Hello Survivors!

To those unaware this is a topic which primarily consist of content to share, made by the community, for the community! As well as any little changes I want to make survivors aware about, which happen within our community ;).

Fan Feature

Prince and Sleeping Beauty by Elite Controler

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=625597276

Rexy by crystal7582

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=626824048

Let’s go for a cheeky Nandodos

Source: https://twitter.com/weefz/status/700573594976321536

Partners by Elite Controler

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=625591292

More Pimp My Dino Teasers by Papukaijah

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=623703455

Sunset at Hobo Estate by JoeLongLegs

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=626342999

Scouting near Blue Tower by JoeLongLegs

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=617398769

Agent Smith’s Kibble Guide

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=619724483

Fandom Fineries: First Batch of Duet Bunk Beds by Ertosi

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=624596704

Mod: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=620368579

Fanmade Dossier: Tigrex by Shadlos

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=622531813

Fanmade Dossier: Acrocanthosaurus by Malkizid's

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=626791146

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=627347730

Fanmade Dossier: Longi by SebTheGamer

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=626909958

Fanmade Dossier: Torvosaurus by Davey Jones

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=625056758

Fanmade Dossier: Deviljho by Shadlos

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=626452437

Fanmade Dossier: Giant Ridable Moth by Scarecrow

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=624215546

Fanmade Dossier: Nargacuga by Shadlos

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=625175712

Community Contests!

ARKitect

This is an award given to Survivors to celebrate the amazing structures you build. These bases are judged based upon a number of different factors such as their creativity, uniqueness, how fun of a base it is, the difficulty of building it, the functionality it provides and much more!

The ARKitect for Community Crunch 38 is..

It’s a tie!

SirShepherd’s Fort Guardian aka Temple Town!

Very awesome fort! Not only does it look secure, but nice to look at too

Check out the full build here: http://imgur.com/a/cXc3S

and

Fresonis’s Valentine Special!

Aww, we <3 you too

Congratulations! As you guys are these weeks ARKitects! We'd also like to give an honourable mention to the following survivors;

DN Rednex’s PacMan in ARK!

Check out the full build here: https://imgur.com/a/JAJwY

Valoule’s PArkemon!

Check out the full build here: http://imgur.com/a/qqijQ

ARKArt

This is an award given to survivors who have created beautiful work of art for that week! As always, the artwork is not being judged on the quality of the screenshot or the graphical settings used, but instead what you have managed to draw and produce in game.

The ARKArtist for Community Crunch 38 is…

Final Stand by ±!

We'd also like to give an honourable mention to the following Survivor for their original piece of ARKArt!

Dream Lake by Okim!

and you can check out how it progressed in Okim’s album here:

Thank you for all the entries this week guys! Congratulations to all our winners and if you’d like to take a look at all the great entries that survivors submitted, you can do so here:

Workshop Spotlight!

Workshopper: Steel

Pub Décor Mod - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=600015460

Communication Crystal - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=625401741

Vanaheimr Forge - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=610672305

Vortex Crystal - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=613164458

Hey! Welcome to the Workshop spotlight. Can you introduce yourself to the community and let us know what mods you're working on?

Quote My name is Steel and my story with Ark Survival Evolved is a pretty long one. Back when Ark was just announced for release I was working with a group called SYNGaming. I was mainly handling PHP coding for our website and helping to keep some other game servers up and running. After hearing the announcement of ARK I decided to rile up the forces and start putting together a dev team for modding. It was going well until the day Ark released, when I went to the hospital due to a major anxiety attack. Turns out the stress of a full time job in conjunction with trying to lead a dev group was too much for me to handle. So I fell back and SYNGaming kind of faded away from there.

Quote Skipping ahead a few months of recovery I dove back into ark and eventually started running my own servers again through a company I’d worked with previously (I’ll get back to that later). I ran modded servers for about five months this way and eventually decided in the end it was too much work. I found a lot of modders either update too often or they don’t update at all and it slowly became tedious work.

Quote So I decided to take on modding myself and that leads us here. I’m slowly making further progress with the Pub Décor Mod while also attempting to make some more primitive / RP friendly mods as well.

Glad to hear you're doing better! So the Pub Décor Mod is your primary mod, now before we dive into that, would you tell us more about the other mods you’re working on?

Quote So far I’ve made only a few other small mods in addition to the Pub Décor Mod:

Quote Communication Crystal This mod adds a free replacement for the radio item in-game. It’s a incredibly simple mod that only replaces the noise, icon, and name of the radio; leaving all other functions intact. I made efforts to keep this mod as small as possible to reduce load times leaving it at only 321 KB in size! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=625401741

Quote Vanaheimr Forge This is actually a really fun and incredibly simple mod that I will continue to work on over time. It adds craftable ‘Pimers’ into the game which you can then place into a Vanaheimr Forge (the primary structure added by this mod). Once a primer is placed in the forge and you activate it the forge then has some really neat particle effects that differ for each primer used. After some time this primer is then turned into a base ARK item (an example being polymer). This mod is honestly pointless to many but for primitive servers looking for a different way to get certain items to their players it offers a unique catalyst to primitive servers. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=610672305

Quote Vortex Crystal I spent countless hours working on this near pointless mod! All it does is add a craftable structure that when placed causes a massive vortex. It really is quite stunning to look at though and I’m very happy with how the particle effect turned out https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=613164458

That’s awesome! You’ve contributed quite a lot to the ARK community with your mods so far. So tell us more about the Pub Décor Mod, what is it and what are you hoping to achieve from it?

