New Terra Nova - Day 9 - 18

Greetings!!!  So it has been a busy time in Ark for me.  I've not done as much building as normal as I'm playing the game more.  Added another tribe member and hopefully my other half will be joining me as soon as we get her new PC delivered.  It is possible however remote that her new PC might have enough juice for me to do a few vids.  I won't hold my breath as it may need a better GFX card but it could actually happen...  I'm looking into capture cards so I could do vids across the two so who knows what might come of it!

So I have FINALLY finished the outer wall!!!  It had been put off a few times while I sorted other things.  The thing about having tribe mates that I'm not used to is the priorities have changed what I'm building.  I can see what is more important so I finish that first.  So here is the front entrance with the completed wall.

Front gate from the inside.

Looking along the compound  towards the second gate and taming pen.

I was suprised as to the attention this gate got.  This is infact a Behemoth gate.  Now I have a love hate relationship with these things.  I love that you can fit things through them easily but they are hugely ugly monstrocities and not the easiest thing to blend into a build.  I skinned mine and made the entrance a tad thinner in the process.  There is a ladder access to the top of the gate as well as each tower along the wall.  This all looks amazing at night!

Quick shot of the tower.  The top deck has been extended slightly and I can't recall if I have already posted the increase of the base for the ring barn.  This is for egg layers so the S+ collector can collect till its heart is content.  If it had a heart.  But it doesn't so it is gonna have to keep on collecting :)  The tower got its reskin so it now uses less parts than it was going to have and I've added all the glass doors to fill in the 'windows'.

To the right on this pic you will see I have added a room to the back of the tower which houses our indust forge and a landing pad for metal unloading.  I added a scroll as part of the foundation because...  why not?

Here is a top shot of the landing pad and back of the base.  I used alternating glass and stone railing on the glass and stone ceilings and quite like the resulting effect.

And to top it all off here is a night shot :)  Builds always look that much better at nite!  I think thats rain obscuring the view lol

New Terra Nova - Days 5 - 8

Well I'm a few days since my last post and that is because I've not done much in the way of building.  My friend and his wife have migrated to this server and have joined my tribe so I changed my priorities a bit.  Lots of things I would normally leave for a bit longer were required and with all the tames getting done I've now started on the perimeter wall so we can house the growing population.

 

All the thyla :)

We tamed up a low level quetz which I added a basic cage onto.  The first we brought down landed in the swamp and we were doing great till the last 5% of the tame when an alligator literally jumped the spike wall and obliterated our tame :(  But we got another and then used that to tame a slightly better one.  We will tame up some large ones once the server settings have been updated.  While classic fliers is installed the quetz in air stamina recharge hadn't been turned back on.  The admin seems keen to make this change so we can use the cage properly.  We only JUST had enough stamina to tame the lvl 40 any longer we would have fallen out of the sky.

 

The top of the tower has been mostly completed.  I've decided I will extend the platform a little more to accommodate the quetz a little better.  I have plans for a hovering ring around the base about half way up the tower for more fliers.  The greenhouse is embedded into the outside of the landing platform.

The top floor of the tower looks mostly empty but there are beer barrels and compost bins behind hidden doors around the room.  There is a door mod on the server which I've only just started looking into.  The hidden door is as far as I got.  Now everything I can hide will be hidden lol

 

Here's a snap of the wall.  Its a couple of walls high around the perimeter now and just starting to get its topper.

Here is downstairs with the hidden doors closed.

And with the hidden doors open.  I'm really loving this door!!!

And here are my tribe mates.  Lets watch them sleep shall we?

New Terra Nova - Day 3 and 4

Well I've had a chat with the server admin now and turns out he had seen my first Mazion tour vid!  Seems to be a really great guy!  Everyone I've met on here has been great.  The lag still isn't a problem so far :)

I've got my best rex and best spino breeders here so the locals can use them to breed themselves a few of their own.  They won't be staying on the server after they have been bred as required.  I did however bring over one more perm dino and that was a golem to speed building up a bit.  I managed a fair bit of work with what I had and got to level 70 before bringing the golem in.  

