Understanding Breeding and Imprinting

[TheRockFromHell]

Hello, I'm single player locally, the island, with vanilla settings, no mods, and trying to understand the process of breeding and imprinting. Read a lot through internet but still not understanding...

To give it a try, I bred a moschops egg. There was a timer showing "needs care" in xx:xx time while growing from juvenile to mature. Right immediately after 100% of that maturity process, it said something like "take me for a walk". The timer was not yet reached, several minutes left. I went for a walk with it, got 100% imprinting and when I ride it, on the top right corner it says +30% bonus.

There was no other imprinting / care request. It was only that single one right after 100% maturity, no care request during juventity, no care request after that.

Thought ok that went well, and bred 3 raptors and 1 ptera with same procedure (each egg on its own, one by one, not together). I constantly watched each egg, from 0 to 100% maturity process. I kept in mind the "need care" timer and watched it even after fully matured for that remaining time (the timer disappeared right after 100% although there was remaining time?). But there is no imprinting at all...? None of that 4 eggs showed a specific "need care" request. Neither during juventity, nor when or after matured... ?

I read about imprinting and obviously I don't understand it at all, haha, hmm. When has imprinting usually to be done, during growth, after maturing, or more than one time? When and how long is / are the "needs care" messages shown? Right after that timer ran out, or after 100% maturity? Why did I manage to imprint that moschop that easy, while the others failed completely?

Another question about level of bred creatures, for example, the 3 raptors, their mom was level mid 50s, their dad mid 40s. Between the first and the third egg, both mom and dad grow by one or two levels, but all three eggs gave a raptor of lvl 4 only. I read the individually levelled stats of parents (health etc) are not inherited, but how about the main level? Why only lvl 4 if parents where 50+ and 40+? The eggs were all at 99% health, does egg's health matter? Did I feed the babies wrong, I gave em raw meat?

Thanks for any advice.

[DreadCthulhu]

Imprinting settings are a pain to get set correctly; you can only do imprints to babies, and if things are set wrong some creatures will grow up before you can do an imprint. I would suggets looking up some single player settings guides to get things right; if you do mess up since it is single player using the admin option "setimprintquality 1.0" while looking at a tame is an option.

As for how the babies work, all creatures have 1 inital level, and then levels into their stats, that add up to the total level. The levels that can get passed on are the levels a creature has when first tamed. For example, say you find a level 3 raptor. It will have 1 initial level, and 2 levels that get randomly assigned to one of the 7 stats. If you tame it, that 1 extra level from taming effectiveness also gets randomly assigned to a stat. Those would be the base levels that can get passed on for breeding. You are right, the levels from XP do nothing.

When the game creates a baby, it randomly picks the level count for each stat from one parent or the other. If you had two raptors that tamed out at level 4, and happened to get the same stat rolls (say 1 level in health, weight, stam each), then all their babies will also hatch at level 4. (Well, unless you get a mutation, but mutating such low level tames would be silly).

[TheRockFromHell]

Thank you for the detailed answer, much appreciated.

Ok then my settings are definitely messed up although I didn't change anything myself. Its the reason why the "care" timer is always longer than the full maturity takes, no chance to do any imprinting that way. That one moschop was luck or a bug then.

I'll look for some single player settings as you suggested. Mutation is something that I haven't dealt with yet. I now understand more and more that ARK has an enormous range of details, almost overwhelming for a single playing guy, if you wanna make it right, and I do so.

[william_es]

If you're able to install mods, I highly recommend installing the mod Structures+.

It has a lot of special structures that will make breeding easier, and structures that add some automation to really tedious tasks.

As far imprinting goes, there's a Structures plus item that will automatically imprint babies and feed them. It's called the Nanny. Every few seconds it updates the imprinting automatically, making it equal to the maturation % or slightly exceed it by 1%. Works even if the dino is almost fully grown. If you lead a baby that's 95% grown (with no imprinting) into range of the Nanny, a few seconds later it will be 95 or 96% imprinting, and just keep imprinting from there.

For breeding, a baby has a 55% of getting the higher level stat of either parent, and 45% chance of the lower stat. It doesn't sound like a huge difference, but over time, you can breed babies until a single baby has the combination of the highest best stats from either parent. It just takes time. A lot of people speed up the breeding rates to make the mothers give birth faster, because some dinos that give live birth have gestation periods over an hour.

[TheRockFromHell]

Thanks for adviced mods, I've read about them earlier but did not want to use mods, at that time. Now, I've spent lot more time in ark than ever in my life in any other game, and I feel I'm now ready to actually really start playing ark, most of it still to do, try, discover, beat. So I think its absolutely legit to alter settings and use mods as single player, even a must; otherwise its a huuuge effort. I like it, and am inpressed about how extensive the game is, but alone it's very very time consuming.

