Ragnarok - Day 36

I went back and got a better night shot of the 3d scroll wall.  I didn't get a huge amount done today.  I did a decent scout of the beach front properties around the playable map.  I think I've found a spot I like for a future build.  I'm thinking more and more about finding a new server to play on.  I've been watching a bit of Ark stream in the last few days and interacted with a few new players and I miss the community side of things.  I've had a few server invites in the last month one in the last few days which has been very tempting although harvest rates are a fair bit lower than I've played in a long time.  There is one server I would love to play on but it is very exclusive and invite only.  I would love to play on it because my builds would get seen by far more people and with a little luck inspire a more builders to try something new.  I would have to really up my game to get an invite and even then I doubt I would meet the criteria (those that know me would prob guess which server it is and why it would be a long shot).  But I feel like dreaming big even if it never comes to pass, it will fuel my motivation, at least for a time :)

This shot gives a nice idea of size.

I did make a greenhouse today.  And a couple of other tidbits around the way station.  I built the greenhouse in the water running past the waystation.  I made all the glass foundations clear so you can see the water running through it. 

I also made a connecting passage to the way station.  At this point the plots are empty.  I have more than enough plots around the map but I can't help myself sometimes.  I just felt like building something lol.  I've had a LOT of fog today.  not sure whats up with it but its been a pain to screencap and during my scout mission.  Had to stop a couple of times as I couldn't see 2ft in front of me.  The other additions I made weren't really worth screencapping.  

Ragnarok - Day 35

I finished the waystation today.  All the walls are now capped and lighting in place.

I changed my mind on the scrollwork wall and decided to make it 3d.  It came out fantastic!!!  I did have a better shot of it but one of the lights didn't turn on or flickered for it and I didn't notice.  

The diag slices wall I'm not as pleased with.  The way that the sloped walls snap its really messy looking I wouldn't build it again.  If the sloped walls get revamped I would consider doing it again without the top capping.

So the extra lights were added to this side and reposted as promised.  As simple as this is I really like the effect. 

Now the outside of the extended region has been completed I'm really loving this area.  The whole thing is coming together really nicely!

 

Here is a topshot of the waystation.  With all the diff wall styles in the shot it really has an interesting look at night :)

Ragnarok - Day 34

I've extended out the unfinished side of the waystation wall and added a second entrance.  I used forcefield walls to make a custom shaped gate.  I've used this wall design before and really like it so the extension will all use this particular design.

I used the same style of arch as the other entrance.  I'm really liking the style of it and the little overlapping piece at the top helps break up the lines from being blocky.  

I assembled one of my now semi famous full sized taming pen.  Dual height with greatly enlarged drop zone.  I decided not to encase the sides as  I normally do which has given it a bizarre look.  When I placed the tek XL hatch I found that it snapped below the ceilings.  So I dropped some railings off the platform and made a half height level to enclose the bottom of the hatch as well.  

As you can see from the top this has ended up with a wonderfully flush seam.  I could almost imagine it is a star gate :)  So I've had a few private messages from people that have told me this design of mine has appeared in a number of youtuber videos since the tour Maz did.  I'm stoked.  I would love to get some links but neither of the people that told me could remember which vids they were.  Which is unfortunate as I would love to see what improvements people have come up with.  I don't mind people using my designs as I want to see people expand on what I've created.  If you do use my designs please link me in your vids etc and drop me a line.  If you have improved on my design I'll link to you so people can see how an idea can evolve :)  Remember I want to inspire and BE inspired to build bigger and better!

Ragnarok - Day 33

So today ended up being a rather productive day and I have loads of pics to post.  I finished building the waystation and decided it needed to be walled in.  There were too many wild dinos running around and getting stuck on things so I started a wall.  Which became many walls.  I kind of got carried away and ended up making a wall sampler.  Now I have to note that its not all finished yet but its WELL into the construction. 

 

I'm going to start with this pic.  Obviously a night shot but gives a rough look at all the diff wall types I made.  I also made one entranceway (the other will be placed on the left of this image where there is currently no wall).  The I didn't want the entrance to have a gate as such so I build a bridge structure with sloped trapdoor 'drawbridge'.

I've used this kind of 'drawbridge' in the past to great effect.  I like it because gates can often detract from designs.  

I'm extremely happy with how the lighting turned out on this one.  I cheated and used two glass walls at the front.  I could probably have managed some funky snap point connections but this was far quicker and less fiddly to deal with.

