Tips And Tricks

All the tips you need to survive in the ruthless, merciless world of ARK Survival Evolved.

Also have a look at Building Guides or the list of all available guides on this wiki.

General Tips

• Exercise caution when tackling anything other than  Coel or  Dodos, as you can be killed pretty easily early on. Even  Dilos can easily overwhelm a new player.
• Creating Bolas as soon as you can can allow you to attack and kill dinos that run (such as Pteranodon and Parasaur) much faster.
• Kill as many  Dodos as you can, they are a good source of early meat, hide, and experience.
• Having a simple shelter can be a lot more useful than you would think. You could easily find yourself freezing and starving on a cold night.
• If you look off into the distance, you will probably notice some large floating structures as well as some beams of light coming off the ground.
  • Don't worry about those floating ones, they are called Obelisks and are for end-game boss fights. It's safe to explore the area underneath them (as safe as anywhere else, at least), as long as you are not there when someone activates the portal.
  • Those beams of light are what you should pay attention to. Those are called Beacons, and they have supplies. But before you run halfway across the world to get one, keep in mind that the distance is probably longer than you think it is and the beacons don't last forever. If one appears near you, it might be a good idea to check it out, but first notice the color:
    • White/Prismatic beacons require you to be level 3 to open them
    • Green requires level 15
    • Blue requires level 25
    • Purple requires level 35
    • Yellow requires level 45
    • Red requires level 60
• Try to avoid swimming. The Ocean is inhabited by  Megalodons and other dangerous creatures who can aggro on you from very far away. Inland rivers and lakes are often filled with  Megapiranhas which can quickly overwhelm you with their numbers.

Learning the Ropes

• Holding H will display advanced information on the HUD (such as what certain status effects mean)
• Your basic harvesting tools are your bare hands. Punching trees hurts, so craft tools as soon as possible.

Making Tools

• First, find stones. The larger rock formations on the beach cannot be picked up, but the smaller rocks scattered about can.
• Second, gather  Wood This is done by punching trees, so go hurt yourself doing that. You will gather  Thatch and  Wood - hopefully before you die or get eaten.
• Combine the thatch, wood and stone together into a  Stone Pick first so you can collect flint for a  Stone Hatchet.
• Using the right tool for the jobs is important.
  • Rocks: picks harvest more flint while hatchets get more stone.
  • Wood: picks are best for thatch while hatchets yield more  Wood.
  • Corpses: picks result in more meat and hatchets obtain  Hide,  Chitin and  Keratin (use  Wooden Club to harvest more organic polymer on  Kairuku).
• With these tools, you can start properly harvesting resources and creating all the tools you need for survival.

Getting Metal and Advancing to Metal tools

Getting metal tools should be a very high priority as they will allow you to gather resources much faster. Once you have hit level 20, learn the Refining Forge and the Smithy. These both require a lot of engrams, so it's advisable not to spend many engrams on level 18 and 19. On high peaks such as the Volcano, Herbivore Island, and a large hill in the southern islets, you can find black rocks streaked with gold and shiny gold rocks that will yield large Metal quantities. Be sure to use a Metal Pick to harvest them. If none of these can be found, simple river rocks will get you started but yield a much lower rate than those previously listed. Once you have metal, use your Refining Forge to smelt metal. Once you have five Metal Ingot you can craft a Smithy. A Metal Pick will allow you to get much more Metal out of rocks and therefore grant you access to metal tools. Once you have an Ankylosaurus you can gather metal much faster.

Finding Food and Water

• Hunger can kill you just as easily as dinosaurs. Small dinosaurs such as the  Dilophosaur and  Dodo are a good source of  Raw Meat and  Hide.
• Picking  Berries as you walk around is a good way to build up a supply of them as you go.
• Fishing is also a quick and easy way to get raw meat, just keep an eye out for the deadly  Megalodon,  Piranha and the  Sabertooth Salmon (these when hit will kill you in packs)
• You can replenish your  Water level by submerging into water or going into shallow water and pressing E. It can also be replenished by activating a filled  Waterskin. Waterskins can be refilled while it's raining or while standing in shallow water. The game does not distinguish between fresh water and salt water, meaning players can survive by drinking ocean water.
•  Berries are also a good source of food and don't try to kill you. Just don't eat  Narcoberries in quantities above 3 or 4, they'll put you to sleep. Eating  Stimberries will rapidly drain your water, but will counteract the drowsiness that comes from certain poisons, such as that of the Scorpion ( Pulmonoscorpius) and  Troodon, where falling asleep could mean death.
• You can also eat  Raw Meat at the cost of a few  HP and smaller amount of food recovered than Cooked Meat. It's a quick solution to hunger but generally not recommended.
•  Campfires can cook  Raw Meat and  Raw Fish Meat on the same burn cycle. This is useful to save time and wood.

