They were super sneaky and although it was announced ages ago they didn't give a date or anything. They didn't even mention it on release, there was just a random patch on 5th Nov and people started finding them!

I'm considering jumping back to The Island and doing the maps in story order. I have enough critters on my existing saves to build up boss armies I think now so I could transfer them over to do those quickly. Only considering it so I have more engrams unlocked plus get max level and Mjolnir. Then just chill out on whatever maps I like messing around with breeding as I love to do.

I need to get a pic of my argies for Shiny, I've been trying to get really pretty ones and am really liking my latest batch.

If you beat the bosses on Fjordur, you'll get the same engrams as on The Island I believe. Monkey, Broodmother and Dragon are shared between the two. You'll need to beat them on Alpha to unlock all the engrams. I will say that the monkey boss is the easiest. You should be able to beat him with just an army of Therizinosaurs or Rexes, either way (even on alpha). Broodmother it harder... Theris are not that good. Rexes work, and drop bears are great (megatheriums). Every time I bring a Theri in, it gets its ass kicked, but drop bears at 15k health and Rexes at 30k health have no issues.

Dragon, however, is a pain. We haven't done it yet on Fjordur, but when we did it on the island, we were the most successful with 1 Yuti to give the roar buff, 3 healing pigs, and the rest tickle chickens with sweet veggie cakes. We were able to kill alpha dragon with that and without losing any dinos. From what I've read, Magmasaurs work really well because they can taunt and don't take fire damage, but haven't explored that yet. If that does in fact work, that's a great option.

Ah yes of course, I do want to do the story maps though for, well, the story. Plus I just like exploring the maps (though I mostly explored the Island before my first save went bye bye). I have my super high level rexes to do most stuff with, still need to get around to my army of battle chickens though. I just get so distracted with breeding! Sounds good if that works on the dragon (the magmasaurs), I finally hatched my first 2 eggs last night though they're really low level.

Good thing about egg layers is it's really easy to build up a bunch of eggs, and once you have those you can raise 5-10 all at once without it really being more difficult than just raising one. Though if they're low level, I imagine you'll want to breed them for a while to get the level up before you start mass producing.. I did do some more research on magmasaurs for the dragon and that doesn't really seem like an option. So back to pigs, tickle chickens and a yuti for now.

Oh my breeding is super easy anyway, I have the dino souls mod so everything gets incubated to 1% after being auto picked up and I can see all the stats easily etc, it's great! Shame the magmasaurs didn't work out though

Oh yea, I forgot you're more cheaty than most when it comes to breeding. We're currently doing a breeding program for Desmodus, Otter and Daedons to bring up their levels. I also built a Dodo farm and Shiny ran around clubbing a bunch to put in said farm. That's for the 2000 or so basic kibble we need per dragon fight for healing.

Oh, I also went out on a taming mission. Mainly I went for angler fish, which I finally got a level 90 one. They are no easy to tame, mostly because the threshold between knocking them out and killing them with a crossbow is really small. While doing that, I came across a plesiosaur and decided to see what happened if I tried to tranq it. When it just tried to run away (and got stuck) I fired all my remaining tranq arrows until I ran out. I was about to give up to leave and it passed out, so now I have a plesiosaur as well. Unfortunately they seem unable to dive underwater when they have a platform saddle, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it.

Well not running a server, I'm not gonna just sit there for 7 hours waiting to do one imprint I do leave the game running sometimes whilst working though.

That is a terrifying amount of kibble that you need. Congrats on the plesiosaur! I still need to do far more underwater exploring. I'm currently raising an army of basilos for that very reason. What do the anglerfish give you? I know I've looked them up before but completely forgotten what the point of them is.

I'm not sure a magmasaur stuffed through a wall is really how you woo someone, but what do I know?

The anglerfish are supposedly the only creature that can harvest pearls. Plus they're pretty fast and have their own light, but the pearls is why I wanted it. I haven't actually used it for that purpose yet. Eventually.

According to the wiki, that Carcharodontosaurus isn't permanently tameable. Just a temp tame by feeding it corpses. Is that what you're seeing? I don't know if force taming makes it act differently. We finally had one spawn near one of our bases... it either needs to die or join our flock, but I'm not wasting my time taming it if it's not permanent.

Er that wiki is definitely wrong. Or you read it wrong. It's a temp tame to get it to be a permanent tame. Basically you feed it corpses until a little hexagon over its head fills up right round the border. Once that is filled up it trusts you for 10 minutes. You then have to ride it and kill as many things as you can. This is when you get the normal taming meter. Fill it up by killing stuff and it's yours. Fail to and it kicks you off but will remember progress so you have to feed it corpses again and repeat the riding/killing section when it trusts you again. Syntac did a good video the day they came out to explain it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnw5dB_gYR0

Ah, nice, thanks. And you're right, I misread the entry. I'll need to go watch a video on how it's done... there are now 2 of them by one of our bases. They're only level 60 and 20, so I'm not sure if they're worth taming or if we should just kill them. I also don't want to lose my tamed giga to a random spawn. I suppose I could set up some heavy guns and lure them over. That would probably work.

I did finally use the anglerfish to harvest silica pearls. They work great! By hand I get roughly 40 pearls per... shell? But with the Anglerfish it's more like 400-500. I found a really high end blueprint for riot pants, but it requires somewhere like 6000 polymer and 4000 pearls. I've been working on the polymer regularly, but the pearls were still questionable. Now it's just a matter of some time and gathering.

I wouldn't worry too much over a carcha, they're nice but they can be a bit fragile. They're like a giga when tamed so the health drops to about 17k (on mine at least), down from around 70k wild. Melee is the stat to pump. The bonus over a giga is they don't frenzy when hurt and their real strength is they increase in damage the more things they've killed, up to 100 kills. A freshly tamed, primitive saddled carcha can take out a wild one but only if it has got the 100 kills boost; I went after just a level 60 with my fresh tamed 200ish one but didn't boost it with kills and I think I got it to about 60k hp and mine was down by half so we ran away.

Those anglerfish do sound amazing! I really need to explore the deeps more. I know a lot of the good drops are found in underwater crates too. Otters can give a nice little bonus to pearls as they can find them on any fish I think, but it's only the odd couple here and there, certainly not 500 from one shell!

I made those pants for Shiny and I, so we're good now. Having the angler was nice. We've actually got high level gigas, so I'm not sure there's a point in the carcacha. Who knows... we'll probably get some eventually. We're still working on getting mats for a few alpha dragon runs.

We're still working on breeding Daedons, Desmoduses (Desmodi?) and Otters. I went and tamed a couple higher level otters because I got tired of how slow the levelling was going. Also mass-producing basic kibble... we're up past 2400 at this point. Going to add some pics of our upgraded taming zone and new dodo farm. It's swank!

So Shiny and I got a bit bored of raising dinos and getting components needed for the last 2 boss battles and decided to turn a castle on Fjordur into something else. We used some of the parts from the mods that were loaded to build this area out and build a cool little hedge maze. This area is still in progress, but we took a bit of a break from working on it.

Damn that looks cool! Sometimes you just have to take a break and do something totally crazy. I haven't been on Ark for a while, need to get back on for the Christmas event. Always some good drops there. Still need to get a pic of my argies for Shiny.