Putting on the Green Thumb

                      When we last left off, we had just tamed a Quetzal and used it to do a few metal runs up and down the mountain. We now have lots and lots of metal. We had started building a pin for the dinos out of behemoth gates. The process of gathering materials for that was a long one, but we finally got it done and were able to move our dinos back across the river with us. It was nice having them all close to home again, and at least a little protected from any threats. With our last few trips up the mountain however, we haven't seen the giga. I'm still hoping he has disappeared and hes locked in an endless struggle with Vanilla Ice like Gandolf and that cave monster from LOTR.

                    My wife had decided to build me a greenhouse, she learned all the engrams for the building, but I was the big gardener at our old base. This time, we were going to do it right, with a greenhouse. We needed to make a crystal run though, since we were running a little short. So, we loaded with some tools and grabbed the quetz and scooped up Flynn (our ankylo) while my wife rode Dexter up the mountain. We were skipping the metal since we had more than we could melt at the moment. Basically, just obsidian and mainly crystal. With the quetz, we were going to be able to carry plenty back for the greenhouse and then some.

                    On the first mountain, there wasn't much crystal, so we flew to another one near by. On the way to that one, we saw the giga. So, he wasn't gone, but he was out of the way, which was good enough for me. Hopefully he wont fine his way back to us any time soon, but we will try and be prepared if he does. We were safe in the air for now. When we reached the other mountain, we found that there was loads of crystal there for us. We ended up filling each beast with as much as they could all carry before heading back home. I'm very happy with the quetz's utility. I can see now why the saddle is such a high level engram. With Flynn in tow and my wife and Dexter flying behind me on the quetz, we made our way home full of crystal after another successful supply trip. While we were unloading, I realized that we were very low on oil, so sometime soon, we would have to make a trip out to the ocean to gather some, if we wanted to keep our generator fed.

                   Once we unloaded everything, construction of the glass walls and roofs of the greenhouse began. My wife learned all the greenhouse structures, and I knew the crop plots and irrigation, so we both got to work building it from the ground up, starting with the metal foundations. It was 3x5, so nothing too big just yet. We may expand it later, but this would do for now. I ran the irrigation up from the near by river, and started placing all the large crop plots while my wife started placing the walls and ceiling. Soon we had a very professional looking greenhouse complete with seeded and irrigated crops and once we placed the last ceiling piece, they all picked up a 300% greenhouse effect. Very, very cool. I was excited to see them grow. Last time I did a little gardening, it seemed to take forever. This time, though, with the greenhouse in place. The plants were sprouting up very quickly. Building this greenhouse was definitely worth the time and effort of collecting all the crystal.

              Before long, our plants had started fruiting. We had planted 8 plots in total. Three were narcoberries, 2 Rockarrots, 1 long grass, 1 savorroot, and 1 citronal. Now that we had all those up and going, we just had to figure out how recipes worked. We'd been hanging on to them whenever we found them, but we've never actually tried to make one before. I know that you could use the cooking pot for them most of the time, but that was about it. It was time to experiment. We went and grabbed the recipe for 'enduro stew' and started putting it together in the pot. It said:

3 servings of cooked meat
5 Rockarrots
5 Savoroot
1 handful of mejoberries
1/2 dollop of stimulant

I took this to mean:

3 pieces of cooked meat
5 Rockarrots
5 Savoroots
1 stack(maybe?) of mejoberries
1 thing of stimulant (could be used to make two things of stew)

Well, needless to say, I was wrong, but am I the only one that was a little confused about the units of measuring in the recipe? Anyway, it wasn't working. Okay, time to use the wiki. As it turns out, three servings of cooked meat equals nine pieces of meat. Who knew? and half a dollop of stimulant is a stack of two (the picture of stimulant makes it seem like there is more there than a quarter of a dollop). Mercifully, a handful of mejoberries meant only 10 mejoberries, but the others were pretty self explanatory.

            We did eventually get the recipe made. We haven't tried it yet, but at least we know how to do it. It's suppose to buff melee damage for 15 minutes. I thought about giving some to one of our dinos for if we ever have to fight the giga, but that was looking less and less likely the further away it wandered from our home. After we finally finished getting the greenhouse up and going, and the recipes made, we decided to turn in for the night. It was getting late in real life, and work has us getting up early all the time.

