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[Mattk50]

Parasaurs are only worth taming to have as a herd animal for laying eggs. Ditto for carbos/turtles.

The first animal you should aim to tame is a Triceratops, and spend engram points on learning the saddle for it too. They make farming narcoberries for crafting narcotics reasonably fast with their superharvesting from berry bushes when ridden. I usually aim to make a herd of 4 trikes, with two of each gender for the bonus to damage and defense from the mate bonuses. Four trikes can take down a Tyrannosaurus or a Carnosaur without significant losses.

After that, tame a raptor for a mount, and use it to explore the caves for metal and experience. A herd of raptors will make farming experience much much faster down there. Trikes are too slow to ride and they're too big to fit in the holes. Later on you can aim to grab some sabertooth tigers too.

These are good suggestions once your levelled up a bit, but my recommendation for anyone just starting out is to tame dilophasurs right away. Get a group of 4 of them then you can take down trikes and stegos.

It only takes 10 minutes to tame each one and is pretty cheap on meat and narcotics costs too, and as you lvl them up you can upgrade their HP significantly.

[Vendayn]

I asked this a while back. But, I'm thinking of picking this up.

Is it worth getting? How many hours about would I get out of it? I liked dayz (the mod, not so much the release version) a lot and got a lot of game time out of it (over 500 hours). Didn't like the hackers of dayz, and it was kinda basic (not really any base building) and the map felt kinda small because so many players would just gank you everywhere you went and the entire map was covered with players lol. I'd only play on a PvP server in ark though. Singleplayer would have been boring though and the dayz PvE servers were really boring. Not really into singleplayer games unless I can mod them like Skyrim/Fallout games.

If I can get 100+ hours of out of it (without running out of things to do/content), I might pick it up. I don't really know anything about this game though...how big is the map? can I find a random place to live and not really be bothered by people if I choose like I can in haven and hearth?

The game looks good, my PC would play it without any issue. And I love dinosaurs Far more than zombies.

[Exerosp]

-snip-

You're bound to love it atleast till you've tamed every dinosaur or teched up to max level. Atleast from what I thought I did. That and when you've wasted a few all-nighters trying to tame them dinos, you'll come back as soon as they've released a new or some new dinos. Can't wait for that canine that buffs you and your tribe.

[TheBronzePickle]

The map is reasonably large. It's about six by six kilometers of actual land as well as some surrounding waters. It'll take you more than an hour just to walk down one of the sides of the island.

The size lets them make a rather square-ish island feel organic, and it's large enough that even a full 70-player server (standard for official servers) can give everyone a little bit of breathing room, though many of the resources are limited enough to still force some competition.

Things can get a bit boring and grindy sometimes, but it depends on how willing you are to thrust yourself into new situations. Some of the dinosaurs can be extremely dangerous to lone wolfs, and even the minor stuff can hit you hard if you're not cautious, especially when you get attacked by multiple enemies at the same time. With the engram system, it's really hard to be able to do everything at once, though if you're on your own private game you generally don't have to worry so much about anyone messing with your base anyway.

Overall, there's a lot to explore and try, but expect to either need to fight dangerous dinos or grind tedious stuff to really advance in tech after a while.

[Flying Dice]

The thing to keep in mind is that it's very heavily about resource-heavy basebuilding and taming, and in PvP servers none of that will last longer than a day or two unless you've got a large enough group to keep up a 24/7 watch. It's not like certain iterations of DayZ which had basebuilding where you could just loot up and fuck off to some obscure corner and hide everything under trees.

So more in the vein of Rust, except that it's easier to ruin someone's work with a little cleverness.

[Paul]

Unless things have changed since I played, even the official pvp servers my stuff lasted longer than a day. Sometimes it would get broken into but I had little mini bases set up across the island and for the most part they stayed safe. Once you get metal structures most people don't bother with them. Just wood prevents the majority of jerks from smashing it since they need metal tools.

[Flying Dice]

It's more about the dinos than the bases, honestly. It's not too hard to lose your tamed stuff from some asshole pelting it with arrows or whatever from a convenient spot outside your base, unless you build fuckoff high walls at the top of a hill or have people constantly there.

[Dunamisdeos]

An Argeventis can pick up smaller dinos and fly away with them.

[Ultimuh]

Argentavis.. Suddenly I am reminded of that incident.. With those birds.. and a Rex or was that two? Either way, It didn't end well.

[Flying Dice]

I keep trying to catch an Argentavis 'cause I want to evolve one into Pidgeot but every time I tranq one it inevitably falls off a cliff and is eaten by Rexes or scorpions before I can reach it. :x

[Ibid Straydrink]

I keep trying to catch an Argentavis 'cause I want to evolve one into Pidgeot but every time I tranq one it inevitably falls off a cliff and is eaten by Rexes or scorpions before I can reach it. :x

It's no easy task alone, to be sure. I recommend the highlands north of the Hidden Lake. No rexes or raptors, but be warned- the place gets colder than the seventh circle of hell at night, and a sabretooth is never far off. Best to bring a couple of carno bodyguards, and place a trinity of campfires or setup a small thatch hut to take shelter in when you need.

Alternatively, if you came to my server...~

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, last time I was up there I nearly died of cold while flying out at night after getting greedy for multiple gold drops.

OR when the Argentavis falls, set up a ring of wooden spikes. Works wonders for stopping anything smaller than a carno.

The problem is that I get to them after the swarm of predators. Also I'm getting around via petra, so I can't carry much in the way of supplies.

[Ultimuh]

The game have just updated.
The update includes a large snowy landscape as well as a swampy one. Both with new wildlife out to kill and/or eat you!
http://steamcommunity.com/games/346110/announcements/detail/110693025694980093
Be sure to dress up warmly if you intend to venture north.

[Flying Dice]

Is it worth twenty bucks, and has it been optimized enough for a midranged machine to hold its own?

Yes, and it depends on what you mean by midranged, respectively.

Here's my experience:

Around 2 months ago I got it and tried playing on my laptop with these specs:

GTX 660M 2GB
Intel i7-3630 QM 2.40GHz
8GB RAM

After I turned everything down to medium-low settings it ran mostly smooth with a few hiccups when entering new areas or breaking rocks.

Now, on my new computer:

GTX 970 4GB
Intel i7-4790 3.6GHz
16GB RAM

Runs smoothly with all settings at their highest or second-highest. IIRC they're also continuing to optimize.

That said, there does tend to be some serverside lag pretty much regardless of where you play, but that actually works out to your advantage--in single player even a lone raptor can wreck your shit, but in MP the dinos generally lag enough that you can take them down without dying, even to the point of doing stuff like KOing raptors by punching them. Another thing to be aware of: ARK's character progression was designed for small groups of people working together. You get more exp in a tribe and no one person can unlock every Engram; if you play MP alone, don't unlock anything except the bare minimum, as you can eventually get blueprints for almost everything else from airdrops. If you play SP and really want to, you can edit the ini to give yourself an engram progression that allows you to unlock everything.

[Flying Dice]

If someone wanted to host it, that'd be cool, yeah. Pub servers tend to break down like this:

PvP: Murdered while you sleep and your entire base crushed every single time you log off, even if you only have a thatch hut. Also randomly murdered half the time you meet someone.
PvE: Assholes who got to the server first filled every square inch of decent land on the map with foundations (or pillars, now) to prevent other people from building, no dinos spawn in most places, people wall off all of the places where decent airdrops spawn.