My partner and I recently wound up an Ark server we'd been playing on. It was on the new Valguero map, with some mods, mostly QOL stuff and decorative bits. Server settings were pretty easy, both of us were pretty noobish when it came to this game so we treated the server as kind of a training-wheels learning experience.
We divided the labor- he is more interested in building and infrastructure projects, while I enjoy the exploring and combat and animal raising aspects of the game. We shared resource gathering duties. It worked out pretty well, and for the most part we were able to focus on the parts of Ark we enjoy while still progressing as a mini-tribe.
I wanted to share some pictures he took of our base, which was cool as hell if a bit laggy.
Castles, Keeps and Forts Remastered is responsible for the building pieces- my partner spent a lot of time looking at real castles to get an authentic-feeling layout.
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| The trees were provided by one of Eco's mods- more on them later. |
We took over the whole peninsula in the center of the map. Took a long time to secure the area, and the massive wall we had to build probably contributed a lot to the lag in the base. It was so huge you couldn't even load it in all at once, which was such a shame.
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| This doesn't even show the whole peninsula. It was a lot of space to try and keep spawns out of. |
It was functional as well as pretty. All our crafting and storage was conveniently located near the animal pen for easy drop-off of resources. My only issue was finding space to stash breeding projects; my partner vastly underestimated just how much space a bunch of bangin' dinosaurs take up.
His pride and joy was our garden. Beautiful, with plenty of crop plots, and small pets ambling about.
Eco's mods are so much fun to decorate with. I ended up coming to the garden sometimes just to sit and take in the atmosphere.
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| It's hard to pick a favorite spot, but mine might be the dinosaur topiary garden. |
On my end, I got to experiment a lot with taming, breeding and using dinosaurs. There were successes- like figuring out how to breed for and stack mutations, or stealing and hatching a wyvern egg, and failures... but that's Ark for you.
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| RIP Jade, my beautiful Aberrant Spino, died to my own stupidity. |
We had fun, and certainly learned a lot. Next time we play we decided we want to do a progression series, starting on the Island and working our way through the bosses and story. I also have more mods I want to try out, naturally. I recently got an SSD, so hopefully loading in will take less than 20 minutes this time...hopefully.
