Welcome to the 36th issue of the Community Crunch! 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

Zaka’s Take on ARK

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=611628521

Yoshisaur by Xefande

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=610681497

RaifuForLaifu’s Deep Sea Exploration

The Spino & the Rescue by NeXus

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=614064976

Tyranossaur Rex Fanart by Zaka

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=612248362

Indominous Rex by EndangeredOX

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=614090470

The Britannia by PommieGamer

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=604668281

Paracer by DonPungo

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=615706411

Epic Morning at the Hobo-Estate by JoeLongLegs

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=615843751

Eyetm’s Runic Tattoo

Fanmade Dossier: Alanqa by Vizon

Fanmade Dossier: Torvosaurus by Shadlos

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=611803674

Fanmade Dossier: Sharo by Graet Wite Pootiz

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=611615371

Fanmade Dossier: Basilosaurus by the_british_kiwi

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=612616441

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 36 is..

DNrednex!

‘The Lake House’

You can check out the full album here: https://imgur.com/a/aVRVf

Congratulations! This is an excellent use of the new structure pieces!

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 36 is…

Okim!

‘A Deadly Beauty’

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

Woodpunk’s Direwolf and Dodo Pub-Sign!

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

Workshop Spotlight!

Workshopper: ClipZ

Building Xtras - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=567659264

Valentine Xtras - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=610770681

Dino House Xtras - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=592629586

Minecraft Xtras - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=592619255

Temple Xtras - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=592605994

Garden Xtras - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=592582571

Kibble Vending Machine - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=592595740

Hey there! Thanks for joining us. Could you introduce yourself to the community and let us know what you’re currently working on?

Quote Hey everyone my name is ClipZ, I am a fellow modder here in the ARK community and a huge fan of the game. I am one of the creators of the Building Xtras mod and all of its expansions that I am sure you all have seen floating around lol. My partner in crime "CarWash YO" (The creator of the Valentine Xtras mod) is a huge part in what I do, we bounce ideas off of each other with everything we do and the mod was created for her as a Christmas present and it just took off from there lol. We are currently working on tons of different mods if I was to say all of them we would be here awhile =)

You have created a large number of mods already! Do each of them serve a different purpose to the ARK and which would you say you’ve enjoyed working on the most?

Quote Yes yes we do have a lot of mods hehe =). Each mod brings something different to the table but they all match one thing which is they are all focused around building rather it be the interior or exterior for your home. All the mods that you see that have "Xtras" in the name are considered an expansion to the main mod to us which is the Building Xtras mod. We had to break them all up into different parts because our ideas and wants to add add and add more things to the mod just doesn't sit well with steam lol the mod would be well over 10 gigs by the time we got done with it. I must say in saying all that my favorite mod/expansion that we have out is possibly the Minecraft Xtras, mainly because it's such a simple idea but literally gives you the ability to build anything in game if you use your imagination and for the record i'm not a minecraft fan what so ever I just like the idea lol.

Marble floors anyone? This was done by a couple of good friends of mine Linda and her sister Vickie, they are gods with using the blocks lol.

If anyone wants to see some of the amazing things they have built or just like to build yourself feel free to join their server and have some fun just search in the server browser for: The Amazons.

What kind of features and updates do you have planned for Building Xtras?

For the Building Xtras mod we plan on adding in a large set of primitive, norse, medieval style buildables of all kinds so please be on the lookout for those. They will include everything from furniture to possibly pre built structures for everyone to build in or even make a city out of ;).

Oh wow that sounds pretty cool! Can’t wait to see it’s addition to the mod. You’ve clearly added quite a lot of extra items and structures to ARK, have you been doing this with balance in consideration, or are you aiming for a more creative-style of gameplay?

I would say we have had both in mind when creating the structures because we wanted to add in a ton of things ranging from primitive to very modern and everything in between so that everyone has something they can use in the mod but also in doing so I didn’t want to release mods with a bunch of structures that do nothing I wanted everything to have a use in some way, so it does, you can even put trash in the trash can.

I am the type of gamer that needs challenge or the game gets boring for me so all the things that people consider OP in the game are just another challenge for me to overcome and I love it. With that being said we have also tried to keep things balanced in game with our mods so things are not to easy to make but also hard enough to make if they do something really helpful if that makes any type of since lol sorry I can ramble off sometimes because I am very passionate in what I do.

That’s very fine, you don’t need to apologize! It’s good to be passionate and we’re happy that you’re so passionate about working on ARK! So tell us, how does this passion influence your creative process when you plan on making a new mod or adding a new structure or item to the game? Do you look for ideas from the community or has this just come from playing the game and being inspired through your experience?

Honestly it's a bit of all of that I have used ideas given to me many times by the community and also have been in game and was like "hmmmm I wish this was like this or we had this" and boom we get to making it lol.

