Time to Find a Flying Fortress

               It's been a while since I've been able to write. It seems real life is always trying to get in the way of gaming. When we last left off, we were having so much fun with our new toy (the fabricator) that we basically ran ourselves out of some of our materials. We were short on metal and obsidian after building a few luxuries like the party deck (still need to fix the beer barrel), and we were going to need more crystal and a few other things for our green house. There is a good source of metal and crystal near where we live, but getting there has been tricky. There is a giga between us and the top of the mountain, so our only way of accessing it until now has been by air. Argents have been our friends so far, but I get the feeling that there is just a much better way. I've been told about the Quetzal and it seems to be the heavy hauler of the skies. I've heard you can even build a platform saddle for it and have a mobile air base. That all sounds like fun, but for right now, we will probably use him primarily as a mule to and from the top of the mountain.


                Our first obstacle would be finding one. I've got no idea where to even begin looking. I've never seen one outside of a few already tamed ones on the multiplayer server that I play on. I did peak at the wiki, but it wasn't much help either.  They are basically rare everywhere. I did catch that wild ones never land and it would take many arrows to put it down. Great, as if finding one wasn't going to be tricky enough, once we do, we also have to tranq him from the air some how. I sort of had an idea about that, but it wasn't a very good one, and my wife was going to hate it. I explained to her that she would have to scoop me up with Dexter and fly me along while we searched for one, then chase it around, so that I could shoot it with the tranq arrows. She was not a fan of this plan at all. Whats worse, she would have to be above it in order for me to shoot it. Which means she couldn't see where it was going. This was an exceedingly bad plan, with many things that could go wrong, but we seemed to excel at those. So, we stocked up on narcotics and some meat and set off searching. We headed south. I knew for sure that we didn't want to bring one down over a swamp, so we avoided those areas. We searched ever other place along the southern part of the island with my wife flying Dexter and myself being carried along underneath. We were somewhere along the southeastern shore when finally I saw one. It was actually flying along over the ocean. We decided to put Dexter down for a quick recharge in stamina, when it hit me. "We probably should have made some stimulant for Dexter, so he doesn't have to land while we chase this thing." We are just going to have to be super observant about our time behind the quetz.

                  Once Dexter was fully charged up, we took off again and started lining up for the shot. I was hoping we could push him in towards the island a bit. As long as we spent looking for him, it'd be a shame if we brought him down in the middle of the water. I got a few arrows in and he started sprinting. It was difficult to keep up with him since my wife couldn't see him. I was basically shouting directions at her while we were in pursuit. Thankfully, the thing didn't seem to stay aggro'd very long, and slowed down after a short sprint. It did turn inland and started moving across the island. We eventually chased it along to a mountain, putting arrows into it here and there all along the way, but Dexter needed to put down. Since the quetz had already been circling the mountain, we decided to put down on a ledge near by on top. There were a few scorpions waiting for us, but I had my fabricated Desert Eagle to help deal with them, and they weren't a problem. The quetz had moved just out of render range by the time Dexter was full again, so we chased after it. After another couple of arrows, it crossed the river and flew towards the volcano when suddenly it started plummeting. We finally knocked it out. It landed somewhere half way up the volcano, we quickly followed it down and landed Dexter right beside him, loaded him full of meat and narcotics and began securing a space around him. We were attacked pretty early on by some sabertooths, but after that, it was pretty quiet in terms of hostiles. About a quarter of the way through the tame, however, I began to realize that we weren't going to have enough narcotics. We had about a stack and a half to start with, but I had to make extra tranq arrows mid flight, so we were down to just over a full stack. The torpor on this thing depletes even more quickly than the beaver, it seemed. We were miles from our base and we couldn't pick narcoberries fast enough to craft more narcotics. So, we came up with a desperate plan to save our tame. There was another full stack of narcotics at our base, and we had Woody (our beaver) just outside. The plan was to use the fast travel and tether mechanics to get my wife to the base and collect the narcotics and jump on the beaver and then fast travel back to the quetz. I knew that I wouldn't be able to keep my inventory for fast traveling, but my wife would be teleported due to the tether and would maintain her inventory. I was reasonably sure we could bring a dino back with us using the same method, and decided we should bring a beaver to pick berries more efficiently.  I had enough hide from the tigers to craft a sleeping bag, so I made one up quickly. Then I popped about 30 narcotics into the quetz to fill its meter back up. We would definitely be racing against the clock so that the meter wouldn't drop too low.


