Want to make a perfect copy of your favorite pet dinosaur? You can now, thanks to Ark: Survival Evolved's patch 257, which adds a Tek Tier cloning chamber. Have your dino step inside, and what was one is now two. That's not the only Tek goodie the patch brings: there are also new sticky grenades, cybernetic armor for Megalodons, and auto-firing turrets. And don't forget, the volcano has been transformed into the "ultra-dangerous new cave" that leads to the Ascenion end-game system. Check out the trailer above.

New dinosaurs? Yep, four of them, including giant bees that produce (presumably giant) honey. There's also a stegosaurus-like creature, though it can't be ridden because it's covered in spikes, and something known as a "Hell Pig" that has a quick-healing attribute, making it difficult to tame. There's also a new sea creature called Liopleurodon Magicus that sounds a bit mysterious:

"...this mythical creature has been said to have the ability to reward the adventurous survivors who tame it, the special attribute of luck. Treasure hunting tribes who have encountered the beast have used this magic to obtain loot beyond their wildest dreams. You're probably wondering why these claims are tales, well it's said that the Lucky Liopleurodon's magic is so powerful, it cannot be kept under control, and after some time, it harnesses this power to get away."

Okay.

Other offerings: new hairstyles and facial hair, 15 new music tracks, 20+ new explorer notes, and some more tweaks to Ark's improved UI. When the patch goes live, players will also receive a perk for the weekend granting 1.5x harvesting, taming, and EXP rates. Have a look-see at some screens below, and read the full patch notes here.

This week on the Mod Roundup, Pokémon and Monster Hunter's monsters aren't the only new creatures you can find in Ark—now there be dragons as well, five different kinds you can tame and breed.

Also, Fallout 4's cooking gets far more immersive with new sounds, effects, and animations. And finally, a mod for Skyrim makes learning spells a more complicated and rewarding process than it currently is.

Here are the most promising mods we've seen this week.

Dragontail, for Ark: Survival Evolved

Steam Workshop link

Modders sure like adding new creatures to Ark, and we're glad they do. How about some dragons, then? Here you go: five tamable, breedable, paintable dragons for you. Some are small enough to carry around, while others can be ridden, though none require saddles. These dragons don't replace existing creatures, and don't interfere with dino spawns.

Better Cooking Stations, for Fallout 4

Nexus Mods link

This mod makes a lot of really nice changes to Fallout 4's cooking stations. It adds new sounds (sizzling), new effects (embers, sparks, heat shimmer, plus an actual fire below the spit, which was missing), and new animations both for when you use them and when they're inactive (you can see the lovely swaying of the hanging meat and pot above). You can even tag them as private so your settlers can't use them—they're always helping themselves to your crafting benches, you know? Darn rude settlers.

Spell Research, for Skyrim

Nexus Mods link

It does seem a bit odd that becoming a powerful spellcaster in Skyrim mostly involves simply buying spells from other mages. Shouldn't there be a bit more involved in learning a spell? This mod turns the task into something more complex, requiring you to perform research in order to learn new spells. You can craft scrolls and tomes, break down alembic ingredients into their base components, and hunt for ancient texts and artifacts. The point is, becoming a master spellcaster requires hours and hours of work, which is as it should be.

Also this past week, I took a look at a mod that adds moving vehicles to Fallout: New Vegas! Plus, we reported on a mod that is adding Superhot's time-bending system to Portal as part of the Make It Superhot competition.

Back in November, we reported on Ark: Survival Evolved's Tek Tier update, which adds cybernetic power suits and laser cannon-equipped dinosaur helmets, among other things. Now, GameSpot reports that it arrives next week.

The update launches on January 30. It comes with a bunch of new Tek Tier power armor sets, which can grant players several different abilities. 

• Tek Vision: Identify AI enemies and creatures, in addition to players
• Tek Boots: No fall damage and the ability to climb up steep cliffs and slopes
• Tek Pants: Faster running speed
• Tek Gauntlet: Punching power increased
• Tek Rifle: Laser-shooting gun with long scope
• Jetpack
• Night Vision

The Tek abilities can be combined in various ways and are intended for Ark's end-game, and Studio Wildcard creative director Jesse Rapczak expects players to use them in boss encounters. Though you will need to defeat some bosses without the armor first, as they drop Element, a resource needed to construct the sets.

