Gacha

The Gacha is one of the Creatures in ARK: Survival Evolved's Extinction expansion.

Behavior
The Gacha roams around in The UnderForest, the deepest area of the Crater Forest, swiping occasionally at rocks, trees and bushes; which they follow with sitting down and eating. They're big and bulky, with relatively good stamina, but, unfortunately, are fairly slow both when walking and running.

Appearance
The Gacha appears to be a large sloth with crystalline formations on its back.

Drops
In the wild, the Gacha will occasionally drop Gacha Crystals which contain various items when consumed in the Inventory. These items include many basic resources such as, , and  to more advanced materials such as ,  and s. In addition to the basic crafting materials that can be obtained from the Crystals, occasionally the Gacha will produce a different colored, glowing crystal of a certain quality that when opened, produces fully crafted items such as s or even something with quality such as an.

Combat
This section describes how to fight against the Gacha.

General
Gacha have a neutral Temperament and will only attack when provoked. The best method you can use to kill a Gacha is either with a flying creature that shoots a damaging beam/projectile, like Wyverns, or on a creature that deals significant damage and/or has high health. When attempting to kill a Gacha on foot, use of a ranged weapon is advised, Assault Rifles and Fabricated Sniper Rifles, for example, are effective so long as the distance between you and the Gacha is great enough so that they cannot reach you. If, by some circumstance, it does get to you, there are two outcomes: you die a gruesome death, or you manage to outwit it and escape.

Strategy
As the Gacha is usually a passive animal, there are not many reasons for one to become hostile. If you must kill one, they are extremely slow and are not capable of doing significant damage. It is advised to keep out of its range so you can hit it easily. The resources dropped by a dead Gacha are generally inferior to the contents of the crystals they produce while tamed, so there is little reason to kill them.

Weaponry
Few weapons are ineffective against the Gacha as long as you are at a safe distance.

Dangers
They are clumsy, passive creatures that pose little threat to your player; fear of a Gacha would be misplaced.

Weakness
They are slow, have a short attack range and deal minimal damage.

Taming
You can only feed a happy Gacha (without other Gachas being nearby recently). Sad Gachas will ignore you. Just simply drop something on the ground from your inventory, and it will soon eat it. The larger quantity of item dropped, the faster it is tamed. The rarer the dropped item is, the higher level it will become(affecting taming effectiveness).

Taming Food
It will eat EVERYTHING you dropped. For higher taming effectiveness, see below.

Preferred Food
Gachas prefer Plant Species Y Traps,, crafted items like walls and foundations (with metal having higher taming effectiveness than stone but normal stone is just as good as crafted items), metal ore, ,  , then. You will have to time the drop of the item to get it into the path of the gacha and you can drop a stack as the Gacha will pick up the whole stack and eat them continuously until tamed or out of the item. Watch their food meter when traveling long distances and supply it manually.

Feeding among other "worthless" items such as  will severely damage taming effectiveness with zero affinity.

KO Strategy
The Gacha is not tamed by traditional means, but rather food and items must be dropped in front of it, they eat everything you drop! When tamed, Resource Harvesting is set to disabled by default, though Gacha babies have resource harvesting enabled from birth.

Breeding
When a male and female Gacha mate, the mother produces a Gacha baby after gestation.

The Production wheel of the new Gacha is visible from birth.

'''Warning: Certain foods will cause the Gacha baby to starve to death! For example, the food meter of Gachas goes down faster than feed them, which means that if they eat berries, they will quickly die. It is therefore recommended to use or, and also ensuring that they aren't near any troughs that contain berries, since the Gachas sometimes decide to eat berries automatically even when meat is available in the trough too.''' Note that  also feeds them, but at a much slower rate than Meat.

There are many ways to raise Gacha babies. One of the easiest methods is to take advantage of the fact that Gacha babies will pick up anything from the ground, regardless of its own Weight limit. This allows you to dump a lot of meat on the ground, much more than the baby would normally be able to carry with its natural Weight, which the baby will then pick up and keep in its inventory as food. However, this feeding method is wasteful, because Gacha babies will "overeat" even when they aren't actually hungry, and will therefore waste a lot of food. If you decide to feed the baby, you should therefore only feed them via their inventory until they reach Juvenile phase (10.1%+ maturation), after which you should clear their inventory and let them eat from your Troughs instead, since they won't overeat from troughs.

An alternative method for raising Gacha babies is to feed them nothing at all. The baby's inventory must be completely empty. This causes the baby to naturally regenerate Food and Health. However, if the baby picks up anything (usually ), it will try to eat it, which briefly stops its natural regeneration of health/food and will quickly starve it within a few minutes. The Gacha baby must also always remain rendered (having 1 or more players nearby) throughout this entire process, because if it enters "stasis" then it will still starve to death. This can be done in intervals while you are online and near the gacha, by simply putting it in a Cryopod when you aren't nearby. Or, if you have the S+ Mod, you can simply put the Gacha babies on an S+ Hitching Post (all variants of the S+ Hitching Posts work), which will then ensure that the Gachas never enter "stasis", and you're therefore able to safely leave their rendering distance.

