Patch Notes Round-Up

As we near the launch of Genesis and a new year of ARK content, the current state of the game and the topics that are trending in the community remain essential to us. While we are excited to introduce new content and experiences to ARK survivors, it's important to take a brief moment and recap some significant updates that have made an impact on the current state of the game. Developers that are working on Live Ops updates have a different priority and focus than that of those working on new content. The main focus of these updates is to ensure that you have an enjoyable and fair playing experience with current game content. As you might imagine, it is a constant process of observing, investigating, adjusting, interacting, updating, reporting, resolving, and repeating the cycle. Performance, Bugs, Balance, Quality of Life and fixing Exploits are important to us and we know they hold a high priority for you folks too. These updates may not be new news for the well-informed survivor but they may provide insight into the thought process behind the changes. Without further ado, lets get stuck into what weve been up to with recent live game patches:

Performance

Performance is an intrinsic cornerstone of a player's experience. Improving performance is an ongoing process for us that well continue to seek to optimize. Heres what weve worked on in regards to performance recently:


- Changed droppeditem physics to improve server performance.
- Added animation staggering system by default to reduce CPU overhead
- Applied a one time disabling of replication on all sleeping players on all Official PvE servers.
- Fixed a client-side crash related to rendering 3D text
- Vastly improved server stability, with various Network Channel threading crashes fixed

Unintended Mechanics / Exploits

Addressing exploits and unintended game mechanics in a meaningful way is crucial to the health of the game on our Official servers. Recently, the team has focused quite heavily on eliminating various methods of exploiting and well continue to hit them as hard and as often as we can! Many of our recent exploit fixes targeted meshing methods and dupes but there was also some focus on unintended mechanics like MEKs becoming invulnerable and the pretty damn rude Ice Titan breath going through the mesh much to the dismay of its targets, amongst others. Addressing exploits is an ongoing commitment and we look forward to rolling out more fixes in the near future.


- Unattach all grapple hooks when sitting on a chair.
- Disabled climbing pick from attaching to gateframes, charge lanterns, ladders, fence foundations, and railings
- Fixed 2 mesh exploits related to creatures.
- Fixed 2 mesh exploits related to structures.
- Fixed ice titan breath going through the mesh.
- Fixed some cases where building structures did not use a bidrectional trace check 
  (allowing certain structures to be placed deep into the mesh).
- Fixed a case where a collision check on players wasn't correctly applying thereby allowing 
  them to go enter some meshes.
- Fixed an incorrect collision profile which allowed MEKs to collide into and stack on top of one another.
- Enforcer can no longer blink onto/or very very near creatures
- Pipes can no longer be placed on enemy structures
- Fixed an exploit with the snow owl that allowed it to infinitely freeze players
- Added additional server-side protection to Explorer Notes to prevent cheaters from acquiring them with hacks
- Passengers on creatures will now be ejected if the creature is picked up
- Fixed an exploit related to turret damage
- Fixed various duping methods

Bugs

What is there to say about bugs? We dont like them, players dont like them and they need to be squashed. Along with what wed consider more run of the mill bug fixes, weve addressed some bugs with far reaching implications in regards to MEKS, Managarmrs and Velonasaurs, among other issues. Our players are adept at rooting out bugs and well continue to iterate on your bug reports moving forward.


- Reloading bows from prone TPV no longer gets them stuck
- Firing bows while in orbit camera no longer gets them stuck
- Firing bows while running no longer gets them stuck
- Pipes can no longer be placed on enemy structures
- Fixed the enemy build radius check for the fence support
- Fixed the whip to properly pickup items that are flat on the ground (previously would miss such items)
- Fixed a bug which prevented players entering 'K' cam a second time if they had a weapon/tool in their hand.
- Fixed a client crash related to Velonasaurs
- Fixed a client FPS bug related to Velonasaurs
- Fixed a bug which allowed Velonasaurs to shoot endlessly in turret mode without draining stam
- Fixed a collision issue with Velonasaurs
- Fixed a network desync related to Velonasaurs
- Fixed a client crash related to Velonasaurs
- Fixed a client FPS bug related to Velonasaurs
- Fixed a bug which allowed MEKs to be invulnerable to various types of damage
- Fixed a bug which allowed Managarmrs to use their ice breath underwater/whilst swimming
- Fixed a bug which allowed Velonasaurs to shoot endlessly in turret mode without draining stam
- Fixed two damage miscalculation bugs with the Managarmr pounce and Velonasaur AOE Needle Spin
- Fixed a bug which prevented players entering 'K' cam a second time if they had a weapon/tool in their hand.
- Fixed a bug with the Velonasaur's attacks causing it to incorrectly attack the wrong collision group on 
  Paracers, Diplodocus, Brontos, and more creatures.
- Items placed on top of water pipes will now respect enemy foundations.
- Fixed a bug which would sometimes cause the atmospheric fog to break
- Fixed a bug which would cause the Snow owl heat vision to cause other clients FPS to drop when around
  large bases or a lot of creatures

