Server settings for weekend long LAN party (~48 hours)?

[oNiD.Elivercury]

Hi All,

Several friends and I are attending a LAN this weekend and are planning to make ARK our primary game. We’re all brand new players with the most experienced of us having ~30 mins playtime and we plan to set up our own dedicated server for us to play on privately over the weekend.

So the actual question – given that this is a fairly high time sink game and we’re only playing for a weekend, rather than a few weeks, we were wondering if any kind souls could recommend or comment on my suggested settings in order to speed up the game and allow us to achieve a decent amount during the 24-36 hours we’ll be actively playing?

I’ve had a look through the config options and the ones that immediately spring out to me are:

Experience – 2x multiplier to give us a boost?

Taming speed – 2-4x? I’ve seen that most medium-large dinosaurs seem to take 1-5 hours to tame (presumably ignoring the prep time) so speeding this up would likely allow us to get much more done

Harvesting Rate/HP – Both to 2x? Get 4x materials from nodes, twice as quickly

Food/Water/Stamina drain – 50% to minimise upkeep

HP regen – 2x to speed up healing…although if this would remove the need for food for healing I’ll leave at 1x (is there natural HP regen without eating?)

Dino/Player/building Damage/Resistance – 1x – I don’t want to change anything here

Spoiling – I figure it’s best to leave this at 1x as we’ll need spoiled meat?

I think that’s all the multipliers.

Plan to leave the normal amounts of dinosaurs, base difficulty of 2.0, make it PvE, allowing flying pickups and disable friendly fire. Also plan to leave daytime/nighttime durations as they are.

I think that’s everything… Any thoughts on how well this would go, if there is anything I could add and most importantly if there is anything I’m potentially breaking without realising. Don’t want to remove all challenge from the game, just increase the amount we can realistically accomplish in a single weekend.

Thanks in advance for any answers,

Elivercury.

[zcrumb]

I don't know the settings but I would aim for super fast tame and xp. It's tough protecting a tame for hours or struggling to level up to get the engram you need for a saddle or structure.

[Singrave]

set XP 10x+ - you don't want to grind and make narcotics all the time
tame speed at least 5x - with more than 5x it's no challenge there
harvesting 3-5x - scavenging for berries and wood isn't very fun in my opinion
set difficulty a little lower than default - you don't want to be killed by 70+ level Dilo on your starting beach.
set day\night cycles as you like.
don't touch any other settings and it would be cool.

[oNiD.Elivercury]

Originally posted by lameover:

set XP 10x+ - you don't want to grind and make narcotics all the time
tame speed at least 5x - with more than 5x it's no challenge there
harvesting 3-5x - scavenging for berries and wood isn't very fun in my opinion
set difficulty a little lower than default - you don't want to be killed by 70+ level Dilo on your starting beach.
set day\night cycles as you like.
don't touch any other settings and it would be cool.

Wow, those are way higher than I was going for. Although you're totally right, we don't want to play for 24 hours and spend 20+ grinding crafting for levels etc.

Default difficulty I believe limited max level to 36, so do you think that would be fine?

I appreciate the advice!

[Singrave]

Originally posted by oNiD.Elivercury:

Default difficulty I believe limited max level to 36, so do you think that would be fine?

to be honest - i don't know how difficulty and dino levels synergies, it's just my experience from playing on official servers and single player.
On official servers i saw 70+ level dilophosaurs on south beaches.
in my single with 0.01 difficulty(slider) i've seen only 25+ level dinos in snow biome

there is not much difference if all dinos are the same level, i.e. 1-25 or 50-150, but i doubt you'll be able to kill\K.O. a 100 level dino at the very start. it was a bit challengeing for me to KO level 7 Carno with tranq arrows. it's my second week in ARK, so i'm a newb too :)

[Phonological]

Cool idea for a lan party :) how many people are planned for this? (Just curious)

I would recommend: xp multiplier to at least 10 (since higher levels need a lot more xp)
Taming multiplier: 5 + ... this depends on how you want to play the game..5 is very high for low-tames however a quetz will take forever..on the other hand, if you got no problems with cheating you could spawn kibbles and feed those to high tames. (Or spawn cheat meat which instantly tames a creature when eaten) Then you could leave it at 1-2. Alternatively you could set the egg-laying rate up and make the kibbles yourself...which I personally don't recommend since you need at least one female Dino per species to get all kinds of kibble)
The difficulty doesn't matter in my opinion..I started playing on low difficulty and got killed by dilos anyway...you will die a lot if you never played before and as soon as you got a few dinos it doesn't matter. The only impact I could think of is, that taming could be over all faster, since taming a lvl 30 is faster than a lvl 120.

As you can see, the settings depend on how you want to play. Do you want to play the survival part of the game or do you want a lot of dinos? do you plan to play together or against each other?

I wouldn't recommend breeding, but maybe someone in your group would like a baby Rex :) then you HAVE to modify the baby multipliers as well...it wouldn't pay of for a 48hrs game otherwise.

Sorry if I was to confusing, I'm writing from my cellphone :)

[Unknown Zombie]

For a LAN party I'd definitely want to crank the tame rates up to like 15-20x (maybe more). A level 100 trike takes 4.5 hours to tame at 1x speed. That's a lot of time to spend during a LAN party doing nothing.

15x will reduce a 100 trike down to about 30 minutes, and 20x will reduce it to about 20 minutes.