Are bosses possible for casual players?

[Chew]

I don't know much about them, just what little I've read of people talking about them.
If I'm not mistaken, gotta find two high level strong wild dinos, then tame then. Breed them over and over until you get strong stats. Then walk that dino around and level them up?
Between breeding, and leveling, this sounds like an insanely time consuming challenge for 20 different dinos.
I can of course change any stat I want as I play single player, but that seems ridiculous if that's what needed on default settings.

[Smaugi]

This game is not for casual players.
Unless you boost your rates and dino stats , on sp settings 2-3 dinos could kill all the bosses (they even get nerfed with the sp option)
Without boosts even attempting bosses with any chances of sucesss can take months.

[Chew]

Originally posted by Lord Gwyn:

This game is not for casual players.
Unless you boost your rates and dino stats , on sp settings 2-3 dinos could kill all the bosses (they even get nerfed with the sp option)
Without boosts even attempting bosses with any chances of sucesss can take months.

I had my taming at 3x and it still felt ridiculous to attempt to tame some creatures at higher levels.
I want to try bosses, but if that's what it takes to get bosses, I don't think I'll ever have the chance.

[retsam1]

Originally posted by Chew:

I don't know much about them, just what little I've read of people talking about them.
If I'm not mistaken, gotta find two high level strong wild dinos, then tame then. Breed them over and over until you get strong stats. Then walk that dino around and level them up?
Between breeding, and leveling, this sounds like an insanely time consuming challenge for 20 different dinos.
I can of course change any stat I want as I play single player, but that seems ridiculous if that's what needed on default settings.

If you're asking about doing them in default settings without any adjustments, while they can be done, I suspect the time consumption and effort would not be to your liking.

That's why the devs implemented for you the ability to adjust settings in single player or on servers that are not official ones to allow players to play as they want. As an extreme example on the spectrum of things, you easily can make a level 5 dimorph 1 shot most bosses if you so wished.


As for breeding tames, there are lots of good guides and yt vids to help explain to you how to do so. There are also mods that let you improve the process to get mutations to get better stats for dino's too. But again altering stat settings can help skip that.

Remember default settings for official servers are intended to be for group play.

[william_es]

Its not impossible, but it will probably take some time.

Think of dino taming as a long term investment. Once you have a good breeding pair, you can literally make an endless number of baby replacement dinos. And if a dino has good stats, you can ride around on it an just go a hunting/murder spree and level it up a lot really quickly. I always pump the first chunk of levels into melee, so it does more damage. More damage = things killed faster = more exp gained quicker.

and just gonna throw this out there... for truly epic tames, you want more then just two breeders... you want to keep taming every high level one you see, looking for ones with super high level stats to begin with, and then who get even more post-tame levels added on top. The higher one individual stat goes, the lower the rest will be. But you don't care about the sucky stats, because of below.

Then you crossbreed them. You breed a high melee stat against a high health stat, until the babies have both. Then you keep repeating. Then you end up with super babies, with a total number of stats that would be utterly impossible to tame in the wild (because theres only a certain number of levels being divided across all the stats... theres a max that any single stat can realistically reach).

[🦊 Hermit]

Another thing to consider - you can make it a long term, slow burn project. You don't have to do it all in one go.

I've been playing a solo save recently where I've been hopping from map to map, doing all the bosses in order. I started it in 2019, and even now I'm only about half way done. I've played it on and off, took a long break for a while, and just dived in to do a little more when I felt like it.

However yes, what others said above is very true as well - one of Ark's biggest strengths is how customisable it is. The devs have opened up scores of settings and configs to us players, so we can adjust the game to make it as easy or as difficult, as casual or in-depth, as we wish. When I first got the game I actually hated it as the hardcore survival aspects really irritated me, but I played around with those settings and found a balance which I was more comfortable with, and I now have over 6k hours in the game.

Research some of the options, and experiment a bit. You may find a setup that works just fine for you.

[william_es]

Originally posted by 🦊 Hermit:

Another thing to consider - you can make it a long term, slow burn project. You don't have to do it all in one go.

I've been playing a solo save recently where I've been hopping from map to map, doing all the bosses in order. I started it in 2019, and even now I'm only about half way done. I've played it on and off, took a long break for a while, and just dived in to do a little more when I felt like it.

Yep, this. He nailed it.

I hop around from map to map, just taming dinos. Right now, I'm on Fjordur, to get the new tames. The desmodus (giant bat) is fricking AMAZING. Right now, I'm actively swapping around between TheIsland, Crystal Isles, Lost Island, Genesis 1, Genesis 2, and Fjordur.

