Building

Building is a primary component of ARK: Survival Evolved. By chopping down forests full of trees and mining metal and other precious resources, you can craft the parts to build massive multi-leveled structures composed of complex snap-linked parts, including ramps, beams, pillars, windows, doors, gates, remote gates, trapdoors, water pipes, faucets, generators, wires and all manner of electrical devices, and ladders among many other types. Structures have a load system to fall apart if enough support has been destroyed, so reinforcing your buildings is important. All structures and items can be painted to customize the look of your home, as well as placing dynamically per-pixel paintable signs, textual billboards, and other decorative objects. Shelter reduces the extremes of weather and provides security for yourself and your stash!

You can rotate building props by hitting the Use key (default ) while in placement mode.

Building Tiers
There are seven tiers of building in ARK: Survival Evolved. Each tier has varying durability. See the List of creatures that can damage structures for a comparison of each tier's susceptibility to damage by various creatures.

Thatch
Thatch is the lowest of all building tiers. All the thatch building Engrams can be unlocked by level 3. Thatch buildings are relatively cheap, but the trade-off is that they provide little to no protection against other players or dinosaurs. If any decent kind of protection is needed, it is recommendable to upgrade to the wood tier as soon as possible.

Wood
Wood is the second building tier. All the essential wood building Engrams can be unlocked by level 10 (although some of the non essential Engrams can only be unlocked in higher levels). Wood buildings are relatively expensive, and require between 20 and 80 wood for each part. However wood provides much better protection than thatch against other players and dinosaurs since wood buildings can't be damaged by stone tools and have roughly 10 times as much hp.

Adobe
Adobe buildings are comparable to wood structures as having the same HP and similar traits. However Adobe requires its own category because of its unique trait of having increased protection from Hyperthermia. Please note that this form of adobe is associated with the Scorched Earth engram and not the Primitive Plus variant.

Stone
Stone buildings have the same durability as wood buildings, but there is one major difference: Stone buildings only take 1 damage from metal tools, as opposed to the approximately 20 damage that wood buildings take. Included in the Stone tier are reinforced structures such as the Reinforced Wooden Door and the Reinforced Dinosaur Gate.

Green House
Greenhouse parts are a special building part used in the creation of a Greenhouse for boosting the growth of crops. These glass parts are incredibly weak and even take damage due to punching.

Metal
Metal structures can only be damaged by explosives, and Tek Saddle Projectiles. The amount of explosives needed to destroy these is immense making them the structure of choice for important buildings.

Tek
Tek Structures can be damaged by Arthropleura projectile attack.

Auto-decay
Since v180.0, on all servers (except some private servers), all structures and tamed dinosaurs auto-decay. This means that if nobody in your tribe logs into the game every few days, your structures and dinosaurs may disappear. In general, higher-tier structures will last longer than lower-tier structures. On official servers, auto-decay timers follow these rules:
 * Thatch : 4 days
 * "Utilities": 4 days
 * Tamed Dinosaur : 8 days
 * Electrical Cables: 8 days
 * Wood : 8 days
 * Stone : 12 days
 * Greenhouse: 15 days
 * Metal : 16 days
 * Vault: 16 days
 * Tek buildings : 20 days
 * Tek Cloning Chamber : 20 Days
 * Tek Generator on the ground : 40 Days
 * Tek Transmitter on the ground : 40 Days
 * Tek Teleporter on the ground : 40 Days
 * Cryofridge on the ground : 40 Days
 * Tek Dedicated Storage connected to another Tek Dedicated Storage: 80 days
 * Tek Trough : 80 days
 * Tamed Dinosaur in a cryopod: as long as the lifetime of the cryopod and the container it's stored in.

There are some exceptions to the above times for certain items. Isolated (non-connected) foundations or pillars may have a shorter timer.

Only vaults and Tek Dedicated Storage will last longer than the foundation they sit on. The decay timer for a vault will reset whenever it falls.

All other structures will be destroyed when the foundation they sit on is destroyed.