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The Great Tea Race of 1866 At the height of the sailing era, four of the world’s fastest clippers raced home with the season’s precious early cargo of tea. <a href=""> By Mike Dash SMITHSONIAN.COM DECEMBER 15, 2011 Captain John Keay, master of the crack new British clipper ship Ariel, had good reason to feel pleased with himself. He had secured the first cargo of tea to come to market at the great Chinese port of Foochow (modern Fuzhou) in 1866—560 tons of first and second pickings, freighted at the high price of £7 a ton: the very finest leaves available. The cargo had been floated out to him in lighters, packed in more than 12,000 hand-made tea chests, and stowed below decks in the record time of just four days. Now Ariel was weighing anchor at 5 p.m. on the evening of May 28–the first tea clipper to sail for London that season. She was a brand new ship: “A perfect beauty,” Keay recalled, “to every nautical man who saw her; in symmetrical grace and proportion of hull, spars, sails, rigging and finish she satisfied the eye and put all in love with her without exception. Very light airs gave her headway, and I could trust her like a thing alive in all evolutions.” Ariel was indeed the fleetest vessel of her time; flying the astounding total of more than 26,000 square feet of canvas, she could reach speeds of 16 knots, far faster than contemporary steamers. But the advantage that Keay held over the other clippers crowded in the port was minimal, and Ariel was unlucky with her tugs. The paddle steamer Island Queen, hired to take the clipper in tow, lacked the power to carry her across the bar of the Min River against a falling tide. Stranded for the night, Keay and his crack crew were forced to lie at anchor and watch as their rivals completed their own hurried loading and started in pursuit. That evening the rival Fiery Cross came down the river towed by a more powerful tug, edged her way into clear water, and set a course east across the China Sea. Keay was still negotiating the bar next morning when two other clippers, Serica and Taeping, appeared beside him. The Tea Race of 1866—the most exciting in the history of the China trade—was on. Tea was one of the very few commodities carried at speed in the heyday of sail. Other cargoes were either too bulky or insufficiently valuable to make it worth risking a whole ship and crew in racing through the typhoons and the shoals of the South China Sea with all sails set, just to be able to dock in the Port of London a few hours or days ahead of the pack. But in the middle of the 19th century, demand for fresh tea was such that the first vessel home from Fuzhou or Shanghai could command a premium of at least 10 percent for her wares, and a clipper ship that cost perhaps £12,000 or £15,000 to build might bring home a cargo worth almost £3,000 on her first voyage. The tea trade dated to the mid-16th century, when the Portuguese established a base at Macao, just west of Hong Kong. But the remoteness of China, and its emperors’ hostility toward Western merchants desperate to trade in silks and spices, meant that the beverage remained almost unknown in Britain until the restoration of Charles II in 1660. When the English East India Company, which had secured a royal monopoly on the trade between England and China, wished to thank the monarch by making him a present of tea, its agents had to scour London to find even two pounds of leaves. For the next century and three quarters, the monopoly gave the Company little incentive to hurry its cargoes home. But it ended in 1834, and the subsequent repeal of the ancient Navigation Acts—which banned the import into Britain of goods not carried in a British ship—spurred the construction of far faster and more capable merchantmen. Another incentive was the growing competition from the United States, whose yards were turning out sailing ships as good as or better than the best that could be built in Britain; still another was the burgeoning trade in opium, grown in India and sold in Canton—one of the few cargoes carried in Western vessels for which there was real demand in China. Since the companies now trading with China were reluctant to drain their treasuries of silver to purchase tea, the opium trade was much encouraged, even though the Qing emperor had declared it illegal in his dominions. Sleek sea greyhounds of the clipper class proved admirably suited to the task of running British drugs up the China coast. Some hundreds of clipper ships were built between 1845 and 1875, mostly in the U.S. and Scotland, and tested against each other in what became highly publicized “tea races” as they vied to be first home with the new season’s cargo. Today, the clippers are regarded as the apogee of ship design during the sailing era. They were distinguished, first, by the rakish bows that gave them their name, which swept forward at an angle of up to 50 degrees and lent the vessels a lean and eager look, and, second, by their narrow beam and lofty sail plans. Below the waterline they boasted radical new lines, with knife-edge stems, narrow foreparts, a long flat run aft to the rudder, and a sharp “rise of floor”— the slope at which the hull angles outward from the central keel to the ship’s sides. The merchant shipbuilders of the time were not yet really engineers; naval architecture remained the province of navies, and civilian designs were based on experience, instinct and rule of thumb. Some clipper builders may have known of the engineer John Scott Russell and his wave-line theory, the first modern mathematical statement of the relationship between hull design and speed, but no two ships built in any yard were truly alike, and often only time could tell which would prove good in the water and which would disappoint. When William Hall, the Aberdonian master shipbuilder who designed the prototype clipper Scottish Maid in 1839, proposed to test his new idea for a sharper bow by sailing a model in a tank, his decision raised eyebrows in the city’s other yards. But Hall’s “Aberdeen bow” added speed without limiting cargo capacity. A ship built along those lines encountered far less resistance to her passage through heavy seas. Instead of progressing in a series of checks and shocks as she encountered wave after wave, eventually burying her stem and forcing her crew to reduce sail for fear of being swamped, a clipper could cut through the swells. The new design soon inspired imitations. The earliest true clipper hulls, however, appear to have evolved independently in the United States and Scotland at about this time. An American merchantman, the Rainbow of 1845, is sometimes described as the first of the clipper breed, and her immediate successor, the Oriental, created a sensation by making the passage from New York to Hong Kong in only 81 days in 1850—a time unmatched for the day. The Oriental was immediately offered a premium of 25 percent above the prevailing freight rates to accept a charter for London. Loaded with almost 1,650 tonnes of tea, she left Whampoa, the tea port north of Hong Kong, on August 27, 1850, and sailed south against the monsoons, reaching the West India Dock in London on December 4–just 99 days later. The older British opium clipper Astarte, which sailed from Whampoa a day later, took a month longer in passage. It took British shipbuilders several years to match the Oriental, but after that they made more innovations to produce ships of the caliber of Ariel and her consorts in the Tea Race of 1866. The flourishing of the China trade crowned centuries of trial and error with masts and sails, and the power that a clipper could draw from a following wind with all sails set was far greater than anything that could be supplied from contemporary steam engines. A