We've finally done it. It's weird, really.
Change is important, right? Progress. Evolution. Ark itself embraces that, has evolution right in its title. So how come most of us, as a species, dislike and straight-up fight change? Clinging on to the status quo, reminiscing about the good old days and shit. Anyhow, we've left THEISLAND for the next part of Ark's story: Scorched Earth.
There are a few things about Scorched Earth, which immediately put me off. First of all, it's set entirely in the desert. You get some mountains and canyons and dried-up river beds, but there's simply no way around the fact it's all a bit samey and gets old a lot faster than the varied landscapes and biomes of THEISLAND. Another problem is that moving to a new ark always means you're going back to the stone age.
Downgrading from tek gear to whatever this is.
The good thing about expecting the absolute worst is how it means you're already somewhat prepared. So we chose the east midlands as our starting point, as we live in the east midlands of the UK. Once more into the fray. Spawning completely naked. No guns, no kickass lightsabers, no jetpack. Punching trees, breaking off rocks, making basic caveman tools. At least this time we had an idea what we were doing, which made a big difference. It also helped that our characters already had a hundred levels under their belts, because Scorched Earth doesn't pull any punches.
Where Ark's first map gently pushes your survival instincts in the starting areas by throwing the odd dilophosaur at you, this time around we were immediately attacked by a raptor. Claire knocked it out with her bare hands. Maximum difficulty, no cheats. Apparently, a level 100 survivor is strong enough to take out a level 8 raptor using no gear whatsoever. Interesting. While Claire was taming her raptor, I took out a bunch of giant prehistoric boars using only a spear. Again, interesting. I remember dying countless deaths to raptors and pigs back on THEISLAND, even when we had actual weapons and armor. I didn't expect our levels to make that much of a difference.
We built a base in no time at all.
We followed the old river bed until we managed to find some water. That's where we decided to set up our base. I built a giant wall to section off the dried-up part of the river, then used the water and the surrounding cliffs to ward off the rest of our camp against potential intruders. I built a nice little stone house. Claire built a wooden house, which resembles a penis. The tip of her cockhouse has a little window in it. She can leave her dick house through the tip-window. She says she did none of this on purpose. Maybe it's all in her subconscious.
Definitely not a penis: Claire's house.
Scorched Earth has a handful of new creatures we haven't encountered before. One of them is a stomach-turningly cute mammal called the jerboa. It's basically a small kangaroo with the head of a fennec fox. You tame one and put it on your shoulder and it'll warn you about each of this ark's impending stupid weather conditions like blinding sandstorms and tech-disabling electrical storms and other such crap. I tamed two of the little shits, as the first one immediately disappeared into the foundation of our base camp, becoming one with our home for all eternity. Great.
Next, we tamed a thorned dragon, because they look like a cross between a lizard and a pinecone, they're really good at harvesting stuff and they can put things to sleep with a ranged attack. In other words, they instantly make other popular workhorse-dinos like the triceratops obsolete. Which is fine, seeing as trikes don't seem to spawn here, anyway.
I miss our old friends!
Speaking of stuff that doesn't exist on this ark - we went and transferred some stuff over from THEISLAND. Obelisks and tek transmitters allow you to move gear and dinos between worlds, making things a little easier. We brought some of our worker dinos for resources, as well as our otters. They are incredibly helpful when dealing with extreme temperatures. For the time being, we left our tek gear where it was. For as fun as it is being borderline immortal, having the ability to fly without the help of dinos and shooting every possible threat with a plasma rifle, we didn't want to just completely stomp the place and eradicate all challenge from the very beginning. In that same spirit, we didn't bring our giga, a T-Rex or any other super powerful dinos for now.
Pinecone reminds me of some of our RL pets. I like him.
We also brought our flying dinos upon realizing that the giant moths in Scorched Earth are as adorable as they're useless. They're agile and all, but their stats are fairly unimpressive and they don't fight, because they're moths. So we went and grabbed our argies, then flew all over the place to get a better idea about our surroundings.
We're bringing freedom and democracy to Scorched Earth.