Taming Spree

                 Back on the multiplayer server, everything has been quiet lately. I've been busy this past week collecting metal and cementing paste for converting my boat into a proper metal yacht. I really like the way it turned out. Living the boat life has its perks for sure. I have been pretty much free of any harassment of any kind. Heck, I haven't even seen another player for a while, not even my allies. The server has had a low population while I've been on, and I think most of the big tribes are worried about resources on land to worry too much about an ocean living hermit. The way I position myself whenever I log off, someone would have to invest loads of time looking for me (or get incredibly lucky) to find me while I'm offline, and when I'm online, I'm always on the move. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people that play on the server are totally unaware of my existence; and yet, I'm fairly far up the tech tree. I have a metal base, several tames already (two sharks, a dolphin, a stego, argent, and frog), metal tools, firearms, and I'm ready to build a fabricator (just need to find the space).

               All the while, every time I'm able  to level up, I've been putting lots of points into my oxygen (hey, if I'm going to live in the ocean, I might as well be able to live in the ocean) and weight. Usually, I find myself gathering resources while listen the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' sound track. Once I felt comfortable enough with my oxygen level, I started diving deeper into the ocean with my dolphin. He seemed to be able to move pretty fast, so I figured he'd be a good get-away if I got into some trouble. I found myself down toward the bottom of the ocean on my dives. I found silica pearls and some oil down there, and.... are those bubbles coming out of that rock? I checked it out and found a nice little under water cave. It wasn't like a traditional cave, it was very small, pretty much all contained in that rock, but a cave nonetheless. It looked pretty much untouched, and most of the other tribes on the island had no marine presents what so ever, so I immediately thought "this will be a great place to put a small outpost with my fabricator. It was pretty well bottle necked. There was only one way in and one way out, and I was doubtful that anyone could get a big nasty dino through the small opening. I felt that it would be pretty easily defended with some plant species X. The toughest part about it is that pretty much any material that I'd need would have to be brought down. There was no place to gather wood, stone, metal, thatch, or fiber. There was plenty of silica, oil, and crystal around, so at least I had that. I could turn this place into a nice little farm if I could get enough fertilizer down. It might be worth taming a couple of Phiomia and leveling up the oxygen to bring it down. Those things poo non stop, so that would have to be a future goal. Before that I'd want a fairly sturdy base, so I'd need to gather some stone and wood.

               Once I came back to the boat, I started heading for east coast. I always see ankylos over there, and they mine flint and metal pretty well. There were also plenty of those smaller heavily armored guys with the spiky tail over there. I was told by an alliance buddy that they gather stone really well. Eventually, I made it to a shore that seemed to have plenty of both of them. There was also an alpha raptor ripping though them. Whenever I have fought one of these before, I've always had Mr. T with me and my wife. I've never tried to fight one solo, and most of the dinos I had were for gathering and not fighting. That is, except for the sharks. So, I took a couple pot shots at it from my boat still out to sea a bit. He came straight for me. This is working better than I expected, but the raptor was also faster in the water than I expected. I pulled him a little further out to sea, and then jumped into the water to fight him. I had my crossbow ready, and whistled the sharks to start going after him, and they did not disappoint. They spent some time tag teaming it, and I'd get a shot it every now and then. It wasn't really putting up much of a fight in the water. Every now and then, it would get lucky and get a hit on one of my sharks as it swam past. None of my sharks took too much damage, though, and finally, the raptor dropped. It had the usual mix of Rockwell recipes and some tools, which I grabbed and headed back for the shore. Once I got there, I began my taming of an ankylo. It wasn't super high level, but then, I didn't need it to be. It'd basically sit on the boat until I needed to harvest some extra flint (and eventually metal when I can find an easy source of some from the ocean). There were also a bunch of those other guys around. I figured I could grab one of them too since I was here. I had plenty of narcotics and my boat was parked on the shore, so, I could run the stego up and down the beech for berries. I tranqed one of those guys too, which was a little trickier because there were alot of them around. Once I had one of them down, the rest of them started charging me. They were slow, so it wasn't a big problem, but it did make the taming process a little more interesting. Eventually I had done enough damage to all of them to pacify them while I finished up the tames.

                Once they both had finished, I loaded them both on the boat and took them down to an area to the south where there were many rocks to mine for everything I would need. I was stuck getting wood on my own. I've been constantly on the look out for beavers to tame, but haven't been able to find any on my recon flights over the island. Stone and flint were not a problem, now that I had these dinos. I made a few trips back and forth, making sure I had enough to keep a small outpost relatively safe from anyone that might venture into the cave. Unless they happened to bring C4 with them, I was comfortable that my stone outpost would be safe. After a while, I had a large chest filled with stone and wood and another with flint, fiber, hide, and Thatch. Time to go back and build it up.

