Overview
How to survive and thrive as this heckin chonker, solo or in a group.
Foreword
So you want to play Stego. You want to be a huge lumbering walnut brain with big flappy plates on their back. And most importantly, you want the THAGOMIZER.
I’m here to help you reach your maximum potential as this heckin chonker of an herbivore.
Before we begin, there are a few things I want you to keep in mind going into this to help you have the most fun and take any mishaps in your stride.
1. Stego has a lot of HP for its size, but it’s still extremely vulnerable for the first hour and a half of it’s 4.5 hour growth time, and remains vulnerable for about another hour after that. Death is probable, especially in the first hour of choosing this creature. Don’t let that get you down. Carnivores are hungry, and your sacrifice is helping someone else have a better day.
2. Stego is slow. For the beginning of your life, you won’t have any sort of travel stam either, so running (even as slow as juvie stego runs) won’t be much of an option. Take deep breaths and embrace the slow. All you need to do is find one food bush and one water source and you’re gonna be okay no matter how low your food and water get. I’m getting deja vu from the sucho guide. If you’ve read that, you probably are, too.
3. I really feel like there should be a third one, for rhythm, but I’m blanking here. I’ve got nothing. This is really pretty much all you need to know.
An Important Note About Finding Food Bushes:
I’ve seen a lot of people say they can’t find food bushes, or that they’re having trouble finding them. There are two ways that you can help yourself find food bushes to make this easier.
1- Sniffing really works. You kinda have to finagle it a bit, but you can smell food from pretty far away, especially if you’re hungry. Try lowering your camera to body level so you’re seeing the particles through your character. I find this helps me pinpoint the direction they’re coming from.
2- Know where to look in the first place. Sometimes food might be close by, but it’s hard to smell it. The places you should look for food bushes are big open fields adjacent to water sources. From a distance, food bushes (and cycads, watch out for those) look particularly pale green, almost like they’re glowing. Once you learn to spot this color change, you may not even need to scent to find food.
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That’s pretty much it for what you need to know before you get started. From here on out, it will be just about the stego itself.
.1 to .3
So you’ve spawned in, and you realize your huge, lumbering, thagomizer-wielding stegosaurus is a tiny babu that stands about knee-high to a grasshopper.
Now what?
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This is gonna get a bit technical, but I’m gonna try to make it as easy as possible. If you already know how to use coordinates to navigate, skip this section.
– The map we have as of update 2 is in the negative/negative quadrant of the map, which sits in the northwest quarter. There are no positive coordinates on the map currently.
-Picture the map with north facing upwards. The largest negative numbers are in the northwest, the smallest are in the southeast. Latitude is your north/south, and longitude is your east/west. Latitude will always be the top number on your insert menu, and longitude will always be just below it. Hypothetically, this is all you need to know to navigate anywhere you want to.
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– At a location around -440, -440 (pretty much the central region of the map) there is a massive swamp that is constantly populated with loads of dangerous carnivores and giant herds of herbivores. If you see yourself getting towards that location while you are .1 to .3 in size (below 10% to 30% when you hover over your growth bar on the insert menu) turn around and go the other way. Maybe south. Yeah, south seems like a good idea. It generally takes some doing to get north of the swamp.
An easy way to tell if you’re getting close to the swamp is if you look north and see a giant spire of oddly-shaped rock jutting into the sky, and that giant spire is starting to look a little close…
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Now, as I’ve stated before, this stage of your life is where you’re most vulnerable. I’ve listed this as .1 to .3, but really it’s more like .0 to .3 because for a while there, you are less than 10% grown. You basically spawn as a hatchling.
Your best bet to survive is to stay hidden, so here are a few ways to do that:
1- When crossing open fields, walk. If you’re shorter than the tall grass and you keep to it, walking reduces the chance you’ll be spotted because you won’t trigger a predator player’s peripheral motion-sensitive vision. A tiny stego running through an open field will be spotted SO FAST. Much faster than it can run, which means very shortly that tiny stego will be a medium-sized meal for most predators.
2- If you don’t have to cross an open field, keep to the trees. Minimize your time in the open to when you need to eat and absolutely necessary field crossings. An unseen stego juvie is a stego juvie that doesn’t get eaten.
