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Wolverine, to get that mushy paints feel again! 

9 hours ago, Antoine said:

Reduce health of all tames. How is this a pirate game when people just jump off boats with bears on cannons? Bears are by far too strong. They can be tamed with berries, farm fiber and floor thatch, they sprint well, have high hp and good damage resistance. Have you looked at your melee skill tree? Its utter garbage. How is a mace ever viable? You literally run slower than a guy reloading, you get killed by tames, and cant even use them when mounted. Tames should not be the go to when defending or attacking on land, and as it stands, your typical battle, is far too tame dependant. Tame is literally the first tree everyone should go for, and that is poor design. Think balance, not realism.

Yea, that ~begrudingly sums it up for the bear as I see it too.

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Just a few quick thoughts for now:

1. Bear- left click attack is basically useless (unless I am missing something)- it is much slower and does lower damage than the right click, doesn't harvest anything (except hide and meat, but this is also doable with the right click and that way you get more). I think, that because of it being slower than the right-click it could have higher damage output (at higher stamina cost?). It could also be a "sickle" attack for harvesting fiber and ignoring berries. I understand that the idea of making berry nodes separate from the fiber nodes was to allow you to harvest one without the other, but the reality is that these nodes are usually mixed together or very close to each other, so it is very hard (or at some locations impossible) to harvest them that way, so a dedicated fiber harvester could be very useful, especially considering how important and widely used this resource is.

2. Chickens- they should run away faster. Have you ever tried to catch a running chicken? 😉 It would be also good, if the eggs were obeying gravity and sliding off sloped roofs/ramps- this would make the egg collection much easier.

3. Cows- female cows have a saddle slot, yet don't use saddles. I don't think they should, but it is sometimes difficult to park them where you want them to be. Maybe adding some kind of a leash or bait could do the trick? something that will keep them following you very closely when held, so you can maneuver them easier to those tight barn stalls

4. Shieldhorn- currently not really worth the effort put into taming them. Granted, they take heavily reduced damage, but their damage output and stamina use makes them pretty useless in battle, unless their single purpose is to be mobile weapon platform for the players. It would be cool if they had also some additional PvE application- perhaps a very short range (I'm thinking here something about maybe 500-600 units?) melee damage reduction buff, so when they are parked nearby creature which is being tamed, the feeding player will take less damage when hit.

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Need to buff thatch gather rates on bull or giraffe because gathering thatch by hand is a pain to do. Also need to be able to disable food gathering on animals as when i swing at a tree with my elephant I don't want to pick up 2k plus berries just to have to drop them. I also feel like some animals survivability against alphas in general is poor even with the recent nerf to them. If stat changes to animals happen it needs to be a greater increase because I feel the only stats on tames atm that are useful are stamina and weight. The other stats increase by so little there is barely any difference and honestly a waist of points just like on player stats. Cargo wagons need to be changed to add weight to the tames on weight cap because those are pretty useless unless its a cannon bear on PvP. Also there needs to be an option to move tames and NPCs off of boats because that is also a pain to do trying to whistle them or riding them off. Shieldhorns and razortooths are useless atm for how hard they are to get I would expect greater stats on them vs normal tames. At least make the shield horn gather stone and metal not to mention how slow they are vs the rhino.

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10 hours ago, Jatheish said:

Let's play a game! If you were a designer, what would you change about the following tamable creatures? We often hear feedback that players don't find value in most of the ones we've tamable, and I know some ideas have been shared in various threads previously but figured I'd make a giant thread where y'all can suggest. Not saying any of this is going to happen, but curious to see what you suggest.

  • Bear
  • Chicken
  • Cow
  • Bull
  • Crow
  • Razortooth
  • Shieldhorn
  • Elephant
  • Giant Pig
  • Giraffe
  • Horse
  • Lion
  • Monkey
  • Ostrich
  • Parrot
  • Penguin
  • Rabbit
  • Rhino
  • Seagull
  • Sheep
  • Tiger
  • Vulture
  • Wolf

@Jatheish

 

As a designer I would scrap how animals are at this point. Currently this game is turning into an Ark expansion. I would decide to stop living in Ark's shadow. Currently I've done all PvE material so my day consists of riding around on a level 70 bear with elephants behind me harvesting X resource with hopes of actually needing blue print weapons to complete the next PvE tier. Currently riding is basically a requirement for things to do effectively either everything else needs to be brought up or beastmastery needs to be brought down.

I would change the tree to crew. It would allow you to get animals but the animals would have something they bring to the table and not be rideable. The shoulder mount thing would be fine but cruising around on (current meta tame) is basically Ark. So I now have a blank slate and need to make it so I can get tames. I would want it to be a  low chance from mate boosted animals when you harvest their bodies or a high chance from an alpha. Could also put a vendor in the game that sells the babies. So now my players have a baby X. This whole temperature thing currently is silly and the way to fix it going to require a lot of resources from my company (grapeshot) so the cost would be too great to keep this. The concept is cool but the creation and implementation creates a poor user interaction with it so I would scrap it. The concept of feeding animals something special is a good one so I could fill up a bear with honey and it would mature faster or just use berries cause they are easy but longer time until they are grown.