                   Finally we were ready, I fast traveled back home and my wife was teleported beside me. She raced to the chest containing the narcotics, we had a little more than a stack, so we just grabbed all of it. After that, she ran down the stairs (ladder) to jump on Woody. Once she was on, we fast traveled back to the sleeping bag and.... it worked. She arrived with me, on the back of Woody and with all our narcotics safely in her inventory. I collected my items that had dropped while she put the narcotics in to the quetz and began collecting berries to make more. This seemed to just work. We were able to finish the tame with only about 20 narcotics to spare. We definitely would have failed if not for grabbing Woody.

          Now, using the same method as before, we transferred Woody back home, then came back for the rest of them. It was at this moment that I realized that I haven't leveled up enough to make the platform saddle, and didn't have enough points for the regular one. So, we just flew back the same way we got here. Wife on Dexter carrying me and with the quetz following. It actually wasn't too far from our base. We landed the quetz on top of one of the mini mountains near our house. We figure the only danger up there would be argents, but the quetz could probably handle one or two of those. He wouldn't be up there long though, after we unloaded our gear, we decided it was time to restock our materials. With our new flying fortress, with his 900lbs of carrying weight, we could pretty much bring the whole mountain back in one trip. So, we took Dexter and Debra and whistled the quetz along, and flew back up the mountain. As we flew over, I was looking around trying to get eyes on the giga. I just wanted to get a since for where he was and which direction he was moving. The whole way up there, neither of us could spot him. I couldn't see him in the normal hunting ground or in the trees, anywhere. We would have to do some recon at some point to see if he had wondered off somewhere, but for right now, I'm glad not to see him.

                Once we got to the top of the mountain, we started collecting. Anything and everything. We gathered a bunch of obsidian, metal, crystal, anything we could find to feed the fabricator with. Loading everything into the quetz and eventually, we cleared the whole mountain top. We were starting to get full so we decided to head back and not press our luck with running into our Houdini giga friend. When we got back, we realized that the giga wasn't the only Houdini around.

                 We landed back at home and realized that we both had levels up to apply and did so. Now we could make a regular saddle for the quetz, but I was still 6 levels away from the platform. We decided that something was better than nothing, and built it. After all that, we plopped him back on the mountain and decided to start building a dino pin for our new place so we could bring our dinos closer to our house (we moved them across the river in case the giga came down the mountain for dinner). I went to go grab Jesse (our other beaver) and did a quick head count, to make sure everyone was still in the right area. Vanilla Ice was missing. We spent the next hour and a half looking everywhere for him. We even found a weird spot in the geography that allowed us to peak under the ground for him. Not even a trace. We searched for miles in every direction. I wouldn't have thought that a bright albino rex would be this hard to locate, they are kind of big. He was no where. It was then that I remembered reading about some players experiencing a bug about dinos just vanishing into thin air. We'd been lucky enough not to experience it until now, but it looks like that might just be what happened. RIP Vanilla Ice, hopefully he will turn up some day and we will have him again, but for now, we had to continue with building a pin for the rest of them. It's already been a hassle trying to keep them grouped together with things coming to attack them every so often.

              With the beavers, the wood gathering went very quickly. It wasn't long before we had a large chest and a half full of stacks of wood planks. The stone went a little slower, but because of the beavers magical weight loss powers, we could be out for long periods of time, just loading them up and bringing back half chest fulls per outing. We already had a large stack of thatch. We decided to make our dino pin out of behemoth gates. I've seen this done on multiplayer servers, and realized that the materials were far less to just build these gates than to build a wall of equivalent height and size. With the giga lurking around some where, I definitely wanted some pretty high walls. We got it about half way built before we realized the time. and decided that we should finish up tomorrow. Hopefully this next week will be a little less crazy than the last, and I can get some time to game on.