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We've done Q&A threads in the past, pinned topic where we've taken questions from and answered live on stream and it's likely we'll do the same going forward -- we'll post an announcement when the details are available.

Additional Update: We have managed to make already existing savefiles load with this change, however, you will be forced to create a new character and make a new company. Force-joining into the old company will not work. However, you can then reclaim all your structures, ships, and creatures again with the use of admin commands such as: - cheat takeallstructure This will transfer all the structures, boats, and claimflags of the previous company, to your own. - cheat takealldino This will transfer all the creatures of the previous company, to your own. - cheat giveallstructure This will transfer the structure you’re looking at, as well as anything snapped to it, to you. - cheat givetome This will transfer the individual object you’re looking at, to you (works with creatures too). With our upcoming update (v218.24), some critical changes were made to the way Unofficial Non-ATLAS (Blackwood) servers saves were handled. This was in order to resolve the following issues: Players were randomly removed from their company Companies being deleted Being unable to spawn on beds Beds not appearing on the map Ships not appearing on the map After some days of investigating ways in which we can push this update with no loss of data, we've had to acknowledge that it isn't possible to migrate existing saves to the new system for dedicated servers. Given the critical nature of these issues, we don't see putting this update on hold as a viable option. Unfortunately, Non-ATLAS (Blackwood) saves made prior to this patch on dedicated servers will no longer load. This means a new save file will need to be created. Please note that this change only impacts Non-ATLAS Dedicated servers, so Single Player and Non-Dedicated saves will be unaffected. We apologize to those affected, and we'll always look to avoid wiping or any data loss scenarios when and where possible. We have opted to push this update through quickly in order to allow players and dedicated server owners to get back into Blackwood with little pause. Thank you for your understanding

At some point, you have to realize that pushing on a door that only opens towards you, just isn't going to work. I have played several survival games, and every one has the ability to totally wipe people...set them back to zero. What took months to acquire, in some cases, can be wiped out in minutes. I have been playing those games again, and I'm presently playing Conan. What I have seen in the past, and I'm seeing again, is that people often quit the game after getting wiped. For some of those games, I am not sure what can be done to fix that, but I think Atlas is unique, in that a fix that drastically reduces the pain of getting wiped, can also enhance the game play. I noted before that if there is a central bank on the Freeports, and a Stable for tames, it would provide for more pirating at sea, while also lessening the impact of wipes. The stables would allow you store 2 of each type of animal. This would work just like uploading a dino in Atlas, except that there is no timer. You talk to the stable owner, and pay a fee to store the animals. Nothing outrageous...like a few credits per week, per animal. You can also breed on this island. A new structure should be made. Just big enough for the tames to breed in, and a baby to be raised in. It disappears after the baby matures. Babies left unattended for 48 hours after this happens, after they matured, become claimable. The Central bank would allow you to store gold, blue prints, and maps. Maps would not decay while stored there, but could become invalid if somebody builds on that spot. A limit could be set on how many maps and BPs a company can store at the bank. Not a small number, but also not an unlimited number. Gold stored should earn interest, but a safety deposit box for the maps and BPs should cost a small amount of gold. So storing gold could auto-pay the cost for the safety deposit box. So, what this does is create pirating opportunities, as people try to store their valuables, but also when they pick them up, to use them. What most companies would likely do, is try to keep enough gold at their base to pay the NPCs, for about a week, but then they would need to make occasional gold runs from the bank, back to base. After breeding your animals, you would need to get them home. To use maps, you would need to go pick them up. To use BPs, you would need to pick them up and take them back to base. Having gold stored, would also allow a company that got wiped, to quickly recover, as they can use gold to buy resources. They could have a few BP ships ready to go, and enough structures, and enough NPCs to get a base set up someplace, very quickly, if they were diligent about creating their safety net in the bank. Somebody who spent 3 to 6 months creating an awesome breeding line, isn't going to feel like they are now, once again, standing at the foot of Mt Everest, after having made it to the summit, or gotten nearly to the top. I think this would help stop the bleeding, the people leaving the game, after being wiped. It would also add more fun and pirating opportunities. I think it would take some of the focus off of wiping, and put it onto pirating.

Just posted another update to the save file. Technically you could still go with your existing savefile, but it may require some admin intervention if you would like things to function how they did. We've updated the OP to reflect this.

I really like this idea, I liked it so much I included it as an idea in my "Nations" system, but it functions more like the space station from EvE Online.

It's not something that's in the game now, but it has been something we have discussed and considered for the future. No confirmation that it's coming, but it's certainly on the table to be considered.