So now I have a way for players to get tames so I now need to make them useful. This would be the bottom tiers of the crew tree.  Different animals would have a function that fall into combat or utility. For this I would think of how I envision an amazing creature of the type.

  • Bear- Combat- Taunt enemies around the player acting as a tank.
  • Chicken- Utility- When on wander produces eggs
  • Cow- Utility- Produces milk (more on wander)
  • Bull- Utility- when on wander fertilizes nearby crops
  • Crow- Shoulder- When you die acts as a bed.
  • Razortooth- Combat- nerfs alphas.
  • Shieldhorn- Combat- Produces a shield that deflects projectiles. (Currently elementals have little counter play)
  • Elephant- Utility- When on wander collects wood.
  • Giant Pig- Utility- When on wander finds buried items.
  • Giraffe- Utility- When on wander gathers thatch.
  • Horse- Utility- Rideable, pulls carriage and cargo which helps tranports large amounts of people or heavy amounts of resources great distances (we need something that makes unloading a galley not horrible)
  • Lion- Combat- grabs smaller creatures.
  • Monkey- Shoulder- barehanded becomes climbing picks at a much higher stam use rate.
  • Ostrich- Utility- Harvests seeds when on wander.
  • Parrot- Shoulder- Makes musical instruments easier to play and buffs the buff radius.
  • Penguin- shoulder- fortitude buff.
  • Rabbit- Shoulder- When on shoulder provides a movement speed.
  • Rhino- Utility- When on wander gathers stone.
  • Seagull- Shoulder- When on shoulder reduces/removes fog debuff
  • Sheep- Utility- When on wander gathers fiber
  • Tiger- Combat- reduces movement speed of enemies.
  • Vulture- Utility- When on shoulder decreases vitamin depletion.
  • Wolf- Combat- has a howl that increases damage.
  • Turtle- Make tameable- Shoulder- Increase swimspeed, decreases oxygen use, and reduces deep diving debuff.
  • Rattlesnake- Utility- When on wander produces venom, venom is used for anti-venom which reduces torpidity.

So now that I have all these super cool animals I need to transport them and the current bug is they fall off (scavenging tames in the ocean is super lucrative I know a guy that got a Razortooth) I would make it so boats have a animal attachment that is basically a cage and when you send the animal to it the animal gets turned into more of an item that is placed inside the cage instead of being on the boat (no more lost at sea tames yay). We now need somewhere to put all these wandering tames. I would make it so tames on wander don't leave your territory. I would also make it so you can apply a filter on the map to see where certain tames are.

Now for the meaty part of the new tree. I would make it so NPC's you get from SotD have a type of suffix like Bob. Bob would be a builder. You would need points in crew to hire Bob and then you can put him on a smithy. If you have skills in construction you would be able to make things like stone at a reduced cost. The points in crew would only be to get Bob, the points in construction would make it so you can get the discounted building from Bob. This would make Bob your righthand man when it comes to construction of things. You would still need the recipe to make it though. So getting NPC's and keeping them alive would have benefits beyond "I need guys on my sails" which you would want to keep around because sailor NPC's would make your sails better.

This would lead into reworks of the other skill trees, I would make farming capable of making the large crop plots grow fiber,thatch, and wood that the NPC's can harvest at a drastically reduced rate. The rate they harvest can be modified by giving them higher end tools.

Artillery tree would also get access to alchemists that can be put on a mortar and pestle that will make it so you can stack unlimited resources inside it and queue up organic paste for more than 220 at a time... it would also make it faster to give the QoL that is missing from the chemistry station.

I could keep talking about how I would change it but the TL:DR is make animals more companion rather than a requirement but still have meaning. Make NPC's more than a parasite when you arn't sailing. As a designer I would change a lot of things but for creatures this is what I would do.

~Lotus

Edited by Lotus
Cause I didn't make it @ Jat :D
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So far pretty happy I do noticed that some  animals got huge hit box so taming can be really hard like a elephant is keeps push and kill and its hard to get a feed on  I really really hope that y all never bring flyer's tho that will ruin the game oooh and fix the boat bug !!!! Animals keep glitch under boat and die ! Crew same the disapear and die  pls fix asp it can be game breaking if you keep lose high levels  us breeding need to be better we can't plan 8 hours to grow a pet lolz

Edited by tamtjabo

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50 minutes ago, Bashka said:

Just a few quick thoughts for now:

1. Bear- left click attack is basically useless (unless I am missing something)- it is much slower and does lower damage than the right click, doesn't harvest anything (except hide and meat, but this is also doable with the right click and that way you get more). I think, that because of it being slower than the right-click it could have higher damage output (at higher stamina cost?). It could also be a "sickle" attack for harvesting fiber and ignoring berries. I understand that the idea of making berry nodes separate from the fiber nodes was to allow you to harvest one without the other, but the reality is that these nodes are usually mixed together or very close to each other, so it is very hard (or at some locations impossible) to harvest them that way, so a dedicated fiber harvester could be very useful, especially considering how important and widely used this resource is.

