Zero Last Dinosaurs

[Keri Gamrath]

iknow that raw meat lasts 40 minutes in a food trough, but an unknown is how frequently to Dinos eat? i'd like to have a better understanding than just "i fill the whole thing to make sure there's enough".

i'm breeding Deinonychus, and getting to the point i have several out at a time and don't want to be spending a bunch of time pod'ing them up and getting them back out every time i want to breed them.

has anyone done any research, or does the wiki state how frequently Dinos eat? i've searched and haven't found this info. i'd like to be able to be a little bit more accurate when determining how much meat i need to leave in my food trough each night.

If you do NOT have juvenile dinos on the trough then zero in the trough should well last through the (real time) night. Any adult will not die of starvation in a real time over night gap - they will just reduce the "food" stat a bit. But nowhere close to 0.

If you you have juvenile "eat a lot" then the game changes a lot ... And here I can't give you good answers- it depends on the count of growing kids and the kind and etc. So there it comes back to your least desired answer which is "a lot"

Adult creatures that are not moving/healing up around use little food. Maybe two rows of meat a day will feed a whole boss army of rexes easily. You would want more if you are having them heal up from a boss fight.

Juveniles eat a ton of food, so always have multiple full troughs, or even better, loaded up maewings nearby. Leveling up the nursing effectiveness will increase how much of the food stat gets refilled per unit of food.

If your concerned about it, just go ahead and cryo them up for the night. Especially with the juveniles who are constantly eating. They will destroy a trough load of meat and starve out before you know it.

As for the adults, not so much. Iv had 5 yuties, quetzal, 2 or 3 rex's, and two thylo's on a trough and I had more spoiled meat than empty slots the next day

As long as you log on a couple of times a week you almost don't need to worry about your troughs unless you're doing breeding. As long as you have even a couple of stacks of meat & berries in the trough when you log off, nothing will starve before you log on and feed them again. The main benefit of troughs is they provide you with a margin of safety in case you can't log on for too many days in a row, but it's pretty rare for healthy, adult animals to starve as long as they're all full when you log off.

It lies somewhere between "You're not serious" and "Oh my God, you are serious." And by "people" giving me these looks, I mean adults of a certain age and outlook. Of course, given that I'm a 54-year-old tenured professor, these "people" are pretty much everyone I know (including my now adult children).

I am just about to finish an amazing game called Horizon: Zero Dawn. I've been in its world, working my way through its story, for the last six months. In this experience, I've encountered all the great things a great game has to offer. This includes, but is not exhausted by, fighting robot dinosaurs.

First of all, there are lots of different meanings for the term "video game," and many of these hold no interest for me. There are the "platformers" like Mario Brothers, which are really just games. Their concept is simple and you basically do the same thing over and over again, which is fun if you're into it. But I'm not.

There are also the multiplayer first person shooter (FPS) kinds of games, where you "spawn" into the game's terrain (a "map"), and then you fight against other real people playing the game. These are mostly, probably 13-year-olds in Korea or Kansas who are much, much better than you. That means you'll probably spend a lot of time just dying. This is not the kind of game I want you to try either.

So Horizon: Zero Dawn is what's called an RPG (role playing game). An RPG basically means you play as the central character in the game's story. For Horizon: Zero Dawn, the story is a hybrid, lying somewhere between science fiction, post-apocalypse tale and sword and sandal drama. It takes place 1,000 years after our civilization has fallen. This new world has been reclaimed by nature in the most beautiful, verdant way imaginable, except for one addition: robot dinosaurs (which, OK, might not really be robot dinosaurs but robot animals.) These machines, until recently, had been pretty docile.

Now, ultimately, it's this story that makes Horizon: Zero Dawn a great game. It's always the story that matters most. Technology alone can't leap over that hurdle. The story in Horizon: Zero Dawn is well-crafted with engaging characters you like or hate, and it slowly peals itself away in a manner that is both surprising and satisfying.

But, on the other hand, if that were all there was to the game then it would be just a hyped-up novel. What makes this kind of video game worth your time is the immersion. That's what makes it a new kind of experience reaching above the older narrative forms humanity has come up with.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is what's called an "open world" game. That means that you can go pretty much anywhere in its extensive map. While you work your way through the story of Aloy and her fallen world, you can just stop and go off to explore anywhere you want. See those beautifully rendered mountains over there? Yeah, go climb them. There's probably a giant robot bird-thing that will attack you. How about those islands on the other side of the lake? Wonder what's over there?