There is exactly zero incentive to PVP in atlas. Why hassle with trying to attack an enemy fleet in an epic sea battle, or siege a well equipped fort with heroic defenders when you can simply wait for your enemies to log off, then kill them without resistance and destroy everything they ever created in the game in minutes. Once your enemy logs off, they are defenseless, sleeping, and therefore can be killed with a single hit and looted of all possessions without any skill or difficulty involved. There are no safe places to log off either. The strongest walls anyone can build in the game can be destroyed with a few salvos from a ship, so in about 10 seconds. Even walls that are built far away from shores can be destroyed by a single cannon cart in about two minutes. Also, a simple cannon has longer range than any defensive armament of a base, so you can safely park your ship or cannon cart outside any base, and shoot it without any chance of retaliation. Any ship you may build will also go down in a matter of seconds if found unmanned, even if you spent a week building it. Suppose you are really vested into not dying when you log off, and decide to spend an enormous amount of time and effort building on a remote mountain top that is both away from ships, and cannot be reached by cannon carts. Well, then then any attacker can still destroy the strongest wall you can build in the game with about 30 grenades, in about 2 minutes. To put this into context, grenades are relatively cheap to make and the average player can carry about a hundred. Interestingly, not only is it incredibly fast and easy to kill people offline and destroy entire bases, its rather expensive to build them. Atlas has the odd logic of making it cheaper to attack a fort than to defend one, even not counting the range advantage of attackers that makes all the defensive armaments useless anyway. At the moment not even mega companies seem to keep a large enough player force to defend themselves 24/7, so just build yourself a cheepo ship, get a horse with a cart, pack in a few grenades and sail around to find any building or ship left unattended for two minutes. Destroy it, loot it then move on. Its what everybody seems to be doing as its the most efficient strategy with the current game mechanics. A single player in underpants can currently beat any mega. I had this stupid idea a month ago to start the game, team up with some friends, build an awesome pirate base and fleet and then look for other fleets to battle. After a month, the four other guys left, as if we built something, it would always be destroyed while we were offline. We never witnessed an actual battle. We did see ships sometimes, but if they found us online, they would just sail away without attacking, and avoided us if we tried chasing them. The few allies we met have the exact same experience (most of them left after getting wiped repeatedly). I have only witnessed actual ship vs ship combat on videos. And to be fair, cruising around we found countless fleets moored on shore with their owners logged off, and also countless bases built by fellow players. We made the policy of not attacking anything if there are no players on it, as it did not seem much fun griefing others. But for most people this is the game: find an unattended ship or base, destroy it, then loot it. If you find other players, then just avoid them. Offline griefing is by far the most efficient strategy in this game, and this makes it a very unrewarding experience in my opinion. Its not the fault of the players, its a mistake of the game developers that made offline raiding the easiest and most rewarding activity in Atlas. A very poor game design choice if I may say so.

There are plans for Blackwood to support the missing quests in a future update

Honestly, it depends on how much administration work you want to do. The admin commands could make this a quick and easy process (moving all the structures/ships/creatures back to their original owners) within minutes or hours depending on how many different people play the game. If it's just a small group, it may be worth just running the commands. If you've not done too much, you may find it easier to restart Mmm.. you could try using: cheat GiveAllDiscoZones but I am not sure if it'll work on that map.

It doesnt work. Maybe its possible to start a thread before Q&A starts and everyone will post questions. The questions with highest reputations will be answered in stream.

Not sure how feasible it would be for to fairly select two individuals per grid but do plan on having more Q&As in the future, particularly timed around our live streams (for which we'll be announcing the next one soonish).

I would definitely like to see some changes here. If an animal is abandoned at sea, it should be immediately claimable. It's abandoned at sea. Any animal is going to see you as it's new best friend, in such a situation. It may not fully trust you, but it's going to recognize that it needs you. There are many real life instances of this, even on YouTube, where animals in dire situations, recognized that humans could help them, and allowed it to happen. There is one I watched, where a Hawk was injured in a hurricane, and took refuge in a man's car, and then allowed the man to take care of it. If a wild animal will do this, a tamed animal will be even quicker to do this. Make animals abandoned at sea, immediately claimable. It's an easy way to make for more loot in the game. It would also make the animals on a ship, claimable if you kill everyone on it, and smash their beds so they can't get back to the ship. A ship that is abandoned at sea, should also be immediately claimable, even if you have to have the pirate skill to do it. Maybe make it very fast, like a few hours without the skill, and 15 minutes with the skill.