typical clipper ship of the late 1860s had three masts, each of which would be fitted (looking from the bottom up) with a lower course sail, double topsails, single or double topgallants, a royal and a skysail. Some masters, anxious to cram on every stitch of canvas, might also unfurl small sails known as moonrakers at the very tip of each mast, and add supplementary staysails and studding sails, as well as fancy racing canvas such as water sails close down along the waterline. A crack ship such as Ariel could easily set thirty or more sails in the most favorable conditions, and any clipper taking part in the tea race might average 11 or 12 knots in reasonable conditions, at a time when the steam fleet made eight or nine knots and would need to coal four or five times on a passage between Britain and China. A clipper designer would also devote much attention to smoothing his ship’s “run,” her bottom at the after end. This practice lessened friction and added speed—but it also had its dangers. Too clean a run could result in an excessively fine form above the waterline and a consequent lack of buoyancy which often led to a ship being pooped—that is, swamped by a following wave. Ariel was one of a number of ships that suffered from this tendency, and when she vanished without trace while on passage in 1872 it was generally assumed that a following sea had struck from behind and washed her helmsman overboard. With no hand on the wheel, the clipper would have swung broadside to the following wave and been struck with such ferocity she would have sunk almost instantly. Nautical men also acknowledged that the finest clipper would be nothing without a captain prepared to drive her hard for every moment of a voyage. The best masters pretty much lived on deck for the three-and-a-half month passage, and the ceaseless efforts made by Dick Robinson of the Fiery Cross were said to be worth an extra half-knot in speed to any ship he captained. Even conservatively built ships were generally loaded so they were trimmed down at the stern, as it was considered that the extra weight helped their sailing qualities. Once all the tea had been stowed away, the crew would still have to work hard to redistribute their cargo so as to ensure the optimum speed; some captains took matters further still. Ariel was noted for keeping on deck an enormous box, twelve feet long, packed with the heaviest metal obtainable. Once at sea, Captain Keay would watch as his men labored to drag the box to and fro until he was satisfied that its position would add still another edge to his performance. As he watched the Fiery Cross pull away in that evening in May 1866, Keay must have realized he would have to call on all of his ship’s fine qualities to win that season’s tea race. His rival, built six years earlier, had proved herself by far the fastest and most successful clipper of the early 1860s, while his own ship was comparatively untried. Although slightly smaller than Ariel, the ship now receding into the dusk of the China Sea boasted elegant lines that made her a good sailer to windward, and her master, Robinson, had fitted her with all manner of gear, including roller-reefing equipment to improve the efficiency of the sails. More important, Robinson was a highly experienced racer who had brought Fiery Cross home to London first in the tea races of 1861, 1862, 1863 and 1865, being beaten in 1864 only by the brand-new Serica. He had been rendered so anxious by the Ariel‘s early departure he had departed the moment his cargo was complete, without his papers and without signing the official bills of lading—thus gaining 12 hours on the Taeping and the Serica and reducing the latter’s master, Captain George Innes, to an apoplectic fury. The four contenders sailed east to round the northern coast of Formosa (now Taiwan), then shaped a course to the south. Occasionally they came close enough for the crew of one ship to see the men of another over the water, setting more sails or trimming their vessel to coax an extra quarter-knot from her, but mostly the rival clippers sailed independently. Fiery Cross made good use of the 14-hour lead she had gained over Ariel at the bar of the Min River, and reached Anjer, at the exit to the China Sea, only 20 days out from Fuzhou. Taeping and Ariel had fallen two days behind, and Serica did not pass the town for another day after that. But the weather in the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope evened matters out somewhat; all four ships made fine time, Ariel logging a single day’s run of 317 miles and Fiery Cross one of 328. By the time the island of St. Helena came over the horizon, Captain Donald MacKinnon’s Taeping held a slender lead of 24 hours over Fiery Cross, with Ariel and Serica one day further behind. Three of the four rivals were composite ships, built of wood over an iron frame, but Serica was lighter, built of wood only, and had finer lines than her half-sister Taeping. Her captain, Innes, was a notorious taskmaster with a volcanic temper, and in the lighter winds around the Equator he caught up with MacKinnon. Ariel was picking up speed too, and all four vessels passed Flores, in the Azores, together on August 29. The Great Tea Race of 1866 At the height of the sailing era, four of the world’s fastest clippers raced home with the season’s precious early cargo of tea Ariel and Taeping at sea during the great Tea Race of 1866. Oil painting by Jack Spurling, 1926 Ariel and Taeping at sea during the great Tea Race of 1866. Oil painting by Jack Spurling, 1926 (Wikicommons) By Mike Dash SMITHSONIAN.COM DECEMBER 15, 2011 Captain John Keay, master of the crack new British clipper ship Ariel, had good reason to feel pleased with himself. He had secured the first cargo of tea to come to market at the great Chinese port of Foochow (modern Fuzhou) in 1866—560 tons of first and second pickings, freighted at the high price of £7 a ton: the very finest leaves available. The cargo had been floated out to him in lighters, packed in more than 12,000 hand-made tea chests, and stowed below decks in the record time of just four days. Now Ariel was weighing anchor at 5 p.m. on the evening of May 28–the first tea clipper to sail for London that season. She was a brand new ship: “A perfect beauty,” Keay recalled, “to every nautical man who saw her; in symmetrical grace and proportion of hull, spars, sails, rigging and finish she satisfied the eye and put all in love with her without exception. Very light airs gave her headway, and I could trust her like a thing alive in all evolutions.” Ariel was indeed the fleetest vessel of her time; flying the astounding total of more than 26,000 square feet of canvas, she could reach speeds of 16 knots, far faster than contemporary steamers. But the advantage that Keay held over the other clippers crowded in the port was minimal, and Ariel was unlucky with her tugs. The paddle steamer Island Queen, hired to take the clipper in tow, lacked the power to carry her across the bar of the Min River against a falling tide. Stranded for the night, Keay and his crack crew were forced to lie at anchor and watch as their rivals completed their own hurried loading and started in pursuit. That evening the rival Fiery Cross came down the river towed by a more powerful tug, edged her way into clear water, and set a course east across the China Sea. Keay was still negotiating the bar next morning when two other clippers, Serica and Taeping, appeared beside him. The Tea Race of 1866—the most exciting in the history of the China trade—was on. The Chinese port of Fuzhou, starting point for the great Tea Races, in about 1860. Tea was one of the very few commodities carried at speed in the heyday of sail. Other cargoes were either too bulky or insufficiently valuable to make it worth