Hardcore Casual

The ARK obsession continues! Today is the story of my Diodicurous (Diod) tame, and all of the game design aspects that factored in and made it an all-around good time.

The Diod is one of the newer dinos added to the game, and its specialty is rock collecting. This is a very big deal because rocks are one of the most frequently used resources, and prior to this dino there were no great methods of gathering lots of rocks quickly. Once you have one, collecting 1000 stones goes from ‘ugh, need to run up and down a mountain with my ‘E-spam’ macro running’ to ‘lets go smash a few rocks Diod, I need 1k stone!’.

Very recently I kibble-tamed a level 112 Diod, who ended up at level 166 with very solid stats, meaning once he is maxed-out on XP, he will be just over level 200. Even now, at around 170ish, he is a rock-collecting machine, and the fact that he isn’t a huge dino means he gets around on a mountain very well, and is able to keep up when following you between rocks and trees (huge dinos are a major pain, as they get stuck on EVERYTHING).

So how did this tame happen, and what went into it? For that we need to go back a few days/weeks. Diod kibble (special taming food) requires Dilo eggs, some berries, some meat, a bit of oil, and water in a lit cook pot. The two somewhat difficult resources are the eggs and oil.

Oil you get from the ocean, where smaller amounts can be gotten without special gear, but for larger (100+) amounts you really need scuba gear and a tamed dolphin (story for another day). I initially got my first bit of oil the manual way, then traded for a bit more, and currently have scuba gear and a tamed dolphin that I use to gather ocean resources (oil, pearls).

Dilo eggs come from the Dilophosaur, a small carnivore that isn’t too difficult to tame. The best method to get a steady supply of Dilo eggs is to tame a bunch of Dilos, put them in a pen, and collect the eggs. Building the pen wasn’t too difficult, as it’s a simple 4×4 stone structure with a roof, although its rather important that the pen doesn’t have a floor as eggs have a bad habit of dropping through or into a placed structure. Once built, it does take a bit of time to find, tame, and bring back the dinos, and then more time to collect eggs and keep the dinos fed. Oh and hopefully an alpha dino doesn’t come along and murder the whole pen, which is very possible if the pen isn’t constructed well.

Once you have your kibble cooked up, you then need to find the right dino. Levels can range from 4 to 120, and using kibble on a dino below 100 is generally seen as a waste. Finding a level 100+ dino, and especially a ‘perfect tame’ 120, can take some time, or you might get lucky and find one quickly. Also the further from base you go looking, the harder it’s going to be to get the dino back either prior to the tame, or after.

In my case a tribe-mate found the 112 somewhat nearby, and as I have a flying dino, I was able to get my supplies and find him and the dino quickly. Once at the location, I took it down with tranq arrows, sat around for about two hours to get it nice and hungry (a tranq’ed dino is defenseless, so you can’t be too far or they might get eaten by another dino), and finally fed it the 50+ kibble to complete the tame. After that it was just the matter of getting the new Diod, along with my bird, back to base.

The Diod represents a huge investment in time and planning, but ultimately rewards you with greatly improved stone-gathering efficiency. It’s a great risk/reward mechanic, along with a solid progression milestone. It’s also not ‘one and done’ content, as the dino can be killed or lost and require replacing.

Overall I think ARK does a good job of providing both types of progression; you have permanent progression like your character level and your basic game knowledge, and then you have repeatable stuff like building a base or taming dinos. Now time to get back to smashing rocks, in preparation for the next goal.

As the title states, ARK is free to play this weekend via Steam. It’s a very fun game to play with a solid group, so if you have been on the fence, or are worried about buying an Early Access title, I highly, highly recommend giving it a shot while its free.

If there is enough interest here at the blog, maybe we can get a Tribe (guild/clan) going. Even with just 4-5 people playing somewhat actively the Tribe can achieve big things.

Please post in the comments here if you are up for a tribe, just so I can get an early indicator of interest.

Still playing a lot of ARK, and still really enjoying it. My latest ‘main focus’ is on building a base, which is great fun but also a source of some frustration as things don’t always work out as I had planned in my mind before placing pieces. There is a lot of trial and error, but because you only get 50% of the resources back when you removed a placed piece, too much error leads to a lot of additional resource harvesting.

The cause of most issues is the fact that the base is built on a slope, near an abandoned base, along a river. The abandoned base is problematic because it blocks me from placing pieces at certain points if they get too close to it, and while we have plans to eventually remove that base, we aren’t at that point just yet. The river is vital as we need the water for crops, but it also causes some issues with placement and with dino pathing. Since dinos can drown, I can’t build in such a way that could potentially lead to one of our tamed dinos getting stuck underwater.

However the biggest problem is the slope of the land. The placement of the base’s initial foundations, while not ‘bad’, aren’t ideal, nor are the structures going further down the slope towards the river. If it was possible to pick everything up and redo the base, I would in a heartbeat, but again that 50% cost is a killer. The actual buildings aren’t too bad, as they are functional and provide enough space. The dino pen however is currently an issue, specifically building a roof for it to keep our tamed dinos safe from aerial dinos and players jumping in.

Roof tiles can’t be attached to walls built using a fence base, only walls placed on a foundation. But as foundation placement is far more limited than fence, fence basing was used for the majority of the pen walls. That worked great for the walls, but now pillars are required to build the roof. Pillars however are limited in their height; you can’t fully control how high they go with each placement, which leads to gaps. A small gap is fine, but if the gap gets big enough, a player could squeeze through, defeating the purpose of the ceiling.

The pen requires multiple pillars for the roof, but again thanks to the slope, each pillar is slightly different in eventual height, leading to a roof that is a mishmash of heights, along with walls that either leave a small (hopefully inaccessible) gap, or that go a bit above the ceiling. While ultimately functional, it’s not as clean looking as I’d like, and that bothers me. Not enough to fix it all to perfection at that 50% cost, but enough to think about the next base and how to improve the design.

A large part of the learning process here is seeing how the world interacts with each of the building pieces, what you are allowed to place where, and some tricky/strange stuff like removing a wall blocking a ceiling, placing said ceiling, and then being allowed to rebuild the wall in its original spot, slightly clipping through the ceiling tile. Again, trial and error is part of the fun, even if it’s a costly part.

It also doesn’t help that ARK is updated at a mind-blowing pace. Almost every day a patch is released, and often the patch brings some major stuff like a new dino, new tools, new weapons, or tweaks/balance changes. Plus bug fixes and performance improvements. It really is amazing, and ARK is perhaps the first game were I truly feel Early Access is very appropriate not because the game is in rough shape (it’s not, at all), but because of how fast it changes and evolves. Playing the game itself feels like a wild ride, and being part of the game’s development is also an experience.

The server we are on is Official 30, feel free to ping me on Steam if you are interested in jumping in.