How to: Tame Mesopithecus

[Ace Trainer Mitch]

Hello everyone, today I will be writing a quick guide for those having trouble taming the adorable little scamp, Mesopithecus!

STEP 1 - Where the heck are you Monkey!!!???

Mesopithecus are comon in jungle and wood land, often finding their way to the inland beaches due to wandering curiosity or running from predators. They are prehaps now the smallest tamable creature currently on the ARK, even dwarfed by the all mighty Dodo. Becuase of this, Mesopithescus can be extremely difficult to spot by eye, even on beautiful high graphic settings. These sneaky little buggers also tend to blend right in to the berry bushes they forage for food, which makes them even more of a frustration to spot. After spending about 6 hours hunting our newest poop throwing friends, I've found a few things useful for looking for them specifically;

- When searching the appropriate spawn areas, riding a mount low to the ground is strongly recommended . Not only will the monkeys be easier to see, but riding larger dinos means you have a chance to stomp on them :( This is no good, as it will send your potential best buddy running to the hills.

- Sound is your best bet to find the Meso, not sight. They may be small but they sure make a heck of a racket! Turn off your music, mute your teamspeak, and you surley wont be able to miss the familar racket of "OOOOOOOOO OOOO AHHHHH"

- Mesos are more often then not, in a group of 2 or more. If you see one, take a look around: There may be one more to your desire of level/colour scheme a few short steps away!

- Some areas i've spefically had good luck finding Mesopithecus are: 68,27 - 30,20 - 40,66

STEP 2 - STOP RUNNING AWAY I JUST WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND DAMNIT

Here comes the fun part - Actually taming this little bugger. I can honestly say that other then the time it takes to time, Mesopithecus is an even more challenging tame then it's big cousin, Gigantopithecus. There is a certain finese and tact that is required while preforming these new non violent tames, and some certain factors you may not have considered while attempting them before.

I am quite a big fan of this new way of taming as it feels more live like and dynamic, although there is some issues to be raised for players with high ping/ rubberbanding on their server. I am fortunate enough to not have either of this issues, so I can not speak for the players who do - You may quite honestly have difficulty taming these creatures the proper/intended way.

Assuming you do not have connection/rubberbanding issues, here is a step by step process on how to tame a monkey you have spotted without issue;

1. Clear any aggresive dinos/ insects in a wide circular area around the monkey. If it takes any damage, the tame will fail.

2. Making sure your appropriate food is in the 10 slot of your hotbar (Dodo Kibble, Citronal, Mejo Berries are the top 3 best), approach the monkey from behind. As you get close, make sure you are looking directly at it to get the pop up with the creatures information.

3. At this point, you want to verrrrry slowwwwwly tap your forward direction key until you see the message "Press E to feed". Once you have fed the monkey, back off immiedietly. Hanging around will spook your new little buddy.

4. Repeat this process until the tame is complete!

NOTE - Approaching the Mesopithecus from behind appears to be the ONLY way to feed it without spooking. If you approach it from the front of its vision it will be spooked and run away 90 precent of the time. If the monkey gets spooked, give it lots of space and it will eventually calm down. If it has not taken any damage, then your progress on the tame will not have been harmed and you can continue on with it as normal, very similar to losing aggro on the Gigantopithescus. I beleive this is the biggest factor to the difficulty people have been having taming this little guy.

I hope this quick guide helps those who have been having trouble with this tame, or even finding the elusive little buggers! I promise you though, once you have one riding on your back, your going to love this game just that little bit more :)

[Fogno]

Great guide! :D Thanks for the dodo kibble tip.

Unfortunately there's still a few bugs that make them keel over and die or refuse to be fed... But this solves my problem of not understanding them in the first place xD

[Do-It-Fluid]

Thanks for the information. Now I just need to find one :)

[PocketYoda]

Any bad latency makes the taming almost impossible.. Always use kibble its dodo so its a lot faster.

[Dyeshan]

If you insist on taming by walking up behind him I use forward button with strafe held in. So I am slightly to the side so when he suddenly stops I am not bumping him and scaring him away. So you would be facing his side as you forward strafe. Have tamed apes without even bumping once like this.

Though it's a million times easier to get someone to pick him up in an argent then the second person just feeds him from behind. No fuss maximum feed efficiency because you are giving him food as soon as he is ready. Talking about the small monkey of course you can't pick up the large one

[Mr Pie 5]

I like how much detail you've put into this, you've got some good ideas here that I don't normally think of when I try to help people with the tame. However, I do want to poke at a couple things you said:

Originally posted by MASTUR CHEEF:

Making sure your appropriate food is in the 10 slot of your hotbar (Dodo Kibble, Citronal, Mejo Berries are the top 3 best), approach the monkey from behind.

I tried to feed them the advanced crops (citronal,rockarrot,longrass,savoroot) and they refused to eat them, they weren't recognized as food.

Originally posted by MASTUR CHEEF:

NOTE - Approaching the Mesopithecus from behind appears to be the ONLY way to feed it without spooking. If you approach it from the front of its vision it will be spooked and run away 90 precent of the time.

