We’ve all been in a holding pattern for a while now, anxiously awaiting the impending cluster wipe. Well, the time is nearly upon us, so let’s talk turkey, not the kind that will obliterate you.
Rates
The following will be the rates post-wipe
- Difficulty: 5 (150 Max Dino Level)
- Experience
- Crafting: 0.001
- Harvesting: 1.5
- Generic: 0.01
- Kill: 1.0
- All others: 1.0
- Harvesting: 4x
- Taming: 4x
- Breeding
- Mature: 10x
- Incubation/Egg Hatch: 10x
- Mating: 0.1
- Food Consumption: 2.0
As you can see, we’re scaling things back a bit from where they were. We got a little too far into Easy_Mode, a place we won’t be returning to. The rates you see now will be permanently fixed, apart from Events. There will be no voting to increase any of the rates, evernever.
Loot Drops
As I mentioned in the announcement, we’re overhauling the way you acquire loot across the cluster. So, let’s break it down:
Carnivores
Instead of the drops, the best loot will be acquired through killing carnivores. Most carnivores will drop something, Alpha Carnivores will drop the very best loot. The loot scales in quality, quantity, and type based off of what you kill. If you schwack an Alpha Rex, you’re almost guaranteed to get a handful of ascendant, end-game gear. If you schwack a Sabertooth, you’re going to get 1-2 mostly ramshackle, early-stage items.
Beacons
I know, some of you liked circling the map, so we’ve decided to keep the floating, glowing turds. Instead of custom loot drops, those drops will be vanilla. So, you can still acquire gear from those drops, but the best loot is going to be trapped inside the things with teeth and caves.
Caves
Speaking of caves. Cave loot drops, depending on the difficulty of the cave, will have much better loot than the floating, glowing turds.
Bosses
Bosses will drop both armor and structure/furniture blueprints. Currently, we aren’t able to hide the engrams and keep the drops, but if WC ever sorts themselves out we will. Loot quality for the bosses scales based on the difficulty of the boss you’re fighting. As usual, element has been replaced with berry bush seeds so you can transfer and convert them at your pleasure.
Titans
The little Titans will drop more loot, good loot, because they aren’t exactly the easiest things to kill. They will include tek gear blueprints as well as berry bush seeds. The big titans, on the other hand, will contain pretty much the best loot in the game. Those beasties take no small degree of planning and effort, so the reward should be consistent with the effort required.
Some Notes
We have it mostly ironed out, but some of the dinos that are supposed to drop tributes, primarily the alphas, may drop an extra tribute item here and there. When you override dino loot containers, it screws with their tribute drops. You should always get a tribute item from the dinos, so be sure to use the bug reporting feature in Discord if you don’t.
We can test everything until we are satisfied, but that doesn’t mean our four eyeballs are going to catch everything. If you think there is a problem, or want to suggest an adjustment, use the bug and idea features on Discord.
Spot Reservation
We’re going to treat holding spots like we would a normal migration. If you want to live where you currently do, you need to submit a ticket with a screenshot of you holding a GPS in the center of your base. No, we won’t just take your word for it. No screenshot, no reservation, the end. If you have already submitted your Christmas wishes, and have received a DM with your pin code, you should go ahead and submit those tickets.
Christmas Wishes
Speaking of Christmas wishes, we’ve changed how we are doing this, slightly. As of this writing, we spawned in all of the submissions was had. Those wishes have been spawned in on the event server, which is currently locked down and separate from the cluster. When we push the wipe, the Event server will be unlocked and clustered in. At that time, you will be free to transfer over and grab your dinos. My suggestion would be to start a new character on the event server and transfer out from there, but you do you boo-boo.
Wish Deadline
We will not accept any wishes after 01 January 2020. If your wish isn’t in by then, you probably aren’t going to get anything. All of the remaining wishes will be spawned in by the first. This will allow the admins the opportunity to start with everyone else.
Community Structures
So, let’s talk about Community Structures:
Teleporters
The teleporters are the corners will not be returning. They take up quite a bit of space, they need to be maintained, and they were not used as we intended. Overall, they’re just a big pain in the ass and we don’t want to rebuild them. All community structures we do build will have teleporters attached to them, however.
Traps
The only traps we will build this time around are for the Wyverns and Reapers. The only reason this will be done is to mitigate, to some degree, the insane amount of trap spam if these aren’t built. We are, however, going to get rather aggressive with those who leave traps all over the map.
Community Center
We are going to return to the Community Center model on each of the servers. This helps us as we don’t have to play ticket tag, or chase you all over the map when we do need to replace something. We’ll just sling it in a vault, pin code it, and you can show up when you want it back. The Community Centers are probably going to be floating this time around though: exciting.
Crafting Costs
We’ve gone through and tuned a number of the costs for crafting items. Mostly items that were rolling their crafting costs under the current loot schema. Some things, however, we felt were just too expensive to be practical and made minor adjustments so that they would become useful. It’s unlikely you will notice any of these changes, so I’m not going to write a separate book on which items and what changes were made, on this day. At some point in the future, we will put up a section on the website detailing the default crafting cost changes.
Mindwipe Tonic
The one item I am going to detail is Mindwipe Tonics. It was our intention from the beginning to make them more expensive, while maintaining unlimited respecs, in an attempt to achieve a balance. They finally fixed the recipe so it could be altered, and so it has been:
- Cooked Prime: 50
- Mejoberry: 400
- Narcotic: 100
- Stimulant: 100
- Rare Flower: 50
- Rare Mushroom: 50
- Wyvern Milk: 5
Dino Spawns
Moving forward, post-wipe, specialty dinos will only spawn on their original maps. We will not employ code to make everything spawn everywhere, again. Doing so made those dinos less rare, and had a negative impact on the trade economy. So, you will need to head to the map those specialty dinos spawn on, or trade, if you want them.
Gachas
Gacha spawns will be tuned down to make them a rare spawn. We want to encourage trade and world engagement, in which the prevalence of the gachas virtually eliminated. This will be tuned to the point where there will be no more than two gacha on Extinction at any one time. Yeah, we know, you wanted to sit in your base staring at gacha butts all day. Sorry, Casper, you’re going to have to go out and getcha some sunshine.
In Closing
We feel that these changes will make the Ark experience both fresh and far more rewarding. Yes, we know that some of you disagree, but this is what we’re doing regardless. In addition to the above changes, some of the ways we handle things will also be evolving. Those things are best addressed individual and as we make those shifts, so look for that information in the coming weeks and months.
THE CLUSTER WILL BE WIPED, COMPLETELY, ON 03 JANUARY.
CLUSTER-WIDE PVP WILL BEGIN ON 01 JANUARY AND WILL END WITH THE WIPE.