Atlas One server admin’s perspective on how to save Atlas. About me, I run a small hosting server for game servers. I mostly serve a small gaming community and a few streamers. Most of my experience on game server hosting started in 2015. However, I have over 25 years of sysadmin experience. Atlas is an ambitious idea. I say idea because at this point that is all it is. As it stands now the game continues to bleed players. Even with new content players are just not returning to the game. It is my opinion that this is primarily due to the complete lack of support for unofficial servers. One can’t discuss Atlas without mentioning ARK. Just in case you didn’t know, Atlas, Grapeshot, is made up of ARK Developers and Producers. The game itself has a lot of code ported from ARK as well. This should have made several aspects of the game just work. Many of the features of ARK that work very well have been broken in Atlas. Below are the things that I feel are done right and things that need changes. Done right: · Water system and weather. The water mechanics, waves, wind etc, all are wonderful. I can’t say enough good things about this part of the game. I truly enjoy and most players I know enjoy sailing. It is fun and you can really immerse in this part of the game. · Changed stats. The way stats have been changed generally are good. Much of the power creep that has occurred in ARK is negated with several stats not being changeable and others having much smaller changes. This is for both players, animals. · Building system. Hands down the building system is a 500% improvement. Every aspect to how building works in Atlas is by far one of the best of any of these types of games. I especially like the multi-part system where a wall can be many different things just by cycling when u place. Needs Work: · Animals. While some aspects to animals are ok, several other parts are not. Either you have a taming system, or you don’t. At this point you have, in my opinion, a dumb system. Same with breeding either make it work or don’t have it. It was stated that animals were not going to be a focus of this game. If that was the case, then why make all the changes that make it feel stupid. If animals are not the focus, then don’t give them a lot of utility. If they are needed then don’t change what has worked before, ARK, to some stupid system that doesn’t work well. If it isn’t broke don’t fix it. At this point you have gone too far to obviously revert to ARK systems, so you need spend some time and make it work. Major changes Needed: These next parts are more about how the current server systems work. Ini files. · Don’t make us guess what works or doesn’t work here. Have someone spend some time and Actually document the current ini file options for servers. · Fix difficulty scaling, whatever you did to totally bork this, undue it. Add or go back to how ARK difficulty scaling works. Right now, it’s totally borked up and is incredibly frustrating to players and admins. Either have NO difficulty scaling at all or have it work in a nice linear method JUST LIKE ARK. Why does it have to be this bad? o As it stands now, animals don’t gain XP if they are above a certain wild level. Difficulty scaling totally borks Alphas to be unkillable and able to kill everything. Why does having wild 150 animals mean we have level 1160+ Alphas that cannot be killed unless u glitch them or trap them somewhere. o The entire system needs a massive overhaul. In my opinion separate out wild animal levels scaling and alpha scaling. Also break out SOTD and AOTD treasure maps. Some high level AOTD are immune to all damage or only take a single point. o Some survivors from high level SOTD disappear after you “claim them”. Again, difficulty scaling problems. Ship stats · I understand that “official servers” need to maintain a balance. However, you should know by now that this game will be make or break on the unofficial servers. ALL ship stats need to be fully exposed in ini files. Servers need an easy way to adjust these. This is an absolute must; mods will never work well for this and it needs to be a priority change. Many players and servers play a more PVE style and creative style. Without more ability to easily make these changes you lose long term playability. The single biggest complaint I have from players on all the PVE and creative side is this issue. Along with borked animal taming but this one issue is huge. Ships are ATLAS, you have to do better here. o Changes needed, exposed stat settings like that exists for player/animal stats. o Ini control of ship base speeds, including backup speed. o Ini control of each sail type/size. o Ini control of each ship type, number of sail “points” i.e. how many points each ship has for sails, larger sails costing more points etc. o Ini control for expanding builds outside boundaries or expanding the boundary by X factor. This obviously can’t work in all servers but if I want to have a server where I can build crazy ships then, if this is a sandbox game there should be a setting too allow that. Server map systems This is a big topic and I don’t have enough coding experience to know exactly what changes are needed but this is probably the single biggest issue facing Atlas. As it stands right now you can now play single player or non-dedicated with the full official map. Or try the actual official servers. However, unofficial servers are basically non-existent for truly large maps. The game is designed for a large map. The official 15x15 is 225 shards/servers. As it stands now it costs thousands of dollars to have the hardware capable of running a full 15x15 server. So, we have these smaller ones. The problem is that they don’t deliver the full experience because the game isn’t designed for “small” maps. Blackwood attempts to provide this by having a fully custom experience, but that isn’t much better than non-dedicated because it is too small, resources, quests, etc. I have tried to come up with ways to make this work. I’ve had a 5x5 custom map designed which I can run on a single “server” albeit one with Dual 8core/16t processors and 192gb of ram. That is an extreme example. It highlights the big issue. Another workaround that I have been talking with the developer of one of the Atlas Server Utilities about is a hybrid solution. Have a Set number of shards say a 3x3 as a “permanent” online server. This server is running the 15x15 map. Using a discord integration, a player can send a command to a bot to boot up shards F3, F4, F5, etc. This in turn would have those shards boot up for X amount of time and shutdown XX minutes after no players are detected. Something that could be configured for each server integration. Some hurdles are when a player logs off on a temporary shard and that shard shuts down if the player forgets what shard they are in, there needs to be a way to see last known location. This is complicated by a bug with Atlas that player locations are buggy. Often players will be shown online in several shards at once when they are not there. This is likely due to some issue with Redis not sending back data to the shards when a player moves to a new shard. Often this is seen when a “sleeping” logged off player is moved to a new shard on a moving ship. Although it occurs without that happening as well. Another option is for Grapeshot too develop a better server system that integrates some of the features of the single player/non-dedicated experience. Custom maps and the quests. This is got to be the messiest part of having custom maps, trying to integrate the quests and locations correctly. It can be done but it is so damn messy and when new content gets added it frequently must be done again. This needs to be fixed. A re-write of how quests are tracked internally in the game needs to happen. When a server admin must spend more time on upkeep than playing the game or simply cannot because of IRL things like a JOB, and Family, then the game just gets dropped. In closing, I want to stress that this post is just my opinion, though many parts are shared by the players who have player on my servers. Along with other server admins I have spoken too on the various discord servers. Generally, the conscious is that Atlas has great potential but as it stands now it just isn’t worth the time, money, and aggravation. Any constructive opinions are welcome.