3- Don’t stay around water sources for very long. Every carno or utah player is constantly checking water sources like rivers and small ponds for things that have come down to drink, and for footprints. Stego fills its water up pretty quickly, so as long as there’s water nearby, don’t be afraid to let it get a little bit below half before getting a drink. This isn’t like sandbox stego, where you get exactly 1% water per drinking animation loop. You get about 40% of your maximum water per drink loop.
If you’ve read through this far, great! But if you’re just skimming, basically this part of your life you should just hide. Only really come out to eat and drink, then disappear back into the woods again.
“But guide writer!” You might be asking, “Shouldn’t I get into a herd for protection?!”
No. At such a small size, you are too vulnerable to risk any sort of incompetence in a herd’s ability to protect you. The old multiplayer rule of “don’t trust randoms” is applicable here. I’ve seen just as many baby stegos get accidentally impaled by adults trying to protect them, and get yoinked by clever carnos out from under stegs that broke formation, as I’ve seen babies successfully grow up in a herd. If you’ve got three or four friends with large stegs that are willing to protect you, go for it. But if you don’t, just stay hidden and alone or with a similarly sized friend or three.
Let me reiterate: Unless you have really good friends who know what they are doing, don’t get into a herd at this size if you can avoid it. You are too small and easy to yoink by carnivores. That being said, even one or two competent stegos that you can voice chat with will be enough to keep you safe, but mishaps are still likely to occur.
.3 to .6
Okay, so you survived to 30% growth. Congratulations! You’re a much bigger snack now.
I say you’re basically food, but for most creatures, a 30%-60% stego is too much to handle. Your tail attack really hurts, capable of taking adult utahraptors pretty much out of a hunt unless they pounce you. It also serves as a great deterrent to adult and small carnotarus, actually allowing you to kill them if they’re small enough.
I’m about to introduce a rule of thumb to you here that will help you survive as a stego:
If it’s your length or shorter, you’re basically not in a lot of danger from it.
Stego’s tail attack is its most damaging move, and also its easiest to hit with from a standing position. Alone, a stego’s best bet to survive is to hold position and defend itself with its tail. You really shouldn’t be running after things trying to bite them or whack them with your thagomizer, because at this size your bite is only enough to deal with basically fresh juvies and also maybe a pesky hypsilophodon. Also, you have to stop dead to use your tail, which means almost anything can outrun the tail attack if it’s already going away from you and you’re chasing it.
This is on purpose. The development team have designed stego to hinder its ability to run down and kill carnivores to prevent over aggression in herbivores. There are times when you will be able to do this, but a stego running after a carno or utahraptor is likely only to get itself into more trouble compared to a stego that stays in formation (read more on formations in the second to last section) or which holds its ground.
About halfway through this growth stage, about when you hit .4, it becomes safer for you to seek out a herd and join with them for protection. At .5 (50% growth) you are big enough to help defend smaller members of a herd or raise your friends if they join fresh while you’re this big.
Also around this time (.5 to .6) a strange phenomenon starts to occur. You see, the bigger a stego is, the more it tends to accumulate other stegosaurs. You may find that as you wander the fields looking for more food, that at this size other stegosaurs gravitate to you from great distances, seeming to home in on your position and joining you on your journey. The closer you are to popular river sections and big open fields, the faster this phenomenon occurs. Another way to accelerate this process is to call, either with loud f-calls or broadcasts. Keep in mind though, that this also tends to draw in carnivores from great distances as well.
There isn’t too much else to discuss here. Once you get pretty close to 60% growth, you start to feel stego’s true special ability: its size. Once a stego reaches a certain size, a real life mechanic starts to come into play: the bigger something is, the harder it is to be killed. As of the second update to Evrima, a stegosaurus over .5 has pretty much zero natural predators. The only thing that could potentially pose a serious threat is a pack of well-coordinated utahraptors, and killing even one of them will likely give you an opportunity to disappear into the trees while they eat their fallen comrade.
If you make it to .6 without meeting another stegosaurus, you’re either on a dead server or you’re WAYYYY out by the border.
.6 to .8
So you’ve made it to the second to last stage of your growth: by the end, you’re technically an adult.
At these growth sizes, your growth chart in the insert menu will likely start telling you you’re an adult stegosaurus. This is only sort of true. Yes, you’re pretty big, but at .6 and even at .7, stego still has some enemies. I said in the last section that at .6 you start to become sort of invulnerable, but the rule of stego length still applies. If it’s longer than you, it’s a threat. And at this size, an adult carno is longer than you are. They’re still gonna be in a lot of pain if you hit them, so it’s likely they’ll back down, but it’s also possible that they’ll be very good at avoiding getting hit, or well coordinated enough that you won’t be able to land hits on them, even though stego’s tail hit recovery time is less than half a second.