 

Left click is used to harvest fish in the water. You can not use the right click in the water, just the left click, so not useless.

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11 hours ago, Jatheish said:

Let's play a game! If you were a designer, what would you change about the following tamable creatures? We often hear feedback that players don't find value in most of the ones we've tamable, and I know some ideas have been shared in various threads previously but figured I'd make a giant thread where y'all can suggest. Not saying any of this is going to happen, but curious to see what you suggest.

  • Bear
  • Chicken
  • Cow
  • Bull
  • Crow
  • Razortooth
  • Shieldhorn
  • Elephant
  • Giant Pig
  • Giraffe
  • Horse
  • Lion
  • Monkey
  • Ostrich
  • Parrot
  • Penguin
  • Rabbit
  • Rhino
  • Seagull
  • Sheep
  • Tiger
  • Vulture
  • Wolf

STOP my animals from glitching through floors and animals from killing them through walls... please!

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  • Bear - increase them to Tame/ride level 3 due to their large utility, overall stat distributions and cargo saddle use.  Perhaps revisit cargo saddle in general, add flat movespeed debuff.  Perhaps two tiers of cargo saddles.
  • Chicken - Strong unique utility
  • Cow - Strong unique utility
  • Bull - good utility mid tier tame, unique attack
  • Crow - Good spot.  visit respec'ing in general with recipes such as the route ark took, or some other method like FOY/quest based.
  • Elephant - Strong unique utility
  • Giant Pig - Add seed creation as a feature.  Feed it your crops and get seeds.  Ties in with current use.
  • Giraffe - Add thatch gathering on par with bear/elephant utility
  • Horse - Good Spot
  • Lion - increase damage by minimum 10% along with similar per level damage scaling.  Currently lions are on par with bears in damage but have the grab utility.  Bears have the hp/weight/stam/charge/cargo saddle over lions.
  • Monkey - Good spot, unique attack and passive
  • Ostrich - Good Spot.  unique mobile mount.
  • Parrot - afaik only grants level based insulation.  Changing this to fortitude or adding an additional passive to make them more useful such as +5% gold from maps or a music buff duration/strength increase.  
  • Penguin - increased radius of buff, change to buff so it is directly based on the level of the penguin, increase to per level hypo buff
  • Rabbit - good spot, perhaps additional noises/stances/ear gestures for storms.  Noises could be kept predators, gestures could be storms/weather.  or keep same noises which change purpose to weather when on a boat.  Perhaps ears up, noises are for creature warning, ears down noises are for weather to limit need for more sound production.
  • Rhino - Great spot, unique utility and unique strong attack style
  • Seagull - Good Spot, unique buffs.  Consider small fish retrieval or a passive buff to fishing.
  • Sheep - Good unique utility, adjust domesticated wool cap to increase based on domestic level or tamed level.
  • Vulture - add small animal hunting/retrieving with increase to spoilage durability in inventory
  • Wolf - fine for mid tier tame.  Utility as all around mediocre beginner carnivore.  Nothing unique aside from they drop what is needed to tame them.  Perhaps a pack buff (3+ members) +10% damage or +10% damage resistance is needed and a minor flat hypo buff for rider.

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Jat if I were the developer I would take a look into balancing the stamina of the game.  Mainly elephants.  

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no tames should be able to gather more than a a normal stone pick, disable  tamed animals.

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General:
Alot of them need improvements to their Hit boxes so you dont get stuck/teleported back in invisible walls when trying to pass them.Allow the building of cargo elevators on large ships so you can store animals inside like in an arc, improve the way they get abord ships so they dont get stuck in dinghy attachments as often. Add a way to reset the position of animals on a ship to be able to free them from such stuck positions. Give Male versions of animals that have females that produce something like Milk or Eggs something as a bonus to balance them out. For example there is hardly any reason to bother taming a rooster compared to chickens. Maybe have them providing an aoe buff to production or something like that. I would also suggest to remove all knockback effects from wild animals unless their attack would suggest it would happen naturally like when a rhino hits you with a charge attack.  Also consider having lions/tigers attack the tamed animal like all others rather then dismounting/focusing the rider, or  at the very least decrease the numbers of them on an island. 

Ostrich: Make Female Ostriches lay large eggs. Increase the amount of wood and tatch gained to metal tool levels to
make picking at a tree not totally useless. Improve hitting area upon attack, it has trouble hitting cobras because they crawl under it for example.

Sheep: Make Hair/Wool to Fiber on both sheep and Human hair. Make Female Sheeps milkable but give less Milk then cows.

Horse: Increase base carry weight and speed a little, improve the animations so it looks less stiff , make the cargo sattle actually carry cargo.

Elephant: The Stamina bar seems to deplete too fast when collecting wood, even when you put skill points in it while the Food bar never seems to deplete. Either make the stamina reserves huge so an elephant can fill up its entire inventory with one stamina bar but needs a long time to refill/rest before he can go out for another farm run, or increase the stamina recovery speed at the cost of more food consumption. But the ladder variant fits more for small agile animals in my opinion.

