Surviving the Tedium seems to require three forces..
My power, Meat power, Metal power.
As a summary for the first year surviving the Ark solo.
With three or so of the Alpha Tyrannosaurus Rex Assholes down.. And few sightings of 2 of the remaining 3 that I believe are still out there.. I'm starting to get tragically bored.
Previously I mentioned that a bit of mental math made it seem like something was wrong with the balance of resources in the game. There's too much resource gathering and crafting overhead and waste that makes actually exploring the island and combatting the larger assholes harder than it needs to be to the point of tedium.
I was thinking that while it is awesome that there are so many raw resources and refined and manufactured resources and tools that can be derived from them, it seemed like there was a definite lack or imbalance in the availability of some materials.
At first raw crystal seemed difficult to obtain so I went online to figure out where to find some. Turns out you have to venture to the forbidding and dangerous peaks... and I'd found at least one peak still in the south islands, that wasn't too dangerous, but it didn't have many crystal nodes to harvest from. That was a quick few trips with the little trike that could.. until there was no more material on that peak to harvest.
There are many other peaks to explore and exploit... and so there have been several trips to these peaks for materials... except the material Obsidian is also rarish.
And so is cementing paste. But once you start using these two resources you start to realize how much of this shit you really need.
Without a tribe, and sadly without workers to mitigate the overhead costs of mat gathering and crafting...
But these materials all are required for higher end tools.. without them a survivor must rely on the remaining two forces, meat power and my power.
My power isn't going to get you anywhere against anything much bigger than a Raptor. If you're well equipped enough you can punch a Raptor unconscious, you can then go about murdering however you like.. but anything much bigger will pretty much kill you. Sadly Raptors aren't usually a solo show.
Metal tools and weapons will take those things down.. but you'll end up ruining your gear after the first few encounters with larger creatures like a T-Rex.
By the time you're plotting the eradication of the Islands Alpha creatures though.. These forces available to you.. must be properly weighed.
For me, since I'm solo'ing this.. and beginning to regret it.. It is really getting driven home that me power and metal power aren't cutting it. I just don't believe in an army of meat cannon fodder.
Yes I've killed a few of them. No I don't think I can cleanse them from the Island.
Having just hit 75 I'm about a month and a bit from being on the Island for a year.
In that first annum or rather in the last few days of the first year I'm still pondering hitting a Gigantonosaurus. Except by the charts that fucker is too big.
And by the looks of things, a paracer with a platform saddle with a genny and fridge on his back.. I could have enough meat for the job. If I can knock it out and then summon my forces who've proven themselves time and again useless at standing guard... I'd probably shoot myself trying to tame it.
So it would be a mighty foe to fell, so I'm not willing to try.. but I mean he's not messing with me I'm not messing with him.
However if he was on my side, virtually nothing could kill it. I would ride my mighty friend across the land biting the heads off of fucking everything!
Of course if it gets hurt enough it flies into a rage and ends up murdering everything.
So...
My power isn't going to drop it. Metal power won't dent it.. I could consider meat power. And if it stubs its toe it'll murder everything around it. Who designed this game?!
Frankly without enough disposable obsidian and cementing paste... I can't count on metal power no matter what. Like just running a machine gun, after getting the materials to even build one and enough bullets for it.. the damn thing breaks. It is guaranteed to require more materials.
But meat power....
I'm going to be honest, with you.
This zoo.
This unreal engine 4 construct, this irreality... wtv... you want to call it.. I can't stand it any longer.. I can't tame another god damned thing. I have these two Castoroids mfs I need for harvesting wood, which I'd plucked from a nearby tributary and dumped into a taming pen.. for the second attempt at taming them both, sucking on the mind numbing pastes in these hundreds of spare narcotic concoctions.
Like the trike that could.. and my indispensable assembly of Tyrannosauri Reges, and more generally the basic principal of the game, which is to find dino and kill said dino or tame it.. if it don't kill you first.. or during the process of taming it wakes up and kills you.. there's a quirk.
An odd quirk.
A quirk so subtle.. and yet so fundamental.. and intrinsic to the core nature of the game.. that I've ignored it..
