Bosses?

[Sellet]

I've never attempted to enter and beat a boss in Ark. Though I've recently been dabbling more and more in breeding and slowly getting the hang of it.
I don't think I'd go into super-breeding but maybe, but breeding in general is complicated.
I think I'm warming up to the idea to fight a boss but it seems very intimidating.

So my question is. Opening the Obilisks to fight a boss. You need artifacts. Along with items from various dinos.

How difficult is it to get those Artifacts?
How difficult is it to solo a boss?
How likely are you to lose dinos in a boss arena?

[Public_Enema]

- Some artifact caves are tougher than the others. One thing is certain, bring a high level caving dino, soups, a lot of ammo, grappling hooks and med brews. The redwoods cave and one of the deep sea cave is especially punishing.

- You can solo a bosss but it takes quite a bit of prep in terms to good quality saddles and breeding for high stats. The search for good saddles is especially quite grindy as you are reliant of pure luck and the best drops are often found in the riskiest areas.

- Losing dinos is common enough that people usually breed armies with backups in mind IE, the best breeding pairs are usually not taken into arenas incase you get wiped and need to re breed.

I've not gone into spoilers but if you're looking for specific tips for bosses and caves, I'd be happy to share as I have recently completed the Island and Scorched earth on alpha and am currently doing aberration. (In single player with single player settings though..not a masochist)

[Grobi]

By far the easiest boss is the Broodmother gamma on the Island. If you manage to get 10-12 Rex, with decent stats (no breeding required) and normal saddles, she is a push over. Beta requires a few more Rex and calc with 1-3 are going to die. For the alpha Broodmother, you need a decent rex saddle bp, but you don't have to breed ultra high stats. Rex with roughly 40 in life 40 in melee is more thant enough to kill the alpha boss.

[Sellet]

Originally posted by Public_Enema:

- Some artifact caves are tougher than the others. One thing is certain, bring a high level caving dino, soups, a lot of ammo, grappling hooks and med brews. The redwoods cave and one of the deep sea cave is especially punishing.

- You can solo a bosss but it takes quite a bit of prep in terms to good quality saddles and breeding for high stats. The search for good saddles is especially quite grindy as you are reliant of pure luck and the best drops are often found in the riskiest areas.

- Losing dinos is common enough that people usually breed armies with backups in mind IE, the best breeding pairs are usually not taken into arenas incase you get wiped and need to re breed.

I've not gone into spoilers but if you're looking for specific tips for bosses and caves, I'd be happy to share as I have recently completed the Island and Scorched earth on alpha and am currently doing aberration. (In single player with single player settings though..not a masochist)

Thank you for taking the time to read and reply!

I'm currently breeding Rexes to prepare them for a fight later. Though I'm still unsure if I'm doing it right. I know you're supposed to stack mutations but I'm not 100% sure if I'm stacking the right way. It is time consuming yes but I'm using single player settings; faster mating/breeding/maturing/taming. Makes things a bit easier when you're solo xD

I'm more worried about entering caves to get the artifacs. I don't have any caving dinos yet as I've been focusing on the Rexes on this run. (New computer, new savefile)

What happens after you've beaten a boss? I've heard your character can level even further?
I have several different characters on all other maps. None of them have ascended. Would they be deleted if I ascend from the Island to Scorched Earth? Assuming the character would be moved that is.

[🦊 Hermit]

Most of the caves can be done on foot if you have good equips, however they are much easier on a dino. And yes, some of them can be quite punishing. A baryonyx is by far the best creature to take into caves imo - it's small so fits into almost every little passageway, can jump over gaps and cliffs, is excellent in the water sections and can deal decent damage if levelled in melee. Just make sure to bring medical brews in case you get rabies from the bats, to heal up your HP.

What happens after you beat the boss: You're given a cutscene (which I won't go into detail about because spoilers), then your character is automatically uploaded to the Ark network. In terms of the story you are supposed to travel to another map at that point yes, however you don't have to if you don't want - you can just download your character back onto the Island and continue playing. You can upload again and travel at any point by using the obelisk terminals.