Boss battles have also been tweaked in the new update, with each now having three difficulties. Bosses you've already defeated will drop new items as well, so it might be worth it to pay them another visit.

One cool new weapon the patch delivers is the lance, which you can use to joust with another player, except there are dinosaurs instead of horses.

While the Tek Tier patch adds new weapons and dinosaurs, the thing that caught my eye the most is the sheep. GameSpot's video starts with a showstopper and demonstrates what it looks like when you cut a sheep's hair for wool. It looks good. Makes me want to play Ark myself.

Rapczak says this is "the patch to kick off the final stretch," which sounds like he's referring to the game's official launch. The game released in Steam's Early Access in June 2015, and the finished version is expected to launch sometime this year.

Ark: Survival Evolved's patch 254, originally scheduled to arrive today, has been delayed 10 days until January 30. The highly anticipated patch will include Tek Tier 1 content, which will add endgame technology like power armor, jetpacks, and dino-mounted laser cannons. The patch also promises to deliver a whole mess of new dinosaurs, craftable lances for dino-mouted jousting, and most importantly (to me, anyway), hairstyles and facial hair that grow in real time.

In a post on the Steam forums, Ark's 'Community Overlord' Jatheish Karunakaran posted the following:

"We're going to be delaying the release of Patch 254 until the 30th of January. I know a lot of you are excited and trust me, we are too. This patch is much larger than we first anticipated and we need more time to work on it in development, and through internal QA process prior public release. However soon you will get to enjoy a hell of lot of new content, and we're cooking up an extra-special surprise feature for the patch!" 

Meanwhile, Ark's free Primitive Plus DLC did receive an update today to v1.4, promising bug fixes, balancing, and new items such as a battering ram and recurve bow. It was, however, quickly rolled back fix the problems caused by the patch (there were bugs with the placement of brick walls, lumber glass walls had vanished, and birds were not dropping poultry and feathers when killed, only normal meat and hide). Hopefully that will be sorted out soon.

First Pokémon, now Monster Hunter. Modders continue their noble work to combine every game with every other game, as showcased by the efforts of garuga123, whose Monster Ark: Hunting Evolved allows you to play Ark alongside some of Monster Hunter's most iconic beasts including the Rathalos, Deviljho, Barioth, and more.

It's surprisingly fleshed out. Originally I figured garuga123 had simply reskinned some of Ark's dinos to look like dragons, but they've actually imported the animations as well. Any Monster Hunter fan will tell you that these creatures' personalities are defined more by how they move than how they look, so being able to run around with a Rathalos and have it act like it does in a proper Monster Hunter game is fantastic. An interesting twist is that you can't actually ride any of these creatures but control them directly. The original intent of the mod was to roleplay as them—which I never realized was a thing that people wanted to do.

Along with the animations, each monster also has access to a few of their signature abilities. As a Rathalos, you can shoot fireballs from the sky. Uragaans can form up into a ball and roll around the island, and the Lagiacrus can charge up a blast of lightning and devastate anything nearby. If you bump into a wild Qurupeco, it'll even mimic the call of other animals so that they come to its aid—just like the bastard does in Monster Hunter. 

Aside from some problems with clipping into the environment the only drawback is that the mod will take some effort to get working fully. Right now the only way to encounter these beasts is to spawn them in using the console commands listed in the Steam Workshop description. That's a bit disappointing if your goal is to, well, hunt for one in the wild. Fortunately, players have conjured up some code you can easily paste into a game file which should cause the creatures to begin spawning naturally in any of Ark's maps. Instructions on how to do that can be found here.

If you want to play multiplayer but don't have the patience to set up a server, this one uses it. There's even more listed in the discussion forums if that one doesn't work. Consider joining the Discord chat server so that you can give any feedback or find others to roleplay that love story between a lonely Rathalos and Rathian you've had in your head for so long. 