As we went and explored the desert from above, I spotted one of the coolest creatures in the entire game: a mantis. You know, big, green, googly eyes, deadly sickles for arms and apparently they like a little head during sex? I wouldn't want one for a pet in real life, as they're a bit on the fragile side and I doubt they're the bonding type. But in Ark? A specimen big enough for me to ride into battle? Fuck yeah!
I'm not massively keen on insects, but these guys are awesome.
So apparently, in oder to tame one of these bad boys you need bits of a creature called a deathworm. Well, that sounds easy enough, right? Let's go find and kill some of these deathworms and tame us a mantis!
Now, before you give me shit about underestimating something named deathworm, let's have a quick look at Ark's nomenclature, shall we? Because everything is already named giga, mega or titansomething. It means nothing. A titanoboa is largely harmless once you've gained a few levels and you've geared up a little. A megaloceros is something you punch in the butt and then laugh at as it panicks and runs away. So I'm not gonna be intimidated by some worm, no matter his forename. Well, about that.
We flew around the desert for hours. Actual, literal, real earth hours. Then we finally found some weird dust clouds in the sand. We flew a little closer and there was a rumble. A split second later, an alpha deathworm appeared, broke all of my gear and killed me in one hit. Just like that. I didn't know they were the size of a skyscraper or that there was an alpha variety. All I saw was this:
Except, from the inside.
Having sunk several hundred hours into Ark, my attitude towards items in this game has changed a lot. You see, in most games I play, items are everything. Picture any max level character in World of Warcraft. Put him side by side with another max level character of the same class, remove all their items and they become identical. Exact same stats, same skills, save for a handful of very minor, meaningless, non-permanent choices in their talent trees. Now clad one of them in green quest trash and the other guy in raid gear and suddenly there's a world of difference between these two characters. Same thing applies to most (*coughs* actual) RPGs to varying degrees. You get your skills and your attributes, but a huge part of your power, if not the biggest, always comes from items.
Ark, at least from a PvE point of view, doesn't give a shit about your gear. If anything, you'll wear it for utility. Stuff that protects you against hot or cold environments. Scuba gear for deep sea adventures. Camouflaged armor to sneak past predators. When that worm chewed through my riot gear? Fuck it. If you're lucky, heavy armor will protect you during one or two hairy encounters that might not kill you outright. After that, all of your stuff will be broken and require so much in resources to repair, it's basically not worth the effort unless you're part of some huge tribe, who mass-produces items on an industrial level. But I lost something else. Something I wasn't prepared to go without.
You'll be missed, little buddy.
Fishface was my otter. He was one of the first creatures I tamed all by myself, all the way back on Switch. I never went anywhere without him. He saved us when Claire and I lost our mount on THEISLAND and got surrounded by raptors and boas. I'm not even exaggerating. That damn otter fought long enough for me to wake up after getting knocked down, bought me enough time to grab my shotgun and helped me fight off that pack of raptors before they ate us.
The worm ate him. I wish we had dived in there to grab him. Got close enough to whistle at him to run away or to at least fight back. To do something. We couldn't save him. Everything, everyone dies in the end, one way or another. Didn't make it any less of a punch to the gut. Look at his stupid, happy little face. The worm doesn't care. It just wants to eat. Nature is fucked up, in real life and in videogames.
Not even penis house cheered me up that night.
Claire said I could always have one of her otters. Or just get a new one from THEISLAND. And that's true. But I don't want to replace Fishface. Guess I'll just be otterless for a while. Doesn't have to make sense to you. It makes enough sense to me.
On a less depressing note, we ultimately caught our mantis and these guys are incredible! Not only are they really great harvesters and fighters, but you can even equip them with tools and melee weapons, so now I'm riding on this giant black insect, which chops all the dinos to tiny bits with his swords. I named him Chakan.
A glitch is making it look like he's wielding swords and axes at the same time, because this is Ark.
Okay, children, time for a bit of videogame history. Chakan: The Forever Man was a game on the Sega Megadrive/Genesis and the Sega Game Gear based on a comic book character of the same name. The game isn't every good, it's brutally difficult, the music is some of the worst in any videogame ever. The reason why this game has stuck with me since the day it was announced is its unusually dark setting and character. Chakan was this incredible swordsman, who would beat anyone in a fight until he ran out of opponents and challeneged Death himself to a duel. Upon defeating the grim reaper, Chakan demanded his ultimate prize: eternal life.