If you try to transfer a character onto a map where you already have a character then you simply won't be able to download the transfer, as the game will automatically put you in control of the character you already have on that map. However if you take that character to the obelisk and upload them, then you will be given the option to download and spawn as either that character or the one from the other map. Anything that the map character owns will still be visible to the transferred player, but they will be considered a part of another tribe and so will not be interactable, and creatures may defend themselves if attacked.

Be aware - while the game is running these creatures will still eat food etc, so you may need to upload the transferred character and DL the map one every so often to fill up feeding troughs and maintain the base. Also, it would be advisable to keep backups of your saves and the obelisk upload file too, just in case something should happen such as data corruption (can be relatively common on single player) if you don't want to lose the second character.

[william_es]

Desmodus, the giant bat from the Fjordur map makes many of the caves super easy. It's allowed to fly in caves, naturally, without having to change server settings.

Flying allows you to avoid the pitfalls in caves (literal pitfalls: pits full of lava, crevices, chasms, etc). It also allows you to pick and choose what you fight, so you don't get swarmed by mobs on the ground. If the desmodus gets torn up, you can fly away to heal. It also heals itself naturally by life-stealing from what it's attacking.

There are underwater caves too, so you'd need an underwater tame for those. There are some people who bring a mosasaurus to one cave and fight their way through the whole cave... and other people swim down with just their character, practically naked and just avoid everything. Swim back out with the artifact.


If you're going artifact hunting, you want to make a side jaunt and tame an otter. Why?
Otters have a weird undocumented ability to carry artifacts, and even multiple copies of the same artifact. Most dinos cannot even have artifacts put in their inventory at all, and your player character can only carry a single copy of an artifact at one time.

If you're playing single player, artifacts can respawn even while you're inside the same cave. Once you clear out the enemies, the artifacts can respawn 2 or 3 times before the enemies begin to respawn. So you can stock up and haul out multiple copies as long as you're there if you have an otter.

[Robert]

gamma and beta boss artifact is hard to get alpha is ez to get but you need good armor for rex

[Liralen]

As Public_Enema said, some Artifact Caves are easier than others. However, they are transferable between maps. So if someone is playing on a dedicated server cluster, they can do an internet search and find the easiest map to obtain Artifacts then transfer to the map where you need them. It's relatively easier for people playing on a dedicated server cluster to transfer between maps, with less risk of error compared to playing single player on a non-dedicated server (from what I've read here - I've never tried to play single player non-dedicated and tried to transfer to another map).

The trophies required to activate boss events are not transferable between maps, so must be acquired on the map where the boss is summoned.

Odds of losing dinos in a boss fight are very high, especially if you don't have experienced players giving you advice. Either in game, or out of game. The very first players to do those fights probably had a lot of lost dinos, hence the importance of breeding to be able to more easily replace them. Now, you can reduce that loss by researching the boss fight on the internet.

Your call on which way you prefer, but if you aren't going into a boss fight without the 20 or so players they were designed for, I think you should consider help from the internet as a substitute.

The number of people posting here asking here for information, but nevertheless disdain "spoilers" from the Internet at large kind of makes me roll my eyes ("Here, let me google that for you"). Not that anyone in this thread is guilty of that, so far.

[🦊 Hermit]

Artifacts are not transferable between maps without mods last time I tried.

[DreadCthulhu]

Originally posted by 🦊 Hermit:

Artifacts are not transferable between maps without mods last time I tried.

That is incorrect; Artifacts can be freely transfered between official servers on the same cluster* or any unofficial cluster using the standard settings. The boss tribute items (like rex arms or spino sails) needed alongside the artifacts for the more difficult boss fights, are not able to be transfered on default settings.

*The new limited download official cluster does not allow any item transfers, including artifacts. The other official clusters can.

[🦊 Hermit]

Ah so it's a cluster thing, gotcha. Didn't realise that, my bad. On non-clustered servers, non-dedicated and single player they cannot be transferred though, so clusters are the exception rather than the norm.