Rhino: Needs serious improvements to its attack area, it seems to be unable to hit Vultures or Bees attacking if from above. Needs large increases to its carry weight of metal to be more competitive against the elephants carrying potential.

Birds: Are very hard/annoying to catch with bolas when they are not trapped in your ship or something compared to the rather small buffs they offer, specially considering that they take up a crew slot on ships.
I would suggest to make those small animals not count as crew anymore so ppl dont feel bad having a parrot on their shoulder when they are on a ship. They could provide a +1 crew buff to the ship that doesnt stack so you cant put 500 parrots on ships. 

Wolf: Seems to be underpowered as a tame since the wild wolf nerfs compared to others like a bear. I would suggest increasing their hp and carry weight a bit while leaving the damage as it is to make them more competitive with the mobility of lions. Maybe give them get an aoe buff thats boosts their dmg and defense when they act together with other wolfes. That way you could have them roaming around on aggressive defending your sheeps and cows for example, specially if you paint them to look like german shepherds. Seems to have trouble hitting crocodiles because of hitbox issues.

I think i had some more but i cant remember it at the moment, hope you like the ideas.

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2 hours ago, Lotus said:

@Jatheish

 

As a designer I would scrap how animals are at this point. Currently this game is turning into an Ark expansion. I would decide to stop living in Ark's shadow. Currently I've done all PvE material so my day consists of riding around on a level 70 bear with elephants behind me harvesting X resource with hopes of actually needing blue print weapons to complete the next PvE tier. Currently riding is basically a requirement for things to do effectively either everything else needs to be brought up or beastmastery needs to be brought down.

I would change the tree to crew. It would allow you to get animals but the animals would have something they bring to the table and not be rideable. The shoulder mount thing would be fine but cruising around on (current meta tame) is basically Ark. So I now have a blank slate and need to make it so I can get tames. I would want it to be a  low chance from mate boosted animals when you harvest their bodies or a high chance from an alpha. Could also put a vendor in the game that sells the babies. So now my players have a baby X. This whole temperature thing currently is silly and the way to fix it going to require a lot of resources from my company (grapeshot) so the cost would be too great to keep this. The concept is cool but the creation and implementation creates a poor user interaction with it so I would scrap it. The concept of feeding animals something special is a good one so I could fill up a bear with honey and it would mature faster or just use berries cause they are easy but longer time until they are grown.

So now I have a way for players to get tames so I now need to make them useful. This would be the bottom tiers of the crew tree.  Different animals would have a function that fall into combat or utility. For this I would think of how I envision an amazing creature of the type.

  • Bear- Combat- Taunt enemies around the player acting as a tank.
  • Chicken- Utility- When on wander produces eggs
  • Cow- Utility- Produces milk (more on wander)
  • Bull- Utility- when on wander fertilizes nearby crops
  • Crow- Shoulder- When you die acts as a bed.
  • Razortooth- Combat- nerfs alphas.
  • Shieldhorn- Combat- Produces a shield that deflects projectiles. (Currently elementals have little counter play)
  • Elephant- Utility- When on wander collects wood.
  • Giant Pig- Utility- When on wander finds buried items.
  • Giraffe- Utility- When on wander gathers thatch.
  • Horse- Utility- Rideable, pulls carriage and cargo which helps tranports large amounts of people or heavy amounts of resources great distances (we need something that makes unloading a galley not horrible)
  • Lion- Combat- grabs smaller creatures.
  • Monkey- Shoulder- barehanded becomes climbing picks at a much higher stam use rate.
  • Ostrich- Utility- Harvests seeds when on wander.
  • Parrot- Shoulder- Makes musical instruments easier to play and buffs the buff radius.
  • Penguin- shoulder- fortitude buff.
  • Rabbit- Shoulder- When on shoulder provides a movement speed.
  • Rhino- Utility- When on wander gathers stone.
  • Seagull- Shoulder- When on shoulder reduces/removes fog debuff
  • Sheep- Utility- When on wander gathers fiber
  • Tiger- Combat- reduces movement speed of enemies.
  • Vulture- Utility- When on shoulder decreases vitamin depletion.
  • Wolf- Combat- has a howl that increases damage.
  • Turtle- Make tameable- Shoulder- Increase swimspeed, decreases oxygen use, and reduces deep diving debuff.
  • Rattlesnake- Utility- When on wander produces venom, venom is used for anti-venom which reduces torpidity.

So now that I have all these super cool animals I need to transport them and the current bug is they fall off (scavenging tames in the ocean is super lucrative I know a guy that got a Razortooth) I would make it so boats have a animal attachment that is basically a cage and when you send the animal to it the animal gets turned into more of an item that is placed inside the cage instead of being on the boat (no more lost at sea tames yay). We now need somewhere to put all these wandering tames. I would make it so tames on wander don't leave your territory. I would also make it so you can apply a filter on the map to see where certain tames are.

