Salty Del

That's interesting. I recall after the wipe that when you place a claim on an island with another claim flag counting down that both are contested, and neither counts down until one is unclaimed, either by one player leaving their flag area and their flag being unclaimed, or them taking their own claim flag down. While both flags were up, neither timer would count down. Maybe that's since changed, as we haven't tried to claim an island since.

We were claiming a polar island with no issues, when we got a notification that our claim was interrupted. I was just outside of our claim flag's area, so immediately headed back to find our flag now being contested and unclaiming, but the island now claimed by another company despite there being no contesting of the claim when I made it. Once another company member came on, I went to the flag of the islands owners, and I have no idea how they now have 248/114 claim points used, and instantly claimed this island. It really seems like a bug/exploit. Has anybody else encountered this yet?

I don’t have a problem with the vitamins at all. I like the buff you get from achieving equilibrium, and with some planning it’s not difficult to keep them up. The simplest way I’ve found to keep them up is to max out your vitamin buff in the survival tree. The second tier is good enough, but having the third is really nice. Put some points into fortitude because that also reduces your vitamin depletion rate. I always have at least 40 points in fortitude. With the equilibrium buff that becomes 70, which makes it a bit easier as well. For food, salt prime meat in a preserving bag, grow veggies, have a cow for milk, and I like to keep rum around as well, though berries are usually easy to find. The salted prime meat gives you a lot of vitamin b without filling up your hunger bar as well. Veggies are good for vitamin a, but if you can’t farm just spend some time picking up coconuts or digging up potatoes. Rum and milk will give you vitamins c and d respectively, and they fill up your water bar, not hunger. Eating the salted prime meat will lower your water level. I also keep salted meat and salted fish in the preserving bag, just in case my water bar is too full. Eating a few of them will lower your water level so you can have more rum or milk. Without any of the overeating skills, you can eat up to 125 points without taking damage. If you need to eat more yet, grab a tool and just swing it in the air to lower your stamina quickly. Regenerating stamina will use up your food levels. With a bit of effort, it’s not that difficult to maintain the buff, and I think the buff is absolutely worth the effort. I always feel so slow after I die and lose the buff. Hopefully this will help you and others out, and if anybody else has some tips please share them.

Oh, we very thoroughly culled the herd. We tamed maybe 20% of the olfends we found. And I like to tame level 15+ because they could have just one stat that’s better than anything else we’ve got.

New friends are abound! We’re a bit late to this party. We concentrated on tortugars, even after we found their limited uses (I still think they’re a fantastic taming mount, if they fix the bug of turning constantly right after using a bola). But, now it was time for us to hunt an elusive olfend! Thankfully, we’ve found the olfends to be significantly easier to locate. They’re found in the desert biomes, but not every island seems to spawn them, so it may take a few tries to locate an island with them. We did the same thing we did for the tortugars; kill everything in a circuit and wait for one to spawn. Unfortunately, they have something else in common with the tortugars. Tortugars, it’s difficult to find a high level one. Most of the ones we’ve found are single digits, with the highest one we’ve found being level 20. And a very high percentage of them were male. Olfends we’ve had the same kind of luck, except that most of the ones we’ve found were female. But, since they do spawn more frequently it’s not as big an issue. Just don’t expect to find a high level one quickly. It took us most of the weekend to finally find a 27 male. The actual taming couldn’t be easier. Kill things in the area around the olfend, trap it with billboards, bola and feed it cactus or other grown veggies. We didn’t see a big difference when we ran out of cactus and had to switch to beans. And clean up your traps when you’re done! The sweet spot to feed it is at it’s back, behind the front shoulder. It’s pretty generous with the range, so you only get hit if you run right in front of it. Left mouse button is a fairly standard attack. They’re not very powerful, and most don’t have a ton of HP, stamina or weight, but they can hold their own in a fight or run away quickly. They can also jump, which can allow you to trip up mobs that are chasing you by crossing something they can’t. The right mouse button sprays from it’s trunk. You may think it’s water; it’s snot (thank you, Jungle Cruise!) You can spray people that aren’t mounted and it will fill their water up. Maybe next weekend I’ll try this on a fire elemental. I may last 5 seconds instead of 2! Pressing C makes it drink water. You have to be either in a clean water source, or in a spot that you could dig for water. Digging for water, it will take a fair bit of time to fill it’s tanks. You can use weapons and bolas while mounted. After we tamed one, we started using them to tame others. Being able to jump to scale mountain sides is really handy. As an added bonus, if you want to tame lions, lions cannot pull you off the olfend. The olfends low damage makes it quite suitable for it to be used as a taming mount. I can’t wait to see what the babies look like.

