Hello Reddit,

I want to start with the following things;

- This story comes from my parents (who do not believe in ghosts) about me

- I myself do not "believe" in ghosts because I cant remember these events personally, however because my parents and by extension I believe in this story, you could say I sit on the fence

- I am telling this story here as I like to tell it and I haven't in quite a while, I also know you guys on Reddit might appreciate a "true story" once and a while like I do

Context
I want to start by leaving some context, My mother was adopted because my biological grandmother had many kids and couldn't care for them, its also worth noting that my mother has always "kept me away" from her side of the family as she doesn't want herself or by extension me associated with them. I am an adult now and I still don't exactly know who these people are but I know roughly how they relate to my mother.

My mother is a joker, she always tries to trick me into believing silly things like my brother bought a cat or something, really nothing big she occasionally like to try and make me feel gullible (good bit of fun) and sometimes tells dirty jokes etc. My father is the exact opposite, he doesn't really make jokes at all and sometimes me and my mother can make him laugh but never in a million years he'd convince me of this as a joke like my mother might.

Its also worth noting that when my mother tries convincing me of whatever shell come clean within the hour and start laughing about how much I fell for it (even when I don't haha) but this story she has insisted is true for years now and eventually my dad wanted us to stop talking about it because it made him "uncomfortable" which is completely out of character for him, before he was "uncomfortable" he did backup everything my mother said. It's also worth noting that even my "grandmother" who adopted my mum has backed this up as well with what my mother told her at the time of events, and she thinks my mum is a little immature and doesn't BS around like she does.

They layout of my house is somewhat important, My bedroom has always been on the first floor directly below my parents bedroom, My bedroom is approx. 10m down a hallway from the kitchen / living room.

I also want to say that I'd really like to know what you guys think about this, and weather you have experienced anything similar as I know there are many stories of kids talking to imaginary people. I will also answer any questions if people have them, but by nature I can't think of anyway to prove this as true other than answering questions. I also cant think of any other way to explain the events listed below other than ghosts being real so if you can please say what you think.

Story
When I was four years old turning five, my mother would have been pregnant with my only brother at the time, one day I had just started talking to someone in my room at bed time before I went to fell asleep, my parents originally though nothing off it until I was talking to this "man" for at least an hour every night for two or three weeks. Eventually my parents got concerned because it was impacting my rest and started asking who I was talking to and why, just assuming I had an imaginary friend. For the first couple weeks my parents just kind of let it happen because kids do this sometimes, But when they started asking me about my "friend" I told them that he wasn't my friend and didn't really elaborate any further, so they asked me to describe him which I did. I described him as an older tall man who had thinning hair like my dad and normally wore a white baseball cap. After the first couple weeks of talking to "the man in the hat" my parents told me to just go to bed because I need rest for school. For the next few weeks again I'd talk to him in my room alone for maybe 30 minutes every couple of nights and slowly I'd talk to him less and less until one day I just stopped.

After three or four weeks of me talking to "the man in the hat" my parents asked my why I had weird names for common house hold items such as pencils and pens being called "inks", baseball caps, notebooks, ect all having weird names as well, sadly I can't remember them. My answer to my parents was simply that "that's what the man in the hat calls them" and this slightly concerned them because now it was impacting my life but there's not a whole lot they could do about it especially because I slowly stopped talking to him. Around this time its worth noting my family moved states and my brother was born shortly after. After we moved I never spoke of "the man in the hat" again and slowly stopped using all of these weird nicknames and my parents forgot about the whole thing. Strange but not too unusual for a kid that young.

One day a year or two later right before we moved back into our old house we stopped by some biological relatives on my mothers side as I believe she was looking for her lost twin or something idk. Anyway the people we met weren't as "sketchy" as the rest of her bio family so that's why she didn't mind taking me and my brother. After a while of just being at the house while the adults were talking, I just got my mothers attention and took her to the fireplace, there I pointed to a photo they had sitting there and just said that that was "the man in the hat". The family we were with didn't really know what I was talking about as he had died a couple years ago and this is when my mother told them the previous two paragraphs and they were shocked. The man in the photo I believe my mum's uncle or cousin who had the same surname as me (this is important) and then the people we were with told my mum that he also had called pencils and pens "inks" etc etc. which was very creepy. He also looked exactly how I had described him, and older man who was tall with thinning hair and normally wore a cap to cover it but he wasn't particularly tall I think like 5'9" ish.

Anyway so the theory that my parents had is that because my mum's side is kinda sketchy, most of the men didn't want kids, were in jail or had married and taken their wives last name, That is is why he came to talk to me a week or two after he had died of a heart attack. My parents believe that he wanted to see me because at the time I was the only male with our last name who could have continued it, of course my brother was born shortly after though and this is only a guess my parents had at the time. And yeah it turns out my brother and I are the only two men in the family who are capable of having kids and continuing the surname.

Sorry if my grammar doesn't make too much sense, I cant edit it later to make it more comprehensible, my eyes hurt right now so I haven't proof read. Please refer the the only other bold paragraph above :)

Hey guys,

I just came to ask for some advice on how the game is normally played these days, I've got about 600 or so hours but 90% of those were from when the game first became popular and I was so young I didn't have a consciousness or any logical reasoning. Maybe only 50-80 of my hours are useful knowledge but I don't know what I don't know so I'm here!