As you can see I'm going for a tower.  I'm not 100% sure on the final embellishments yet and if I will have landing pads or not.  I'm trying to keep a little smaller than I normally build to balance out with the harvest rates.

I've gone with some cupboard building this time for some of my crafting gear.  I'm yet to make anything spectacular yet.

I did however get my storage all sorted which is a big must if I want to keep resources under control :)

I tamed a moose day 3 so I have enough of a build team now to get things moving much faster.  I'm already at the height I orig planned to build to but it looks too short and squat so I'll be going up a few more floors yet.  I have had a tour of the admins base and he has an awesome looking treehouse base.  He also did a great job of his community center!  Hopefully I can teach them a few tricks of the trade here :)

New TerraNova - Day 1 and 2

I'm trialing a server I was invited to in the US.  I believe the server is hosted in Seattle.  I've had a bit of lag here and there but I want to see how well it goes.  Server hosting in the US is much cheaper than where I am so it will be interesting to see how it goes.  This server does not favour builders with its 2x rates so I won't be posting from it quite as often.  I will prob also be checking out a private server that has been/is being setup by someone I have played Ark with before.  They are setting up as a building server and there will only be 10 players.  I might give it a few days before jumping on that one to make sure they have time to work out any bugs with the large selection of mods they are running.

I took with me one of my bred Thyla which has earned itself a name of Crookshanks (thanks go to my other half for the name).  I have tamed an argie and a beaver so in between building.  I gotta say low rates building by hand has brought back some memories lol.  I had forgotten how rough it can be at the lower end but I still managed to get a decent lock box created.  

Its nothing special just a hexagonal box with roof access.  There was loads of running around levelling and harvesting to get to stone.

I also built a very basic taming raft.  This server has leeds so travel will be very close to the shore lines while taming.  I used it last night for taming the beaver.  I had some lag issues while on the raft I'm guessing due to the bobbing nature of the raft and higher ping times.  Pings are anywhere from 55 to 120 at the moment.

Server Tour

I meant to post this earlier but Blogger was acting up for me.  For the latest tour video visit here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR32BmghyXc

It turned out pretty good and I didn't say facility 50 million times!!!  Here is the first tour:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WUKB38n7rk&list=PLXzg-lD1p61qZohxMfHLLLCKlz7zyQZvG&t=1s&index=20

I must get round to counting how many times I said facility lol.

Ragnarok - Day 38

Well I have a couple of things to cover in today's post.  For starters I had my VIP guest!  It was day later than orig thought because RL happens :)  I'm now happy enough to say what it was.  I post the occasional screenshot in the Mazionite Discord - SelfPromo section and when I posted the pics of the scrollwork from the storage base I came home to find this:

For those that remember I had a tour from Mazion on my Center map base (I really need to name my bases lol).  It has been a little while since I got the above message as I was only just finishing the storage base and wanted to be sure I had enough good content before we did another tour.  Well as of 30 mins ago the tour has been completed.  He has gone straight onto streaming so I'm not 100% sure when it will be edited and released but I will link it from here once it is online!

I set him up with all sorts of gear and such and on teleporting between bases on the initial look around he was mounted and it destroyed him!  I had death helper installed and he got nothing.  It very much destroyed him!  The one thing I am super happy about is that I didn't say Facility soooo many times in this tour.  I don't think...  I've often thought of watching the first one again and getting a total count lol. It has to be quite a few.

I had a great time doing the recording.   Even when he isn't on cam or recording he still comes across as being a genuinely nice guy.  For anyone that is interested before we start recording there is a brief fly around.  Normally this is when he would be assessing if a base is good enough for doing a tour vid.  In this case it was to get an idea as to what part was going to be done first and if anything was going to be skipped.  There are a few area's we didn't bother with.  I had estimated 1 hour to get around but we managed it in about 40mins thankfully!  We have a bit of a chat about things as we do the initial run around and looked at some of the better bits I wanted to cover.  There was one drop out of discord while recording but other than that it went pretty well.  We cut between locations so viewers didn't get the load in lag.  He is in USA I'm in NZ so the lag is about as bad as it can get. This is the first singleplayer tour vid!  Possibly the first repeat vid on someone that isn't a pooper or patreon even.  

