As a group of dedicated, year long unofficial ARK players we found ourselves bored and tired of existing ARK clusters that either made the game way too easy or just didn’t hit the right spot for our taste. With Avalanche, launched in December 2019, we are trying to find the balance between keeping ARK challenging and at the same time, make it less grindy or frustrating than the official or unmodded servers. While we include Quality of Life (QoL) mods like Super Structures and Kraken’s Better dinos in our setup, we still try to balance them by limiting or removing completely automated features like Nanny, Mutator mutation pulses and the like.