Quote My goal for the Pub Décor mod is to allow players to build the tavern of their dreams. I’m looking to keep everything with a highly polished basic primitive theme. I’ve taken care to make sure the cost of each item is kept in line with relative ark costs and that it can be used on both primitive and non-primitive servers. In the end I want to help bring a little atmosphere into the Ark.

The Pub Décor Mod adds quite a large number of items to the ARK. Were these created by you? How do you know what to work on next and what's your creative process like before bringing those into the game?

Quote I will always give credit where credit is due. No I did not make these items; I actually purchased them from the Unreal Marketplace. Most items in the Pub Décor Mod come from an asset pack called “Bumping Pub”. I recently spoke with the creator of the asset pack and he was delighted that I was able to bring their designs to life. Some, like the candle lighting, is of my own creation.

Quote What to work on next is always a big question; I try to listen to friends and the community in order to get a good feel for what others are looking for. I try to stay close to my own limitations as I know I’m not as experience as some other developers out there but I try to help people where I can. My creative process is fun. After doing a lot of research on what I will be working on I cuddle up next to my computer with a monster or two. I then crank up some up-beat jams and scream at the computer a lot for being too slow. If I ever encounter something I don’t know how to do then after about an hour or two I’ll end up giving up and sleeping on it. Normally it will come to me at some point in the night and I’ll wake up and pound it out in a matter of minutes.

Nice to hear about your actual working process haha - don’t often hear about that! So what are the long-term goals for the mod? Are you planning to continuously update it and do you have any upcoming features you can share?

Quote Pub mod is going to be one that I always keep up with. I don’t want to be updating it every day as that is stressful on server owners but I will more than likely be updating 2 to 3 times a month for the foreseeable future. I really am trying to balance between quality and mod size at this point. I know that if your mod folder becomes to big at this point in time then players will start timing out when trying to log into your server. With a large portion of server owners now starting out with a base of Valhalla it becomes pretty important to not have an enormously large mod to add to log-in strain. So my plan is to continue to develop and optimize the pub mod as much as I can while still keeping the mod under a 500MB. I plan on continuing to add more items and will help keep taverns lively around the ark. I do still have quite a few assets to work with from ‘Bumping Pub’ and will continue adding them over time. Finding out to properly add implement some of them has been quite a challenge though as I don’t wish to just throw a buggy / useless item into the game. As always Pub Décor Mod will retain its primitive feel. I’m a big supporter of Role Play & Primitive servers and definitely wish to help them out as much as I can.

How do you plan to support the Roleplay and Primitive ARK scenes?

Quote Honestly? I haven’t thought about that much. I was a big fan of the IDEA of the Primitive+ mod and I’m hoping to one day be able to create a really in-depth primitive total conversion mod. In the end I’m really just trying to hone my skills and listen to other people’s ideas on how a Primitive / RP server should be setup. One day I hope to be able to create a whole map with NPC’s and Quests and things like that

Looking forward to seeing the progression of your mods, especially as someone who has an interest in both of those ARK-worlds! Now tell us more about your experience with modding. How are you finding the process so far? How are you finding working with the ARK Dev kit?

Quote Over the holidays I bought myself a SSD in order to do ARK Modding. By Late January I had completely filled up this SSD and am no longer able to use it for ARK Dev Kit. Prior to me switching back over to my old mechanical drive the dev kit was actually fun to use. Now that I’m on a mechanical drive I am now spending a large portion of my free time waiting on the Dev Kit to load assets and perform basic functions. I know it’s not ADK’s fault but rather a lack of proper hardware on my end. I’m saving up for a larger SSD now and eventually I’ll be able really get back to work. All in all I’ve had a lot of experience in coding prior to my work in ADK so for me it was pretty easy to get into. I’ve also had a good bit of help from ElectroSkelington and DoctorDiscord, creators of Ark Automated and Cooking Extras.

Always nice to hear members of the community coming together and helping each other out :). Leading on from that, do you have any tips for upcoming modders on what they can do when working with UE4 and ARK itself?

Quote Don’t be afraid to ask questions in the Dev Kit forums or asking other mod developers directly. There are definitely some walls you are going to hit and there’s a good chance that someone else has also hit that wall as well. If I’m ever stuck on anything I always give it a day or two myself and then I ask someone else for their opinion on it.

Cheers Steel! Is there anything you’d like to end with before wrapping this up?

Quote Yes! The hosting company I mentioned earlier just rebranded and is looking to get their name out there! They have agreed to sponsor a giveaway of a GTX 960 and all you have to do to enter for a chance to win is Re-Tweet and Like their Twitter status @ServerBlend Awesome! Get to sharing guys for a chance to win a new GPU - Thanks for doing the feature Steel and good luck with the mods!

That’s it for this week’s Crunch guys! As always if you’ve got anything to share please get in touch and be sure to follow us on Twitter at @survivetheark - Facebook at www.facebook.com/survivetheark and Reddit at www.reddit.com/r/playark

All the best,

Wildcard Jat and the ARK Survival Evolved Team