risking a whole ship and crew in racing through the typhoons and the shoals of the South China Sea with all sails set, just to be able to dock in the Port of London a few hours or days ahead of the pack. But in the middle of the 19th century, demand for fresh tea was such that the first vessel home from Fuzhou or Shanghai could command a premium of at least 10 percent for her wares, and a clipper ship that cost perhaps £12,000 or £15,000 to build might bring home a cargo worth almost £3,000 on her first voyage. Charles II (1660-1685) granted the monopoly that helped get English trade with China underway. The tea trade dated to the mid-16th century, when the Portuguese established a base at Macao, just west of Hong Kong. But the remoteness of China, and its emperors’ hostility toward Western merchants desperate to trade in silks and spices, meant that the beverage remained almost unknown in Britain until the restoration of Charles II in 1660. When the English East India Company, which had secured a royal monopoly on the trade between England and China, wished to thank the monarch by making him a present of tea, its agents had to scour London to find even two pounds of leaves. For the next century and three quarters, the monopoly gave the Company little incentive to hurry its cargoes home. But it ended in 1834, and the subsequent repeal of the ancient Navigation Acts—which banned the import into Britain of goods not carried in a British ship—spurred the construction of far faster and more capable merchantmen. Another incentive was the growing competition from the United States, whose yards were turning out sailing ships as good as or better than the best that could be built in Britain; still another was the burgeoning trade in opium, grown in India and sold in Canton—one of the few cargoes carried in Western vessels for which there was real demand in China. Since the companies now trading with China were reluctant to drain their treasuries of silver to purchase tea, the opium trade was much encouraged, even though the Qing emperor had declared it illegal in his dominions. Sleek sea greyhounds of the clipper class proved admirably suited to the task of running British drugs up the China coast. The 1850s American clipper Lightning, sailing out of San Francisco, was more than capable of matching the finest British vessels of the day for speed. Image: Wikicommons. Some hundreds of clipper ships were built between 1845 and 1875, mostly in the U.S. and Scotland, and tested against each other in what became highly publicized “tea races” as they vied to be first home with the new season’s cargo. Today, the clippers are regarded as the apogee of ship design during the sailing era. They were distinguished, first, by the rakish bows that gave them their name, which swept forward at an angle of up to 50 degrees and lent the vessels a lean and eager look, and, second, by their narrow beam and lofty sail plans. Below the waterline they boasted radical new lines, with knife-edge stems, narrow foreparts, a long flat run aft to the rudder, and a sharp “rise of floor”— the slope at which the hull angles outward from the central keel to the ship’s sides. Donald MacKinnon, skipper of the Taeping, and one of the finest masters of the clipper era. The merchant shipbuilders of the time were not yet really engineers; naval architecture remained the province of navies, and civilian designs were based on experience, instinct and rule of thumb. Some clipper builders may have known of the engineer John Scott Russell and his wave-line theory, the first modern mathematical statement of the relationship between hull design and speed, but no two ships built in any yard were truly alike, and often only time could tell which would prove good in the water and which would disappoint. When William Hall, the Aberdonian master shipbuilder who designed the prototype clipper Scottish Maid in 1839, proposed to test his new idea for a sharper bow by sailing a model in a tank, his decision raised eyebrows in the city’s other yards. But Hall’s “Aberdeen bow” added speed without limiting cargo capacity. A ship built along those lines encountered far less resistance to her passage through heavy seas. Instead of progressing in a series of checks and shocks as she encountered wave after wave, eventually burying her stem and forcing her crew to reduce sail for fear of being swamped, a clipper could cut through the swells. The new design soon inspired imitations. The earliest true clipper hulls, however, appear to have evolved independently in the United States and Scotland at about this time. An American merchantman, the Rainbow of 1845, is sometimes described as the first of the clipper breed, and her immediate successor, the Oriental, created a sensation by making the passage from New York to Hong Kong in only 81 days in 1850—a time unmatched for the day. The Oriental was immediately offered a premium of 25 percent above the prevailing freight rates to accept a charter for London. Loaded with almost 1,650 tonnes of tea, she left Whampoa, the tea port north of Hong Kong, on August 27, 1850, and sailed south against the monsoons, reaching the West India Dock in London on December 4–just 99 days later. The older British opium clipper Astarte, which sailed from Whampoa a day later, took a month longer in passage. It took British shipbuilders several years to match the Oriental, but after that they made more innovations to produce ships of the caliber of Ariel and her consorts in the Tea Race of 1866. Loading tea at the Chinese port of Canton. Image: Wikicommons. The flourishing of the China trade crowned centuries of trial and error with masts and sails, and the power that a clipper could draw from a following wind with all sails set was far greater than anything that could be supplied from contemporary steam engines. A typical clipper ship of the late 1860s had three masts, each of which would be fitted (looking from the bottom up) with a lower course sail, double topsails, single or double topgallants, a royal and a skysail. Some masters, anxious to cram on every stitch of canvas, might also unfurl small sails known as moonrakers at the very tip of each mast, and add supplementary staysails and studding sails, as well as fancy racing canvas such as water sails close down along the waterline. A crack ship such as Ariel could easily set thirty or more sails in the most favorable conditions, and any clipper taking part in the tea race might average 11 or 12 knots in reasonable conditions, at a time when the steam fleet made eight or nine knots and would need to coal four or five times on a passage between Britain and China. A clipper under full sail. A clipper designer would also devote much attention to smoothing his ship’s “run,” her bottom at the after end. This practice lessened friction and added speed—but it also had its dangers. Too clean a run could result in an excessively fine form above the waterline and a consequent lack of buoyancy which often led to a ship being pooped—that is, swamped by a following wave. Ariel was one of a number of ships that suffered from this tendency, and when she vanished without trace while on passage in 1872 it was generally assumed that a following sea had struck from behind and washed her helmsman overboard. With no hand on the wheel, the clipper would have swung broadside to the following wave and been struck with such ferocity she would have sunk almost instantly. Nautical men also acknowledged that the finest clipper would be nothing without a captain prepared to drive her hard for every moment of a voyage. The best masters pretty much lived on deck for the three-and-a-half month passage, and the ceaseless efforts made by Dick Robinson of the Fiery Cross were said to be worth an extra half-knot in speed to any