As I've said before I'm not a big fan of ceiling thick structures and like a little bit of something to make them look more sturdy.  In this case I decided I wanted a halfwall above and below.  For those of you that don't know how to achieve this kind of snap here is the basic idea.  You simply add a wall under the ceiling and a railing will happily snap into place.  

Its not a hard snap to get in fact it seems to rather like this exact position and doesn't jump around as much as other snaps often do.  Simply remove the wall and hey presto you have a halfwall above and below.

You can sink the top railing so it snaps to the bottom one or keep it sitting on top of the ceiling.  I kept it on the ceiling as I wanted the nice line that it produces.

 

This is the first section of wall I did.  I wanted to see if I could add some basic scrolls to a wall.  I could have made them 3d but I wanted something more in line with being an actual wall.  When building a wall as long as the first couple of layers are solid small dinos can't get through.  The top doesn't have to be solid because bigger dinos sure as hell can't fit :)

It looks far better at night but then again I think most things do in this game :)

This is the second section of wall that I did and its far from completion.  I had an idea for the next section of wall so I didn't finish this one off.  Its missing its capping on the right as well as the entire outside.  

I need to work on the lighting on this one but I had only chucked a few random torches in for the night shot screencap.  I will repost when its complete.  

Now this is my favourite!  Zig zag walls and an entrance that looks nice and grand!  This leads onto the walkway that I posted up top.  This is why some of the walls weren't completed before moving to the next.  I had an idea for this side and just went with it.  If I have a good idea I often will stop what I'm doing to pursue it while it was fresh.  And in this case it worked out perfect.

Here is the day shot on it.  Not quite so awesome without the 'mood lighting' but its definitely got presence!

This wall I tried something new.  Alternating sides I snapped tri ceilings into place and built up off them.  It allowed me to make structures that didn't quite touch which shows glimpses of the outside.

It looks great at night especially as your moving around it.  Lighting really makes a difference.  There are times where I wish the game was all night time.  Then I run into troodons and wonder what I was thinking lol.

I went with a checker board design on this wall.  It was remarkably quick to put up in comparison to the other sides.  Probably because its mostly just a few lines of ceilings across with some wall seperations.  But again it turned out looking pretty good.  I had originally thought to cap the top but I think it looks better that I didn't.

Here is the night shot.  Again it needs some work done in regards to lighting so that there is better coverage.  Another I will repost once I get it sorted.  

The waystation was completed although looking at it now I think I may have forgotten to add the extra round of ramps to the foundations.  I must check into that lol.

This sides of the waystation supports are now capped and as you can see the sections that have no support have a hollowed out groove.  I wanted it to look like it just slots together :)

Here is the top telepad.  Nice and basic!

And while I was up capping the top telepad I looked down to see this.  I really really like how this is looking!  Views like this are why I enjoy building in Ark :)

Ragnarok - Day 32

So I had another day off yesterday.  I had plenty of time to play but I really wasn't feeling it.  I disable the collision check code and completely spaced on testing to see if it fixed the bug I had.  Thats because I loaded up and looked at what I had made and decided on a slightly different route.  I decided to do some scrollwork without the 'wings' on the side.  Vanilla scrolls I suppose you could call them.  I went with this idea as I wanted to be able blend them into the tower a bit more.  I'm splitting my waystation into two.  I have a ground access teleport, a tower and then another air access teleport on top.  I wanted this for moving the quetz cage around the map without risking it so close to the ground.  I could have just put a shield down but I wanted to avoid using shields.  I used shields for this when I played online as I was trying to avoid adding too many structures to the map.  This was back when I was under the impression that structures caused server lag and was trying not to make others gameplay suffer.

I still need to add more foundations to support the platform thats going on top and then blend that into the ground.  I laughed when I got to this point and started snapping the screencaps as it looks like I've built a mini obelisk.  I had even added a transmitter into the structure so the beam of light appeared.  I wanted that for dark nights so it was easier to spot the location.

The tower isn't crazy tall.  I considered making it above the tree line which I could have done easy enough but the area is open enough not impede a quetz cage flying too or from the top.  This is meant to be just a way station not another monolith lol.  I spent a number of hours on this project and am quite pleased with the result.  I don't think it will take too much longer to complete it as long as I don't hit any hiccups.  The top platform will have a ridge around the outside to add to the look of thickness.  I want it to look solid and just a ceiling would look flimsy.  I've checked the teleporter range and it comes out to the edge of the scroll.  I'll add some extra angle shots once I've completed it.

