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However before I quit, I discovered something which got me curious - the game's customisation options. The devs have opened up a huge amount of settings to us players, for us to tweak and adjust the gameplay however we wish. I sat down with those settings over the course of a few weeks, changing this and trying that, to see if I could find a setup that I liked. And eventually, I did. I backed off the difficulty considerably - things like upping player damage resistance to give me more survivability, increasing drop quality to get more HQ gear, etc. And on doing that, I found that I really began to appreciate the game's good points, like it's beauty, atmosphere, and immersion. When I wasn't trolled so persistently by constant death, I actually began to enjoy the game a massive amount, so much so that while my friends who I played with soon lost interest and moved on, I kept playing for hundreds, then thousands, of hours.
So to start with, I would recommend looking through some of those config settings and trying to adjust them to make the game play more to your liking. There's no shame in reducing the difficulty...computer games are supposed to be fun, not a chore, so if we can find a setup that makes it fun for us then that's perfectly acceptible.
And in addition, if you can find a gameplay style which works for you and keep at it for a while, you might start to find something quite remarkable happens: You start to find it too easy. It's true, at the start of playing I was ready to quit very swiftly, but after getting many hours into the game I started turning all those difficulty settings back up to their default, or even more difficult than default.
As impossible as it may seem, it is indeed plausible to play the game on vanilla or even harder settings and survive, but it does take a great deal of knowledge, experience, and patience to learn. Reducing the difficulty gave me said patience in order to gain the knowledge and experience. It allowed me to learn each dino's attacks and behaviour, become more skilled at spotting them from afar and having strategies to deal with them, and being more prepared to recover if something did end up going wrong. Now with this experience and knowledge, I can traverse most maps on foot with little risk or worry, and am actively considering more difficult gameplay challenges to make it harder for myself in my next save.
The choice is yours, of course. But if you are able, I'd recommend trying easier settings to start with while you get more used to the game, and try to stick at it if possible. You might find that, while it starts out being a major annoyance, you suddenly end up with over 7k hours spent in the Arks and know their quirks in and out.
I'd really recommend getting a better flyer. Use your pteranadon to fly up to the redwood area in the middle of the map, staying WAY above the trees if you can. That way you don't get jumped by a thylacoleo (kind of like a tiger, but they hang out on the sides of trees and jump people). Go the mountains in the middle of the redwoods towards the west side of the redwoods, and try to tame an argentavis, the giant hawk/vulture birds. You can find argentavis in many other areas, but the problem with those places is there will be tooooooooo many argentavis. Try to tame one, get attacked by 5 others. And other things like rexes, scorpions, etc.
An argentavis is like a flying packmule. They have very high weight reductions on many resources (usually -50% weight), and their saddles count as a workbench. You can make basic stuff right from their saddle. They are decent fighters too. You can peck and claw things from the air without even being hit in return if you're careful. Argentavis also get a healing buff if they kill and eat something. In fights against larger predators, you can zoom over and kill something small (like compies), eat it, and then return to the main fight while the buff heals the bird.
Argentavis can also _pick up_ other dinos, depending on your server settings. This will allow you snatch up many creatures, carry them around, and drop them inside taming pens. This ability is game-changing.
They can pick up many mid-size creatures in the talons (feet), and pick up smaller creatures in their beak. They can even fly around with a small creature trapped in their beak, land and take off again repeatedly. Their ability to hold something in their beak makes taming some annoying creatures like otters 20 times easier. You don't have to chase the scatter brained otter all over. You catch fish, and then run over and feed the fish to them while their stuck in the argie's beak. The argie will even nod it's head towards you to move the otter closer to you. It's hilarious.
Highly recommend building a small base in one the quieter areas on the top of the mountain. It can get insanely cold at night (cold enough to kill you). There's a sort of path up the mountains, and it ends at a little flat area with one big tree. That area is very quiet, and makes a great location for a small base. There's lot of metal nodes nearby, so I'd suggest making forges and smelt metal while you try to tame an argentavis.
You might have to look up taming traps for argentavis, and build one. Basically a big box with huge gates at one end, a small door at the opposite. Get the argentavis to chase you through the big doors, then you run out the smaller door, around to the big doors and shut them. Then you can fire narcotic arrows, etc at the thing while it flaps back and forth inside. With flyers a trap is really essential. When they get close to being knocked out, they can turn and begin to fly away at max speed. You probably won't even be able to keep up with them. You want them trapped in a taming pen.
An Argentavis (or more then one) will really open up huge areas of the map to you. You fly over the dangers on the ground. You can haul tons of resources with them. I'd load up 2-3 ones with resources, then set them all to follow me like a conga line. Haul back 1000's of lbs of resources in a single trip. And being able to pick up dinos will change the whole game, for taming purposes.
I had a Pteranodon, but I got TACKLED by one of those huge cats in the redwood forest area. It tackled me right off of my mount while I was flying around looking at things and murdered me. I was laughing but also very pissed off, and wound up losing my flier as well.
So much good advice in here, much appreciated as I really do like the game a lot just tired of getting absolutely rekt lol.
Also once the dino hatches feed it fast and wait for its imprint timer , then try doing whatever it wants , it makes its stats better.
We all know how you feel. I died dozens of times when I first started playing. Hang in there, It does get better when you get new tames.
And yes, the thyla's are pretty evil, but good news is once they launch off the tree they hardly ever respawn. They're pretty rare. Use a few sacrificial lives to "de-tree" them and then they can be ignored after that. Once they're off the tree, they just run around on the ground trying to kill everything, and eventually get killed. They'll kill 100 things in the meantime, but they'll eventually take enough damage to kill them. As long as you don't do a "dino-wipe" admin command that resets everything, they'll hardly respawn.
