I'll be logging on later tonight to get stuff ready so we can get going on the sky titan quickly.
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
I think that was the best boss fight thus far. I really liked the ability to hook onto its back to (usually) keep from getting flipped or hit off the back. It's like, "no, I don't think I will go flying. Have more bullets."
Looking forward to the big finale, but we really should try and have 4 players or minimum 4 meks together and ready for the final fight so we can make a mega mek. It takes 4 total.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
So the server hasn't been active for a while, but I was keeping it up for potential boss runs. That said, despite being unemployed for the moment my weekends remain surprisingly busy. I've decided to let the server expire on June 6th when the billing renews. It will remain up until then.
You can download the backup now, however, if you want it.
So I lost my screenshots folder in a reformat last week, but a few of us did take out the King Titan before the server shut down. Since I can't link screenshots, here's the cinematic at the end of the game.
So I lost my screenshots folder in a reformat last week, but a few of us did take out the King Titan before the server shut down. Since I can't link screenshots, here's the cinematic at the end of the game.
It is. Looks like they left themselves a story hook in the event that they want to do anything else with ARK. If they do end up making more ARK, I hope that the next map is more beautiful with the life brought back to earth by the ARKs. The dull drab of the wasteland got kinda boring.
3DS Friend Code:
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
It is. Looks like they left themselves a story hook in the event that they want to do anything else with ARK. If they do end up making more ARK, I hope that the next map is more beautiful with the life brought back to earth by the ARKs. The dull drab of the wasteland got kinda boring.
I mean, apparently they already have one new dino they're introducing, the Deinonychus, so work could be being done already on something new. The drop/vein mechanics were cool, even if they were also sort of "old, fast", and the vertical traversal of various creatures and abilities later on in the game's production really helped to liven the game up.
I think my main issue is that the dinos themselves quickly become a non-issue unless it's an alpha, which simply causes slightly more trouble, there's not really a lot of PvE content, the PvP content is mostly balanced around being an asshole, and everything takes so god damned long unless you speed it up and then everything takes such a short amount of time and resources as to almost feel pointless. And the strongest building features were still those added by a mod they still haven't managed to fully add to the game proper.
Which is to say they could try another expansion, but it feels more like the "different servers as different areas of a much larger map" feature of Atlas would be more in line with what they'd need to do with ARK to make a whole world feel good, and I think the entire PvP and PvE systems would need to be reworked totally.
Basically, I think that in order to follow up the end of the story, they'd really need to do an ARK 2.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
I would love an ARK 2 with bigger maps, after the ARKS return home.
Also maybe with a bit more balance and scaling work. Especially for 'late game' stuff.
I mean, I can't see any point in doing the voluminous amount of work it would take to hack the current ARK framework into being able to do those things. I know that they apparently cludged Atlas together to do that out of the bones of ARK, but I feel like the sort of advancement that would be required at least requires a new code framework, even if they recycled the models and textures and the like.
But hey, maybe I'm wrong and they'd love to go sifting through what I can only assume is code akin to a backed up sewage pipe at this point . . .
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
I'd just love an offline single player mode that doesn't require me to tweak half the in-game variables an a few more in the files to not be tedious as fuck.
I never got around to playing it on the PA server, and the offical ones are too ganky to even try, so that's where most of my ARK enjoyment has been, and it has been enjoyable, but at some point I get tired of having to travel halfway across the map because metal respawning rates are based on the "server" being active 24/7 rather than a few hours at a time, and despite collecting enough that my Arky has to be carried because he's too loaded to move, only get a handful of bullets out of it.
Extinction did help a bit in that regard with the gasbags, poke balls, and balloon crates.
3DS Friend Code:
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
Also, the teleport pad mod did wonders for hauling ass across the map. I mean, there were still places to go that couldn't easily be TP'd to, especially on Extinction where most dinos would just tear the shit out of TP pads, or meteorite damage would destroy them.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
Color me disappointed. Explored a bit by giving myself insane speed/fly/god mode.
No actual Extinction content except engrams as far as I saw, seems to be missing most or a lot of SE. Not much water and nothing deep but the big lake is still swarming with awful for what few water creatures the map has. Basically the north half of Ragnarok with no ocean and an aberration cave.