They can be tamed from the front, but it's riskier. Not because of line-of-sight, but because they're more likely to move forward than backwards. Keeping in mind that there's only a small difference between their startle and feed ranges, you can be just on the edge of the startle range when he makes a small movement forward, only to be immediately scared off.

Also worth noting is that, at least in my experience, they always seem to run in a straight line when they get scared, so that can make it easier to find them after they've calmed down.

[Kal]

Crouch-walking helped me greatly. Slower movement speed and you're closer to their level so your distance from them doesn't seem as close as standing.

[owchrodale30]

EASY Tame in 5 Min.. Have 1 person pick up the monkey with a bird. The monkey does not agro from the bird. Fly close to the ground DO NOT DROP IT.
Have a 2ed person feed it..
We tamed 3 in under 10 min using Dodo kibble.

http://arkservers.net/1/search/?term=Rark-PvP
feel free to join us. Ill help you tame one.

[Armitage Shanks]

The biggest issue isn't the method of taming. Approaching cautiously/outside LOS, or crouched makes no difference, the spooking is a game of Russian roulette. The biggest issue with taming mesopithecus is that it almost always bugs out, and starts losing health instead of hunger, and eventually just drops dead. Here's a video I recorded after a monkey started to refuse food altogether (ie. it would just says "Wait until it's hungry again" instead of "Press E to feed it a berry/kibble/etc".), and the health would start to slowly decrease until the monkey drops dead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-SqUEg7Loo

[Armitage Shanks]

Originally posted by owchrodale30:

EASY Tame in 5 Min.. Have 1 person pick up the monkey with a bird. The monkey does not agro from the bird. Fly close to the ground DO NOT DROP IT.
Have a 2ed person feed it..
We tamed 3 in under 10 min using Dodo kibble.

http://arkservers.net/1/search/?term=Rark-PvP
feel free to join us. Ill help you tame one.

This method is also hit and miss, because if the monkey spooks while being held by an argy/ptera, it will never stop being spooked, even after it's dropped and runs away.

The issue with the tame isn't that people are too supid/not skilled enough/don't know how. The issue is it's horribly broken (more so than gigantopithecus was on day 1), and it's all but impossible to tame any meso above a certain level (depending on tame multiplier) without kibble taming it on the first or second feeding. On the server I play on( difficulty 4, 6x taming), level 16+ are practically untamable, unless you can somehow miraculously not spook the monkey.

[sriggle]

You can also pick them up and drop them inside a prebuilt structure. I have one on top of my base that I use to tame raptors, scorpions, etc that I want. Pteranodons and Argentavis' can both pick them up.

[owchrodale30]

we tamed 3 using the bird with no issues. had one aggro, i dropped it let it de-aggro after 1-2 min and picked it right back up and tamed it.. the key is the Kibble.

[di eshor ribly]

Originally posted by Armitige:

On the server I play on( difficulty 4, 6x taming), level 16+ are practically untamable, unless you can somehow miraculously not spook the monkey.

On my server (3x tame, difficulty 4) I tamed a 56 meso with 3 kibbles, spooked it 3-4 times, and had no issues. Though, if it had taken more time I'm sure I would have run into the "draining hunger" bug, as that was starting to go when I finished taming. Just takes patience and fast legs.

[Barclim20]

Thank you!!! Ive been flying around on my argy trying to find this thing for forever thinking it was the size of a dilo or something. Now I know where I went wrong!

[Mr Pie 5]

Originally posted by Armitige:

The biggest issue isn't the method of taming. Approaching cautiously/outside LOS, or crouched makes no difference, the spooking is a game of Russian roulette. The biggest issue with taming mesopithecus is that it almost always bugs out, and starts losing health instead of hunger, and eventually just drops dead. Here's a video I recorded after a monkey started to refuse food altogether (ie. it would just says "Wait until it's hungry again" instead of "Press E to feed it a berry/kibble/etc".), and the health would start to slowly decrease until the monkey drops dead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-SqUEg7Loo

The reason you couldn't feed that monkey was because it was scared (as evidenced by the screech, jump, and refusal to move in any other direction) and you can't feed them when they're scared. He was trying to run away, but those rocks were blocking his path. When you walked away, you didn't put anywhere near enough distance between him and you for him to naturally calm down. You also could have broken the rocks to allow him to run, or picked him up with your Argent and placed him somewhere else.
I've been hearing about this "bug" a lot but I've never encountered it myself. Is this what's really been stumping everybody?

[GeekyGek]

simplest way I've found - tranq the darn monkey. build a box around it with a hatch and ladder. they won't climb the ladder, lets you get into the box. go off and wait for them to wake back up, come back and feed them when they have calmed down. easier then trying to chase the bugger all over the place because you got a little too close. they don't run a tiny when you spook them, they run pretty far. sure if you can box them in somewhere its going to be easier, but building a little hut with no doors to trap them seems easiest.