And since you don't fuck with death, the arrogant fencer soon regretted his wish. He continued to age, undying, ceaselessly withering away. In the game you have to fight your way back into Death's realm to defeat him once more in order to find eternal peace at last. How fucking cool is that? In the 90s, a decade dominated by mascot platformers and cheesy, 'radical' coolness, there was this game where your ultimate goal was to die. And check out that character art:
The megadrive cover art was reason enough for us to buy the game back in the day:
There was a sequel planned in the early 2000s, but in the end it never happened. Rumor has it, that much of the artwork meant for the new Chakan went into Blood Omen 2, instead. And that concludes today's history lesson.
So, inspired by some scrotum-faced badass, who fucks shit up with two nasty swords, I'm now riding around on a giant mantis, which is doing pretty much the same thing.
The hat is important.
Having watched what my new pet of choice can do, it only took Claire five minutes before she wanted her own mantis. Hers is bright orange and lunges at stuff with two giant lances.
Imagine that thing flying at you like this.
This beastie is bright orange and chops its enemies to bits with heavy medieval weaponry. Obviously, there can only be one correct name for such a creature and that's Choppy Orange. Claire, however, decided to name him Ziggy, which is ... also a name, I guess.
Poor you.
Next to moths, killer insects and pinecone lizards, there's one more thing you'll definitely want to tame when you come to this place: a wyvern. Suffice to say I couldn't wait to go out on an adventure, fly into one of their lava-filled nests and steal one of their eggs, which is the only way to obtain one of these suckers.
Except, Claire went and did all that during a 16-hour Ark session while I was working. I'm not kidding. Started the game one evening, stayed on there until midnight, talked about how we should probably stop soon, fought deathworms until 4 in the morning, tried our new mantis pets at 5, by 10am there was absolutely no point in going to sleep and by 1 in the afternoon I requested a break, because health experts suggest frequent pauses and I could really use a two hour nap after all that.
Having deprived me of one of the cooler things you can do on this ark, I was stuck raising one of the little fuckers from a tiny baby to something the length of a grown-ass bronto. And while I won't deny that wyverns look cool, they're probably the only thing I dislike more than all those bionic robo-dinos. First of all, from a conceptual point of view. I enjoy Ark, because most of the creatures in this game used to exist for real at some point. Not all in the same time period, not exactly the way they're depicted in the game, but it's fun to watch them and to imagine what the world may have been like back in their day. Robots and mythical creatures just don't fit into the picture for me.
I like dinos. And I like dragons. But I don't want them mixed together. I'm not putting bacon on top of my ice cream, either.
I also find them underwhelming from a gameplay perspective. Not only are they the size of a flying oil tanker, but they also handle like one. They have a turn radius of 'see ya in three weeks' and while it's nice of them to come with various flavours of elemental breath attacks, their damage really isn't anything special by the time you have a level 200something argentavis. It'll take your dragon an eternity and a half to catch up in terms of raw stats and then it'll still handle like ass. And, much like gigas, you can't take them into boss battles, so what is their point in pve?
Owning dragons for the sake of owning dragons.
We've also encountered our first cave, which, compared to the caves on THEISLAND, was a bit of a letdown. There were about five enemies and a small platforming section in there, which wasn't much to stop us from obtaining our first artifacts. Two more to go, then it'll be time to fight the one and only boss on this particular ark. And that's okay. The desert is nice and all, but I wouldn't mind a change of scenery. We've got what we came here for and I'm sure that some of our new friends will move to a new ark with us once we're ready to relocate. Next one on the list is Aberration, I think. But we still have a manticore to fight before we worry about that.
I've recorded several days worth of video footage showing pretty much all of these events as they happened. I might convert them into another supercut when I find the time. Not that it really matters, it's not like anyone really watches these. It's still fun putting them together, if only to have a reminder of all the crazy shit we get up to in this game. Right now, the plan is to complete all story content present in each of the official arks, then build a retirement base on Ragnarok and settle there with all our surviving favourite dinos from all the arks we've explored. There's still so much to do!