ship he captained. Even conservatively built ships were generally loaded so they were trimmed down at the stern, as it was considered that the extra weight helped their sailing qualities. Once all the tea had been stowed away, the crew would still have to work hard to redistribute their cargo so as to ensure the optimum speed; some captains took matters further still. Ariel was noted for keeping on deck an enormous box, twelve feet long, packed with the heaviest metal obtainable. Once at sea, Captain Keay would watch as his men labored to drag the box to and fro until he was satisfied that its position would add still another edge to his performance. As he watched the Fiery Cross pull away in that evening in May 1866, Keay must have realized he would have to call on all of his ship’s fine qualities to win that season’s tea race. His rival, built six years earlier, had proved herself by far the fastest and most successful clipper of the early 1860s, while his own ship was comparatively untried. Although slightly smaller than Ariel, the ship now receding into the dusk of the China Sea boasted elegant lines that made her a good sailer to windward, and her master, Robinson, had fitted her with all manner of gear, including roller-reefing equipment to improve the efficiency of the sails. More important, Robinson was a highly experienced racer who had brought Fiery Cross home to London first in the tea races of 1861, 1862, 1863 and 1865, being beaten in 1864 only by the brand-new Serica. He had been rendered so anxious by the Ariel‘s early departure he had departed the moment his cargo was complete, without his papers and without signing the official bills of lading—thus gaining 12 hours on the Taeping and the Serica and reducing the latter’s master, Captain George Innes, to an apoplectic fury. Anjer in Java, one of the waystations on the clipper route–though the fast ships sailed non-stop from China home to London, San Francisco or New York. The four contenders sailed east to round the northern coast of Formosa (now Taiwan), then shaped a course to the south. Occasionally they came close enough for the crew of one ship to see the men of another over the water, setting more sails or trimming their vessel to coax an extra quarter-knot from her, but mostly the rival clippers sailed independently. Fiery Cross made good use of the 14-hour lead she had gained over Ariel at the bar of the Min River, and reached Anjer, at the exit to the China Sea, only 20 days out from Fuzhou. Taeping and Ariel had fallen two days behind, and Serica did not pass the town for another day after that. But the weather in the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope evened matters out somewhat; all four ships made fine time, Ariel logging a single day’s run of 317 miles and Fiery Cross one of 328. By the time the island of St. Helena came over the horizon, Captain Donald MacKinnon’s Taeping held a slender lead of 24 hours over Fiery Cross, with Ariel and Serica one day further behind. Three of the four rivals were composite ships, built of wood over an iron frame, but Serica was lighter, built of wood only, and had finer lines than her half-sister Taeping. Her captain, Innes, was a notorious taskmaster with a volcanic temper, and in the lighter winds around the Equator he caught up with MacKinnon. Ariel was picking up speed too, and all four vessels passed Flores, in the Azores, together on August 29. Taeping (left) and Ariel race neck-and-neck up the English Channel, three months out of China. The wind remained fair, blowing from the southeast, as the racers headed for the English Channel. Gradually they strung out into a line, luck or determination slightly favoring Ariel and Taeping over Fiery Cross and Serica. Still together after 97 days at sea, the two leaders ran up the Channel in sight of each other, both logging 14 knots for most of the day as they made for Deal and the Tea Race’s unofficial finish. At eight on the morning of September 6, Ariel was spotted signaling her number by watchers on the shore, and not ten minutes later Taeping hove into view to claim second place. Serica was less than two hours behind, with Fiery Cross an unlucky and (to Robinson) humiliating 36 hours further back. Even then, the racers seem to have been reluctant to abandon their chase. With Keay unable to afford the latest tug, Taeping nipped into the London docks 25 minutes ahead of Ariel. He and MacKinnon agreed to split the premium of 10 shillings per ton awarded to the first ship home each season. The Tea Race of 1866 caused an enormous stir in the sporting and nautical circles of Britain. Ariel and Taeping had left Fuzhou together and arrived home on the other side of the globe still together, Ariel‘s winning time being seven thousandths of one percent faster than her rival’s. The Tea Race was never so close again in its 30-year history. Sources Leeds Mercury 13 June 1866; Glasgow Herald 7+12 September 1866; George Campbell. China Tea Clippers. London: Adlard Coles, 1974; Howard Chapelle. The Search for Speed Under Sail. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968; Arthur H. Clark. The Clipper Ship Era. An Epitome of Famous American and British Clipper Ships, Their Owners, Builders, Commanders and Crews 1843-1869. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911; Basil Lubbock. The China Clippers. Glasgow: James Brown, 1919. See it at the Smithsonian for your self! https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-tea-race-of-1866-8209465/

For bears it depends on the biome, definitely. In temperate zones you can have a great setup where the temp doesn't even play a part! When the cubs are born the only thing I have to do is make sure they have food. I use potatoes (they eat one every thirty seconds or so). At first they can hold 7 at a time but within a few minutes they can hold much more. When they get to 3&1/2 stacks of veggies - usually around 2.5-2.6% maturation - they're okay to leave until they're fully mature. The only thing is you have to make sure they have enough food. I have two troughs that I fill completely with veggies (they last longer than berries), and depending on how many I breed I may have to refill one of them if not both at least once. If you're doing 1-5 cubs, one refill should be enough, but if you're doing 6-12 it's a bit more work - you may have to refill the trough 2-3 times. I'm doing these bears solo, so I don't always have time to get all the imprints. I'm not worried about that because I only start imprinting my bears when I max out the stats... LoJack

The problem is that server capacity is a finite resource. Meaning that there is a certain number of tames, above which the server will stop working. That means, having no tame limit is not going to work. Since no carebear could ever wrap their mind around having even one stupid ass tame fewer than whatever astronomical number they had in mind, it is impossible to find a tame limit that is not going to be met. The only thing that could possibly counteract this problem is to have a tame decay system in place. If you haven't used one of your tames for ages, you should get a warning message directing you to move said tame out of the grid and if you don't, it is going to be removed from the game. If anyone still wants to keep his thirty million fucking bears, they can pay for the increased requirements in server hardware. If you pay for having your million bear server, you may have it. If you don't pay, you are using up other peoples (server hardware-)resources. LOSE SOME FUCKING TAMES ALREADY you greedy, filthy, selfish, boundless carebears ! And it is the exact same problem with all your barbie dream houses and 30 million piece disney castles and harbors. Be a part of the solution instead of being part of the fucking problem!