Now for the meaty part of the new tree. I would make it so NPC's you get from SotD have a type of suffix like Bob. Bob would be a builder. You would need points in crew to hire Bob and then you can put him on a smithy. If you have skills in construction you would be able to make things like stone at a reduced cost. The points in crew would only be to get Bob, the points in construction would make it so you can get the discounted building from Bob. This would make Bob your righthand man when it comes to construction of things. You would still need the recipe to make it though. So getting NPC's and keeping them alive would have benefits beyond "I need guys on my sails" which you would want to keep around because sailor NPC's would make your sails better.

This would lead into reworks of the other skill trees, I would make farming capable of making the large crop plots grow fiber,thatch, and wood that the NPC's can harvest at a drastically reduced rate. The rate they harvest can be modified by giving them higher end tools.

Artillery tree would also get access to alchemists that can be put on a mortar and pestle that will make it so you can stack unlimited resources inside it and queue up organic paste for more than 220 at a time... it would also make it faster to give the QoL that is missing from the chemistry station.

I could keep talking about how I would change it but the TL:DR is make animals more companion rather than a requirement but still have meaning. Make NPC's more than a parasite when you arn't sailing. As a designer I would change a lot of things but for creatures this is what I would do.

~Lotus

I agree with most of the things on Lotus' list. Primarily that if you want to make this game different than ark you have to make the animals useful but not the best at everything. Give them the utility functions but make travelling out foot not a death wish. I love the concept of having them passively generate the associated resources while on wander. Adding to this.

Add a Corral/Pasture type object for animals set to wander. potentially something similar to the leash that restricts wander range. 

Let the gather animals keep their associated gather type to go with the passive gather. If this means for balance the passive gather needs to be low return that's fine. But the less time we spend just straight farming the more time we get to build/explore.

MAKE A BETTER THATCH GATHERER. I don't care if it's the Bull or the Giraffe but it needs to happen.

Regarding Alphas. Why are they even in game? most wild animals go to 30 and alphas go to 250. it's practically impossible to fight them on foot. Even on tames I'll avoid almost every alpha fight that isn't stuff like chickens.

On a similar note, Cyclops & Elementals (both fire and Rock) don't have too much counter at the moment. I know cyclops you can ballista to the eye. but if it catches you on land it can stun lock you, knock you off a mount, and then murder you. Fire elementals aggro from very far, and have ranged attacks that cause tick damage. I want to explore those islands not just run through as fast as i can cause the best way to do the end game content is by running in naked.

Regarding breeding. I haven't even bothered to try because at the moment I don't have the time to commit to attempting to spend 2-3 days trying to keep something alive when i have bare minimum methods to control the temperature. I don't have that kind of play time. 

Why can we not ride the horses bareback? are there any animals that will have the option of no saddle? organic paste is needed for so many other things needing it for every saddle too really limits early gameplay.

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Bear
I feel this is in a good place. Probably too good? I feel they are way too tanky for how easy they are to tame.


Chicken
Again good place, supplies food doesn't really need to do much more.


Cow
Again good place, supplies food doesn't really need to do much more.


Bull
Increase thatch gathered or allow it to pull a cargo wagon.


Crow
Good place, doesn't need much more. Could you maybe make farming worms less cancer?


Razortooth
Good place, please DO NOT BUFF HP. They need to be squishy because you currently use the same fear table as ark I guess which means they fear EVERYTHING.


Shieldhorn
Maybe make this the goto thatch/sap farmer. But please for the love of all things good please up their stam, trikes always had horrible stam.


Elephant
Good place but please up their stam REGEN they are rediclously slow in regening stam.
Also please allow elephants to hit multiple trees if in range, 1 at a time is a bit harsh, especially when you can harvest all bushes in range with a swing.


Giant Pig
Good place doesn't really need anything extra, I wouldn't mind them being able to heal like daedons? But you need to be careful with this or they will make tames next to impossible to kill. 
Another idea would be if a beast master skill is used on a pig it will pass that affect to all unmounted creatures around it? So if we have like 10 bears on follow killing stuff for us and they all need nature's cry, pig rider uses it and passes the buff on to all the bears within an AOE


Giraffe
They feel pointless and I can't see anything you could do to improve their use. 
Maybe give them ridiculously high weight so they can be used to haul stuff?


Horse
remove their ability to use cargo wagons, these with swivels/cannons is honestly stupid, they can jump around and run so fast it can be hard for the bobs to counter.


Lion
In a good spot honestly 


Monkey
In a good spot 


Ostrich
Add ability to give hyperthermal protection, but please make this pass over to babies too!!


Parrot
good spot 


Penguin
Good spot, but need to make them pass their Hypothermal protection to babies/tames too!


Rabbit
Add a movement speed buff when carrying ? (please not too much or it will become ark movement speed meta again)


Rhino
Good spot, but you may need to reduce their damage multiplier on charge attacks as once people start using them for pvp everything else will be irrelevant. 
Also please enable the ability to harvest more than one rock at a time, and let them gather metal from stone/flint/metal variations of rocks please.