On the plus side, it's built with an eye for base building. Tons of cool locations, little, huge, sheltered, open, a couple that looked nearly unassailable except via quetzals once it's built up.
I played with you guys a year or more ago. I've gotten the urge to play again and have been mucking a bit around in single player. But it would be nice to have someone else around. Are you still active and do you have a server up that you play on?
'Pet' thing available now, Part 1 in December 2019, Part 2 'Winter 2020'. I am unsure if that means January, or literally Nov-Dec 2020.
Continue your quest for survival and unlock a whole new chapter in the saga of ARK: Survival Evolved with the ARK: Genesis Season Pass! This Season Pass gives you access to two new huge expansion packs and one exclusive in-game cosmetic pet. Further the ARK storyline while adventuring through unique and diverse biomes via an all new mission-based game mechanic. Discover, utilize and master new creatures, new craftable items and new craftable structures unlike anything you have seen yet!
We've actually been discussing what it would take to fix ARK late-game content on the Discord recently, and mission/quest features were something we discussed. Waiting to see more details as they announce them, but there might be potential here.
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Damn, that expansion appeals to me a lot more than the previous ones. Yes please give me giant Gaia tortoise pets.
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
I can't say I'm not interested . . . damn them.
My saving grace will probably be my inability to actually buy the expansion.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
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NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
Have to say I'm impressed with how they keep adding stuff. A shame I don't care for how they've balanced time/resource investments.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Have to say I'm impressed with how they keep adding stuff. A shame I don't care for how they've balanced time/resource investments.
With the official / default settings, I agree. But luckily you can change the settings if you run your own server. I'm still fiddling around with it, but 5x taming speed, 5x resources etc makes it a lot more enjoyable when you want a relatively casual game where you can collect cool dinos and build some nice bases.
I've recently had my my interest in sandbox survival games re-ignited from playing the Conan Exiles free weekend, and I remembered that I've owned ARK for a really long time. Originally I played very little of it since I fell into the classic trap of temporarily losing interest in the game, becoming interested in other things, and then never going back to playing it (also, when ventured into the jungle off that starting beach area and found both terrifying raptor creatures, AND a giant cave snake that I stood no chance against. my video game cowardice kicked into overdrive).
So before tentatively jumping back in, I just wanted to know how the game has changed since early 2017 (if at all).
There's a lot of weird shit on the Aberration and Extinction maps, but the Island, Ragnarok, Center, and Scorched Earth are probably what you remember.
On the Island, sticking to the beach and out of the water will give you tons of food avoid the worst of the horrors, usually nothing worse than a dilophosaurus until you actually pick a fight, but harshly limits your resources and mounts to the bottom tier stuff.
Ragnarok has better resource availability, Viking Bay area can basically take you 80% of the way through the non-Tek tree, at the cost of being more dangerous than the Island beaches, but still relatively easy (you can see the occasional Allosaurus or Argentavis far enough off to at least plan around unlike a forest or jungle).
Have to say I'm impressed with how they keep adding stuff. A shame I don't care for how they've balanced time/resource investments.
With the official / default settings, I agree. But luckily you can change the settings if you run your own server. I'm still fiddling around with it, but 5x taming speed, 5x resources etc makes it a lot more enjoyable when you want a relatively casual game where you can collect cool dinos and build some nice bases.
That's basically how I played it offline all the time, with sped up growing and taming times so everything happened at a pace that made since for only a few hours at a time. As I got more established I started raising dino levels looked for more impressive beasts to tame.
Forgot to do anything with resources or resource spawning last time though, which is what eventually got me frustrated, as I was having to comb the entire island for every last bit of metal with the closest stuff having not respawned yet even though I'd hit everything except a couple of mountaintops and the caves. Considering how much the idol caves tear though your gear, that made progress pretty much stop.
If I get back into it I'll have to make sure to tweaking something for that.
Last year when muddbudd hosted a server, he had some kinda "realistic taming" mod enabled that made taming creatures 90000000000000x more enjoyable than the default taming method of "tranq a creature and then spend 7 hours shoving food up its ass while making sure that an ant doesn't glitch inside of it and eat it."