It is at this size that stego really needs a herd. However, thanks to the Law of Stego Gravitation, it’s highly likely that you won’t need to even look for other stegos, but rather that other stegos will just sort of find YOU instead, even if they’re not looking.
I haven’t really said it thus far, but up until now it’s not really advised to make any sort of loud calls. Once you hit .6, calling can actually be advantageous to you, helping to accelerate the stego gravitation process. If you broadcast, and you hear another stego broadcast back, just start heading in that direction and you’ll soon be accumulating other stegosaurs of all sizes like the floor under my couch accumulates dust bunnies in winter.
In this section I have to make note of stego’s interactions with Deinosuchus. As you grow up to this point, you are a hamburger to the larger individuals. From .6 to .8, you are still vulnerable to gators three times your weight in kilos as measured on your insert menu.
However, once you reach .85 (85% growth), you become too heavy for even fully adult deinosuchus to grab and drown. It is only at this stage of your life that you start to feel the invulnerability of stego. Still be wary of packs of raptors, but there are very few packs well-coordinated to take down even a lone stego right now. If you have a buddy, the two of you should be just fine as long as you don’t hit each other.
In the next section, we’ll discuss how to best throw your weight around as a large stego, solo or in a group!
Adulthood and Group Strategies
So you’ve made it. You’re finally among the largest stegosaurs on the server. You’re really starting to feel the weight of the creature you’re playing. Utahraptors are looking mighty small and even a carnotaurus that was sizing you up looked like it wasn’t much of a threat, and maybe it even backed down before you even had to take a swing at it! What can you do to keep this stego alive through thick and thin, whether you’re alone or in a herd? Maybe you’ve got a friend that you want to protect and raise up to be this size, or maybe you’ve joined a herd of randos and need to protect their smalls as effectively as possible.
I’m here to tell you how to do that.
Before we begin, there are two things you need to know about stego that will help prevent friendly fire:
1- Stego winds up with its tail before stabbing forward, unlike legacy stego, which just flicks its tail out to the side haphazardly. This is because stego can now swing its tail in every direction, and must stop completely and turn itself so that the stabbing motion is possible no matter what angle you need it to go to. During this windup, the hitbox for the tail’s damage activates. Anything touching the tail from the moment it reaches its apex to the moment it stops lunging forward will take damage from it. That means that if a baby is on your left, and you swing right, if that baby is right up next to your tail, that baby is about to become a tail ornament and you’re about to have a bad time.
2- Sometimes players desync when they rub against each other. I’m serious, when two players start to collide with each other and get moved around by each other’s hitboxes, sometimes desync occurs where the affected player will see where they really are, but the other player will see them somewhere else. This means that sometimes it looks like you’ve got that baby right under your nose, when it’s really in the shadow of your deadly tail. Always check with your friend where they see themselves and where they look like they are to you before you start swinging.
Now, once you reach .8, you’re capable of killing two full adult carnotaurus without dying. Are you gonna be in pain? Yes, but you will survive. Carno doesn’t do a lot of bleed, so they have to land a LOT of hits to get you into a state where you can’t stand your ground. Here are a few ways you can prevent that from happening:
– Yes, your tail can swing in every direction, but it has a hard time hitting things directly in front of your nose. When you can, turn in place so that your flanks and tail are what any and all opponents are looking at.
– Always watch your six. Oftentimes, if a predator is hovering in front of you or feinting at you, the partner is getting ready to move in behind you. Maybe turn up your mouse sensitivity if you can, and keep your head on a swivel.
– Stego’s tail attack has a really short cooldown after it activates. Feel free to spam as much as you like, the stamina cost is next to none. You’re not a tenonto, using your tail doesn’t require a ton of energy.
– Even if you can’t avoid an attack, feel free to trade as much as you like. Unless you’re being hounded by over 10 carnos, trading two bites for two tail swings will probably end the fight. At .8, you two-shot even full adult carnos. If you hit one of them twice, he’s dead and you can book it away while the other eats. If you hit two of them once, they’re both not gonna be looking to keep that up.