Seagull
The oxygen buff is all well good but the fact your bird drowns before you is a bit silly xD


Sheep
Good spot 


Tiger
Make them slightly tankier and have more weight, they are basically a lion without the ability to smash ground pvps


Vulture
Health bar view radius increase, so let us see enemy health bars from further away, or copy dire wolf ability from ark that they reveal anything below half health?


Wolf
Good spot mostly, could do with more weight to allow them to carry the hide they harvest.

 

I'd also like to add the following in relation to tames:
Cargo wagons need swivels and balistas removed, they make ground pvp a single meta at this point
Cargo wagons should also have their own weight limit (maybe you can have BP based wagons that have increased weight) and don't increase the tame's weight at all (except the weight of the saddle). This means they can be used for the purpose of a cargo wagon. Say one has a weight limit of 5,000 you can put up to 5,000 weight in the wagon and maybe another 2,000 weight in your bear and drag it around. But it would avoid any exploiting of weights on a boat both the cargo wagon and bear together will still weigh 7,000.

Creature stasis. It seems that stasis food calculations aren't taking into account the new types of food in ATLAS or the Troughs use a different ID compared to ARK, but basically if you leave a creature long enough that it's food stat would deplete it won't matter that there is food in its inventory or in a trough in range it will starve to death.

Baby raising. Health loss from temperatures is some what manageable even if we can't use penguins to help aid it. However there is currently a math problem with how you calculate this. It seems that the creatures X% of current max health per tick which is fine it means it will always take the same amount of time to die, however you didn't account for the steady health regen that creatures have. So I guess someone tested this on a baby where it would take about 1-2hours for a baby to die. However if you have a 90% raised creature it becomes a lot worse. Because the health regen does not scale like the loss of health per tick does.

Example of this is a baby bear with max current health of like 60 visually ticks down about 0.1hp per tick. A bear though that then goes up to max current health of 1200 now ticks down like 20 health a tick. So the regen of babies needs to be adjusted to be % based like the health loss is or the % health loss needs to scale down based on how far raised they are.

Experience limit, currently all creatures are limited to about lvl120 wild level, anything over this the creatures will not gain experience.

Edited by racidon

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@Jatheish Two primary issues that need resolutions asap, basic QoL changes that would make a huge impact, and some suggestions for tames:

1) Animals falling through the mesh of boats or structures absolutely needs to be fixed ASAP. I recognize you saying above that you are making this a priority, so I'll just reaffirm how crucial this is to the player base. This has to be the #1 priority for animals; we've stopped sending bug reports about this, because it happens so much. Daily. And it was never fixed in Ark.  Don't let this one slip.

2) The main thing wrong with the breeding system is how fast the temperature spikes can kill an animal.

In Ark, you generally get to a point where you can leave the darn thing alone entirely for large chunks of time, as long as you're careful and watch your timers.  In Atlas, even if you've got all the temperature ranges for your biome/grid known, you still have a maximum of maybe a 10 minute window where, if unobserved, the baby can die, because it can transition from a heat wave to a cold front, and no amount of insulation we've found can prevent a swing like that from killing a baby without manual adjustment.  This window should be significantly longer, especially further on into maturation.  You can still keep the temperature requirements, but the window for failure needs to be much larger, given the extremely long maturation time.

Boosting someone else's idea: Give babies a scaling insulation buff when close to their mother. This will benefit smaller tribes who don't have as many people to do babysitting, and still make it more complex for larger tribes to manage that proximity if doing mass breeding.

We also need some way to cool down a baby. It doesn't have to be huge (but more than being submerged in water).


Necessary QoL changes

  • Add armored saddle blueprints to the game (even just a bit, doesn't have to be the full 25 armor of a bear)
  • Add Medium sized gates, for Tier 2 animals (and smaller tier 3s)
  • Make medium and large sizes cages (like those in the Piracy tree) to hold animals on board ships for better transport. Make the "Transfer <animal> to <x>" option move them into specific, named cages, instead of to ships.
  • Filter gathering would be amazing
  • Add the "Dino Leash" item from ark

 

Animal Specific 

  • Seagull - allow for a 'homing pigeon' ability where it can send weightless items like blueprints or treasure maps back to a specified location at your home base (like a special bird cage you craft)
  • Crow - Help you spot nearby undiscovered Discovery Points with a UI element, like the Bulbdog alerting you to high level predators
  • Sheep - Convert the hide-like resource your shear off them to a Fiber. This would help alleviate the lack of fiber in certain areas, since you could just bring along a couple sheep. Also fur just seems more like fiber then hide.
  • Pig - Allow it to act like a super-shovel. Bonus chance to harvest worms, gold, etc from the ground
  • Wolf - Revisit the idea of a "Pack Buff" like in Ark, as a means of boosting the wolves' currently underwhelming power level, without drastically changing the creature itself.
  • Elephant Giraffe - should be able to gather additional thatch from trees (higher up)
  • Bulls should get a buff to farming thatch from plants on the ground (all plants, not like how with Bears it needs to be a special plant)
  • Shieldhorn - Its special passive ability is fantastic, but it needs a base HP boost or armor to really be a viable tank.
  • Razortooh - Needs a stamina buff, and probably HP or armor.
  • Seagull - Gather fish, increase Fog of War reveal distance
  • Rabbits - on the shoulder gives a "Lucky" gold boost buff
     

PS: While the new taming system of getting hit by the animal is somewhat annoying, I really like that it pushes taming into more of a group activity, often needing people to do the primary tame, scout/kill predators, and have someone on backup to take over if you miss the sweet spot a few times and get hurt. I like this design direction; even though I end up doing less solo taming, I have a LOT of fun on our group taming excursions into dangerous areas!

