Feeding the Fabricator.

                     When we last left off, we had just explored around the area a bit, nothing too exciting. We did see a local Giga that we may have to deal with sooner or later. Ever since then, our secondary objective has been to prepare for battle with him. Now that we have settled into our new home, though, it's time to start playing with our new toys. As we moved in, I finally got the chance to unpack and place our fabricator that I had built some time back, but didn't have any room to put it. Now that our new house has a lot more space, We were able to place it in our crafting corner. Aside from that, however, I haven't had a chance to do much with it. I haven't even so much as put any polymer or electronics together. I was giddy with excitement to try it.

                     So, While my wife was checking all our dinos for food and levels up. I walked over to the device, and found a relatively simple item to put together, then loaded up the necessary materials and hit the craft button. Nothing happened. I tried a couple of times in a couple of different ways. Finally I went closer to the screen to read at the top (split screen makes the menu hard to read some times). "Oh, you need to activate it with gasoline to get it to do anything." No problem. I had some oil in the smithy, I'll just transfer it over. I put the oil into the fabricator and still nothing. I couldn't even turn it on. I was puzzled. Gasoline must be its own material then. The oil was hard enough to find, and we even cheated a little, I've never even seen gasoline anywhere. "Okay, time to go to the wiki again." I searched gasoline in the wiki for ark, and found that it was a craft-able material. Good thing I searched it, I would have spent days trying to find where to mine it. Luckily, Crafting it looked pretty easy, It was mostly things we already had laying around, oil and hide. I'm beginning to see now why people were telling me to stock up on as much hide as possible. It's a safe bet that the electric generator also takes gasoline as well as the industrial grille. I'll have to find out another time, my wife is still figuring out where to put everything in the house. I do kind of wish there was a way to pick certain things up and move them some place else, instead of having to demolish them and re-craft them, but that's a discussion for the official game forums.


                      Anyway, we have plenty of hide (probably a whole large chest full), and I figure we will slowly get more just as a result of the regular meat collection that we do to keep the dinos fed. What we really need more of is oil and silica pearls. The last time we went to the arctic, we only grabbed a handful, since we were unsure of how much was actually necessary for crafting higher tech things. It turns out, you need quite a lot of it. We still had our freshly tamed ankylos, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to get them some action. We decided to load them up on the boat along with our Pterodons for fast recon. This time, we had gathered enough pelt to make winter clothes for the both of us, so we wouldn't have to worry as much about freezing in the arctic. We could focus more on the resources. Once we had loaded up with enough supplies we began heading down the river.

                 This wasn't our smoothest trip down the river by far. We didn't end up getting attacked by anything significant, but we must have hit every single rock and pebble on the way out to the ocean. Most of them, I had to turn the boat completely around to get free, and some of the time, it didn't seem to be stuck on anything at all. It'd just stop moving. Eventually, though, we did make it through with everyone and we were coming up on our shark drop point, and we whistled them along as we passed by. It was a pretty long trip from smugglers pass to the tundra, but its the fastest and safest way I know how to get there for right now. After a while, we arrived on the snow filled shore, ready to collect copious amounts of oil, crystal, and silicon pearls. My wife has been wanting to build a green house for me for some time, so we are going to need alot.

               We explored around on our new creatures and collected every resource we could find. We eventually came up on a T-Rex blocking our path. These guys seemed tanky enough, so I decided that we could take him on if we were both together, and we each flanked him and started our assault. It seemed for awhile that he didn't know which one to go for, which gave us the upper hand. Eventually after a few swings each, we brought him down. Plenty of meat and hide for the trip home. We went on collecting resources, every now and then getting full and returning to the boat to unload until our large chest was full.

                The whole time we were out, we saw many of the new wholly rhinos roaming the beach. They were pretty impressive looking and I saw them taking on packs of wolves several times. I wondered about taming one, but decided to take the procrastinators road, and do it later since I'm not really sure what they would be good for.

                 After a while, we decided to call it a day, it was getting late and we knew we had a long trek home. The trip back was pretty peaceful. Even getting back up the river wasn't as troublesome... until halfway up the creek. We came right across a mean looking albino rex. He Seemed pretty hungry, but my wife like the look of the albino rex. I thought it might be nice to have a second rex anyway just to help prepare for the giga. So, we went to work taming it. I had all the Narcotics on me, so my wife kept our other dinos out of danger while I went head to head with the rex. I had forgotten how quickly they got around. I was only just faster than him, so every time I turned around to fire a shot, he was able to catch up and do some damage. Eventually, I managed to get him snagged on a rock for a few arrows until he went down. Let the taming begin.

                 It ended up being a pretty uneventful tame. The rex had already pretty much wrecked everything else in the valley, so we were all alone. So, by the end of the night, we had a brand new albino rex for our new home. We haven't named him yet, but let me know what you think we should name him in the comments. We will pick the best one. Next time, we will have to look at getting a frog to help us collect some cementing paste. That is going to come in handy for our greenhouse and new toys from the fabricator.