I Don't Know how to Ocean...

[🦊 Hermit]

I've not been playing this game too long. I have a couple of ongoing single player games, and a server I host for me and my friend, but in all of those games I've yet to reach fully endgame status. And one of the things that I haven't fully explored yet, is underwater, and harvesting resources from this medium.

I've dabbled in it a little, but every time so far it has ended in disaster. On my main single player game I tamed a high level megalodon and icthy on a beach, and was bringing them back to the bay where I set up my base, when they were set upon by two other sharks and an entire swarm of manta rays, and overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. And in my online game with my friend, we made scuba gear and took our raft-base out into the water to start taming, but again an army of mantas and a few hard-hitting dunkies soon beat us to a pulp and left our scuba suits languishing at the bottom of the sea.

And yet I've heard experiences on this forum of people at low levels taming water mounts (from icthys to beavers and more) and going harvesting high end materials without even scuba gear, without being torn apart by the waters' denizens. And others who have clearly got a strong foothold in the water, enough to have multiple moasas following them and a base on the back of a plessie when they dive.

I can't help thinking I'm missing something rather obvious here. How does one get into the water without any mount they tame (and they themselves) getting savaged by other animals, particularly mantas? Is there a strategy to it, or sheer weight of numbers in pets, or something else? In short, how does one ocean?

Any hints or tips people can give would be much appreciated, thanks.

[GPD]

Listen, you promise me something, OK? Just if you’re ever in trouble, don’t be brave. You just run, OK? Just run away.

[rob_arend]

Sarco ftw. Plus, the resources in the ocean consist of pearls, oil, and crystal. Those can be obtained from caves that you can ride your sarco up into. And, as previously mentioned, they outrun everything and can be placed on the safety of land.

[🦊 Hermit]

More great tips, they're much appreciated guys, thanks^^ Keep 'em coming ;)

[Khan, Binary of None]

Early Game Ocean play for low levels at most is having a boat (Raft + Foundations/Mobile Base).

End Game you need a strong swimming dinosaur to manage deep dives, I personally use a Spinosaurus and I can slaughter everything that swims; plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, dunkleos, megalodons, etc.

If you want to get things like oil or pearls safely, then you need to farm beach Trilos, that's how you get those resources early on.

[Attack Kitty]

Advice for the ocean... hmmm... been mastering the seas for so long in ark its hard to know where to even begin.

First, don't panic. There's plenty of dangers in the sea, but there's plenty of dangers on land too. If you can master one, you can master the other.

There are 2 approaches to dangers: 1) be faster than the dangers, and get away. 2) be more dangerous than the dangers, and make the sea red with the blood of your enemies. Generally, you'd do 1 before moving on to 2, based on what you have tamed thus far.

Movement speed affects swim speed.

Oxygen stat, each point gives 20 oxygen (1 points gets you to 120 oxy, etc.). Base oxygen gives you about 30 seconds of air. Oxygen also affects your swim speed... every 20 points in oxygen give you about 6% more swimming speed. This can add up considerably. going from the base oxygen of 100 to 200 will double your time to drown, and give you 30% more movement speed in the water, for just 5 points spent. I recommend this much to anyone. Personally I like to sea-fare a lot, and i run 600 oxygen, which with flippers allows relatively safe swimming alongside wild plessies and mosas, and negates the need for a second air tank or any lazarus chowder.

Before 75, use lazarus chowder. It is your friend. Mass produce the stuff if you want to get into the sea.

Ocean gear:

Leave some things at home... axes, sicles, guns, bows, canteens/water jars, and until you get good at ocean faring, leave behind any irreplaceable armor... you don't need these in the ocean, leaving them behind saves you some hassel as you engage that ark learning curve that costs so much gear ;-)

Early on, Hide armor is your friend. Much of the ocean is cold, and this will negatively impact your food usage. Hide armor is also very easy to replace if needed. Fur armor gives zero temperature benefit in the water, so hide is the best insulation you can get until scuba gear at 75.

Bring lots of cooked meat or similar custom consumable, much more than you think you need. Swimming does a number on your stamina bar, and that burns food fast. Add the cold, and you'll want lots and lots of meat. NOTE: You can only eat while mounted, or not-swimming... if your'e in the water unmounted, you can't eat.

Spyglass, water mounts don't let you use it normally, but if you equip it before mounting, you can use it with the alt function. Generally what i use it for is finding the level of plessies/mosas, by swimming up into water that is too shallow for them, and then looking back down at them with the spyglass. This is very difficult to do without scuba goggles... although you can kinda exploit a bug that lets you see clearly through the ocean if you are dismounted and press space bar while at the surface and looking down...

melee weapon (sword/pike)... optional. I've had a good sword and high-ish melee stat get me out of trouble with an angler fish or megalodon or manta before... but it's probably only useful to fight hand to hand against minor enemies and only if you have decent weapons/melee stat.

pick ...you want this for oil, and crystal

gps ...you want this early on, before you learn the terrain, it can all be a bit disorienting.