And did I mention the art? The world of Horizon: Zero Dawn is so beautiful to look at that sometimes you have to just stop climbing or running or fighting and just look. The game artists managed to take the most beautiful aspects of a rainy meadow or a mountain pass and turn them up to 12. RPGs may demand a good story to start, but the world you inhabit derives its felt quality from that world's art and design.

Now, I get it that you may not be interested in a game that includes fighting robot dinosaurs. That's fine (sort of, I guess). There are other games with other kinds of stories. Some are heavy on investigation; others have more fighting. Choose what you like. The point is this: I spent six months slowly working my way around Aloy's world and her story and, in the end, the whole experience was delightful and exciting and engaging.

That might seem like a strange recommendation, but what I really mean is that it was a delicious waste of time. We live in a world of endless pressing concerns with so many competing avenues of being productive. A good game makes no demands other than the age-old pleasures of great story combined with the very modern possibilities of immersion. And none of it matters except the enjoyment of the doing.

Adam Frank is a co-founder of the 13.7 blog, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, a book author and a self-described "evangelist of science." You can keep up with more of what Adam is thinking on Facebook and Twitter: @adamfrank4

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

The most famous mass extinction was the disappearance of non-avian dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago (Mya), after ruling the Earth for 170 million years1,2,3. The best-supported extinction model is the impact of a large asteroid in the Yucatn Peninsula (Chicxulub, Mexico), which set off a global cataclysm and environmental upheaval4,5. Although evidence for an end-Cretaceous impact is indisputable6, most scientific debate has focused on whether the extinction was geologically abrupt or gradual7,8,9,10,11, whether it was caused by factors intrinsic to dinosaurs12,13,14,15 or by extrinsic physical drivers16,17,18 or both acting in concert19,20. If extrinsic events had a role, the question is whether this driver was terrestrial or extra-terrestrial21,22,23. It has proved harder to posit a convincing killing model that explains exactly how the dinosaurs, as well as many other groups24,25, vanished. And yet other groups of animals and plants survived through this singular, short-term crisis26,27. Could some groups have been teetering on the brink already? Furthermore, the extinctions coincide with a period of long-term environmental changes that resulted in remarkably high sea levels, cooling climates and the spread of new habitat types on land, as well as massive volcanic activity at the end of the Cretaceous16,19,20.

There is a debate about how these events affected non-avian dinosaurs, and yet little evidence exists for a global decline across dinosaur groups prior to their extinction at the end of the Cretaceous3,7,28,29,30,31. The latest thorough analyses of fossil data found no evidence for a decline of non-avian dinosaurs before their extinction3,30, and little evidence of any decline in dinosaur species richness or ecological diversity during the last million years of the Cretaceous. However, a phylogenetic study using dinosaur timetrees10 challenged the idea of a sudden extinction, but instead supported a diversity decline with extinction rates exceeding speciation rates well before the K/Pg event, which has been disputed recently32. Thus, there is no consensus on whether dinosaurs were in decline or not prior to their extinction.

Although the dinosaur fossil record provides invaluable data for our understanding of macroevolutionary patterns and processes through time, it is biased and incomplete3,11,33. Previous attempts to estimate dinosaur diversity dynamics were based on simple counts of the numbers of species in specific time intervals8,9. However, the extent to which these raw data have been biased by preservation and sampling artefacts has long been debated34,35,36. New analytical methods have attempted to alleviate these biases, but despite their widespread application to a wide range of taxa, these methods are constrained by their inability to deal with the absence of data, especially when the spatial distribution of the fossil record in a particular time interval is strongly heterogeneous37,38. Biases in primary data can produce a misleading estimate of palaeodiversity, and this has been argued to be the case with the dinosaur fossil record; using climatic and environmental modelling, Chiarenza et al.11 suggested that the apparent diversity decline of North American dinosaurs could be a product of sampling bias whereby Maastrichtian diversity was likely underestimated.

3a8082e126