Lotus

We found ours in I-7 and killed it with the submarine it's not much stronger than a trench squid and kinda just ran away. My guess is it might have a spawn block by whales. I have also seen it in F11 and F12. ~Lotus

Hello, So I planned the kraken for yesterday and today. Doing 1.0 on Friday and 2.0 on Saturday. The problem with the kraken is that you now have 2 sets of stones so summoning the 1.0 is not possible for the group if everybody has the second set of stones. This made it so we accidentally summoned 2.0 on Friday and were able to work out a system that we hoped would summon 1.0 on Saturday which we did but it was still quite a headache. Word that we were going to do Kraken also spread like wildfire and so a lot of people showed up on Friday with a griefer of some kind that kept summoning the kraken early so we could not get everybody in at once and it really screwed things up. I have a few suggestions that would help clear this up. First suggestion is that a cooldown be placed on summoning 1.0 and 2.0 per company of around 12 hours. This would make it so a guy in a sloop can not just sit in the middle of the kraken and grief 100 players (Which is what happened). Also make it say who summoned the kraken. Second suggestion would be that in order to summon the Kraken you should have to open your map with M then hold right click to hold up your compass channel for a few seconds which would lead to the Kraken coming out. This would prevent accidental summons. Third suggestion would be that you can highlight the quest either voyage of power (1.0) or Journey of the Gods (2.0) to summon the different difficulties. The final thing I would recommend is that you put some kind of warning like 30 second until the kraken spawns. ~Lotus

The cooldown is there to prevent swap macro abuse which would effect PvE. The reload minigame is kinda dumb because it literally puts a halt to action in the game. Int used to have an effect on CDR and with lucky loader you could almost instantly reload every single time. I don't know if it still works that way because I don't really use guns except on leatherwings and cyclops. I would change the kill on the guardian to be a buff that only effects the specific island and persists through death. You would gain the buff by hitting E on the corpse of the guardian and only if you were in range of the kill. This would prevent people from zoning in to get the buff and also prevent people from just waiting in the cave for the buff. To me the powerstones need some work. ~Lotus

I asked questions about this on the live stream questions panel. https://www.playatlas.com/index.php?/forums/topic/70959-developer-live-stream-qa-deadline-1st-of-may/&page=2&tab=comments#comment-356262 Basically elementals are the only real threats on powerstone islands if they were to make them killable you could actually clear the islands in a non-cancerous way with the exception of the damn drake which flys all over the place like an adhd kid on a sugar rush. It is still killable in about 15 minutes on foot with carbines if you don't miss a crapload. Fire as a mechanic could use a good nerf in PvE aswell cause basically anything that hits you with fire is most likely going to kill you. 4 people can clear the island with some teamwork and good bears until the damn elementals that have no weakness because they removed the PvE weakness to balance PvP without giving us a new way to kill them. ~Lotus

Hello Devs, I am wondering why as a PvE group I can't have as many people in a certain alliance as I would like. I have 4 different types of alliances. Friendly tribes to keep in contact with, Progression tribes for powerstones, kraken, etc, trade tribes for buying and selling, and tenant tribes so I can talk to people living on our land the limitations of these add a lot of headache when I can't put all the tribes that belong in that group into those alliances. Is there a plan to change this? We have hit tribe limit twice which made it so some people's spouses that are casual were removed. I understand I could just keep adding people to stack points but the cap of 150 points means with our 2 islands I have 34 points I can spend which is only a smaller island which I believe should go to smaller tribes because they can't buy the bigger islands. We have some allies that would merge with us but they would lose their island and I can't bring all their people because of this limit is there a plan to change the limits on PvE? Currently gold has little value because there's nothing to spend it on. Most people I know have enough gold to keep their islands for over a year. Will there be a change to make gold (to me the resource most deals should be in along with mythos) to make it harder to get enough of? Are you going to remove freeport grids to make room for the new large land masses you are putting in? If so will the current lawless zones around them become claimable? Will the new large land masses be claimable? Will there be changes to the substantial imbalance of resource farmability located in lawless vs claimable lands? Is the feature for everybody or allies or company only for claimed lands going to be fixed or is it under company governance by mistake? I ask because having to knock down taming traps every day is awful. Will the new polar dungeon require the 20 power stones to access? What is the vision for how a powerstone island should be ran. Our tribe is recognized as a high end progression tribe and people ask us for how we get our powerstones. Naked running is how I answer them . The way I envision it is using tames and people to clear out islands of creatures. The problem is elementals/cyclops used to be killable with ballista/cannon (explosive kegs) recently you nerfed them to the point that I don't see it being doable and now it's just run things away because you can't kill them. Is there a plan to change the powerstones to give you more of a sense of accomplishment by clearing it instead of just running around naked with a carbine? (this includes the run naked to the cave and have people kill themselves until everybody gets their stone). I believe the hydra from H6 went to visit his buddy on L3 to see his new home. After a few shots he got drunk and can't get home. Is there a way to get the H6 hydra back home? I have noticed that the game has way too many schooners of the damned. I believe people kill the galleys and brigs cause they are high ticket ships then leave the schooners and now they wander around alone and angry. Could you make it so that the ships are worth exp per kill but the items and crew don't drop until you kill the entire pack of ships of the damned? After the nerf to predator spawns it seems to be too hard to find high level predators. Can they get increased spawns on the larger islands atleast? Why can't I tame and ride a turtle? Can the submarine get a button I can hold to auto dock rather than having to hold E on the wall of my sub? Can I get some kind of submarine port to protect my submarine? ~Lotus