So, 'member how I said we were preparing to fight the dragon 'n shit? Here's how that went down:
We packed all of our strongest dinos and a spino (they're horseshit) into pokéballs and battled the last of the three titans on THEISLAND. Basically, all we had to do was to cram the fucker right in the middle of our 20 tames, beat the crap out of him and stuff a pig with all the food in the world in order to out-heal some of the dragon's nasty DoT effects. My pants broke, because Ark is stupid and somehow all bosses and dinosaurs in general always go for the ass. They're always my first piece of equipment to break. I've never finished a single goddamn boss battle with my pants on.
Beating the dragon was a pretty big deal for us, because it meant we could finally craft a full set of tek gear. And it's pretty insane.
Partial tek was pretty impressive already. We had tek helmets after the spider boss battle, which allowed us to breathe underwater. We had boots, which absorbed fall damage. Gloves with a pointless super punch, because why punch shit when you have a shotgun? Now we have full tek armor and we're basically Iron Man. Iron Men? People? We're Iron People.
We're also pretty damn sexy now.
We can fly without argies or pteranodons now, sprint so fast we can literally walk on water, fall from just about any height without taking damage and hang around under the sea with zero risk of drowning. The tek helmets even clear up all water distortion and sight limitations. Beating the dragon also unlocked tek sharks, so now our fishy friends can look awesome while they sit around and rot, never to be used again.
That's really my one small complaint with this whole thing. Yes, Tek is amazing, game-changing, a massive reward when you actually beat the game instead of just spawning it all in via console commands. It also means you're so stupidly fast, agile and basically unstoppable, it makes using most dinos pointless. Basically the thing that ruined Saints Row IV - that game made you a superhero with godlike abilities from the very beginning, meaning you never had to steal a vehicle or use any of the countless guns, because what's the point when you can fucking fly, run faster than light and destroy everything with one punch?
Saits Row The Third was basically GTA with more wrestling moves and a giant dildo.
In Ark's defense, you're pretty much at the end of the game by the time you unlock it, if you do it the legit way. Continue to the next ark (read: map, level) and you'll be back to sticks and stones until you find the resources required to get all of your tek back. So I suppose it can be forgiven that players get to be completely overpowered as they tie up some final loose ends, hunt down their last few explorer notes and prepare for ascension. That's the thing where you face the ark's overseer and learn a little more about what these arks actually are. We've ascended and there's a little video, but mind the thpoilerth that lurk within:
Next stop: Scorched Earth. Not sure how to feel about that. Leave Camp Nova behind, get used to a whole new place, build up another base, decide which dinos we want to take on our next journey. THEISLAND is a shithole, but it's pretty and it's been our virtual home since late 2018. There's also the fact that Ark has suddenly weirdly exploded on Steam, so we're now supposed to play and review Genesis. Not entirely sure how to squeeze that in. Maybe move from THEISLAND straight to Genesis, finish that first for our review, then play the rest of the DLC in its intended order. Or create alts for Genesis and cheat them up to endgame level. We'll see. I guess Ark's gonna be my job a little while longer. Life could be worse, I guess.
It's funny how you never see cool moments like these when random YouTubers blab about how Ark is 'the worst game on Switch' after a whopping three minutes of play time. A cynic might say they never really tried to actually play the damn thing and just jumped aboard the hate train for some easy clicks. But of course there are no cynics here in this blog.
Anyway. We've re-created our most awesome Switch adventure in the PC version, this time fighting the alpha version of the spider, making the fight last juuust a little bit longer:
Good times. We squished one of the three main bosses on the hardest difficulty setting. This led to what we thought was the logical assumption we could tackle all the remaining content on Ark's first "level", THEISLAND. Thing is, Ark doesn't understand difficulty.
There's no curve here. You start facing a wall. You die repeatedly, while the game tells you absolutely nothing about WTF you're supposed to do. Till you either give up and leave like the vast majority of people who ever try this game. Or until you smash head-first through the wall, tame the absolute shit out of all the dinos and rapidly get to that point in the game where difficulty just drops and flatlines at the very bottom.