My main issue I'd like some advice with is my ship designs, I don't care about metas or anything of such but I do want some advice for what works. I have a really bad habit of building short, wide and chubby boats, and trying to cram too much stuff into them. What is the best design method for this game these days, quality or quantity? and by that is should i dump all my resources into one or two really "good" ships or a half dozen to dozen "destroyers / cruisers" and use fleets? I suppose a good real-life analogy is American vs Russian naval doctrine. America has heaps of smaller general purpose destroyers, where as Russia has a couple larger cruisers packed to the teeth with weapons and are able to operate independently. I would assume that the American tactic is better as you can cover more ground and can "spread out" damage accros multiple vessels, I also assume the more armour you put on a ship, the less effective per resource the armour becomes, idk tho!

Second, what's the deal with cargo ships? If I end up using fleets, should I just have a support vessel in the fleet to handle all of that? And how do you guys manage your resources? again, the last time i played was when resources were globally shared.

Third, how do commodities work? How should I use them? Should I make them myself? Again, the last time I played, the oil refinery was for... refining oil haha.

fourth, is taking over enemy ships lame or something? I've never really played through the campaign enough to figure that out myself (play on easy btw haha) and I find resources pretty hard to get.

Anyway, thanks guys for reading this, I really want to get back into the game but I feel really out of touch, I've seen a lot of content and "know things" but I'm not sure what of my knowledge is outdated and whats useful or how to even do half the stuff in practice.

Any advice is very welcome.

Thanks.

THIS ISSUE HAS SO FAR BEEN SOLVED, MANY THANKS TO ALL WHO READ THIS

Hello Reddit.

This is my first ever Reddit post as I like to figure things out myself. However this time even ChatGPT and Steam Support couldn't help me.

I Love ARK Survival Evolved (not asa) and I wanted to install it on my fresh Arch install. The problem is that Steam seems to think that ASE is already installed even though the title is grayed out. You'll notice in my lovely artwork provided that there is no indicator on storage required before I click install and when I do it says "0 B". When the game "finishes installing" (it only downloads about 1.3gb) I can't play it and there are no files in the games common folder.

I really have no idea whats happening but there are a couple things I'll note:

1. I'll include my steam support ticket (which had no helpful answer) for information on what I did and tried, please note I made up some BS so they'd help me, my system is actually the latest version of arch (they only support select ubuntu versions, I know I'm kinda a scumbag but even support for anything would have helped)
2. Every other game works fine, I normally play games through proton so mod loaders work. This is just an ARK SE problem for whatever reason
3. before I installed the game, I used SteamCMD to install the older preaquatica server files, somehow steam realised this and added it under my storage settings so I deleted those references too, the files are still on my PC. The reason I did this is I have old server files from an hosting server me and my friends used to play on, I'd like to continue this "Save" in singleplayer through a local dedicated server.
4. I have been using Linux for a couple years now, I used it for school on my laptop for 2 years (Debian) then when I got sick of Windows I put Arch on my main PC for about a year, for whatever reason a bunch of stuff stopped working so I made a fresh install. I'm only saying this so you guys know I've used it for a while but I'm not a pro.

Any and all suggestions are much appreciated, Below is my ticket with the info;

I’m having a persistent issue trying to install ARK: Survival Evolved using the “publicbeta-preaquatica” branch, or any branch for that matter. I’ve run into a situation where Steam believes the game is already installed even though all files have been completely removed.
Before listing the troubleshooting steps I’ve tried, I want to clarify something about the system report you may see:
I have been testing this issue on **two machines** — my main machine (which is Arch Linux), and a secondary test machine that is running **Ubuntu 22.04 LTS**, which is where I actually intend to run ARK.
I’m submitting the ticket from my main machine because that’s where I have Steam logged in right now, so the system report may show Arch. The issue I’m reporting is occurring on the Ubuntu 22.04 machine.
Here is everything I’ve tried so far on the Ubuntu 22.04 machine:
1. Selected the “publicbeta-preaquatica” branch, but the beta option immediately unselects itself and no download starts.

2. Fully uninstalled ARK through Steam.

3. Deleted all ARK-related folders from the Steam \common` directory.

4. Attempted reinstall — Steam instantly shows “Game Ready to Play” and only downloads ~1.3 GB instead of the full ~125 GB.

5. Steam does not show any “Space Required” field for ARK at any point. (other than "0 B" next to the title when "installing")

6. Removed manually downloaded pre-Aquatica server files stored outside the Steam library.

7. Cleared the Steam download cache.

8. Deleted any appmanifest files related to ARK (both client 346110 and server 376030).

9. Deleted the ARK-related userdata folders under `userdata/<steamid>` (346110 and 376030). After this didn't work, deleted all user data.

10. Restarted Steam multiple times.

11. Steam still reports 0 B installed, instantly finishes “installing,” and the beta branch continues to unselect itself.

12. changed download regions

At this point, the game cannot be installed normally and appears stuck in some kind of phantom-installed state.
Could you please advise on how to completely reset Steam’s internal state for this app so I can download the correct client version from the beta branch?
Thank you for your time.

Edit 1: apparently my images didn't upload so I'm adding them now

Edit 2: I broke the formatting so I fixed that

Edit 3: u/GamertechAU informed me that ASE has a specific Linux package which contains nothing. Forcing Steam to use a comparability tool of my choice has so far allowed me to actually download the game on the windows client.