I probably missed it somewhere earlier but I'm genuinely confused about the different Ark games and the one Pev just bought. Is this an early access sequel or something? Would appreciate it if someone could explain how they're related and which game(s) you were all playing before.

As for the internet here: it's not as good as in France yet, but the major ISPs have been pushing fiber hard (with government backing) and have been aggressively expanding their networks too. The big cities tend to be almost entirely hooked up (of course, not every individual building might be) but even in the bigger suburban towns things are changing rapidly. Of course, Belgium is very densely populated and very small, so there are a lot of incentives for the ISPs and government to do it, much more than in other countries.

Having said all that, the internet here is expensive and capped at unimpressive speeds compared to when I was in France. I'm on about a 100 Mbps down/up here, compared to 850 down and 450 up in France. For twice the money.

I have a feeling birth numbers in Ark are gonna be pretty low with these crotch fires. No wonder dinosaurs are ruling the earth!

The 'newest' is sort of a remake.

You have Ark: Survival Evolved which is the original. You have Ark: Survival Ascended which is basically an "oh shit we need money for Ark 2". I thought it was nothing more than an upgrade graphically as they've basically gone from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5 but they have actually changed some of the systems in it as well. I suppose you can think of it as Ark 1.5. It was the extra/changed systems that convinced me to get it. Purely an update to graphics and I wouldn't have bothered. Still probably shouldn't have but oh well, I own BG 1 & 2 about 3 times

Yea, I see Ark: survival ascended as a money grab, since Ark2 was supposed to have come out by now. However, there are significant changes to the underlying systems, so that may not be entirely fair. I'm not sure what Ark2 is supposed to be now, though. It'd be hard to justify ark 2 coming out any time soon.

Who knows what Ark 2 is, there's so little info. I'm sure it was supposed to be out this year when first announced, it's clearly going to be at least 2 or 3 more years. Probably more. At first I thought that was the typical "same game, different maps, different story" sequel but there are hints they're turning it into more of a souls like? God knows. Considering the CEO of snail games seems to think he's the next Elon Musk anything could happen!

I got my first argy and took an appropriately spooky picture today. The RAM has made a huge difference and it runs smoothly now. Also managed 6 hours without a crash yesterday and about 4 so far today. I'm really enjoying messing with the new building options; I didn't really try out S+ before so it's all very new to me.

The snail games CEO sees himself as a Musk? Man, that's sad on so many levels.

You mentioned S+ building... what about the new game uses S+ features? I did use S+ for a while, but ended up not installing it for the current maps we're playing because some parts of it are super cheaty to me. I'm just wondering what made the cut for inclusion in ASA. I know over the years ASE ended up incorporating some of the features of s+ without going totally overboard (looking at you, nanny).

Yeah he's trying to build an electric car with a gaming pc in it. That's why the company had to borrow $4mil from Nitrado to even get ASA out apparently (hence the new exclusivity contract for servers). Was meant to release in 2018, there's all sorts of articles and rumours around it, like this: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/227 ... i-lawsuits