Once you've got your own pack of raptors, then grab a T-Rex or two, start breeding your own, you basically own THEISLAND. Yes, there are some challenging bits left, such as taming a Giga or trying to survive in extremely hot or cold zones without proper gear or a pet otter (they help regulate your body temperature for some reason). But there aren't many challenges which can't be overcome by simply throwing enough dinos at them. Or using tools such as bear traps, bolas and improvised cages for the more dramatic taming attempts. It's all about the dinos and the tools. Weapons and armor ... yeah well. Try shooting that T-Rex with your pistol and see what happens. Or have half a dozen hungry raptors chomp on your riot gear and see how long you'll survive.
Even some of the most advanced gear simply breaks after an encounter or two.
We had reached a point where upon level-ups I'd start raising random dump-attributes on our dinos, because I felt guilty about the amounts of health, stamina and damage they had. It seemed the game was becoming just a little too easy.
Broodmother Lysrix, the spider boss we just whacked in its difficult alpha form, is the second out of three boss encounters on THEISLAND. So we figured we may as well go and challenge the first boss, some angry cyber ape, who is supposed to be quite a bit easier to fight than Lysrix.
In order to get to that first boss, however, we had to retrieve a bunch of artifacts from caves scattered around THEISLAND. These caves function a bit like dungeons in an RPG. They're full of traps, monsters, treasure, that sort of thing. Pretty easy stuff, as far as we knew, because we had absolutely no trouble obtaining all the artifacts for Lysrix. So how hard could it be to finish three more caves for some boss you're supposed to tackle first? Yeah well. I did say Ark doesn't understand the difficulty curve.
Our dinos are so powerful, there is nothing left that would threaten them.
The first of the three caves used three annoying methods to absolutely fuck with us. First of all, it simply didn't allow any dinos inside, so we spent the next hour or so shotgunning the crap out of dozens and dozens of bats and spiders. They infect you with MEGARABIES, because everything in this game is giga, mega or titano and in ALL CAPS for emphasis. Bring a bunch of antidote or die in seconds, basically.
Then there are the countless bottomless pits. Fail at platforming and die. We crafted a bunch of grappling hooks and ninja'd all over the place, but the level designers were kind enough to place a shitload of enemies all around the bottomless pits, who'd repeatedly knock us over the edge, anyway.
Once we finally managed to navigate around the entire cave and kill every last enemy in sight, there was no artifact. Turns out it simply doesn't spawn half of the time. In the game's defense, this problem has only been there and was repeatedly reported since 2017, so it's not like the developers had a lot of time to become aware of it and fix this issue. In the end, we had to spawn in the artifact manually through a console command, which is the least satisfying way to do this, but if the game refuses to spawn the item, it leaves us little choice in the matter. On a mildly related note, it turned out we didn't even need this particular artifact for the ape boss, but heyho.
Ark is a pretty big game with a pretty small dev team. The game has its problems.
Well, at least things could only get better from there. Except, it got so much worse. The next cave on our list didn't allow anything inside that was any bigger than your average player character. So we put a cage on our quetzal's platform saddle and stuffed it to the brim with dilophosaurs, then had a bunch of dimorphodons come along for air support as we made our way to the Snow Cave. That's what the game calls it. Just the Snow Cave. Doesn't sound very dangerous or impressive, does it?
Snow Cave is chock-full with super high level polar bears, wolves and other nasty shit. I don't know what the fuck they were thinking when they made this. It looks like something I created as a teenager in Game Maker. Just cram as many enemies as you can inside a small space and watch the ensuing mayhem. The critters in there beat the absolute fuck out of our tiny dinos. And once they were out of small dinos to eat, they continued with us. Great. Massive amounts of fun! The regular overworld had become laughably easy, but this cave, something you're supposed to play in order to access the first, easiest boss in the game, just throws some of the toughest baddies at you and leaves you no space to bring anything major for you to defend yourself! Grrr!
Our allosaurus pack would have torn the absol... waiiiiitaminute!
The thing with Ark is that you can't play it like most videogames. It's a bit like Divinity: Original Sin (2) in that regard. You don't just accept the rules, play by them and expect to win. It's about creativity. Thinking outside the box. As it turns out, Ark has these little things called Cryopods, which are basically Pokéballs. Small, portable devices you point at any dino, which will then shrink down because SPACE MAGIC or some shit, and go to sleep inside the pod.