Carwash and I have been hosting game servers and modding/scripting/coding different games for almost seven years now so the experience always helps as well. We are pretty random and funny we will just be playing the game and think of something very stupid and out of the box and think of how stupid or funny it would be if we saw something like this in game and it's all about fun and laughs for us so random things will make it in our mods like "Dave" for instance, I made him in an attempt to scare carwash and she ended up loving it and trolling me with him for hours so I put it in the mod lol.

That's basically how things happen for us if we think it's fun or funny you will see it in a mod usually and we are open to all types of suggestions because that's how things thrive by giving the people what they want, which is why I love you guys you really listen to the community about things even when some can be rude or very immature about things. I say keep up the good work and don't change a thing it's a reason the game has sold so many copies.

Cheers, we appreciate the kind words ;). Speaking of the community, what has their feedback and response been in regards to your Xtra series?

When the mod first released it exploded with positive feedback I didn't expect it to take off like it did because this started off as just a Christmas present for someone very special to me and now about two months later it has over 30k subs and still growing and i'm still amazed by it all.

We pride ourselves on making mods the right way with little to no bugs no matter how big or small the mod is, so when it first released of course there were a few small bugs but we got those fixed right away and people seem to love the fact that we are so responsive and supportive to what the community needs or wants but to us it's just normal. We like to help people and give them something fun to play with and we are gamers at heart so we can see it from both perspectives and if something needs to be fixed or changed or added we will always look into it. We will never just brush something off when someone brings it to our attention because we are not those type of people. There I go rambling again lol but to answer your question, the mod has had crazy positive feedback and it just keeps coming and we love it =).

Excellent to hear that they love it so much! Could you expand more on the long-term goals for the mods, you mentioned additional structure pieces earlier from different periods?

Our long term goal for the mod is to have many different era's of structures to build so if someone wants a Roman themed or a Norse themed server they can have that just by downloading our mod. We also plan to release a Mod/Expansion for every holiday that comes up this year, you can already download the Valentine Xtras mod now to get ready for Valentines Day because its right around the corner.

Oh and everyone has seemed to love the fish tank that we have released in the mod and I just wanna say be on the lookout for our new terrarium which will be releasing soon.

Awesome, so you’ve got that to look forward to guys! Now you mentioned you had some development experience earlier, could you tell us more about that?

Well as i mentioned before I have been modding for almost 7 years with various different games such as arma and the DayZ mod so I am very in tune with how things work and can usually find my way around issues pretty easy if I just work with it. The Ark Dev Kit is new to me although I have messed around with unreal engine in the past a little I'm still finding myself learning new things all the time and that's what i love about it. The dev kit is amazing and actually is really easy to get the hang of once you get going, although I wish it and the game would get upgraded to version 4.10 instead of 4.51 but hey I can live with it and I know it would take an entire rehaul of the game to do so I’m not betting on that happening anytime soon lol.

Haha, we do merge-in the critical updates as we go along :p. As someone with a lot of experience, what advice would you give to new modders on what they can do when working with UE4 and ARK itself?

To all the new modders out there all I have to say is don't be afraid of the dev kit from the first look it can look scary hard to use but it's really not the devs have made it very easy for us to use. I say if you have an idea make it come to life it just takes some time and dedication and the rest will come. With that being said I have wanted to help the community learn the dev kit more and I noticed a lot of the tutorials out there are very outdated so we have started up our new tutorial series on our youtube which helps all the beginners out there get started and if you stay tuned you will be able to make mods like anyone else in no time.

Here is the link to our first tutorial video -



Link to the channel itself - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2AagxXD1I8CTEyba5bLqqw

Also for everyone that loves to see all the new dinos and content the devs have brewing you should take a visit to our channel as well we have all the new up and coming things on there that are in the dev kit before they are released just to give everyone that may not be able to use the dev kit yet an early look.

That’s awesome! I’m sure people will appreciate your tutorials, as well as all our secrets you reveal :P. Now is there anything you’d like to say before wrapping this up?

I want to say thanks for having me and I hope all goes well with the game because we are loving it so far. I wanna let everyone know that we are working on something very big to add to the mod for the modding contest and we hope it will help push the mod to a top five spot =)

I just wanna say we love all the support and hope we can get as many votes as subs lol but if not it doesn't matter we do this for fun and for the community so regardless we will keep bringing you guys tons of mods because we can see that you enjoy it just as much as we do =). I do wanna give you guys an idea of what we are working on adding before the modding contest but ummmmm well I think a picture would be better, after all they do say a thousand words right ;)

And there is way more than just that ;)

Wow, that’s awesome! Thanks a lot ClipZ!

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

Thanks everyone!

Ah wait, but before I go… here’s a little sneak-peek of the upcoming Tek Tier ;)

SPOILER

All the best,

Wildcard Jat and the ARK Survival Evolved Team