I never really used S+ much myself so can't say for certain but we get more snap points on things.
Roofs for example can now more easily be rotated between the snap points instead of having to try and line yourself up exactly pixel perfect so it goes up from the wall instead of down.
You can flip a roof upside down too so the underneath is on top. Pillars now automatically will snap to corners as well as the middle of floors and ceilings.
When placing a foundation you click once then can look up and down to raise/lower it before finalising.
Many items snap onto the foundations or walls; holding Q will turn this snapping off so you can finetune your placement, or turns it back on.
Storage boxes stack!
Items use less engrams. Stone wall engram includes stone wall, stone doorway, stone double doorway and stone window. You use R when placing them to flip through the options.
Doors automatically size to fit the doorway (there's now a taller version of the doorway to go with the standard one).
Windows can snap to any point of the window frame so you can control if they open in or out, up, down, left or right.
Quarter walls! These work like railings but also are a tiny square wall in their own right. Stone one for example is the normal stone texture or a fancy one with a cross of wood on it. There are also quarter ceilings.
Oviraptors sort of work like nannies in that they'll pick up fertilised eggs for you.
Dung beetles will actually pick up poop as well.
Wires and pipes no longer exist; instead of them running through walls like with S+ the intake pipe and generator act as a wireless radius. You can daisy chain water with reservoirs if you don't want to build near water. Generators you just have to put another one down (so that's a little annoying as it's more to keep filled with gasoline).
Some crafting tables allow you to pull from dedicated storage. Not tested this yet myself but heard rumours it's only the tek crafting thing you get at the end. So you can click your recipe, press a button, tell it to pull for x many and it will extract all those materials you need into the crafting station.
Picking up joined structures don't destroy things anymore (and it all defaults to being pickupable forever). Pick up a behemoth gateway, it will pick up the door in it as well. Pick up the bottom of a 7 high stack of walls, all 7 will go in your inventory. You can of course still choose to destroy items though.

I'm sure there's more but I keep getting distracted by argy taming

Oh wow, that is quite a bit of changes... and yea, most of those are indeed from s+. Most of that sounds great, except the wireless range for the generator... and pipes. Running pipes/wires long distances was a bit of a pain, but you could do some really cool stuff with it. Guess not any more. Have they changed the way that supports are calculated for putting down stuff like ceilings over foundations? Just curious. I may have caused some massive lag issues on my server because I get a bit carried away with building sometimes.

Your huge fjordur tower/base is a great example of you getting carried away! Looked cool though.

I think I'm ok with those 'wireless' changes. You can still place a tap btw as well so you can drink from it wherever. I used to quite enjoy having a pipe going down the centre of my greenhouse roof with taps coming off it to 'sprinkle' the garden beds below. But I could still do that just with the taps I suppose. The wires I'm fine with, never bothered doing much with electric as they annoyed me. I started trying to set up outdoor lighting on Lost Island once and got fed up with it after 2 lights! People on official aren't happy though; wires were apparently used to find bases to raid by following them and the larger tribes have such large bases that having to fill more than one generator with gasoline is pissing people off.

I think some of the supports have changed actually but I haven't messed with it very much. I laid down something like 4 stone foundations in a row and was able to put around 4 walls out from the foundation with no extra support, like ____LLLL (L being foundation, _ being wall if looking from above). I've built a fairly normal looking house to start with so not tried to get creative yet. Just the foundation raise/lower helps a lot though with not having to bugger about putting pillars down to snap everything to the correct height if the terrain is uneven. I'm building in the bay on herbivore island though so I might see what I can do with some sort of cliff-hugging structures.

You may still end up lagging out the server as pillars can now snap sideways to act like beams... Unfortunately I haven't been able to get them to snap across empty space to look like old roof beams in a barn or something, only across a ceiling, but that can still give some nice building looks.

Interesting. I'm curious how this will work for really large structure. Still, the game is still in early release, so I'm curious how things will evolve.

BTW, my tower base in Fjordur is nothing compared to my bridge base. I should post pics at some point.

I definitely need pictures of that base then. I'll post a bunch of pics tomorrow, can't be bothered now, but I'm taking tons. They have a photo mode now. It's mildly annoying me; it must be tied to graphics settings but I can't get a field of depth to work on mine, everything stays in focus, whereas I've seen streamers getting it so their dino is focused and the background slightly blurred. The pics still look good though.

I've done all sorts of random stuff the last few days. I got a 145 allo (had seen it when digging for oil in the north and put a marker down to return later, very useful) and the same with a 145 rex. I've grabbed some fairly low level barys, a couple of low level frogs and an oviraptor. I got a couple more argys as well but nothing over level 100; I saw a 135 but it got killed while trying to knock it out. I had fun today as well; the drops keep giving me sarco saddles so I went up the east coast where the swamp meets the sea. I found a level 100 and as I was knocking it out, WHOOSH in front of my face when a level 100 kapro. Thankfully it missed me somehow so that got knocked out and tamed too. I've also been messing some more with building while breeding my argys to see what colour mutations I could get. Just one so far, a purplish body.

