What do you do to fill in the midgame

Solution 1:

After some careful deliberation and laying out what we had accomplished, we decided that we did in fact omit a large part of the game.

Exploration!

It's kind of simple if you think about it, the island is huge, and while we did carve out a small safe corner of it, we had not yet explored even a fraction of the island.
So now we've set off on foot, following the shore from the western to the eastern border. Due to the crafting of arrows / food / temporary shelter and the fighting involved, we've discovered new species of dinosaur and leveled up quite a bit.

So if you're in doubt after the early game on what to do, and don't want to break the feel of such an immersive and fun game by power leveling or doing stuff just to get ahead in the game, try finding out whats past that high hill near you.

Solution 2:

• Goal 1: Local ARK is like Jurassic Park Pokemon, gotta catch em all.

  Taming two of everything should keep you busy for quite some time.

• Goal 2: Create bases in the harsher environments.

  Swamps, frost lands, caves, underwater caves, dangerous islands all pose their own unique challenges.

• Goal 3: Explore the entire map (you already figured this one out)

• Not a goal but you can fiddle with the server settings to make certain aspects of the game more challenging

  Harder dinos, more dinos, stricter food/water requirements, etc. This will change how you have to play to survive.