Stegosaurus

The Stegosaurus (STEG-uh-SAWR-us) or Stego is one of the dinosaurs in ARK: Survival Evolved.

Behavior
While not aggressive by default, Stegosaurus will attack by swinging their spiked tails when provoked. Caution is advised when hunting them. They are also herding animals, coming to the aid of others when attacked.

Appearance
The Stegosaurus appears as a large quadrupedal herbivore with distinctive plates on its back, which are often vibrantly colored. The dinosaur also possesses 3 pairs of spikes on the end of its long tail, and has a small head tipped with a beak as well as a few grinding teeth.

Tek Stegosaurus (Variant)
The Tek Stegosaurus is a creature that was permanently added to the game in the Extinction Chronicles II event. It is a unique alternate of the original Stegosaurus, and is purely made of Tek. Unlike the original, they spawn at a 5% rate at a 20% higher level than usual.

Drops
Stegosaurus, Aberrant Stegosaurus=

Tek Stegosaurus=

Corrupted Stegosaurus=

Base Stats and Growth
Stegosaurus=

Aberrant Stegosaurus=

Corrupted Stegosaurus=

KO Strategy
Stegosaurus are slow but powerful, kite them from a considerable distance. A slingshot's limited range and low damage may be insufficient for low level players to succeed unless the beast is trapped. Tranq arrows or darts will allow you to stay further away from the beast and achieve a faster KO with much less risk.

Combat
This section describes how to fight against the Stegosaurus.

General
Stegos are herd animals that are incredibly slow but hit quite hard and have hefty knock-back. Watch yourself around cliffs or just near slopes as a single hit can send you flying to your grave.

Strategy
Stegos are very slow and can be peppered with most ranged weapons to death with little issue. Keep your distance and hammer away but watch your position and don't get cornered or surrounded as that can quickly lead to an early grave. If your movement speed is high enough you should be able to dart forward with a pike or spear and dart back before the stego can react properly however this is very risky and should only really be used on low level or lone dinos. Stegos stop when they attack with their tail, giving you time to step back. Use this to your advantage, and the battle is already half won.

Weaponry
Ranged weapons are greatly preferred, a bow should prove sufficient. Keep away and only engage in melee to finish it if the dino is very low on health and can be finished off swiftly.

Dangers
The most dangerous aspect of the Stegosaurus is its ability to dismount riders from mounts with its swings.

Stegosauruses additionally have respectable knock-back. Their damage is nothing to sneer at but their knock-back can quickly turn an easy fight into a foolish death. It should be noted non-mounted dinos are immune to fall damage and thus have little to fear other than getting mobbed by a herd. Play carefully and the Stego will fall easily. Also take care not to engage in fights you cannot win, either through lack of ammo or sheer number of enemies.

All wild stegosaurus, even corrupted stegosaurus are set on hardened plate mode, so think twice before taking one down.

Weakness
The slow movement speed of the Stego is its ultimate weakness. Engage from range or with a meat-shield in the form of a Dilo, Raptor, or other dino. If slowed by any means, the Stego's movement speed is laughable.

Tamed
A tamed stego will be hard to fight against as it will have one of the 3 modes if it has a rider and the armor that the saddle provides.

Danger
The most common scenario will be defending your base in a raid, where the enemy tribe will use an Imprinted stego with Hardened plate and a good saddle to soak the turrets until they can get close enough to blow them up using a Rocket Launcher. If the tribe is clever enough they might bring another stego to apply Mate Boost and even a Yutyrannus to apply courage boost to deny even more damage. In this case if you don't have Tek Turret to be able to damage the rider it will be difficult to inflict any damage to the stego.

Strategy
A Yutyrannus fear debuff will cause the stegosaurus to agro the Yutyrannus and will cause it to receive more damage. any weapons or creatures that can penetrate armor are advised. The Net Projectile can dismount the player canceling the Hardened plate buff. Spear Bolt shoot from a Ballista Turret can do a decent amount of damage too and using the Chain Bola you can prevent the stego to getting closer.

Another good strategy is simply taking the stegosaurus away from the battle, using a Quetzal or more effectively a Karkinos since this can throw the stego away, since the stego is slow and Cryopod have cooldown this will make the attacking tribe to lose a lot of time. Ideally you can create a deathpit near your base and throw them in there.