Leveling Up

• Every activity results in you gaining experience, even if it's simply not dying. Each level you gain will give you a single point to increase your attributes and a couple of Engram Points to unlock new crafting diagrams. Early on,  Health and  Fortitude are useful upgrades, keeping you healthy and more resistant to dinos and the environment longer. They also raise your resistance to losing consciousness.
• For newer players it's easy to get caught up in the moment of having a lot of  Health and/or a lot of  Melee Damage or any other non-directly survival focused ability. With that said, be sure to plan ahead, by this I mean far ahead. Are you a crafter? Then perhaps  Weight will be useful, but then again. Perhaps you like to tame dinosaurs? If so then investing some points into  Stamina is a viable option, this will allow you to sprint and fight for longer durations. To stay longer under water and also to swim faster level up  Oxygen.
• Having around 200 Health, 180  Stamina and 120%  Movement Speed is adequate to be able to stay on your toes even against a  T-Rex or a  Spinosaurus.
• To avoid being overburdened and carrying excess amount of resources, it is highly recommended to spend your skill points on only weight on levels 2-25, it will help tremendously in the future. After all, players in this game are building and carrying resources half the time, so having weight maxed or over 380 is extremely useful. It will prevent players from having to go back to base to dump all kinds of resources.
• Save your Engram Points after level 30 and only spend them when you come across something you need immediately. Higher level Beacons will provide you with many of the Blueprints for items that you would otherwise spend engram points on. Saving your engram points early on will enable you to make a more educated decision later in the game in regards to how you should spend them.

Long Term Survival

In order to survive for a long time it is advised to do the following,

• Form or enter a Tribe.
• Create Custom Consumables, as they will grant a long-lasting source of food
• Make a farm. It will provide food, and Kibble for dinos.
• Spend your Engram Points in Engrams such as the  Campfire,  Waterskin, all wood/stone/metal building structures,  Narcotic with the  Mortar and Pestle, and definitely get the Dinosaur Gate/Gateway and the Fence Foundation.
• You're going to need to tame a selection of dinosaurs, such as some for the transportation by land, sea and or air, the ability to gather meat, hide, wood, thatch and berries and overall, protect your base when you're offline.
• Never settle for  Thatch based structures, since they have relatively no protection or durability, people will focus on these first.  Wood based structures take longer to demolish; however, with a few dinosaurs or a couple people with metal tools, they're rendered quite ineffective as a means of protection. Using  Metal will provide the most durability and protection when you're away (useful for PvP. In PvE a Stone-based home will also do.).

• Build a  Vault. It allows you to protect the most valuable resources and items you or your tribe own.
• Build Alliances with other tribes so that you can rely on a helping hand; and return a helping hand.
• Do not make enemies and avoid being hostile to people. Killing low level players will definitely make higher level players continuously seek and destroy you, your structures and anyone who is associated with you.

• Do not stop taming dinosaurs and do not stop increasing your defense. Yeah you may have built a complete wooden fenced in yard with a nice wooden house; but you are going to want to upgrade your walls to metal as soon as you possibly can. This is usually done after acquiring at least a  Fabricator and a  Behemoth Gate.

Taming

To tame most creatures you have to knock them out first. If you can craft them, it's highly recommended to use Bolas to hold it in place while you shoot it with a Slingshot or Tranquilizer Arrows.

Taming creatures can take a long amount of time (up to several hours), make sure to minimize the amount of damage you do to the dinos when knocking them unconscious. Ideally, knock them out in as few headshots as possible by using a slingshot, or more advanced methods like Tranquilizer Arrows or even Tranquilizer Darts. Doing damage to a dino during taming will reduce your taming effectiveness, decreasing the dinosaurs basic stats. This has nothing to do with the duration of your tame.