S+ Bug?

Was trying to get some building in this morn and encountered this problem.  I know there was changes to collision code but I thought that was only relating to foreign objects not other building blocks.

So it comes up saying obstructed so I removed the wall and attached ceiling.

Now it will place.

Adding the wall back in and again can't place?!?  I've built like this recently and not had an issue.  Something perhaps broke in one of the last big updates?  I'm going to post this to the S+ bug section I will mess with the collision code after work to see if it makes a diff.

Ragnarok - Day 31

Not a huge building day I'm afraid.  Spent a fair bit of time exploring the map to find a spot to build my first way station.  I did however build a deepwater pier for the new submarine.  The lil dock area I orig built is way too shallow for the likes of that.  Oh and for anyone else that is curious:  No I don't have leeds on this map.  I had a few private messages asking about it :)  I think the leeds was a bad addition to the game.  So many people love rafts and raft building especially early game to have Leeds there just to mess with them (wouldn't be so bad if blocking the raft in foundationss worked as armour) is a bit of a dick move.  I also don't have Giga or Titano's on this map.  These are dino's that I don't think belong in PvE and its my world so its my rules ;)

I decided to use the underwater pods for this pier so that I could do the glass sides and see underwater much better.  The glass sides took much longer than I would have liked due to the Model and Transparency gun not targeting the glass.  The pods seem to get in the way a lot which is a pain when your remodelling lots of glass.  

This is a back/side shot of the submarine raft from the new pier.  I'm still pleased with how it turned out.  I'm not a huge fan of leaving the pods as standard I would rather replace them with another material and make them invisible but the increase of structure count would be crazy high.

So I started my first way station in the redwoods.  I've been messing with how I want it to look.  I've replaced the entire thing (foundations and all) a few times now.  I have an idea I'm aiming for but as with all Ark projects I'm keeping an open mind as I may adapt it as I go along.  This is still a very early stage of building.  As anyone that has been through the rest of the posts if I really get stuck in buildings can go up exceedingly fast.  Once I nail the look I'm after it should progress a lot faster.

I also decided to alter the font back to something more simple.  I had to go looking for some information for someone from one of my earlier posts and hadn't realised how much of a pain it was to read.  Hopefully this is an improvement.

Ragnarok - Day 29 and 30

I wanted to have a play with S+ underwater pods and adv rafts to make a sub.  Now I was orig planning to do a traditional sub but I realized I didn't need to conform to that.  I messed with the design a number of times and spent a lot more time than I would like to admit trying to blend the change in angles into each other.

Its funny the end result makes me think of the Daedalus from Stargate.  I had thought of removing all the pods sides and replacing them with another material but I hit the build limit.  I managed to remove a number of tiles I had put in place mostly to assist snapping.  This is a method I've used in the past.  Leave a few extra things in place then as you fill it you have a small margin for error.  When you run out of tiles you can just trim out the extras.  The forward sections are all one way glass with no sides so the view is great :)

The raft has a few foundations just to cover up the wood and I've added a raised landing platform.

The inside is surprisingly spacious, far more spacious than I really needed lol.  Like that hasn't happened before ;)

This is the central passage to the front of the ship.  I've not snapped many internal shots because of the angles it doesn't show things off well enough to bother.  This was orig going to be two posts but I forgot to make the post after the first day so I decided to just merge the two.  Its not like I had a huge amount of content to spread into two because of the nature of the build there was a lot of adding and removing trying to get the best shape with the space I had.

Ragnarok - Day 28

This will be the first post I've made without any images.  I added a number of canvas's around the place and tidied up a few last bits today.  There was a lot of stuff done but nothing to show for it lol.  I dressed the mystery bedroom under the ramp but that won't be capped onto here just yet.  These two bases are about as complete as they are going to be for now.  I will work on a proper dock near my seapen at some point but that will prob happen after I've built a few rafts.  The next item on my agenda will be to construct some way stations in various spots of the map yet to be decided.

