“Hey, do you want a drink?” I ask over voice chat, recognizing a possible buyer lurking outdoors my base. They react at first with an air of suspicion. I drop an merchandise on the seaside they usually stroll backwards and forwards, mousing over it cautiously. “No thanks,” they finally reply. Then, earlier than I can say one other phrase, they’re off once more, mounting a close-by Quetz and escaping over the jagged cliffs. Not precisely the response I might have hoped for.
I’ve develop into caught up in considerably of a predicament of late. Gazing on the contents of my base, any skilled Ark: Survival Evolved participant will instantly spot the place I’ve gone fallacious.
All throughout the separate flooring of my home, there’s beer barrel after beer barrel, making my base look much less like a comfortable homestead and extra just like the basement of your common pub on matchday. Accidentally, I’ve develop into the proprietor of my very personal micro-brewery, and worse but, eliminating the stuff is like asking somebody if my pet can take a dino-sized dump on their garden. Let’s simply say they aren’t precisely biting my palms off for the chance.
So, how did I find yourself on this scenario? Well, it began with my dream of taming the Chalicotherium – a big herbivore that appears like an odd combination between a gorilla, a canine, and a horse. The creature packs a ferocious punch, throws faeces at its enemies, can collect berries rapidly, and may even be taught to sit down to impress your neighbours.
The solely solution to tame the creature is passively with assistance from alcohol, which implies it’s a must to make investments a whole lot of time and sources into crafting a beer barrel (500 wooden, 80 steel ingots, and 100 cementing paste), a glass jar (seven cementing paste, 5 cover, two crystal every), and gathering sufficient berries, thatch, and water to ferment.
Then you want to wait as much as an extra six hours for a single unit of beer to be created on official servers. In order to hurry issues up, I made a number of casks.
Bottoms up
Primitive Plus is a complete conversion DLC for Ark: Survival Evolved that expands the food and drinks choices, alongside refocusing the game on the extra primitive parts. Here you possibly can craft mead, along with wheat beer and wine, letting you experiment extra with the fermentation course of and create your favorite tipple.
And now having lastly tamed the creature – albeit getting my ass kicked a number of instances within the course of – I’m geared up with sufficient alcohol to cater for a big space of Greater Manchester, however with not one of the curiosity.
I’ve tried palming it off on neighbours, giving it to new gamers on the server, and providing it to those that need their very own bizarre prehistoric canine to trip about on. But, thus far, I’ve had no luck.
The downside is that there isn’t that a lot you are able to do with alcohol within the game, apart from taming the Chalicotherium. Drinking it produces a bunch of various buffs, resembling growing your resistance to chilly and resilience to wreck, however it additionally quickly drains your stamina and reduces your imaginative and prescient. Which means gamers will normally keep away in case you provide them a pint as a logo of fine will.
Whereas, elsewhere, in PvP, the place the merchandise would possibly really be of some use, there are different more cost effective and time-saving methods to incapacitate a participant. Ones that don’t contain going by way of the difficulty of remodeling your base right into a nonetheless and forcing a drink down individuals’s throats.
In a manner, beer in Ark highlights a a lot wider design fault you see throughout a whole lot of survival games, the place pointless mechanics are launched into the development system after which deserted prematurely.
You might imagine that beer would develop into an vital part of a recipe additional down the road – warranting maintaining a barrel or two round on the very least to proceed manufacturing – however you’d be fallacious. Once it has served its function, it simply turns into one other piece of nugatory furnishings, which gamers must demolish when it comes time to make room for extra vital equipment.
Read extra: Check our our record of the best survival games on PC
Now surrounded by cask after cask, I’m left questioning about its potential functions and a number of the wasted alternatives. It looks as if beer may have made an incredible different gasoline supply for equipment someplace down the road, or a superb ingredient for extra concerned recipes – which do exist elsewhere within the complete conversion DLC Primitive Plus.
As it stands, there isn’t a lot I can do in the mean time, apart from get blackout drunk, attempt to drum up enterprise for my ailing enterprise, or demolish the lot.
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