Above level 75, use scuba gear. The pants give great insulation against cold, the goggles give much longer visibility in the water (still blury, but longer), the flippers multiply your swimming speed by 2.5x (stacking with any other movement buffs), and the chest gives you 1 hour of oxygen before needing repairs. Your 'top tier' outfit for the sea will be the most bad*** high armor/durability gloves you can find (i use mastercraft riot), and a full set of gray label scuba, with 1 spare oxygen tank in inventory. Even if you watch your scuba tank's air usage super carefully, the scuba tank loses durability as it is consumed. This makes it increasingly fragile vs. being damaged by a sea critter. So a low-air scuba tank can be broken with the lightest of hits by minor sea predators. That can put you in a bind, bring a spare (unless you stat crazy high in Oxygen like i do, and can swim pretty much anywhere you want to from the sea floor without drowning). Having extremely high armor gloves will help protect you if you get hit. Armor suffers very steep diminishing returns in ark, so going from 600 armor to 850 armor is actually a pretty minor upgrade to your damage mitigation %. But if you are in scuba, which has 0 armor... then adding some gloves with 250 armor will increase your character's survivability by 3-4 fold over going without. I normally use blue label flak outside the water, cuz it's cheap to maintain and gets me very deep into diminishing returns on armor anyway. But for the ocean i wear classy gloves.

Ocean Mounts:

Sarco... this is your best bet for a starter ocean mount, hands down. It's fast, can fight light opponents, can run away from water fights by going onto land, can run away from land fights by going out to sea, and you can use a spyglass while on it. And you can start doing sea-stuff with it before even making a water pen.

Ichys... easy to tame, fast. This is a great starter mount. They will not survive log-out outside of a well made pen though. They cannot fight worth anything, so just leave them on passive all of the time. This prevents them from running off all haywire in a crisis when you need to be able to re-mount fast.

Sharks... I used to favor them as a mount, because they are very maneuverable, and easy to get in & out of tight spaces. But after the dino nerf in february, sharks became rather fragile in combat. They have also reduced the size of their bite AoE, so that they have trouble defending themselves when surrounded. I have a 120 perfect tame shark leveled up to 222 with a good saddle, and it can fight out a grisly mess of 2 plessies, a mosa, and a pack of angler fish, all at once... but it gets badly hurt by this, and needs to run to safety afterwards to eat thousands of meat to recover. It's "meh" in a bad situation at the sea floor, and it's about as strong as a megalodon can possibly get. A lower level megalodon with a gray label saddle will likely just not be able to fight it's way out of serious trouble. Sharks are also rather slow, by ocean movement standards, so the mix of being both fragile and slow, is not a good blend. The dino nerf kind of made sharks a bit useless. If you get one, stat it hp/melee with a little stamina, for combat, or stat it for speed and make it into a somewhat slower, but tougher ichy.

Mantas... 3 words "passive-aggressive tame". also known as the ark devs just trolling players. they are fast, but you'll die a lot trying to tame one, and you'll inevitably get it killed by touching land with it at some point. Their purpose in game is just to make the ocean suck as much as possible. The game is far far better off without them.

Anglers... These are about as tough as a megalodon. They move slower, Are much more compact, and they have a built-in light source to illuminate the dark depths.

Dunkleosteus... Being slow, and desiring titanboa kibble, promising to break underwater stone (breakable stones underwater don't really exist), and moving slower than slow... They are not a particularly useful mount. but much tougher than a megalodon. They can make a tougher guard-dog than a mega, but I wouldn't explore with their swim speed. They have one advantage, they can harvest oil nodes without dismounting, which is only useful if you park yours very near to where there is some oil, cuz they move soooo sloooow.

Plesiosaurs... Now we're talking. This is one of 2 mounts that will transform your sea-faring experiences from one of caution to one of domination. Tamed plessie's are fast, really fast, faster than an ichy (though the scale makes it hard to tell). Plessies have a good health pool. Plessies have a bite like a t-rex, and a faster bite animation time. They are the t-rex of the sea, and a good plessie can circle the whole island at the sea floor, laying waste to everything it lays eyes on. Their attack has excellent AoE, helpful in fighting your way out of being surrounded. Note that the attack does have a focal point, which is generally anywhere in the front half of the plessie, and focused wherever your camera is pointed. If you look straight up, you'll focus more damage there, but still hit below you, etc. This is a feature of the long neck, and very useful once you get a feel for it, to help kill off the weaker partner first in mate boosted pairs. Plessies bob up & down when swimming, you will have to practice with them to compensate and guide them precisely in the vertical plane.