I'm glad to finally feel like such a big project is pretty much done (even a couple of days ago I wasn't sure how long it was going to take).  It has already been a fair bit longer than I had expected it to take but you get that with the big jobs lol.  As I have said in a recent post there are rooms still empty in the storage base but that was always the plan.  I need space to expand into :)

Oh I just realized I put together a quetz cage in the last few days and didn't screencap it.  I must get round to snapping it :)

So the storage base ended up with a number of vanity builds but not limited to:

Courtroom
Library
'Dance' club ;)
Boxing ring
Inverted Towers
 - 1 with Cafe
 - 1 with private quarters
Kitchen quarters with Bar

The 'Fortress' base has:

School
Cryo Facility
Medical Ward
Medical Lab
 - With Quarantine room
Guest wing
 - Sleeping quarters
 - Living area
Barracks
Underwater hive room

I think summing it up that I actually have more vanity builds than my last completed big base did (the one from Mazion's tour vid)

I still plan to get round to posting a few snaps from some of my original Ark builds too so there will be more things to come :)

Ragnarok - Day 27

Well today turned out really great.  I had a buddy of mine (L360) pay me a visit today.  He didn't get the full tour due to time limitations (that we breached anyways lol).  Finally got some decent feedback on the progress of things which filled me with a renewed vigour.  We ended up in "Gardeners, Gardeners, Gardeners" where he had a great idea for some shelving behind the bar using catwalks (like the bar is made from).

For starters this is where my storage base is located.  It turns out that L360's base is only just a stones throw away from my build location lol what are the chances ;)

Here is us mucking around with the shelving.  Which evolved rather quickly.  His thoughts were to trim it with a pillar which turned out to be a bit of a hassle with snaps and such.  Even with the pillar breaching the ground it kept disconnecting when we dropped out the supporting ceiling lol.  In the end we managed a work around which lead onto a far more annoying to snap idea of adding doors to the shelves and turning it into a cabinet!

It turned out amazing!!!  We had to leave some invisible glass railings on the underside of the catwalk so that the double doorframes would stay attached.  There was so many overlaid snaps in the area that getting them to snap into where we wanted was a challenge to say the least.  Thankfully between the two of us we managed to sort through them and end up with this :)  

He decided to get into the mood of the location (in one of the bedrooms behind G,G,G).  He picked the one with the chains hanging from the roof lol.    This is the only room I can see that has the new cabinet shelves penetrating it so a few bottles made it a thing :)  

Cya L360 thanks for stopping by :) 

With renewed enthusiasm I went through some of my existing vanity projects and tweaked things.  The cryo facility has had an upgrade that gives a much better vibe!  Can you guess the parts used to make the contraption in the middle?

I've moved the hives out (they are now in the seapen (yes really the seapen)).  Sorry I forgot to screencap that bit but to be honest its nothing special.  Just a few underwater cubes with hives in them.  I must get round to seeing if the bee's can sting you underwater lol.  So in the hives place I kept the airlock and made the area into a medlab.  I was going to try use the multi lamps to make a mic and do a recording studio but I couldn't get any to cover the extra 2 lights for the look I needed.  I'm happy with how this turned out.  There is enough going on to give the right atmosphere.  On the outside of the airlock another airlock facility was added.

Instead of blending it into existing structures I went with a look that suggests that it was added as an after thought (which is true).  There are a couple of angles at the back which are awkward and I like it for this.  If you can't tell this is my quarantine room.  All this is across the hallway from my hospital wing so it all ties in rather nicely.

The hospital wing got a tweak as well.  It now has visitor seating in the middle and I used some crop plots from Adv Rafts to add some life to the place.  I embedded the piping in the wall which incidentally means you can access the tap from either side of the wall lol.

One of the comments L360 had was that the middle of my underbase needed something in the middle.  I had always planned to do something but couldn't think of anything.  He thought some kind of pillar would be good but in the end I created what I had orig hoped would be the major light source for my underworld.  It has a few internal lights and 3 searchlights pointed at it.  The beam is the transmitter in my crafting room which took a few goes to center it.  I've used a standard transmitter in this case so I can turn it off when I don't need it to look so good :)

I added some tri roofs to the existing structures and came up with this which works for me :)

 

I also got round to adding a platform down here to place and indust forge.  It may need some tweaking but its workable.  And I've added a hatchframe above so it can be accessed from the top level (only using the res transfer gun).

So this new base only has a room or two to complete now :)  There is a room I keep meaning to revisit at the storage base but once that is done I'm prob gonna leave the rest as is for now.  There are a few empty rooms in the storage base but I want some space for expansion rather than filling it all from the start.  I may have already mentioned this in one of the prior posts.  I just remembered another room 2 rooms that actually do need to be done but they shouldn't take too long.  I've already got some ideas for projects to do after these few things are completed!  I can't wait to start some new bits!