Because I may as well, since I haven't seen another player in at least thirty hours of play. Not on land and not at sea. I put something in Chat like "Hi!" or "Any locations for Salt?"... crickets. No community, no-one to trade with, no-one to team up with, even Freeports are absolute ghost towns. What's the point in my joining a so-called public server and having to play, to all intents and purposes, a single-player experience? The advantages to singe-player gaming are: no foundation spam; no offline raids; no zerging; no toxic players; I can try mods out for quality of life improvements and added content; I can build as big a base as I want and make it as extravagant as I want; no claims to worry about; I can learn ALL the skill trees if I want to, to see what I might be missing in gameplay. I also don't have to join a Company if I don't want to, because while I met some great people in Atlas I also encountered a LOT of dickheads that I wouldn't hang out with in a million years. Atlas was INTENDED to be a MMO with a large player-base and a thriving, player-driven economy... well, that just didn't happen, so it's Unofficial servers and single-player for me. from now on. I put about 5 mods in that I liked the look of and they all work. I don't see an "approved list" mentioned?

**Note -- Originally posted to Reddit June 1, 2019 Fellow Texians and Men of Honor in all Parts of the World, I come to you now in earnest to account the loss of our island in F10 to the rogue agents of Wendigo and Jazz Cabbage. I would dare say that it was a fair fight to the last man, but from our own ill-preparedness that was hardly the case. Our island harbor was protected mostly by the ships at anchor, their crews set to ready action should any hostile approach our entrance. But due to the earlier raids by the accursed bandits of the Wendigo and Jazz nations, our harbor lay exposed and empty except for the wrecks of our small Texian fleet...which we were in the due course of salvaging when the scoundrels appeared on our horizon once again! A ship of unknown allegiance first approached our harbor and the call went out to action! I climbed the High Guard platform and manned a mortar...one of my captains joined me there and manned a second. We identified the ship in harbor as she opened fire on our remaining yards and structure...as suspected it was our friends to the West come again to harass our small settlement and test our Texas good nature. In appropriate response we tried our best to bite at their heels with what teeth we had left ~ Don't Tread on Me! Our pucklers began to shout out sightings of men-at-arms on foot and mounted bears entering our valley. We turned our mortars then to the inner grounds of our crafting hall and surrounding buildings as my captains called out positions and sightings of the invaders. We caught sighting of a second brig off our eastern coast...at anchor in the unprotected waters where we have often invited visitors. It dawned on me at that moment that it was the exact spot we had invited a Jazz Cabbage galleon to come ashore to harvest cotton just days ago and welcomed them with our nicest Texas hospitality....myself guiding them to anchor using multiple flares and bidding them safe travels on their peaceful departure afterward. It is now believed in my heart that their pale excuse of needing our cotton was but a ruse to scout our defenses and make ready for these underhanded and treasonous actions against us. So be it...all pleasantries be damned at this point! The High Guard turned our mortars on the offending brig at anchor to the east and we opened fire! She bore the brunt of our assault and made a hasty retreat....leaving ashore her men and cannon bears to fend for themselves! It was one of several small victories we enjoyed during the night. But that was just the beginning. We rained mortar fire down on the island below and exhausted our stores of ammo in rapid order. One of our captains mounted horse and rushed from our crafting hall up the sloped cliffs to High Guard and brought us new stores and supplies. An enemy cannon bear followed him and we attempted to rid our cliffs of the animal to no avail. Protected by own platform, the enemy began to attack our mortar structure from below and was helpful enough to instruct us and advise us on our lack of experience and poor tactics. We Texians enjoyed a laugh or two as this helpful individual seemed willing to help and yet so willing to grief us at the same time. How noble these brutes must think they are, I wonder? The battle lasted for some time. We would attempt to man puckles and swivels as our hired crews would fall, only to be cut down ourselves by either cannon or marksmen or grenadiers. It was a good fight and quite the spectacle, to be sure! Our High Guard mortars kept up the barrage during the battle until the enemy was able to assault it directly on foot and rid us of our mortar captains -- then they set about to destroy the mortars themselves which they accomplished unopposed. Their cannon bears made short work of the crafting hall walls and our beasts of burden were slain in their pens. Wall defenders died at their posts or had their stations blown out from under their feet from cannon fire. Our stores were plundered, our crafting resources pilfered and many of my fellow Texans were slain in their beds at slumber with no chance or offer of surrender or retribution. From our hidden spots among the cliffs and ridges overlooking our small settlement, my captains and I bore witness to the destruction and the barbarous nature of these poor bastards who would have you hold their actions in high esteem as "fair play" or "it's just PVP". No my dear friends, utter destruction for the sole satisfaction of kicking a dog while it is unable to bite you back, is not fair play....not by Texas standards at least. Then the leader of the assault called out his wish to now talk. Suddenly it would seem that once there was nothing left to destroy or pillage this man would wish us to join his allegiance and swear fealty to himself and his band of miscreants. To be absolutely clear and honest, my captains and I had discussed this possibility already prior to the events of the day at hand -- prior to the raid on our harbor by the Jazz Cabbage brig, Grimm Reaper. We had already noted that the Wendigo nation seemed to be good sports and had only given us their cursory attention in due course as they made patrol of our waters in search for their intended quarry, the YT men of China. I swear to you now on the Holy Ground of the Great State of Texas that had the Wendigo and Jazz Cabbage invasion come to our shores with peaceful intention to recruit the Republic of Texas as an ally and sought our favor as a friendly harbor in the F10 war....they would have been met with respect and interest. But as God is my witness when their demands came in the form of an ultimatum to either join them or pay them taxes after such a pointless raid of utter brutality and accompanied meaningless show of force....my one and only response was, "Have you ever been to Texas, sir?" It was our national hero, Colonel William Barret