Edit: PS, clarity, typo

Edited by bixby
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I definently think that a cow/bull etc should be able to pull a heavily laden cart to help transport materials for trade etc further inland.

Seagulls would be great if they could fly around your boat and alert you to shipwrecks in your area, as well as land.

Crow would be interesting if it had an additional perk to maybe find odd shiny objects or detect objects you could gather with a shovel.

The biggest thing i would like fixed is when a creature enters your boat they sometimes get stuck in a falling animation which requjres me to usually break apart half my boat or risk teleporting it onto another boat which can cause them to insta die or fly into the sky.

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Move ostriches to tier 1, they are good for speed but not really for carrying anything.

Wolf should be made a companion pet, not a mount. Needs a buff to damage, probably tier 1 since I would think of having them as hunting dogs. Probably rework taming methods. It just doesn't seem right to beat a dog, tie them up, and force feed them bones and meat.

Ditch pigs, totally useless.

Bears need a nerf to their gathering abilities and weight, otherwise they are pretty good for a tier 2 tank. Remove their cargo saddle. Their charge should be very stamina draining and not part of their sprint.

Ditch the lion or the tiger, we don't need both. They can both fill the same role of providing a bleed.

Elephants need more hp to be a tier 3 tank.

Razortooth and Shieldhorn need to be buffed to make them better for endgame, possibly be their own exotic tier with it's own taming skill and saddle skill. If you're going to go taming then you really should have to invest more heavily into it for these special creatures.

Bulls need to gather thatch better and have a better weight which can be enhanced with a cargo saddle similar to weight sails.

Horses need a nerf to their speed, probably tied to its weight, possibly look at creating 2 kind of horses, one for weight and one for combat. That was a thing with knights and would probably still be around in the pirate period.

 

As others said, you need to work on melee and hand to hand. Neither of these skills are particularly good and useful. Shields also need some work, not worth using. I think we could use some diversity in melee weapons as well. Axes were still popular weapons for boats. I'd like to see a 2 handed sword option in the same tier as the pike. 

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#1 I'd change the way we tame. I don't know about you crazy devs but when I get a new pet I don't kick the living shit out of it and then feed it over and over and over again. It doesn't make sense.

#2 Give us an animal that's good at farming thatch, like it's that animal's #1 priority. Maybe the wiki is lying but it seems to me there's no animal that primarys thatch, which is odd since it's one of the 3 most basic resources. Each resource in the world should have a tame that specializes in harvesting it.

#3 Make the Rhino get metal when it mines rocks that you get stone/flint/metal from when using a pick.

#4 Give us a command that allows the elephant to move to a location we point out, drop all of its inventory into a container and then return to where it was. So we can farm stuff, send the elephant back to base to drop off our load while we continue to farm. (Also, give us something like the hopper from Minecraft and allow us to craft while pulling from containers we're standing next to, so if i'm standing next to a box with wood, thatch and fiber in it I should be able to craft building components without having to move them to my inventory first.)

#5 According to the wiki the rabbit is supposed to warn you about dangerous creatures, but it either doesn't work or the creatures are like monster level ones. It should warn you about any nearby predator.

#6 The cargo saddle should actually allow us to put cargo in it, with a much higher weight limit. That's the whole point of the invention of the wheel, to move things that are much heavier than we ordinarily would be able to.

#7 Wolves are underpowered compared to bears. The only reason I'd ever use a wolf right now is for the warming buff, also they need more base stamina.

#8 Make one of the birds able to deliver message notes to allies, sort of like carrier pigeons or the ravens in Game of Thrones. (for that matter, add a note item and a mailbox item so we can leave messages in the actual game for people)

#9 FIX. BREEDING. Breeding right now takes waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long. I have no problem with it being challenging, I do have a problem with breeding taking as long as a full time shift at a job.

#10 Allow us to craft a higher tier feeding trough that allows preserving salt to be put into it to increase the shelf life of the food.

#11 Make chicken eggs give you meat vitamins instead of veggie.

#12 Parrots can talk, right? So allow us to "teach" it a saying to say randomly using text to speech. This is a pretty low priority idea but it'd be funny.

That's all I got off the top of my head.

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If i were redesigning tames, i would look at how they help you both on offence/defence and as a utility helping you progress into an automated base system.

