"Maelstrorcas are a synthetic-organic creation that were created in a laboratory as part of an experiment."

Custom cosmetic to play as a fishy fellow, the Maelstrorca. Optimized to keep texture memory usage as low as possible while retaining as much quality as possible.

Important

Update Notes

HOW TO USE

Select the 'Mods' option in the Ark: Survival Ascended main menu.
Search for Maelstrorca and subscribe to this mod ingame.
Restart your game after fully downloading and installing the cosmetic. It is REQUIRED that you restart every time the cosmetic updates! Otherwise it will not show up.
In the game, open your Inventory and select the 'Cosmetics' tab at the top.
Open up the Maelstrorca cosmetics folder on the right side in the 'Custom Cosmetics' section.
'Use' or drag any Maelstrorca skin to the torso slot.

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Features

Conditional Overlays

The Maelstrorca visually becomes wet while standing in rain or while swimming and slowly dries when not.
The Maelstrorca visually becomes covered in sand as you remain in a sandstorm, jump into water or stand in rain to wash it off!
The Maelstrorca will visually get bloody and hurt. Scars and cuts appear as health drops. Healing will mend the wounds.

Lifelike Behaviors

The Maelstrorca will visually show that its in pain and hurt. Ears droop down and the facial expressions change to show the player its condition without looking at the UI.
The eyes move and jitter around randomly as eyes do to breathe some more life into this fishy fellow.
The tail slowly wags from side to side while standing still.

Body Features

The tail, ears and body have physics, interacting with the environment, structures and objects around, colliding with them.
Most of the Maelstrorcas are available in both a male and female version though visually they make no difference as of now, this might change later.
All Maelstrorcas come with a first person view model that reflects the color and patterns of the third person model as well as the damage,wetness and sanding overlays.
Maelstrorcas come with emissions, stripes or patterns that will glow in the dark similar to aberrant dinos.
All Maelstrorca textures will be carefully optimized to keep the texture memory usage at a minimum. Most textures will be carefully modified to reduce their filesize to a minimum in order to keep the mod size as small as possible while offering as much quality and quantity as possible.

Variations

There are different variations available, they come in different colors, emissions and model features. Some have extra fins, some of horns, some don't.

Available Variations:

Amethyst Default

Upcoming

Future Plans:

More variations.
Texture optimizations.

Known Issues:

First Person thumbs are a bit... off at times.
Texture optimization is still WIP.

Changelogs

Version 7

Fixed facial expressions for when affected by beer and troodon poison.
Fixed sand overlay not working and made it actually dependent on being affected by a sandstorm (indoors no longer counts).

Version 6

Improved eyes visually.
Finetuned wet shininess and roughness to make it less mirror-like reflective.
Improved wet normal blending.
Added tail wagging.
Cleaned up code a bit.
Optimized more textures.
Slightly improved blood overlay by switching from DXT5 to BC7.
Changed default Maelstrorca to have whiter eyes.

Version 5

Fixed ears not drooping on low health.
Optimized several more textures in filesize and usage.
Optimized materials and combined texture samples.
Improved blood and wet overlay visuals.
Slightly improved eye visuals, slightly less color banding.

Version 4

Optimized several textures in file size.
Overhauled specularity, metallness and roughness of the body.
Overhauled physics to fix jittering.

Version 3

(Potentially) Fixed some hair (cosmetics probably) not hiding.

Version 2

Fixed broken Eyes Material.
Fixed permanently wet body.

Version 1

Initial Release

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Here's the discord for my cosmetics (looks like more are to come), it is currently very basic though: https://discord.gg/RuEjm7crJP

Also if you like this mod you might want to check out my other cosmetic mods:

The Waggan
The Avali
The Novabeast

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Credits:

Maelstrorca Avatar - Made by Callistakirin (Gumroad)

Permission to upload was acquired from Callistakirin. If you like the Maelstrorca you can get the original model (for VRChat) above.

Alternative Textures - Provided by the respective owners and myself.

Custom Cosmetic: Maelstrorca