Ah cool, sounds like you got some pretty good tames. Argies are still one of the best flyers in my opinion. And of course rexes are great as well. I'm interested in seeing your pics. Like you, I'm not feeling particularly motivated to get pics at the moment. I'll get to it one of these days.

Yeah no rush, the laziness is real Here's a spam of some of my screenshots. I'm on medium graphics now. I did try the presets low/med/high/ultra and took comparison pictures for each. There's relatively little difference. I think the main difference is in lighting effects like light bloom (which I always turn off anyway) and light shafts (which do look amazing when I've seen them on videos in the redwoods). I did attempt play at high once and it ran ok but you could tell there were a few more stutters so I'm happy on medium with some tweaks.

I went swimming yesterday on my bary and found a basilosaurus, only lvl 50 but a decent starter and means I have some oil coming in now at least. I also found a dunky up at the surface for some reason. Level 25 so grabbed that too while waiting for the basi to get hungry again. I then went on a huge metal run with my anky. I've got an industrial grill now (the updated model is great) and want to get the other upgraded crafting machines. 2500 ingots for the forge is painful. I have plenty now I think, it's just the wait for smelting it. I mainly messed about at the base aside from that, built a wall so the tames can stay in a pen in the middle of herbi island (got fed up with continually accidentally doing a group whistle and they just go everywhere, at least now they'll be contained). I also realised because my oviraptor was set to pick up both fertilised and unfertilised eggs that the wild dinos kept aggroing so that's a little frustrating.

I did find a max level bronto on the beach not far from the island so that got tamed up as they're good to tame the new huge bug things (rhyniognatha). I also grabbed an abandoned baby bronto and tamed a 75 female but those 2 are on my island. Not sure how to get them across to him on the beach as there are no ocean platforms or cryopods in-game yet. They definitely will not fit on my raft! Unless I get creative with foundations maybe. I also did some more argy breeding. Got a purple back and a sort of olive green chest and some orange wingtips on 3 different birds. These are all not great stats as the starters were only level 100 or less but I just like the colours of argys. If I can get some better ones then I'll breed the colours on to them.

I think there are 4 titanosaurs on my map btw! I thought there used to only ever be 1. There's 1 near herbi island, 1 near the red obi and then I think I saw 2 others north of green obi somewhere. There were also 3 carchas and 1 giga in the middle of the volcano.

Ah, nice pics. The game is definitely prettier. I'm getting closer and closer to building a new machine... I think that'll be a pre-requisite to me actually buying into ASA. Grats on (almost) getting a furnace. It's a lot of metal to build one, but it really is a game changer. The grill is really nice too, though not anywhere near as expensive. But oh man, I had no idea cryoballs weren't in the game yet. That really sucks.

There's a working mod for cryopods so I might get that. It's kind of fun not having then but also infuriating. My main issue is right now I'm argy breeding for colours so have about 15-20 standing around and if I knock "all follow" or "aggressive" or something it's sudden chaos. It would be nice to throw them all into storage and just keep the current breeders out. I might download it but put a restriction on myself that it's only for storage; travelling must still be done manually. I'm sure that won't last though if I do that haha, too convenient to pod your dinos. There are also no ocean or tree platforms yet. I can understand dino saddles not being in for dinos that aren't on this map yet but it seems weird they have stripped back some of the other stuff as well. Like harpoon nets. We're used to them, just let us have them.I know you can restrict certain engrams on servers so anyone who wants the more 'primitive' experience would be able to shut them off.

I've got my metal now. Just need the polymer, cementing paste and oil. Oil is easy as I now have 3 basi's so that's just time. Polymer and cementing paste are more annoying but we'll get there. Was about to go hit up some beaver dams but I got distracted taming a spino