I’ve been wondering for a little while how much RAM each of the server instanced have allocated to them. I’m assuming that each server is virtualized, not a unique physical server. I bring this up because what I’ve noticed is that as a server gets more players, especially 20+, the latency gets worse and worse as more players enter the server. From what I’ve read for setting up an unofficial server for ARK or Atlas, this could be caused by having insufficient RAM allocated to a server. Then again, when we did the kraken fight pre-wipe, everybody had to turn their graphics way down to get make it more playable. That doesn’t seem to be related to server performance on the surface, but I can see it being possible if the clients graphics setting can impact what and how the server loads itself. For instance, a lower render distance means the server may not have to load and transfer as much data as for a client with a higher render distance. This is all speculation, of course, and I do not have much experience actually hosting a server, but I think it’d be interesting to know what hardware/resources the official servers have. As I finished writing this, the thought popped into my head that somebody is going to link the answer that was in an FAQ that I’ve long since forgotten reading.....

From what I’ve noticed, when I get lag and high ping most is when I’m entering an area with a lot of NPCs and structures. I think it’s just a byproduct of how the game loads new items as you move, and at least for now there isn’t a lot to do to change that. One of our company members was having very high ping on one server, but when I fast travelled to him mine was normal while his stayed high. Logging off and loading back in didn’t resolve it, but resetting his router did. I’m not saying that the problem you’re experiencing isn’t caused by Atlas, say a server being bogged down for a period, just that there is a possibility that it could be something else.

You could already climb aboard unallied ships that were unanchored. What you should probably do is to go to all of your ships and make sure your ship wheel is locked. Older boats have them unlocked by default, and it may be possible for somebody else to steal a ship that was unanchored. With people now being able to board anchored ships, we could see a short period where players are stealing unlocked ships in PvE to crash them for salvage. This does assume that players can sail unallied boats that have unlocked ship wheels, but I’m not taking any chances.

TL;DR: I like the cargo racks. Only use a couple and don’t fill up the ship as well, and you get most of your speed with most of your cargo capacity. You can’t have your Kate and Edith too. We recently tried the cargo containers out on our galleon. I thought that upgraded weight sails would be better than the cargo racks. What we ended up doing was putting two cargo containers on the galleon and filling them to maximum capacity. Our galleon was level 31 with all points into weight, so it had a max weight of 39,000 kg. With the fully loaded cargo racks, our weight was about 16,000. kg. Not filling up the galleon itself, we were not much slower heading back as we were going there. If we had loaded up the ship itself, I know we would have been much slower, and I don’t think the upgraded weight sails would have helped anywhere near as much. At 16,000 kg, we were well under 50% weight. If we had just put the weight in the resource bin, we would have been over 30,000 kg which would have slowed us down significantly. Having upgraded weight sails (we have a BP for masterwork 123%), I had thought to make two for the galleon. That would have made our capacity just under 49,000 kg. That 30,000 kg is still over 50% weight, so you slow down because of that, and the weight sails are already slower than speed sails. You’re taking two performance hits. I definitely think they’re worth using, just don’t try to weigh down your ship like you didn’t have them, or fill every available slot with them, and you’ll be quite happy with the cargo racks. I now want to try out a stripped down cargo schooner and see how I like that as an alternative to using a galleon.

I don’t know if this will help you or not, but if you’ve built a base over the water you likely will not be able to breed in it. Even though the foundations may be just above the water surface, if may register as (biome) water and not allow breeding, I found that out after building a nice castle specifically for breeding on the water, so as not to be obtrusive on the land.