Blackwood is perfect for play on SP or with a few friends. There are some things I don't like too much. A.e.: - I found bears only on the "Japanese" island (NE) and only there I could breed them. - Hydra was respawning instant after killing. - dragon and Hydra at the same spot is really hardcore (because you can't pull the Hydra out or I don't saw the exit). - too many equatorial or desert islands and I haven't found "equatorial grass" soil spots. (only with these together with equatorial wood allouds you to plant all seeds on one island) To your pictures: the first pic is from the freeport (SW corner of the island). The cave is really huge and a brig perfectly fit in there nice map! Just waiting for pirate forts and defence.

good idea it solves many problems

Steve, I am one of the players who resides on the Kara's servers. I couldn't agree with her more. Official servers are always going to be infested with Mega alphas and other forms of cancerous aids looking for somewhere to leave a skidmark. That is official. That is the very reason that unofficial servers are so important. Firstly it allows admins to curate the asshats. Secondly it allows us to use far superior hardware to what GS/WC can afford to use for hosting. The Nitrado boxes are very cheap quality hosting solutions this is beyond debate. These things are why proper INI documentation matters soo much. This games overall population has dwindled to the point that myspace may have more active users at once than Atlas has players. This is sad because this game has a great deal of potential. The taming system is one example. Ark got taming and breeding correct IMHO. It wasn't too easy but it also wasn't too much of a grind once you know what you are doing. Atlas on the otherhand injects an ungodly amount of grind into the process. I should not have to breed different animals in different climates. That is a level of grind that has probably contributed greatly to the issues they have had with continued community engagement. Remember that players who have 6-8 hours a day to play are a minority and should not be catered to.It's your 6-8 hour a week crown that matters the most. They have the highest incomes usually and will also be loyal willing to may 20-40 bucks extra whenever you drop expansions. It's the 6-8 hour a day gamer who usually whines and moans about having to buy expansions because they don't have or won't get a real job. I am aware there are exceptions to this rule as there are a few exceptions in our group that Kara is well aware of. This is however marketing 101. I'm sure GS has this metric internally but I would guess that around 80% of the Atlas players also own Ark. I know this bothers some people who are ignorant as to how much of the underlying assets and code Atlas borrows from its parent. They need to get over it and accept that Atlas assets are about 90% reused from Ark with a light reskin in a few cases. The SDK for Atlas even still has TRexs and Argent's in it as well as dozens of other dinos and all Ark items. GS would do well to emulate the features such as breeding and INI documentation that have been popular in Ark. At this point they have little left to loose with Atlas.