               After a long boat ride to where the cave was, I used the sharks and the dolphin to ferry all the supplies down. It took many, many trips. None of those animals make good water mules. Eventually, I had everything down there and I started setting up some walls. The geometry of the cave was set up so that I only needed two walls to block access off to one little corner where my base would be. The natural bottle neck was another advantage to this space. It would be highly defensible. I had some extra X plant seeds laying around, and it looks like I finally found a use for them. Once I can get a steady supply of fertilizer, I'll be able to have them going at the entrance to the cave, and I'll have even less to worry about. With the walls built up. I started building a couple of foundations in the back corner of the cave. Basically just big enough to fit my crafting stations and a few chests for storage. This was basically going to be my fabricator outpost. I'd use this space to craft anything that needed that machine. I'm pretty happy with how it is so far. My biggest obstacle is going to be getting a few animals down to it for the soul purpose of fertilizer. Although, It would be impressive if I could get some other small predators down for extra protection. So, I'll need to focus my future efforts on grabbing some phiomias or other things and training them for oxygen so I can lower them into the cave. I managed to tame one and tried to run it down without any leveling for O2 and I was pretty close to the base before it ran out. So, I don't think it'd take very long to get one there. The trick is finding a place for them to hang out in the mean time. The top of the boat is getting a bit full since the two new additions.

                When I was on my way back up from my last supply run, I noticed what looked like a wild shark in the distance. I thought "more is always better." and swam in to try and tame it. As I got closer, I realized that it wasn't a shark at all. It was much bigger, and the tail had a funny shape. That didn't discourage me from trying. I had about 25 tranq arrows on me, so I gave it a go. I put the first one into him, he started turning around really slowly, so it seemed I'd be able to out run him on my dolphin. I'm not sure if I was just a terrible shot and missing, or if this guy was just really tough, because I put all 25 arrows into him and he was still going pretty strong. I went back to the boat to grab more arrows and narcotics, just in case. After going back and wrestling with it for a considerable time, it finally went still. I had knocked it out after about 60 arrows. I start the taming process by sticking some meat in the inventory. I had a whole stack of narcotics, but it didn't seem to lose torpor very quickly. I brought the sharks around to guard it, but this was the biggest thing I've seen around this part of the ocean, so we didn't run into any trouble. It didn't take as long to tame as I thought it would, but I did spend some time running back and forth between the surface and back down to drop a narcotic or two. Eventually, without much incident, it finished taming. I learned it was a dunkeo-something, and I also learned that he has a carry weight of almost a thousand pounds. "where was this guy an hour and a half ago?!" I thought to myself. I was happy to have him now, though. This would make supply trips to and from the cave outpost much easier and less time consuming. It also made me wonder what other creatures of the deep ocean were out there waiting to be tamed and become part of my marine based aquatic force. I'm slowly, in my own right, becoming a force to be reckoned with on this server, and I still find it very funny that I've made it this far without even showing up on anyone's radar. I have a few friends, but even they wouldn't know how to find me if I didn't want to be found. Once I get this outpost properly up and going, I feel that I'll be very difficult to completely wipe from this server without an admin command. I always see in the chat other tribes boasting about how many gigas they have and other large dinos and siege weapons and such, and I'm over here like "Good luck getting any of that to where I live Even if you find it."

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.

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.

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.

             

Settling in to Smugglers Pass

                When we last left off, we had just finished moving all of our things out to Smugglers Pass from the base of the volcano. We realized that we had forgotten most of our stone at the old base, so we made a quick trip back to collect it on the argents. It was an uneventful flight. I wont bore you with the details. Once we had collected the stone and were on our way back, however, we came across our other pterodon. He was in a battle with a wild argent and I had forgotten just how quick he was. He was absolutely flying circles around it. We rushed in just the same to finish off the argent so we could grab him and take him to our new home. I hope he wont try to escape again. The rest of the flight back was as eventful as the trip there.


                 Once we put the stone away, I did a quick look at the rest of our inventory, to make sure we hadn't forgotten anything else. I noticed that we were a little light on metal. We only had one stack to work with. There was a mountain right near where we lived, so our next trip was going to be checking it out for metal and other rare materials. We'd never ventured over that way before, so our first trip would be just checking the place out and seeing what it was like. We loaded up Dexter and Debra for the short flight up the mountain. It was close enough that we could basically sprint there and back without running out of stamina. About three quarters of the way up the mountain, my wife says to me "oh look, that kind of looks like a big T-Rex over there." I look around and see it, but something didn't look quite right. It was far away, so I went in to get a little closer.