So last night I started on the process of re-creating a UFO build.  I'm only 4 hours into this build so its only got a rough shape about it.  I had to be up early for the tour or I would have gotten another couple of hours done.  Its not very high off the ground this time (I've wondered if I should have made it higher) but I've found a flaw that I can't fix.  It seems that the S+ torches don't save the colour on SP restarts :(  I reset the colour of 2 engines for the screencap so you can see what it should look like.

Ragnarok - Day 37

I've not done a lot of building in the last few days.  I still have things I want to start on but I've been playing the game a bit and doing some taming and the likes.  I had made a run through the wyvern chasm and scored a few decent eggs including a nice 150 fire egg.  Which I then ate...  I wasn't hungry at the time but I ate it anyway.  I had not long since thought to myself "Hey I better not eat that egg when I get back to the hatchery!" and still I ate it.  It may have been delicious but I couldn't actually say because my character wasn't hungry at the time so I'm not sure where that much egg might have gone.  But...  I went out again to get more.  As I flew through the Chasm I thought to myself why does that wyvern over there look all sparkly?  It was a moment later I realised I was head to head with an Alpha wyvern.  Now I've encountered many alpha's in my time but this was my first time facing the wyvern.  The first pass of fire missed me and he circled behind me and on seeing the flash of flame I did the one thing that came to mind and nailed the brakes. Straight away I started chomping in mid air.   His blast of fire went wide and flew right on by and conveniently into my wyverns chomping jaws.  It turned out to be a mere lvl 20 but I had no idea until it died.

So I ended up with a few eggs and decided to hatch a couple while I was at it.  After all I had a stack of wyvern milk thanks to the alpha.

AND I ended up with a fire wyvern better than the one I ate so it all worked out in the end.  

I realized that I was going to need some more wyvern milk at some point so I decided to make a quick cage.  Yes I know it could be much simpler but this is ME we are talking about lol.  I have seen a few builds that were far smaller and prob simpler that mine but as I'm on singleplayer I need to make sure if I screw anything up I have some extra leeway. 

Here is the gullet of the trap.  Nice wide area incase I'm an idiot and don't bring the wyvern in from a good angle.  Ideally I would rather have a second person do the doors but I have a keypad setup in a safe spot so I can still manage it without too much hassle.

So I tamed a little lvl 50 Griffin (lets call him the crash test dummy) and made a naked run to test it out.  I managed about 4 wyverns before I lost the griffin.  He really wanted to die I'm sure of it. I swear he was on passive but he decided to get involved with one wyvern and somehow managed to kill it without dying.  Just.  Then I decided to try tranq another wyvern without closing the gate.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  Well I can tell you now, it was a bad idea.  Unlike the ones before instead of just getting angry this one started flying in circles which happened to take him out of the cage around and back towards me and the griffin.  I dodged the blast but the almost dead griffin took a blast.  And instead of staying on passive and not doing anything (where I could have mounted him and flown to safety) he lept into battle again.  It was his final act.  While all this was going down I was firing tranqs into the wyvern and 2 more darts after the griffin went down so did it.  The crash test dummy did its job till the very end.  I tamed up a little one as I figured if I could do it with a small one then it was worth risking a better one.  The lack of stamina suggests a bigger one would handle things better with a bit more room to spare.  Its times like this I wonder about the classic fliers mod.

A little while ago I hinted at something coming up, well if all goes according to plan, said event will be happening approx 8 hrs from now.  I'm now willing to say I will be having a VIP visitor stop by.  Some of you may be able to guess who it is (although there is a chance no one is reading this so maybe you won't guess haha).  I won't say who it is just in case something comes up.  I'm super excited and I'm about to do some extra prep work so it should run more smoothly.  I'm a little worried about lag as he is from the US but the visit from 360 recently went fairly well so fingers crossed it does too.

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 :)