RyuujinZERO

How about 'Get rid of the Damned' I never wanted to be a land lubber in the first place. I wanted to live off my ship and explore, taking on supplies as I travelled, trading with locals, and bringing back my bounty to a small, off-shore dockyard/workshop that only needed a tiny spit of rock to be placed where I could build my future/replacement ships and make upgrades. Instead I'm stuck with a rather large land claim that I'm only hanging onto/derping around with because there is no future for me at sea with the Damned everywhere, most of my friends are in the same boat... or, land claims. Being in boat is exactly where we're not. If we could survive out there, I'd give up the prime land claims in a heartbeat.

Ding Ding Ding! - We have a winner! Yep... every day we head on out to see if we can escape H10 by sea across any border, every day we find we cannot and go back to playing island adventure and leave the ships moored. Well, every day but today. Today we've officially thrown in the towel until they make the Damned genuinely rare/remove them entirely.

The question is whether 1 medium speed sail is enough. Not all SotD are made equal - the green ones typically can be outrun by a medium speed sloop, but yellow and above, especially red or purple will most certainly catch you. Then of course you have wind conditions to consider; if you're becalmed by low winds you're totally screwed; or you might be fleeing one SotD at a reaching angle and suddenly find another in your path, and your only angle of escape is to close-haul, but that may lose you too much speed and they catch you. Then of course you could cross a zone boundary and find an SotD sat literally on top of you on the other side, and you are instantly fucked. In general, it's just too risky to sloop right now* *Location matters I have seen some zones with almost no SotD because the local mega-guild has warships and they routinely kill them as and when they are spotted, to keep their waters safe. Conversely some more remote territories with only small companies that can't afford giant warships are practically impossible to enter or leave without encountering a dozen SotD at the border and death is assure; and ironically, due to the sheer numbers of SotD those companies have no hope of ever clearing them out because they are effectively under siege and have no supply lines.

Strictly speaking it's more of an colonial age of sail MMO. You have territory control, taxation, residency etc. All the tools needed to make an organised colonial governorship, with taxed residents, a standing militia to protect those residents and profit from mutual co-operation. Or, you know, you can smash down people's doors and steal shit as a pirate or marauder. At any rate the game on paper stands to gain a lot from base building.

I'm not sure the devs know what they want. Base raiding, land claiming, ship sinking and if you try live on the ocean the Damned will eat you; there is no way to keep anything safe from one day to the next. They keep comparing their long term vision to EVE, but EVE has high-sec zones and hangars where you can safely secure your ship when you log out, and insurance to underwrite your losses, ATLAS has all the risk but none of the risk-mitigation tools.

Our company has thrown in the towel. We love ATLAS and can see it's potential, but we came for the boats and as long as the seas are under lockdown by the Damned... We'll be back when or if they find a more reasonable solution (Only come out at night? Super rare encounters? Bloodmoon style event?). Until then the game is dead to us.

Unfortunately, taming stuff requires getting it's HP extremely low, and if, like us, you're cursed to live on a vulture infested island, every time you get the target's HP down, the vultures swarm and eat it. Once again I wonder if they did even basic QA testing during development

We replaced all of our flags in our territory and this morning we logged in to find someone had stolen one of ours which we'd replaced since the update. I dunno what we can say or do about it now, the claim system seems to be fundamentally broken. And no, I'm not just griping that we missed one, I KNOW it was replaced since then, because we took the land from a mega-guild that'd dumped a bunch of flags on the island and moved on, and not refreshed it themselves. Between the ships of the damned camping the sea, repair hammer warfare, overloading ships in port and ability to steal your land based assets, the game has about as much permanency as World's Adrift, which was ultimately killed by it's rogue-like nature; whereby you'd basically lose everything on a weekly basis and have to start over.