Extinction's "pokeballs" and "gasbag" creatures made resource harvesting much more convenient. The gasbags had ungodly carry capacity and were excellent mounts for traversing the map quickly by air... Although your mileage may vary since apparently I had more of an affinity for travel via gasbag than some others. It's kinda like those old lunar lander games. Some people had trouble gauging their hops and ended up running out of "fuel" mid jump and slamming into the earth.
The "awesome teleporters" mod was also super convenient.
3DS Friend Code:
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
There's a lot of weird shit on the Aberration and Extinction maps, but the Island, Ragnarok, Center, and Scorched Earth are probably what you remember.
On the Island, sticking to the beach and out of the water will give you tons of food avoid the worst of the horrors, usually nothing worse than a dilophosaurus until you actually pick a fight, but harshly limits your resources and mounts to the bottom tier stuff.
Ragnarok has better resource availability, Viking Bay area can basically take you 80% of the way through the non-Tek tree, at the cost of being more dangerous than the Island beaches, but still relatively easy (you can see the occasional Allosaurus or Argentavis far enough off to at least plan around unlike a forest or jungle).
I don't know what the difference was, but on Mudd's server, Viking Bay (what we called Murder Beach) would have fairly regular visits by Rexes, Carnos, Terror Birds, Scorpions, Hyenas, and others.
Different stretches of beach were safer than others, but in general they were safer than the jungle just inland of the beach. Back on the island, in an early build of the game, I built my home on the circled island at a river's mouth. The most hazardous predator that I ever encountered on my island was a croc. I had a bronto stepping on my base once that could have caused problems. The river just north of me would often have raptors and the occasional carno and skorpion. Rarely I'd see a spino in the river. Only one spino ever approached my home, but I called for help and we tamed it before it could get close enough to be a threat.
IIRC the southern half of the map was safer than the beaches further north.
There's a lot of weird shit on the Aberration and Extinction maps, but the Island, Ragnarok, Center, and Scorched Earth are probably what you remember.
On the Island, sticking to the beach and out of the water will give you tons of food avoid the worst of the horrors, usually nothing worse than a dilophosaurus until you actually pick a fight, but harshly limits your resources and mounts to the bottom tier stuff.
Ragnarok has better resource availability, Viking Bay area can basically take you 80% of the way through the non-Tek tree, at the cost of being more dangerous than the Island beaches, but still relatively easy (you can see the occasional Allosaurus or Argentavis far enough off to at least plan around unlike a forest or jungle).
I don't know what the difference was, but on Mudd's server, Viking Bay (what we called Murder Beach) would have fairly regular visits by Rexes, Carnos, Terror Birds, Scorpions, Hyenas, and others.
Multiplayer servers see a lot more creature migration than private or single player. More player movement and structures, and the weird way the game spawns them to start with also means there's usually way more on the map even in identical settings. Generally more chaotic all around.
Different stretches of beach were safer than others, but in general they were safer than the jungle just inland of the beach. Back on the island, in an early build of the game, I built my home on the circled island at a river's mouth. The most hazardous predator that I ever encountered on my island was a croc. I had a bronto stepping on my base once that could have caused problems. The river just north of me would often have raptors and the occasional carno and skorpion. Rarely I'd see a spino in the river. Only one spino ever approached my home, but I called for help and we tamed it before it could get close enough to be a threat.
IIRC the southern half of the map was safer than the beaches further north.
That's a pretty good place to start on a solo/private server too. Even if you decide to make your main base somewhere inland, you could still use it as a southern sea base with the nearby bay closed off as a pen for your aquatic tames.
There's a lot of weird shit on the Aberration and Extinction maps, but the Island, Ragnarok, Center, and Scorched Earth are probably what you remember.
On the Island, sticking to the beach and out of the water will give you tons of food avoid the worst of the horrors, usually nothing worse than a dilophosaurus until you actually pick a fight, but harshly limits your resources and mounts to the bottom tier stuff.