Utility
Stegosaurus has three back-plate modes that are cycled through using the key by default. Each time the is pressed, the mode name will display at the top of the screen and the icon for the mode will be displayed in the upper right corner of the screen. All of these grant immunity to being dismounted (except when shot with a ).
 * Supplies a damage reduction buff (reduce damage by half or doubling the stegosaurus' health) ; harvesting benefit
 * Applies a slow effect when attacking with the basic tail whip; harvesting benefit
 * Applies an armor penetration effect when attacking with the tail whip. Also useful for harvesting

Every time the survivor mounting the dino switches its backplate mode, it will always wriggle and shrug off before the mode changes.

Aiming directly at the small creature or survivor at any mode and right clicking on them will cause Stego to temporarily immobilize and impale them with its tail swing as well as drain all its stamina in the process. This attack can work on creatures with drag weights as high as 550. Anything higher than that will not allow a stegosaurus to use its impale ability. Multiple Stegosaurus can impale a single creature to stack the impale effect and damage, but they have to be on separate ticks to maximize damage. Base points, melee mutations, and level up points factor the effectiveness of the impale ability in having a greater damage output.

Roles

 * Gatherer: Stegosaurus are very good at gathering berries with Sharpened Plate, thatch with Heavy Plate, and wood with Hardened Plate (similar to ) (Level up Melee Damage and Weight).
 * Lunar biome plant harvester: Stegosaurus are exceptional at harvesting wood, thatch, stone, and crystal from the lunar biome exclusive plant nodes with their sharpened plate mode. They can gather these lunar biome resource nodes far better than an ankylosaurus. However, they can get quickly encumbered due to the heavy weight of the stone and crystal.
 * Transport: Able to carry a great deal of weight and with high health, Stegosaurus make for great pack animals. Also traversing at places where wild dinos can dismount you makes them unable to do so as long as you are at the stegosaurus (Level up Weight, Speed, and Stamina).
 * Genesis Bog Travel: Bloodstalkers cannot dismount the survivor from Stegos, making them perfect, albeit slow, bog biome mounts.
 * Travel: Stegosaurus makes for a strong, albeit slow, mount (Level up Speed and Stamina).
 * Tank:  Stegosaurus has a pretty high base damage and knockback which makes it good for fighting multiple enemies smaller than itself (Level up Health, Melee Damage, and some Speed, and utilize Hardened Plate). With only a primitive saddle with a 25.0 armor rating, a yutyrannus' courage roar, a Mek's M.D.S.M, their mate boost, and their hardened plate mode will only make stegosaurus receive 14.2% of damage, making a large group of them difficult to kill and will be challenging for even players on giganotosaurus.  Overall, a stegosaurus' hardened plate mode can be magnified with other creature's buffs or debuffs on the enemy to a point even the strongest creatures are only chipping away at its health.
 * With only hardened plate mode and a primitive saddle alone, a stegosaurus will already have a 75.0 saddle armor rating and taking only receiving 1/4 damage from creatures.
 * Experience Gain: Stegosaurs have high and extremely high  making it an absolute killing machine and an amazing dino that can take care of a lot of experience giving dinos such as,  or even a
 * Boss Killer: The stegosaurus, if well-bred, is a useful tool against the many bosses in the game. It is favored by many tribes since no Rex are on Aberration, it can dish out a decent amount of damage and can be healed easily through vegetable cakes. This is even more useful with either Hardened Plate for additional survivability. Overall, they can act like a shield for your tames. You can also equip weapons while you are mounted on it, turning the stegosaurus into a literal tank.
 * Stegosaurus can be a great diversion to get the boss' attention with its hardened plate mode to allow your damage tames to surround it.
 * It can be useful as a diversion in the Overseer fight to distract most of the defense units.
 * In Genesis: Part 2, they are useful in stalling Corrupted Survivors that attack it if you pumped alot of health into it. With faster mounts, the Corrupted Survivors are stuck in dealing with the stegosaurus.
 * Stegosaurus can withstand a prolonged fight against the full might of the Experimental Giga if it is fully imprinted, has a 100+ saddle, high health above 40k health, has high melee damage, and has Veggie cakes in its inventory.
 * Mobile Armory: Stegosaurus can carry plenty of armor sets to a boss battle for each player that joins the fight since it has one of the highest carry weights amongst creatures that can be brought to boss fights. Have the stegosaurus far away from the chaotic parts of the fighting. When a player's armor set is broken, they can run to it and replace their armor safely since the plate modes prevent dismounting. Create folders within its inventory so players can easily see through the armor sets that they brought to the battle so it can be quickly and correctly taken out.
 * Damage: Great Compared to an easy early game tame
 * War Mount: A mounted Stegosaurus with full stamina is basically invincible, as they can deliver damage without touching their opponent, allowing you to take on powerful creatures like Spinosaurus and Paraceratherium and come out unharmed. The only disadvantage is their attack range may strike unintended targets, destroying your tame efforts and starting unnecessary fights with other animals. When fighting with a stegosaurus, make sure to have its tail side facing the enemy, further increasing its attack range while potentially negating the enemy's attacks.  The heavy plate mode works in this role where players who are riding stegosaurus' can leisurely defeat creatures that need to close in the distance to get their attacks in.  The hardened plate can make stegosaurus take far more damage. The sharpened plate mode is PVP oriented as it can pierce saddle armor.  (Utilize between 3 backplate types for combat efficiency)
 * PvP Turret Soaker: Utilizing Hardened Plate, Stegos can protect the rider and also reduce the damage of projectiles such as arrows and bullets by a significant amount. If angled correctly against opposing Auto Turrets the Stego can soak more bullets than even a Bronto. This tactic will require a lot of practice and can't be used in every situation but the rewards are plentiful to any tribe that can utilize this niche to its maximum effectiveness. (Level up Health and stick to Hardened Plate.)
 * PVP Armor Destroyer: With the Stegosaur's Impale Ability, it can impale Humans until their armor breaks ( Level Up and optionally ) Humans would not be able to escape although they can still use weapons such as the  and  (note that the Stegosaur impale Ability can be finicky to aim so it requires some practice)
 * Impaler: The Stegosaur can certain Creatures draining their  and  as well as rendering them immobile during the impale:
 * Forest Titan Killer: Even though the Forest Titan doesn't look like it can be impaled, a stegosaurus can actually impale it because its drag weight is 35. With the Forest Titan having a health pool of 400k, a stegosaurus' impale ability damage would scale to high numbers. Level up health and have a high quality saddle to make sure the stegosaurus can tank all the Titan's heavy attacks.