So we went home to Camp Nova, shrank down four extra beefy allosaurs, flew all the way back to Snow Cave, re-summoned our massively overpowered dinos inside the cave, then spent the next 20 or so minutes watching the fuckers sleep, because apparently there's a thing called cryo sickness and absolutely everything in Ark must have some sort of arbitrary grind or time gate attached to it.
You can't go wrong with an allosaurus.
Once our badass dinos were finally awake, we sat back, issued the 'go out for breakfast' command, then casually retrieved our artifact from a cave, which was now entirely devoid of life, save for four allosaurs, two humans and two otters.
The next two caves were an absolute cakewalk by comparison. The first one was basically just a gaping pit. The idea is that you slowly and carefully shimmy across some ledges that spiral around the pit and lead all the way down to where the artifact rests. There's a fair bit of platforming involved, which is interrupted by frequent monster attacks. Oooor you just hop on a thylacoleo, climb up and down the walls and ignore all the mechanics as you're in and out with the artifact in five minutes and move on to more interesting stuff.
Like watching sunsets.
The final cave started like any other cave, with narrow passageways and bats and centipedes. Only for the remaining 90 percent to be completely flooded. Claire brought a baryonix. These fellas are water-proof and make excellent swimmers. I brought a wolf. And wolves are ... well, they're wolves. So that wasn't great. But we got our artifact, at least.
Finally, we stuffed 20 of our finest dinosaurs (translation: three or so rexes, our four allosaurs plus random assorted crap to fill the gaps) into cryopods and ferried them all the way up to ... White Peak? I think it's really just called White Peak. God, the location names in this game are so fucking boring! Anyway, we dragged all our dinos up some mountain top in order to summon them for the boss fight. Apparently the boss arena has some bottomless pits, which are super effective against dinos and their less than stellar AI, so we just stayed at the entrance, Claire pulled the boss, our dinos ate him and that was that.
I'm riding a wolf while wielding a pump-action shotgun. Best game ever.
By the way - if you want to see what all of these adventures looked like, you can watch it right here:
By defeating two out of three bosses on the hardest setting we've unlocked a bunch of tek gear, which makes the game significantly easier. Shock-absorbing boots to mitigate fall damage, a helmet with built-in night vision, a life sensor to detect nearby creatures, as well as an infinite oxygen supply and clear vision when exploring under water - there are some incredibly fun gadgets, which make defeating these bosses feel that much more rewarding.
Interestingly enough, even with well over 150,000 players over the past weekend, only the tiniest amount of people have ever fought any of these endgame baddies:
Barely one in every ten players even makes it to this point.
After dozens upon dozens of hours, weeks and weeks of RL time spent on this game across two platforms, it feels strange to be so close to the end. Only three more caves and one boss left to go - we're about to face a real dragon in the next boss arena!
Of course there are even more maps to explore after THEISLAND, more parts of the story to uncover, more dinos to tame and more bosses to fight in other places. We can finally leave this first zone behind. Part of me really doesn't want to. Yes, THEISLAND can get fucked for all I care. But I like my little blue hut by the beach (I painted it myself!), sitting in the shade under a pair of palm trees, starting every session by waking up in there, looking out the window and watching the sun rise above the ocean. My little piece of paradise. I'm not ruling out that landscapes titled 'Aberration', 'Scorched Earth' and 'Extinction' can be nice, but judging by those names, I'm not overly hopeful. I reckon once it's all done, all the bosses are defeated and all maps are fully explored, I'm gonna retire on THEISLAND, sit in my little hut, surrounded by all my favourite dinos, which end up surviving this journey.
It's funny how you never see cool moments like these when random YouTubers blab about how Ark is 'the worst game on Switch' after a whopping three minutes of play time. A cynic might say they never really tried to actually play the damn thing and just jumped aboard the hate train for some easy clicks. But of course there are no cynics here in this blog.
Anyway. We've re-created our most awesome Switch adventure in the PC version, this time fighting the alpha version of the spider, making the fight last juuust a little bit longer:
Good times. We squished one of the three main bosses on the hardest difficulty setting. This led to what we thought was the logical assumption we could tackle all the remaining content on Ark's first "level", THEISLAND. Thing is, Ark doesn't understand difficulty.
