Salty Del

The mermaids only spawn in the ocean in the golden age ruins. Both the friendly and aggressive mermaids sing you off your ship. If you’re watching for it, you can see the mermaids area of effect for their singing. It’s a yellow circle with yellow musical notes rising from it in the waters surface. When you enter the circle, you get a debuff with no timer and will start bouncing towards the side of your ship. You can control yourself somewhat to stay on the ship with your directional keys. Even after leaving the AoE, you’ll still have the debuff for a short period. I’ll have to try the laying prone tip the next time I encounter one. If you have crew manning the sails and all players are off the ship, the crew will furl your sails. If you’re on your own, I hope you’ve got a bed on board and are not sailing directly at a very close island (I’ve not seen them spawn close to land though.) The aggressive mermaids are dark colours and will grab you and start dragging you underwater. This starts a mini game for you to punch the mermaid to break free. Don’t worry though. Chances are a shark will eat you both first. The friendly mermaids have brighter colours, and once you get close enough you’ll get the achievement and a small amount of a resource in your inventory. I don’t really see a huge gain from having the achievement. 35% extra stamina gain is nice, but not game changing. So don’t worry too much about not having the achievement. You’ll get it eventually.

Time zones are simple enough, but not every time zone has daylight savings time. Though I would expect that app to be able to know and tell you.

Suggesting that somebody who enjoys the game as it is is playing the wrong game is certainly an interesting argument, though one that I think is just backwards. Everybody enjoys different things. Just because they don’t enjoy the same things you do doesn’t make them wrong.

I agree. I think that speed sails have too much of an effective radius to make the other sails desirable right now. I also like the idea of placing a mast and having the sails being an item you equip on it, so that you can change them without having to destroy the sail every time you want to change them. Just have a cool down period for actual using the sail, say 30 seconds or so. Enough to make it undesirable to do in battle, but not enough to be more than a minor annoyance at worst. Heck, raising the anchor seems to take that long sometimes anyways.

I like the sailing as it is. When it first launched, I appreciated the more realistic sailing experience, but I do see how now I prefer the current model for sailing around the world. While sailing, I like to have music or a podcast playing, but I’m usually pretty vigilant about watching for ships of the damned. The only change I’d like to make is to make the flotsam a little more worthwhile to stop and get. Thinking about this, I’m now wondering if you can use the harpoon to pull them in. I’ve not tried one yet, but looks like that’s a tonight project.

So far I’ve been able to find at least one tortugar a day, typically in about 45-60 minutes. I have yet to find a high level one, but that’s just luck of the draw. My recommendation is to kill all the creatures in a few areas and make a circuit, so you loop back for respawns. On the island we’re in, that means killing lots of elephants, which means lots of marrow to tame the tortugars with. I have not tried any other islands for them, but I think that’s not going to be as effective as doing a circuit. You won’t find them at sea. As for their usefulness, my expectations were that they’d be a poor man’s sub. They aren’t, really. Low and mid-level tortugars that’s I’ve found all have very low stamina. I’ve only seen 220-240 stamina on 6 different tortugars with levels from 4-26 tamed. What I have found them very good for us taking large animals. You can take their health down (slowly, they don’t hit very hard), then open the shell and bola from safety. These things are amazing tanks! They take less damage than other tames with saddles, and they have relatively high health. Our max health one was ~1150, and that was only a level 23 tamed (wild 16). They also give you ~450 hypothermia resistance. Which would be really nice when deep diving, sure. But, it would also be really nice in tundra and especially polar areas. I haven’t looked up anything in the ice cave yet, but I suspect that you’ll want at least one tortugar to take with you in there (if you can). Have four people in it, pop open the shell and just lob grenades, shoot bows or fire guns and clear everything out. At least that’s what a I envision. Reality could be far different.

The ninth powerstone is on a new Golden Age ruins. I was very surprised to find that out. The ghost ship is just its own quest now.

You’re using it wrong. It’s obviously meant to be used as leggings.

