This week we are going to learn the ins and outs of the Dino Storage Mod V2. This mod was created to take the place of cryo-pods in a more organized and user friendly fashion. There are four parts to this mod, the first being the soul traps. This item is the main asset of Dino Storage, with it you can easily store and deploy your dinos when and where you need them. While in the trap your dinos will still heal and gain experience as if they were out in the open world. Second we have the soul gun, this item makes it easy for you to pick up dinos on the fly, cycle through dinos that you have in your inventory, and even can pick up item caches left on the ground after you soul trap your dino. Next we have the Soul Terminal. This unique structure is responsible for many QoL functions, some of these function include picking up babies, generating eggs and resources, and distributing some items where you need them. Last we have the soul finder; this item is a handheld device that you can use to search though all soul traps in a given area to find the specific one you are looking for. Below we are going to outline each of these items and how they can work for you to help you and the server have a better play experience.

Soul traps,

Soul traps are both easy to make using just 1 crystal each. Crystal is a pretty easy resource to get on Mystic Isles, if you are having a hard time finding this resource, it is important to remember that some maps are better for certain resources than others.  Once you have located some crystal, you are ready to start creating soul traps. To create this item you need to learn the engram which will cost you 0 Engram points. You can craft this item in your inventory or in the soul terminal itself.

Once you have your soul traps you will notice they represented in your inventory as a single item, if you want to remove just one ball from this stack, simply right click on the stack and select “Convert” from the box that appears. You will now have a single soul trap that has been pulled from the stack of soul traps. Now that you have this soul trap, you can place in in your hot bar, or just right click and equip it. While looking at the dino you want to trap, left click and the dino will be placed inside of the soul trap for easy travel and storage.

While in the soul trap this dino will still get passive healing as well as the ability to still gain experience over time. The amount of healing and experience gained is based upon server settings and are equal to the dino being left out in the world. Because of this, there is no benefit for you or the server to leave dinos out when you are not using them, this mod was created to improve the players life and the servers work load so it is important to always keep any dinos soul traped when you can.

Another thing to note about the soul trap is the color that it changes too when trapping a dino inside. After trapping a dino you will notice the ball will turn blue if the dino is a male, pink if it is a female, or orange if it has no gender at all. This makes it easy to tell what gender your dino is while it is stored.

The last thing to know about soul traps is the great menu it will display while the dinos are trapped, if you hover over a soul trap you will see a very detailed menu popup that gives you all the information you need to know about what is inside. This information includes everything from current health to base stats from when the dino as born or tamed and even the quality of saddle you have equipped on it. You will notice that it also gives you the stats for points you have placed in each level when gaining experience with the dino. All of this makes the particular item one of the best additions that ARK has ever seen.

The Soul Gun,

This item is the second part of Dino Storage V2. It is a device that was created to make it easier to pick up and deploy dinos that are in a soul trap or that need to be soul traped. While holding the gun, simply point it at your dino and left click, this will use a soul trap from  your inventory to trap the dino for you, unlike using them by hand, this item will automatically use 1 soul trap even if they are in a stack in your inventory. Furthermore, you can left click again while aiming at your item caches that are left behind after picking up your dino and it will pick up everything in the bag and place it in your inventory for you.

Another great function of the soul gun is the ability to cycle through dinos while you are holding the gun. While you have the gun equiped, hit the R key on your keyboard and it will start cycling through your dinos, once you reach the end of the dinos you have in your inventory, you will see yellow text come up on the screen indicating that the order is being reversed and it will start going back through your dinos in the opposite order.

If you want to get a list of the specific dinos you have in your inventory, while holding the gun simply hit Left Ctrl on your keyboard, this will bring up a radial menu on the screen that will show every dino you have, if you have many dinos you will notice it will say “next” as one of the option on the menu. Using this method can save you a lot of time when you need to rapidly deploy one of your dinos in any situation.

Soul Terminals,

The soul terminal is a very useful item that can make your game play experience better. This structure is considered to be one of the best quality of life structures ever created in the mod community. Using this has the potential to save you many hours of wasted time doing tasks that would normally be very tedious. Things that it can do include pickup up babies when they are born, generating passive resources, making and distributing fertilizer, and keeping owl pellets in your gachas for you. The one downfall of this structure is the fact that it runs a constant process within the server at all times, this is the reason that nearly all ARK communities limit the amount of soul terminals each tribe can have. If too many of these structures are out running at one time it will cause the server to be overworked and start generating crippling lag across the entire map they are located on.

The first thing we will cover on the soul terminal is the mesh feature, most people are not aware that you can change the look of this structure, it has 3 different styles you can choose from. To choose between the styles of structure you bring up the radial menu (Holding down E while looking at it) and go to Options menu.

Once here you can go to the section that is labeled “Mesh” and Cycle through MODERN, BASIC, or PRIMITIVE mesh styles.

Another feature of the soul terminal is to set dynamic text. To do this you go to the options menu and select the "Dynamic Text" option.

Once this menu is up, you can set two lines of text to the structure in the color of your choice.

Next up we will go through the soul transfer system, this option will allow you to set the terminal to Private or Public transfer, by default it is always a good idea to leave this private unless you trust people that have access to your soul terminals. When using this option you can push soul traps to any terminal in a certain range. If you want to use this option, enter into the inventory of the soul terminal and click on a dino that is being stored, you will then get the option to transfer that dino to another soul terminal.

Once you click on "Transfer Soul" you will be prompted with a menu to select the area you want to send the soul trap to.

Once you select where you want the soul to go, it will be automatically transferred to that terminal, If you want to retrieve it you will have to go to the terminal you transferred it to.