Quality of Life

As many players will have noticed, weve rolled out a significant number of QoL updates recently. The time you spend in-game is valuable to you and is most rewarding when it's not filled with tedium. We prefer your time be spent on the things you enjoy. This is where Quality of Life comes in! These updates have incorporated changes to stack sizes, inventory slots and other miscellaneous tweaks to help make your time on the ARK feel engaging and rewarding. Please continue to let us know the types of QoL changes youd like to see as we work together to identify whats important to players. We understand that the ARK Community is diverse with each group holding a different perspective and all of your feedback is valuable to us.


- Dedicated Storage weight reduced from 50 to 20
- Decreased cook time on the industrial grill by 50%
- Shortened aberration earthquake duration by ~10%
- Shortened Scorched Earth sandstorm duration by ~15%
- Lowered gasoline consumption rate by 50% on the following structures: 
       Chemistry Bench
       Electrical Generator
       Fabricator
       Industrial Cooker
       Industrial Forge
       Industrial Grill
       Industrial Grinder.
- Modified the stack size on various items:
       Veggie Cake 5 -> 10
       Raw Meat 20 -> 40
       Cooked Meat 30 -> 50
       Sap 20 -> 30
       Fiber 200 -> 300
       Thatch 100 -> 200
       Organic Polymer 10 -> 20
       Vacuum Compartment 100 -> 5
       Vacuum Compartment Moonpool 100 -> 5
- Modified the inventory slot size of various items:
       Industrial forge 60 -> 100
       Chemistry Bench 60 -> 100
       Fridge 48 -> 80
       Industrial Cooker 48 -> 80
       Preserving Bin 24 -> 48
       Mortar and Pestle 12 -> 24
       Refining Forge 8 -> 24
- Made it easier to look at items to pick them up
- Improved dropped item placement when dropping items from structures to reduce the chance of them getting stuck
- Added F alternate activate option on items to pickup all items in a nearby range
- Improved third person view offset so that it now positions at the average head height rather 
  than the center of the characters capsule to improve how it feels when the camera is brushed up against 
  a collision in the world

Game Balance

Balance is an ongoing process and well continue to monitor our servers to see how players are using creatures and items as we consider making balance changes. Healthy balance is achieved by a constant process of small nudges, changes, and tweaks in order to improve the entire ecosystem as it is maintained and honed in response to the needs of the player-base. Its no secret the Managarmr and Velonasaur have held the top position in the food chain to dominate the meta since the launch of Extinction. The Managarmr intrinsically holds loads of utility and that has made it challenging to balance whilst retaining that utility that helps make it the popular dino it is. Our intention was never to make Manas capable of remaining constantly airborne. Granted, its place as the top player killer was partially due to some bugs/unintended mechanics which we also addressed. Velonasaurs were outputting extremely high DPS. Similar to the Managarmr, bugs are responsible in part for this (we see you, no stamina drain in turret mode and an unexpected scaling to the right click +c attack!). Velos are primarily intended to help in base defenses but they were far stronger in the meta than intended. That said, our statistics show theyre still two of the most popular creatures which is interesting! Other balance changes include some steps towards addressing the cliff platform meta, giving Brontos some love, smacking Plant Z a little and tweaking enforcers up after some functional changes we made in order to mitigate a meshing exploit left them looking a little sad.


- Enforcer blink recharge cooldown reduced from 20 seconds to 7 seconds
- Enforcer blink range extended from 4000 units to 5000 units
- Enforcer can no longer blink onto/or very near creatures
- Velonasaurs will now consume stamina whilst in AI-turret mode
- Reduced Velonasaur recovery time from 4 seconds to 1 second
- Managarmr limited to 3 jumps, 6 strafes, and 1 dash before it has to land
- Reduced Managarmr ice-breath exponential damage scaling by approximately 20%
- Reduced stun duration on Jellyfish and Eels by 20%
       Wild eels 7 -> 5.6
       Tamed eels 1.5 -> 1.2
       Cnidaria 4 -> 3.2
- Reduced Plant Z flash range by 50%
- Plant Z Grenades weight reduced from 10 to 5
- Metal Cliff Platforms no longer take 50% less damage from explosive damage
- Bronto should no longer be affected by knockback
- MEK pistol Damage reduced by 10%
- Fixed the enemy build radius check for the fence support

Content

The whole team has a lot of fun conceptualizing and implementing events and event-related content for our community to enjoy. The end of 2019 saw a return of our Turkey Trial Event and 365,085 player deaths from a well-known culprit. Shortly after, we released Winter Wonderland and introduced the adorably dorky chibi pets. Last year you indicated that events were important and listed several things youd like to see. Because of this, we took some time to invest in events and make them more memorable for you. We get a kick out of the pics and art you folks share of your events skins and chibi collections, thank you for including us in your holiday adventures! As always, keep your feedback coming, whether we are interacting directly or reading and observing, we pay attention to, and value, your communication with us.