The way I look at it, is every new tame is like a new tool in the toolkit. When I run into issues, I look for a dino that solves the problem. I have no problem with bringing high level tames from another map into a new map. I don't have a ton of time to play sometimes, and If I spent time taming animals on one map, I'm not repeating that on a new map. Sorry, not enough time. I might tame MORE of them, in order to roll another chance at a higher stat, just to improve the bloodlines. But I'm building on and refining the same tames over time.

[MrBishop077]

Greetings,
If and when you start breeding make Full use of the Incubator. It can tell you the sex and stats of the egg (or gestating baby) and if you get really serious about it you might want to keep a notepad handy.
And remember to breed out the movement speed (useless stat except for Levels) a mid level food stat, and depending on the creature O2 is also useless.
Hp, Melee and Stam with some weight is all you really need for your base boss dino's then after you have those stats into a breeding pair you can start to breed an endless army of super 'clones'.
Also with breeding, base stats only are what you are mixing. Leveled and Imprinted stat improvements do not count towards the Offsprings stats.

[Liralen]

As others have said, playing with rules other than official server settings, you can do it quite easily, depending on how much effort you wish to expend, by modifying the games' parameters.

This video shows the general process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL4fDTRg4Ig, but as MeShell said quite early, she spawned in 36 level 150 T-Rexes. You could stop right there and use that fact to spawn in whatever dinos you wanted.

I chose not to do that, but rather tamed level 150 wild dinos. But I also play on unofficial settings with mods that easily enable me to find 150 wild dinos (Creature Finder Deluxe), plus another mod that allows me to see exactly what I need to tame a dino (Awesome Spyglass) which also shows me the original stats regardless if it's been imprinted and leveled up (before getting the mod, I used to make spreadsheets to record that data so I could imprint and level up my breeders.)

When first setting the parameters for our server (I started with my husband and son) and after spending several hours taming a high level therizin with berries, we decided that was nuts, so we decided to modify our server settings so that with Exceptional Kibble, we could tame a level 150 therizin in half-an-hour, which we judged was more reasonable for people with jobs.

With 5 players, we had no trouble with killing the Island bosses with level 300+ dinos. Obviously, if you're soloing it, you will need to adjust for that accordingly.

Just some ideas on the range of possibilities available to you in Ark, depending on how easy or difficult you want it to be.

[🦊 Hermit]

Originally posted by MrBishop077:

And remember to breed out the movement speed (useless stat except for Levels) a mid level food stat, and depending on the creature O2 is also useless.

On a solo game, breeding out the useless stats really isn't required, and would just add a lot of extra grind, which is what the OP is trying to avoid.

The reason people breed low speed, food, and other useless stats into tames, is because official servers have a cap of around level 450 for any creature. Anything which goes above that cap is deleted for being too OP. So removing levels from useless stats allow a player to maximise the stat points in stats which they want to have, before the creature hits that limit.

But on solo games, no such limit exists. By default, the system to automatically delete creatures at a certain level is turned off unless deliberately set by an admin. So it doesn't really matter how high a level the creatures get, they will not be removed from the game for having a few extra points in speed or food - those stats can be left there without issue.

[darcek]

Of course even Casual can do Bosses.
Everyone can do everything they want as ARK has trading.
All you need is go into one or more discord servers apply for a sit,pay the entry fee and your off on your way.
This goes as well for getting any dino you want any color etc etc.

Its plain Cheating in my eyes,but its promoted by WC and the community so why not dab into it?

Also its understandable not all of us have no life and can conquer ARK like I did.

So go forth,pay and win and enjoy all that ARK can offer you,

[Stabby]

Walk up to a dino, hit the TAB button on the left side of your keyboard, now type forcetame. Hit tab again till it closes.

There. Much faster.

[Migromul]

It's pretty much, what the others said. I'm not sure, if breeding is necessary with Single-player setting on.

The "difficulty" determinds the possible level of wild dinos. If it is set to 1, the max level is 150 wild.

ON the center, it's even higher, as fas as I know. And in caves, it's much higher on basis. (cave-creatures are normally extremyl high level and not tamable.)

At the advanced tab, there are 3 different lists for tamed dino-stats. afaire, healthe and damage is quite reduced at standard-settings. Just take it to 1, both. I thinkg, that should be enough to just tame high-level creatures and try the bosses with them.

Start with the Megapitecus if you play on Island. This is the easiest of the 4.

But there is an easier way: Play on Fjordur and just try the world bosses there. (They're on the alternate realms. Just watch some let's plays. search for viedeos of the last month, because the official verison is not even a month out, yet...)