They are a rare spawn, but if you clear out the current animals in a few areas and loop back one will pop up eventually. I’ve found them along beaches, or in ground level trenches on the island we’re on. I don’t know if they can spawn higher up or not, but I’ve not found one much above sea level.

This may be a stupid question, but are they too hot or cold? We found the range to be from 24 to 45 Celsius. Also, where are you breeding them? I’ve found that even in the correct zone and in a structure, if that structure is over water they cannot breed. Press H where you have them, and it will tell you the biome you’re in in the top-left corner. I’m assuming you’re breeding them in an equatorial zone. We have successfully bred ours, so it does work.

I’ve found that when the rider of a tortugar opens the shell and uses a bola, it seems that after the camera reverts it behaves as if you were still looking to the right, and the tortugar will just keep turning right while moving until you open the shell and dismount.

Because it’s just so handy to be able to keep ahead of a shark. You can swim backwards far faster than forwards. With the max swimming speed, it’s just enough to keep you away from sharks, even in leather gear (found that one out thanks to a mermaid). It’s possible that it’s intended, but it feels a bit exploity. With a spear gun, I think it would be relatively trivial to kill sharks. It’s probably not quick enough to kill a whale, but it would be interesting to try.

It probably wouldn’t take too much for a (theoretical) GM to do. Check maybe a dozen different islands every day, and if they find somebody spamming, just destroy all of that company’s buildings in the zone. I recall a command in ARK that would do exactly that. I don’t think it would be too long before the spammers give up on blanketing areas with foundations when it costs them everything else. The (theoretical) GMs, would just have to keep doing it, not stopping when it slows down. Are there actually GMs?

Over the past several days, while trying to get the power stone, our company has seen three hydras at the same time, so many wild creatures it causes slowdown, and once you have an artifact, the cave is so full of creatures it's almost impossible to get to the stone. Is this normal for all the servers, or just EU PvE?

I haven’t tamed a shieldhorn yet, but yes, I do believe they are bigger. They dwarf an elephant, and I think that with the shell open it may reach higher than a giraffe. If you plan on catching more than one, bring a galleon. I could only fit one on our brig, and it looked ridiculous.

Tortugar are massive, and hard to miss when you come across them. They have bioluminescent spots on their backs that are pretty easy to see at night. How we tamed our first tortugar was fairly standard. Found one, took down its health and bola’d it, then put billboards around it to hold it in place. Works well enough, provided that the billboards are on the same level. Did I mention they’re huge? If you’re using a bear, be aware that biting its butt doesn’t work. You have to hit the sides or front. Don’t worry, these guys are tanks equipped with pillow cannons. Firm pillows, but still light damage. Tortugars prefer crustacean meat. I’ve never gotten any of that, and I’m too shellfish to share it with a turtle if I had it. Marrow works very well though. Fish meat is alright, animal meat is about the same, and I imagine berries are your absolute last resort. I’ve still not tested the prime meats yet. They are a tier 3 creature, so you’ll be needing a tier 3 saddle. To mount them, you have to press e to open their shell, and then e again to get in. The left mouse button is a bite attack, the right mouse button opens and closes the shell, and c is a tail swipe attack. Are they worth the effort of taming? I’m not sure yet. They have a severe lack of stamina, which greatly limits how much they can swim. Your tortugar will die from stamina loss long before it drowns. I don’t have one I’m willing to risk to try out its limits, but when I do I’ll give an update. And their eggs are massive! Did I mention they’re huge?

The cargo containers reduce weight by 90%. I’ve heard that they have a limit of 2000 weight each, but I have not seen if that is before or after the reduction as I’ve not been back on to test that out.

The PTR is an unofficial server for some reason. Change to unofficial and it should show up.

I tried it out and had no issues accessing the ships inventory from the wheel.

