capn_creepy

I'd like to make a suggestion for the sails in this game. Atlas currently has 3 sail types. While the ones that exist are decent looking, and allow visual customization, i think the game would benefit greatly from offering a more complete and realistic set of sail options. Ideally since the practice of designing sails on ships already has a name and storied history in the real world you could just emulate the "Sail Plan" with a ui inside the shipyard or inside the ship itself. Types of sail that can be part of a sail plan can be broadly classed by how they are attached to the sailing craft: To a stay – Sails attached to stays, include jibs, which are attached to forestays and staysails, which are mounted on other stays (typically wire cable) that support other masts from the bow aft. To a mast – Fore-and-aft sails directly attached to the mast at the luff include gaff-rigged quadrilateral and Bermuda triangular sails. To a spar – Sails attached to a spar include both square sails and such fore-and-aft quadrilateral sails as lug rigs, junk and spritsails and such triangular sails as the lateen, and the crab claw. To a halyard – Spinnakers are the predominant sail supported solely by a halyard. I know this is considerably more depth than exists today and likely would require an overhaul of the sail mechanic in game to make this work, but it would provide for infinite variation in appearance of ships and allow to build much more purpose built ships. Building a ship for weight carrying should be a complete overhaul from a gunship but in today's atlas meta, pretty much everyone uses the same one or two configs and they are not aesthetically pleasing. Even if the above design options only added cosmetic flair, it would be a welcomed improvement, but ideally it would govern the performance of the ship as well.

This post may now be irrelevant because this happened in the hours running up to the 10.0 patch and just hadnt taken time to report this yet. We had tamed our first higher level bears and had some success killing alphas and level 30 army of the damned so we decided to load up our schooner the green bastard and take him into the closest ruins to explore and see what they were about. This was only a couple tiles away from us so we got there pretty quickly and upon crossing the border with about as much chunky loading as it can handle without crashing to desktop we got into the zone. Almost instantly we noticed one of the bears was about 5ft off the deck and about 5ft in front of the ship and making ground on us. We were laughing about it and thinking... well this probably wont end well for that bear.. when suddenly we get hurricane weather and a sotd right in front of us.The bear is now a couple hundred feet in front of the boat and above mast height. when we turned, he turned with us. We had read about being able to glide through the wall and teleport your ship and crew through it so we thought we could escape this zone by turning the bear into the wall. As soon as he hit it we teleported back into the region south of the ruins and promptly got disconnected. At this point we started trying to respawn on the boat and got three different outcomes randomly it seemed. 1. We would spawn on the boat and it would be blinking in and out of existence(sometimes even upside down) After a moment and trying to get back on schrodinger's boat we would crash to main menu or a bed selection screen. 2. bed selection screen would just loop us back without even getting the action bar to popup on the bottom of the screen before failing. 3. once we started feeling like maybe the schooner and bears were lost we started just trying to go home but got all kinds of crashes and errors going home lets you select a bed but you dont spawn or even worse end up in the water behind the vanishing boat again. After trying these in loop for 30 minutes with a huge patch incoming and no idea how it would effect our situation we eventually got one of us into a bed at our main base and claim. I was able to get to the bed on one of our sloops and i look down at the bed and gaasp to my friend.. "dude, this timing is crap but it looks like hackers are trying to troll us right now" i saw a stack of players inside the bed frame that i was unable to click on. These players were all level 40 and 43 and all named "player" my friend and i start ranting about region locking china and how can this game have such poor hack protection that people can spawn high level generic players under a bed that you cant remove and it sinks your ship. We were going from amused at early access hilarity to enraged pretty quickly. everything was frantic so i had not yet noticed what was really going on. After the sloop was sunk, and we were about to rage quit we saw a string of the both of us dying rapidly. Holy crap! what is going on right now! I ran to another bed we had tried, and sure enough sleeping "player" by the many inside the bed. Now that im calming down i realize wow... these "player" look a lot like you and i dude... i think we were creating clones of ourselves every time we tried to use a bed here. I went to every bed on every boat and in structures and had to break the beds to get to them but then dragged no less than 40 clones of me and my friend into the ocean to die. We were the chinese all along!!!! This was hilarious to us, we understand its early access, and quite honestly... BRAVO! for such a mind bending sequence of bugs. This was fun to be a part of and sorry we didnt report the details sooner. Seems you may have cleaned the clone issue up by having better recognition that the player is currently on another server. We see this often in crash to desktop situations where the player still online sees the one that crashed still standing there like nothing happened. and hes getting errors telling him a player of the same account is already logged in or something similar. The flying tames thing still seems legit and we now get on our bears and make sure all 4 feet are on the ground after every transfer or rubberband so we dont end up with them flying away but still part of the boat again. EDIT: we could see the boat actually moving on the map while this was all going down and neither of us were on it. Eventually it stopped moving and i tried to go to the bed on it and was droped in the ocean about 100ft from the boat near one of the bears which promptly died to sharks. It stopped moments later and i could see hundreds of clones of us falling off the back of the ship. and death message spam for me and my crewmate.i was still i the armor i was wearing when this started and was able to swim to the boat and we still have it to this day. There has been no death of the floating bear to this day. If you find him trying to exit out the top of a server please return him.