We have been shying away from ballistas because they nerfed them a lot before 1.5. They do a little bit more damage against tentacles but we find the ability to do damage to SotD very beneficial. It also helps because in 1.0 you can ignore the brigs but 2.0 summons galleys. I personally run a galley with full gunports 2 handling and 4 speedsails all masterwork my job is to make passes on the head and kill ships of the damned to take pressure off of the brigs. Our tribe has 3 people with all the tier 2 powerstones and we killed Kraken 2.0 on Friday. Killing 2.0 does not give the sub but it does give you the 40% cooldown reduction. ~Lotus

You go to the powerstone island and kill the guardian it will put a key in your inventory you have 2 hours to get that key to the powerstone alter. If you die the key will stay on your body but somebody can run up and take it. Those people are parasites We have ran the kraken a few times already and all are welcome to come. Need to have discord and a boat that can do some kind of damage. We have people meet up at our island on I-7 (The Lotus island) then we sail out together. We are a NA tribe on EU-PvE so our times are a little weird for some EU players. I am figuring out when our next run will be because now with 2 difficulties I have to balance 2 different runs. I am leaning towards a Friday 1.0 with a Saturday 2.0 ~Lotus

The game is currently a lawless meta I will make a video about it eventually. ~Lotus

We use our submarine to catch ours it's not hard but it is kinda... frustrating because of all the hoops you need to jump through to tame them. It doesn't swim it kinda jumps around in the water, this means it goes up and down fast but not forward very well. It can sink to the bottom and run. You can still drown while op it. To tame it you used innard, to feed it after tame you use rotten meat. ~Lotus

https://discord.gg/pJvQt7d is the group I use to sell my bears. ~Lotus

It does not say cannons anywhere though.

How do you get working as intended when it specifically says company and allies as an option but everybody is building?

I believe you are talking about the flag. The actual company has a setting that says who can build on settlements. ~Lotus

There's a governance tab under company. You can select for company only, Allies and company, or everyone. Sadly it does not seem to work I want mine to be allies only and people actually talk to me so I don't have to go out and delete a crap ton of traps every day. ~Lotus

What kinds of BPs?

Yeah we just popped out the 5th gen. ~Lotus

I have a bear for sale from our last batch of babies. https://gyazo.com/08273aae2e8a56f3c116935149889562 Add Lotus#4187 on discord if interested we will have some more shortly. ~Lotus

Friendly people and they gave me a discount. We will be back again ~Lotus

Generally maps on the same server are going to be bad. The map quality determines the distance from the map location for further maps are better.

Empires bombed cause the the old system was trash. What I think they should look into would be having island clusters where each little island would be claimable. G10 and E10 have some I would use as an example. The minimum of an island should be 30 points and if you take more than 1 island they should add a mythos upkeep of 10% of the gold cost daily to hold multiple islands. Some of the mid sized companies have taken multiple small islands rather than an island that they should be on. The higher cost of small islands will make them not worth it for companies that shouldn't be on them to take them. At this point I believe they will just fix point values and it will work out. They will most likely not go back to claim flags at this point because of how bad empires failed. If I was a solo player I would actually prefer to live on other people's islands. A guy in my grid has a public garden for people. It's a win/win he gets food in his tax bank and other people don't need to worry about maintaining a farm or spending points on it. ~Lotus

It needs some tuning but I feel it's way more balanced than the previous one. I believe the gold cost should go up by about 2x daily. This will make it so people will need to put more effort into holding islands. I also think the second island should add a mythos upkeep to the flag. The little islands got soaked up super quick but I think higher upkeep will make it so they change hands more. Some of the island values are screwed but all in all I think it's good so far and promising in the future. ~Lotus