Upon reaching the juvenile phase (10.1%+ maturation), the Gacha baby will be able to eat from your Feeding Trough, which means that you can safely leave the Gacha or even log off, since it will simply feed itself via the trough. Alternatively, you can still opt to feed them nothing at all, and easily let them grow all the way from 0% to 100% maturation without any food, by simply placing them somewhere that's out of range of your troughs, so that they don't waste any of your trough's food.

In summary, players with the S+ Hitching Post mod can simply let the Gacha baby stay leashed, outside of your trough ranges, all the way from 0% to 100% maturation, and will never have to be within rendering distance of the Gacha. If you don't have any mods and are playing completely standard ARK, you will always have to be within rendering distance until the Gacha baby reaches 10.1%+ maturation (Juvenile phase), after which it can feed itself from your troughs. Alternatively, if you don't want to use the no-food method, you can simply feed it from 0% to 100% or 0% to 10.1% by placing lots of food in its inventory, as explained above.

Note: Contrary to popular belief, the "no food" method of raising Gacha babies does NOT require wandering enabled or any adult Gacha nearby.

Technical details: A non-adult gacha will periodically have a massive amount of health and food restored to it as long as it isn't in stasis (meaning that it's either in render distance, or is attached to an S+ Hitching Post). This effectively means they don't need food as long as they are being rendered. The eating animation (when the Gacha sits down and munches on stuff in its inventory) temporarily breaks this mechanic. Even a Gacha with thousands of food will run out in mere minutes and begin starving if this happens. That's why it's very important that the babies don't pick up and eat anything, if you want to successfully raise Gachas via the "no food" method!

Note: It appears the Gacha does not receive an imprint bonus to its.

Utility
Gachas are solitary creatures, except when they have one (and only one) mate with them. If there is a same gender Gacha within 14 or less foundation range, they will become 'sad'; other than their facial expression, they will refuse to look directly at the survivor if "Ally-Looking" is on, they will not pick up items/resources dropped near them (they will make an expression with their head turned away in front rather than grabbing it), and they will very rarely produce crystal (with severe resource rate drop), or eat anything in their inventory even if or other resource/item are placed inside. Moreover, if they had eaten, dreary flecks of light will appear behind where the lights would be.

Even if the Gacha of the same gender leaves the sadness range, the previous Gacha with the said gender will remain sad for a time unless reintroduced to the opposite gender Gacha.

Note that baby/juvenile/adolescent Gachas ignore these effects until they are adult, and adult Gachas are not affected by nearby baby/juvenile/adolescent Gachas, even if they came from different parents.

Roles
The Gacha retains its ability to create resources by consuming items and transmuting them into crystals. Each Gacha, tamed or bred, will only be able to produce 6 random resources from a large pool of potential resources, including many DLC-exclusive ones, making it a renewable source of materials that would otherwise be impossible to acquire naturally in some maps. Their production is always structured so that it can produce 3 'common' resources, 2 'uncommon' resources and 1 'rare' or 'very rare' resource as shown below, with each tier producing different quantities per crystal. Bred Gachas are not influenced by the possible resources of the parents. Via the selection wheel, survivors can select which of the available resources that their Gacha will produce (or to produce them randomly like wild Gachas). Cloning a Gacha will make an exact copy of the resources from the original. In addition, Gachas will sometimes produce 'loot' of varying qualities, which will be denoted by quality-colored crystals (white, green, deep blue, purple, etc).
 * Resource Spawner