[william_es]

Originally posted by TheRockFromHell:

Thanks for adviced mods, I've read about them earlier but did not want to use mods, at that time. Now, I've spent lot more time in ark than ever in my life in any other game, and I feel I'm now ready to actually really start playing ark, most of it still to do, try, discover, beat. So I think its absolutely legit to alter settings and use mods as single player, even a must; otherwise its a huuuge effort. I like it, and am inpressed about how extensive the game is, but alone it's very very time consuming.

Yeah, there are some aspects of the game that can be kind of ridiculous. Tedious and time consuming as well.

Structures plus adds a lot of things that create some automation for some tasks in the game. The things you build will take care of a lot of work for you, giving you more time to actually play and have fun.

The Nanny (which I already mentioned), feeds babies and imprints them.

The hatchery will collect fertilized eggs, and start slowly hatching them (eggs get teleported right into the hatchery while you're playing somewhere else).

There's another structure that collects anything that drops from dinos (poop, snow owl pellets, achatina paste), and it will send that stuff to other place (poop to dung beetles, pellets to gacha, etc).

another structure collects crops that grow, and put them into storage for you.

[TheRockFromHell]

Originally posted by DreadCthulhu:

As for how the babies work, all creatures have 1 inital level, and then levels into their stats, that add up to the total level. The levels that can get passed on are the levels a creature has when first tamed. For example, say you find a level 3 raptor. It will have 1 initial level, and 2 levels that get randomly assigned to one of the 7 stats. If you tame it, that 1 extra level from taming effectiveness also gets randomly assigned to a stat. Those would be the base levels that can get passed on for breeding. You are right, the levels from XP do nothing.

When the game creates a baby, it randomly picks the level count for each stat from one parent or the other. If you had two raptors that tamed out at level 4, and happened to get the same stat rolls (say 1 level in health, weight, stam each), then all their babies will also hatch at level 4. (Well, unless you get a mutation, but mutating such low level tames would be silly).

I now had an offspring that was born one level higher than the higher level of both its parents when they were tamed / born. No muations on full tree. How's that possible?

[Giacomo]

When it comes out higher level than either parent without a mutation that means it got the higher stats from each parent.

If you are serious about breeding the best stats together its worth making a spreadsheet with your dino stats so you can see which ones you need to breed together for combining the highest stats that your tames have.

[TheRockFromHell]

Thanks Shifty. Up to now I had the most important infos of each dino in it's name, instantly visible. Seems I have to move on to rocket science now to get really serious ;-) all the details in this game are pretty demanding, even overstraining...

[Giacomo]

I highly recommend using the mod awesome spyglass. It shows you how many levels a dino has in each stat, which makes it easy to record in a spreadsheet to keep track of which ones you should breed together.

[P.]

About level:
- Each stat before taming is a wild level.
- Each leveled stat after taming is a tamed level.

All "tamed stats" are ignored on breeding, babies can only have wild stats from their parents. They get two extra levels per mutation too.

So taming low level dinos is a waste of time.

[Giacomo]

For the best chance at getting good stats to breed into your dinos, you want to tame as close to max level as you can get. However it is still possible to get a slightly lower level tame that has had a lucky roll on stats and stacked 1 stat really high and making it useful to breed that stat into your line.

If you only have say 1 really good female and a much lower level male, it is still possible to end up with a male that has the same stats and level as the female eventually by breeding over and over until all the female's stats transfer into a male. It is much better and faster to just spend the time finding a good wild male though.

Also, the overall level your baby comes out at isnt that important as it could be higher and look good, but have only got higher as it transferred a really high food or oxygen level from its parents, which are mostly useless.

Breeding to min/max stats is a whole game in itself.

[TheRockFromHell]

Originally posted by P.:

So taming low level dinos is a waste of time.

From the sight of a single player, I learned a lot by taming dinos, did not matter what level, one has always first to learn, Pretty much everybody out there in the ark won't have a lvl 150 rex or giga as its first own tame I think... ;-)

[Giacomo]

Low level dinos have their uses at the early stages of a new playthrough. Trying to breed them is a waste of time though.

[sonix2003]

From your description I assume you are playing a single player game. There is an option "use single player settings" which activates a couple of settings. See: https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/forums/topic/203535-patch-259-hibernation-single-player-settings/
The predifined single player settings have badly chosen values, that won't give 100% imprints (if any) for low tier dinos (like Dilo, Raptor, ...).

The game multiplayer settings are different, but make sense for a 24/7 environment. I disabled the "single player settings" and changed some of the advanced settings to my preference (usually about 1,5-2.0x of the multiplayer settings regarding taming speed, dino growth aso). Some people go for 10x/20x - too extreme for my taste, but everybody has a different opinion about this.

If you change the "baby mature speed" you must also adjust the "baby cuddle interval multiplier" to the reciprocal value (e.g. mature speed = 2, cuddle interval = 0.5) to get a chance for 100% imprints while the dinos are growing.

[TheRockFromHell]

Sonic, exactly, I tweaked my settings just that far to fix those bad default values for higher tier dinos, the others just don't matter as no imprint needed if you won't ride them anyways.