Alphas are definitely too common and also appear to have zero tether range. I ran an alpha giant snake in two laps around one of the larger islands yesterday and even after aggroing to another mob killing and eating it, it still remembered that it really hated me at a distance where i was unable to see it anymore. In Ark, alphas were not that bad because they basically only existed in a few forms. theres literally alpha everything in this game and with rng you can pull up on glowing red islands at times where everything in sight is alpha... that can not be the intentions of the devs. Alpha predators only would go a long way here, reducing the spawn rate considerably would also make them seem more interesting instead of seeming like normal. Tether needs to exist on alphas or some equivalent mechanic. If i can get so far it cant see me, and jump in water, then a boat and sail 500ft off coast, the damn snake shouldnt eventually show up eating my planks. I aggrod an alpha vulture and when i go under water he seems to forget about me and fly all the way back to his original tether location, i sent a friend to watch him because it was all the way across an island. as soon as i stepped on land it somehow instantly knew from across the map and raced towards me. This can not be intended. Damage is fine, alphas should not be capable of being handled by hand period. You wouldnt fight a bear you saw just eat every animal in sight indiscriminately with your flintlock and sword.

I'm sure this is not the first and will not be the last vitamin post. I think its a decent idea, but it needs to be retooled in order to achieve something closer to reality. Vitamin depletion to nothing is hard in real life, yet in Atlas you can achieve this in a single afternoon of sitting on your ships deck without even approaching the need for food or water. The average person lives their whole life without ever thinking of how to balance their vitamin intake, there are benefits to doing so, but if we all died in a single day of ignoring vitamin balance humanity would have never reached the point where it could create a video game in which we could. There are many ways to improve this but a few of us discussed this and the following solution seems to make this workable while not completely removing a core mechanic of the game. PROBLEM: Vitamin usage is beyond unrealistic. You should not be able to die from vitamin shortage before ever needing to drink or eat to survive. Most humans never achieve vitamin balance in a ~80 year lifetime. SUGGESTED SOLUTION: Vitamin depletion rate reduced to ~10% of current rate. Vitamin Equilibrium Buff changed to a 3 tier system where you gain 1/3 of the total buff for every hour you maintain it stacking to 3. Losing equilibrium during the buff removes a stack once every 10 minutes you go without recovering it. ADDITIONAL IDEAS: 1. Theres a disconnect here, food should deplete slower than vitamins and they do when you are constantly working or taking damage, but then you reach a state where food doesnt deplete at all while captaining a ship or sitting at home and vitamins still do. the same things that decrease food and water usage should decrease vitamin usage and do it by a lot more. Being at home doing nothing should not deplete vitamins as fast as chopping down hundreds of trees in 51c heat. 2. Create the ability to extract vitamins from raw foods in the mortar and pestle for chemical experts. vitamins that can be crafted and eaten without increasing stomach fullness. this still creates regular maintenance tasks both for the company and the individual but doesnt break immersion by adding silly unrealistic mechanics that everyone playing this game likely ignores in real life the entire time they are logged in without dying.