So I started a new breeding project | Carcharodontosaurus

As many of you know, my role in most tribes I have been in ARK was the role of the dino breeder. The person that magically hands you high level mutated animals and probably never leaves the base for thousands and thousands of hours. That kind of person that makes your heart drop when a wall of red text appears on your screen when weaping out the good from the bad offspring.

Finding the right server to breed on

I have the privilege to be able to play on a full cluster that has all maps and animals available to me. I usually try to spread my breeding projects through the cluster so the heavy load is not on one machine / server only. For the Carcharodontosaurus I was unsure to use Genesis 2 or Valguero (where my main base is). Genesis 2 has a lot of space, boosted rates through missions. Valguero has my main base with all my resources, but the space might be a problem. The decision was made for me when I saw that on Valguero the “I didn’t know what else to put there” (*) cliff was unclaimed after having a base on there since the launch of Valguero.

(* )The name refers to Nekatus comment on why the spot exists: “…And then there is me who just made this plane area because I didn’t had any other special idea for this place“

So I took this chance, brought over a Stone Golem, a Therizinosaurus and a Wyvern to farm resources to build on there. While I am sitting on resources in my main base, I often farm them for bigger projects anyway cause nothing is as bad as running out of resources in your main base and then have to farm twice to finish the building and refilling the base resources.

My first step was to surround the whole platform with barriers so dinos couldn’t fall off easily. I know many people have strong feelings towards gates as a base surrounding, but considering that this already took about 2 hours, I don’t even want to know how long it would have taken if I had used walls. I am not a builder after all and building to me is usually this:

How big should my breeding base be?

After I had finished the surrounding, I had to decide what direction I want to go with the building. Also, if I wanted to have a big building that will contain all my breeders or just a small building that contains Cryo-Fridges, storages and a Cryo-Sleeping Bed for idle times. I decided to go with a small building, because my main base is very close to this spot and it is already a gigantic building. Two buildings so close to each other might be problematic for people with weaker computers, and we don’t want to make anyone crash when flying over that spot.

I decided to remove one of my old breeding bases that was on the map that I had big plans with (mainly to mutate Stegosaurs, but I ended up mutating them in my main base). I had been empty for almost a year and I knew I wouldn’t use it any more. It’s kind of heartbreaking taking down buildings but realistically I can free a spot for someone else who wants to build there and I can also reuse the building parts for the new base, which saves me resources and time.

I don’t have any screenshots from that progress because I was “in the zone” listening to a podcast while doing it.

They day before I already had tamed a medium level Carcharodontosaurus on our cluster. It took me about 2 days of permanently killing Gigas to make it spawn without anyone else claiming it before I can see it. It tamed out as a level 127. Not insanely good but also not terrible. I decided to not farm further for Carchars for now because it’s a quite monotone work that can take days.

Preparing the breeders

I cloned the Carcharodontosaurus I had and switched the gender on it to have a breeding pair. I usually do this when taming methods are not as easy and quick and I just want to be done with it. Over the time I was building at the new spot, both Carchars had already produces eggs and the first clutch of babies were growing. On our settings the babies take one real life day from baby to adult.

I need to create a way to protect my tames and my lines. While I am playing on PvE, stealing lines is a super common thing which I try to avoid at all costs. My plan is to put a private or ally shield over each breeding group. I also decided to go for two groups with 20 females each. Since I can use the mutator, 20 are plenty for the start:

Typically I only go for one group and switch out the male, but since it takes forever to breed these Carchars, I decided to breed parallel. I will see if it works out because I am not sure about the mating range of this dino and if 20 females are actually reasonable to put in a circle. This is something I am figuring out next time.

Building the base itself

For the base itself I had decided to go with a smaller building and also to reuse structures I used before on another base.

I went with the building parts of Castles, Keeps, and Forts: Science Fiction because I like the clean look of the high-res building parts. I also went with a non-traditional shape. I am not a fan of simple box bases unless it’s a design choice. The color choice was easy because I wanted to replicate the pink-cyan building I had before and just replicate it in a smaller version. The cyan also goes surprisingly well with the forcefield walls from S+ that I use instead of gates.

I left out all the babies overnight that I hatched yesterday to have enough breeders available once I do set up my breeding groups. As you can see they have been doing great.

I am glad that I chose this platform to build on because now that I see how big the Carcharodontosaurus is compared to the space I have available, it looks like I can barely make it. Two breeding groups will already be using most of the space on this spot.

I will move the force field shields and also increase their radius, once I am settled. I will post an update once I am done with it, and I am progressed further into breeding the Carchar. I hope you enjoy these kinds of posts and I will leave the comments open, so feel free to ask questions or leave a comment!