Travis, who upon hearing the demands of el Generalisimo de Santa Anna, that the garrison of men of the Alamo mission surrender their arms and submit to the Mexican army, answered with a single cannon fired over their heads! If I had but one shot and one cannon at my disposal, my answer would have been likewise. My Texian captains and I stood our ground with nothing but the rocks and sticks in our hands and we refused their satisfaction. Our hearts and minds were set. They would have to take it by force for we would not give them a single inch. It was then that the Wendigoans and Jazz Cabbage men set about to take our claimed island from us. They established their claim and set their perimeter. I took note of the time and my captains and I discussed our options. To some, the battle was over and the time was late...our ships were at the bottom of the sea and our base was but a shell and empty walls. Understandably, some elected to retire for the night and hope for the best. A few of us remained. I inquired to the men who now wished to take our home from us if it was truly their intent to play hide and seek for the next three hours as our island would count down and cycle back to peace time. They assured us that they had nothing better to do. My captains and I discussed how sad a state of affairs it must be to be in such an organization that would have nothing better to do than spend an entire night taking pennies from the poor and call it fun. Why would anyone want to join up with such a group in the first place, I wonder? To be honest, some of their members expressed their displeasure in the situation. We could overhear their discussions....and one of the ships departed entirely when a single YT ship made its presence known in the grid. The Chinaman's poor attempt at insult to the Wendigo nation made even our Texas captains smirk. We bantered in private, "and they think we are with these guys? Do they not see that nobody is coming to help us???" But the line had been drawn in the Texas sand. We set our minds to harass the invaders and try to keep one of our number within the line at all times...thinking that if we can delay the declaiming of our island for the next 3 hours that the fight would be ours and their efforts totally wasted. It was a battle of wills at this point.....we were determined to defend our small claim as best we could or at least make it the most irritable action for them to endure as possible. We gave it our best. At one point, we had sent a captain to our reserve base and returned in a small sloop loaded with supplies. We donned armor and weapons, firearms, bows and arrows, grenades...and we steeled ourselves to rush the walls of our own crafting hall. We split up and came into sight...one of my captains stripped his armor to appear naked as before, attempted to lure them out as seemed to work easily and had been often repeated. When they came upon him, myself and one other lept from our cover and rushed them...muskets and blunderbuss fired, swords drawn. It was a short fight but chaos none the less. I ran through the melee having spent my powder and ran to the crafting hall. I literally ran into a number of their men who let me pass not knowing it was a Texan wearing armor and not one of their own. I was able to approach their claim flag and discern the timer -- it still showed 59 minutes and the Texas flag was still above half-mast. We were doing the best we could and it was going to take them all night to be sure. My captains were killed in the fight but I escaped detection for some time. While hiding inside the boundary line, the claim timers were frozen, contested. They would have to find me. I could see the back of the crafting hall and I remembered that I laid some ceiling tiles next to foundations when I put in the plumbing for our seed crops....if I could make my way to one of those tiles, perhaps I could hide under it and go unnoticed for some time. It seemed like a plan so I jumped at the chance. I ran to the back of our structure and demolished one of our cisterns...directly behind it was an open space under our wooden floors and I crawled inside. It didn't take as long as I had hoped for them to find me. In fact, I wondered if they had a lookout posted above the valley in the cliffs and he had seen my actions because it wasn't long before one of their men addressed me at the end of a musket and bid me come out. He fired to persuade me. I had just used my final respec and focused all my energy in health. So his musket did me far less damage than he had hoped and I'm sure the full plate armor helped as well. I crawled out to face him and he fired again....I grinned under my visor and drew my sword! We tangled...I embraced him in close hand-to-hand combat and danced around him leaping and jumping. Then I remembered the grenades I had on my belt....I began dropping them at our feet as I laughed maniacally in my bloodlust. This one man was about to pay for all the wrongs given us by these miscreants! To my great satisfaction, I blew both of us to smithereens....and laughed and celebrated for quite some time! Another small victory. The game of cat-and-mouse continued...for hours, literally. At another moment in the effort, I found myself swimming in our harbor among the wreckage of our ships. A pair of elephants had gotten themselves tangled in the debris and I knelt below one of them perched on the hull of our harbor tender sloop. I was inside the circle and contesting their claim, again. Quite happy with myself I knew they would have to go to a great length to find me. I thought I was discovered when one of their men swam around me and literally demolished the plank I was perched on....I fell into the water behind him and immediately swam away under our docks. He did not follow. Did he even see me? I curled back under the docks where we had left many open spaces between columns, pillars and stacked foundations....I could hold my breath for quite some time and could catch air when the waves and tides surged. Not long after I was discovered once more and put to the sword. One of my captains managed a huge feet of luck when he was able to rush the crafting hall and lock himself in the space between the inner and outer main gates. To the joyful glee of myself and my fellow Texians we laughed and joked about how they would have to really put in some effort to get him out...stone gates on one side and a medium wood gate on the inside of the crafting hall....surrounded by stone walls. It was a tomb fit for a king, or in this case, the most brilliant turn of luck of the night. We laughed as our invaders gathered what grenades and hand weapons they had and began to chip away at the gates. My captain taunted them yelling "Tik Tok, Tik Tok!!!" from inside his coffin. Another small victory, yet short lived. they eventually blasted him out but every minute and every second counted to our favor. We were not winning, but neither were they! They eventually setup cages and gibbets and instead of killing us outright they switched tactics to try to take us prisoner. They would chase us with grappling hooks and assault us with clubs. We countered by