Ragnarok has better resource availability, Viking Bay area can basically take you 80% of the way through the non-Tek tree, at the cost of being more dangerous than the Island beaches, but still relatively easy (you can see the occasional Allosaurus or Argentavis far enough off to at least plan around unlike a forest or jungle).
I don't know what the difference was, but on Mudd's server, Viking Bay (what we called Murder Beach) would have fairly regular visits by Rexes, Carnos, Terror Birds, Scorpions, Hyenas, and others.
Multiplayer servers see a lot more creature migration than private or single player. More player movement and structures, and the weird way the game spawns them to start with also means there's usually way more on the map even in identical settings. Generally more chaotic all around.
I'm not sure if this explains it. I'm running a server but just using it for singleplayer, and Viking Bay is definitely murdertown. It's manageable if you know what you're doing, and not the most dangerous area, but my experience is pretty much the same as Sir Carcass -- plenty of T Rex, Allosaurus, Carnos, Terror Birds, alpha Carnos, all sorts of fun and nasty stuff. I've explored all around the bay with interest in possibly finding a safer spot, but it really doesn't exist. Everything is within 100 yards of some terrible deathspawn given any modest amount of time there. I have accelerated XP gather and taming rates that helped me get over the hump and get a stone wall, but without that it would be rough as hell. The areas to the west and south along the coast are much safer, though less resource rich.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
There's a lot of weird shit on the Aberration and Extinction maps, but the Island, Ragnarok, Center, and Scorched Earth are probably what you remember.
On the Island, sticking to the beach and out of the water will give you tons of food avoid the worst of the horrors, usually nothing worse than a dilophosaurus until you actually pick a fight, but harshly limits your resources and mounts to the bottom tier stuff.
Ragnarok has better resource availability, Viking Bay area can basically take you 80% of the way through the non-Tek tree, at the cost of being more dangerous than the Island beaches, but still relatively easy (you can see the occasional Allosaurus or Argentavis far enough off to at least plan around unlike a forest or jungle).
I don't know what the difference was, but on Mudd's server, Viking Bay (what we called Murder Beach) would have fairly regular visits by Rexes, Carnos, Terror Birds, Scorpions, Hyenas, and others.
Multiplayer servers see a lot more creature migration than private or single player. More player movement and structures, and the weird way the game spawns them to start with also means there's usually way more on the map even in identical settings. Generally more chaotic all around.
I'm not sure if this explains it. I'm running a server but just using it for singleplayer, and Viking Bay is definitely murdertown. It's manageable if you know what you're doing, and not the most dangerous area, but my experience is pretty much the same as Sir Carcass -- plenty of T Rex, Allosaurus, Carnos, Terror Birds, alpha Carnos, all sorts of fun and nasty stuff. I've explored all around the bay with interest in possibly finding a safer spot, but it really doesn't exist. Everything is within 100 yards of some terrible deathspawn given any modest amount of time there. I have accelerated XP gather and taming rates that helped me get over the hump and get a stone wall, but without that it would be rough as hell. The areas to the west and south along the coast are much safer, though less resource rich.
Getting up high on the rocks for your base can keep you mostly safe, but you do still have to worry about the occasional argie meandering by. Still, I do have a soft spot for Murder Beach. It's much safer on a single-player game since the spawns are closer to you. A dedicated server has a wider spawn area, I believe, so the nasty stuff around the bay tends to wander in after chasing things.
I've been playing solo PvP on official but got wiped again yesterday and I'm getting a little tired of it. It's a great game, but the power difference between me and a fully equipped tribe is too much to overcome.
So I think I'm going to take a break. But if anyone wants to tribe up, that could be fun. It has to be PvP though. PvE just doesn't do it for me.
I keep trying to run a dedicated server and it seems to start fine but I can never find it in the server list to join it. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? I was following this video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slpp3fDcYCQ&t=175s
I keep trying to run a dedicated server and it seems to start fine but I can never find it in the server list to join it. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? I was following this video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slpp3fDcYCQ&t=175s
As someone who is not particularly good at networking stuff, I love Ark Server Manager as a base. It makes setup and tweaking settings super easy.
Aside from that, the most common issue I run into is just not having the correct ports forwarded. If it's on your own LAN you should be able to see it regardless, but make sure you're forwarding the relevant ports in your router.