Sugar is endemic in the central desert regions and counts as sap, I think honey does too

I think this is already in the game. From what I've read 'allies' can build inside other companies territory under stipulation that they pay taxes in the form of a portion of all materials gathered (If the company enforces them), and the owning company has veto power to remove any structures their allies place inside their lands (I believe pin codes/locks/personal property like ships remain sacrosanct). Obviously this means you need to be able to completely trust your local land baron, but this was always an intended core feature of the game; companies and residents living together. You don't have to be a land owner, to be able to own property in Atlas. On NA PvE I have seen several companies offering alliance residency, some don't even have taxes.

The way servers are broken up, means that your character is linked to your present server, and when you go between zones/servers, your character is copied across. If the server is down, your character is also inaccessible and you can't transfer to any other servers until it comes back up. Kind've archaic, but that is how it works.

Ships that are unanchored degrade fairly quickly over time and can attract ships of the Damned, so you always want to anchor. But the location (inside friendly territory, allied territory, 'enemy' territory) doesn't really matter I don't think, so long as it is anchored. Ships do decay over time even then, but it's very very slow, like real ships you'll need conduct maintenance to them now and then. The EXCEPTION to this rule is Freeports. Freeports have very rapid hull decay even when anchored, to discourage players from clogging up the Freeport servers and to help dispose of abandoned rafts. You should never harbour overnight in a Freeport as you'll probably lose your ship.

That's incorrect. When we claimed our territory during the initial gold rush, there was a handful of rafts within the zone and those rafts are still there, belonging to their original owners. I'm also pretty sure the claim that taking territory with other people's boats in, claims the boats, is wrong too. But I can verify claiming unclaimed territory will not steal boats within it.

No, normally a bunch of giant snakes and crocodiles will swarm you while still standing on the deck of your ship, and eat you before you even reach the shore.... But yes if you make landfall, that's when you get swarmed by a coordinated team of tigers, wolves and vultures

ARK's ini configuration does use fractional values - ie. whereby 1.0 is "100%", why do I feel like someone typed in "100.0" to mean 100% (Actually 10,000%), and has now toned it down to "40.0" (4,000%), a '60% reduction'.

Different fibre plants yield different amounts. Our local jute plants are AWFUL, but the plants at the local freeport are amazing. We used to import our fibre by the truckload from the freeport; at least, before the Damned launched their blockade of all inter-zone travel anyway. Now as you say, it's back to sicklesimulator 3000 getting 4-8 jute per plants, or 2-4 by hand. At any rate I think the intention is different biomes have different levels of resource availability and optimally you can trade/import bulk goods from areas where they are more abundant

'60% reduced spawn rate'

While this is mechanically true, it's also not fair because you can blindly transition across a border right into a waiting damned ship with no warning whatsoever, but if you then try and use the same transition to flee, the ship will chase you until you are dead, likely loading before you do, because they are operating server-side and have less load time to become active. At least if transitions stopped them, we'd have a fighting chance of meta-gaming our survival from an equally meta-gaming ambush.

You're either optimistic or lucky; closer to 30 seconds for me, usually 2-3 at a time, and given we have no way to tell if one is waiting on the far side of an area transition, it's really not worth risking sailing at all right now.

It's just a theory we havn't built anything from the blueprints yet, but from my observation it seem to mean you need that many different materials of the same class (Also, said material has to be a named material, and not a generic version). ie. 3x20 hide might accept 20 skins + 20 furs + 20 pelts

Actually I've seen people overload a ship under construction on a shipyard and it took the whole thing with it, so that might well have been the case.

Yeah, H10 on NA PvE I counted 7 in just the strait between the two islands. ...Our company is basically only logging on for maintenance this week that's for sure, waitting until they ACTUALLY fix stuff, for reals.

Might have been griefers if the destruction text just says 'ship was sunk' and no identification as to who or what. People have found a way of destroying ships in PvE by loading them up until they are critically overburdened and sink...

And yet some rando parked a couple of rafts in our claim and abandoned them half blocking entrance to our shore, and 4 days later they're still at 99% health... and we have no way to remove them.

It can it seems, and since the weight of anyone stood on deck is added to the ship, a large group of likeminded griefers, carrying a large amounts of mass, jumping on people boats can systematically sink them, even on PvE There's a video of people seemingly doing it to a sloop