Ark is all about that thug life of punching trees in the face with one's bare fist. Than carrying that heavy loads of wood on your back both ways across a river, up to a hill and fighting off an army of dinosaurs. Finally, you are putting up those walls so raptors or other things do not kill you during the night. All while like a caveman eating berries and drinking water right out of the lake.

Overtime primitive caveman learns that you don’t always have to bash things with your bare fist. You still can and it’s quite enjoyable. Just not very effective now is it caveman? We shortly learned while on this strange continent that you could make tools out of basic stuff lying around the beach. Soon you had a stone pick and hatchet for cutting down trees and busting open rocks. This is far more effective than just trying to will these things to happen with brute force.

As one evolves in levels and gains an aptitude for wanting to do things faster the mountains and their treasures of leaving iron nodes all over the place soon become a reality. While the burdens to carry them back are quite heavy-- it can be done. It has to be smelted down into iron bars in a refining forge. This is no small feat for a man to work to construct such a thing. From there it can be created into metal picks and hatches. Still, this leaves the caveman wanting more. After all his own might be the limiting factor in what he can gather, carry, and build his mighty empire.

Over the past week or so the cavemen have been busy working out the process of taming more and gathering strengths in numbers. Just to tame something you need to be able to knock it out while a stick could do the trick that not enough either. Sure slighting rocks at it could help but only if you wanted to take down a pitiful Dodo. Crafting arrows and covering them with the narcotics like substance that increase torpidity in both taking it out and feeding the same substance extracted from wild plants as well also will do the trick.

This, however, will not be good enough to take down the really big things. If it takes you a hundred arrows to knock something out chances are it will be long dead before you are done. There is an even better it just becomes rather time-consuming and expensive for the caveman to be able to mass produce. After all, he needs a longneck rifle and darts to deliver maximum dosage while doing as little damage as possible.

Thankfully he has already learned how to gather metal for crafting the rifle and had a crossbow as a side weapon as well. Soon afterword’s he learns all that burnt charcoal he was saving from his endless fires could be used as well. Mixing in the torpidity substance into bullet shells and making a dart out of it to prick the dinosaur sounds wise beyond his years. He can even make gunpowder out of the charcoal to ignite and send the dart flying into the flesh of what he wishes to tame.

Once this was accomplished the cavemen set forth taming like Wildman who just discovered magic. After all that is quite a magic feat. With these new and bigger creates tamed once could gather more, carry even more, and build even bigger than one’s own imagination.

Taming, however, takes a very long time. It is full of risk of things waking up and escaping if you don’t keep the torpidity up and the belly of the beats feed. Not to mention bigger creations could come along and decided your future companies of a tame is now lunch. There even dangers of just trying to get the new dinosaurs home. After all, it is deadly worlds out there filled with horrors from the sea, land, and air.

Taming Madness

Last week we tamed up a few smaller things to try and get us started. This week along with the endless tranquilizer dart grinding we went crazy. We had at least one person always out trying farm resources for that darts (stone, flint, charcoal, narcoberry, and metal) and another going out and taming. This is where a considerable amount of the game time is spent playing the game. It really is a grind fest but hey you end up with dinosaurs you get to ride and farm with!

Brontosaurus

This is one of the first guys I took down solo once we had darts. He was roaming next to a cliff so I took a flyer and went up top. While he has a very long reach with his neck and the cliff was not high enough to escape his damage. I managed to dance around taking damage and laying down dart fire to take him out over time. It took quite a few and I even missed many as he was running all over the place. He was rather confused in how to attack me since I was after above him one cliff.

These guys are super slow but they make up for it in carrying weight, decent amount of stamina, and some good health as well. I wanted him to help farm more narcoberrys in mass amounts. He attacks with his tail and it clears out bushes, trees, and hits other dinosaurs as it swings back and forth. While not the best for this I just like having the option to have the view you get from being up top. Not to mention coming back with thousands of thatch and hundreds of wood as a byproduct for trying farm berries since they are next to trees is also great.

While we did have the normal saddle for this guy to wear. An even cooler thing is a platform saddle they can wear. It allows you to build a small house or whatever you want up top. Sadly unless we happen to loot the saddle form a random drop you need to be over level 80 to craft it. For now, there won’t be any mobile land base such as him to use. They are also just a tad slow to move around so not the most practical either.

Tyrannosaurus

While we lacked high enough levels to craft the saddle yet to ride one we took down a couple. They are great for farming meat with, gaining experience, and just good all-around defenders of the base from anything wondering in. They can have an amazing amount of health and damage dealt which makes them great to have a few. While they are not the most deadly thing that roams around they sure are up there.

Often times since they can take hours of real-life time you are having to tame overnight or a couple of in-game nights. As such we tend to set up some torches and campfires around whatever we are taming. It makes it so we are not losing track of anything and if someone needs to go on a supply run they can find where the camp is without too much of an issue.