I appreciate that I have not had reason to contact a GM.

If the giraffe was not in render range for 8 days, maybe somebody grappled onto the giraffe and claimed it? But why isn’t it floating on the deck if it’s no longer yours?

I don’t believe that breeding is affected during the normal 2x events. That was only for the one 3x event. Regardless, that’s 11 and a half hours to hatch and get to 10% that you’ll be babysitting it for. Not to mention keeping it fed. Speaking if which, what can they eat while being raised? Please say it’s berries or crops. The tigers were a bit of a pain, just because of how quick the meat spoils, and they wouldn’t eat cooked meat.

They are only in the golden age ruins, and the friendly ones are rarer than the unfriendly ones. I think it was the sixth mermaid I came across (and chased down, I think the others filed restraining orders) that was finally a friendly one.

Sorry for hearing about the egg loss, but thanks for sharing the knowledge. Three and a half hours just to hatch the egg. I’m not sure I want to think about the maturing rate is right now.....

Artificially making content rare is not just a part of MMOs, and has actually become a large part of several AAA games. The ones I’m most familiar with are first person shooters. Loot crates are artificially making content rare, and the companies are actually charging you money to even have a chance at getting what you want. Some let you earn them in game as well, but from what I’ve heard about how long that takes, tortugars spawn a lot quicker than your “free” loot boxes. If you want examples of artificial rarity out side of video games, then card based games like Magic, Pokémon or Yu-gi-oh are good examples. Most of the desirable cards are printed in lower quantities than more common cards as a way of boosting sales. Same with sports cards, and those are mostly just used as collectibles. The biggest difference I see between tortugars and these other examples is that there is no way for you to pay to avoid having to play to get them (Grapeshot, please, PLEASE, do not take that to mean I think you should add that option. I am dead set against pay-to-win mechanics.) Although, you could always buy them in game with gold. But, then you’d have to play to earn the gold. Probably longer than farming for the tortugar, but if sailing and treasure maps are more your thing, then there you go.

Hmm. I wonder if it’s an issue with all bears with cart saddles equipped. I have noticed that occasionally, while travelling with a bear with cart saddle onboard, that I’ll hear a sound and then about half a second later all of the bears will shift towards the rear of the boat, or even floating in the air behind the boat. Thinking about it more, it does seem to occur more frequently when I have several bears onboard. I’ll try and record what is happening and how many bears are on board when it happens. Hopefully that will shed some light on what causes the issue. I used to furl the sails and whistle them on follow if they’re floating off the boat, or mount them and reposition them if they’re still on the boat. I’ve since found it much more reliable to just sail to a nearby island and drop anchor. After a second they’ll reset to their original positions.

You need to finish your testing. How many iceboxes to keep it cool enough above 45 degrees?

A catapult! I completely forgot that you can be launched by them now. My poor little schooner is already a bit limited for deck space, but I guess it will get tighter yet.

Reading this, an interesting idea occurred to me for a PvP use for cargo crates. Use them to lure in prey! They’ll think you’re loaded up, but they’ll just be empty and slowing you down while still being at full sails. Once the prey gets close enough, dump them to get the speed back and turn the attack on them. Better yet, have an ally sailing nearby that can come in to support or flank them. There you go; a use for the cargo crates in PvP. Will it actually work that way? I have no idea. I don’t play PvP. But, I do now have a good idea of what configuration to use on a galleon to transfer as much cargo as I can without losing too much speed. Thanks, Tindalen

The bonuses are increased durability and weight. For example, I have a large masterwork weight sail blueprint that has 123% weight.

Could you add a field for sail quality for the weight sails? I’d like to see what difference weight sail quality can make, and if that makes the weight sails better than the cargo containers.

I didn’t check at the time and it’s too late now, but I don’t think you do.

Though the idea of named ships of the damned does sound nice. Make them a bit stronger and faster with better loot for a good challenge and reward.

A sailing dinghy would be fantastic. Keep the current weight limit, drip it to two crew max, and it would be very useful. The current dinghy may be what most people are familiar with (movies or historical), but how many players actually use one?