True that it isn't intended to be played solo. But it is indeed possible to do it solo if you are good enough, even without the single player settings mode active to adjust creature stats. It takes a huge amount of effort, skill and experience, but it can be done.
The only part of the game that is legitimately completely impossible for a player to complete solo are the gauntlet missions on the Genesis Part 1 map. Those missions do not allow you to use your own equipment and tames, and the ones provided simply do not do enough damage for a solo player to be able to complete the objective before time runs out. It's intended that players would enter there as a tribe of multiple people, and they were never balanced to account for less than that.
Those missions have to be 'cheated' by using admin commands to count them as won if you are doing them solo. But everything else, from surviving, to completing the map bosses, to beating the entire game, is possible for a single player who knows what they are doing.
The two lower gauntlets can actually be done solo. I have a character on genesis with a ridiculous number of points in speed, and I just have to kite everything. If I stand still for even 2 seconds, I'm dead. The gamma is easy & fun. The middle one I've done a few times, but my hands were cramping up by the end. Sheer terror the entire time. Never doing that again.
The alpha gauntlet is as you said, utter impossible solo, just from a dps angle.
I've seen some videos of people using exploits to finish alpha. #1 was entering the arena, triggering it, and actually leaving the arena through one of the lower gates. When the event starts they're outside the arena, and they used parked tames shooting/hitting through the forcefields. Watched a guy using reapers (spin attack) and velonasaurs to whittle down the enemies through the forcefield. It took forever, looked idiotic, and has probably been patched out.
This makes me think of a related question of is it possible to play the game solo in a more primitive style way? Like limiting myself to stone tools and weapons without using much metal and no modern stuff or tek? I really enjoy playing this way, but it
seems extremely tough and I would probably need to rely on dinos like 100%?
I just had two triceratops, a low level and a level 35, get rekt and I also died to one level 4 alpha raptor. I even hit him with like 10 arrows, then fought with him with a spear and two trikes attacking him and he killed ALL OF US. Jfc...
You're going to need much better dinos to take on even a low level alpha, and I wouldn't even bother with arrows on one. I'm pretty sure you're going to need a bred dino for that, bred and leveled up. For now, when you see an alpha, run.
Alphas can have hit point totals in the 10's of thousands. Anything you can fire at them is a waste of time, and if you're on foot you will probably die. Then it kills all your tames.
You want good high level tames. I used to use an argentavis to kill them. Fly low and slow right down the back of a t-rex claws and biting. It was ridiculously slow, but safe. If i got hurt, I could fly away to heal and then fly back. Since I was flying, I didn't have to worry about much of anything else attacking me.
Nowadays I use a single thylacoleo. Their bite attack applies a bleed effect. The bleed does a huge % of the heavy lifting. Their bite attacks are also ridiculously wide. When riding a thyla, it can hit things almost a full body width to the right and left. So I run circles around the alpha, and zoom in to bite it on the ankles and then away, like I'm a fighter plane strafing a target. I'll run circles around it while the bleed effect drains thousands and thousands of health. Then nip in to refresh the bleed. It's all over pretty quickly too. With the bite being so wide, I never stop moving, I just strafe them.
High level desmodus and rhyniagnathia also work great. But desmo only come from the fjordur map, and rhynia... whew... those are fun to breed. (that's heavy sarcasm).
Beyond that, perseverance and just learning how to use what the game teaches you/provides you with (eg as other have said taming pens etc) like bug repellent metal tools/weapons and such. Also, since you're playing single player don't be afraid to dive in and make use of the workshop to get the game suited to your taste and play style.
It's a harsh but fun game (bugs aside) once you get your head around things
Technically it may be possible to do the first two maps in that style, yes. But it would be extremely difficult indeed.
*) You would be severely limiting your firepower and defence by not using riot tier armour and weapons such as the fabricated sniper rifle and pump-action shotgun. And if you went totally primitive, not even using the more basic ranged weapons crafted at the smithy, then knocking creatures out to tame them would be insane without a longneck rifle and tranq darts. An equus kick can cause some decent torpor, and a few other creatures can make dinos sleepy too, but you'd need a very tanky one to KO a rex, and some creatures have such low HP to torp ratio that they'd always die from the kicks before sleeping. You need the more potent tranq power from narco arrows or darts, or even narcotic traps, in order to sleep them.
*) You wouldn't be able to craft scuba gear, so resources like oil and silica pearls would be very hard to come by. You'd have to either get the small amounts that spawn on the shores in The Island snow biome, or tame a diplocaulus and ride that to go underwater since it can give you oxygen. But they can't fight and have no saddle for armour, so if you aren't alert in all directions at once to flee from any approaching danger you're gonna die pretty quick.
*) You wouldn't be able to craft air conditioners, which would make surviving the heat of Scorched Earth more difficult, and would greatly impact breeding creatures for mutations to take on the map bosses. You would have to tame dimetrodons and penguins to regulate the temperatures of incubating eggs instead, and they're difficult to use.
From the third map on, I'm not sure that playing in that style would be possible. In order to survive in the depths of Aberration you need a hazmat suit, which is crafted at the fabricator. And also the meta for defeating that map's boss uses a high quality pump-action shotty...beating that fight without one of those is much more tricky. And then the challenges only get more difficult from there on: beating the titan bosses on Extinction without technology would be borderline impossible, and some of the missions on the two Genesis maps require tek.
EDIT: Just thought of something else - one of the caves on The Island has poison gas in it, and requires either a gasmask or scuba chestpiece in order to survive in there. So without using those, you would never be able to get the artifact from that cave, and therefore never be able to beat one of the bosses. So The Island is not completable entirely without advanced technology, no.