There's no curve here. You start facing a wall. You die repeatedly, while the game tells you absolutely nothing about WTF you're supposed to do. Till you either give up and leave like the vast majority of people who ever try this game. Or until you smash head-first through the wall, tame the absolute shit out of all the dinos and rapidly get to that point in the game where difficulty just drops and flatlines at the very bottom.
Once you've got your own pack of raptors, then grab a T-Rex or two, start breeding your own, you basically own THEISLAND. Yes, there are some challenging bits left, such as taming a Giga or trying to survive in extremely hot or cold zones without proper gear or a pet otter (they help regulate your body temperature for some reason). But there aren't many challenges which can't be overcome by simply throwing enough dinos at them. Or using tools such as bear traps, bolas and improvised cages for the more dramatic taming attempts. It's all about the dinos and the tools. Weapons and armor ... yeah well. Try shooting that T-Rex with your pistol and see what happens. Or have half a dozen hungry raptors chomp on your riot gear and see how long you'll survive.
Even some of the most advanced gear simply breaks after an encounter or two.
We had reached a point where upon level-ups I'd start raising random dump-attributes on our dinos, because I felt guilty about the amounts of health, stamina and damage they had. It seemed the game was becoming just a little too easy.
Broodmother Lysrix, the spider boss we just whacked in its difficult alpha form, is the second out of three boss encounters on THEISLAND. So we figured we may as well go and challenge the first boss, some angry cyber ape, who is supposed to be quite a bit easier to fight than Lysrix.
In order to get to that first boss, however, we had to retrieve a bunch of artifacts from caves scattered around THEISLAND. These caves function a bit like dungeons in an RPG. They're full of traps, monsters, treasure, that sort of thing. Pretty easy stuff, as far as we knew, because we had absolutely no trouble obtaining all the artifacts for Lysrix. So how hard could it be to finish three more caves for some boss you're supposed to tackle first? Yeah well. I did say Ark doesn't understand the difficulty curve.
Our dinos are so powerful, there is nothing left that would threaten them.
The first of the three caves used three annoying methods to absolutely fuck with us. First of all, it simply didn't allow any dinos inside, so we spent the next hour or so shotgunning the crap out of dozens and dozens of bats and spiders. They infect you with MEGARABIES, because everything in this game is giga, mega or titano and in ALL CAPS for emphasis. Bring a bunch of antidote or die in seconds, basically.
Then there are the countless bottomless pits. Fail at platforming and die. We crafted a bunch of grappling hooks and ninja'd all over the place, but the level designers were kind enough to place a shitload of enemies all around the bottomless pits, who'd repeatedly knock us over the edge, anyway.
Once we finally managed to navigate around the entire cave and kill every last enemy in sight, there was no artifact. Turns out it simply doesn't spawn half of the time. In the game's defense, this problem has only been there and was repeatedly reported since 2017, so it's not like the developers had a lot of time to become aware of it and fix this issue. In the end, we had to spawn in the artifact manually through a console command, which is the least satisfying way to do this, but if the game refuses to spawn the item, it leaves us little choice in the matter. On a mildly related note, it turned out we didn't even need this particular artifact for the ape boss, but heyho.
Ark is a pretty big game with a pretty small dev team. The game has its problems.
Well, at least things could only get better from there. Except, it got so much worse. The next cave on our list didn't allow anything inside that was any bigger than your average player character. So we put a cage on our quetzal's platform saddle and stuffed it to the brim with dilophosaurs, then had a bunch of dimorphodons come along for air support as we made our way to the Snow Cave. That's what the game calls it. Just the Snow Cave. Doesn't sound very dangerous or impressive, does it?
Snow Cave is full to the brim with super high level polar bears, wolves and other nasty shit. I don't know what the fuck they were thinking when they made this. It looks like something I created as a teenager in Game Maker. Just cram as many enemies as you can inside a small space and watch the ensuing mayhem. The critters in there beat the absolute fuck out of our tiny dinos. And once they were out of small dinos to eat, they continued with us. Great. Massive amounts of fun! The regular overworld had become laughably easy, but this cave, something you're supposed to play in order to access the first, easiest boss in the game, just throws some of the toughest baddies at you and leaves you no space to bring anything major for you to defend yourself! Grrr!
