Arkadia Key 1: My First Experiences in Aakas

Well... I have ventured back to Ark to finally try the treasurehunting. I am glad to be able to report that my returns are much higher on treasure than doing ores and enmatters, but due to the larger cost per drop, you may need a larger ped roll to be able to absorb the ups and downs of doing treasure only as compared to ore or enmatters. I do not like running combo drops, because like I said before, MA would not have given us the ability to run multiple types on our finders if it didn't add to their profit margin. It is just simple common sense. Also, you have to bear in mind that a finder that is geared for ores in a certain area is not going to be as effective at finding enmats. Every serious miner knows certain tools for certain places to find certain things is what is effective.

But...

I want to say yes, the keys are like the beacons. If you have ANY lag or have to run on reduced settings for normal game play, you probably will NOT be satisfied with your results attempting a key. They are pure bloatware, I mean, I have to shoot in first person with RIGHT CLICKING because frame rate is so low I can't hit anything aiming and shooting, right clicking at least only shoots when a target is lined up!

Do not attempt them with a slow internet connection. Best results, use hard wired. I have less lag on hard wires than with wifi. Also, if your wifi craps out you will lose valuable time.

If your system resources are not sufficient enough to keep up with the key runs, you will crash frequently and often. If this happens, you may attempt compensating by clearing your shader cache in the launcher options. This is what cured the crashing for me.

Last night I attempted doing one of these on dialup at home. BAD idea. Lagged out constantly. Finally it kicked me out and the next morning I log in to find my 20 peds for the key was refunded. NOTE: If you are paying for a higher key, with huge markup, (even though the keys are UL, apparently they are only one time uses, so you do not get them back), and they give you a refund, You better open a support ticket and ask them for the key back due to the high markup. On the ark 1 keys, the +2 peds is nothing really, for the hassle of trying to get them to replace the key and all.

In the ark 1 run, you will have level 2 snakes that I can one or two shot with the herman ark 10. The grasshopper things are pretty much two or three shots, but I am using the CB 13, which one shots everything except for the level 6 Ubos... They are kind of a pain because they hit hard, probably doing acid damage which I am not protected against. You must make it down four levels. Once you reach bottom you go out through the center of the underground complex, and under the big statue, into the other side... You keep going and you will find the treasure room. There will be a bunch of snakes. You must kill 8 of them or 10 of them to spawn the Dahar soldier or whatever it is called. It looks like those same statues standing in the main room with all the doors where you entered the run.

He is very much a pain, I did not have time to defeat him due to about 30 minutes of crashing trying to make it work. And I wasted much unnecessary time... But now I have learned what I must know and will reattempt it. You will find two treasure chests. I am not 100% positive as to whether or not the loot not gotten in the previous run is added to the chests in the next one, but I can only imagine it would be.

A team of noobs should easily handle this run. It is soloable if you just make a team put someone on it that doesn't want to go, and go by yourself, if you have decent weapons, fap, armor and high frame rate. You do respawn fairly close to the boss mob at least, which is good because you can keep running in... But I am not sure also on the mob boss's regeneration or anything, so I may need to do some research at this point.

Those of you that do not have Aakas... You must head towards the southwest of the desert area, but the exact spot can be found on entropedia.info.

Good luck and happy treasure hunting!