How to Make Babies in ARK! (Updated with list of Creatures that currently Make Babies!)

[Jeremy Drake Stieglitz]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqkwykA4iFw
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=534341691
Here are the creatures that currently support babies. More will be added later this week (including the Flyers etc), and we should be getting to the mammal pregnancy lifecycle next week:
Trike
Raptor
Bronto
Rex
Stego
Spino
Dodo
Parasaur
Dilo
Anky
Sarco
Turtle
Pachy

At least Dino babies for now. Please bear in mind this is the first iteration on the baby-makin' system, and it will doubtless become more advanced and better as we proceed forwards in development.

First, all your previous eggs are just good for eating. They're not fertilized. To get fertilized eggs, the first step in v219 is to get two tamed dinos of the same species together. Not all Dino species will support babies yet in v219, but most will. You can tell if your Dino species supports babies because it'll say on their HUD "Enable Wandering to Mate". So bring a lovely male and female (tamed) together, set them both to "Enable Wandering", and most likely pen them in to ensure they are kept quite close together for a time. When sufficiently close, beating hearts will appear over their heads, and the mating bar will appear on the female Dino's HUD. Both Dino's HUDs will also indicate who they're mating with, specifically.

When the Mating bar is complete, she'll drop a fertilized egg. She won't be able to mate again until a subsequent Mating Wait interval has passed, which is indicated on her HUD. (Males can mate as often as needed.)

The Fertilized Egg itself only incubates when dropped, not in Inventory. When dropped a Fertilized Egg won't spoil, but to incubate it must be kept at a certain temperature range depending on the species (this also factors in insulation). If outside of this temperature range, it won't make incubation progress, and it will lose "Fertilied Egg Health" over time and be destroyed if zero. This is all indicated on the HUD when looking at a fertilized Egg, and its description also tells you its Parents.

After being fully and successfully incubated, the baby dino will pop out of the egg. Babies initially have extremely low health and carrying capacity and food, so you need to carefully feed and take care of them in their first moments of life, or they'll soon die. They dynamically can carry more, gain more HP, and food capacity, as they mature over time. Babies are unclaimed initially, so you should "Imprint" on them to claim them after birth.

Babies can not be ridden or attack until FULLY MATURED (for now). They'll flee any fight.

The Baby's base stats are a random combination of its parents' base (original pre-tamed) stats, and so are its colors. This is where things get interesting:

Because the baby randomly inherits any of its parents' stats, the baby can have more "total" stats than either parent. For example, if you had a Trike Male Parent with "Natural Max" HP (Max wild stats all dumped into HP), and a Trike Female Parent with "Natural Max" Stamina, mating the two of them together COULD result in a baby with BOTH Natural Max HP AND Natural Max Stamina. You could then mate said baby (once grown) with another baby (once grown) that happened to inherit Natural Max Attack Damage & Natural Max Inventory Weight, to create an even more powerful 3rd generation Trike. And so forth. By using this (random but 70% biased towards inheriting the better stats) selective breeding, you can breed out the stats you don't want, breed in the ones you do, and eventually with enough effort, breed a complete max-base-statted Uber-Dino... and the world shudders.

However, you don't get to see the stats until after the Egg is hatched, so that could take some effort ;)

Also, the dinos don't have to be "in-Tribe" to mate, they just have to be non-aggressed and tamed and in proximity. So a Tribe could, ahem, loan out their prized breeding dinos, and both Tribes split the resulting eggs, etc.

And oh yeah the younger a baby is, the corresponding less resources it gives if u harvest it, but the more chance of prime meat you get. Newborns are pretty much guaranteed to give a couple primes >:D

Finally, babies don't have an "age" in days, since given the speed of ark days are rather arbritrary. They have a maturation progress bar on their HUD, which they grow in real-time, and they're known as Babies < %20, Juveniles <%50, or Adolescents <100% depending on their maturation progress.

So yeah it definitely could be a significant time & skill investment to breed a master race of super-dinos but... aren't kids in real life? ;)
(ok, that came out wrong! :)

Have fun all, and as mentioned, this is just phase 1 first pass. I plan on several additional layered systems as we proceed, including random mutations and family trees, and soon enough, mammalian pregnancy.

All the best,
Drake

[Darwiin]

2015 or 2016?

*This video is not available*

[Jeremy Drake Stieglitz]

Err... tonight? ;)

[Darwiin]

Originally posted by Drake:

Err... tonight? ;)

Thanks for the answer! you're the first able to answer me

And seriously i can't watch the video (i live in europe)

[Sovvagn]

This is going to be EPIC!!!

[Quail]

AH!

[BadgerBacon]

Awesome!

[NocturnalLlama]

w00t!

[missWhite-_-]

Damn time zones:ooo

[GP]

Originally posted by Deathwill:

Originally posted by Drake:

Err... tonight? ;)

Thanks for the answer! you're the first able to answer me

And seriously i can't watch the video (i live in europe)

It was obvious it was 2015, asking if it was 2016 was stupid!

And the video in this thread is just a song so don't worry about it.

[graystar19]

so cool!!!

[Brob93]

Originally posted by Drake:

Err... tonight? ;)

In what alternate universe?

[GearedGeek]

NICE!

[Fuffy]

Would it be possible to create another video without the music? I live in germany and cannot watch it because of our beloved GEMA :|

[White, the Loiterer]

Yay

[Ant2001]

Originally posted by missWhite-_-:

Damn time zones:ooo

i now right 10:20 pm here