So first off, yes you do start with federation Tek armour. They recently removed damage from the tek glove’s ability, because you could just one-hit people in pvp.

Start out in the Eden zone, and if you aren’t used to tek gear abilities, then get used to them, because your gonna be using them a ton. So first off, after the cutscene you get an explorer note buff, so make cooking pots and level up as high as you can. Once you’ve done that, there’s two paths you can take:

1. Make a smithy, do a few race missions and get a harpoon gun and a net. To tame the maewing, it’s your standard tranq-and-feed.

Or

2. Make fishing baskets and go to Rockwell’s garden and catch piranha, and be sure to avoid kaprosuchus and baryonyx. If it’s a baryonyx, then fly away until it loses aggro. To tame the shadowmane, you have to put a fish basket on the last slot of your hot bar, like any passive tame and then land decently far away from the shadowmane you want to tame, crouch and walk up to it and quickly feed it the fish basket while it is asleep, it also sleeps somewhere during the day, so they are nocturnal. If done correctly, it will teleport away. If any other shadowmane aggro, then fly away until aggro is lost, and remeber these guys will teleport in to the air if your flying in their range, so be careful. Also use the taming tracker thing to find the shadowmane again. After that, you’ve gotten probably the most op mid game to early game mount. It also comes with high natural armour, don’t know if it scales with anything but here’s an example of the natural armour: let’s say you got 100.0 saddle armour for a rex, if the shadowmane had 100.0 natural armour, it would have the same amount of defense as the rex saddle. If you don’t understand what I mean, then you’ll figure it out.

Or

3. Get a reaper king day 1. I’ll go over this one, if you really want to progress quickly in the dlc then this is your option. Somebody made a video on how to do it, it was either “teacher’s game too” or “Raasclark.”

-Lamprey