With some of the people I've met on this game I wouldn't mind not understanding them ~Lotus

We got 2 powerstones on PTR and explored the trenches in the sub. Tamed a crab threw each other into the ocean. For EU-PvE tried the Kraken today. Basic boats kinda screwed us. We will try again in a few days. Unless they transfer all of our stuff to NA and the tribe agrees or they do another wipe (Both of which I highly doubt) I don't see Lotus going back to NA anytime soon. As for the whole NA server thing I don't feel a need for it. The ping difference is not really noticeable it's the patch being laggy. We have a nice healthy player base right now it feels really good and I think colonies on PvE has been really successful. ~Lotus

I started thinking of all kinds of crazy things that would make the game be like this is a specific type of island. Things I came up with were simple some were like that's crazy but it could work. Theory 1 Island invasions. What if there was an item that we could put into something that triggered an invasion of something stupid strong. (Like the drop pods in extinction). The amount of griefing that could happen from that would be stupid. They could use the OLR protection but then we could just have one person build walls and log out so we have invulnerable walls to hide behind. So they make it so the creatures do damage to online and offline stuff well not it's the SotD grief all over again. This theory doesn't seem super possible but it could be. The amount of work it would take to make this not trash would be epic. Theory 2 Player made cities. So if a tribe puts a massive city up and this thing has all kinds of things in it then right next to it another tribe builds another massive city and the server lags like hell because of it. You would have to limit it to 1 city per island but how would you decide who gets the city? The tribe that owns the island gets to build the city. Theory 3 Island levels. What if they are going to make it so you can dump resources into the island to level it up. What would be the point of this? I thought of some things that the island level would effect maybe the grid would have higher level SotD in bigger packs. Maybe higher level cap on animals. Theory 4 Biome changing. What if they make an item that can change the biome of the island. I would be madder than hell if I made my perfect tropical paradise with a tiki bar and everything. I wake up the next day and it's polar with a penguin making that horrible penguin sound. Theory 5 Island naming. I believe the idea was confirmed somewhere that you can rename islands. I just can't remember where. Theory 6 Factions. What if they make it so taxes go towards a war effort type thing like in WoW and after a certain faction pays enough taxes something happens. Like a warfront type event on lawless which is why they didn't want people to live on lawless and why lawless is programmed the way it is. Only it becomes how it is on WoW where it's like a Battleground. (This is something I could get a real MMO feel from) It would be a PvP experience because Faction A is pushing out Faction B and you can go participate in the fighting. After the fight though it goes back to PvE on the lawless it just has a factions guys on it and this would be tied to dailies or something. I don't know though it could be all kinds of things. The point is we don't know Grapeshot's reasons. We were just focusing on what we thought would be best for the current game not the game they are building. ~Lotus

I was talking to somebody about the land claims situation. Person is familiar with Atlas but a much bigger Ark player. The conversation was basically this. I was playing 16 hours a day every day for like 2 months. I had 1k hours when the wipe was announced. So I am talking to this person about the claims. I was explaining how at this point claims worked that people would basically need to quit for a month to get land and would only have to log in then out to keep it for another month. The upkeep they had was not working to make getting>keeping>losing land cycles in check for PvE. So they needed a harsher upkeep applied to owning land. So they were going to make the islands all lawless and put this repair machine in to keep your buildings from decaying to death. The problem I saw with this was they would have people blocking resources to kick other players off the island cause they can't repair if they can't get resources. They decided to change it though which I was thankful for was putting 1 tribe as owner of an island then they have to basically feed the flag based on island size. Which I think is great. Just take freebuild off and make it so the owner has to allow tribes to build. Then the people that don't want to or don't have the ability to feed a flag every 3-5 or whatever days can just build on somebody else's land and they pay taxes to help the land owner. Win/Win I then started talking about how some people want it to be 1-3 claims per person which would be fair if they added an upkeep cost like owning the island. The only problem is if 1-2 people wanted to they could screw all the tribes on an island by using their claims to block resources. If somebody wants to build on top of the only metal mountain on an island you can't really have a dev say no you need to play how it benefits the other players. So it would lead to problems. So I think the devs see it was the whole island for a tribe is better for the players regardless of big or small tribes. This person goes and explains to me well Atlas is supposed to be an MMORPG with few real MMORPG features at this point what if they are making the changes in preparation for features that haven't been announced yet? And at that point my jaw just kinda dropped and I was like damn it might not have anything to do with what people want but what they are designing. So I just kinda sat there humbled. ~Lotus