And in general, I find the Steam server browser to be better and more reliable. I was having issues more with Dark & Light (it's the exact same engine and...pretty much everything else as Ark) than Ark, but the steam server manager is worth a shot. In steam, hit "view" in the top left and choose "servers". Under the favorites tab there's a button in the bottom right for "add a server", which lets you type in the IP to bring it up and connect a lot more easily. Try it with and without the port syntax on the end.
Posts
Will our other titans exist for that long?
Or will we just be having you summon tamed versions of them at that time?
The latter.
Or I'll figure out a setting to make them stay.
Either way, we'll take all three into the fight with the king.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
So let's aim for... April 20th, at 1pm PST.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
I'll be logging on later tonight to get stuff ready so we can get going on the sky titan quickly.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Looking forward to the big finale, but we really should try and have 4 players or minimum 4 meks together and ready for the final fight so we can make a mega mek. It takes 4 total.
You can download the backup now, however, if you want it.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hs651gdkmetwlxi/2019-05-23-18-41-50.zip?dl=0
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
I think I'm officially burned out on ARK/Wildcard for a good while, but I had a blast with yall.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Okay, that's actually a pretty good end(?) to the game's story it was trying to tell. Also
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
I mean, apparently they already have one new dino they're introducing, the Deinonychus, so work could be being done already on something new. The drop/vein mechanics were cool, even if they were also sort of "old, fast", and the vertical traversal of various creatures and abilities later on in the game's production really helped to liven the game up.
I think my main issue is that the dinos themselves quickly become a non-issue unless it's an alpha, which simply causes slightly more trouble, there's not really a lot of PvE content, the PvP content is mostly balanced around being an asshole, and everything takes so god damned long unless you speed it up and then everything takes such a short amount of time and resources as to almost feel pointless. And the strongest building features were still those added by a mod they still haven't managed to fully add to the game proper.
Which is to say they could try another expansion, but it feels more like the "different servers as different areas of a much larger map" feature of Atlas would be more in line with what they'd need to do with ARK to make a whole world feel good, and I think the entire PvP and PvE systems would need to be reworked totally.
Basically, I think that in order to follow up the end of the story, they'd really need to do an ARK 2.
Also maybe with a bit more balance and scaling work. Especially for 'late game' stuff.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
I mean, I can't see any point in doing the voluminous amount of work it would take to hack the current ARK framework into being able to do those things. I know that they apparently cludged Atlas together to do that out of the bones of ARK, but I feel like the sort of advancement that would be required at least requires a new code framework, even if they recycled the models and textures and the like.
But hey, maybe I'm wrong and they'd love to go sifting through what I can only assume is code akin to a backed up sewage pipe at this point . . .
I never got around to playing it on the PA server, and the offical ones are too ganky to even try, so that's where most of my ARK enjoyment has been, and it has been enjoyable, but at some point I get tired of having to travel halfway across the map because metal respawning rates are based on the "server" being active 24/7 rather than a few hours at a time, and despite collecting enough that my Arky has to be carried because he's too loaded to move, only get a handful of bullets out of it.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
New official map coming tomorrow
Big lake, surrounded by land of various biomes. Nice, but nothing super special about it either.
Also, remember how well supported the center mod-map was after it was released? As in, they effectively stopped it? I'll wait and see on this.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
No actual Extinction content except engrams as far as I saw, seems to be missing most or a lot of SE. Not much water and nothing deep but the big lake is still swarming with awful for what few water creatures the map has. Basically the north half of Ragnarok with no ocean and an aberration cave.
On the plus side, it's built with an eye for base building. Tons of cool locations, little, huge, sheltered, open, a couple that looked nearly unassailable except via quetzals once it's built up.
I don't know if anyone frequents any other servers.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Here's what we know.
'Pet' thing available now, Part 1 in December 2019, Part 2 'Winter 2020'. I am unsure if that means January, or literally Nov-Dec 2020.
We've actually been discussing what it would take to fix ARK late-game content on the Discord recently, and mission/quest features were something we discussed. Waiting to see more details as they announce them, but there might be potential here.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
My saving grace will probably be my inability to actually buy the expansion.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
So before tentatively jumping back in, I just wanted to know how the game has changed since early 2017 (if at all).
