Oh, interesting. I recently had to update my servers due to a breaking change... I'm sure the bug is the reason. Haven't seen one of Fjordur yet.

Cool boots! What's the durability? I only recently realized my super-awesome flak helmet schematic has absolutely terrible durability.

I also really like your Basils. Those are great colors. We got a red one, but that's about the only interesting color we've gotten. Since bails aren't very useful in Aberration I haven't really done much with them besides the original breeding. I think they may be useful in Genesis or Genesis part 2? Not sure... guess we'll find out.

We attempted to run the second cave in Aberration and after a strong start, things went very very wrong in an underwater section. A combination of Cnidra,eels, barys and Karkinos dismounted us from our Barys and killed Shiny. I was able to rescue her gear and all her creatures, including her bulb dog. Unfortunately, my own bulb dog died in the process. That place is dangerous... even the underwater entrance is super dangerous. I plan on building a base with turrets and z plants on the shore as close to the entrance as I can. That way hopefully the guns will help keep the entrance relatively safe. As for the under-water passage, next time I'll use a crossbow to kill/lure everything out.

Other than that, during the pink giga breeding, I got a mutation that went from a light pink to a bright pink, so of course I then had to breed that too. Shiny was literally raising 13 gigas, though thankfully that ended recently. I'm also now breeding argies for mutations in health, stamina, weight and melee. Over the last 2 days I've managed to get 14 mutations combined. Only 66 to go.

Still working on Aberration. We've run all the caves and have at least 3 of each of the 3 artifacts, which should be enough for gamma, beta and alpha rockwell. Gamma first, obviously, hopefully this weekend. We may have everything we need to run beta, but for alpha we'll need to hunt down and kill an alpha karkinos, alpha basilisk and alpha reaper. The last one scares me a lot. I'm hoping to just build a bunch of auto turrets and lure it there.

I also bred some super-argies. Combined the best stats of the massive number of argies Shiny tamed to get a base of level 255, then mutated them until I had 20 mutations in health, stamina, weight and melee. They come out of the egg at level 415 and are absolute beasts. It took a long time, but totally worth it. I'm considering doing it with other dinos soon... tickle chickens, rexes and gigas. That last one is going to take freaking forever. Even with our enhanced settings, it takes 6 hours for the egg to incubate.

Some pics of aberration and the stats on a freshly grown super-argie.

Damn nice stats! You could just unleash a flock of those on agressive and harvest the rewards Aberration looks scary haha, I keep hearing things about it like radiation and alien-style births for reapers. Sounds terrifying!

I've just been popping on from time to time doing random breeding mostly. Stat-wise it's crap but I have a pretty griffin now, I'll have to get a picture. I've also got some x-argies that pop out around base level 241 I think so I'm working on mutations there. I also started gathering wyvern eggs with my griffin. Lightning and fire I only have crappy ones but I managed to grab a max level poison egg!

I'd also seen where the crystal wyvern cave was ages ago and went to take a look but only one low level wyvern was in there so I hadn't bothered much about it. Flying back from the fire/poison/lightning trench (very slowly due to being overburdened) I came along the coastline and saw at least 8 crystal wyverns all clustered in against the cliff. Somehow they've spawned outside the cave but are still trying to get back into it. I grabbed a couple of them and will likely go back for more. One I got purely for the colours as it looks like a tropical sunset.

The icy castle I have my base by is supposed to be an ice wyvern 'trench' but aside from the level 20-ish egg I found ages ago and the 3 wyverns I then killed, nothing has spawned since. I may have to do a dino wipe to see if they start spawning again.

I've never played Crystal Isles... it's on the list of maps, but pretty low. Story maps are first. So i've never seen a crystal wyvern. And wait, you're breeding griffins, or did I misread that? Do you have a mod or something to allow that? On fjordur griffins can't be bread. You can only capture them. Which is really unfortunate, as I'd love to breed some mutations into one. They're pretty cool, but could use some more weight and stamina.

We're supposed to try to beat Gamma Rockwell on Aberration tonight. The last time we tried it went pretty sideways. One guy died from radiation due to an incomplete suit, while 2 other people accidentally lost their light pets. One got accidentally tossed into the element water and the other died when someone went swimming in the element water on their rock drake. Just so you know, the element water is very very bad. Do not swim in it. So we never even went in to fight the boss. Hopefully this next time there's a little less fail.

It's all part of the Caballus map that griffins can breed. I haven't played for a few weeks; Niall and I have been playing some Diablo 4 and there are some double exp events in one of my MMOs so that comes first. Still never tackled a boss Just trying to reach Rockwell sounds awful! In fact that whole attempt sounds like everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Surely that means you'll breeze through it this time

Time for the new creature (only in the 'new' Survival Ascended version though), the gigantoraptor! It looks and sounds amazing. They really know how to make people want to spend money on buying exactly the same game again lol. It makes use of the fact there will be young dinos around in the new version in the wild. You can't tame adults, only their young, by protecting them in their nest. Once you've tamed one the adult helps with raising your own young dinos and also gives them a boost if you ride it into battle with any it helped rear. I'm sure I'm forgetting some other stuff they said about it.