           This must be the "giga" that all of reddit is warning me about getting too close to. I knew he was bigger than a rex, because there was also a rex on that mountain side, and it was small by comparison. He was on our side of the mountain. Still pretty far from our base, but it didn't seem like it'd take much for him to come down to where we were. I worried that we would have to deal with him sooner or later. I'm not very comfortable with the idea of him surprising us someday with an unplanned visit. We've taken down some pretty dangerous predators with our crew, pretty easily too. From what I have heard though, none would compare to this guy. I knew it was going to be a tough fight, but we would make a plan and be ready.


             For now, though, we proceeded the rest of the way up the mountain for our materials. Once we got to the top. We found, not only metal, but also obsidian and crystal waiting for us there. I knew instantly that this would be a place that we would spend a lot of our time. It also became even more important that we find a way to deal with the giga that was hanging out on the slope. The short runs up and down with Dexter and Debra were fine, but I'd love to get some of our heavy carriers up the mountain to help carry a bunch of it down in one trip. As anyone who does grocery shopping will tell you, it's all about getting it done in one trip. We filled up once and began back down the mountain.

             Once we reached our home and unloaded all the metal into the forge, we poked around our little area, getting to know it a little better. It seems like its a great place to find beaver. We saw a couple close to the water again today. I also found a scorpion attacking an ankylo. I shot the scorpion, and thought to myself "that guy is probably pretty close to being knocked out." so I loaded up some tranqs and brought him down. I remember hearing somewhere that those guys were good too have around because of what they collect, but I couldn't remember what it was. It was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn't remember. Since he was well on his way to taming anyway I decided it wouldn't really be cheating to aid my memory with a quick peak on the wiki. As it turns out, hes good at picking up a little bit of everything. All the stuff that we now needed for the new fabricator, he seemed to excel at picking up. Flint, metal, crystal, oil, and obsidian. The trick would be getting him up the mountain to where that stuff actually was. This was even more incentive to come up with a plan to take on the giga.... Some day.

           We concluded our time on today with another short and successful trip up the mountain with Dexter and Debra. We weren't on very much today, but I feel like we got to know our new area quite well. It gets a little hot down there during the day, which can be a little bit of a drag, since we both get overheated even while wearing nothing and in the river. Looks like we will need some organic polymer to craft some ghille suits, and to up the fortitude on our characters. I think this is going to be a good spot for us going forward. It has everything we need close by, and we are even closer to the ocean than we were before, by a lot. Trips to the arctic will be much easier from here on out. Maybe some day soon, even trips out to the deep ocean.

Mean While, On the Multiplayer Server...

             Alright, among all that has been happening with my wife's game, I did get a chance to log into my multiplayer server while she was hanging out with her mother on Saturday. It was nice getting back in touch with everyone. I found that our Alliance had grown, and now included another whole tribe for trading and gathering. I haven't met the new guys yet, but they seem nice over comms. I might be able to do more meeting and greeting on my day off. When, I first logged in, everything was still in tact. I hadn't been trolled while offline. I can't remember if I mentioned this on the last post, but I did manage to tame an argent, stego and a shark in my occational short plays on this server throughout the week. This time, when I logged in, I had the mission to make cementing paste. I have a dream of converting my boat into metal since it seems like I have to repair the wood every time I log in. I have already lots of metal ingots, but very little cementing paste. Chitin is hard to come by out in the ocean where I live, but I've heard on reddit that there is a cave full of chitin carrying creatures on Carno Island. I have been to Carno Island a couple of times, but I have never actually seen a cave there. I usually end up getting chased away by... well, Carnos.

            That was my first stop. I've been struggling to keep a good supply of chitin in my little boat base, and this was as good of a time as any to get some. I set off on a long trip around the island. About half way up, my ally needed to know if he could borrow a pelt jacket. I had some extra pelt laying around from my time in the arctic last time, so I just made him one. I told him to meet me at the island and as I jumped to my smithy to make it, I realized that I forgot to have my shark follow the boat before setting off. I was about half way to the island from the south sea where I started. So, I couldn't be bothered to go back and get him at the moment. I've been meaning to tame more sharks anyway. That was going to be my secondary goal while I was out. Eventually, I did get to Carno Island, where my buddy was waiting. He had managed to acquire a Quetz off a dormant tribe that had let there timers run out. Two of them, in fact, as well as a couple of Rexs. Great timing. So, he flew in, and I gifted him the jacket and we both went on our way. I, now, was looking for a good place to set anchor. I didn't want to sit too close to the island, for fear my boat would come under attack by the indigenous animal life here while I was away. I also didn't want it to be between the main land and the island, so that it would remain hidden to people flying between the two. I chose to anchor off the west side of the island nearer the edge of the map and fly in on the argent for now (it would have been better if I had remembered to bring my shark. I would have rather taken him in closer, since he would remain hidden under water). Once on the island, I decided that having the argent follow me might be safer than leaving him alone somewhere to possibly come under attack. There are a lot of scorpions on the island, and while he could defend himself fairly well, if he were to get knocked out, it would be over quickly.


