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 Welcome to Ambiguous Geological Period Park! The Isle is an Early Access game on Steam that's been around since late 2015, but it being an older game is completely irrelevant since I only became aware of it recently thanks to Idle Thumbs, and it’s a loving blast. I won’t waste time selling you on this game. You should know by now if you like playing with dinosaurs. The lack of a tutorial is the game’s greatest weakness. This OP is devoted to basic controls and interface, saving you the effort of looking at offsite wikis and steam guides just so you don't starve to death as the beaver looking starter herbivore. This post will be long and messy, just like my puertasaurus. What it is The Isle is a multiplayer exclusive, survival game. Up to 125 people have their choice of 27 dinosaur types and set out to survive on a massive map. Carnivores kill other players to survive, herbivores kill plants to prolong their meaningless lives. The game is surprisingly popular considering it's on EA and has been out for a while. It seems to hang around 1000 online players split across a bunch of dedicated servers. There's currently two modes. Sandbox and survival. There’s a third mode in the works for the end of August, but for the sake of explaining the game, we’ll focus on what’s currently in the game. Sandbox lets you pick whatever you want and go hog wild. Servers like that tend to be a no-stakes deathmatch. Survival mode (aka progression mode) is the meat of the game. You start at the bottom of either the herbivore or carnivore tech tree, and become bigger and cooler dinosaurs by feeding and staying alive. All progress is lost on death.  Important keybinds To change a keybind, keep the left mouse button pressed on the bind, click the new key, and while still pressing LMB, move to ‘Apply’ before letting go. It's way more complicated than it needed to be. Zoom out on the mousewheel when playing adult dinos. Zoom in when playing babies or the camera gets stuck in the ground and you starve to death disoriented and lost. C and left ctrl to toggle crouch. Some dinos can’t crouch. The rest can hide with varying degrees of success in bushes. Most bipedal carnivores gain a temporary speed buff when they start a sprint from being crouched in a bush. H to rest. Fastest way to recover stamina. Only way to recover from a bleed. Only way for a T-rex to recover stamina. Z toggles trotting. You want this enabled most of the time, except when sneaking with dinosaurs that stomp or grunt a lot when moving fast. Left Alt turns in place and makes no sound. Important for stealth, for moving around cliffs without falling and, if you’re a slow dinosaur, to position your fighting parts in the direction of trouble. Number key 1 is a loud shout heard miles away. 2 is a short range, greeting call. 3 is a short range, warning cry. 4 is a short range shout for help. Often spammed when people want to group up. F is a short range, non-descript cry. The same you get when you talk in chat. Hit Enter to chat. You can only talk to your own species. [ and ] toggle chat channels by default. The broadcast channel is serverwide and often disabled. Groupchat is your herd. Chatting makes noise and can give away your position. V brings up a context wheel. Hold down the left mousebutton to pick an option. Use the context wheel to invite another dinosaur to your group. G fakes a broken bone, making you hump along at a crawl. Useful for baiting people. Spacebar is a raptor type exclusive jump. It lets them pounce on bigger dinosaurs. Hit the right mouse button after pouncing on someone to chew on them. Generally, raptors can only hang on to the torsos of the biggest herbivores. So, we’re not talking Dragon’s Dogma levels of mounting. Attacks are bound to your mouse buttons. Most dinosaurs have a frontal attack. Some stomp, some tail swipe and a few have special attacks when they run. I'm not specific because I haven't played them all. Bigger herbivores tend to have very strong attacks and can one-shot smaller dinosaurs. Carnivores, except for the highest tier predators, rely on weaker, debilitating bleed attacks or bone crushing combined with hit and run attacks, and pack attacks.  Health and injuries Your HUD has three elements. Hunger red. Stamina in yellow. Thirst in blue. You have no health indication outside of the screen getting bloody as you're near death, and your skin gets claw marks. Carnivore bites can cause bleeding. Only rest can stop bleeding. Bleeding is indicated by a blood drop under your water bar. Falling off a cliff will break a bone if not outright kill you. Broken bones slow you down to a crawl and prevent you from turning in place. Some attacks can become disabled too. Bones heal slowly over time. Faster when resting. Some dinosaurs have attacks that break bones. A fracture is indicated by a broken bone under your food bar.  Grouping You want a pack. Herbivores can group together regardless of species. Carnivores can only group within their own species. It's easier to kill herbivores when there's a bunch of tooth-havers working together, and it's easier to survive tooth-havers when you're not the slowest plantchewer around. To join a pack, either bring up the player list on TAB and hit the plus sign on everyone until someone acknowledges you, or find someone in the world who doesn't instant kill you and invite them using the action wheel on V. Once you've got a group going, you can all see each others name provided you're reasonably close and you're not crouching in shrubs. Packs are also your ticket into becoming a baby. Once you get to know the nerds who play this game, chances are they'll fast-track you into their species by inviting you to be a baby in their nest.  