How....how do you breathe on the back of one of those (?) whales?

A disappointingly simple answer: scuba gear

You can tame a creature called a diplocaulus and have it follow you around. It acts like an oxygen tank so you can go up to it and basically breathe from it every so often but they of course might get murdered by everything in the ocean so scuba tank is just easier

If you can make sweet vegetable cakes (if they're in the game and you have access to the resources) I highly recommend taming up some snails for paste. I'm sure there aren't any Gachas in the game yet, but those bring the paste farming up to a whole new level. I've probably already talked about my paste farm, so I'll leave it at that.

I don't think harpoon nets were added with the original island map, were they? I want to say they came with the desert map. I may be wrong though. Too lazy to check.

I have a vague recollection of the nets being added with Genesis (not sure which part). Only because that came out not long after I'd started playing and I remember watching some videos with people going "omg these nets, woo!" but then that's the same channel that has recently been saying "omg otters incubate your eggs?" despite playing Ark since it initally released so...

Anyway yes I think I will try to find a snail. The cakes are definitely in. Mind you if I get lucky they might have babies... I got an ovis last night because one had spawned out on an iceberg with a baby. Pick up and murder the dad, imprint on the baby, no need for veggie cakes. I think I need about 126 more cementing paste. I keep intended to head for the swamp cave with a frog but it keeps not happening. I did end up in the underwater cave on a basi yesterday. We were fine until I found a lvl 20 and lvl 195 tuso together. Got the 20 dead but was down to about 1/4 health so I turned tail. I need more polymer too but I can get that if I can just find a male penguin to set up a farm (got 2 females currently and murdered the wild population )

Just wanted to post some pictures of my ridiculous bridge base. I will never build another base this large. The time it takes to load in is bonkers.

Wow that's certainly impressive but my head hurts just thinking of all the resource gathering! I was at the end of my tether just getting enough to span the bay in Herbivore Island the other day to make a bridge/fish eater storage platform!

Yea, the quantity of metal used to build this was insane. Luckily Shiny enjoys doing metal runs. She rides the anky while I fly her around with an argy. I can point out the best locations to collect metal on Fjordur for this combo.

Hah well as long as it's not super tedious it's all good then I do get tempted to jump on cheat mode sometimes just to build crazy shit but I also like that feeling of having earned it so I never have. I'm at the stage now where my dinos can hold a few thousand of whatever resource they're getting but you can burn through it so fast it's a little scary.

I've been watching some of Aaron Longstaff's videos for new ASA builds. He's done a really cute little beginner house so far and a tree platform (I missed that tree platforms are already in it, just ocean ones that are missing) and saw some really awesome screenshots of other people's builds too, including a sort of tropical resort with little huts everywhere and walkways between them. I really need to up my game.

May I suggest getting a life outside of the stupid game .

Life outside games usually involves people. I'll pass thanks She says as she's having a friend over this evening.

My Ark dinos don't carry Covid or stupidity. Well, good luck with improving your builds. I tend to build very large, but not particularly pretty. It's something I keep trying to work on.

I've been playing a bit but too lazy to update. However I thought you'd like to see how huge fish can get now. This was a 2.7x so I can't even imagine what a 3x would be!

Lol how is that fish even living in that river? Do they feed on animals and people trying to drink the water or something?

I'm gonna go with magic I mean that fish was in such a shallow spot it was definitely not breathing very often lol. The fish are pretty benign, there are 3 types. Coelcanth that just swim about and do fuck all, piranhas who of course try to eat anything that dips a toe in, and the one in the pic is a sabertooth salmon. They generally don't do much either but if you attack one and others are nearby sometimes they'll attack back.

that's a bit crazy. Can you still kill them and then haul around their corpse like in ASE? Because that would be mental.