Crashes: I’ve experienced two crashes so far. The first was a fatal error, and the second was the game just freezing. The fatal error occurred while laying prone to dig for water, and the freezing was when I was opening my smithy’s inventory. Both times required a reboot of my computer before the game would launch properly. *UPDATE* I just experienced my second fatal error. It seems to have occurred either the same, or very similar to the first. I laid down prone, had my pick equipped, then unequipped the pick to dig for water and then it crashed. Smithy: The lighthouse blueprint is now under Structures > Cooking. Ship Cargo Rack: While building a schooner, I put a cargo rack on it to try out. Opening the cargo rack sunk my schooner while still in the shipyard. Lawless zones: Lawless zones, or at least the J10, is acting as a Freeport. Fast decay, and cannot go higher than level 8. Diving Suit: Not sure if this is a bug or improvement, but the diving suit no longer has the helmet overlay. MUCH easier to see underwater.

You’re not lazy, you’re efficient. And they recently increased the intervals between payments on your crew leases. You can increase it further by levelling accommodations on your ship, which also decreases your vitamin depletion at sea and increases the number of beds you can have on the ship.

It’s the May Mega Update, but did they say which year?

Well, our island is quite small, as I’ve said. It is quite limited for resources, which I believe is a large part of why we don’t get many active settlers. We had one small group join our company as we were claiming the island. I believe we have three small groups that have built on our chain of islands, not including the taming pens and single foundations with beds, shipyards, etc. that we can’t clear out because they keep getting refreshed. Of the three groups that have settlements and are active, only one was problematic, but seemed to have calmed down. So 33% of the active settlers were/are what I would define as problematic. If you want to count all of the companies that have built single foundations, four foundation bases and shipyards, taming pens and then abandoned them, or worse keep refreshing them, then the percentage goes well above 50%, probably closer to 67%. And of all of the companies, which I think was about 12-15, only 2 spoke with us at all, and that was after we approached them. One was building his own base, and wasn’t doing anything that would obstruct others. The other had built a small base after his schooner was sunk on one of our shallows. I actually made him all of the base pieces he would need to rebuild his schooner, and I dove to salvage his old ship for him because of the sharks. We had all of the mats, so it didn’t take me more than a few minutes, and I wanted to make him feel welcome. The only caveat here is that we have been on holidays the past week and a half, so I don’t know if the situation has changed much until we get back late tomorrow. As an aside, I really don’t understand that mentality. You take the time to harvest the resources to build these structures, and then just abandon them when you could get half of those resources back, if not for the better reason of not just creating random clutter for others to deal with.

I think that you’re right as well, Winter Thorne. And as you’ve said, a lot of the issues were pointed out to the devs before the changes were made. But, I don’t see the devs changing the claim system anytime soon. For now, the best we can probably hope for is for them to make adjustments to balance better between the owners and the settlers. I would say that as they currently are, they strongly favour the settlers, at least in PvE. Yes, the proposed ideas do make it less fair for settlers, but currently it favours the settlers too much. Even with a land owner that tries to block settlers, it’s very possible to build there, and now you have a situation where the owner and settler lead to a combative situation. The settler spends more time trying to carve out a slice of land from the owner, and the owner is actively trying to find them and tear them down. The sad thing is, most of these issues could be eliminated if people would actually talk to one another. The alliance only option forces this discussion, if the person wants to build on a specific island. The increased upkeep costs give the owners incentive to accept settlers, or pay more to keep the land to themselves. I still think that a better solution would have been the original system with limited claims and no sea claims, at least as far as PvE is concerned. They could even have added the upkeep that the new system has, and I think it would work quite well. Simply fast travelling between claims means little if you can’t take the gold with you to pay the upkeep. But, as I said earlier, I don’t see the devs making drastic changes to the claim system any time soon. They’ve made their bed, and now we have to lay in it. Doesn’t mean we can’t ask them to fluff the pillows, or maybe change the sheets. I do kind of expect them to short sheet the bed instead though.

That does sound like a much safer method than mine. Especially if they change(d) whatever allowed it to work for me in the past.