Next we are going through the most important function of the soul terminal. This next function will make your life easier and will take large work loads off of the server for all players. It is very important to use these options to ensure you are helping the server run smoother. To get to the automation window, bring up the radial menu and click options again, under this menu click "Automation".

This next menu will have a lot of option, we will go through them one at a time so we can explain what everything does. The reason this is so important is because it will allow you to not have a bunch of unnecessary dinos out at all times, especially on wander to create resources and fertilizer. Additionally you will not have to have them out to make unfertilized eggs for you.

Once you see this menu, it is time to start automating your soul terminal. We will start from the top of the list on the left, most of this is self explanatory. You will also notice that the first two options are greyed out, this is because we have them turned off in the config, there are already several other ways to do these two functions and there is not a need to cause further server strain to use the soul terminals.

Unfertilized egg generation - This option does exactly what it says, it will produce unfertilized eggs for any dinos you have in the soul terminal. These eggs already produce at a faster rate than they would with the dinos being out in the world, so there is no need for an ovi-raptor egg buff to keep you making plenty of eggs. You can add as many different types of dinos that you want, just remember that it will not produce if you hit the cap of 300 items.

Passive Generation - This option will cover all of your normal dino options such as organic polymer, pastes, oils, and even bio toxin. To use it simply put the dinos of choice in the terminal and check this option on, it will passively produce the items over time and keep them in the terminal for you when you need them. 

Misc poop/poop generation - This option will make any dino in the terminal produce what ever poop they would normally produce when not stored in the terminal. If you look over on the right, you will see sliders to let you choose the amount of each poop you want to store in the terminal, it is important to set these sliders to around 10-20 each type you want to produce so your terminal does not get full.  The misc poop generation will have owls produce pellet's for you, if you look on the bottom right you will see an additional slider to choose how many pellets you want to keep in the inventory of each gacha. When setting this up the soul terminal will produce the pellets and automatically put them in the gacha for you so you will not have do this task by hand any more.

Beetles Convert Poop - This option will allow dung beetles to convert poop into fertilizer for you, for this to work you must put dinos in the terminal with your beetles. The dinos will produce the poop and then the beetles will convert it to fertilizer for you. This is another option where you will see an additional slider on the bottom right, with this slider you can choose how many fertilizer to keep in each crop plot you have within range of the soul terminal. Once you set this up, your days of making sure your crop plots stay full of fertilizer are over, just put everything in and it will produce and distribute everything to make your farming is fully automated. 

Iguanodons Seed Fruit - This option will have your iguanodons turn any fruit or crops you store in the terminal with them into seeds. 

Sheep Wool Generation - Will auto sheer sheep that you place in the terminal and hold all wool inside until you need it. 

Queen Bee Honey Generation - Will passively produce honey from any bees that are placed in terminal, this option is kind of not need considering the S+ Bee Hive produces at far better rates.

These are all the automation options for the Soul Terminal, as you can see if you spend a little bit of time it will be worth the outcome. I cannot stress enough of how important it is to set this feature up, it will make the server work far less than leaving the dinos out to do these tasks in the open world.

The last feature of the soul terminal is the New Born Auto trap. To get to this menu, bring up the radial menu and go to Options, then click on  "Newborn Auto Trap".

Once you click this option, it will bring you to the following menu.

In this menu you will have several option, the important thing to remember is that this function will not work unless you have soul traps in the terminal. So once you turn this on, make sure you have soul traps in the terminal and it will pickup any babies born within the specified range that you set. You simply click enable to start the trap, you can choose visible if you want to see the traps radius. Below that is a slider that you can use to set the range the trap will work with. To enable breeding on all dinos in range of the trap, simply click "Mating: On" Once they are finished click "Mating: Off". If you make a mistake or forget to pulse dinos with a mutator, the Abort Gestation option will revert all dinos back to pre gestation. It will also reset the cooldown so you can immediately mate them again if you want or need. It will not reset any cool downs if eggs are laid or if the dino had a cooldown before turning mating on. 

This gives you a good idea of what a soul terminal can do, it is a very powerful tool that can help you save many hours in ARK and free up your time to do other things. It is very wise to use it for both you and for the health of the server. One thing to remember is that storing soul traps in the terminal is not necessary, they will not get any healing or experience bonus. It is best to store soul traps in any other type of storage so you can use your limited terminals for other things.

last we will touch on the Soul Finder. It is a simple hand held device to help you locate souls that you may have misplaced or just want to search through. 

To use this item, just equip it or store it in your hot bar. you can use the left CRTL to bring up a radial wheel of all souls in your inventory just like the soul gun. Or you can simply left click and it will open a menu to allow you search for soul traps.

From here you can type in a name or dino type to start a search, you can also set the range and how many entries per second you want to search, please to do no lower the search per second any lower than what is default it could cause you and others around you to lag if you are searching a lot of souls at one time. If you are not sure what you are looking for you can leave the search are blank and just click search and it will list all souls in a given range.

Once this menu is up, you can further refine your search to find exactly what you are looking for. You can use wildcard characters as listed in the search field to narrow your search down to exactly what you want to find. When you scroll through the list, you will notice on the right it gives you very detailed information about each soul you choose. When doing  search it will look through everything listed on the right, you can search for colors, stats, names, just about any information you can think of. Once you find what you are looking for, just click the the soul and it will be placed directly into your inventory for you.

I hope this has helped you understand this complex and useful mod a little better and what it can do for you to give your more free time to enjoy playing. There may be other functions that I have not covered in this feature but at least you now know the basics of how to use it. I hope you all have a great day and will see you next week for another Friday Feature!