rushing the rhinos and elephants and slapping them as we ran into the courtyard to be taken captive. If done right, the animals would kill us and knock our foes in all directions as well. Their beastmaster made work of taming every animal he could. They eventually had a small herd of goats guarding the claim flag and we would run in and jump into the middle of the aggressive animals and attempt to get them to chase us out of the claim area. One of my captains rustled up a small herd of elephants and lead them into the fray to much entertainment and confusion. They eventually caught me and placed me in their guillotine...they removed my head and took their prize...it was a grizzly scene but a small victory for them to be sure...and a hard won trophy. I hope they never forget this night and think about it every time they look upon my face. I hope it haunts them. But the night was not over. Another of my captains retired...the next day brought real work to be done and 2am was his last call. That left it to only two of us remaining. We took turns in our efforts...one would lay in wait while the other would do his best to distract the enemy whose numbers were also greatly reduced from the start of the evening. When they were distracted, the other of us would run in and try to hide inside the claim. The enemy had been hunting down our beds and safe havens and were removing them as methodically as they could. They even enlisted the work of a small sloop to destroy our watch towers around the entire island since each had a safe bed inside. We also had platforms and observation points on the cliffs facing the open sea and those as well had to be destroyed or climbed and the beds thereon removed. It was tedious work I'm sure...and meant to make them earn every second of their conquest. I was caught again and placed in a cage...guarded by one of their men who was quite apologetic for the circumstances. We chatted and I expressed my utter displeasure for their antics and methods of harassment and promised that this was not a sure way to earn one's respect or allegiance. In fact this was how one makes enemies, not friends. I eventually died of thirst and went about the work of thwarting their efforts once more. With less than thirty minutes remaining in our combat window my fellow Texan was captured, leaving me alone. I spawned at our last bed...our farthest south platform, facing open ocean on the side of a cliff. I knelt in a corner and privately discussed our situation with my fellow captain. He was taken with full health and well fed and rested...it would be some time before he would die in their cage. The timer was under 20 minutes. Would the claim fail if the island came out of combat before our flag was lowered? We didn't know but that was our hope. While we were discussing our options, the enemy climbed onto my platform and stood just outside my doors. I heard them discuss that they had no way of destroying the walls or doors as their grenades and blasting powder was spent. They suspected this was the last bed and they would just wait for me here. They had no idea I was just inside and heard every word. It was then that I laughed to myself as my plan solidified in my mind. When the timer clicked 15 minutes, I demolished the platform on which we all stood. The entire structure fell out from under our feet and we all plummeted to the cliffside below. The plan did not quite go as I imagined because we did not fall in the water and nobody died when we hit the cliff -- it was not so far a fall after all. And lastly, the weight of the materials now in my possession made it impossible for me to run away. Damn the luck! My enemy made short work of me with clubs and knocked me out just as I was able to drop my inventory on the ground. They shackled me and lifted me to their shoulders and began parading me back to their base and the waiting cages. Happily they estimated that the fight was done and they had won. But it was a ruse....I played the part of being knocked out until I regained my strength....at once the man carrying me dropped me and I landed on my feet! I leapt from the cliff and found the water below and made for swimming the deep and followed the cliffside below the surface. I was very familiar with the waters of our small island and as long as no sharks, mantas or crocodiles caught my scent I would be able to make the harbor. As I held my breath I circled past the harbor and came out on the northern cliff slope....just a few yards from their claim flag...I just needed to run that short distance to suspend their claim once more...maybe for the last time. But the effort was in vain. At that moment, the island was still in combat phase for another several minutes, but they struck down our Texas flag and our claim was lost! The battle was over. .... It would take gold for me to contest their claim now and all our gold had been stolen from us during the night. What we had left was on the claim flag as I had not thought to remove it when the invaders appeared on our shores. The claim was lost and there was nothing I could do about it. The victors called out asking what my intentions were to which I responded "I need to find a way to remove these hand cuffs" which they replied they had expected me to be food for the sharks by then. My captive captain began to ask them to remove him from the cage he was in....which they were reluctant to do so seeming intent to add insult to injury. His pleas for mercy fell on deaf ears...as they took him to their guillotine. In response he pointed out their poor sportsmanship and I myself found a crocodile to help remove my shackles. Unable to return to our once home island, we retired for the night...swearing that our vengeance would be patient and measured, as is our way. This was Thursday night and all the way up til 3am on Friday morning. It is now the weekend and we Texians are busy making preparations to claim a new settlement and work towards new ships and bases of operation and we will incorporate many of the new ideas we have learned in the past few days to bolster our defenses against such invasions in the future. And rest assured....one day the time will come....that we will present ourselves before the factions of Wendigo and Jazz Cabbage and ask a single question: Remember us? ~Republic of Texas

Sorry your just making statements the prove you know exactly nothing about breeding. So let's add a little fact to the discussion. 1) ALL babies only need someone with them until they turn juvenile at a hair over 10% maturation - that's FIVE hours for bears and SIX for tigers NOT THIRTY. After that they eat from troughs so no more hand feeding. 2) If its made totally automatic then there is no sense of achievement for doing it. The game has no depth and is cheapened by that - you want something put in at least some nominal effort. 3) Babies need more care than adults - if you have to have some fires to keep them warm then do it - DON'T use fires, use your brain and pick something else. 4) Babies don't HAVE to be imprinted - they will survive just fine without. Once again if you want something extra put in some extra effort.