                As I wondered around the island in search of the cave, I was looking to find scorpions for their chitin, and otherwise try to avoid drawing too much attention. In my history on Carno Island, fighting something one on one can quickly turn into ten on one, and when you think your over your head and try to run, you find there is a rex behind you. Since I had the argent with me, I wanted to avoid that. I had be stumbling around the island for a while and ended up building up a somewhat small supply of chitin just off the scorpions. I was starting to get hungry, so it was time to go back to the boat and cook up some meat, as well as restore the inventory of my preserving cabinet.


               I made it back to the boat and threw some meat on the fire. As it was cooking, I went up top and took in the ocean view, and saw something in the distance jump out of the water. I swam over to check it out, and it was an Ichy. I put some extra meat in my quick bar and tried to tame it. I ended up getting it about half way tamed before it swam out into the deep blue, out of my reach. I hung around and waited for it to come back. After a while, I noticed two larger shadows coming towards me. I started swimming back to my boat and just before I got there, I turned to see two sharks close behind me. I still had plenty of narcotics and meat. So, I worked at tranqing them both. It took a long time, but I did eventually knock them both out and tossed some meat into them along with a half stack of narcotics each. Nice! now I'd have three sharks to protect my boat while I'm away, once I get back to the other one in the south sea. I just hope he hasn't had to wonder too far from where I left him. I'd really like to tame an Ichy though, because they are a little smaller and faster than the sharks. Basically I'd use him as a shuttle, to and from the land so that I wouldn't have to bring the boat too close. I've pretty much accepted that I am going to basically be Aqua Man on this server. I might as well live the part.

            After a long while, I was fed and the sharks were tamed. I only managed to bring enough chitin back to build a saddle for one of them. So, I did, and it made me feel a lot better now that I wasn't leading my argent to a dangerous island. I was more confident in the sharks ability to stay safe. So, I went back in. This time to the smaller little island on the north side of Carno Island. I saw that there were two scorpions there and I went after them. I was packing plenty of munitions. I had my bow for most encounters, but if I got into real trouble, I had a simple pistol with about 20 rounds ready to fire. The first scorpion was an easy kill. A couple of arrows and he went down. The second one, however, was a level 92, and wasn't having any of it. I put arrow after arrow into him, and he was like the terminator. He just kept coming. Finally, I ran out of arrows. I said "okay, buddy. I bet I know some place you're not so strong." I started leading him out into the ocean, back toward my shark. Once he was close enough, I hopped on the shark and just started chomping. I was a little worried that he might sting my shark to sleep, but that didn't end up happening. He went down after 4-5 chomps and I harvested him and his friend. After that, I went back and started running across to the main part of Carno Island and there it was. I found the cave, staring me right in the face. I'd been in caves before, some of you might remember the adventure my wife and I had in a couple (Cave 1, and Cave 2). So, I knew more or less what to expect to find in them. My biggest fear was snakes. I hated those things more than anything else in the game. They are a big reason I no longer go into swamps.. ever.

                After I had crossed the loading screen, I found that I had to swim through a part of the cave to proceed very far. I was fine with this (living on the boat, I decided it'd be good to level up my oxygen stat quite a bit. It's come in handy) and very comfortably swam to the other side. I was greeted almost instantly with two dung beetles. My pike seemed to be able to handle them just out of their range. They had lots of chitin on them. As I walked through the cave though. It didn't take long before I came to a cavern that was HUUUUGE! I looked down and could literally not see the bottom. I decided that my excursion into this cave had come to an end until I could come back with at least some hide to make sleeping bags with. Otherwise, If I died, it would be a very long trip back to fetch my stuff. About this time, My wife and her mother got home also, so it was time for me to head back to the boat and find a safe place for me to log out. I ran to the exit past a sabertooth that had found its way just inside the cave. I barely escaped getting tagged by him. I ran back to my shark and swam home. Then boated my way to a quite little spot to log off.


                It was a very productive trip, and I now have something to do when I'm able to come back to this world with lots of extra time on Monday. I know exactly were to go for some chitin. Even with the few stacks I was able to collect, it only made a hand full of cementing paste. There must be a better way to go about collecting it. So many people have these huge metal bases, and it requires a lot of paste for that. Maybe some day.