EVO Event

Survivors on all platforms will be receiving a special Evolution Event perk this weekend! It will be active from Friday the 17th of Jan at 1 PM EST until Monday the 20th of Jan at 3 PM EST. All Official Servers across each platform will be undergoing this evolutionary change which includes:

2x Harvesting Rates
2x Taming Rates
2x EXP Rates

That wraps up this Community Crunch, our roundup of what weve been up to lately and a little insight into our process. For a more in-depth look at all of our recent patches, you can view full notes in our forums

[ 2020-01-15 00:55:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

ARK: Survival Evolved

Studio Wildcard Developer

Studio Wildcard Publisher

2017-08-29 Release

Action Indie RPG Adventure MMO Singleplayer Multiplayer Coop Tags

FREE

Game News Posts: 346

🎹🖱️Keyboard + Mouse
🎮 Full Controller Support

Very Positive (529376 reviews)

http://www.playark.com

Steam Store

The Game includes VR Support

Keyboard & mouse: 1

Gamepad support: 1

Seated: 1

Available DLCs:

The Center - ARK Expansion Map
Primitive+ - ARK Total Conversion
ARK: Scorched Earth - Expansion Pack
Ragnarok - ARK Expansion Map
ARK: Aberration - Expansion Pack
ARK: Extinction - Expansion Pack
Valguero - ARK Expansion Map
ARK: Genesis Season Pass
Crystal Isles - ARK Expansion Map
Lost Island - ARK Expansion Map
Fjordur - ARK Expansion Map

As a man or woman stranded naked, freezing and starving on the shores of a mysterious island called ARK, you must hunt, harvest resources, craft items, grow crops, research technologies, and build shelters to withstand the elements. Use your cunning and resources to kill or tame & breed the leviathan dinosaurs and other primeval creatures roaming the land, and team up with or prey on hundreds of other players to survive, dominate... and escape!

The following features are in the game on its Day-1 Early Access release. We have many more aspects and refinements planned for the long-term development roadmap, and here's what you get to experience right now in ARK:

Dinosaurs, Creatures, & Breeding! -- over 60+ currently at Early Access and 100+ planned for final release -- can be tamed using a challenging capture-&-affinity process, involving weakening a feral creature to knock it unconscious, and then nursing it back to health with appropriate food. Once tamed, you can issue commands to your Pet, which it may follow depending on how well you’ve tamed and trained it. Pets, which can continue to level-up and consume food, can also carry Inventory and Equipment such as Armor, carry prey back to your settlement depending on their strength, and larger pets can be ridden and directly controlled! Fly a Pterodactyl over the snow-capped mountains, lift allies over enemy walls, race through the jungle with a pack of Raptors, tromp through an enemy base along a gigantic brontosaurus, or chase down prey on the back of a raging T-Rex! Take part in a dynamic ecosystem life-cycle with its own predator & prey hierarchies, where you are just one creature among many species struggling for dominance and survival. Pets can also be mated with the opposite gender, to selectively breed successive generations using a trait system based on recombinant genetic inheritance. This process includes both egg-based incubation and mammalian gestation lifecycles! Or put more simply, breed & raise Dino Babies!

You must eat and drink to survive, with different kinds of plants & meat having different nutritional properties, including human meat. Ensuring a supply of fresh water to your home and inventory is a pressing concern. All physical actions come at a cost of food and water, long-distance travel is fraught with subsistence peril! Inventory weight makes you move slower, and the day/night cycle along with randomized weather patterns add another layer of challenge by altering the temperature of the environment, causing you to hunger or thirst more quickly. Build a fire or shelter, and craft a large variety of customizable clothing & armors, to help protect yourself against locational damage & extreme temperatures using the dynamic indoor/outdoor insulation calculation system!