Whenever my fellow crew member reaches equilibrium (at perfect numbers on each vitamin type), the buff lasts for about two seconds, and resets back to the thirty minute cooldown.

Hate to burst the "this is going to ruin the game bubble" ya'll got going on in here, but the old pvp rules were alreadying ruining the game for a huge chunk of players. Prior to the wipe announcement, average player connections were down over 50% over the previous thirty days. And they were still bleeding off about 1K a week for peek connections consistently. That is not sustainable. Something had to be done. Did they make the right call? Time will tell. Did they make the right call for you specificall? Probably not. Personally, I am in favor of checking these changes out. What was essentially a free for all was not very fun. Folks from my alliance would go and poke at nearly empty CSTG holdings with little to no fight back because none of them were online. Then they would come and poke at our nearly empty stuff when none of us were online. They had more players to go about replacing ships and restocking resources more quickly, but I would not be surprised if they found being the target of offline raids just as frustrating as we did. Our group had either defeated or befriended anyone nearabouts our size. The rest of the groups were either non-hostile, too far away to worry about, or mega-companies that would be silly to attack when we were already defending against CSTG. For all intents and purposes we were only actively PvPing by placing or assaulting static emplacements. Like some kind of weird turn based castle defense game. It wasn't very fun.

90% of the blueprints are garbage. The other 10% are gold. The key is knowing which are worth it. Base building blueprints are all garbage. Weapon, armor, and ship pieces can be good. Speed sail blueprint can increase max velocity of ship six percent. Fur armor blueprint can increase hypothermal insulation and armor and run speed on one armor piece. Sword blueprint can increase damage thirty plus percent and durability fifteen percent. (Real examples I own or have seen.) As for the multiple resource requirement, you can usually find two or three of each type in one grid. Digging with shovel will usually yield another type. Between two grid squares you should easily be able to collect four types of each resource except sugar/sap.

Because the melee combat is garbage. Add to that the lack of healing in the game. Add to that the over spawning preds. You cant afford to take a melee fight in this game. Even taking one hit from an animal could mean death, if not to the hit then to the subsequent alpha spawn that jumps on you. I guess i was wrong though. Some people seem to like the 10 second reload timer... My mind is blown. you spend more time reloading than playing the game lol. Thirty shots and you have spent 5 minutes of your game time waiting on reloads and thats IF you hit the minigame 100% if not it can be as much as ~10 minutes. Nutty...

Yes we stole some territories, but as the Patch Note explain, we can only claims PVE territory when players were offline since 3 days, so when we stole this territories, we thought there's nobody anymore and destroyed structures to build our base. No aggressivity was planned, just playing in rules. For your treasure, I don't understand what your talking about ? Is it about treasure map we found in your chest when claiming territories or you wanna said we stole gold directly ? Because yes we take treasure map, but never stole gold directly to one of your mates or you. We only killed animals which are in our tame trap because we don't want players came near our house with aggressive creature. And even if you could tame it in, you couldn't took out your tame... Ok we are probably mistaken but when you sunk our ship, they were with you and looting everything so we conclude about an alliance. This time we maybe took some speed conclusion, but thirty minutes before our neighbours have their ships and just after our ship was sunk, we checked our neighbours to know if it was personnal or global to farm and we saw only shipwrecks... What a coincidence... But sorry for the accusation. So now we have report for our ship sabotage by weight which look unfair for us on PVE servers, not for our neighbourhood troubles.

The thing is, it doesn't take long to cover the highlights and anything with a large number of replies, such as this thread. Go through every single post with a fine toothed comb? Of course not, but it doesn't take long at all to sort wheat from chaff. Thirty posts of chaff about the same/similar thing starts to look awfully wheaty. The medium is not so important as is the exposure level and this is variable.

Me and two friends turned up at a small island with pistols, bows and hide armour. We can handle ourselves against predators, or so we thought. After a while of exploring the island (about thirty minutes) we thought we'd cleaned up the beach and started harvesting stuff we really needed, like fibre and metal. Then, as we were loaded up and on our way back, we got ambushed by lions and died. Okay, fine, this happens. Then we come back to our bodies to see the nonsense attached to the topic. Not pictured: The three crocodiles that chased our schooner endlessly until we managed to finally distract them by jumping overboard and aggroing them as we sailed away. (There is a family of scorpions in the center and at least two giant snakes. You may not see them clearly, but they're there.)

At 14 Fortitude it makes literally 0 difference especially if I'm wearing Hide Armor, I'm much better off putting my points in Health, cause at least when it's raining and colder than fuck outside, I'll have that extra 2 seconds to slow run back to my base. Also, do these fucking morons not beta test their fucking game? Upon walking onto land from water, I jump like 20 feet into the air, and I've been stuck so many times on random shit. As well as animals forcing your movement around, and launching me like a fucking rocket when I get hit. Cold climates are overtuned, Fortitude does nothing. Fix that. Also, why the fuck is there a level TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY FUCKING ONE ALPHA GIANT SNAKE ON THE BEGINNER ISLAND AT I13 ON KRAKEN'S MAW????? You can limit the player level on beginner islands but not animal level? Also, WHY THE FUCK ARE THERE SO MANY HOSTILE ANIMALS ON THE FUCKING BEGINNER ISLAND????? Holy shit, what a way to make me not want to play. Ark devs are lucky I'm playing this with friends or I would've refunded a second time already.

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