chickens were ordered to fight anything that poses a threat to us, we suddenly had one hell of a fight on our hands.

Cows and chickens fighting a golem. Did I mention videogames?

Every battle we had fought up to this point had always ended in seconds. But this colossal creature dwarfed our mighty cows and wasn't at all impressed by the beaky flurries of our feathered, frantic fowls. I was surprised to learn that even the massive boulders thrown by the golem at my cow Tofu was tanked in its entirety by my noble bovine steed, meaning I remained entirely unharmed, but my mount was taking considerable amounts of damage. Fortunately for us, the golem was so focused on both of our cows that our chickens could maintain their relentless attacks and whittle him down more and more over time. The whole thing took an eternity and a half, but against all my expectations, we ultimately won, our farmyard animals gained a whopping ten levels each, but there was no way we could have taken on another golem. No matter how tanky you are, you're not just gonna walk off the injuries sustained during a fight like that.

Packs of wolves attacked us in the snowy mountains, but compared to a massive golem, they were absolutely nothing.

One the one hand, our farm animals had now reached a point, where we could genuinely consider taking on a giga. Only in their fully-rested state, of course. We had defeated a golem, regular predators posed absolutely no threat, there really wasn't that much more room for improvement at this point. So the journey back home really wasn't going to be all that exciting or scary. On the other hand, chickens are dumber than shit, Ark's AI is the absolute worst and then we ran into not one, but two more golems. 

At that time it was 4 in the morning, all our animals were injured from their previous battle, we absolutely couldn't take on these monsters, but our chickens were still set to attack anything that moves. So I was circling the golems with my cow, shouting at our chickens to chill, all to the delight of our neighbour upstairs, who couldn't get any sleep because of our bullshittery. The voice commands worked surprisingly well, causing the chickens to let go of the golems and follow our cows, instead. Unfortunately, thanks to Ark's garbage movement AI, they'd get stuck in absolutely every single rock, tree, root and other random shit they managed to find. You'd think you could tell your animals to jump or attack whenever they get stuck on something, but no, they'll just keep on walking straight into every single object that pops up between them and whatever it is they're supposed to follow.

Oceans, trees, rocks - they don't care and will always attempt to move straight through it.

So for the next ten or so minutes, we frantically ran all over the place, uprooting trees with our cows in order to collect our stuck, headless chickens, all whilst constantly getting pelted with boulders. At that point, it might have been less stressful to simply attempt to fight the golems, even if it would have caused the deaths of our birds in all likelihood. 

Instead, we destroyed a small forest, gave our animals some good cardio and finally escaped the golems. We were jumped by several packs of wolves on the way back to the farm, but compared to everything that had happened on this journey, this barely even seems worth mentioning. In the end, everyone returned to the farm safe and sound, with a crapload of levels under their belt and ready to take on the world, once all sustained injuries were healed. I don't know, maybe we'll take them to some boss fights, take down all of Ragnarok's alpha bosses using only cows and chickens.

Time to mount the royal unicorns and go back to the fortress!

I feel that at this point we've turned this whole thing into prehistoric Top Gear. We're picking a bunch of exotic and unexpected methods of transportation, travel to some of the most beautiful spots in the world, there's always a lot of suffering and old people shouting at each other and in the end we're just grateful to find a pub. Well. Or in this case, our massive fortress, surrounded by tall cliffs, titans, dragons and the biggest of dinosaurs. It's quite the pleasant sight after such a long and difficult trek.