Our allosaurus pack would have torn the absol... waiiiiitaminute!
The thing with Ark is that you can't play it like most videogames. It's a bit like Divinity: Original Sin (2) in that regard. You don't just accept the rules, play by them and expect to win. It's about creativity. Thinking outside the box. As it turns out, Ark has these little things called Cryopods, which are basically Pokéballs. Small, portable devices you point at any dino, which will then shrink down because SPACE MAGIC or some shit, and go to sleep inside the pod.
So we went home to Camp Nova, shrank down four extra beefy allosaurs, flew all the way back to Snow Cave, re-summoned our massively overpowered dinos inside the cave, then spent the next 20 or so minutes watching the fuckers sleep, because apparently there's a thing called cryo sickness and absolutely everything in Ark must have some sort of arbitrary grind or time game attached to it.
You can't go wrong with an allosaurus.
Once our badass dinos were finally asleep, we sat back, issued the 'go out for breakfast' command, then casually retrieved our artifact from a cave, which was now entirely devoid of life, save for four allosaurs, two humans and two otters.
The next two caves were an absolute cakewalk by comparison. The first one was basically just a gaping pit. The idea is that you slowly and carefully shimmy across some ledges that spiral around the pit and lead all the way down to where the artifact rests. There's a fair bit of platforming involved, which is interrupted by frequent monster attacks. Oooor you just hop on a thylacoleo, climb up and down the walls and ignore all the mechanics as you're in and out with the artifact in five minutes and move on to more interesting stuff.
Like watching sunsets.
The final cave started like any other cave, with narrow passageways and bats and centipedes. Only for the remaining 90 percent to be completely flooded. Claire brought a baryonix. These fellas are water-proof and make excellent swimmers. I brought a wolf. And wolves are ... well, they're wolves. So that wasn't great. But we got our artifact, at least.
Finally, we stuffed 20 of our finest dinosaurs (translation: three or so rexes, our four allosaurs plus random assorted crap to fill the gaps) into cryopods and ferried them all the way up to ... White Peak? I think it's really just called White Peak. God, the location names in this game are so fucking boring! Anyway, we dragged all our dinos up some mountain top in order to summon them for the boss fight. Apparently the boss arena has some bottomless pits, which are super effective against dinos and their less than stellar AI, so we just stayed at the entrance, Claire pulled the boss, our dinos ate him and that was that.
I'm riding a wolf while wielding a pump-action shotgun. Best game ever.
By the way - if you want to see what all of these adventures looked like, you can watch it right here:
By defeating two out of three bosses on the hardest setting we've unlocked a bunch of tek gear, which makes the game significantly easier. Shock-absorbing boots to mitigate fall damage, a helmet with built-in night vision, a life sensor to detect nearby creatures, as well as an infinite oxygen supply and clear vision when exploring under water - there are some incredibly fun gadgets, which make defeating these bosses feel that much more rewarding.
Interestingly enough, even with well over 150,000 players over the past weekend, only the tiniest amount of people have ever fought any of these endgame baddies:
Barely one in every ten players even makes it to this point.
After dozens upon dozens of hours, weeks and weeks of RL time spent on this game across two platforms, it feels strange to be so close to the end. Only three more caves and one boss left to go - we're about to face a real dragon in the next boss arena!
Of course there are even more maps to explore after THEISLAND, more parts of the story to uncover, more dinos to tame and more bosses to fight in other places. We can finally leave this first zone behind. Part of me really doesn't want to. Yes, THEISLAND can get fucked for all I care. But I like my little blue hut by the beach (I painted it myself!), sitting in the shade under a pair of palm trees, starting every session by waking up in there, looking out the window and watching the sun rise above the ocean. My little piece of paradise. I'm not ruling out that landscapes titled 'Aberration', 'Scorched Earth' and 'Extinction' can be nice, but judging by those names, I'm not overly hopeful. I reckon once it's all done, all the bosses are defeated and all maps are fully explored, I'm gonna retire on THEISLAND, sit in my little hut, surrounded by all my favourite dinos, which end up surviving this journey.
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?