By chopping down forests full of trees and mining metal and other precious resources, you can craft the parts to build massive multi-leveled structures composed of complex snap-linked parts, including ramps, beams, pillars, windows, doors, gates, remote gates, trapdoors, water pipes, faucets, generators, wires and all manner of electrical devices, and ladders among many other types. Structures have a load system to fall apart if enough support has been destroyed, so reinforcing your buildings is important. All structures and items can be painted to customize the look of your home, as well as placing dynamically per-pixel paintable signs, textual billboards, and other decorative objects. Shelter reduces the extremes of weather and provides security for yourself and your stash! Weapons, clothing & armor gear can also be painted to express your own visual style.

Pick seeds from the wild vegetation around you, plant them in plots that you lay down, water them and nurture them with fertilizer (everything poops after consuming calories, which can then be composted, and some fertilizer is better than others). Tend to your crops and they will grow to produce delicious and rare fruits, which can also be used to cook a plethora of logical recipes and make useful tonics! Explore to find the rarest of plant seeds that have the most powerful properties! Vegetarians & vegans can flourish, and it will be possible to master and conquer the ARK in a non-violent manner!

By bringing sufficient rare sacrificial items to special Summon locations, you can capture the attention of the one of the ARK’s god-like mythical creatures, who will arrive for battle. These gargantuan monstrosities provide an end-game goal for the most experienced groups of players and their armies of pets, and will yield extremely valuable progression items if they are defeated.

Create a Tribe and add your friends to it, and all your Pets can be commanded by and allied to anyone in your Tribe. Your Tribe will also be able to respawn at any of your home spawn points. Promote members to Tribe Admins to reduce the burden of management. Distribute key items and pass-codes to provide access your shared village!

All items are crafted from Blueprints that have variable statistics and qualities, and require corresponding resources. More remote and harsh locales across the ARK tend to have better resources, including the tallest mountains, darkest caves, and depths of the ocean! Level-Up your player character by gaining experience through performance actions, Level-Up your Pets, and learn new "Engrams" to be able to craft Items from memory without the use of blueprints, even if you die! Customize the underlying physical look of your character with hair, eye, and skin tones, along with an array of body proportion modifiers.

Everything you craft has durability and will wear-out from extended use if not repaired, and when you leave the game, your character remains sleeping in the persistent world. Your inventory physically exists in boxes or on your character in the world. Everything can be looted & stolen, so to achieve security you must build-up, team-up, or have pets to guard your stash. Death is permanent, and you can even knock out, capture, and force-feed other players to use them for your own purposes, such as extracting their blood to for transfusions, harvesting their fecal matter to use as fertilizer, or using them as food for your carnivorous pets!

The mysterious ARK is a formidable and imposing environment, composed of many natural and unnatural structures, above-ground, below-ground, and underwater. By fully exploring its secrets, you’ll find the most exotic procedurally randomized creatures and rare blueprints. Also to be found are Explorer Notes that are dynamically updated into the game, written by previous human denizens of the ARK from across the millennia, creatively detailing the creatures and backstory of the ARK and its creatures. Fully develop your in-game ARK-map through exploration, write custom points of interest onto it, and craft a Compass or GPS coordinates to aid exploring with other players, whom you can communicate with via proximity text & voice chat, or long-distance radio. Construct & draw in-game signs for other players to help them or lead them astray... And yet.. how do you ultimately challenge the Creators and Conquer the ARK? A definitive end-game is planned.

On the 100+ player servers, your character, everything you built, and your pets, stay in-game even when you leave. You can even physically travel your character and items between the network of ARK's by accessing the Obelisks and uploading (or downloading) your data from the Steam Economy! A galaxy of ARKs, each slightly different than the previous, to leave your mark on and conquer, one at a time -- special official ARKs will be unveiled on
the World-map for limited times in singular themed events with corresponding limited-run items!

You can play single-player local games, and bring your character and items between unofficial player-hosted servers, back and forth from singleplayer to multiplayer. Mod the game, with full Steam Workshop support and customized Unreal Engine 4 editor. See how we built our ARK using our maps and assets as an example. Host your own server and configure your ARK precisely to your liking. We want to see what you create!

The over-the-top hyper real imagery of the ARK its creatures is brought to expressive life using a highly-customized Unreal Engine 4, with fully dynamic lighting & global illumination, weather systems (rain, fog, snow, etc) & true-to-life volumetric cloud simulation, and the latest in advanced DirectX11 and DirectX12 rendering techniques. Music by award-winning composer of "Ori and the Blind Forest", Gareth Coker!

MINIMAL SETUPOS: Ubuntu Equivalent Distro
Processor: 2 GHz 64-bit CPUMemory: 4000 MB RAM
Memory: 4000 MB RAM
Graphics: OpenGL 3 Compatible GPU with 1GB Video RAM
Storage: 20000 MB available space

💰 Games on Sale 💰

GAMEBILLET

[ 5499 ]