A PvEvP server will not hire additional GM staff to make sure everyone is not breaking and exploiting rules. So that means new code that cannot be bugged and exploited to make sure everyone has to play by the rules to deal with PVE/PVP integration issues when those rulesets was originally intended for seperate servers. The facts are as this thread shows is they did the nuke option for spam removal because they do not want the GMs doing this work. So I stand by my point that a PvPvE server only works with strongarm admins, which is work that Grapeshot does not want to do - they prefer you go to unofficial for that.

I stand corrected. I meant to say the "Handling Sails" that work incredibly well and if you are not sporting them you will get run down. I am very aware of the useless BP speed sails handling sails are the new speed sail. You are correct and we will have to just agree to disagree on this subject. As per usual time will tell ..... Additionally, I made no such insinuation that you were some "Johnny come lately" and I'm not sure where that came from. I do at the very least think you mean well. However, I do find it curious how in a thread titled "What makes you feel like no longer playing Atlas?" you spend so much time rebutting people trying to answer that very question. Never played Ark, but, I do have a couple hours in Atlas.

You seem to have skimmed over the part where the map was made by one person, and that that one person doesn't even work for Grapeshot, and that they decided to make the download opt-in using the Steam DLC system so that people who have no intention of playing it don't have to download a 10gb update. And where did that part about having to pay their employees even come from? There are plenty of valid things to criticize Atlas and Grapeshot for. This is not one of them.

Your confused about the decisions they make about a dead game? this game died along time ago, BECAUSE of the decisions they were making. your mad about something too late bro. move on. theres much better games out there.

on a map that is not meant to be officiallly supported ? they need to stop wasting time on single player and start focusing on the game they advertised , the online mmo , there has been little to no additions of worth to the main game for a long time now , nothing that is worth the title of A MEGA UPDATE, all we have had is fluff and silly tames , they are concentrating on the console release to try one last cash grab and if it fails there the id guess all we will ever see for the next 18months of development is small qol and fluff updates , while they start work on their next title . i wanted this game to succeed but unlike when they developed ark they seem to have no idea where they want to go with this game or even how to implement it .

*silently places 5k bouys around F8 Island *

Well hellllllloooooo sailor! *bats eyelashes*

Hi, nice idear sounds interesting and i would like to play this but there need to be some modifications to run this succesfully: Just to make one thing clear NEVER TRY TO FORCE PVEers TO PLAY PVP to reach something, this just results in WE LEAVE THE GAME! Pve players need always the possibility to travel and play without gettin killed or griefed by other players. Why should the PVE community agree on a PvPvE mixed server, if we lose our free world? Theres just one way to combine both modes, PvP can just be offered as an option to the PVE world but should not be ruling the PVE world. PvP is just an option which is nice from time to time for a PvE player nothing more and everything else wont be accepted, thats why we dont play competitive servers. It must be a win win situation, we dont want to pay for this option because pvp is having more benefits from a mixed server. Its not like we need it or love it, for the Pve community this would just be a nice addon, like pet fights or ingame chess.

Thanks for the write up, will definitely have a read and share with the team

I think they went way overboard because of all the spam complaints and in the end couldn't see the forest for the trees. At least they walked back the landlord wipe. Seriously, all that's needed is to set a good goal for what you want to achieve and then code to that. 1. You want to remove junk from players who are no longer playing the game. 2. You also want to remove junk put there purposely to annoy other players. 3. You want to protect legitimate stuff belonging to players who currently play the game, especially on land that they own. The first and last one are easy. The middle one is a bit tougher, but so far it looks like all the rules and timers are being set according to that middle goal, which makes no sense. How much time can a player stay away and still be considered playing the game? Let's say two weeks. Buildings, tames, ships anchored ..anything at all that you own...if it's on a claim owned by your company stays there until your claim expires. Claims expire 2 weeks after the flag runs out of money. This handles #3. If a player does not render their possessions in 2 weeks, everything they own that is not on land claimed by their company decays and/or becomes claimable. This keep people from having beds and taming pens they've used once and never again from persisting in the world. It also gets rid of junk from players who have quit. This handles #1 The middle one is difficult because the answers change based on whether the servers are full or lightly loaded and whether everyone has a reasonable chance to claim land. But you can't rewrite the rules for all the regular ownership and abandonment issues in #1 and #3 just to solve this, which is what it seems like they're doing. Why should some active player who has claimed land and built on it have to run around the claim jumping on and off boats and tames, making guesses about unspecified actions at some unspecified intervals just so their stuff doesn't disappear?

This is something we're investigating at the moment.