Greetings! Making a state of the mod address to detail out what all is going to happen.

EDIT 2/17/2018: Due to a rather painful mishap, Zero to Hero is deader than dead today. File recovery only got me a fraction of the files present in the current version. This also means the current state of the project cannot be made open source since the files aren't there or have corrupted.

PART 1: TLC

Zero to Hero already had a backlog of existing issues to handle which has been magnified by the TLC Pass and it's only going to grow larger with more TLC updates. The assumptions that Zero to Hero was built around aren't as relevant anymore. Frankly the recently TLC'd creatures make my counterparts look like chumps now (Sabertooth aside), and that's for the better. It means that the vanilla creature has a proper niche as is.

PART 2: Retroactive Conversions

The window for setting up retroactive conversions (where creatures will naturally shift from their vanilla to their mod counterpart on mod install, and shift back on uninstall) has long passed, as learned from talking with the Better Dinos mod author, Kraken:1, who also has Better Mammoths, Damn Dirty Apes!, and more under his belt.

If there's a way to do it after release, it is lost on Kraken & I. The way he explained it was that it works by giving naming the custom creature the same blueprint name as the vanilla counterpart. Renaming my creatures now to drop the 02h_ prefix would wreak a lot of havoc.

PART 3: Lol is u ded[cdn.funnyisms.com]

Old fashioned burnout is what has slowed down the communication and update frequency, having been pretty much non-stop chugging away at the mod since the beginning of summer last year.

PART 4: Overspawns

The overspawning might be a corruption of my dev kit. I'll see if a fresh install of my Dev kit (after backing up my project and its tertiary files!) does anything. If nothing else, it's a variable worth testing that doesn't require directly tampering with mod files. Overspawning is not an easy issue to fix at the scope it has reached in Zero to Hero.

PART 5: What's next

Broken fliers has a known fix, so that will get pushed ASAP since it's so glaring and so hideous. For now, just getting critical bugs handled is the focus in light of the longer update lapse. Balance updates already planned will be in the mix.

PART 6: The fate of Zero to Hero

With Aberration and TLC Stage 1 giving painful reminders that core-code is always subject to change together with newer creatures becoming much more deeply involved, copying creatures, updating scripts, and wholesale replacing vanilla with custom is a lot less practical and sustainable than it once was. That becomes a constant source of woe when mixed with Zero to Hero's TC-like nature.

What I am ultimately looking to do is develop a spiritual successor mod loosely titled “ARK: TLC+” which takes into account what I've learned and what changes the TLC passes bring to make the core appeal of Zero to Hero more sustainable by relying on “Additional Default Buffs” when possible so that the vanilla creature doesn't need to be replaced, and hence the creature will stay updated.

PART 7: Tertiary elements

For creatures that were completely reworked, like Giganotosaurus, Triceratops, Diplodocus, Sabertooth, etc, those will become additional creatures in TLC+ rather than replacing their vanilla counterpart, unless by some miracle my counterparts more or less become official.

Custom creatures of Zero to Hero, like the Elder/Ancient roster, Fairy Moth, Kryadon, etc, will be splintered into their own mod and given greater depth compared to what they currently are. The rebalanced/buffed player character will become a stand-alone mod.

Thanks for sticking with me, folks! Zero to Hero's been quite the experience for everyone involved, there was a lot learned both during the development and after it went live. But there are better, smarter ways to handle the core appeal of the mod that are proving more and more necessary with each successive update.