On the Island, sticking to the beach and out of the water will give you tons of food avoid the worst of the horrors, usually nothing worse than a dilophosaurus until you actually pick a fight, but harshly limits your resources and mounts to the bottom tier stuff.
Ragnarok has better resource availability, Viking Bay area can basically take you 80% of the way through the non-Tek tree, at the cost of being more dangerous than the Island beaches, but still relatively easy (you can see the occasional Allosaurus or Argentavis far enough off to at least plan around unlike a forest or jungle).
That's basically how I played it offline all the time, with sped up growing and taming times so everything happened at a pace that made since for only a few hours at a time. As I got more established I started raising dino levels looked for more impressive beasts to tame.
Forgot to do anything with resources or resource spawning last time though, which is what eventually got me frustrated, as I was having to comb the entire island for every last bit of metal with the closest stuff having not respawned yet even though I'd hit everything except a couple of mountaintops and the caves. Considering how much the idol caves tear though your gear, that made progress pretty much stop.
If I get back into it I'll have to make sure to tweaking something for that.
Extinction's "pokeballs" and "gasbag" creatures made resource harvesting much more convenient. The gasbags had ungodly carry capacity and were excellent mounts for traversing the map quickly by air... Although your mileage may vary since apparently I had more of an affinity for travel via gasbag than some others. It's kinda like those old lunar lander games. Some people had trouble gauging their hops and ended up running out of "fuel" mid jump and slamming into the earth.
The "awesome teleporters" mod was also super convenient.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
I don't know what the difference was, but on Mudd's server, Viking Bay (what we called Murder Beach) would have fairly regular visits by Rexes, Carnos, Terror Birds, Scorpions, Hyenas, and others.
IIRC the southern half of the map was safer than the beaches further north.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Multiplayer servers see a lot more creature migration than private or single player. More player movement and structures, and the weird way the game spawns them to start with also means there's usually way more on the map even in identical settings. Generally more chaotic all around.
That's a pretty good place to start on a solo/private server too. Even if you decide to make your main base somewhere inland, you could still use it as a southern sea base with the nearby bay closed off as a pen for your aquatic tames.
I'm not sure if this explains it. I'm running a server but just using it for singleplayer, and Viking Bay is definitely murdertown. It's manageable if you know what you're doing, and not the most dangerous area, but my experience is pretty much the same as Sir Carcass -- plenty of T Rex, Allosaurus, Carnos, Terror Birds, alpha Carnos, all sorts of fun and nasty stuff. I've explored all around the bay with interest in possibly finding a safer spot, but it really doesn't exist. Everything is within 100 yards of some terrible deathspawn given any modest amount of time there. I have accelerated XP gather and taming rates that helped me get over the hump and get a stone wall, but without that it would be rough as hell. The areas to the west and south along the coast are much safer, though less resource rich.
Getting up high on the rocks for your base can keep you mostly safe, but you do still have to worry about the occasional argie meandering by. Still, I do have a soft spot for Murder Beach. It's much safer on a single-player game since the spawns are closer to you. A dedicated server has a wider spawn area, I believe, so the nasty stuff around the bay tends to wander in after chasing things.
So I think I'm going to take a break. But if anyone wants to tribe up, that could be fun. It has to be PvP though. PvE just doesn't do it for me.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
As someone who is not particularly good at networking stuff, I love Ark Server Manager as a base. It makes setup and tweaking settings super easy.
Aside from that, the most common issue I run into is just not having the correct ports forwarded. If it's on your own LAN you should be able to see it regardless, but make sure you're forwarding the relevant ports in your router.
And in general, I find the Steam server browser to be better and more reliable. I was having issues more with Dark & Light (it's the exact same engine and...pretty much everything else as Ark) than Ark, but the steam server manager is worth a shot. In steam, hit "view" in the top left and choose "servers". Under the favorites tab there's a button in the bottom right for "add a server", which lets you type in the IP to bring it up and connect a lot more easily. Try it with and without the port syntax on the end.