DEFENSIVE FORMATION ALPHA, CHARLIE, BRAVO!
So with stego being a medium-sized-herd animal, and the extreme potential for you to unwittingly find yourself a part of one of those herds, here are a few defensive formations that you can establish to help prevent a bite from even being landed before the predators move on:
Defensive Formation Alpha:
This is the big one, the classic, the essential formation to end all formations. You can do this with as many stegos as you want, or as few as two.
All stegos face each other, with their heads facing in and tails out. Tails can be straight out, or a circle can be made with all flanks facing out and all heads facing the same direction around the circle. The former is better against large dinosaurs that are more cautious, but the latter is better for body-blocking more reckless dinosaurs from running in and trying to land bites regardless of their safety.
Defensive Formation Bravo:
A two-person formation where an adult protects a baby. The baby stays adjacent to the adult’s front leg/shoulder on the side opposite to the predator. The adult moves around the baby, keeping their flank exposed to the predator, while the baby moves to keep in its shadow. Very effective against single predators, vulnerable to packs of utahs or trios of carnos.
Defensive Formation Charlie
This is the defensive formation you’ll use the most. Most players use it automatically. This is where a medium to large sized group moves from one location to the other. All adults are distributed evenly around the sides and back of the group, surrounding the juveniles. the front is usually left exposed because if anything attacks from the front, the two adults flanking at the front can run up and go head to head to form a wall of flesh, but they’re more likely needed at the side. Great for moving to water or food during a standoff (which happens more often than you might think)
Defensive Formation Delta
In the event that food is not accessible, but water is close by, the final defensive formation, Delta, is formed. This allows smaller members of the herd to drink while being protected. The adults form a semicircle around juveniles at the water’s edge, tails out or all facing to the left or right as the situation demands. Think of the letter D where the straight side is the water’s edge and the curved side is adult stegos in defensive posture.
This concludes my TedTalk on defensive posturing in stegosaurus, thank you all for coming.
No seriously, these formations work and they will save lives more often than they will take them. I mean that for both carnivores and herbivores. I’ve seen a trio of full adult carnos move off and look for other prey when faced with a good Defensive Formation Delta, and I’ve seen a pair of adult stegos go flank to flank with a baby between them cause an entire pack of utahraptors to starve to death.
Afterword
So now you know just about everything there is to know about stego. I hope that even if you didn’t read all of it through, my three hour labor of love has given you the information you need to survive if you’ve been dying, or has gotten you into a dinosaur you didn’t expect to like.
I know I didn’t expect to like stego, but I thought I’d give it a shot. While I lost my original stego to a bug before I reached .3, the second stego I ever tried to grow is still alive on NA #2 as of three days after it reached full adult, and I expect it will survive until something bigger than carnotaurus comes and eats it or a server wipe occurs.
Something that Dondi once said that I actually empathize with is that “everyone should walk in this game.” In legacy edition, walking was really too slow and food was too scarce to warrant it. But stego’s animations, speed, and food and water drain mean that for at least some of your life, you will probably find yourself walking. I really enjoy walking as a stego because it’s the most cinematic thing I’ve ever seen in this game. It’s something you never get to do as a carnivore, since your hunger often goes down too fast and food is always moving. But as a stego, walking feels just as natural as it does in real life.
Granted, sometimes you’ll walk for a minute and a half, go 200 feet and say “okay I really need food now” and you’ll run the last 300 feet to the food bush, but for that minute and a half, you’ll enjoy what is probably the best thing about this game: experiencing being a dinosaur, and witnessing the glory of a group on the tree of life that was more dominant on Earth for longer than we mammals have been.
I hope that some of you read this and see how much love I have for this game and the dinosaurs that exist in it. I also hope that even if you’ve been an avid carnivore player since the progression days, that you’ll give stego a try because KissenKitten has done some serious work and put some serious love into herbivores that they haven’t had before. I’d like to thank Kissen and all of the dev team that have worked on tenonto and stego for making a class of dinosaur that I never thought I’d seriously enjoy one of my favorite dinosaurs to play. So thank you. And thank you, dear reader, for visiting this page and reading my work, and maybe leaving a comment on what you’d like to see next, or what you liked or didn’t like about the guide.
If you’ve made it this far, and read everything through and through, you’re a seriously dedicated reader with loads of interest in this dinosaur. You rock. Now go out there and put your thagomizer in the air and wave it like you just don’t care!