While I have not ridden once for quite some time I recall them having some drawbacks as well. They always felt somewhat slow for their size. They have a big turning radius when trying to defend themselves from smoothing agiler. They also tend to lack having enough stamina to attack or run for prolongs amounts of time. Not to mention trying to load on up a ramp onto the raft house for transportation can take a few tries!

The wonderful about taming these once you get them down and they don’t kill you and anything you had with you. Are they are meat eaters. Which means if I can farm prime meat from hunting the right dinosaur and getting some to drop I can speed up the process from a few hours to just about an hour. Prime meat does expire within minutes so you don’t have a long time to get back and make sure they eat it. As such you tend to only farm one or two at a time then head back. I tend to farm on an Argentavis since that is my preferred flying dinosaur to use when farming.

Since I was not looking to set up my own zoo of sorts to farm a bunch of different eggs and then turn it into kibble. Which each dinosaur has their own preferred one to eat to increase the taming rate and get higher bonus levels from taming. We do prefer the meat eaters over the vegetarians. Sorry, we just don’t want to make kibble or the other stuff.

We were really excited to go hunting on the couple we tamed up. I even did a couple of long game sessions in grinding experience to try and get there faster. The levels in the 70’s are quite long and even a single one with us having the rates up higher could take a full day or longer to acquire. The saddles themselves are not that hard to craft we already have everything needed waiting around.

Direbear

Anyone who plays ark with me knows I love Direbears so much!!!! If I could only have one dinosaur to use the rest of my days I would want these guys. Leveled right they can take down a Tyrannosaurus, escape when needed, and travel a great distance on land at a decent speed before having to take a break.

As such when somewhere found even when I was not around people went out to try and tame them. They can be a hard tame to get since they run at a decent speed. Not to mention they have a high torpidity and recovery from it for the amount of health they have. As such, even if you are using darts which are very low damage for the amount they deliver you still have a slight chance of killing them. Trying to tame one of these with a crossbow and tranquilizer arrows is an almost certain death of one of these.

Since they are nice and fluffy they even provide some insolation from the cold if you are traveling in an area that has freezing temperature while still not punishing you for using one in hotter ones. Since they have no issue taking out a pack of wolves or even other things found in the snow they are just great to have. I prefer them over a raptor as they have more damage, health, and can carry more than just the person that is riding them

While they are not the greatest as farming for narcoberrys per amount gained per action they move fast and can cover great distance in no time. So I do prefer them over a Brontosaurus, Triceratops, and even a Stegosaurs when the local area has been cleaned out of bushes to farm.

Other Tames

After the weekend this is what the inside of our gates looked like. I really should have turned off name tags or the UI or something. Because well I guess we are still cavemen with the names dinosaurs’ dirty things! I hope I blank out any of the really dirty ones. Guys and their weekends left to naming things!

They were all group up like that since something tried to come into our area from the above cliff and attack one of them. That is a really bad idea since we are playing on our own private server we just leave them on neutral. That way they don’t get killed if anything gets in.

A bit of an action shot for this one. As a few were brought back in since they ran over the ledge and down onto the beach below. Some kind of aggressive bird had flown in and they went chasing after it. Needless to say, we noticed that giant heard running off after something. Don’t worry they killed whatever it was. We also managed to get them all back safe as well.

Finally, this is just a couple in a more natural spread out. Among all the screenshots I hope you were able to see everything we have so far. Many of them we have a more than one and even a male and a female. While we don’t have the time right now to get into breeding and that part of the game for a couple of these types that is an option we have. They should be Argentavis, Allosaurus, Ankylosaurus, Brontosaurus, Direbear, Doedicurus, Parasaur, Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops. Least those are all ones we have tamed so far some might have gotten lost or have died along the way.

Base Tour

I’ve been meaning to give a base tour for a little while now. It is nothing special and we have even outgrown it. We are based on a ridge that gives us two endpoints to put gates up on either end. The game does not have massive large walls to build just behemoth gates so that is how everyone does it. This provides a considerable amount of protection. It also lets you leave a number of ways as you just open and close a gate door as needed. They took around a day of my time farming all the resources to build them. As at the time, we were lacking good farming dinosaurs and it needed to get done no matter what so I used steel tools for the most part.

While the base is two layers in height it just has one level to it for now. It is just a simple 3 by 3 building that we have outgrown. The land around it is a bit too uneven to make it wider. We could build more levels up top but something of the equipment we need to build is rather massive so that not leaving much space per floor for other things.

We are surely living like packrats inside. Massive storage everywhere and not to much room to walk around or access things anymore. We have lots of supplies so the need for all that storage.

While we need to make a bigger base and maybe one day we will. We opted to switch the server we are running this game on to another game. I’ve been told the game files have been saved if we wish to switch back. Everyone is kind of burnt out of this game so I’m not sure what the chances are of that. Hence us being lazy in not making a big enough space to live in or more rafts and a bunch of other stuff as well.

Maybe I’ll have more Ark content in the future maybe not. For now off onto other games.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content written by @enjar. Screenshots are from a game called Ark Survival Evolved