When you tame a creature in Ark: Survival Evolved, your work isn't done. You need to keep your pets fed, though that's usually not a problem. Most carnivores are happy with red meat or fish, and herbivores are typically content with a selection of berries. Fill a trough, park the animal nearby, and it'll eat when it gets hungry. 

A few animals are more selective, like the dung beetle, which only eats poop. The beetle won't eat out of a trough like other animals, either: you have to stick the poop right in its inventory, but poop isn't exactly hard to come by since dinos and players are constantly taking dumps all over the place. There's even a key you can press to make yourself or your dinos poop on command. Dinner time!

There's another creature that only eats one kind of food, and that's the Achatina, a land mollusk that I will just call 'snail' to keep it simple. The snail, too, needs to be fed manually, but it has a more refined palate than the dung beetle. The snail only eats cake. And isn't that the perfect life? Only eating cake?

As you might imagine, cake doesn't just fall fully formed out of dinosaur butts, and it can't just be roasted in a campfire like a slab of meat. It takes a tiny bit of work, by which I mean you might wind spend hours gathering and mining and crafting and building several entirely new structures. All to feed a single snail.

I'll just briefly explain how to bake a cake. In a cooking pot, you'll place your ingredients: fiber—no biggie, you can grab that from bushes. Water—collected in a skin or a jar, no problem there. Stimulant—okay, you'll need to collect stimberries from bushes, and mix them with sparkpowder, which itself requires grinding flint and stone together at a mortar and pestle. A little work to do there, but still pretty easy.

You'll also need carrots, corn, and potatoes, because this is a vegetable cake. You won't find those lying around, either, you'll need to grow them from seeds (gathered from bushes) in three different planters (built from wood, thatch, fiber, and stone) and you'll want to keep them irrigated with a water source like a reservoir (which is built from stone and cementing paste—which itself can be made from stone and chitin (which can be harvested from creatures with exoskeletons) and then connected with a stone pipe and tap (made from more stone and wood).

Of course, growing your plants will also require fertilizer, which can be created in a compost bin (combine poop and thatch) or generated by feeding poop to that beetle I mentioned earlier. And, unless you want to spend ages waiting for your crops to grow, you might as well go all-in and construct a damn greenhouse using a whole bunch of metal ingots (made in a forge), crystal (mined from mountaintops and caves), and more cementing paste.

So, you've built your poop box and farming plots and irrigation systems and a damn greenhouse and you've grown and harvested your vegetables. Time to bake the cake? Ha ha, no, dummy! You're not done yet. The cake's final ingredient is sap, which you can harvest from giant redwood trees, once you craft an enormous metal tap (from 100 ingots—which take 200 metal—and still more cementing paste). 

Ready to stick your tap into a redwood? Nope, you're not. You need to place it well above ground level, so hey, why not just craft a bunch of wooden tree platforms and build an Ewok-style base way up in the trees so you can actually attach your tap and collect your sap and bake your cake (which will spoil in just over an hour, so you might want to build a fabricator so you can craft a gas powered generator and a fridge to preserve it, too).

In return, your snail will produce paste, which is ironically enough, one of the resources you just crafted or gathered loads of just to be able to feed the snail its special veggie cake. It also produces a natural polymer for crafting, which is very useful. It makes a cool wet slimy sound when it slithers around, which I enjoy, plus it's one of the only creatures in the game that will never attack you.

Yes, it is quite a lot of work to feed this one snail, this one delightfully picky creature that insists on only eating hand-fed cake produced by hours of construction and tons of materials.

But in that way, Ark's snail is like a real life pet, which is why I love it. If you have a dog or a cat or some other type of pet, you know the lengths you'll go to just to keep them happy. You'll pay massive vet bills, administer expensive medicines, buy crates full of toys, replace pieces of furniture, and redecorate your entire home just so the little animal in your life can experience some contentment. You don't just put your dog or cat near a bowl of food and call it a night: you tend to them, care for them, and spend hours of your life doing back-breaking labor so they have what they need. Ark's snail is no different. It's just a little slimier.

