StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I don't know if I should necro an almost year old thread, but I figure it exists, so why not use it.

My buddies and I picked this up during the $18 sale and I have to say I'm pretty God damned impressed so far. Warframe is lagging because with the new poop-machine requiring constant attention, I can only game in sprints. So, it's not fair to have the other guys waiting on me to do missions. With a game like Ark, I can do my own thing and step away for 30 minutes at a time and no one is held up. 7 Days to Die petered out because the server was buggy as Hell, Zombies are played out, and world interaction is almost solely based around other survivors or just killing/avoiding zombies and hunting for supplies. The tamblable dinos, almost with flying and building "up" instead of down, adds more than enough new dynamics into the game. to make it feel fresh. Also, lag aside: the combat doesn't disappoint.

Techincal BS you may not care about.
I had a server setup in no time (Unreal servers have next to no bullshit). While changing a diaper, I had our group find me some random mod to test the system. They found Naturalism. I laughed, then went ahead with it because a model/texture replacer would seem to be the perfect test and easily removable. However, Unreal seems to handle this in a weird way as trying to now remove the mod causes issues with existing characters since they seem to be some form of entity in the server files rather than just a string of text values... if that makes sense. Whatever, I'll pull it when I do a wipe and we go primitive plus.

To replace the trolling dipshits you'd normally deal with on a public server, I've been messing with the NPC Bush Peoples mod which the author is updating CONSTANTLY. And since joining a server with a mod subscribes you to that mod, you can end up not being able to do shit until you update the server mod version, which has to be done manually. This is... annoying.

Gameplay: We've been doing pretty well for ourselves. Have a pretty nice setup for the time being. Game will eat all your GPU clocks if you let it and it can look really nice when doing so. I've turned down a lot of settings to keep 4K up, but I might end up lowering down to 1080p to see how high I can push the graphics. I love how many hours we have into the game and we've barely left the low level areas. I want a more primitive setting, but the devs pulled the cvar, and you now have to rely on configs and a modding to get the primitive setup. I plan to do this once we've beaten "endgame" and I wipe the server.

There's some UI issues and certain things need explaining, but the game is very intuitive. I've found a lot more problems in other early access games where you're fighting the UI or design decisions. This game has very little of that.

Public Servers: I'm too old for this shit. In my teens/early 20's I would have loved fighting other dipshits and/or allying and fighting the good fight. I don't have that in me anymore. I have to recommend avoiding Official servers. For just one example, a tribe admin was talking about dealing with a troll by locking him in a cage. This same tribe had dropped wooden pillars, spaced out, almost everywhere in the spawn zones. For those that don't know, you can't build within X feet of another tribes buildings. I literally could find no where to setup a hut and bed. I couldn't even damage these wood structures with what I had available.

I'm sure this building bullshit exists to fight trolling, but from reading: the devs don't care about trolling as they endorse other types they find acceptable. Either have a free-for-all or don't. But the system seems setup in every way to reward people who came first and have the good stuff. Those people don't need protection: time spent is already on their side.

Bugs: Game hard-crashes your PC if you ALT-TAB out of it too much, even with windowed borderless enabled.

Oh man, server configs, how I have NOT missed you. It still amazes me developers won't include an updated .ini file(s) with all the cvars set to default values. Is that really too much to ask? By default, Single-player runs at 1.0 difficulty without any change. Dedicated servers run MUCH lower. So, you actually have to specify the difficulty as 1.0, even though the official wiki pegs it as default. The wilderness just got a lot more wild. You can really customize your Ark experience if you can find the cvars.

I decided against Primitve Plus because it's an entire overhaul. I just wanted to remove everything past the fabricator and add in a few primitive extras. Thankfully, you can blacklist ALL engrams, then whitelist the ones you want. This will make your server blacklist anything new they add, which is nice. Problem is, your game.ini gets filled with whitelisted Engrams, but at least there's loads of customization. I found a default primitive ini, but I had to whitelist everything from the other mods I'm running (such as bonfires, primitive A/C, primitive grills, etc). Took me a long time.

That actually wasn't that hard because they all have engram paths in the asset folders. Everything except the OneShotRifle. It's a vanilla item with no engram path in the files.... Beat my head on this one because I want a few shitty guns in the game. Hopefully, the "indexpath" command I found will work. Have to try it tonight.

I also just went "q234kjn3t4kljn534t" for the admin password to keep one of our players from continually spawning motherfucking Ascendent gear into his damned inventory. What the Hell is his problem? Go run your own server if you want the game to be a cakewalk. More mad he's been lieing about it because I specifically said to only use it if there was a bug related loss of something as the NPC Bush Peoples mod can do some weird stuff.

Like, there's one I just recently removed that will knock you out and steal all your stuff. I didn't want that, so I told everyone to just console anything he took until I could fix the spawn list. That obviously translated to "May as well make my shitty spear now do 595% more damage."

The server has now been reset and we've built a small base in prep to move onto another area. Considering building in the mountains, but I want some kind of danger to where we live. Once we're established enough, the group wants me to get the admin password back and we go public. But I'm already having a lot of fun, I don't see the point.

While I haven't played ARK, I'd caution you about ignoring group opinion. You might wind up hemorrhaging players before you know it.

To be fair, our "group" is my wife, brother-in-law, and two guys I've been gaming with for 5+ years. That said, I finally worked out multiple configs in getting ready for going public. Tribute downloads are disabled and I've worked out the engram listing with the exception of "metal railing" which still shows up, but you can't craft it because I pulled the "metal Wall" engram which is a prerequisite.

There's a few other mods like TorchBoost, Better Beacons, and Primitive Extras I've ironed out. We get stuff like Obsidian Arrows and Java Darts to even the power gap we have without access to the fabricator. BattleEye is enabled and the password has been pulled. I doubt any pugs will join, but we're public so whatever.

I did get another "cheap" stick of 8GB RCC RAM for the server. That's helping a decent amount. I think my Quad-core Xeon at 2.0Ghz should be able to handle up to 20 players.

Still trying to hammer out some spawn issues with the Bush Peoples mod. The dragon keeps spawning and I don't like that their containers will sometimes spawn gear that shouldn't be on my primitive setup. I have pulled advanced spawns for the time being, such as the towns. They have loads of higher end loot and the NPCs that should protect them are despawning as fast as they are created (which means it's at the limit already). I don't want such nice loot unprotected.