Mosasaurs... generally 1 mosa is equal to 2 plessie's. Their damage is somewhat higher, and they are considerably more tanky than a plessie. Some have difficulty getting used to their swimming motion, as they wag side to side while swimming. This makes turning more complex, and generally increases the space you need to turn around. Much like the plessie though, this is something you can get used to, and adjust to.

Dangers:

mantas swarm, and they suck. they're fast too... try to avoid.

dunkles swarm, but they are slow and aren't very aggressive... easy to avoid.

sharks swim slow, if you have some movement speed & oxygen, you can largely outswim them.

angler fish swarm, and are highly aggressive, but slower than mantas. They go away when hurt, but they always come back. keep count on how many you've hurt, and don't dismount till they're all dead. They will ALL be back.

plessies and mosas are quite fast, it takes flippers + 160% swimming movement (from movement or oxygen) to keep pace with a plessie, flippers + 205% to keep pace with a mosa. They hit like a truck too. if you're in melee range of them, dismounted, your in bad shape. Also, they will aggro from further away than you can see without scuba goggles. scout an area on all sides before dismounting, to minimize risk of 'suddenly plessies!'. mosas have a somewhat shorter aggro range than pless (which aggro at max render range).

sea scorpions, hard to see, hang out around pearls and oil, will 1-shot you with stamina drain + torpor, often this kills. with a high oxygen stat you just have to move up off the sea floor to avoid further attacks from them, so you pass out beyond their reach. Best defense for them is to push your mount to the sea floor and move around, let them hit that if they are around, if nothing attacks it's probably all clear.

sea caves: don't try to take plessies/mosas in them, they'll get stuck. sharks/sarcos are fine. this is the best place to harvest oil pearls and crystal un interrupted by dangers.

[🦊 Hermit]

Yeh I've been picking off trilobites for a while now, but their resource yield and scarcity on land is beginning to become an issue for me, that's why I wanna learn the ocean when I can.

And wow, very long and detailed post there AK, thanks for that^^ I especially like the aquatic creature breakdown - I had previously been leaning towards taming a dunkie on my way to a moa because I'd heard they were quite tanky, but you'd suggest not to bother with them then? Also I'd heard plessies were quite weak and not particularly useful, but is that not the case?

[theprofessorisin]

How I farm black pearls( this wont be as detailed as above post)

Itchy. Park itchy over a crab thingy. Crab thingy stays on ocean floor and trys to agro to Itchy, use as distraction. Make sure to shoot any Angler fish that agro Itchy. Shoot crab thingy with crossbow until dead, do not fight it on ocean floor stay above it, make sure no other crab thingys around, as they will KO you fast(rip). Go in to harvest your kill, axe is best i believe, hope you get black pearl or 2.
If too populated with badies in area of crab, find a different crab thingy, too dangerous.
Stay safe.

[GPD]

@Attack Kitty:

Hands down the most informative post I've ever read on Steam.

[retsam1]

Originally posted by Hermit:

I've not been playing this game too long. I have a couple of ongoing single player games, and a server I host for me and my friend, but in all of those games I've yet to reach fully endgame status. And one of the things that I haven't fully explored yet, is underwater, and harvesting resources from this medium.

I've dabbled in it a little, but every time so far it has ended in disaster. On my main single player game I tamed a high level megalodon and icthy on a beach, and was bringing them back to the bay where I set up my base, when they were set upon by two other sharks and an entire swarm of manta rays, and overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. And in my online game with my friend, we made scuba gear and took our raft-base out into the water to start taming, but again an army of mantas and a few hard-hitting dunkies soon beat us to a pulp and left our scuba suits languishing at the bottom of the sea.

And yet I've heard experiences on this forum of people at low levels taming water mounts (from icthys to beavers and more) and going harvesting high end materials without even scuba gear, without being torn apart by the waters' denizens. And others who have clearly got a strong foothold in the water, enough to have multiple moasas following them and a base on the back of a plessie when they dive.

I can't help thinking I'm missing something rather obvious here. How does one get into the water without any mount they tame (and they themselves) getting savaged by other animals, particularly mantas? Is there a strategy to it, or sheer weight of numbers in pets, or something else? In short, how does one ocean?

Any hints or tips people can give would be much appreciated, thanks.

Some stories you were probably reading too were:

1. Pre manta dunkle, alpha mosa, etc times.
2. Where you go is also a factor as there are easy then there are really hard spots to farm.
3. Pumping all stats into oxygen also can be a factor(or at least alot).
4. Beavers are not water mounts per se and bad to use if you go in deep water and dismount.
5. Server settings for how much per level you can place points into a tame on unofficial servers(making ichthy 1 shot wilds) can also be another factor.

All in all, it really depends on how your server settings are and where you go and how you prep that makes a difference.