Moving from the Bronze Age to the Modern Age

               In my last post, my wife and I had gone on a boating trip up to the arctic to gather some more materials for our fabricator. We ended up coming back with lots of oil and crystal, enough to fiddle around with our new toy and learn all about the modern tech that it offered. Even with all the new materials coming in, we were still short on cementing paste. I knew, already, from my time in the multiplayer server that taming a frog would be the answer to our cementing paste problem. That would be our first goal for the day. Our new house is a short walk to the swamp, so we wouldn't need to load up the boat on this trip. We were running low on wood, so we grabbed up Woody, and Jesse (our two beavers) to go along and grab wood on the way. For protection, since it was an easy trip, we took Vanilla Ice. He is still a fresh tame, and we haven't taken him out anywhere, so this would be an easy trip to level up.

                 So, after that, we started on our way to the swamp, I was riding the beavers leading the way, tagging trees as we went by them. My wife was on the rex, keeping a look out for dangers. Usually there is a spino along the way that we were going, but today it was a little more quiet. We did run into a giant croc when we arrived at the swamp. He was fighting a stego when he popped into view, so I took advantage of the distraction and popped a few arrows into him. It didn't take long for the rex to catch up and finish him and the stego just to stock up on meat.


                  We looked around for a while and couldn't see any frogs anywhere. Usually, I can't go near the swamp without tripping over them constantly. Of course, now that I'm looking for them, they are no where. Some times, I feel the game has a 'desire sensor' that can detect what you are looking for, and with holds resources and dinos based on what you want. Eventually after searching through the water a bit more, we did find one. He went down with only one tranq arrow, and we began taming him. It was an easy enough process that went quickly. He was a pretty low level frog, which didn't matter too much to me. We just wanted him for the cementing paste. Surprisingly enough, we finished the tame without any incidents. I think that is the longest I've been in the swamp without seeing any snakes. We lucked out. We started on our way back and didn't run into too much resistance that way either.

                   Before we made it all the way back to our little area, we did see an alpha carno storming around in the woods near our place. I didn't really want to go against him with our beavers and new frog in tow, but we were close to home, so we switched them out for Mr. T and the three raptors. I was a little nervous with engaging this guy. We've fought many alpha raptors before without much problem, but this would be the first carno. I'm sure that he would be tougher than the raptors.We went in at him with the rexes leading. I was riding Mr. T with Daisy and Lilly following behind, and my wife was riding Vanilla Ice with Jeff in tow. Before we got within range of the carno, we found several hundred insects flying and walking towards us. My wife kept her eyes on the prize and went for the carno, and I shielded her from the insects. Mr. T was often quite good at taking them out en-mass, at this very moment I did wish the frog was here to lap up all the insects, but we could come back later for them. After I had dealt with most of the insects, I saw that the carno was pealing away from my wife, and I discovered the reason why. He had managed to get Daisy by herself and was pounding away at her. She wasn't going out without a fight and was doing considerable damage. Thankfully I had leveled up the movement speed of Mr. T and was able to get him into the fight. Between him and Vanilla Ice, we took the carno down before Daisy could suffer any fatal injuries. There were several levels up for our dinos to pass out when we made it back home.

                 I made a quick trip back with the frog to gather up what was left of all the bugs that went down. There were many still there, very many. I ended up coming back with about 4-5 stacks of cementing past plus chitin. This should keep us going for a while. Not a bad first trip with the frog. Once I got back, my wife had finished leveling up the raptors. I took a look at Vanilla Ice (who started at level 20) and he had several levels up to do. Once we had finished all of them, he was level 58. Not bad. We will have to find more of those carnos to pick on. It seems to be the perfect way to get our heavy hitters ready to take down bigger pray.


                 Now that we've gotten today's chores out of the way, it was time to start building some cool new tech. Of course, I started with some modern weapons, which was pointless because I haven't made nearly enough gunpowder for the ammunition. I did manage to pump out about a magazines worth for both the pistol and the rifle. I'm guessing they will be nice to have, just in case. The next thing I started on was an electric generator. Having electricity was exciting. It hasn't yet made us much more powerful in anyway. We could basically craft lamps and stuff like that with the engrams that we'd learned so far, but it seemed nice that we could turn all our lights on with one button and not having to refill each individual torch with wood to keep them burning. We definitely needed to play around a bit to figure out exactly how it worked. So we put down a couple of lamps and put an outlet on our generator. Reading a few of the descriptors told us that the outlet would power near by devices by proximity. We could tell immediately, because one lamp seemed to be getting power, and the other was not. After playing with it for a while. It seemed like the outlet would go in any direction (through anything) about 3.5 to 4 foundations away, and power any device that could use it. This was pretty cool, since our house was only about 4-5 foundations deep. I could wire under the porch and put an outlet under the house that could reach most everything inside. It worked. We had a few lamps inside and a couple out front, and when it became night time, the effect was very obvious. I found that the lamps outside, alone, were enough to light the inside of the house as well. but we kept the others just the same. I do wish there was an option to 'hide the power wires' that connect between the outlet and the individual lamps (the same way you can hide the sail on the raft). They don't seem to get in the way of moving around, but they are quite an eye sore. Plus, once I've hooked everything up, I don't really need to see them anymore.

                 In addition to the generator and lights, we also built an industrial grille. It was a bit too big to go in the house anywhere, so we built a little 'party deck' off the front of the house. We installed the grill there and gave it some gas. I am not disappointed at all


with mass cooking meat. We have plenty of meat around, but can't always seem to cook it fast enough in our camp fire to keep the both of us fed. This definitely solves that problem. We ended up with four stacks of cooked meat in about five minutes after loading it up.


                 We can't exactly call it a party deck with just a grille, so my wife decided to learn the engram for the beer barrel and place one of those out there. I'm pretty excited to get everyone digital wasted in our game. Getting the beer barrel set up proved to be one of the most difficult tasks I've come across in this game. I spent a couple of hours trying to get the thing irrigated. Seemed like everything I tried just didn't work. I couldn't even get a reservoir hooked up to it. I ended up building pipes from the barrel down to the river below our house. I finally got it to show irrigated, but now I couldn't access its inventory. I was completely confused. Unsure if this was a bug or a feature (or both, as can be the case with some games) I went to the interwebs for help. I was some what relieved to find that other people were having similar issues. At least I wasn't being a total tit. I guess we will have to wait for the fix to the beer barrels before we can get wasted in our front yard. I did see a post that said that if I break the barrel and re-snap it in to the pipes that it should work properly. I'll have to try that next time. This is another scenario where being able move stuff after its being placed would be handy.

               I'm over all pretty happy with the set up. Everything was neat and tidy (aside from the irrigation piping, but I'm pretty sure its impossible to make that look neat and tidy). Mostly everything worked out better than I expected. I'm excited to build even more tech around our place. We probably should build a dino pin eventually. I'm a huge procrastinator, so we will see how long it takes to get that done.

               We ran out of polymer pretty quickly, so we will also need to make a mountain trip soon. Our demands for resources up the mountain are starting to exceed our ability to fly up and down with the argents. The day is soon where we are going to have to take down that giga so we can take a large convoy up to collect everything. We were able to construct a bronto platform saddle for our unexpected moving tame. It'd be really handy to be able to take that guy up and just collect all the metal and obsidian that the mountain has to offer. With the giga in the way, though, that is just too risky.


              After all, I'm pretty happy with our progress today. Soon we will be properly civilized and able to take on just about anything with our technology. We just have to remove the obstacles of our growth and find even better ways to move resources around. I've seen people on multiplayer servers with bases on the back of large pteradons. That is definitely a goal of mine.