How nests work Female dinosaurs can build nests that spawn players in as baby dinosaurs of the mothers species. This is the only way to skip the tech tree grind. The downside is that the mother stops gaining progression points while the nest is alive. This is why you really don’t want to build a nest by accident. Nests can be destroyed by attacks. Your nest-building goes on a 15 minute cooldown if yours is killed. Nests automatically despawn when you progress or die. Nests stick around on the server even while you’re logged out. Don’t build nests in water. It is a pain in the rear end to use it instead of drinking. After you click the button to build a nest, one will appear in roughly 15 seconds. A nest can hold 4 eggs, and requires food to spawn those eggs. You click the Use key on the nest to deposit 5 food from your food meter at a time. The nest consumes 2 food to get 1 progression point every minute. An egg appears at 15 minutes and progression starts towards the next egg. You can invite a player to be your baby from the nest interface. The list does not say what dinosaurs people are from before. The only way to get a player name for a specific dinosaur is to invite them to your group first. Being a baby Once someone has sent you a nest invite, you can activate your egg by going into the progression menu and clicking ‘nest’. Your camouflage and gender will be randomized. You start as a miniature of your parent with a growth spurt every minute until adulthood. I’m not entirely clear on how your stats spread out during the different stages. If you notice don’t get the 1 minute growth spurt (the camera usually shudders when you grow), go to your progression menu and it should automatically transition you to the next stage of growth instead of opening the dinosaur tech trees. I don’t know why it works that way. It’s dumb and weird. Babies are weak, slow and hungry. Pray that your nest is near a food and water source or you’ll be dead in minutes. Most baby herbivores eat flowers. The long necked ones eat trees. Baby carnivores need a lot of help with food since their parents have to do the killing. It’ll take hours to grow up, but the worst stage is the first 15 minutes, then you can chill between meals.  Progressing Every minute you’re ingame you get 1 progression point (PP). That’s it for carnivores. Herbivores, however, get 3 bonus PP from eating white flowers on region map 2. They tend to spawn in out of the way places. There's always some in the swamps and at the harbour ruins (see map below). Blue plants are the white flowers of region map 1, but nobody hosts it any more so I can't help you there. You lose all your PP and go back to a starter dinosaur if you die. Region 2 map:  Hit esc to bring up your menus where you can log out or progress. There’s a 45 second cooldown before it’ll let you hit the actual progression menu. The tech tree itself is a mess and impossible to read. Valid dinosaur breeds only show up when you have enough points, so you don’t even know what you’re saving PP for unless you have a chart. Here’s a chart: Herbivores
Orodremus -> Dryosaurus -> Maiasaura -> Shantungosaurus -> Camarasaurus -> Puertasaurus Psittacosaurus -> Avaceratops -> Pachycephalosaurus -> Ankylosaurus/Therizinosaurus Psittacosaurus -> Avaceratops -> Diabloceratops -> Triceratops/Stegosaurus Carnivores
Velociraptor -> Herrerasaurus -> Utahraptor -> Allosaurus -> Tyrannosaurus Velociraptor -> Herrerasaurus -> Utahraptor -> Carnotaurus Velociraptor -> Austroraptor -> Baryonyx -> Suchominus -> Spinosaurus  What's coming? Scent tracking. They're promising an extra way for carnivores to get PP outside of 1 per minute. Chances are you get them from merking fools. Flying "dinosaur" whatever it's called. Prrererereydarryl. Fish NPCs for fishing dinos, ie. the Austroraptor and its tech tree. AI dinosaurs to provide a working ecosystem for the upcoming third mode. Third mode will be a progression and sandbox hybrid where you pick your breed and start as a baby instead of using a tech tree. They want to do a human faction with guns and vehicles, and a faction of tribal cannibals and mutant humans with telekinesis etc. Humans will kill dinos to get materials for building poo poo. Base capture. Air drops. Dinosaur taming. Mutant dinosaurs with EMP powers and thermal sight. Crocodile dinosaurs. Titanoboa, the giant snake "dinosaur".  Their ideas are all over the place. They've promised full AI support and the third mode at the end of August. I wouldn't hold my breath. It'll be ready when it's ready, and it isn't that important. The game is at a decent stage as a dinosaur walking/survival sim. Whatever they end up doing in the future, there will likely be modded servers with only dinosaur stuff if you don't want to deal with the triple faction, Hunger Games, sci-fi content they want to add. Attack on Princess fucked around with this message at 11:43 on Aug 8, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 16:44
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 12:44 |
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Hey so...is anyone playing this? And if so what server? Meaning i love this game and if there were goons playing, it would make it 500000 times better. I'm currently playing on The Isle of Forgotten Time Prog server and its a pretty chill server overall.
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Aug 20, 2017 21:15
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Well, doctor, I don't think there's many goons that are into this yet, and I solo. I was excited about the new survival mode, and then disappointed when the European servers only hosted survival with 20 dudes. So I figured I'd check in on it again a couple of weeks later. I've updated and checked. Still no EU survival. I'll wait for progression to phase out. Prog is chill and all, but survival letting me go right for Utah and do Utah things all day is much more my thing. Attack on Princess fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Aug 21, 2017 |
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Aug 21, 2017 17:11
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