Note: Food draining (starving an unconscious dino before feeding it) does not actually reduce the time to tame, since the time it takes to drain food compensates for the time you save when feeding. The one exception is for fast spoiling food like  Raw Prime Meat. Given its short spoil timer, if you have a bunch in storage (e.g. in a Preserving Bin or Refrigerator) starving the carnivore down enough to eat multiple Primes at once, will reduce loss. One method has been found to reduce tame times, it is linked as the following Taming#Taming Hints.

Keeping them Unconscious

•  Narcoberry if you are not yet able to craft  Narcotics or in emergency use when out of Narcotics. Narcoberries are also more efficient for creatures that have a fast decreasing torpor, like the Plesiosaur or the Giganotosaurus.
•  Narcotic is a highly improved version of  Narcoberries that no longer spoils.
•  Bio Toxin is twice as effective as  Narcotics in keeping unconscious level up, however it does spoil and is generally harder to collect.
•  Tranquilizer Arrows can also be used to keep the unconscious level up in emergency situations, however you will hurt the animal and the taming effectiveness will drop.
• You will notice you use more  Narcoberries compared to  Narcotic when taming.

General Tips

• You can lure carnivores to other dinosaurs and leave them to fight each other, leaving you with a weaker dinosaur and free resources.
• Knocking a dino unconscious can be quicker than going straight for the kill.
• Keep an eye on nearby herbivores. If you see them running, they are either fleeing or fighting a nearby predator.
• Don't build shelter too close to the water, there are sea dinosaurs that can destroy the earliest shelter easily.
• You can upgrade your shelter parts (ex. thatch to wood) by placing the new part in the same place as the old part. The old piece will be destroyed and grant you some resources back.
• When building a wooden shelter, you can quickly become encumbered with wood. Instead of running to your shelter and sorting everything out, make whatever components you can straight away as it severely lessens your weight, allowing you to stay out collecting for longer.
• It's recommended to make a  Hide Sleeping Bag at an early level - it displays map coordinates to aid navigation, may be picked up and re-used, and is handy for marking caves or other points of interest. A sleeping bag does not require a structure to be built upon, but cannot be shared by tribe members and is a single use item. Change to  Simple Bed when you can.
• To get around 20 meat and hide, kill  Phiomia as they don't fight back, it is also an easy source of experience. This is easier with a ranged weapon or in an area that is not wide open, as they run away quite fast.
• When taming, each dino has it's preferred food; most of them prefer  Kibble over any other food, carnivores prefer  Raw Prime Meat, and herbivores prefer  Mejoberries. Some creatures (such as  Pulmonoscorpius or  Araneos) prefer spoiled meat.
• You can keep a target unconscious by force-feeding them  Narcoberries or  Narcotic, which is a necessary process when taming. While "necessary" for taming dinosaurs, you can sacrifice Taming effectiveness by using a  Wooden Club, which cause little damage while adding about 8  Torpor per hit. Use it while starving the desired dinosaur, but don't swing to much! Otherwise you'll kill your dino! (Highly recommended for low level taming in which Taming effectiveness is practically useless, ex. level 1 - 5).
• You can quickly repair an item by hitting its assigned hotbar button (assuming you have the required materials).
• You can also quickly create an additional item if you press Alt while hitting its assigned hotbar button.
• Greyed out/broken items on the hotbar bar can be crafted by merely hitting its button (assuming you have the required materials) while holding that button will display what you're missing or need to repair.
• Split meat into stacks of one for getting  Spoiled Meat faster, making it easier to craft Narcotics.
• When in your (or a dino's) inventory, hover over an item and press O to drop that item. No need to click the item and then go down to the 'drop item' button.
• When in the inventory of a creature or container, hover over an item and press T to easily transfer that item to your own inventory, or vice-versa.
• You can easily escape insects by diving under water. But keep an eye out for  Piranhas, as they are very dangerous early on.
• At night you can throw a lit torch on the ground by right-clicking, allowing you to see while harvesting/fighting. When you're done, you can pick it back up.
• If you're performing a beacon run, give yourself a moment to check around the beacon. You may have attracted attention from nearby predators.
• The  Wooden Raft can offer tribes an opportunity to hunt  Megalodon by firing a  Crossbow from the raft while someone on an  Ichthy kites the shark around. Wooden Raft is also a good source of XP in the early stage.
•  Sparkpowder is an excellent fuel source. It requires just a few stone and flint, and can be used to light everything from fireplaces to  Refining Forge and keep them burning for a fairly long time. However, it doesn't yield  Charcoal which is needed for ammo and gunpowder.
• When building walls, use E to toggle the direction the wall is facing.
• While riding a dino you can press the F key to access the ridden dino's inventory.
• It's easier to place fence foundations walking backwards.
• It is near pointless to attempt killing an awake  Giganotosaurus as only a higher level or pre-enraged one can easily kill it. Often it is best to leave them alone for others to tame, as a 20 can take over 100 tranq darts to the head, in which many would see as a pointless waste unless taming it.