Update 2: The DMCA notice has apparently been lifted, and no longer appears on the mod's page in the Steam Workshop.

Update: We've spoken with the developer of the Pokémon Evolved mod who has confirmed that, as of right now, this DMCA notice appears to have been submitted by another modder (or a supporter of that modder) who is also developing a Pokémon mod for Ark. (Copyright infringement claims can be submitted by parties who are not copyright owners.) Drama! We'll let you know if we receive any further information.

Original story: A mod for Ark: Survival Evolved that replaces all of the survival game's dinosaurs with Pokémon has appeared in the Steam Workshop, though if you want to catch 'em all you might need to be quick about it. The Workshop page states that "A DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement has been filed on this item." As of Sunday, five days after the the mod appeared, it is still available to be downloaded, though that may change in the near future.

We're not sure yet who issued the DMCA notice—we've inquired and will let you know when we hear back (and we have: please see the updates)—but it could definitely spell trouble for the mod, especially since modder 'Mystic Academy' admits the models and animations used in the mod were imported directly from Pokémon X/Y rather than recreated from scratch. The modder only made changes to ensure the models worked in-game.

We'll keep you updated as to the status of the Pokémon Evolved mod, which, legality aside, looks pretty cool. There's no resource gathering—you just hunt, fight, and ride Pokémon. You can watch enthusiastic YouTuber Riot enjoying it here.

As I write this, almost 32,000 people are playing ARK: Survival Evolved. By current player count, it’s the sixth most popular game on Steam. I’ve always dismissed it, figuring that if DayZ was still unfinished, any newer Early Access multiplayer survival games would likely be even further from completion. That’s a dumb thing to think, and not at all how game development works. I’ve decided to give ARK a chance.

I start the game, and chose a server at random. It’s nighttime. I pick myself off the ground and find myself face to face with a dinosaur. Score! It’s a dilophosaurus, and it looks familiar. Wasn’t that the one that, in Jurassic Park, spat venomous goop into Dennis Nedry’s eyes before eating him? Yes! It was! My suspicions are confirmed when it spits venomous goop into my eyes. Then, as if any doubt remained, it eats me.

I respawn in a different location, and start exploring the beach. I learn that tapping E over bushes and rocks rewards me with stones, berries and fibres. I also find a tree and punch it. Wood is added to my inventory. This is for sure an Early Access survival game. Soon... hold on, what’s that sound? It’s a raptor. I know about them from Jurassic Park, too. I’m dead. Again.

I exit to the menu, figuring that a daytime server would at least enable me to see the creatures that are eating me. I spawn and, for a change, see gentle dinosaurs. I spend a moment admiring a brontosaurus up close, before a raptor runs up and eats me. I should try a different spawn point. I pick one to the west, and wake up on a tiny, floating patch of ice. I’m naked, and freezing to death. I jump into the water, planning to swim to the mainland. A megalodon is looking right at me. It does what I assume comes naturally to a massive prehistoric shark. 

I try spawning to the east, and wake in a tropical biome. I’m told it’s too hot. Before I can do anything about that, I run into a giant snake with a goddamn dinosaur face. Why is everything in the past so big? What is prehistory trying to overcompensate for? Instead of eating me, the titanoboa merely paralyses me. Then it eats me.

In a last-ditch attempt to make any progress, I go back to the eastern spawn point. I wake to a temperate beach, and, best of all, no dinosaurs. Instead, there are dodos. I punch one for a few seconds, and its meat is added to my inventory. After a little bit of scavenging, I start a fire and craft a weapon and pickaxe. Sure, I’m still 25 fibres away from owning my first pair of trousers, but it’s a start. 

I explore a bit more. Suddenly, my health starts to drain. I spin around, but see nothing. My health is still falling. I look down, and finally see the problem: a pack of compys—tiny carnivores that would be cute if they weren’t eating my bits. I run, but they keep up. I get out my hatchet, and start swinging wildly. I take one down, but it’s too late. I’m killed. I spawn in the south. It’s pitch black. It’s night. A titanoboa eats me.