You need some things, to even get to a boss. You need trophys, which are aquired from apex-creatures. (Like Rexes, carnos and Argentavices.) And you need artifacts. On Fjordur, however, you just need runes, which you will get, if you kill alpha-apexes. And you only need level 50 for the mini-bosses. (normally, you must be higher in level lik 65 or something like that for the gamma (least) difficulty of a boss.)

you are even allowed all creatures. (normally, flayers aren't allowed with some exceptions.) Bringing them to the terminal, which summons the boss is another topic, however. (I wuold recommend, to be able to make crypods, and use this item. In SP, there is no cry-sickness, so you just can freeze your army (up to 20 dinos) and release them at the terminal

ALWAYS consider the dinos, you bring to bosses as cannon-fodder. Don't expect, that they will survive. If so, the better. But just don't expect it.

Fjordur has another advantage, and that's the Fjorhawk. This is a bird, which will prevent you loosing your items. You just need to have to sit on your shoulder. (on the other hand, you just can use a mod for that... But I find it just cooler to use an official way.)
Normally, you will loose your items, if you die. The fjordhwak, however, iwll bring your items to your next spawn-position, regardless of the weight. Beware, however, there might be a bug: if you're overloaded, you will be overloaded at the spawn-point, ignoring the fact, that you don't have anything in your inventory. Logging out and relogging will solve that.

[Chew]

Originally posted by 🦊 Hermit:

Another thing to consider - you can make it a long term, slow burn project. You don't have to do it all in one go.

I've been playing a solo save recently where I've been hopping from map to map, doing all the bosses in order. I started it in 2019, and even now I'm only about half way done. I've played it on and off, took a long break for a while, and just dived in to do a little more when I felt like it.

However yes, what others said above is very true as well - one of Ark's biggest strengths is how customisable it is. The devs have opened up scores of settings and configs to us players, so we can adjust the game to make it as easy or as difficult, as casual or in-depth, as we wish. When I first got the game I actually hated it as the hardcore survival aspects really irritated me, but I played around with those settings and found a balance which I was more comfortable with, and I now have over 6k hours in the game.

Research some of the options, and experiment a bit. You may find a setup that works just fine for you.

Oh god, it would probably kill my soul to take on a task in a game that would require years of off and on. Props to you buddy.

[Chew]

Originally posted by william_es:

Originally posted by 🦊 Hermit:

Another thing to consider - you can make it a long term, slow burn project. You don't have to do it all in one go.

I've been playing a solo save recently where I've been hopping from map to map, doing all the bosses in order. I started it in 2019, and even now I'm only about half way done. I've played it on and off, took a long break for a while, and just dived in to do a little more when I felt like it.

Yep, this. He nailed it.

I hop around from map to map, just taming dinos. Right now, I'm on Fjordur, to get the new tames. The desmodus (giant bat) is fricking AMAZING. Right now, I'm actively swapping around between TheIsland, Crystal Isles, Lost Island, Genesis 1, Genesis 2, and Fjordur.

The way I look at it, is every new tame is like a new tool in the toolkit. When I run into issues, I look for a dino that solves the problem. I have no problem with bringing high level tames from another map into a new map. I don't have a ton of time to play sometimes, and If I spent time taming animals on one map, I'm not repeating that on a new map. Sorry, not enough time. I might tame MORE of them, in order to roll another chance at a higher stat, just to improve the bloodlines. But I'm building on and refining the same tames over time.

I thought about hoping, but I also thought for completion sakes, it might be better to fully complete a map before heading to the next. But I guess I'd never get all done legit. Especially considered 2 is coming within a year.

[Chew]

Originally posted by Liralen:

As others have said, playing with rules other than official server settings, you can do it quite easily, depending on how much effort you wish to expend, by modifying the games' parameters.

This video shows the general process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL4fDTRg4Ig, but as MeShell said quite early, she spawned in 36 level 150 T-Rexes. You could stop right there and use that fact to spawn in whatever dinos you wanted.

I chose not to do that, but rather tamed level 150 wild dinos. But I also play on unofficial settings with mods that easily enable me to find 150 wild dinos (Creature Finder Deluxe), plus another mod that allows me to see exactly what I need to tame a dino (Awesome Spyglass) which also shows me the original stats regardless if it's been imprinted and leveled up (before getting the mod, I used to make spreadsheets to record that data so I could imprint and level up my breeders.)

When first setting the parameters for our server (I started with my husband and son) and after spending several hours taming a high level therizin with berries, we decided that was nuts, so we decided to modify our server settings so that with Exceptional Kibble, we could tame a level 150 therizin in half-an-hour, which we judged was more reasonable for people with jobs.

With 5 players, we had no trouble with killing the Island bosses with level 300+ dinos. Obviously, if you're soloing it, you will need to adjust for that accordingly.

Just some ideas on the range of possibilities available to you in Ark, depending on how easy or difficult you want it to be.

Thanks buddy. I'll definitely need to look more into breeding. I spent about an hour and breed 2 creatures. Was too slow so I'll have to major pump breeding sliders, to the point where the number would kinda make me feel like cheating. But as of now, I wouldn't know what a mutation is, or if I got one.