I've been playing ARK on a locally hosted server with my wife.
We're pretty goal oriented and have spreadsheets with what we need to accomplish and how / when.
However, we've now:
- Constructed a three story house
- Created an animal pen large enough to house our herd
- Tamed 20 dodos, 2 triceratops, 2 dilos, 2 phiomas
- Constructed an archery tower surrounded by several spike walls with ammo to kill just about everything on the map
- Have 10 storage boxes filled with a thousand of each resource near enough
- Have a garden with 8 small plots
I'm now lvl 23, and she's lvl 18. And we're not sure what to do next.
As there are no real set goals as far as we can tell, and the aspects required to summon the broodmother require increasing levels up to 55 it looks like we'll be stuck grinding levels for a while.
It feels like we hit a curve in the game where we're too well off to really need to do anything, we're lacking goals.
What are we missing, is there some mid-game content we're not seeing?
What do people tend to do in ARK once they've built a small colony?
Is it just improbable to play ARK on a local server, is the idea of humans killing humans so ingrained in the game balance that we're missing out?
Best Answer
After some careful deliberation and laying out what we had accomplished, we decided that we did in fact omit a large part of the game.
Exploration!
It's kind of simple if you think about it, the island is huge, and while we did carve out a small safe corner of it, we had not yet explored even a fraction of the island.
So now we've set off on foot, following the shore from the western to the eastern border. Due to the crafting of arrows / food / temporary shelter and the fighting involved, we've discovered new species of dinosaur and leveled up quite a bit.
So if you're in doubt after the early game on what to do, and don't want to break the feel of such an immersive and fun game by power leveling or doing stuff just to get ahead in the game, try finding out whats past that high hill near you.