Originally posted by Cooperal:

I wouldn't count on using it all the way up to the plains. That would take a heck of a long time. I would probably just go and kill bonemass.

Like with non-flying raids your base doesn't need much protecting if you take the fight outside. Maybe shelter your livestock. Personally I ignore taming wholesale. It may even be argued that drakes are some of the more manageable enemies to deal with in raids because being slow and airborne makes it easier to pull them away from your stuff from afar.

Every biome has at least one pest-tier enemy and that is what drakes are to the mountains. Wolves are a bigger concern and even then that is only if they are grouped.

Bonemass unlocks a lot of raids, and that was the reason we skipped him the first two times. (Third was just for fun.) Not just the Drakes (since that one is only temporary), but blobs, skeletons, bats, and wolves. Once we found one node, we typically had enough silver for one weapon each (when there were two of us) and a cloak (wolf or lox) to make finding the second and third nodes more easily. THree nodes was more than enough for two of us to get fully geared, I think.