 * Place resources within the Gacha's inventory and the Gacha will slowly consume them to produce on their back.
 * The quality and type of the resource the Gacha eats will affect the Gacha Crystal's quantity of contained resources and quality of the loot. A very popular feeding method is therefore to feed them s, which creates very high quality loot and lots of resources, since the game seems to think that Plant Y Traps are a "Structure" (which therefore has much higher "Gacha nutritional value" than basic resources such as s). Note that does not extend the 1 hour spoil timer of the Plant Y Traps (probably because the traps are intended for PvP and shouldn't be able to have a super long timer), so it's pointless to use salt for this food type.
 * Gachas have a "Crafting Skill" stat that can be improved to increase the crafting speed, quantity of resources, and quality of loot. Community testing has revealed that the "sweetspot" is to have 160% Crafting Skill on your Gachas if you want to focus on resource creation, since having 160% skill causes the Gacha to produce Crystals containing up-to the maximum possible amount of the desired resource. If you continue leveling Crafting Skill after that, then the Gacha will generate more and more loot, and less and less resources, and the loot (weapons and armor) will have higher quality. So if your Gacha is intended to make resources, then you should aim at having at LEAST 160% skill (having a few percent higher, such as 161.4%, is fine, but having LESS than 160% is NOT okay since the 160% level must be reached for the game to treat the Gacha as a "master resource producer"). If you instead want your Gacha to make loot (instead of resources), then you should continue to raise its Crafting Skill beyond 160%; in fact, the next "big jump" is if you somehow manage to reach 260% crafting skill, which makes the Crystals drop very little resources, but a ton of Ascendant and Mastercraft loot instead. It's not worth continuing after 260% skill when focusing on loot production. However, note that the EASIEST way to make high quality loot is actually just to have a "normal" 160% Crafting Skill amount, and then feed the Gacha "Plant Y Traps" (high quality food, see above) and Snow Owl Pellets (buff food, see below), which together causes very high quality loot to drop effortlessly, without having to invest a ton of points into Crafting Skill!
 * After you've reached your desired Crafting Skill, you should put the rest of the Gacha's skill points into Weight to help them carry huge amounts of food resources so that they can feed themselves and continuously create Gacha Crystals.
 * "Wander Enabled" is NOT required for the Gacha Crystal creation.
 * After a time, these crystals will fall off and can be collected. A crystal sound effect can be heard over a fair distance when this happens.
 * Feeding the Gacha a will provide a temporary buff that increases crafting speed, increases the quality of loot produced, and increases the quantity of resources inside the Gacha Crystals (by double on average). The Gacha will not eat a Pellet if it already has the buff, which means that it won't waste pellets. A Snow Owl can be landed or walked to face a Gacha and the Gacha will then pick up the  when the Snow Owl spits it out. This will save you from having to manually collect and distribute them. NOTE: The  does not count as "Crystal-producing food", so you will still need to feed it a real food too, in addition to the pellets.
 * Production is disabled when 'Sad', which occurs when they are nearby to another Gacha unless it is only nearby one other Gacha of the opposite gender. The multi-colored 'disco lights' that are usually present are, instead, dreary flecks of light and the Gacha's face is unhappy.
 * Sometimes the Gacha Crystals keep floating in mid-air. A is ideal to still reach it; they are common in the Sanctuary, have a similar height to the Gacha, and the survivor can stand on its back to pick up the crystal.
 * Occasionally the Gacha Crystal contains a structure, armor piece or a weapon. For a complete list of possible items see.


 * Possible Resources

Gachas can gather:
 * Resource Farmer

Despite being able to interact with their nodes, Gachas will not harvest the following:

While slow, the Gacha has a high stamina and a high carry weight to move items from place to place. As they can be carried by, they can also be used for long distance transport as an alternative for. Note: Gachas will eat anything, (save poop excluding snow owl pellets and several other items listed) and as such, should not be used as a transport creature lest it eat the items in transport.
 * Transport

The Gacha will automatically pick-up parcels that are dropped nearby, which can be enhanced with Enable Wandering to make them a roaming vacuum cleaner. This can be used to collect poop, which is one of the few resources that the Gacha will not eat. Be aware that Gachas can eat virtually everything, including weapons, blueprints and filled cryopods. Can be used to collect Achatina paste automatically, which is an easy way to substitute Cementing Paste.
 * Poop Collector

A Snow Owl can be landed or walked to face a Gacha and the gacha will pick up the when the Snow Owl spits it out. This will save you from having to manually collect and distribute them.


 * Travel

Weight Reduction
The Gacha reduces the weight of the following resources by the listed amount while they are in its inventory:

Notes/Trivia

 * This mechanic and the name Gacha are a reference to "gachapon", the Japanese toy machine in which after putting in money, a plastic egg pops out with a random collectible toy. The name is onomatopoeia of the sounds the machine makes ("Gacha " from turning the knob, "pon" from the capsule dropping down).
 * In lore, the person who had childhood memories of Japan that Helena Walker was referring to was Takaya Kazuma, one of the Mek pilots in-training who was from the URE. Connecting info with the fact that he was from the futuristic Panasian alliance of the URE, this implies that Japan allied with the URE in the ARK universe.
 * The Gacha's species name, "Macrodryadis crystallinus", means "Great dryad which crystallizes" in Latin.
 * The Gacha's diet is so varied, that it would probably be faster to compose a list of things they don't eat
 * The Gacha appears to eat 'anything' whilst not being ridden. when its being riden it will eat typical food items such as Meat and Berries.
 * One of the most common misconception of keeping their hunger up was they eat when their food is low. That is not the case regardless of their mood. They will only eat it when they are eating other items and that they are not under the buff effect.
 * Prior to Patch 288.113, Gacha can also potentially spew out Journeyman, Mastercraft and Ascendant Crystals which contains items beyond the cap. Items from these crystals are now found at crystal quality below Journeyman at a rare rate.
 * The Gacha has a happiness level that can be influenced by being near a mate. The Gacha experiences sadness when exposed to another of its kind that is of the same gender. Happiness level can be determined by the Gacha's facial expression.
 * At low graphic setting, the facial expression is difficult to determine.