But it has been eating at me.
You have to understand that I consider myself to be the apex creature on the island. I mean I can reset the island. No matter how many times I'm killed.. or stupidity should befall me and set back my effort to rule the land, and thus belie that apexness.. the game's designers built into it a thing... a thing so vile.. a thing which vexes me.. meat power.
It's the smell! If there's even such a thing from a video game.. uh.. oops.
It's that every adult dino is just meat. They are only there to provide meat power. There's no deeper simulation because all the devs are providing to you are unlimited spawns of meat power.. You can even breed more more power.. although that's stupid since breeding and raising babies is stupefying boring and nonsensical.
Like no matter what you're doing, if it is not based on the core golden principal of exploiting meat power.. you're doing everything wrong with your life and you're just wasting your time.
This isn't actually the simulation that I thought it was or could be.. everything is meat. I'm saturated by it. If you don't use the meat fast enough it rots.
Since I first realized it.. it is as though I've always known it.. that the devs acknowledge only two distinct major groups of players, the primitives and the nots, where the modders fall under the nots.. I include anyone not playing on default settings under the classification of modders even if they are playing as primitives. But playing on Xbox One.. without mods, there's little choice.
Am I the only simmer? that needs to solo because everyone else seems to be perfectly happy to hack away at survival with the core concept that each dino is there to be used as a tool.. a weapon to kill or a means to gather materials... or is there as a mobile sack of meat. Literally to use as a mobile pouch that you can stuff even more meat into, cleaved from the corpses of dead dinos, for 6x longer than in your survivor's inventory.
I want to be in the simulation! Each dino falling from a mother or bursting forth from a soft or hard shell or pouch or out of the soft warm earth.. Not spawned out of thin air. Granted you'll almost never see anything spawn right next to you.
A sim where in not every creature is a damned walking pile of meat immune to the elements that so quickly freeze or roast your puny human survivor. Not one with creatures that only need to move or to eat when commanded to do so by the player for the purpose of murdering or to mate.
It needs a proper diversity and attention to details so that everything at least makes a little logical sense. Your character has several stats that decay but the dinos do not. You need never lead them to water. You need never feed them or provide them any food when and for the majority of the time, they are just standing by idle.
But it is there.. the quirk that for no damned good reason.. adult dinos aren't sims. Unless they are injured they don't need food. They are as representative of dinosaurs as the animatronic art exhibits at Disney's World.
That's the core of the boredom with his game, because it is the core game play mechanic that I decided a long while back that I had to ignore.. because it seemed such a stupid omission that it must have been intentional... and only after a very long time has it really started to bubble over into a game immersion breaking problem.
Like I'm not playing the game to endure the tedium of enslaving dinosaurs just to kill other dinosaurs.. or to fell trees more efficaciously. At least with these Castoroides mfs I can have a mobile workbench.. yay?
I'd like to explore the island on the back of just 1, like TLTTC while it was alive. Or on the back of my Argentavis Morgcules the 2th.
Fun.. with a fair amount of the Island explored I could move on to caves, but since stepping foot into one sent me through the floor and under the island to a series of pointless deaths I gave that shit up again and turned back to trying to murder off all these mf Alpha TReges that keep spawning.
The hunt isn't the tedious part.. the tedium is from harvesting a mountain top for half a machine rifle and 700 bullets it takes to have enough Metal power to kill just 1.
So.
Meat power....
The game's vast online community suggests just taming 5 TReges and ranking them up to 50+
Then I watched a video of a Giganotosaurus get into rage mode and in 1 attack murder such an assembly... an I looked at mine and went nope.
I don't want them to die. These are mine. There are many like them.. but I tamed these ones. These ones are mine.
Being that they won't need to really eat, and there's ample meat supply spawning all over.. Ok.. that's plan A.. or plan that's boring, fuck plan a.
Plan b, gather the materials to make guns and bullets is insanely impractical. Plan b works great.. but takes a long ass time and I'm having a hard time finding obsidian and enough insects to murder to make cementing paste. So I can't do plan b for much longer.
Plan c.. fuck this game.