I tried playing with no engrams, has anyone done something similar?
So this idea sounded fun in my head but after playing for a few hours I'm not so sure anymore 😆
As an OG ARK player that never fought bosses or beat any maps in 1k hours (too many restarts), I revisited the game this year with a few friends and it was a blast. We were checking out the new maps that I didn't even get to see over the years and we ended up dominating them. So I got the idea to play the next map without flyers (until late game), and holy crap was that the best decision ever.
I got to experience Ragnarok and Valguero for the first time without using flyers and I had WAY more fun using underrated ground dinos, had no idea that Moschops and Procoptodon were so insane for example. Some areas suddenly became hard to reach because they were guarded by nasty dinos and we couldn't just fly over them. Because we felt flyers make many dinos obsolete and make traversing the map a cakewalk. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love my Argies and Pteras, when mastered they can do everything, but they do make every playthrough feel kinda the same, once you discover flight you just skips A TON of progression and it's a massive power spike.
So then I got another idea while I was chasing beacons on my perfectly bred Ptera. What if I don't craft anything from my Engrams and can only use the loot and blueprints I find in the world? This could make almost EVERY loot drop meaningful again, huge even, whether it's early or later on. It would especially make finding blueprints invaluable, like finding a forge/smithy blueprint, or weapons and ammo on dead carnivores. It would make finding a random saddle early on a big deal, because you now get to use that dino, even if it's one of the underrated ones. I'm used to S+ so can even convert blueprints etc into S+ version.
And then I started on the Island, since idk anything about the story and wanted to find notes and learn more etc. I also nerfed XP rates to 0.25 to try and make progression more meaningful, to encourage finding notes on my own, without doing these note runs that I've seen people do when they max out their speed and end up high level in a couple hours already while being butt naked. That's definitely not what I was going for.
I spawned on the eastern beach near the swamp and slowly made my way towards the western beach and peninsula because I really like the scenery in that area. Not much to do obviously because I can't craft anything and can't fight anything either at this point. On my way across the southern beaches I found the first white beacon (lvl 3 req) and just hit lvl 3 from passive XP and from gathering berries. The beacon had a hatchet, torch, spears and other minor stuff which was perfect. The next 2 white beacons had a set of cloth armor and thatch building materials with a thatch foundation blueprint, so I could start building a base once I got to my location. Then I found a phiomia saddle and campfires and a bunch of other minor loot, a green sling blueprint from a ringed white beacon. A dead sarco had some arrows and stuff, but no bow yet. Carry weight was already becoming an issue because of the heavy saddle and the thatch pieces.
After I got to the western peninsula I noticed it wasn't exactly safe, there were 2 raptors running around across the water, but I started building anyway and realized I had nowhere to put the extra loot, like the heavy saddle and other stuff, since I didn't find a box, lmao. And at that point the 2 raptors somehow made it across the water and charged my half finished thatch house and ripped everything to shreds, including me. Usually they would be no problem as I would just bola them and headshot them with a spear or whatever because of their headshot multiplier, but I realized that I may never see a bola because it doesn't spawn in beacons afaik.
So yeah, I'm now thinking that maybe I didn't think this through properly. What do you guys think?