Ark: Survival Evolved mutates again with its new v257 patch released on Friday. Among other things, it adds lasers to sharks. About time honestly.
The patch also introduces new creatures, including giant bees, something called a Liopleurodon Magicus, and “hell pigs,” as well as a cloning chamber and of course the mysterious Tek cave dungeon hidden within the now active volcano. Inside the cave players can access the Ascension mechanic allowing them to level up and prepare for the game’s new, more difficult content. Of course, before they can ascend, they will need to defeat whatever creatures await them down there.
Studio Wildcard also briefly outlined a number of other features getting added or updated:
– More UI overhauls
– New Hairstyle and Facial Hair
– Approximately 20+ New Explorer Notes
– 15 new music tracks, per-biome and situational
– Full Gamepad input pass (i.e. console gamepad functionality)
– Fixed issue with Cave spawns not functioning properly in singleplayer
– The Center mega-update!
– New Emote
– Engram Tree Revamp
– Alpha Megalodon
– All Alphas have their own APEX Items
To celebrate the latest patch, a weekend long event ending tomorrow around noon will give players bonuses to harvesting, taming, and EXP rates. Ark also got a big update at the end of March, showing that it truly is evolving all the time.
You can find out more details about patch v257 here.
Image credits: Studio Wildcard.
Comments
17 responses to “Ark: Survival Evolved Gets Sharks With Frickin’ Laser Beams After Latest Patch”
Yeah gotta admit this latest patch is pretty FRIKKIN AWESOME SCOTTY!
I play on PS4, but I really wish they’d fix the lag, frame rate, and constant rollbacks we have to suffer. Also, improve pathfinding and collision detection.
Since I started playing since release, the majority of the dinos I’ve lost has been to bugs.
I don’t know anyone who has built the Tek stuff.
I mean honestly, I do sympathize but my opinion is they never should’ve released it on console. Not only for the fps issue but Ark is a game that lives and dies by its mods, it truly does. Vanilla is *ok* but mods make it the necessary experience it is. The console aspect, not only for the lack of fps etc, but the scope of the game, the fact it’s in alpha, coming up to beta and what they set out to do with it, it’s that and more that I think they did the wrong thing releasing it on consoles. The requirements for the Tek stuff is high, no doubt, but having used it in single player, it’s a necessary burden for it to be that high. It’s so ridiculously OP and chews through the element resource so quickly, if it weren’t expensive, it’d imbalance the game moreso and ruin the experience for everyone. The only other (more favorable) option, would be to give some midway tier between Riot and Tek, some sort of ‘research level’, with Rocket packs etc, that could serve as a midway point perhaps? I’ve heard it runs ok on the pspro with its extra grunt, but the xbox one and ps4 not so much.
I play on Official, because I like the idea of having a permanent place on the internet where anyone can get jealous at my dino collection. And I play on PVE, because I don’t want to deal with the headache of PVP. I also am on the PS Pro. Console players on servers 43 and 48 might know me.
So frame rate is usually okay, but occasionally the game locks up and freezes and stutters and it doesn’t appear to be to do with lag. Most noticeably when I was recently taming a horse while it was raining near river, it was so ridiculous and jittery I threw in the towel. As far as I can tell, rain is just an animated overlay on the camera, so I don’t know why that’s even a thing. A lot of other people complain about bluescreens, which doesn’t happen so often to me, but did used to happen in the deep ocean, which made me stop going there.
As far as lag goes, every time there’s an evo weekend on, at least 2 or 3 rollbacks will happen per day, which is absurd. What’s worse, Oceania region only gets 2 island servers, 2 SE servers, 2 center servers. Since day one there’s been a problem with Europeans coming on, lagging everything up, and building stupidly elaborate buildings like the game was minecraft, and people flying over their bases will blue screen.
Because there’s only two island servers, it’s crowded. It’s better than it used to be. Now peak is around 56-60 players. It used to be 72-74 every day. Once I saw it at 78 and then the server crashed.
Tek Stuff : I honestly doubt anyone on the servers I frequent will bother, due to the crazy difficulty. I only heard of one tribe who succeeded in chat, but that’s all, and it was probably on easy.
I totally agree there should be a tier before Tek. At least give us a boat that isn’t going to be smashed by a leeds, because any form of dino transportation has been rendered trash by the flier nerf. I tried to play it smart by equiping a plesi with a tray so I could take my ascended clubs penguin clubbing, but I almost lost my 255 mantis to jelly fish because the plesi dives at the slightest touch.
As for mods… even when I was a PC gamer I rarely touched them, as I liked to play games as the designers intended…. but man, I have a killer idea in my head involving mages and the ability to summon demons that would translate nicely to ark. The idea being instead of taming dinos, you perform a ritual to summon demons, with more powerful demons requiring more powerful ingredients and longer summoning times. But that’ll only exist in my head.
There’s a TON of garbage mods out there that just plain suck. But there’s some, like the S+ crafting mod, that are pure magic. S+ crafting allows you to ignore rocks, to ignore terrain etc unlike normal where the slightest incline will screw up your building etc. It allows foundations to be placed on top of others in different ways, it’s really good. I try to play with minimal mods now, I’ve tried some absurd ones like the Star Wars mod which was fun for 5 minutes, but then got annoying, but the subtle ones like S+ make the game all the more worth it. As far as the PSPro goes, I imagine as it nears Beta, when the kinks are ironed out, it’ll get better. My biggest issue with the game to be honest, is they need a bigger map? Now, The Island is way too goddamn small. It needs a map roughly 3 – 4 times bigger. We need some rolling fields, some dense jungles, bigger redwoods areas, we need some vast oceans. But we don’t have that and we really do need it in a game like Ark.
S+ is an absolute must have. I can’t even imagine going back to vanilla after experiencing how awesome S+ is.
Automated Ark is another game changer with its new items like the Egg Crate and combo Smithy/Fabricator.
As for the map size, on my server we recently switched over to the custom Shigo Islands map and it’s awesome!
40% bigger than The Island with 2 swamp areas, 2 redwood areas (one with giant mushrooms!), a volcano, a wyvern lair on the central island, a desert area with more SE dinos, and loads of ocean to explore!
Ooooh I checked out Shigo a LONG time ago, it had promise but was highly underdeveloped. Just checked out some footage and so glad to see its come a long way 🙂 I wish Valhalla had of come along, the size of that was amazing. Have you got your server dets?
Sure thing! It’s ARKstralia PvE – 25xAll – Mods – No Flyer Nerf
Or just connect to 45.121.210.1:22925
Oh neat, been looking for a decent PVE server, been sick and tired of losing everything to douchebags raiding.
People still play this poorly optimised piece of shit?
There’s been a bunch of optimisation in recent patches, and the next big patch at the end of this month has a boatload more.
Absolutely, I’m getting 70+ fps on my 1070 card on ultra settings these days, its fantastic.
Next update promises “Memory reductions, texture memory & mesh optimization, and performance gains via GPU and CPU utilization & threading improvements”
https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/forums/topic/166421-pc-patch-notes-current-v25748-upcoming-v258-eta-may-30/
Yay, more tools to make the lives of small clans harder in the face of mega clan aggression.
The Tek Cloning Chamber is a big waste of time from what I’ve experienced.
On a 25x modified server, it takes 30k element shards and 2+ hours to clone a level 230+ rex, and even then it doesn’t come out at the exact same level as promised (but at the level the original was when tamed/bred) or with the exact same stats.
Can’t imagine doing this on vanilla official servers where it’d take 4+ days to clone!
Holy shitballs. That much element??? They need to make more ways to get Element than just fighting bosses, seriously.