The core concept of taming and riding is fine, but is pretty limited in its application in its current design. Part of the reason i love this game is that as you spend more time, you learn to become more efficient and progress your base/farming/ship building capability. At the moment farming on a tame gets you more resources, however we're now at a point where it feels like a grind. The 2x resource rates are fantastic, however it stops us from exploring as we feel like its wasted as we should be back home farming. In the early stages of the game, you are focused on harvesting basic materials to build up your base, and your basic ships for exploration and pirating. From there you start to shift to requiring gold and exotic materials. 

I would suggest you implement a different use for NPC's, give them the ability to automatically harvest basic materials within your claim. Unlocking this ability will  require a skill or by placing an new item in their inventory, you will also have to pay your crew so the requirement for gold should be able to help ensure that this is not just free resources. This should be an mid to late game ability that has risk and reward components. This would then change the way we run our bases, freeing up more time for the real game aspects, but still requiring you to design your base and implement defences from wild element and other players.

As for the tames themselves, give them a variance of passive buffs that can help you with either improve how you run your base, or how they help with offence/defence/exploration.

Add different equipables for tame, and please introduce a weight carrying cargo harness that allows us to put materials in.

Lotus’s post above has some amazing suggestions that align with the above.

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So far I am enjoying the tames. Here is how I would make it better.

First I would love an ability to select what my tame should harvest and ignore the rest. Second pls let us select tame ans NPCs to only attack players and tames like they already do on guns, it will make them viable first responders and make ninja raids much harder. 

  1. Bear - take away the ability to attach carts, the tame is either battle or utility. Once you have it both it becomes OP. The rest of it seems fine.
  2. Chicken - leave as is
  3. Cow - leave as is
  4. Bull - make it a hauler, give it good weight (say 2K), let cargo carts have an ability to snap a small box on top instead of a cannon. And let the animal haul say 2-3 times their weight limit if placed in the box on the cart
  5. Razorthooth - did not have enough experience to suggest anything
  6. Shieldhorn - did not have enough experience to suggest anything
  7. Elephant - leave as is
  8. Giant Pig - no idea.
  9. Giraffe - Make it 50/50 wood thatch gathering animal, so you get less wood than an elephant but more thatch
  10. Horse - make it a hauler, let cargo carts have an ability to snap a small box on top instead of a cannon. And let the animal haul say 2-3 times their weight limit if placed in the box on the cart. Unlike the bull it should have less weight capacity but higher speed.
  11. Lion - leave as is
  12. Monkey -  leave as is
  13. Ostrich - Make it a primarily thatch animal, the reverse of the elephant (the light weight of the thatch should compliment it)
  14. Parrot -  leave as is
  15. Penguin - leave as is
  16. Rabbit -  leave as is
  17. Rhino - Leave as is
  18. Seagull -  sentry, early warning system. Has a large aggro range about the size of a claim flag. Will respond to any non-friendly entering the range. Will seek out non friendly player, upon proximity contact will send a similar message as someone is stealing your territory, and will keep circling around the area for some time before acquiring another target and doing the same. Will return to original spot if unable to find non-friendlies in the area. 
  19. Sheep - leave as is
  20. Tiger - leave as is
  21. Vulture - sentry, early warning system. Has a large aggro range about the size of a claim flag. Will respond to any non-friendly entering the range. Will seek out non friendly player, upon proximity contact will send a similar message as someone is stealing your territory, and will keep circling around the area for some time before acquiring another target and doing the same. Will return to original spot if unable to find non-friendlies in the area. 
  22. Wolf - does a tiger type attack to cripple and bleed the enemies. Gets wolf pack bonus for every friendly wolf in proximity up to say 5 (stat buff so HP and DMG) 

 

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 - Cargo saddles need to either increase tame carry capacity, or have their own inventory with their own carry capacity separate from the tame pulling them, we should be able to load a cart up with all the loot from our ships to tow it all to our base without needing to use 10 horses or do 10 trips

- Bulls should have substantially higher carry weights, higher than horses or bears but lower than elephants. This gives them a use in the game as cargo haulers that can carry more than a horse or bear but are slower.

- There needs to be an additional method/tool for taming neutral animals that flee as it is currently substantially harder to tame a horse than a bear because it's easier to injure and bola an animal that is chasing you than one that's fleeing. Give us a lasso that works like a grappling hook does on soft targets - once lassoed a target behaves like they do when grappled (unable to walk away and can be pulled closer with RMB), but if they are a neutral tame they can be fed as if they were bola'd while they are lassoed. This would make tames like horses easier than bears while still being a bit more difficult/skill-based and resource intensive than the fully passive tames like sheep

- The logic for tames boarding ships needs some serious work. So many times I've tried to bring a bear or horse onto a ship only for it to teleport half way into a wall and get stuck. When boarding a ship tames should never be teleported to a position where they are trapped. There needs to be a check before teleporting that only passes if the target location has a path for the tame to get off the ship, if the check fails then another spot on the ship needs to be checked until a spot is found where the tame isn't stuck

- Vultures should have a passive ability to loot any nearby corpses, returning their items to your inventory

- Pigs should have an active "dig" ability that works like a shovel

Edited by wyqydsyq

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