Stegosaurus can impale the following dino and survivors into its tail spikes (except flying creatures):

Weight Reduction
The Stegosaurus reduces the weight of the following resources by the listed amount while they are in its inventory:

Collectibles
(Note that the Efficiency drops to 1 if the Stegosaurus is not under the specific backplate mode to gather the corresponding materials.)

Notes/Trivia

 * Can be very effective at harvesting berries (but not Fiber) from Plants, or either Wood or Thatch from trees by swiping its tail across the ground. This however depends on what backplate the stegosaurus is at.
 * Surprisingly, Wild Stego can impale other herbivores, including other Stego.
 * Although Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus are often depicted as living alongside each other, a large time gap separates both species. Coexistence between humans and a T. rex would be more accurate because of the shorter time gap.
 * The spiked arrangement on the end of a Stegosaurus' tail is called a thagomizer. The word, unlike many scientific terms, was coined in 1982 by cartoonist Gary Larson, in his comic The Far Side, and said to be named after the late Thag Simmons. The name was eventually picked up 11 years later by Ken Carpenter, and has gradually been adopted as an informal anatomical term, even used by the Smithsonian Institution.
 * If judged by its Brain-to-body mass ratio Stegosaurus might possibly be the dumbest dinosaur in terms of intelligence.
 * Can be picked up by a or a.
 * Don't be fooled into expecting it to be faster than the ; it may seem that way, being smaller, but its sprint is actually barely half as fast as the larger dino.
 * The name "Stegosaurus Regium" roughly translates into "Reflective Roof Lizard".
 * Real Stegosaurus were social dinosaurs that lived in herds, Ark's Stegosaurus can be found in some groups but can also be found on their own, even more often so at subterranean ARK, dead Earth and reality simulation.
 * Stegosaurus is a relatively easy tame that can deem you invincible against powerful single opponents. Their ability to deal damage without even touching the enemy allows them to effortlessly kill dangerous creatures like Spinosaurus and Paraceratherium, as long as their stamina is high.
 * Wild Stegosaurus can pratically impale any creatures, including other wild Stegosaurus and herbivores.
 * Tek Stegosaurus will change their body lights color as the mode changes as well. Hardened Plate will give the Tek Stego orange glowings, Heavy Plate will change the glowing to blue and Sharpened Plate will change to yellow.
 * Stegosaurus can in fact impale, and , and even  and , but only when they have sustained enough damage, than Stego will be able to impale them, however, be careful that Rex will still try to attack your Stego while it is being impaled.
 * As of Genesis: Part 2, its sprinting animation resembles its pre TLC 3 movement if the stegosaurus has been moving in a straight line for a while.