[WIP] Rail System and Carts

Development Modding ARK: Survival Evolved
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1

My most ambitious of the current modding projects would be the Rail System and Minecarts.

Is there a resource node heavy area that is near your home that you love to pillage every chance you get? Do you despise your pack dino’s ability to get caught on ever sapling you pass?

Then you need to build a better industrial infrastructure and that is where the rail system comes into play.

The plan is to make the Rail system to be a mid tier engram that would allow semi-established
Storage Cart
storageCart.jpg

The Storage Cart will use an instanced version of the storage crate from the game (highlighted in blue), mounted on top of a basic rail cart, this will be able to be pushed by hand or moved via the Engine Cart, and have the same storage capabilities as the default storage crate.

The benefits of this would be that players can load many of these up and connect them together and push many carts worth of material back home. These carts would greately improve material collection as well as provide a new dynamic to PVP servers where raids on resource trains could be a viable strategy for disrupting enemy plans.

The possibilities for trade and role playing elements are also possible.
Engine
engineCart.jpg
The Engine will allow trains of resource carts to be moved without a survivor needing to push them, this will be fueled by gasoline.

The Engine will aid more towards autonomy and efficiency. A survivor could be continually sending resources back to base with another survivor unloading the trains and sending the trains back to their original destination.

Tribes can send resource shipments between each other and role playing could benefit greatly from these types of relationships.
Rails
Rails will be crafted at one of the crafting stations and would be a mesh extruded along a spline that would allow a natural curve and course for the track.
track_01.jpg
track_02.jpg
Further Plans

  • I further plan to work on a refrigeration cart that would allow the transport of perishables.
  • Adding stopping points to allow for long looping tracks that can have multiple preset destinations

At this time, I do not plan on adding any sort of survivor transportation or allow building on the carts, because face it, that’s what dinos are for.

Help Wanted!
I am fairly competent with modeling and getting the assets into the game what I am not proficient at is texturing.

If you want to help with the mods and can texture 3DS Max assets, please contact me.

2

Looks really nice, I hope everything is going well! I myself can’t wait until you release this, would love to try it on my single player game! Checking here daily for updates hehe. Keep up the good work!

3

Sent you a pm man!

4

sounds fantastic!

5

Thanks, I switched gears over to my real cable mod for the time being (got more feedback on that one, then made it a priority) but I haven’t given up on this one. I’ve had some people offer to help with the texturing, I’ll be exploring those over the next few days and maybe IMO be able to post some visual updates to this with their help.

Thanks, I love feedback!

I got your PM this afternoon, I’ll get in touch with you on Sunday.

6

Is this mod still in the works? Think would really cool on a PVE RP Server also.

7

I was wondering if you planned on coming back to this, there is a guy making a train mod now but it in no way compares to the looks that yours would have had. Would really like to see yours get out there and help us run railways through the maps.

8

i would say no, since, its been over a year.

9

Sad :frowning: - that here is no work since a Year ago. Maybe he comes back, just hope for it

10

i would love to take this project on as would work on a bridge mod im doing its same as has so much potential but it looks great though

11

This looks awesome, but I would encourage survivor transport because there will be a day when Ark modding isn’t about dinosaurs and total-conversions and modpacks won’t even have them on the map.