Shirogane Noel Finds Her Way Through Ark’s Trial Cave With Pekora and Towa

HOLOLIVE — Shirogane Noel of Hololive made her first run through the Trial Cave in Ark on Thursday, with Pekora showing her and Towa the way on Hololive’s Ark server.

Noel opened the stream by preparing for the cave. She said she had watched a guide video and understood none of it, and that she planned to follow Pekora’s lead. The cave asks players to give up an egg or a tamed dinosaur at an altar, so she spent the early hours taming ankylosaurs and arranging eggs. One egg could no longer be picked up once it was close to hatching, and she had to rework her plan before joining the others on a voice call.

“I heard you can’t do the Trial Cave on a first try, not a chance, so I watched a video to study up. I couldn’t make any sense of it.” — Shirogane Noel, before the run

Pekora, who has run the cave many times, demonstrated each puzzle first: buttons that must be pressed in order, fire that kills anyone standing too tall, crocodiles in the water, spear traps and a maze of timed doors. Noel and Towa then repeated them, and the pair worked out the opening button sequence largely from memory. A rabies-like sickness from cave bats spread among the group and cost one of them their life, but an egg hatched in time for the altar and the first route was completed.

A second run took in the cave’s instant-death course, a series of jumping sections where a fall wipes out the player’s gear. Pekora walked them through it and told them she had nothing left to teach. Noel later said the group had made it through the other route but not the instant-death course, and that she meant to try again. Chat reacted to one fall with “Pekora does this so easily.”

Noel went on to cover the rest of the evening on her own. She cleared the Carnivore Cave, then hunted a giant crab and a creature from the game’s new downloadable content, without taming either. She stopped earlier than planned, at about the seven-and-a-half-hour mark of a stream that drew 16 Super Chats, because the stream was unstable, and said she would be back at 6 p.m. the next day depending on her throat. She also mentioned a collab on Nov. 1.