Oh, i'd read somewhere that you could tame wild babies in the next game. I didn't know about the rest of that. Considering all the bad things I've seen about survival ascended, I'm still not convinced. I'll definitely be continuing with survival evolved for the foreseeable future. Maybe once ascended has been out a while and I can verify it's not a pile of dog crap I'll spring for it.

We did end up running gamma rockwell last night. Shiny ended up getting left behind on the pad for some reason, along with 2 of our megalosaurs. No clue what happened.. we definitely only had 20 dinos and 5 players including her. That's the dino limit and nowhere near the survivor limit. Besides that it went fine. A light pet died, but that was because someone did something dumb and got electrocuted during the fight. Afterward I went back to the boss bad, helped Shiny cryo everything and brought her back to the base. We need to set up a time to do Beta Rockwell so Shiny can get the unlocks she missed out on with Gamma, but at least we finally did the boss and got the tek sleeping pods (which Shiny can't use). I ended up having to go back down to the pad again later to pick up another light pet that was left behind by accident, but that was no big deal.

You need to kill a boss! Are there any bosses on Caballus? At least on Fjordur, the monkey boss is pretty easy. With the Deinonychus I have bred, we can kill that thing on the hardest difficulty in like 2 minutes. He's not much harder using tickle chickens or rexes either, especially with a yuty to cheer everyone on.

I'll be waiting until it's not in early access (I think it's set to be in EA for at least 6 months). Just fucking wait until it's finished before you release. I also won't buy it until it's on a sale. Ok I bought original Ark on sale as the big bundle, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to spend another £40 on a slightly shinier version of what I already own. I'd have happily spent £10, maybe even £20 for an upgrade like I did with Skyrim to whatever their first special edition was but I'm not paying full price. Especially as save games supposedly don't carry over.

Way to go on Rockwell! Shame poor Shiny got left out. Another reason not to pay full price for ASA; the original is still pretty buggy at times

I do, I know. I just get distracted lol. There are bosses, I don't know which ones though. I do know there are some new bosses, including 'god horses'. I'm not sure if you fight them or tame them. They might be like Fenrir on Fjordur where you get one after defeating it. I need to breed up my thylas or something to get a decent cave dino going. I have rexes I can raise for bosses, and theris. Though it sounds like I need one of your wonder Deinos!

So man, breeding those super dions is a serious pain in the ass, but, once you do it, you're done.... and it's a benefit forever...so yea, recommended. In case you're curious, here's the vid I used to based my whole breeding strategy off of:

Anyway, we ended up running Beta Rockwell last night because apparently everyone felt really guilty about Shiny missing out after she and I spent so much time setting everything up for Gamma. This time everything went peachy and we wrecked beta Rockwell with few problems (another light pet died, but it's ok). So next is alpha rockwell, which requires some mats that are not so easy to get ahold of. We'll see how that goes.

So anyway, the bosses aren't that hard typically if you have decent dinos and decent saddles. I'd recommend giving it a shot. It's worth it, I promise.

Oh trust me, breeding is the first thing I looked up in Ark. Main reason I got it tbh, pisses me off no game has yet managed to do any sort of 'realistic' breeding that is better than the old Petz games!

Yay for Shiny, now she doesn't feel left out Once I do finally get around to breeding everything up to do bosses I should breeze through the maps. I switched from completely offline to non-dedicated host for my Caballus playthrough so I could switch more easily between maps; you can do it on the fully offline ones but it's a bit of a nuisance, so when I have the dinos I'll be able to just transport a pair of breeders across along with a cave dino, speedrun some artifacts and show the bosses what for In theory anyway

lol, sounds good. The boss fights are definitely easier with other people, but it's not required.

Speaking of, yesterday we finally beat Rockwell on Alpha. Two more light pets died, but nothing else, so it was a win. Light pets just die a lot I guess. With that we're basically done with the Aberration map... at some point I want to get a reaper pet, but that can wait. I've fired up an Extinction server... we'll be heading there next.

Nice, well done! That's a gorgeous screenshot right there too!

In Ark we went to Extinction and did some base building, but haven't really played it all that much. The map is really cool though... the city is awesome. I've also been mutating Rexes... In a couple more weeks I hope to have some insanely over powered Tek Rexes. Other than that it's mostly been BG3 for me, with a little bit of Assassin's Creed Valhalla mixed in.

I haven't played in a few weeks. I've been swept up in some mmo stuff and Sea of Stars. Plus I've heard rumours/reports that they're in some major financial issues so I'm just generally keeping an eye on what happens (not that it would affect my single player game but it's another excuse )

Your argy looks beautiful! They are definitely one of my favourite dinos looks-wise.

Just out of curiosity, which MMO.

I'm in my 'try them all' mood at the moment. So I'm on my usual WoW/UO/Istaria but have also jumped back on LotRO and tried out Albion Online. ESO occasionally too