Gaining XP

Main article:  Leveling

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• When you first spawn as a level 1 just craft several picks or torches to get the first few levels faster.
• Craft  Narcotic for easy experience (2xp per craft).
• Later game alphas provide a very good source of XP
• A Rex can help worlds in gaining xp, and can be tamed easily once a player has enough meat by standing on a high rock
• Rafts give a lot of xp and are rather cheap once the player has a  Metal Hatchet,  Mammoth,  Castoroides or  Therizinosaur.
• Killing simple dinos such as  Trikes gives a bit of exp, allowing higher tier players to farm exp fast, as these can easily be killed by guns.

Solo Tips

• A beach is a good area to start building a base. This allows you to constantly have a source of water for drinking and cooling down, and depending on where you are, fish to eat. Resources may be scarce, but so are predators. The few predators that are present can easily be seen from a good distance.
• You will probably find yourself spending engram points on a wide variety of things. You can save some points by ignoring multiplayer-centric engrams such as  Blood Extraction Syringe,sloped roofs and the various Signs and Billboards.
• Every time you go to load your single-player game, there will be a bunch of sliders for server options. If things are going poorly or you want more of a challenge, you can adjust these to your benefit/detriment. Keep in mind that Player Resistance and Structure Resistance work inversely, meaning that setting player resistance to 2 will make you take twice as much damage, not half.

• Be strategic when it comes to choose the location of your main base. Keep in mind that you should have all the resources not far from there, especially if you want to spend as little time as possible traveling.
• It is always a good idea to have 2 or 3 strong dinos around your base to protect the weaker ones.
• Always try to leave your dinos in a relative safe place when you travel or you enter a cave, especially if you count on them for a quick escape. Remember that your biggest threat are wild dinos.
• Flying low in circles before landing it is the smart thing to do, especially on swamps and biomes where danger exist everywhere.
• Always carry water, food and sources of heat in your Dino. None of them weight much and can save you a trip back before expected.
• Its never a bad idea to have several single square metal or stone shelters around the map as they can provide a quick safe zone.
• When taming a high level dino (considering the process will take for long or its a hard Dino for solo taming such as a Quetzal) don't hesitate on building fence foundations around it and placing stone walls on them. This will make the taming process a safe and easy timing thing.
• The base building dino team consist on a  Castoroides for wood, an  Ankylosaurus for Metal and a  Doedicurus for stone. They are a must have for every lone survivor not only for making big bases, but also they gather the essential items for crafting everything. Also they are good fighter in terms of base defense. A Rex can also be a good source of base defense. They are somewhat easy to tame if you have  Tranquilizer Arrows (Level 21). For people that are taming a Rex for the first time, shooting it in the head does the same damage as the body. Rex has no multipliers for the head, so it will take about 10-100 (depending on the level) Tranquilizer Arrows anywhere to knock it out.

Multiplayer Tips

• Join a tribe. Seriously, do it. Being in a tribe gets you a share of the experience your tribemates earn, you can help each other take out larger threats or tame dinos, and it's just nice to have allies.
• If you're in a tribe, it might be a good idea to assign specialists, people who focus on one or two type of engrams. For example, one of you could focus on structures, one could get tools and weapons, another could get saddles and clothes, etc. The drawback of this is that you will be dependent on one another. If your base gets beat up and your structure guy isn't on, someone else may have to learn the engram themselves.
• Be aware of the server settings. Certain settings can vastly change how the game plays, and information found on this wiki may not be completely accurate on servers that don't use the default settings.
• Don't be needlessly aggressive towards other players as making enemies can be far more detrimental than you initially realize. It is far more beneficial for everyone in an area to at least tolerate the others presence than constantly worrying about your neighbors.

Console Commands

To open the console press Tab ↹.

• To show your FPS, type stat fps.
• gamma # where # = 1 to 9. Example gamma 3 alters the darkness in the game so you can see at night . To return to the default value, just type gamma.
• For all commands see page Console Commands